A man in the UK has been sentenced to two years in prison for maintaining an online library of far-right political stickers.
I wonder if clowns like Freddie deBoer who were hysterically crying about people facing negative consequences for supporting palestine are even opposed to this. Or Scott, for that matter, who was quick to cry about some incompetent rich Haitian diversity hire at harvard get fired but has not to my knowledge ever talked about europe imprisoning people for political speech.
Let's say hypothetically that Messrs Alexander and de Boer, in addition to crying about the things they are currently crying about, began whining about the thing that you're currently sniveling about. Would this satisfy you, or do you need for them to bitch about the things you prefer to piss and moan about *exclusively*?
What on god's green earth does any of this have to do with the first amendment? Nothing Freddie and Scot are complaining about can remotely be considered violations of first amendment rights.
And the dude's go a right to "wonder" whether Scott is opposed to putting people in jail for far-right political speech, but if he does we're going to wonder whether he is A: paying attention and B: seriously trying to engage with the community.
Anybody still following up on Ivermectin as a COVID-19 treatment, there's a new study using Bayesian statistics. It's a randomized controlled trial with N = 8811, offering this interpretation of the results: "Ivermectin for COVID-19 is unlikely to provide clinically meaningful improvement in recovery, hospital admissions, or longer-term outcomes. Further trials of ivermectin for SARS-Cov-2 infection in vaccinated community populations appear unwarranted."
So I'm in the middle of listen to Tucker Carlson interview Putin. And... well I can only describe this as 'liking' Putin's narrative of history, compared to the hawkish government here in our country. Wouldn't it have been good for Russia to join the west as a full economic partner? It would have been good for everyone. No? Amazing number of times (Putin says) our presidents made a tentative deal, only to be talked out of it by their advisors. Isn't peace with Russia better than war?
Did you like the bit where this Putin fellow that you like so much, explained why Hitler had no choice but to start World War Two by invading Poland because the dastardly Poles backed him into a corner and forced him into it?
The rest of his history lesson was no better, but this highlights the fundamental problem with your assessment. Yes, in an abstract theoretical sense, peace with Russia is better than war. But in the practical real-world sense, peace with Russia is rather like peace with Nazi Germany - it just plain isn't going to happen until someone surrenders. Who do you want to surrender?
Hmm Well let me first correct your mistake about me liking Putin. The man's the f-ing dictator of Russia. You don't get to that spot by being a nice guy.
I must have missed the part about Poland. To be honest I tuned out most of the history lesson... it's mostly interesting because this is what is important to Putin. This is what he believes, or the story he tells. There's a real historical celebration of the defeat of the Nazis. And I don't know if Putin thinks he's still fighting Nazis or if he's just using it to whip up support in the country. I don't know what peace with Russia would look like. I guess I'm in the mode (mood) to give it a shot.
> I don't know what peace with Russia would look like.
I'm too late to the debate, but this is very simple. From Russia's perspective, "peace" means "Americans will not interfere while we recollect the lost pieces of the former Soviet empire".
The lost pieces of the former Soviet empire do not really want to be recollected, but as long as they do not join NATO (or perhaps side with China), it is just a question of time. A few square kilometers at a time; a larger "special operation" when necessary; try again a decade later. Russia has enough human lives (lots of ethnic minorities) to sacrifice, and the boys in the country conquered today will be sent to the front lines of tomorrow's special operations.
So the ideal (from Russia's perspective) peace plan would be to let Russia conquer Ukraine, then Belarus, Moldova, Kazakhstan (probably forgot something here), in return for some nice words from Putin. The next step would be whining about former Soviet countries allowed to be in NATO, because... you know, they are too close to Russia. They need to become neutral first, and get conquered by Russia later. The next step would be whining about former Warsaw Pact countries allowed to be in NATO, because... you know, too close to Russia. Neutral first; Russian latter. And then? Who knows, perhaps we will finally see the "peace for our time". Or maybe not. Putin decides.
> I don't know if Putin thinks he's still fighting Nazis or if he's just using it to whip up support in the country.
Russians have been doing this literally since Brezhnev. In Russian politics, "Nazi" means "someone who opposes Russia". The connection to the actual historical Nazis is very loose, especially if you notice how Putin says that Hitler attacking Poland was a good thing.
I'm afraid I didn't have the patience to listen to the maestro of historical whining in action, but I bet he recycled the same accusations and historical distortions again. Did he say anything new in front of Tucker? it's remarkable how similar Putin's previous statements sound like an aggrieved 1930s Adolf Hilter. According to Putin, the entire post–Cold War era has been a period of Russia’s humiliation at the hands of a hostile West.
Did he go on and on about the Ukrainians and Russians being historically one people culturally and spiritually? Most Ukrainians don't think that.
Did he name-drop Vladimir I? — a.k.a.Volodymyr I, the Ukrainian (Rus/Viking) king who converted to Christianity in the tenth century? Medieval Kyiv before the Mongol invasion was the home of the original Viking/Slavic Rus. Moscow didn't even exist at that time.
After the Mongols arrived, Moscow became the tax collector and enforcer for the Khanate of the Golden Horde whose leadership was based where? — you guessed it. Crimea. Eventually, the Tsars of Moscow acquired enough military power to conquer a much-reduced Tartar Khanate. But I bet he didn't mention these things.
And Putin has been the one to break the treaties. Russia agreed to respect Ukraine’s territorial integrity and sovereignty and to refrain from the threat or use of force against Ukraine in both the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 and the Russian-Ukrainian Friendship Treaty of 1997. In Return Ukraine gave the Soviet-era nukes it had in its possession back to Russia, agreed to partition the Black Sea Fleet, and agreed to rent the naval base in Sevastopol to Russia.
Putin has called the Ukrainian leadership Nazis (which is good for a belly laugh because Volodymyr Zelenskyy is Jewish), and from the git-go, he alleged that Ukrainians were perpetrating genocide against Russian-speaking people in the illegally annexed "republics" of Donetsk and Luhansk — and that his initial incursion into Ukraine was to denazify them.
And the GOP love affair with Putin makes me cringe. But it seems like they're envious of his power, his audacity, and his duplicity.
OK I read the NATO thing. I believe all of that. But Putin's take (like I know.. hah.) is that NATO expansion is aggressive. (And yes his aggression has lead to more nato members.)
Re History. Yeah it started with a ~10-20 minute history lesson, not back to the Mongols, but maybe starting in 10-11th century. And then continuing to the present. He is still worried about Nazis, (which I knew from previous readings.) I guess what I found most interesting is that he says he talked with Bush Sr. and later Bill Clinton, about more advanced economic ties and that both were receptive, but then came back later and said no. (Putin says the president's advisors talked them out of it.) Anyway for me it was interesting to see the world from his perspective... or at least maybe closer. I don't have any love (or like) for Putin. But he is Russia's leader, you have to deal with him.
So this is unrelated but I think the Republicans like Russia, because the Democrats picked Ukraine. And in our tribal country if one side picks X the other side is automatically not-X. It's silly but that's the way we behave these days.
>And the GOP love affair with Putin makes me cringe. But it seems like they're envious of his power, his audacity, and his duplicity.
You should cringe more at the Democrats and state department wanting war with Russia. Because apparently billion and billions of american dollars aren't enough, we have to spend not only more treasure but american lives defeating the russian boogeyman who isn't responsible for any of the problems facing working americans.
> I can only describe this as 'liking' Putin's narrative of history
Congrats, you fell for Putin's charisma, lies, and propaganda.
> Wouldn't it have been good for Russia to join the west as a full economic partner? [...] Isn't peace with Russia better than war?
We (Europeans) tried to live with Russia in peace. They weren't interested. We tried to incentivize them via economic cooperation. They interpreted this as weakness.
Putin and a good part of the Russian people don't strive for peace and prosperity through coorperation. They only understand power, force, and subjugation. The sooner we, collectively as Europeans, understand and accept this, the safer we are from their ambitions of conquest.
Hmm well I'm no fan of Putin. But I hear the same story from people in the west. (That Russia wants cooperation.) So there's propaganda on both sides, and I'm just looking more closely at what 'my' side is saying. Beyond that I really don't know enough to have a firm conviction.
There's no need to believe any "stories" from either side, when you can you just check what each actor is *actually doing*. And Russia has broken the 1994 Budapest Memorandum by invading Crimea, first in 2014, then again in 2022. No amount of deceptive twisting of history, crafted to convince the feeble-minded, is going to change that fact.
Yeah sure I know of all the shitty things Putin does and continues to do. You should ask yourself why he does them. (Look there are many reasons, and I'm mostly ignorant about things.)
Dictators have to do things that make them look strong, or they die by a coup. Putin does not have the option to lose in a fair election and then enjoy a wealthy retirement.
Conquering territories makes you seem strong. Overthrowing governments that opposed you, assassinating politicians and journalists who opposed you, makes you seem strong.
Ukraine is culturally important for Russia. (Russia itself is named after Kievan Rus, which was a kind of medieval Ukraine.) Ukraine saying "f--- you" to Russia, joining NATO and EU, and becoming relatively wealthy compared to what it is now, would be seen as a huge weakness by Russian population. The militant nationalists would ask: "how come that our mighty army couldn't have stopped them?" The average Russians would ask: "how come that the 'Little Russians' are now a part of the rich West and have luxuries that we can only dream of?"
This would even be worse by Ukraine having a large Russian-speaking population, so you can imagine how all their quality-of-life improvements would be broadcasted by media in Russian language, which would directly contradict the official Russian propaganda. Imagine tens of millions of people who are native-level Russian speakers, and who can openly make fun online of Putin and his regime. You can face propaganda with propaganda, but how will you address youtubers showing the stuff they can buy at a local supermarket?
Hmm well I think it's all propaganda. We just don't see it because it's the water we swim in. Most propaganda is true, but it's just the slant or what they don't tell you. You know from reading anything about Putin that he is being painted as the bad guy. I don't take in much news these days. I find it is all just trying to tell me this story or that story. I guess it has always been this way to some extent. And maybe it's just me becoming a grumpy old man.
Yeah I know almost nothing about any of those meetings. I know this is going to sound offensive, but maybe Putin thinks he can only be seen making a deal with another white man.
Just writing here to let anyone in the Minneapolis-St Paul area know that I've made a local ACX community discord for the region to plan local events and chat generally. The link is here: https://discord.gg/hySwpphmdN
In one of the previous Open Threads I complained about how both Google Translate and DeepL screw up translations between Slavic languages, basically by erasing every information that does not make sense in English -- such as grammatical genders, flexible word order, or even distinguishing between words that happen to be homonyms in English -- so much that the result looks as if someone translated first to English and then from English to the other language (this is most likely not a technical description of what actually happens, but the results look the same for all practical purposes).
It just occurred to me to try Yandex Translate https://translate.yandex.com/ and yes, it seems better in this aspect... but worse in some other aspects... so I suppose I will actually use both Yandex and Google/DeepL translations side by side.
Posting here, because it took me surprisingly long time to think about a solution that is obvious in hindsight, so perhaps someone else may benefit from this idea, too.
Have you tried GPT-4? It's good at translating in my experience - I've only ever used it for translations to/from English , but I would expect it to be good at translating between other languages as well.
Compared to other religious beliefs, why is it so hard to convince people that pantheism is true? Spinoza makes a great case that God, whatever God is, must include everything, because God is perfect.
It's a simple argument, if you want to believe in God.
I understand that CS Lewis argues that things must complicated and therefore we should reject simple explanations. I believe the opposite.
I haven't read Spinoza, and I imagine his version is probably more rigorous, but the argument as you've described it seems to just be two unrelated statements with a "because" confusingly shoved between them.
Is a body that doesn't include cancer cells less perfect than one that does? I would think it's the other way around.
Why do people believe in God? To pray and hope wishes come true? To combat the feeling of being lost in a cruel world, soon to be dead and forgotten? Now, would pantheism help with any of that? Or would a God that is everything be akin to a God that is nothing?
The same reason why polytheism isn't more popular these days. Monotheism is just very attractive to humans. People really like worshiping one person. It's probably a result of natural selection selecting for societies that blindly follow their leader, since otherwise it's hard to have a stable, cohesive civilization.
...What? The current dominant religions are Christianity and Islam, both monotheistic. Hinduism is weird because it varies so much based on the school, though apparently the most popular one is pantheistic and/or polytheistic. East Asia is pretty secular for the most part, and while there's a bunch of polytheistic folk religions, very few people actually practice them seriously. So I don't get why you think that polytheism is "massively" popular.
> Hitler couldn't exist without WW1, which was the product of Bismarck's wars, which were a German answer to Napoleon, who took over because of the revolution, which was inspired by the American revolution, which was ideologically rooted in Dutch and English anti-catholic activity, which was caused by Catholic absolutism emanating from the wealth of Spain, which came from the new world. So really, the discovery of America is to blame.
Neat little comment isn't it? Discuss its validity.
It leaves out the Ottoman Empire conquering Eastern Europe, the Levant, and Northern Africa and blocking trade routes to Europeans eastward, which forced Europeans (specifically Portuguese) to explore ways to get around Africa and then to find shorter ways to the Indies across the Atlantic (Spain and Portugal).
So the Ottomans are to blame for not only WWII, but the European discovery and colonization of the Americas, the European slave trade, and the eventual colonization Africa most of the rest of the world.
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters…
That comment -- which I'd hope was intended facetiously but who the hell knows anymore -- seems similar to rookie family-tree geeks getting all excited about being descendants of King Edward III or whoever. "We're royalty!!" That's about 22 generations ago now, so....congrats you are one of the literally millions* of living people each of whom have Edward III as one of thousands of ancestors going back 800 years.
[* tens of millions, according to some genealogists; the specific math depends on assumptions/guesses related to what's called "pedigree collapse"]
Posted v3 of the Eve Theory of Consciousness: https://www.vectorsofmind.com/p/eve-theory-of-consciousness-v3 Briefly, it argues that recursive self-awareness is what separates humans from the rest of the animal kingdom, is what allowed us to conquer the world, and has evolved fairly recently. There is the first strong evidence about 50kya, but even then the experience of self could have been fractured. "Recursive" culture spread, which changed the selective gradient for those that experienced a seamless construction of self from a young age.
The main thrust of the argument is about evolution, but the evidence I put forward for recursive culture spreading is interesting even if it didn't figure in our evolution. The bullroarer is a religious instrument used in male initiation ceremonies from Australia to the Americas, to Africa, to Europe. An implement of the primordial snake cult?
Scott linked earlier versions of this argument: the Snake Cult of Consciousness, and the Unreasonable Effectiveness of Pronouns. The Snake Cult piece looked at the Sapient Paradox, which asks why sapient behavior is not widespread until about 12,000 years ago. The pronoun piece looked for linguistic evidence of Julian Jayne's theory about self-awareness being recent.
It also follows the natural language usage of conscious vs unconscious. But yes, it's not a Theory of Consciousness. Could have called it the Eve Theory of "Sapience" or "Secondary Consciousness," but the usage is defined in the beginning so it seems alright
Kids utilizing AI to create nonconsensual deepfake sexual photos of their peers was a perfectly predictable result of generative AI. This current story is probably just the tip of the iceberg. Outraged parents will be suing school districts (at the taxpayers' expense) and demanding that school staff and administrators use (waste) their time and limited resources to address the problem. Parents will be suing other parents (possibly financially ruining other parents who likely never head of generative AI or know how to search for the app on Little Johny's smartphone). The resources of police departments and prosecutors will be wasted investigating and prosecuting juveniles with unpredictable results (since the laws don't really cover this twist in the evolving world of kid-generated kiddie porn). The most sensible solution to me would be that parent and teacher groups launch a class-action suit against generative AI companies to stop allowing nude bodies to be merged with non-adult faces.
Ultimately this will be a much bigger deal than Google Gemini generating racial diverse photos of Wehrmacht soldiers. But kids will be kids (and I mean that in a creatively generative negative way)...
Then we'd start needing definitions of "non-adult" faces to handle computer-generated faces, and real faces would be measured on the scale, and actual adults would have their faces flagged, and people would mod faces from both directions towards the line until they just barely crossed, and there'd be racial disparities in what types of faces are recognized as "non-adult", and there'd be AI generated filters to age or de-age faces, and then eventually there'd be a VR app that de-ages everyone's face to 6 years old and removes their clothing, and in the darker corners of the Internet there'd be a VR parody app that gives everyone the face of a 6-month old black baby and the body of an 90-year-old white woman.
I don't think we've adjusted enough yet to the social consensus that implies that every child has a basilisk in their pants, and many have access to a camera phone. We're in some sort of pre-9/11 world where we still think "oh, people just don't **do** things like that".
I thought the first use of generative AI way back in its infancy was to age kids' faces for those milk carton pics. Seems like the aging and de-aging of facial features is old hat for AI. And ironically, wasn't there a bit of embarrassment around that app, because it was turning black and Asian kids into white adults?
>The most sensible solution to me would be that parent and teacher groups launch a class-action suit against generative AI companies to stop allowing nude bodies to be merged with non-adult faces.
To which the kids' immediate and predictable response (should the lawsuit succeed) will be to use existing pre-AI technology to age the faces by four or five years. To which the next group of outraged parents' response will be...?
Yes, but I don't want my taxpayer dollars wasted defending these lawsuits. Go sue Big AI!
But yes, child-generated child porn has been a problem since phones got cameras. and kids will be kids in a creatively negative ways no matter what we do.
It's not obvious to you? At least in the US, your taxpayer dollars pay for schools. So having teachers and administrators wasting their time trying to stamp out kid-generated kiddie porn wastes your tax dollars.
And taxpayer dollars pay for the police, who have to investigate whether kid-generated kiddie porn (that doesn't depict real kids except for their faces) is a crime. And it pays for the prosecutors who have to decide whether or not to prosecute the juveniles who generated the kid-generated kiddie porn. And your tax dollars have to pay for the courts if these cases come to trial. And your taxpayer dollars pay for the juvenile correction facilities if the juvenile kiddie pornographers get sentenced. And even if the criminal justice system doesn't get involved, your tax dollars pay for the courts whose time is taken up by lawsuits between parents and parents and the school districts.
And finally, your tax dollars have to pay if your school district loses a lawsuit from angry parents over how the kid-generated kiddie porn humiliated and damaged the reputation of their child.
A quick Google search will show that there's already been a slew of lawsuits about pre-AI kid-generated kiddie porn on smartphones in the US. Seems like the legal and financial burden of this latest trend should be directed to the generative AI companies that are enabling this latest twist. And right now it's only still photos AFAIK, but, up next, kid-generated AI videos of kids having sex for bragging purposes or to humiliate their peers!
You asked what taxpayer dollars. I answered. And my original post was about the flailing of a public school system and law enforcement over this issue. Pot calling the kettle black?
I'm also not clear on how the AI is supposed to tell a face is "adult". There are plenty of people in their early-mid 20s who could pass as high schoolers. If you're going down to middle school like in the article it's presumably more obvious, but still.
Is Google no longer gray tribe? On my twitter feed right now:
"In Google's 2023 Annual Report, the terms "unbiased", "objective" and "accurate" did not appear even once. Nor did the "Don't Be Evil" motto- it has largely been retired."
This is in addition to the leading designer for Gemini having some *very* Blue Tribe opinions on Twitter.
I'm not anywhere near SF or Silicon Valley and was interested if anyone could tell me how the culture has changed over time.
Google can't be said to be "Grey Tribe" for multiple reasons, chief among which is the fact that Google is a swarm superintelligence that doesn't have political allegiances as we know them. It was perhaps accurate to say that *Googlers* are Grey Tribe, before some threshold year such as 2010 or 2015 or 2017 (Firing of James Damore), but this - due to the nature of how companies bloat themselves as they grow and dilute their culture and due to the specific conditions of Google as a corporation operating in a woke stronghold inside a woke stronghold - is probably no longer true.
The term "Grey Tribe" is also contested, it's (and this is not necessarily my opinion or one I agree with, but one I see worth consideration) the result of Scott giving too much salience to points of difference between Less Wrongers/Rationalists/Tech Nerds/Effective Altruists sub-tribe of the Blue Tribe and ignoring the many similarities. The Blue Tribe has many sub-tribes, wokism is one of the noisiest, but there are also center-ish, the trump refugees, the global non-American non-woke people repulsed by the overt Americanism of Red Tribe (and/or attracted by the shallow globalism of the Blue Tribe), 50 shades of Leftists, etc... The neo-reactionaries -for instance - don't call themselves "The Dark Tribe" or "The Black Tribe", even though they mostly hate and have very radical views compared to the Red Tribe, they might reject the classification but they're still Red Tribe. The heart of tribes such as the Red Tribe and the Blue Tribe will in turn pretend that those like the Grey Tribe and Neo-Reactionaries are fringe and don't represent them, but they secretly and whether they know it or not love the fact that Polarization is such that no independent small sub-tribe can break off the dichotomy of the dominating 2 and that their respective fringe still orbit their center and are still nominal allies (and are still very hated by the rival tribe, who overestimate how common the fringe is in the other tribe and how accepted they are).
It’s definitely left the grey tribe quite some time ago. This latest thing is just the steaming pile of shit in its pants that makes it clear it doesn’t take care of itself.
I can confirm that it was quite woke even 10 years ago. Of course that's not inconsistent with it being mostly "grey tribe". Also, "Don't Be Evil" was retired many years ago, although that's a matter of marketing, not politics and isn't related to any of the CW stuff.
Are "unbiased" and "objective" really Gray Tribe coded? I tend to associate them (when used as tribal signals) more with Blue-coded outlets like NYT or Vox.
The words as slogans are neutral, one might even say "fair and balanced".
I'd say that the Grey Tribe coding is about actual, systematic attempts to move closer toward removing bias and achieving objectivity, recognizing that these things are impossible to achieve, but treating them as a worthy goal nonetheless.
I always assume both of those phrases tend to mean "yay ingroup, boo outgroup" when I hear them.
Most people tend to think of themselves as unbiased and objective. If anything, the Gray Tribe seems more likely to recognize that they themselves are not perfectly objective or unbiased (but then like all people tend to think that makes themselves better than others and therefore *more* unbiased and objective than others, leading to the same conclusion).
> Are "unbiased" and "objective" really Gray Tribe coded?
That is a good question. As a first approximation, people generally perceive that someone has the power, and the words "unbiased" and "objective" mean that those with power should not push their beliefs on everyone.
During the Bush era, the power was pro-war and pro-religion, so "unbiased" and "objective" were used to oppose that.
These days, the power is pro-wokeness, so "unbiased" and "objective" are now used to oppose that.
IMO the "blue/grey" split is largely incoherent in the first place. I think it was just originally made up by Scott so that he could feel superior to the masses by being above their petty squabbles. But that's how everyone thinks! If you divide by partisanship, you get two big tent groups. If you divide more finely by culture, you get dozens of groups. But 3 is not a natural categorization.
I seem to agree with this liberalism-vs-leftism thesis https://www.natesilver.net/p/why-liberalism-and-leftism-are-increasingly that at the moment there does seem to be a divide between two types of "anti-red-tribe" and the difference and antipathy between each of them is as large or even larger than any of them versus the "red tribe". And the immense depth of that divide is an argument why it makes to split groups there, but not divide more finely by culture, as those finer divisions don't really hate/despise each other that much.
Now I'm not sure whether these two current "tribes" is aligned with the same blue/gray split as Scott discussed back then.
I think this is largely correct, but the missing piece is how first-past-the-post voting incentivizes having precisely 2 political coalitions. So right now, socialists and liberals are stuck in a coalition together, and the story of the last 20 years is the socialist faction becoming dominant.
The original "Everything but the Outgroup" article indicated as much:
"(There is a partly-formed attempt to spin off a Grey Tribe typified by libertarian political beliefs, Dawkins-style atheism, vague annoyance that the question of gay rights even comes up, eating paleo, drinking Soylent, calling in rides on Uber, reading lots of blogs, calling American football “sportsball”, getting conspicuously upset about the War on Drugs and the NSA, and listening to filk – but for our current purposes this is a distraction and they can safely be considered part of the Blue Tribe most of the time)"
It's the latter discourses with Scott readers seizing upon the admittedly half-baked Grey Tribe concept to describe themselves that have tried to construct a strict borderline between it and the Blue Tribe, a borderline that never really existed and exists even less now than before.
Very true. And the whole single-axis mapping of the political spectrum has little descriptive power except for finger-pointing and name-calling. Adding "Grays" in the middle or as outliers, or as part of one tribe or the other, obscures and distorts the complexities of social and political beliefs. As someone who many on this list would lump into the "Blue Tribe" I certainly wouldn't include Grays in my group! LoL!
If I am forced to simplify political groupings, I like the old 2-D Political Compass (https://www.politicalcompass.org/relatedBooks). They divide the political spectrum into four quadrants — Left to Right on the X-axis and Libertarian to Authoritarian on the Y-axis. They use the older British definition of Libertarians as classical liberals, which I know some Lefties find uncomfortable. I'd prefer that they'd use authoritarian vs anti-authoritarian for their Y-axis terminology, because that would create less confusion in the US where the definition of Libertarian has morphed most radically from its original meaning — but I digress.
They divide the political quadrants into the Authoritarian Left, Libertarian Left, Authoritarian Right, and Libertarian Right. We'd see people like Mao and Stalin in the upper left corner of the Authoritarian Left quadrant. We'd see people like Bakunin in the lower left corner of the Libertarian Left quadrant. In the upper right quadrant of the Authoritarian Right, we'd see the likes of Hitler and Franco. In the lower right quadrant of the Libertarian Right we'd see people like Ayn Rand. Traditional Democrats would cluster more towards the center of the Y-axis and closer to the center of the X-axis.
And ChatGPT gives a good general overview of how the term Libertarian has changed over the years.
User
How has the definition of Libertarian changed over the decades in the US and the UK?
ChatGPT
The definition of libertarianism has evolved over time, particularly in the US and the UK, reflecting changing political contexts and philosophical developments. Here's a broad overview of how the term has shifted:
Classical Liberalism to Libertarianism: In the 19th century, "libertarian" was often used interchangeably with "classical liberal," emphasizing individual liberty, free markets, and limited government intervention. This tradition persisted into the early 20th century.
20th Century: In the mid-20th century, particularly in the US, the term "libertarian" began to be used more specifically to refer to a form of anti-authoritarianism that emphasized individual freedom, autonomy, and minimal government. This shift was partly in response to the rise of big government policies and the growth of the welfare state.
Modern Libertarianism: In the latter half of the 20th century, especially in the US, libertarianism evolved into a distinct political ideology. It came to encompass a range of beliefs, including a strong commitment to individual liberty, free markets, limited government, and often a skepticism of government intervention in both economic and social matters.
In the UK: In the UK, "libertarian" has often been associated with more left-leaning or socialist ideas, particularly in the 19th century. However, in more recent decades, especially since the 1970s, the term has been increasingly used to refer to a more right-leaning ideology similar to that in the US, emphasizing free markets and limited government.
Variations and Subgroups: Within modern libertarianism, there are variations and subgroups, such as minarchists (who advocate for a minimal state), anarcho-capitalists (who advocate for the abolition of the state in favor of voluntary cooperation), and classical liberals (who emphasize individual rights and limited government).
Overall, the term "libertarian" has evolved from its classical liberal roots to become a distinct ideology emphasizing individual liberty, free markets, and limited government, with variations in its meaning and emphasis between the US and the UK.
You serious with this? Since you appear to not be American, let me point out that blue tribe hates libertarians just as much as they hate red tribe. They see them as “conservatives who happen to like drugs and let that inform their entire worldview.” And to be honest they’re right about them having a fundamentally different worldview.
Libertarians and Classical Liberals used to have a lot in common, but while libertarians have held their ground, liberalism got popular and jumped the shark. Calling libertarians “basically blue tribe” is an utter lie some leftists might tell themselves but it’s nothing more than a vague headnod to the once philosophically-grounded roots they’ve long since abandoned.
Libertarians aren't one group. There's right and left wing libertarians, even just in the sense of the american sense of the word. There was basically a fork in libertarianism in the early 2010's between right wing libertarians and libertarians who became woke while convincing themselves that the problem is the government being too big (while also saying that the government should engage in racial wealth redistribution for slavery and other nonsense).
This appears to treat tribes as wholly analoguous to political ideologies, which the original post never indicated it would do in the first place. The "gray tribe", as far as I've understood it, are supposed to be libertarian-ish, not a group where libertarianism is supposed to be the entry requirement.
Insofar as I've understood, what would moreso define blue tribe would be things like the secular/religious split (with blues being secular), academic/non-academic split (with the blues being academic), urban/rural split (with blues being urban), alternate sexualities vs. traditional monogamy split (with blues at least more amenable towards the former) and so on. On those axes, the "grays" certainly are blue.
I'm a biomedical science student who will be interning with some scientists in Toronto this summer. The current thinking is that I'll use publically available data to look for some sort of link between air pollution or maybe weather anomalies and heart disease. With that in mind, what are some databases I should investigate, either in Canada, the US, or elsewhere?
Domestic terrorists and mass shooters in the US often show similar psychological characteristics and behavior in terms of their plans. Seeing as this happens so often in the US, what's the base rate that potential perpetrators get caught? If the base rate is low, why is there a blind spot like this in our surveillance?
If it's framed as a search problem, maybe ten thousand out of three hundred million people in the US are serious suspects:
- Nearly all have anti-social, autistic characteristics or something in the same category of diagnosis (~1 percent of the population) – 3 million people
- Nearly all are male (~50 percent of the population) – 1.5 million people
- Nearly all reveal intention or potentially violent instability ahead of time (as a personal estimate, ~1 percent of the population) – 15 thousand people
Those numbers are obviously rough, but I think the ~10 thousand figure is accurate for the US. What are defense agencies not be able to do that lets this continue to happen?
You're looking at the problem the wrong way around. Suppose you're looking at two people, and you know nothing about either one of them. They have equal likelihoods of becoming mass shooters of whatever variety you have in mind. (The profile you describe makes it clear that you're not referring to "mass shooters" in the sense of people who shoot a lot of other people.)
Now, you learn that one of them is a 17-year-old antisocial male who frequently remarks on how he'd like to shoot certain other people at his school.
This is enough information to raise the likelihood that that one is eventually going to become a mass shooter... by an amount that is too small for you to measure, one that is absolutely dwarfed by the error bars on all of your likelihood estimates. The outcome is so rare that the indicators don't make a noticeable difference.
Or looking at it the same way, but using a different paradigm, you might imagine that you have an intervention you'd like to apply to future mass shooters. You have some kind of cost-benefit test that applies to it.
The filters you describe will not change the outcome of that cost-benefit test; they don't carry enough information.
This is a general problem with attempts to prevent outcomes that don't happen anyway.
So... What do you want them to do? Ethical concerns aside, obviously they can't just kill everyone on the list. That would kill more people than it would save. Monitoring high risk individuals is something I'm sure they do already, but even if they do have all the information necessary to identify them, by your estimates, you still have 15k people you need to monitor. The FBI only has 35k employees, and I'm assuming most of them aren't employed to monitor people. Of course, AI will make this easier, but the tech still isn't there yet.
And even if you do everything perfectly, some people are still going to fall through the cracks, either because they failed to be identified as high risk in the first place or they just circumvented surveillance.
As you said in another comment, most potential attacks are prevented. Given the circumstances and the resources available, US defense agencies do seem to be doing the best they can. You can't expect every attack to be prevented.
The median damage from something falling through the cracks isn’t very high but the tails and externalities from those are, which, combined with the trend of events like these, is worrying.
There are a million other reasons not to put accurate data about yourself online. Surely you remember what happened to Scott. Smart people are always going to make it difficult to identify them, and others will continue to naively plaster personal information on the internet. The point is to neutralize all of the low-hanging fruit, because despite their stupidity, they can still cause a massive amount of damage. Unfortunately, the state does not have enough resources to prevent every attack, and thus they will go after the ones who are the most cost-effective to stop.
Say you have a son who is diagnosed with Asperger's, a mild form of autism, at age 11. (By the way, while it's true that several shooters have been diagnosed with autism, most people with Asperger's are introverted and inhibited. I don't know the stats, but it would not surprise me to hear that they are *less* prone to violence than boys who do not have a psychiatric diagnosis.) Your boy now meets 2 of the 3 criteria. Do you want the doctor who diagnosed him to be obligated to send a report to defense agencies, so that, as long as he is in school, they can scan his online communications and school reports for evidence of either intent to shoot or violent instability. Because if your idea goes into effect, the doctor will have to do it. Let's say the doctor does. So one day your son has an argument with a friend over Minecraft and texts "I hate you! Drop dead!" Now whoever is monitoring him has a piece of evidence that he is violent. Then he and another kid get in a little shoving match at school, and the "fistfight" appears in the teacher's report on your son. Now he's met the violence criterion twice. Meanwhile, you know that he's a cheerful kid who has it together and has several good friends. Sure, he bickers with them sometimes. All kids do that. Want to go tell the authorities your point of view and try to get him off the watch list? Good luck with that.
Most potential perpetrators do not end up committing an attack because they are caught early on. Successful perpetrators would have to both 1) be anti-social enough to come up with a plan, 2) competent enough to go through with it – which would select heavily for Asperger's, rather than the reverse. Selecting people to monitor out of a large population for risk would have a high cost per false negative.
The sheer number of these events has been rising at a high rate for the last twenty years, which is deeply concerning. What do you think about anonymized approaches, like analyzing written homework assignments? This be done at much less than John Schilling's ~$5,000 per high-risk suspect, without the same privacy concerns.
The first part of that plan *might* be doable for $5000/person, say by delegating it to a modified chatbot. But even there, don't underestimate the overhead costs of having every homework assignment scanned and submitted to the AI.
What's the second part? When Big Brother Gemini says "Autistic Timmy's homework indicates a 2.7% chance of his shooting up his school at the next convenient opportunity", what are you going to *do* with that information, and what is it going to cost for you to do that, and how is it going to actually prevent Autistic Timmy from shooting up the school?
No, hiring a therapist to talk to Timmy isn't going to make him not shoot up the school. What else have you got?
If it accomplishes anything, it will jt hasten the inevitable day when the wannabe mass murderers switch to explosives and incendiaries. And that will not be an improvement. This is mostly an imitation game, and you have no idea how lucky we are that Klebold and Harris weren't able to get their IEDs to work. Sooner or later, someone will get it "right", and others will take note.
The therapy is less than useful per se. But the feeling of being caught by your school on grounds that other people noticed you were making violent plans or in a violent headspace – and then being grilled about what you were thinking – is what deters this. The whole fantasy is kind of nullified. If this doesn’t apply to the cases that get caught, it applies to the ones that fall through.
When I was in third grade (~2 years after the Sandy Hook attack), I said something with violent influence on a written assignment, and a teacher noticed. They called the principal of my elementary school, who in turn put me in a room and called my parents, who were told to the effect: “be thankful: this is concerning, we’ll be sure to monitor your middle-eastern-looking kiddo and give him some lessons – but hey, we didn’t call the cops”. From that (and my parent’s reaction), I learned our thoughts can and are being read by authority, and that our actions, in being informed by our thoughts, can and do contain information that indicates greater patterns in our thoughts – even if we try to hide them.
With more interactive systems, maybe Big Brother Gemini will be able to neuter violent inclination early on. Persuasion seems like a relatively simple RL problem at scale (chatbots can do far more complex procedural things), and the overhead is already being paid by Google’s safety team.
We don’t need chatbots necessarily. With transformer encoders, you can measure more dimensions of the relationships between two written documents. All schools use the same turn-in software as it stands, which already runs a ton of processing on every assignment, so the overhead is to the companies less than the schools. When people read Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto they’re more likely to use the word “surrogate” in text they write afterwards to adapt to the way that Kaczynski uses language (both the framing and repetition), *especially* if they’re being influenced by his ideas or perceive it as high status.
There’s the issue of when a surveillance technology provides credible evidence of its existence, people will price that into their behavior. Good surveillance that uses these methods might provide deliberate disinformation, like the turn-in software informing teachers that the suspected students show “signs of disengagement or asocial behavior in online class communications and school emails” (which violent actors usually do, but that doesn’t indicate written assignments as the factor).
I really don't think this is going to work the way you want it to. These people are writing their thoughts and plans on homework assignments they know their teachers are going to read, and they're posting them on social media hoping their friends will read them. They're not ashamed or afraid of anyone finding out, they *want* people to find out. They're still in the phase where they can hope that if other people know how much they are suffering, those people will do something to help.
That hope doesn't last forever, of course. If nobody does anything to help, it usually turns into despair and enduring misery; sometimes it turns into bloody violent retribution and a quick glorious end. If the thing people do to "help" is to ritually humiliate Timmy and send him off on the short bus, or back to the class in front of which he was humiliated, do you really think that makes them *less* likely to turn to Plan B?
And if Timmy's humiliation deters three more Timmies from folllowing his path, then the thing that's being deterred is the "write about your feelings and hope someone notices" part. Not the "there's no hope, might as well go out in a blaze of glory" part, because when they get to that point they're beyond humiliation.
You're dealing with a bunch of people who are suffering from pneumonia, and your "solution" is to punish them every time they cough because coughing is the first warning sign of pneumonia.
This is pretty clearly a case of the cure being worse than the disease. Mass shooters don't kill that many people in relative terms, so it's a pretty bad hill to found your dystopian police state on.
Well, I totally get being horrified by mass shootings, but I don't think your plan is realistic. It's sort of like trying to predict who's going to cause a fatal auto accident this month. We know who's likeliest to: People with lots of speeding tickets, moving violations, DUI's, previous. accidents. There are a LOT of people like that, Maybe 5 % or so of drivers. There are 233 million US drivers, so about 10 million high risk drivers. But we have 4000 auto fatalities per month in the US, and while the high risk drivers will no doubt have caused more than their share, they will not have caused all of them. Some will have been caused by people with clean driving records. Let's say the high risk drivers, while only 5% of the drivers, caused 75% of the fatal accidents. So out of these 10 million high risk drivers, only 3000 caused a fatal accident. Hardly any of them did. Trying to pick the school shooters out of the population of fucked up young males who are likelier than most to be a shooter is the same way. You know what haystack to look in, but you're trying to find a needle in it.
There is no good way to pick out the real shooters-to-be from the large group of kids at risk for becoming shooters. I doubt that even highly invasive government investigations would be able to do it -- likewise, even highly invasive government investigations would not be able to pick out the very few bad drivers who are going to cause fatal accidents this month from the ones that are not. Let's say you were willing to be very invasive. The government gets to monitor their location and cell phone use, and determine how much texting and internet browsing they do while driving. It gets to check the person's purchases and find out now much alcohol they buy each day. These horrible invasive approaches will make prediction of fatalities better, but it will still be terrible. Maybe now you will have identified the 3 million riskiest drivers, who are responsible for 85% of accidents. But still, the vast majority of even these awful drivers will not have caused a fatality. And some fatalities will still have been caused by good drivers. See how it works? You can't get away from looking for a needle in a haystack, unless, with the kids at risk for school shootings, you had an agent assigned to eavesdrop on all their communications and follow them around all day. You'd have to assign an agent to every one of those 10000 kids.
School shooters may look like low-hanging fruit -- a source of murders that is easy to get rid of. But it's not. It's high in the tree. Also, if you want to be coldly statistical about it, mass shootings account for a tiny percentage of violent deaths in the US. Here's a chart of deaths from mass shootings over the last 20 or so years: https://www.statista.com/statistics/811504/mass-shooting-victims-in-the-united-states-by-fatalities-and-injuries/ There have been only 1 or 2 years in the last 30 when the number exceeded 100. On average it's maybe 40/year over the last few years. And while the number of fatalities per year is going up, it is not going up very fast.
Black americans commit more homicides every year than there have been people killed by terrorism since and including 9/11. Is this "deeply concerning"? Is the thousands of assaults, muggings and rapes on top of this concerning?
Putting more police into high-risk (i.e. high % black population) neighbourhoods would cost multiple orders of magnitude less per life saved than your mass surveillance state would. So why on earth aren't you advocating for more police?
Consider that the open internet is scraped and monitored quite often for all kinds of things. Homework assignments are already analyzed by turn-in software to check for plagiarism, and false positives are reviewed by teachers. If you use the same methods to measure influence to things written by extremists or terrorists, this seems in turn much cheaper than funding aggressive expansion of the police force.
Sometimes people accidentally repeat words in a paragraph. The same happens with words you’ve just learned or heard. The history of your dictionary searches could likely predict the books you’ve been reading. These all reveal psychological state, sometimes very uncannily, and advanced language models can use these for specific inference.
My point is there's not much that they can do, absent concrete evidence that one of these people is planning a crime. This is as it should be. Presumption of innocence and all that good stuff.
There are many forms of monitoring that the Patriot Act / Freedom Act etc. should allow for, as well as granting search warrants as any individual becomes more at risk of violence. Often therapy or some form of forced but unobtrusive socialization can make the difference between someone acting violently or not.
Or, to borrow a phrase: sorry if I was being too terse. I am wondering why security or defense agencies can't or don't make use of information like this.
Oh I am fairly sure they do, to the extent permitted by the legal system they operate under. In other words, much of what you propose can be (and is? ) implemented in China, but is contentious here in the USA. Jay Edgar Hoover did pretty well at it. That the planet will become perfectly surveilled in the not too distant future is an outcome that I think is very difficult to avoid.
Human lives are commonly estimated as being worth ~$10E6 in modern industrialized nations. If the average terrorist/mass shooter/serial killer will kill ten people, then a countermeasure that works half the time is cost-effective at $50E6 or less. If the countermeasure starts with "here are 10,000 suspects, one of whom will be the next big killer", you can afford to spend $5000 on each of them.
What are you going to do with $5000 that gives you a better-than-even chance of figuring out whether the guy who was assessed at 0.01% probability of being the next big killer, is actually that guy?
Your estimates are assuming that these are uncorrelated, but, for example, bring male and autism are correlated.
The other thing the government can't do in the US - thanks to the first amendment - is to reduce recruitment by suppressing news stories glorifying mass shooters.
A more cynical take is that the government is maximising utility by providing television entertainment for millions of viewers at the expense of a relatively small number of people getting shot.
IMO, the realistic blackpill is that the media will always find something that bleeds to lead. The government has nothing to do with it. And likewise, enabling mass shooters does not "provide entertainment" because lurid crime news stories are limited by the number of news stories that can be active at one time more than the supply.
It's an amusing take. Could make a good short story that compares our society to a society that's more explicit about that trade (like in The Hunger Games or something).
That’s true, I think it would be hard to tell for any major perpetrator in the recent past whether they would turn violent or not, even shortly before their attack. But the space of people is still relatively small.
Looking for a good book about the energy industry. Something that covers most everything (carbon based, nuclear, solar, wind, etc). Some technical depth would be good but obviously it will be limited if it covers everything. Any recommendations?
Vaclav Smil wrote about this often. There's "Energy and Civilization: A History" from 2017. I like "How The World Really Works" which is accessible to anyone, mostly about energy and climate plus the scale and difficulty of transition required, but touches on energy sources.
The Prize by Yergin is one of my favorite reads, it's about oil history.
More lecture series than book, but The Science of Energy by Michael Wysession sounds like exactly what you’re looking for, available on Audible. It’s in-depth enough that I’ve given it multiple listens and learned a ton even as a civil/mechanical engineering graduate who already knew a lot on the topic, but it’s geared towards a more general audience.
I see the UAP story pop up from time to time ... and remain a complete disbeliever.
Reports come from only military aircraft, typically from complex computer controlled aircraft equipment. Reports never come from commercial or private aviation despite these flights outnumbering military flights by some staggering amount.
Consider, that we're not using Isaac Newton's Radar anymore. Every image presented is a collection of data. Objects presented on a screen are assembled from data in a table or database, i.e. direction, strength, etc. Most of the equipment isn't on it's first generation, but has undergone several hardware and software upgrades. That means I'm writing code to interface someone else's system, on proprietary interfaces, which means we're writing the handshaking code too. If my software doesn't properly address memory, or someone else's software walks on my storage locations, we get garbage ... garbage which may just look like another 'flying' object. Did you think there are 10,000 pairs of eyeballs combing through this stuff?
Commercial aircraft just never seem to report UAPs, despite having hundreds of bored passengers, carrying cameras, taking pictures of clouds and what-not ... yet never seem to report a UAP. Private aviation (pop in his Cessna) and carrying a phone with a camera never seems to see a UAP either.
If your objection to UAPs is that the multiple independent sensors and detection systems are not doing specifically what they're designed and validated to do at the expense of billions of dollars, and that these artifacts appear across multiple generations of these systems, some of which were developed independently, or that it's a simple software glitch in processing accessing this sensor data that has been present for multiple iterations of these systems and never detected, then I don't know what to say. There are good objections to UAPs, but I don't think this is one of them.
Many reports have also been accompanied by visual confirmation, so that wouldn't track. If you want to dismiss eyewitness testimony given its unreliability, then it could indicate an equipment problem, and I can only assume the military brass would have shown *considerably* more interest in tracking the issue down as it compromises military effectiveness.
Military radar and other sensors have considerably more resolution and sensitivity than commercial radar. This can indeed produce false positives, which is why you have multiple sensors to cross check.
It's fine to be skeptical, but it's way too early to be so dismissive. There's a lot of data that permits many possible explanations, some mundane and some fantastical, but whatever the final verdict, it almost certainly won't be trivial.
Are there any examples of moves from famous human chess games that were previously considered brilliant but are now known to be unsound due to computer analysis?
Not a huge chess guy, but you may want to look into Mikhail Tal, "the Magician from Riga" specifically. He was renowned for his strategy of
A) make the board as complicated as possible by threatening everywhere simultaneously
B) hope the opponent screws up.
He would often make a "Tal move", which were moves that looked 0 iq but magically led to checkmate like 11 turns later. Tal moves don't often survive the scrutiny of computer analysis, but they're strong anyway because human opponents don't have time to calculate the entire search tree.
I had the pleasure of meeting him and photographing him at a chess tournament In NYC in the early 90s. He was all legend and no competitor at that point, but you could feel the love.
There are probably better answers, but in the Opera House Game, on move 8, Morphy developed Nc3, instead of playing Qxb7; a relative pawn sacrifice. Engines say Qxb7 is better. However, this is of course typical of Morphy, and the Romantic Era of chess generally, and this possibility was already noted by Lasker who remarked that Morphy was an artist, not a butcher. Moreover, Nc3 is still winning.
More relevant, but still not exactly what you're talking about, is Mikhail Tal vs Andres Vooremaa in which on move 14 Tal sacrificed his knight with Qg3. This isn't strictly unsound, as it isn't losing, but the engine says that after the sacrifice White is equal, whereas if he protected the knight (fxe5) it would have been +1.1.
Many ? Take any random famous game and you have a good chance of finding moves that are computer refuted but still good at the human level. For a precise example, Kasparov -Topalov Wijk aan Zee 1999, in my opinion the most beautiful game in chess history.
apropos of nothing, here is a wonderful example of (unless I miss my guess) an unsung hero of words, a laborer in the trenches deep in the dictionary yet spinning their own beauty into the world of words, just in case it happens to catch and inform some hapless writer looking for advice on capitalization like I did. Fortunately I can share a little of my joy. Worth a click:
Yet, I've never seen an explanation for why the names of the seasons aren't considered proper nouns like the days of the week and months. I asked ChatGPT and it spat out the same old pablum that seasons aren't like days of the week because they're "general periods of time" and not specific times within a cycle. Nonsense! Astronomically seasons are well-defined right down to the minute they begin. And they happen in recurring cycles like the days of the week. Ironically, there's no astronomical reason to divide a week into seven days, but there is an astronomical way to define a season.
You
What is the history of categorizing seasons as regular nouns but days of the week as proper nouns?
ChatGPT
The distinction between categorizing seasons as regular nouns and days of the week as proper nouns is rooted in the way language has evolved and how different cultures have viewed these concepts.
Seasons as Regular Nouns: Seasons are considered regular nouns because they are viewed as general periods of time that recur cyclically. The concept of seasons is universal and not tied to specific instances or unique identities. In many languages, including English, seasons are described using common nouns because they are seen as part of a natural cycle rather than as individual, unique entities.
Days of the Week as Proper Nouns: The names of the days of the week are considered proper nouns because they are specific names given to each day within a recurring cycle. Each day has its own unique identity and is treated as a distinct entity. This distinction likely originated from the historical association of each day with specific celestial bodies, deities, or religious observances, which gave them a special significance beyond just being a part of a cycle.
In summary, the categorization of seasons as regular nouns and days of the week as proper nouns is a reflection of how language and culture have evolved to categorize and conceptualize these different aspects of time.
Unless you follow strict astronomical rules, seasons are squishier
Traditionally spring is when you plant crops, summer is when you turn the AC on, autumn is when the leaves change color and winter is when you break out the toboggan and snow shovel.
All of these vary a lot by latitude, altitude and proximity to large bodies of water.
In Mpls television weathermen generally don’t start talking about meteorological spring until mid April. But yesterday, February 26 was definitely astronomical winter and the high temperature was 65 F. Anyone taking a run or bicycle ride would have called it spring. So ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I know the verses in The Bible that say "thou shalt not kill" are more correctly translated as "thou shalt not murder". Is the same generally true for the commandments against taking life in Buddhist and Hindu scriptures, or are those actually meant to be about killing in general?
The Buddhists don't distinguish between murder and legal killings. It's all violence that results in a karmic burden on the perpetrator(s). But it's important to note that Talmudic interpretations of the 6th Commandment extended its meaning to encompass any act of violence against others, including verbal attacks such as gossip, slander, and shaming a person in public...
I guess it depends on what your definition of "woke" is. The definition varies for the unwoked and the awoken. And AFAICS even within those camps there there's little agreement about what makes woke woke. But the idea that words can harm others goes back a long way, and it's certainly not unique to Judaism.
Matthew 5:21-22 (American Standard Version)
21 Ye have heard that it was said to them of old time, Thou shalt not kill; and whosoever shall kill shall be in danger of the judgment:
22 but I say unto you, that everyone who is angry with his brother shall be in danger of the judgment; and whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca [an expression of contempt], shall be in danger of the council; and whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of the hell of fire.
Buddhism has the concept of the four abstentions of sammā-vācā (i.e. "Right Speech") which are abstaining from lying, from divisive speech, from abusive speech, and from idle chatter because those things can cause others suffering.
Modern speech-as-violence doctrines seem to add a fifth component to mix — speech that triggers upset in the hearer that doesn't involve insults, slander, shaming, or threats (i.e. topics that trigger agitation in the hearer). From what I've seen, the claim that discussing certain topics inflicts violence on others by disrupting their comfort bubbles is shared by both the Leftie social justice woke and the Christian Right.
In Hinduism, the ideal is ahimsa, which means non-violence, but not to the extreme of pacifism. The idea is that you should try hard to avoid violence, but be ready to fight and kill if it comes to that. This is central to the Bhagavad Gita, where warrior Arjuna is told directly by God that he must fight and kill the family members and mentors who are opposing him (that sounds brutal, but well, Krishna sells it quite well, and the broader context of the Mahabharata makes very clear that the good guys tried very, very hard to avoid a war).
Buddha was pretty much a pacifist, even extending to animal life in some ways. There are five jobs that are prohibited for a Buddhist: trading in weapons, human beings, meat, intoxicants, and poison. So from what I know it is tricky to find wiggle room in the Buddha's words for killing. That doesn't stop some Buddhists from doing precisely that though (Jainism is one of the only religions that never developed theories of just war).
>There are five jobs that are prohibited for a Buddhist: trading in weapons, human beings, meat, intoxicants, and poison.
As a hobby chemist, I'm curious about more detail about the poison case.
a) Even in the Buddha's day, lye used in soapmaking was an example of a poisonous (strictly speaking, corrosive) intermediate used to produce a (mostly) harmless final product
b) "The dose makes the poison" This is more spectacularly obvious in modern times (people have poisoned themselves with vitamin A), but, even in the Buddha's day any number of folk medicines could be toxic
I think a prohibition against killing in general is likely incompatible with civilization -- sourcing food and space will be difficult without killing plants.
Also, any religion which is the ideology of any successful state is very unlikely to endorse radical pacifism for the simple reason that radically pacifism is not a winning strategy in interstate anarchy settings which dominated most of history.
In regards to not killing plants, one of the reasons that Jains are not only vegetarians but also abstain from eating root vegetables is that they don't want to kill the plants.
Although Buddhism overall has had less violent history than Christianity, Islam, Judaism, or secular religions such as Marxism and Atheism, it has not been completely non-violent in all times and places. The Dalai Lamas kept standing armies, and at least among the Mahayana of Tibet,a there were tantric rituals to help cleanse the karmic burdens of soldiers who had killed enemies (sorry, but I can't find the link to those texts, anymore).
Various Buddhist sects in 16th Century Japan formed armies which they used to protect themselves and to influence the tumultuous politics and wars of the Warring States Period. The Shoguns when they came to power stamped them out.
We also have the examples of Sri Lanka where Buddhists have been willing to wage war on the Tamils, and of Myanmar where militant Buddhists are leading a genocidal campaign against the Muslim Rohingya.
There is a lot of boredom these days, which Hoffer mentions as well: "There is perhaps no more reliable indicator of a society’s ripeness for a mass movement than the prevalence of unrelieved boredom." Are we in the midst of a mass movement, or is one on the horizon?
Most replies are misunderstanding what Hoffer meant by bored. Here's a slightly longer quote from my copy of The True Believer:
"When people are bored, it is primarily with their own selves that they are bored. The consciousness of a barren, meaningless existence is the main fountainhead of boredom. People who are not conscious of their individual separateness, as is the case with those who are members of a compact tribe, church, party, etcetcra, are not accessible to boredom. The differentiated individual is free of boredom only when he is engaged either in creative work or some absorbing occupation or when he is wholly engrossed in the struggle for existence. Please-chasing and dissipation are ineffective palliatives. Where people live autonomous lives and are not badly off, yet are without abilities or opportunities for creative work or useful action, there is no telling to what desperate and fantastic shifts they might resort in order to give meaning and purpose to their lives. "
In other words, boredom is a lack of purpose, meaning, or creative work. Staring at your phone is pleasure-seeking and dissipation, which is an "ineffective palliative". Which, yeah, I think society is starting to sense that. Doomscrolling is not satisfying, it doesn't give you purpose, it just fills time. And there are not many opportunities for creative work or useful action these days.
Yum. Give me a good potboiler novel, paper or ebook, and I'll ignore work — creative or otherwise. And I spend hours online each day researching questions across a wide range of subjects that will have no use whatsoever to my struggle for survival. Yay! I'm bored! Give me more boredom! And my life is purposeless. I'm going to die without doing anything significant. Even so, I'm enjoying it immensely. Purpose is for small minds.
>The differentiated individual is free of boredom only when he is engaged either in creative work or some absorbing occupation or when he is wholly engrossed in the struggle for existence.
If the guy insists on using words by non-standard meaning, you can't really call it a mis-understanding. It's just poor writing. Had he written instead 'There is perhaps no more reliable indicator of a society’s ripeness for a mass movement than the prevalence of lack of purpose and meaning at large.", replies would have been different.
I haven't been bored since 2014. Seriously. I remember the true, stark, and lifeless boredom of my childhood in the 80s/90s pretty well still. At any given moment now I can remove a personal sized computer from my pocket and have instant access to infinite sources of distraction and entertainment that would have looked like literal magic in 1990.
Building on what Bldysabba says, I don't think we have an abundance of boredom as we normally categorize it. I think we have a significant lack of *purpose* and also *meaning.*
We have lots of distractions, mostly our phones but also the internet generally, that stop us from feeling normal low levels of boredom that we typically associate with that feeling. But I think boredom is still related to what we often feel, which is ultimately lack of purpose and meaning. We don't seem to get involved in meaningful, fulfilling activities nearly as often. We get lost in daily entertainment and many videos of things that look like fun, without engaging first hand in things that would actually be fun and give us a more complete positive feeling.
This hit the nail on the head. I don't watch TV anymore, does anyone?, and apart from reading and writing, I do several physical pursuits everyday, and different ones throughout the year. The purpose is never to change the world, but to learn, stay vibrant, meet people. This was normal for my parents generation, but seems to have been lost.
I would argue the opposite - we have never had so much easy and cheap entertainment, and we have a dangerous lack of boredom, resulting in a shortage of movement, whether at an individual or societal level
I may be a bit too romantic about it, but I feel like easy and cheap entertainment doesn't relieve boredom but merely suppresses it, like stimulants suppress appetite but don't actually satisfy your hunger.
My partner and I are in our 30's, both ACX readers who are married due in part to this blog. We were planning to have children this year but recently found out that we both technically qualify for an Asperger's/high-functioning ASD diagnosis. (We weren't looking to get diagnosed; one of us was seeking ADHD treatment and got diagnosed that way, and the other of us found out about a childhood Asperger's diagnosis that had been kept a secret.) We are both high-functioning and independent, if a little neurotic, but we are worried that combining our genes could result in a greater chance of us having a child who is autistic to the point of being extremely disabled. Can any doctors/scientists here help us think through the following:
1) What is the increase in our risk of having a severely disabled, low-functioning child by chance, given we both have mild ASD?
2) Is it worth doing IVF to select for genes less likely to cause developmental disorders up front?
3) Can anyone recommend genetic counselors in the Bay Area who are smart and will take us seriously? So far, it seems like most medical providers do not know how to deal with the concerns of autistic adults, especially prospective parents. It feels like doctors are either brushing us off or patronizing us.
Thank you all who replied! Quick update, we had our first meeting with a genetic counselor today. We weren't expecting much based on past experiences with our health insurance, but it turns out Kaiser has just rolled out a re-vamped and updated genetic testing program this week and it's miles ahead of what other parents went through just a few years ago. They now offer more comprehensive standard tests plus chromosomal microarray (CMA) for patients like us with diagnosed developmental disorders. While imperfect, CMA seems to be the first step forward for some kind of genetic autism screening, particularly concerning severe intellectual impairment, which is what we are most worried about.
Thank you for all this information, as it helped us ask the right questions.
Just spotted this comment! Chromosomal microarray picks up on copy-number variations, which are one of the major causes of the "complex autism" I alluded to. They're not particularly common in people with "milder" autisms, especially people of well-above-average intelligence, but this is not to say they're unheard of -- some CNVs have mild phenotypes and don't cause "disability" per se. The presentation of CNVs is really variable within families, so if one is passed down, it can result in anywhere from "significantly higher-functioning than parents" to more significant levels of disability. IMO given how bell curves work it's fairly unlikely for there to be many people with CNVs amongst ACX readers, but it's not strictly impossible.
Individual CNVs are very different to one another, and if any given one is found it'll have different implications to any other. A lot of genetic counsellors are...not great with CNVs, because they're individually very rare and they have serious clinician's illusion/ascertainment bias.
If you do find a CNV, the research you can do on your own is likely better than that of any genetic counsellor or company. They're all very different to one another, and I wouldn't expect anyone who doesn't specialize in a particular one to be 1. up-to-date on the literature and 2. have really internalized "the profile of any given CNV is super broad, and includes literally-no-symptoms-at-all". If you do run into someone who researches a particular one, though, they're probably at least as excited to meet you as the inverse (we don't have much data on 'mild' CNVs).
(This is assuming you're reasonably confident in interpreting the medical literature, patient groups, etc., so it doesn't scale infinitely, but the things I tend to hear from counsellors or companies tend to be below the 'what do you get from searching Google Scholar as a reasonably comfortable-with-research person' threshold.)
This is an area in which I've done a lot of research. No one has seriously researched "how many children of autistic parents are autistic" -- and they couldn't, really, because autism diagnosis is so unclear and we're nowhere near even having good base rates -- but there's a lot you can read into what we do know.
A large share of all diagnosed "severe autism" does not naturally cluster with ASDs. "Syndromic autism" -- autism in the context of an identifiable genetic disorder -- is a relatively large share of all diagnosis; every single intellectual disability syndrome is "associated with" autism, including ones radically unlike autism (15% of people with Williams syndrome, a disorder with a characteristic behavioural phenotype of "extreme outgoingness", "strong social interest", and "piercing eye contact", are diagnosed with autism). About 20%-ish (maybe more?) of diagnosed ASDs are "complex", which means they're associated with birth defects or dysmorphic features; as time goes on, more and more "complex autism" is discovered to be caused by ever-rarer genetic disorders. "Complexity" is strongly correlated with severity.
I think the significant majority of syndromic and complex autism isn't autism at all, but a general diagnostic substitution because of the greater recognition of "autism" as a label compared to "intellectual disability". Some genetic syndromes seem genuinely associated with autism (e.g. sex chromosome aneuploidies), but -- as you'd expect -- these tend to be the *mildest* of all developmental syndromes, the ones so mild most people with them are never diagnosed, because we don't generally karyotype people because they're a little dyslexic and had speech therapy.
The "milder" autisms tend to be much more heritable, and are rarely associated with de novo mutations, which the "severe" autisms far more often are.
Neither Kanner nor Asperger conceptualized autism as something that could coexist with severe intellectual disability. Kanner thought the appearance of intellectual disability was flatly wrong, and that even autistic kids who seemed significantly impaired at a brief interaction were far smarter than they came across. Asperger thought the association was genuine, and Frith translates him as discussing "severe retardation", but this is a seeming mistranslation -- his actual descriptions correspond to mild or upper moderate ID. This same range is where Kanner found the "most disabled" of the children he diagnosed were functioning at thirty years later, and these were likely underestimates, given they had been institutionalized for decades and had little exposure to schooling. The "lowest-functioning" autisms are a much more recent construct, and remain questionably related to anything Kanner or Asperger saw. (People substantially overestimate the gap between their patients.)
None of this is to say "mildly autistic" parents never have "severely autistic" children, though the severity of autism is complicated and most people travel to multiple points-on-the-spectrum in their lives. But the connections are very murky and absolutely not additive. Everything we know implies "mildly autistic" parents will usually have "mildly autistic" children.
(postscript: I have a very strong family history of autism and, to my knowledge, zero relatives with the stereotypically "low-functioning" profile)
Some places discriminate against people with some diagnoses. And even if they do not today, there is no guarantee they won't change their mind tomorrow.
Thank you, this seems close to the information I am looking for!
It seems like the SSC survey found people with mild autistic traits don't necessarily have increased risk of very autistic children but the sample size was pretty small. However Emily Oster found the opposite in larger datasets: populations with greater proportions of mildly autistic parents had a greater chance of producing more severely autistic children. It is helpful at least to know the likelihood is so small that the data is fairly noisy; if there were a strong correlation, perhaps this question would have a more obvious answer?
Epistemic status: personal intuition, not actual medical advice.
I'm also high functioning ASD in my 30s, and my girlfriend is on the spectrum too but less high functioning due to a mix of CPTSD, depression, chronic fatigue, social anxiety and work related burnout. There is also some non-neurodivergency related history of health issues in the family as well, so we decided against having biological kids.
But in your case, I'd totally go for it. Common sense tells me to expect that on average your child would be about as high functioning as you and your partner, with possible deviations to either sides. And as you are in the top part of spectrum the risk of having disabled autistic child may be just a bit highter than average, but the chance of having a highly capable autistic child will be much more likely. And the world really needs more high functioning autists.
I don't think that IVF selection is precise enough to remove all the risks without loosing the benefits of your condition. I'm worried there is a risk that it can lead to just the selection of the most neurotipical looking embrio and so whichever autism related genes that allowed you and your partner to be high functioning will just be lost in the next generation. But maybe you can specifically talk about this kind of failure mode with a specialist.
I suppose? There are known genes to be correlated with autism so in theory you could select against them. The problem is that they are also correlated with other stuff, most notably intelligence.
I'd recommend searching this question on google scholar before seeing a professional. It's good to have your own info, to help you assess how seriously to take what the professional says. One thing to take into account is that most studies of this kind are going to concern parents who are autistic by the older, stricter definition of the term: People who are without a doubt odd, rigid, prone to repetitive fidgets, bad at social perception and interaction, etc. -- people whom you would notice are odd within 60 secs of meeting them. If you have what used to be called Asperger's, and especially if you are self-diagnosed with that form of high-functioning, subtle autism, the stats about autistic parents are not going to apply to your situation.
In Eastern Canada, there are groups of individuals falsely claiming to be part-Indian, known as the Eastern Metis. They've organized "tribes" with "chiefs" and "membership cards;" the whole deal. They've built a whole conspiratorial worldview, in which their ancestors were listed as white in censuses because they were trying to avoid the Residential School Genocide. Many are obvious grifters, looking to benefit from affirmative action. I wonder what it's like for the second generation. I bet many were told by their parents "this is just a fun cultural thing, we're basically just white people, don't take it too seriously." But I bet many others grew up believing it wholeheartedly. I'm indigenous, part of a marginalized minority; settler colonialism is the reason my family has little money, etc. Then one day they're browsing the net and they learn that, not only are they not the identity they thought they were, their whole community is fraudulent. They aren't indigenous, their tribe is not a real tribe, their chief is not a real chief, their membership card is just a worthless piece of plastic. Real Truman Show s***.
One difference would be that here, the Kemi Sámi tend towards the main center-right party of the area and their claim is that the other Sámi are safeguarding indigenousness to prevent access to land rights; the other Sámi, meanwhile, consider the Kemi Sámi a part of a plot to dilute the concept of indigeneity and fennicize the Sámi.
As I indicated in the blog post, it's best to just see "indigenous" as a word that does not really indicate things like "how long a nation has been in the country" but rather "does this group's experience pattern-match to Native Americans and their experience during the settlement of America".
What gets me is that this arrangement, whether you want to deem it privilege or not, is clearly not working. The self-governing-within-Canada demographics are have-not societies whose ails do not improve after every billion-dollar payout. They want no federal oversight to deal with issues, yet we keep returning to a point in the discourse where the activist perspective on solving problems is to just give money. Conditions are deemed colonialist.
Leaning further into independence could work in some capacity, and would be palatable to voters of all stripes. Take for example foster care. Aboriginal kids are overrepresented in this system and one of the outcries is that they're taken from their culture. I believe there is a shift in the works where their societies would take care of it instead: great. Now you're in charge. This could be extended to other areas, with fewer open questions as to where responsibility lies. I expect that federal involvement will still be needed for services (health, infrastructure). If we decry issues that fall in the federal purview, then they should set the conditions.
That's not much of a question; it is the normal practice of every culture.
The question is why white Canadians tend to advocate for giving privileges to other ethnicities and removing them from themselves. This is nothing special to Canada either, but it is at least historically unusual rather than being the continuance of an unwavering norm.
Not everyone views their own ethnic group as their ingroup and everyone else as an outgroup.
For example, there were some white people which were opposed to the enslavement of black persons.
Evolution failed to align the aims of the individual human with increasing the relative frequency of their genome in the population. Thus not all humans follow your social darwinist model of furthering the interests of their own ethnicity over others, but instead select policies for different philosophical or religious reasons.
I would argue that this leads to better overall equilibria in multi-cultural societies. If rights are granted to the ethnicities holding power only, they might quickly lose their rights if the power balance changes.
I would thus much rather be a citizen of a state which recognizes the universal human rights than being part of the ruling tribe in some unequal society.
It is certainly debatable if overshooting color-blindness is beneficial or not, but simply expecting all humans to unfairly favor their own ethnicity is treating us as dumber than most of us are.
I actually thought once with some amusement (not that I would actually consider doing this, just a thought experiment) that if I had a kid, it would be easy raise them as culturally Jewish because I have a pretty stereotypically Jewish surname (though in my case it's just German), live in a pretty Jewish milieu, and I think many people I meet already assume I'm Jewish. Then if as an adult, he finds out that he's not 'actually Jewish,' how would that affect his identity? Would he just say, 'to hell with it, I'm just going to keep being Jewish?' And how would other Jewish people regard him? As a fraud like Rachel Dolezal? At the same time, most ethno-cultural communities today accept people who were adopted by parents of said communities, and would probably see it as racist to reject them on the basis of not being 'biologically' a member of the community. But they also typically reject the idea that ethnic/cultural identity can be conscious choice - people who 'choose' a new identity are generally considered immoral frauds.
So I guess it's childhood upbringing that 'transmits' authentic identity? If so, then the children of ethnic frauds have a somewhat valid claim to continue identifying with the identity they were brought up in. I guess it doesn't seem to me like there is a coherent set of rules determining how 'authentic' ethnic/cultural identity is actually transmitted; it seems like it'd be hard to come up with such a coherent set of rules that would simultaneously deal with all of these edge cases in a way that isn't counterintuitive, but also isn't basically racist, by modern definitions. Of course in the US at least (I would guess Canada too?) much of ethnic/cultural identity is already basically LARPing, so there's already a great deal of fakery in it.
> Then if as an adult, he finds out that he's not 'actually Jewish,' how would that affect his identity?
Depends on how he finds out? Maybe he runs for political office, and an opponent notices that his ethnic claim looks a bit odd, and does some research, and next thing you know he's a laughingstock in half the country? (Not saying that this is what happened in any particular case, but it seems like something I'd try to avoid.)
Well, the question of "Who is a Jew?" is complicated enough that the only part I'm certain of, is that the Nazis were wrong.
Most branches of Judaism do, in principle, accept converts, although they're very much not "evangelical" about it. So your hypothetical kid, if they follow the Torah and integrate into Jewish culture, might not be able to claim Right of Return to Israel but they might be able to "convert" to make their religious status official.
Islam takes the complete opposite approach - recite the affirmation of faith once and you're a Muslim. Then I guess you can start learning about the culture?
The bit about childhood upbringing as authentic identity is also a huge controversy in another context, namely whether late-transitioning women can be disqualified for being "socialised male". I'm personally on the side of, you can be gay or trans even if your upbringing tried its best to prevent that.
There was a joke going around the 23andme forums to the effect of, "I wasted all that time learning Hebrew as a kid and now this genetic test is trying to tell me I'm not Jewish."
And in other news, I have a mitochondrial DNA haplotype usually found in Ashkenazi Jewish populations, and I don't even know Hebrew.
I know someone that happened to. Didn't turn out well. Wasted years of his life trying to fit in, eventually figured it out, is angry at his parents. Still has Hebrew tattoos.
We really are one thing or another. Good to be glad of whatever you and your kids actually are.
That's a little different as Judaism has a well-defined conversion pathway. Various people have found out they're not Jewish by the standards they thought they were and had to convert from time to time.
Honestly now that you get affirmative action for being some kind of minority, it's going to be kind of motivated by that.
Why is ethnic identity even necessary in the first place? The only thing that matters is what a person is now. Their origin provides nothing of value. These superficial cultural ties have no reason to exist.
I'm not sure that it's "necessary", but it does seem to exist. The wisdom of Chesterton's Fence aside, getting rid of it seems like it might involve a lot of ... unpleasantness.
I think, in the beginning, there was culture, or "this is the way it was done". For various reasons (geography, climate, conquest), certain cultures were dominant within certain places.
When they leave those places, are their values, habits, knowledge, etc, all useless? I like to think that they're not necessarily. Some traits can be maladaptive, sure. Sometimes you just adopt a better way of doing things. But no, I don't think culture from country of origin is completely bereft of value.
It won't be "pure" (nothing is), it will have evolved with time and various selection pressures, and it will keep evolving, but I think diversity is useful in its own right because it's important for resilience. Indigenous American culture was why Europeans knew potatoes and tomatoes were edible and great crops when they arrived (recall both plants are nightshades and most Old World nightshades are deadly poisons). Culture encodes information.
(One place I feel strongly about is indigenous land stewardship. That bridge might have already been burnt in a lot of places, and oral histories and cultural knowledge irreparably lost, unfortunately. But this is one arena you definitely want genuine indigenous people vs frauds, provided that there's enough fragments of cultural knowledge to go around and piece together what people were previously doing to manage natural disasters and prey/predator populations. It would have been damn nice for someone to have wrote all that stuff down before doing all the murder, that's for sure).
Are superficial cultural ties useless? Well, they clearly serve a purpose to the people who enjoy them. I think a lot of people have a strong, psychological need to signal belonging, and the modern liberal society which accepts everyone isn't really meeting that need (to wit, it's hard to belong to an ingroup that consists of everyone). It's mostly harmless, but can be constructive (genealogical research). It can be damaging (making up ethnic histories and customs from wholecloth, kind of like some people inventing an ahistorical "white" culture).
But perhaps the "ethnic drive" is a real thing and is a psychological force the ensures the continuation of culture. It's the memetic mechanism that keeps culture going. So in that case, it's a drive that needs to be managed. Perhaps you can manage it by making genealogical testing accessible and having a couple of Society of X Ethnicities around in major cities to teach things (languages, customs, techniques used in cooking, performance, art, etc). That would be the sensible and pragmatic way to manage the tendency for some people to be intensely miserable about not knowing their origins and not knowing what they're "supposed" to do, with the added benefit of preserving knowledge and skills that might be useful one day. Though yeah, in many cases you'll find the reason why you don't do things the way your ancestors did is because the old way took massive amounts of effort with middling results. Or maybe you'll find it's better with aid from modern technology - I mean, you no longer need to mill the flour with a donkey but sourdough bread is slightly better tolerated than yeast bread in some people with certain GI issues, and sourdough is the traditional method - so it's really good that we didn't lose the traditional way of making bread, for the benefit of people who get sick eating newer bread. And it's really useful to know how people sweetened things before the invention of high fructose corn syrup if you happen to be allergic to it.... Or if we get a corn plague that abruptly wipes out all the corn.
Does it matter if it's true or not? Is awarding people special privileges based on fake ethnicity any better or worse than awarding people special privileges based on real ethnicity?
Imagine that two people are lost at sea, with only enough food for one. One is the world’s most promising cancer researcher while the other, to be polite, has far less potential to improve humankind. Most people would wisely choose the cancer researcher.
Yet the fashionable Effective Altruism movement focuses on lower-potential people—typically, people who are struggling in poor countries. That implies the belief that all lives have roughly equal value. Of course, our hearts go out to “the least among us,” but they face so many barriers. If we care to maximally benefit humankind, we’re wiser to invest in people with great potential for ripple effect who, importantly, would not otherwise get fully funded.
For example, leading lights in the Effective Altruism movement are far from downtrodden, for example, William McCaskill, Holden Karnofsky, Peter Singer, and Zvi Moshowitz. Effective altruism might fund such people to develop ever more “ripply” altruism.
Some other possibilities for more ripply and thus more effective altruism:
— SuperCourses: online versions of standard school courses taught by dream teams of transformational instructors, augmented by vivid demonstrations and gamification. Of course, instruction would be individualized, not just in pace but in teaching approach. Machine learning would make that individualization ever better, and automatic translation would make SuperCourses available in many languages. The development of SuperCourses would enable every student, rich and poor, kindergarten through college, Alabama to Zululand, to get a world-class education. The private and government sectors haven’t funded this—I have proposed SuperCourses to top U.S. and California education officials and gotten nowhere. One reason is the fear that the teacher’s union would use its might to try to stop it to preserve teacher jobs. But if developed and disseminated worldwide, SuperCourses could be very effective altruism indeed.
— Independent researchers studying solutions that are promising but have a poor chance of success. Governmental and corporate funding sources tend to invest in institution-based researchers whose projects have higher probability of near-term success. But if the focus is on long-term risk-reward, effective altruism would include independent, unaffiliated researchers working in their home-office or garage who are exploring novel ways to, for example, lower the cost of nuclear fusion energy, develop better AI-driven models for predicting and foiling terrorism and even for assessing a war’s worthiness, e.g., the U.S. entering World War II versus the war in Vietnam or Afghanistan.
— People developing ever better mental health apps, for example, using ChatGPT. Such apps could be distributed worldwide to countries rich and poor—Cell phones are ubiquitous even in poor nations. Private sources are funding development of such apps, but such development deserves greater funding given the apps’ potentially great ripple effect.
— Researchers studying the enhancement of reasoning ability, impulse control, and altruism. For largely political reasons, those research areas are underfunded by government and corporations but, with sufficient ethical guardrails, such research has great ripple potential to provide major benefit to humankind.
— People developing software that matches mentors with protégés, available worldwide. It would be like match.com but for mentor/protégé, relationships—Many protégés and mentors say that mentorship has been among their life’s greatest learning experiences. Such software would facilitate that. Alas, the matching industry, despite having been around for decades, has remained focused on romantic relationships. That makes mentor-matching apps a good candidate for effective altruism.
Again, it’s understandably tempting to want to help “the least among us,” those with the greatest deficits. After all, we feel good in helping them and it’s a fashionable form of virtue signaling. But if we truly care about humankind and are willing to focus on the greatest ultimate benefit, ripple should be the core criterion for determining what is maximally effective altruism.
Could you please provide evidence for your assertion that Zvi Mowshowitz is "a leading light" in EA? A quick search provided multiple examples where he is at least sceptical and plausibly at pains to distance himself from EA.
Malaria presents one of the major obstacles to the development of Africa, as do other endemic diseases common in the continent (e.g. trypanosomiasis). (The other major obstacle is the extremely poor institutions there.) The development of China into a first world country will undoubtably unlock an enormous number of intelligent researchers of great value to the world; similarly, African development would result in 2+ billion more healthy people in developed countries, some of whom would no doubt provide useful scientific and technical insights. Productivity per worker in African countries which received PEPFAR aid from the USA went up significantly compared to countries without it; disease is a major obstacle to economic development, and economic development underlies the potential of people to contribute positively to the world.
>Malaria presents one of the major obstacles to the development of Africa, as do other endemic diseases common in the continent
Citation very much needed
>(The other major obstacle is the extremely poor institutions there.)
This is an EFFECT, not a CAUSE.
You speak of institutions as if they're an exogenous factor like climate. They're not. They're a product of the people, and there's no evidence sub-saharan africans are capable of building good institutions.
>The development of China into a first world country will undoubtably unlock an enormous number of intelligent researchers of great value to the world;
China has a long history of intellectual accomplishment and had more sophisticated society in many places than much of africa does TODAY.
>similarly, African development would result in 2+ billion more healthy people in developed countries, some of whom would no doubt provide useful scientific and technical insights.
Not "similarly". There is no evidence that sub-saharan africans have anywhere close to the intellectual potential of the Chinese on the whole, and the majority of individuals who do have this potential are leaving or have already left
There's no evidence that any amount of "effective altruism", or any other intervention, will result in Africa becoming "developed"
And even if it could, it's by no means necessarily true that the impact of whatever scientific research they produce could ever come close to the monumental cost, past present and future, of africa achieving some level of "development"
>and economic development underlies the potential of people to contribute positively to the world.
Black americans have more wealth, more educational opportunity, more access to healthcare and so on than the majority of people in the world, but as a group they are a massive net fiscal drain on the US even before you consider the massive costs associated with their extremely high crime rate.
>Productivity per worker in African countries which received PEPFAR aid from the USA went up significantly compared to countries without it; disease is a major obstacle to economic development, and economic development underlies the potential of people to contribute positively to the world.
There's absolutely no reason to think you can scale this up to africa becoming 'developed'. Per capita income in africa has stagnated over the past decade and this has been with the rest of the world keeping them afloat with aid, financing and building/operating the majority of productive natural resources operations in Africa.
Its literally never been easier in history for a country to develop, with science and technology already existing, the internet existing, sophisticated global trade networks already existing. Europeans literally had to invent most of their science and technology from scratch in order to industrialize, and in a time without any of the other advantages listed above. No country on earth has these hurdles to clear, and yet much of africa is nowhere close to developed even compared to much of europe centuries ago.
The entire argument here is "Africans are fundamentally inferior, stupid people, who could never build anything of value," repeated endlessly. I'm not really interested in engaging with it because it's something only a very stupid racist would say, but since I know you will take this as an excuse to claim you are correct: in order for you to be correct, every single black country must be a miserable failure of a country with broken institutions. If even one isn't, it proves that it is not purely a product of genetic heredity. Botswana, the Bahamas, and Seychelles are all doing quite well at displaying the capacity of those of African descent in creating and sustaining institutions.
Nitpick: Zvi has repeatedly stated that he doesn't consider himself an EA and finds it a flawed movement, albeit one with occasionally interesting ideas and a lot of natural overlap with [r/R]ationalists. With regards to charity specifically, he thinks it's often possible to achieve high impact with local donations, for some of the same reasons you're arguing against EA here, but also because it's much easier to check the receipts when recipients aren't halfway around the world or whatever. Betting on the metis line vs the episteme line. Did you mean Scott instead?
> ripple should be the core criterion for determining what is maximally effective altruism.
You also need to account for the probability of failure, which is often quite high.
Gamification is sometimes actively harmful. My kids are already motivated to learn math on Khan Academy, but they have to wait for the animations of the fireworks to finish. I am already motivated to learn languages on Duolingo, but I have to skip a few screens telling me how many "xp" and "gems" I have collected today, how many more should I collect today, and how do I compare to people I don't know and don't care about.
Anyway, Khan Academy exists, and is quite good. And translated to many languages. Do we see any great ripple caused by it? If not, what makes you believe the next time will be different?
Researchers often spend tons of money producing research that does not replicate. Do you know how to make this process more efficient?
Is there any evidence that mental health apps using ChatGPT actually help?
...in other words, there is a very high risk of spending lots of money on something that seems to promise a great ripple, but then it will turn out to be... just another ordinary thing.
The 'lost at sea' metaphor doesn't really capture the actual situation, and so misses the core idea of EA.
If you wanted to express the real-world situation as a 'lost at sea' metaphor, it'd go something like this:
Two people are lost at sea. One is adrift in a boat filled with provisions following a maritime disaster that made international news headlines; the other is adrift in a practically empty boat following a maritime disaster that barely received two sentences' coverage on page 19 of the Cornish Post.
We only have a very limited supply of provisions that might just-about keep one person alive until they can be rescued; should we choose who gets our provisions based on how many provisions are already in their boat, or on how much media coverage their respective maritime disaster generated?
(If we *must* contrive to bring the cancer research thing into this metaphor somehow, I think the least-bad match for the real world might be, "the well-provisioned boat guy has a 0.00000001% chance of making a meaningful contribution towards curing cancer, and the ill-provisioned boat guy is making a 0.00000001% contribution towards elevating his developing world society to a first-world standard of living.")
For the two people lost at sea, I'd choose the most aesthetically pleasing of them.
Also, your ideas for mostly sound like "hey, <scam> is really big right now, what if we extend <scam> to cover even more of our lives". Mental health apps and matching apps aren't making the world a better place.
The value of a marginal dollar is orders of magnitude greater for these lower potential people. Relatively small interventions can create prosperity in the sense of successful small businesses, more education, ability to plan for the future, etc etc.
High potential people cannot reach that potential without a robust society to support them. It's a mistake to attribute 100% of the success to the last link in the chain. The existence of a robust social "substrate" is essential. EA interventions (e.g. in Africa) conribute towards the quality of this substrate.
Ah yes, the magical "robust society" that is completely exogenous to the people in said society
The type of magical thinking that treats "institutions" as if they were a factor like the climate or something
The "substrate" is INTELLIGENCE. Smart people can build something out of almost anything. Non-smart people cannot and never will.
For goodness' sake, just look at South Africa and Zimbabwe. There's no evidence black africans could ever build countries as prosperous and functional as pre-ANC South Africa or Rhodesia, which is bad enough. But these people categorically failed to even *maintain* these societies.
I know you've got a million just so stories to rationalize this, but it's all nonsense. There's literally no evidence whatsoever sub-saharan africa is capable of becoming 'developed'.
The main things holding them back is a lack of intelligence, and instead of EA being "rational" enough to understand this, no, they literally *encourage* African brain drain and ensure that Africa's potential falls lower and lower.
But please, PLEASE tell me what it is other than a lack of intelligence that makes things harder for Africans than for e.g. British settlers in 18th century Australia - the ones who created one of the most prosperous societies in history out of a completely undeveloped, mostly desert remote island with a founding stock of petty criminals.
Africa has every conceivable advantage over these people, all the science and technology is already invented, every thing they could ever need to know is available on the internet, the world now has sophisticated international trade networks etc. and yet they're nowhere close to Australia (let alone the US) after a comparable amount of time.
This is the greatest case of 'trapped priors' I've ever seen - this refusal to abandon egalitarianism after countless decades of failed predictions - and you people are supposed to be good bayesian rationalists?
So, this "egalitarianism" you're ranting against is something I never claimed. I also never claimed that African countries are free of social dysfunction. The material wealth and technology of the 21st century certainly gives those countries a leg up, but there are also downsides (brain drain is a prominent one you already mentioned).
Intelligence is not a hard prerequisite for being a productive member of society. Stability and culture are also important factors. You should go outside more and see for yourself. The social capacity of the western nations you laud so much is in alarming decline, and I don't think we've gotten dumber.
The most valuable lives are those of the people who can do work that helps many, via ripple effect, People who are poor and struggling are "lower potential" people. Seems to follow from this that the more accomplished someone is at skills that can have a big ripple effect, the more valuable their life is. But by that logic, the lives of the poorest people is of least value. Why bother helping them at all? At least, why bother helping them before one has helped all the people who are better off, who have more potential value to help others? Even if someone who is not destitute never makes any effort to help others, they at least have the potential to. So let's be realistic here and leave the dirt poor til last, which is where they have always been.
It's a wonderful thing when one's theory supports a status quo in which one has a comfortable spot.
>So let's be realistic here and leave the dirt poor til last, which is where they have always been.
Remind me again when white people needed foreign caregivers to lift them up out of poverty. Did god come down from heaven and gift us science and technology or something?
No, we lifted ourselves up. And if we had the same advantages that modern day africa has in terms of science and technology already being developed, the internet existing, modern financial and trade systems existing etc. then we would have industrialized almost overnight.
>It's a wonderful thing when one's theory supports a status quo in which one has a comfortable spot.
There is no alternative "status quo" where africa is equal to the west, unless we're all equally poor
But Hammond, your belief that the Africans are so motherfucking stupid that it is not worth our while to aid them is irrelevant to my point. I was not urging OP to show more enthusiasm for helping Africans, I was pointing out an absurdity in OP's basic idea: Resources should go to those who can help the most via ripple effect, and thereafter to those that can help second most, etc. The destitute are uneducated, ill, burdened by problems, etc. and have nothing to give. So by that logic they never qualify for any resources at all. Why send ripples to people who aren't going to be able to send out little ripples themselves? If you're going to make the case that Africans are hopelessly stupid, it's important to try to think clearly in these discussions. Otherwise somebody might think you're. a stoopit motherfucking African. Listen, just to stay safe look down at your hands on the keyboard once in a while when typing out diatribes. Are the looking browner? UH OH! Time for a break.
Could use info about options for someone I know who is getting an advanced degree in a highly technical STEM field. What they study is abstruse and has no practical application, so the natural path for them is to become a university professor. However, they need a fallback, because there are not enough faculty jobs to go around. They are extremely gifted at math, and good at the kind of coding that's used in their field, and could probably be hired as quant or something similar where they use their math talents in the service of the finance industry. However, their values are such that working in business or finance is out of the question. I was wondering if Effective Altriusm, either the organization or the activities they support, might have a place for someone like this: an extremely introverted math prodigy with few outside interests who would throw themselves into a job where they believe they are helping the world.
Serious answer: the NSA, specifically the side of the house that is tasked with protection of domestic (not just government!) communication & information systems.
Thank you! Do you think there are jobs where they might be presented with some challenging math-related tasks? This person really is extraordinarily talented. They're the sort of person who you'd have wanted working on breaking code in WW2. And they are not difficult to be around -- just sort of deeply disengaged.
Also, one of the jokes was that mathematicians there love their work so much, that the only way they leave is in a pine box. Why bother with a silly thing like "retirement," pfft!
Good point! And, as quantum computers get better, and RSA-style public-key encryption gets more and more exposed, quantum-resistant encryption is becoming more and more critical - even to us just-civilians trying to safely use a credit card on the internet.
Thank you. I did do the search. Do you think there are jobs where some of the math tasks would be challenging? This is somebody who could take on very difficult problems. They should be up at the top of the How Hard the Tasks are hierarchy, but definitely not high up in management.
Semi-joking answer: work on changing their values. It's pretty bizarre to me for someone to be against working in *any* business. There are tons and tons of businesses that make unambiguously useful stuff.
In general, operations and logistics are good places for people who are good at math but also want to see the concrete good their work does.
This person is very inflexible -- a math prodigy who is way past the introverted and a bit odd end of the autistic spectrum. I understand that people can help the world run better in all kinds of ways, some of them business, but this person is determined to be doing work directly for a helping organization. It is very hard for them even to consider anything other than being a college professor. Their flexibility is maxed out.
mmm, I see. It's a tough ask though. Academia is a tournament profession and I would discourage people from going into it without a solid plan B. Some EA organization may indeed be the best option.
GPT-6 requiring ~0.1-10% of all world compute to train isn't all that outlandish compared to other major industrial goods. This report [1] says that aluminum production requires ~1.5% of all electricity in the US. Aluminum is great, but it doesn't exactly dominate the public discourse. A one-off 10% of all compute for ~6-12 months might only register as a "fun fact" level of economic / environmental impact (e.g. "did you know that concrete production is responsible for 5% of all global CO2 emissions?").
Then again, energetic and compute costs to train bigger and bigger AI models might get into crypto or private jet territory, where the environmental impact is overemphasized because AI/AGI falls into the same tech bro / silicon valley elites sphere of negative emotional connotations.
If aluminum and concrete production suddenly stopped, it would have massive negative effects on not just the world economy but life as we know it. OpenAI could disappear tomorrow and nothing of real value would be lost.
>OpenAI could disappear tomorrow and nothing of real value would be lost.
That was probably also true in the first few years of industrial production of aluminum and reinforced concrete too. Give it a decade or so and OpenAI's models will be something akin to white-collar concrete--a nearly-ubiquitous "glue" or "foundation" for office and information work.
>That was probably also true in the first few years of industrial production of aluminum and reinforced concrete too
Guess what - in the first few years of production, they didn't use anywhere near as much electricity as they do today
>Give it a decade or so and OpenAI's models will be something akin to white-collar concrete--a nearly-ubiquitous "glue" or "foundation" for office and information work.
That's unclear. OpenAI disappearing would, by my estimates, be a good thing, but it could also be tremendously harmful. Imagine GPT-6 being the system that cures cancer and solves climate change.
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OpenAI and its closed-source contemporaries are purportedly the main drivers of the economy right now.
Remember all the economists that predicted a recession in 2023? Have you seen the litany of economic indicators that have consistently pointed towards a downturn for the past 2 years?
One of the main arguments about why the 2023 recession never came is that the economy is being buoyed by a burst of economic productivity, driven by none other than AI. This is why Nvidia's stock has risen dramatically (Nvidia, which produces graphics cards used by AI, had its value increased by the size of *Netflix* over *a single day* recently).
Nvidia's ascent represents the increase in supply of AI computational power, but anecdotes indicate a high demand as well. Lawyers are currently saving their clients billable hours with an AI law consultant that has read every law since 1850. Doctors are saving lives with the help of AI.
The anecdotes abound, but the conclusion is inescapable: The disappearance of OpenAI and its cohorts, at this very moment, would almost certainly plunge the global economy into a recession.
The stock market can plausibly be driven by AI hype because it is forward looking, but there's no way that AI had a meaningful macroeconomic impact in 2023. That doesn't even pass the laugh test.
I wish them well. I, personally, really want to _see_ true AGI and have a nice quiet chat with it.
>Lawyers are currently saving their clients billable hours with an AI law consultant that has read every law since 1850.
Is it really that reliable?? I've read of at least two cases of lawyers humiliating themselves by taking LLM (I think it was GPT4) output as trustworthy, and finding that it was citing nonexistent cases.
I keep asking GPT4 simple chemistry questions, and it keeps getting them pretty badly wrong. For a simple example https://chat.openai.com/share/7faacb6b-a487-494f-b0b7-4a071798fb1c . I asked it some simple cerium chemistry and, amongst other things, _it_ came up with the "equation":
2CeCl4(aq)+H2(g)→2CeCl3(aq)+2HCl(aq)+Cl2(g)
which doesn't even balance. GPT4 put 8 chlorine atoms on the left and 10 on the right.
Partly this distinction is about taking away something that already exists instead of preventing something from existing. If we removed all planes from the sky that would be a big deal now, but obviously wouldn't have made a difference to life in 1900. Removing OpenAI right now would cause zero major problems because there are no major systems that rely on it. Give it 10 years and maybe we're relying on it the way we rely on aluminum and concrete. But maybe not.
As for "cured cancer" - at least that would mostly be a one-off and we can still enjoy the benefits of successful research even if it's turned off and doesn't continue producing new research.
A series of unfortunate exchanges down the thread has escalated to the point where I need to explain why Ethnic Cleansing is bad to justify a mildly snarky reply I made in response to someone who advocated for Ethnic Cleansing as a norm.
Because I'm a patient teacher at heart, and because I have always been an advocate for repeating and explaining and re-explaining the obvious - a norm that religious cultures understand all too well but more secular cultures like Rationalism have failed to fully digest - I will try to make a comprehensive case of why Ethnic Cleansing as a norm is bad, and why people who advocate for it as a norm are bad and should feel bad. There is no reasoning in this comment that people are likely to find unique or exceptionally insightful, you likely already know all what I'm going to say on some, possibly non-explicit/verbal, level. By the end of this comment, someone who isn't too sure that Ethnic Cleansing is bad should hopefully be convinced or moved in the direction of being convinced that Ethnic Cleansing is bad, provided they're engaging in good faith and is reading attentively.
--------------
1- Definitions
What do I mean by "Ethnic Cleansing as a Norm"?
Ethnic Cleansing is the (not necessarily systematic) forced displacement of some population sharing a common trait (e.g. Religion, Skin Color, Gender, Nationality or Ethnic Origin) and crossing a certain size threshold, where "forced" implies any coercive and destructive practices and actions that - intentionally or unintentionally - makes the current habitat of the population more and more unfit for living, where those practices and actions are primarily perpetrated and/or incited and/or funded and/or planned and/or advocated by people outside the victim population.
The "As a Norm '' bit means that you're only a bad person if you want Ethnic Cleansing to be a "norm", lit.: a normal option that people can openly promote in normal political and geopolitical conversation. You're NOT a bad person if - say - you merely will begrudgingly choose Ethnic Cleansing from a list where it's the most humane options (e.g. as an alternative to Genocide), just like you're not a bad person if you're slightly relieved that a woman was raped and not murdered (or the reverse) and you're not a bad person if you do choose someone to kill after somebody forces you to choose which one of your children to kill.
--------------
2- Verdict
Ethnic Cleansing is Bad.
--------------
3- Arguments
Ethnic Cleansing being bad, there are several arguments for why Ethnic Cleansing is bad:
3-(a) The Argument from Private Property
Most people believe in some form or the other in the notion of Private Property : The notion that people have the right to certain things, and that those things can't be taken away from them by force (even if this forced taking away of things involves payment).
Ethnic Cleansing violates the Right to Private Property: It necessarily involves forcibly taking away the homes, cars and all other non(-easily) -transportable property that people being Ethnically Cleansed own.
Note: Notice how mild (3-a) actually is, the belief in Private Property needed here is not that which justifies Billionaires or private space travel or luxury yachts and private jets, it's not that which a lot of Socialists and Communists and some Anarchists rebel against. The vast majority of people living today, including the vast majority of Communists, believe explicitly or implicitly in a version of Private Property that at least grants you the moral right to buy things you need for a fair price (with the full consent of the seller), and then forever retain those things until you sell them, voluntarily relinquish them, or throw them away entirely for any reason.
3-(b) The Argument from the Immorality of Non-Consensual Actions Done to Humans
Most people believe in some form or the other the following notion: that humans, or more generally conscious minds at or near human-level sentience and/or intelligence, have a sacred moral right to decide their own fate.
Ethnic Cleansing is, by definition, a name given to actions that people do to other people, to force them to make decisions and accept fates that the victims didn't want to make or accept. Therefore, Ethnic Cleansing violates the human right to decide one's own fate.
3-(c) The Argument from the Sanctity of Intimate Property
Many people believe in what we could call - without loss of generality - Intimate Property: Property that has value beyond what their strict material valuation would imply, and which can only be perceived by the current owner. Among the list of potential Intimate Property: (A) The house you grew up in (B) The car you got married in, or the first car you own (C) The first piece of jewellery that your husband or wife brought to you (D) The belonging(s) of a dead relative.
It's important to recall a crucial property of Intimate Property: It can't be replaced by an equally-materially-valuable - or sometimes even materially-superior - property. The house you grew up in is fundamentally valuable because a thermodynamically irreversible event - you growing up from a child to a teenager - happened in it, and thus no other house can ever satisfy this, and thus you're very reluctant to sell it.
Ethnic Cleansing involves the destruction and/or the confiscation of - at least - the intimate property (A) of the victim population, and frequently many other kinds of Intimate Property, including all the ones that appear on the example list above and more. Thus, it violates the right of humans to own and appreciate and preserve Intimate Property.
3-(d) The Argument from the Perversity of Perverse Incentives
Most people believe or can be convinced to believe a certain model of human dynamics called "Perverse Incentives". According to this model, whatever actions you do - if they're known by other people - will shape the future actions of said people. Thus, for example, be careful giving charity to begging children, because when the people who force children to beg know that this strategy works and the children are too cute to be refused, they will have and/or kidnap even more children to force them to beg. Perverse Incentives is an anti-inductive model, it posits that the sum total of all human interactions respond to your action in ways nullifying the effects of your actions, often in unexpected ways.
Promoting Ethnic Cleansing as a norm will set a perverse incentive, namely that any state or powerful corporation which doesn't like a group of people can simply engage in less-than-murder ways of making their lies worse and worse and worse till people advocate for the Ethnic Cleansing of the victim population and the problem is "solved".
3-(e) The Argument from the Immorality of Violence and Destruction
Most people believe or can be convinced to believe that Violence and Destruction is bad, and furthermore that its typical outcome is the killing of humans and the destruction of property, which most people believe - in turn - to be also bad.
Since Ethnic Cleansing is typically not the first choice of the victim population, it typically requires an immense amount of violence and destruction to achieve. Furthermore, even after a critical percentage of the victim population is finally convinced, a substantial percentage always remain opposed, and thus need additional further waves of violence and Destruction to neutralize or eliminate.
3-(f) The Argument from etc
This list was outlined over the course of approximately 2 minutes, this section is for all the additional reasons that Ethnic Cleansing is bad, whether they come from me as I think about the issue more over the following days or from commenters who respond to this comment.
--------------
4- Objections
4-(a) I was just joking
Joking about immoral things is not necessarily immoral, unless the person telling the joke is actually convinced of the fundamental premise of the joke and is merely using a joke as a pedagogical/infotainment way of preaching the premise. For example, a joke about rape or America invading other countries for oil could be funny and harmless, unless the person doing the first is a rapist and the person doing the second is G.W. Bush.
Given an ideological affinity and/or a history of supportive comments to a party that advocated Ethnic Cleansing, making a joke about Ethnic Cleansing makes you a horrible person.
4- (b) Do you want the victim people to be Genocided instead ?
This argument is only against "Ethnic Cleansing as a NORM", Ethnic Cleansing as a desperate last resort while a genocide is taking place is not in its scope.
4- (c) What about all historical instances of people who were ethnically cleansed and turned out to be okay after centuries of healing ?
See Appendix, but this is not an argument pro-Ethnic-Cleansing-as-a-norm for the same reason that "What about all the women who were raped and then turned out to be ok after years of the incident" is not an argument.
--------------
5- Conclusion
Ethnic Cleansing is bad and people who argue for it should feel bad. Mockery of people unambiguously arguing for Ethnic Cleansing implicitly or explicitly is morally good and should be a norm in any good community.
Perhaps you believe in a deity that certifies a set of moral beliefs. I’m one of them. One of those beliefs is that ethnic cleansing is bad. But without this deity where does this morality come from? What physics equation defines a configuration of atoms in a state of morality or immorality? One thing I respect about the Rationalist community is that they’ve been willing to address this issue. Many of them (not all) have settled on Peter Singer’s axiom to reduce suffering. This axiom should make you generally wary of ethnic cleansing. But Yudowsky makes the argument that torturing one person for fifty years to save fifty thousand people from getting dust in their eye for a moment has a net reduction in suffering. I could see a Rationalist extending this argument to justify ethnic cleansing if they believed it would reduce suffering.
> Most people believe or can be convinced to believe that Violence and Destruction is bad
> Most people believe in some form or the other in the notion of Private Property
> Most people believe in some form or the other the following notion: that humans, or more generally conscious minds at or near human-level sentience and/or intelligence, have a sacred moral right to decide their own fate.
> Many people believe in what we could call - without loss of generality - Intimate Property
Saying that you should believe something because many other people believe it is just saying that you should replace your belief in a deity with belief in groupthink. Do you have any argument other than “you should conform to groupthink?”
As a society, I think that we’re in a current liminal state where traditional religions used to dominate moral belief and we’re in a transition to a new set of moral beliefs. We still have a lot of beliefs that are commonly held, but are vestigial Christianity. As you say, many people believe that violence is immoral. But from an atheist point of view, what physics equation defines a configuration of atoms in a state of morality or immorality? Rationalists are willing to give this serious thought rather than just handwaving these problems away and conforming to groupthink.
>But without this deity where does this morality come from?
From human minds. Human minds define morality. It's subjective, but its trivially true* this is how morality is defined. At least human morality as applied to humans.
>What physics equation defines a configuration of atoms in a state of morality or immorality?
Why does it need a physics equation? What physics equation defines a configuration or atoms as "being in pain" ? Or as "Happy" or "Sad" ?
If the answer is.... the physics equation that defines the state of the atoms in your brain such that the neurons are configured to feel happy/sad and are set in the happy configuration right now..... then it is the same answer for morality.
The physics equations that cover all humans brains are configured to find this moral and that immoral, and are set in the "that is immoral" state right now.
* In order to justify the trivially true comment....
Humans are evolved to take care of their young for long periods and invest huge amount of time/resources into them. As a result killing children (your own or others) is defined as immoral as our brains have been evolved such that they are pre-disposed to saying this act is immoral. Almost all humans over almost all time have defined this as immoral as a result. No god needed.
Frogs/Toads live in an ecosystem where they produce thousands of young, who are herbivores that eat pond algae etc. Adult Frogs/Toads are carnivores who eat (among other things) frog/toad spawn and tadpoles. The frog/toad ecosystem is (at least in part) "Tadpoles eat the algae as frogs/toads cannot, frogs/toads eat the tadpoles instead". That's their circle of life.
If we imagine such a species became sentient its pretty clear their morality would be extremely different to human morality on the subject of children. Killing and eating them would be acceptable behaviour (at the least) and probably moral behaviour. Afterall, if no-one eats them then the next generation will see a population boom of 10,000% or more and wreck the eco-system and/or cause some kind of mass genocide/armageddon.
The socially responsible thing for sentient toads/frogs to do is to eat all the 10's of thousands of children they produce except just 2-3 of them. (or more likely, eat others children but also allow them to eat yours as even frogs/toads show a preference for eating other frogs tadpolkes if offered the choice although they will also eat their own if there is no other option). They would have an evolved preference for a morality that would allow them to do so. Their moral system would take eating children as an axiomatic moral good.
There CANNOT BE a once and for all moral law for all living things in the universe.... Not given by a god. Not from any other source... Due to issues like this.
All we have is human morality, that's an expression of human minds and their evolved nature...constantly changing, being updated and being refined, but yoked closely to our evolutionary past and defined in relation to the "permittable moral space" this created.
The idea that its absolute/universal is a human invention..... as is the idea that it has to have an empirical basis or it is "just groupthink".
It isn't groupthink that makes the toads/frogs child eating moral. Or the human child protective view moral. The toads/frogs/humans aren't able to groupthink their way to any other solution. Letting all the children live would feel as instinctively immoral to them as killing and eating our children feels as instinctively immoral to us.
> Human minds define morality. It's subjective, but its trivially true* this is how morality is defined.
Agreed. The whole point of the comment was that it’s socially constructed. But I think you’re saying that it’s biologically constructed. The common ground we have is that yes, either way, it comes from human minds.
> As a result killing children (your own or others) is defined as immoral as our brains have been evolved such that they are pre-disposed to saying this act is immoral. Almost all humans over almost all time have defined this as immoral as a result.
Sadly, this is factually false. Almost all humans over almost all time have not defined killing children as immoral. Humans are actually among the most lethal species in the mammal kingdom [https://www.nature.com/articles/nature19758.epdf]. According to the author, “In the primates, infanticide is undoubtedly the commonest type.”
I don’t think the argument that Homo sapiens—among the most lethal species in the mammal kingdom—have brains that have evolved to see violence as immoral is going to hold water. But let’s address the argument that the moral beliefs of a group of people is simply a biologically evolved belief. Let’s take a specific example, the Comanche tribe. They genocidally exterminated tribes across the plains (contemporary American Southwest). They would tie babies to ropes and drag them behind horses and tie children to sticks and roast them alive over a period of days in methods that were standard to North American indigenous tribes. In the Caribbean, the Carib tribe worked their way through the Lesser Antilles where they kept the boys under military age and castrated them to fatten them up before they were eaten as livestock.
> It isn't groupthink that makes the toads/frogs child eating moral. Or the human child protective view moral.
And yet, human societies have very divergent moral beliefs when it comes to the “human child protective view.” One answer for this variation is that their moral beliefs were the result of social construction / groupthink. Another is that these divergent beliefs were biologically evolved by different types of brains. Of course, you see plenty of similarities across societies, and you could say that this is due to evolution. But I believe the variation between societies, say with regards to eating children, is likely social construction, not that the indigenous tribes had evolved different brains.
>Humans are actually among the most lethal species in the mammal kingdom [https://www.nature.com/articles/nature19758.epdf]. According to the author, “In the primates, infanticide is undoubtedly the commonest type.”
To say we do it is not to say it wasn't considered immoral. Posting proof that millions of men have visited prostitutes doesn't exclude that doing so was considered immoral generally at the time.
>I don’t think the argument that Homo sapiens—among the most lethal species in the mammal kingdom—have brains that have evolved to see violence as immoral is going to hold water.
Why not ? I take it that we understand that modern western society definitely holds murder as immoral. Yet, there are still lots of murders. And wars. And all sorts of homicidal acts that fall short of murder even in the modern west.
If its physically possible to do, humans have done it. Whether Humans in general believe they *should* do it (morality) is a different thing.
>Let’s take a specific example, the Comanche tribe. They genocidally exterminated tribes across the plains (contemporary American Southwest). They would tie babies to ropes and drag them behind horses and tie children to sticks and roast them alive over a period of days in methods that were standard to North American indigenous tribes.
Well, one they wern't "standard across indigenous tribes" the Comanche's stick out for being very exceptional, and noted as exceptional, at the time.
And second, this was whilst at war. Almost all human morality recognises war (defined as a group using violence to defend the group) as a special case where normal rules of morality are explicitly suspended in order to reduce the possibility of the group being wiped out by opponents who do not fight with restrictions in place.
>And yet, human societies have very divergent moral beliefs when it comes to the “human child protective view.” One answer for this variation is that their moral beliefs were the result of social construction / groupthink. Another is that these divergent beliefs were biologically evolved by different types of brains.
Do they?
Human societies are as likely to have a view that "Anyone in our society can kill any child they please" as have the view that "You aren't allowed to kill any of our children except in special restricted circumstances (like war)" ?
You can see how one of those views is vastly more commonplace (perhaps even truly universal) accross a huge numbers of times/places/cultures and the other is not.
Why is it so lopsided ? If it's biological, common biology among those humans can be the answer. If its not, then why did the "fair coin flip" land a thousand times on "protect children" and only a few times on "children are fair game for your local neighbourhood psychopath" ?
If the cultures can be anything, if the groupthink can justify anything, then why isn't it 50:50 ? Or 55:45 ? Rather than (at worst) 99:1 or (at best) 100:1 ?
Clearly something in common, across massively different cultures, causes the coin to predominantly fall one way. Humans are predisposed to one answer much more than the other.
>Of course, you see plenty of similarities across societies, and you could say that this is due to evolution. But I believe the variation between societies, say with regards to eating children, is likely social construction, not that the indigenous tribes had evolved different brains
I agree.
Take something everyone can agree is biological. The drive for humans to have sex.
That doesn't preclude cultures like those of "Nuns" or "Monks" or other celibate groups occurring from time-to-time culturally. Just that those cultures swim against the general biological drive, while the other 99 in 100 cultures swim with the flow.
In saying human morality is biological I am not saying its 100% biologically determined. With billions of humans and thousands of societies will be exceptions. But they will be exceptions that swim against the flow, not with it, and are regarded as aberrant as a result by everyone else.
Maybe some frogs *won't* eat their young, they'll develop a weird culture where eating children is forbidden. But they'll be a tiny percentage of the frog cultures, and the other frog cultures will think they are weird, aberrant, and *immoral* for doing so.
I wonder if there isn’t a bit of both; I am am thinking of a Bonobo compared to an Orangutan. I will assume there is no social construction there but they’re very different temperaments and I can see why different temperaments of early Homo sapiens would lead to different social constructions.
Another advantage of private property is that it leads to increased efficiency because you don't have to worry about whether other people are using your stuff at any given time. If you own it, it will be there when you need it. This means more predictable planning and less slack required to account for not being able to find shared objects when you need them.
Do you need to use the word "Ethnic" when your definition clearly states that it also applies to people selected by other criteria like religion or gender? I could understand religion alone as it often strongly correlates with ethnicity and a lot of the instances of cleansing on religious grounds probably have minimal differences with "properly" ethnic cleansing. But adding gender, which I can't remember historical examples of being used as a criterion for cleansing, indicates you do intend to extend your definition. So why use the word in a wrong sense, rather than pick a different one? Is it important that you mentioned gender and religion but not class or political affiliation, which is what some definitions of genocide also do?
> But adding gender, which I can't remember historical examples of being used as a criterion for cleansing
It was not uncommon to kill the men capable of bearing arms in a conquered town or village. Mongols I think did it, although they often spared artisans and craftsmen.
About the concept of Gender-based Cleansing, analogous to Ethnic Cleansing:
At the level of pedantic detail, there are studies of the history of genetics which indicate that at some point in distant past, the males of the local Hunter/Gatherers died without many children surviving...but about half of the females of the local Hunter/Gatherers had children, mostly with the males of the invading settlers who set up a Farming culture.
My memory is hazy, but I believe this particular instance appears to have happened when Indo-European speakers moved into what is now Western Europe. The evidence for this came from comparing samples of ancient DNA (Y-chromosomal DNA, inherited along the male-line, and mitochondrial DNA inherited along the female line), with population samples from modern populations apparently descended from those ancient populations.
As another instance, there is reputedly a tribal language in East Africa in which the vocabulary for female-dominated spaces (home/children/farming) is from one language family, while the vocabulary for male-dominated spaces (hunting/herding) is from another language family.
In both cases, the theory is that some sort of violent interaction resulted in most of the males from the losing culture dying, and the males from the winning culture formed families with the females from the losing culture. This interaction left traces of evidence in both genetics and language.
Admittedly, all are in the distant past. But I don't think we can say that Gender-based Cleansing has never happened in human history.
Oh I entirely expect that there were numerous instances of "kill all males/adult men, enslave some/most of females". But it's hard to see that as gender-based violence, it's violence against entire peoples where the forms are somewhat different based on gender. Also "ethnic cleansing" assumes forced removal of a group of people from their habitats, even if that is fulfilled by the invaders taking the women with them, it seems more accurate to call it kidnapping/enslaving rather than cleansing.
I'm aware of the misnomer, I just use the commonly accepted and universally recognized name for the phenomena where a huge number of similar people are all deprived at the same time. This term is also accurate for the particular case that I wrote my defense because, but I also saw no reason not to expand the term to encompass any shared trait, since the arguments I list do not depend on the "Ethnic" and entirely depends on the "Cleansing". Mass Cleansing would be a better term for the crime against humanity that I'm arguing against.
> But adding gender, which I can't remember historical examples of being used as a criterion for cleansing
Yes, Mass Cleansing due to gender is a purely hypothetical case that I added for completion, accounting for some deranged future conflict where it might happen or some deranged unknown historical atrocity we don't know of. As it currently stands, the only known (to me) instances of Mass Cleansing on grounds of gender would be the historical massacres where the males of a certain population were killed and their women and children taken as slaves, it's technically "Mass Cleansing" because it often involved a forced migration to the conqueror's land, and it's "on grounds of gender" because if those women were men they would have been killed, so the reason they're being cleansed instead is because of their gender.
> So why use the word in a wrong sense, rather than pick a different one?
Brand recognition, plus the inertia from a more specific conversation where "Ethnic Cleansing" is indeed the correct term. But you can call it anything and the argument wouldn't be affected, and you can narrow and widen the definition within reasonable bounds and the argument would still not be affected.
> is it important that you mentioned gender and religion but not class or political affiliation
No, it doesn't have any significance. It was mentioned after an "e.g.", it's just an example list that reflects the common identities that I could come up with off the top of my head at the time of writing. Forcibly expelling any large group people purely because of their identity is equally bad no matter the identity, unless perhaps the identity is some criminal factor that somehow unifies all of those people. And then only perhaps.
>I also saw no reason not to expand the term to encompass any shared trait, since the arguments I list do not depend on the "Ethnic" and entirely depends on the "Cleansing".
Hi! I think you've expanded the term more than you really would want to. Consider the case where the shared trait is "has been convicted of axe-murder". As far as I'm aware, typical societies with prison systems routinely favor removing axe murderers from their current residences and forcibly placing them in the prison system. Perhaps a more restrictive choice of possible shared traits would avoid generalization to a group with this shared trait?
Oh hey Jeff, ah yes I noticed that the Prison system constitutes a possible exception to my definition, which is why I inserted a copout clause at the end:
>> unless perhaps the identity is some criminal factor that somehow unifies all of those people. And then only perhaps.
Do notice however, 2 things:
1- The displacement of Prisoners doesn't meet many of the conditions to be considered a Mass Cleansing. Most obviously: They're not (usually) moved out of the nation state they reside in, they are not made stateless, they are not deprived of their ownership, and whatever is being done to them is temporary and is not denied by the state doing it.
2- The Prison system has long been a troublesome aspect of Society, usually noticed by Left Wing philosophers and writers (although maybe some Right Wing and/or conservative writers too, I'm not familiar. I usually call myself an Economic Leftist because I don't want people to die of hunger but I don't necessarily agree with all Leftism or even most Leftism and - by fuck - especially not American woke leftism). It's weird when you look at it with an unbiased fresh eye too : """Somebody is bad, therefore we will put them in a place full of bad people (!!) isolated from all the good people (!!!) where they will eat and sleep for free (!!!!) but also, sometimes work for free and be abused, verbally or otherwise. Also, sometimes the "bad" people there are just political prisoners whose only crime is that they made the ruling classes mad. """
It's not hard to see how this is a path-dependent aspect of society that a society inventing itself from scratch could very well make a better alternative to. So, while my case against Mass Cleansing doesn't touch Prisons due to (1) and due to me inserting the special exception above, I'm not necessarily opposed to it being against Prisons either, I don't see this as a bug, Prisons suspiciously look very much like a non-optimal institution from the human rights POV.
Hi LearnsHebrewHatesIP, Many Thanks!. Sorry that I overlooked your
>>>unless perhaps the identity is some criminal factor that somehow unifies all of those people. And then only perhaps.
clause. My bad. That indeed covers the case I was considering.
>They're not (usually) moved out of the nation state they reside in, they are not made stateless,
Agreed.
>they are not deprived of their ownership,
Sometimes yes, sometimes no. It isn't uncommon for punitive fines to be added on top of prison sentences
>and whatever is being done to them is temporary
Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Some prisoners are sentenced to life in prison. (and some few are sentenced to death - which tends to mean decades on death row)
>and is not denied by the state doing it.
Agreed (albeit the usa has been at least suspected of holding some prisoners secretly)
>Prisons suspiciously look very much like a non-optimal institution from the human rights POV.
That's fair. As technology stands today, for violent crimes, I'm not sure that there are better alternative available. One doesn't want a serial killer able to move about in the community.
I see. Personally I'm against this expanding of terms if it makes them contradict their etymology. It can be misleading and be intentionally used to mislead/create wrong impressions. It's fine as a part of the previous conversation to remark that your arguments do not change for other cleansing criteria and so you are using the term loosely, but since you've taken them to a separate discussion and presented in a rather formal style, I think a different term would be better.
A few months ago over 100,000 Armenians were expelled from Nagorno Karabakh. Could you tell us how much time have you spent protesting this act of ethnic cleansing?
I am skeptical of the claim that Armenians were expelled from Nagorno-Karabakh, as opposed to choosing to leave once it became clear that there wasn't going to be a powerful foreign army backing up their claim to privileged territorial status and immunity from Azerbaijani law any longer.
What is this argument supposed to prove? You either have to keep monitoring all atrocities over the world and commenting on every single one of them... or you have no right to talk about the topic at all?
I posted not an argument, but a question. The alleged plans for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza tend to generate a much stronger reaction than the actual ethnic cleansing that was performed just a few month ago. So I was wondering whether the thread starter is equally opposed to all acts of ethnic cleansing and if not then what are his reasons for the imbalance.
As the appendix demonstrates, I view the Ethnic Cleansing of Armenians to be as morally bad as the Nakba, the Ethnic Cleansing of Palestinians from what is now called Israel. I don't spend as much time arguing against it because (1) As far as I'm aware, it didn't involve killing 18K civilians (Israeli numbers) or 25K civilians (Hamas numbers). And counting. (2) As far as I'm aware nobody is Pro-Azerbaijan in ACX, at least not in the sense that they're denying the Ethnic Cleansing motivated purely by politics or saying that it should happen because Azerbaijan "has the right to defend itself" (3) I don't know about the conflict as much as I know about the Israeli-Palestinian one.
Your question, in my experience, is a cynical non-sincere cheap distraction often employed by Pro-Israeli commenters, and I'm quite honestly sick of it. But I decided to entertain it anyway for the sake of discussion.
I suspect most of us find it difficult to separate a) the alleged plans for a future ethnic cleansing of Gaza, from b) what's going on in Gaza right now. So I think most reaction to the alleged plans is basically just the person's reaction to the current state of the war. And thus not applicable to what happened Nagorno-Karabakh.
No, they weren't expelled, but whatever Azerbaijan says should be taken in the context of their political system, relationships between Azerbaijani and Armenians, and history. Do you believe that were the Armenians to stay there their odds of facing no problems (on the scale of 100 dead per year) from the government and/or "grassroots" would be below 20%?
Meh. You talk as though complexity doesn't exist in your world. What do you do if the ethnicity being 'cleansed' consistently refuses to honour the same rights that you claim for them?
1) A lesser evil is still evil, and 3d) don’t give dictators ideas because more evil in the world, even if it’s lesser evil, is bad.
3a, 3e) Thou shalt not hurt people in tangible ways.
3b, 3c) Thou shalt not hit people in the feels.
But a world in which Russia just kicks out all Ukrainians from within internationally recognized borders of Russia (possibly to make space for the Russian speakers it claims to protect) is immeasurably better than what we have now, and somehow incentivizing Putin to follow that route would be in everyone’s best interests. Only then, when all dictators switch to this instead of murdering, we can consider our next steps, trying to replace forced displacement with something less bad.
Tangible losses can be compensated.
The hurt feelings have to be weighed against whether those people hold feelings of support for groups that are doing things that are worse than forced displacement, such as outright slaughter of civilians.
You say ethnic cleansing as a norm is a very bad norm, comparing it to replacing murders with rapes. But the problem with the latter isn’t the rapes, is that you just can’t turn murderers into rapists whether you want it or not. Were it possible, you would then turn the rapists into robbers into thieves into litterers and so on.
The civilized countries are now so civilized that they spend a great deal of time arguing what are the correct words for someone with a dark color of skin, for someone who has a certain set of organs etc., and then they’re shocked people with different values just cut people’s heads off. But when it’s suggested other people should gradually taper off the beheadings following a path similar to what the civilized countries themselves followed, it’s somehow unpalatable, and the only acceptable solution is some kind of magic that would make everybody civilized by noon tomorrow.
So ethnic cleansing as a TEMPORARY norm, while still bad, has some potential to make the world a better place, or a less bad place.
> But a world in which Russia just kicks out all Ukrainians from within internationally recognized borders of Russia (possibly to make space for the Russian speakers it claims to protect) is immeasurably better than what we have now, and somehow incentivizing Putin to follow that route would be in everyone’s best interests.
The mind boggles. Possibility A: Putin is lying (as usual), he has approximately zero interest in protecting Russian-speaking people from the evils of Ukraine. I won't even list the reasons why I think it is overwhelmingly more likely. So not only incentivizing him to commit a different form of atrocities will not change anything in this case, it will give him additional excuse to do so in *other* cases. Him and all the other dictators.
Possiblity B: okay, let's say Putin got high on his own supply (dictators removing possible feedback might be somewhat prone to that). So giving him a different way might be preferable to what he did, in this particular case. Assuming he would care about your opinion. But this still leaves all the other dictators who might not have enough tanks to invade a neighbor country but definitely have enough police (and willing supporters) to round up a fraction of their own population they don't particularly like.
I think this line of argument about Russian or Ukrainian people begs the question; what is it that Putin really wants? I don’t think he gives a tinker’s dam about the people, but he does want that land. It’s very valuable.
It's certainly one of the reasons (not mutually exclusive) I consider the most likely. The other two are actually about people, though in a different way: 1. if Ukraine were to enjoy even a relative economic success following the 2013-2014 revolution, that would be very dangerous for Putin, and 2. The Crimea annexation certainly did boost Putin's ratings, it looks like he hoped for more of the same. He's a populist dictator, and high ratings not only allow him to get away with doing something people would otherwise protest strongly (in that case, it was the pension reform), the people's admiration or getting his name into history books in some major role might be one of his terminal values.
Yeah I agree. I meant the people on the ground where the fighting is but he certainly cares a lot about his popularity. He’s in a great position to stay popular too because anybody who doesn’t like him can be rounded up in no time.
> But a world in which Russia just kicks out all Ukrainians from within internationally recognized borders of Russia (possibly to make space for the Russian speakers it claims to protect) is immeasurably better than what we have now, and somehow incentivizing Putin to follow that route would be in everyone’s best interests
All Ukrainians nowadays have an option to apply for Russian citizenship using simplified and expedited procedure. I would imagine that vast, vast majority of Ukrainian that are physically in Russia either already took that offer, or planning to (the ones that don't - well, they are probably planning to move to EU or USA or someplace else very soon, extra encouragement to leave is not necessary).
So why do you think Putin should be incentivized to do something different in this particular area of internal affairs?
Thank you for that thoughtful post. I don't disagree with anything you said. By tying your argument to property rights, ethnic cleansing becomes theft—and I would agree that it is. Unfortunately, that raises the question of original ownership. There are parts of Europe where the borders have shifted back and forth over the centuries with people being displaced upon each border change. Say that a group's lands were stolen and given to another group by force or legal fiat. After a certain number of generations that property would seem at least to current occupants to be their own. At what point if any does the historicity of the theft no longer apply to the current owners?
For instance, I live on land taken from indigenous hunter-gatherers, first by the Spanish, and then stolen again by settlers from the United States. I would feel ill-used if the descendants of the Spanish ranchers that once owned my land demanded restitution or the return of their lands (especially since there are at least a dozen times it changed ownership—across seven or eight generations—during the interim between its theft from the Spanish and my ownership). Likewise, if the descendants of the Spanish ranchers could claim this as their property, could the tribe of hunter-gatherers who originally lived on this land claim ownership from them? I'm quite aware that I have benefited from two historical acts of ethnic cleansing, but at what point (if any) do the crimes of the past no longer count?
Ultimately, I'm left with the unpalatable conclusion that property rights are an illusion, because legal fiat, force, or accidents of history can be used to trump property rights.
Yeah, I agree it raises questions of original ownership and never really gets at that core issue. But I'm very curious about this topic. It seems that LearnsHebrewHatesIP's argument is entirely based on an Appeal to the People logical fallacy. Every subsection of section 3 includes "Most people believe in" and then just assumes that if most people believe in something that you should go along with it. Is there part of the argument that I'm missing? I don't disagree that ethnic cleansing is a generally bad thing, I just don't see how this is even an attempt to argue the position, but rather an attempt to say, lots of people think I'm correct. Am I missing part of the argument?
You might be missing a bit of the context? There's an earlier discussion below, which this sprang out of.
I think here, it's simply the argument that "ethnic cleansing" is actually, in fact, bad. Not as bad as genocide, but objectively bad. In service of that, I think LHHI tries to grab as many supporting arguments as possible, and points out that these are common things that people believe. I don't think it's about "you should believe this because other people believe this", but more like "you probably already believe something like this in some circumstances; isn't this other circumstance similar enough to be included?"
For example, if you don't believe in private property at all, that part of the argument isn't going to work on you. But I'm not sure how many people like that are commenting here.
Yes, thanks for explaining my intent. I'm not sure why exactly KLS thinks I'm arguing from Authority or Populism, what I'm doing is rather building up a case against Ethnic Cleansing, starting from some commonly-agreed-upon moral primitives, things which include Private Property, Intimate Property, Anti-Violence, and the rest mentioned in 3-*. I'm not saying the basis for believing those things are Populism or Authority, I'm just saying that those are things that the vast majority of people - and thus the vast majority of those reading the comment - already believe some combination of, to some degree or the other. And that's why I don't bother building up those primitives, but rather I use them to build my case against Ethnic Cleansing.
If need be, things like Private Property or the case against Violence or the model of Perverse Incentives can be argued from First Principles and built from more primitive assumptions, and this is exactly what thousands of philosophers, writers, economists, etc have done and have been doing before me. I doubt I will ever be as good as them in building up those primitives. (and for that matter, probably thousands of better educated moral philosophers and writers have argued against Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing, so I doubt that my case is as good as them, but they don't write on ACX and I do, so here we are.)
This is the far more elegant version of my argument: "there is no reason the suffering of now-dead conquered people five generations ago should be considered more significant than the suffering of now-dead conquered people six or twenty or one hundred or a thousand generations ago, so shut the fuck up already."
Or put another way, if one follows the argument about reparations for "theft" to its logical conclusion, Europe and Asia should be returned only to those with Neanderthal on their 23andMe profile.
So, one of the things I notice about the "Shut the fuck up about <<Historical Grievance>>" schtick is that it's often quite selective, mostly to the benefit of the groups that the speaker saying "Shut the fuck up" likes or are "mainstream" in the speaker's society.
For example, if you think that we should "Shut the fuck up already" about historical grievance - even ones with living survivors - your opinion about the various Museums and Remembrance holidays for the Holocaust should be pretty dim, after all, - quoting you - I see no reason why the suffering of long-dead Jews about 2 or 3 generations ago should be considered more significant than the suffering of mass-slaughtered Europeans under the Mongols 20-23 generations ago or the suffering of the Canaanites and Amalekites under the Jews some X (40? 50?) generations ago. The Hebrew bible itself - a document written by Jews - admits what we today would all "Genocide" and "Ethnic Cleansing" against the population inhabiting what we would today call Israel/Palestine/Jordan/Syria/Lebanon.
It's all the same right? Why don't we - alternatively - remember the Vietnamese who died in the French-American aggression on their land? The Cambodians who died in the Khmer Rogue madness? The Chinese and the Great Leap Forward (15 to 55 millions according to Google, 2.5 to 9 (!!!!) times as much as the holocaust Jewish victims)? Congo and the Belgian reign of horror at the start of the 20th century (1.5 million to 13 million according to Wikipedia).
If you want to be as Vulcan and Spock-like as possible about historical grievances, why not go all the way and tell the next Jew you meet remembering their genocided ancestors "Oh for fuck's sake just stop whining already it has been 80 years oh my fucking gosh you people and your endless kvetching"? I'm waiting for the results.
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Assuming you're asking in Good Faith (^TM), here's (one of the reasons) why you should care about the suffering of long-dead people: Living Descendents.
Imagine my grandfather did something horrible to your grandparents, maybe he stole and dispossessed your grandfather, maybe he raped your grandmother. He did something Unspeakable. I imagine that - if you knew this - you would want nothing to do with me. This is because I represent the offspring of someone who did horrible things to some of the people you most love, and people generally assume (quite accurately in some cases, quite non-accurately in others: My actual grandfather's name translates from Arabic as "The Perfectly Pious". I'm Atheist.) that the offspring of someone resembles them in every way, so I most likely resemble the horrible person that did horrible thing to your loved ones, and therefore I'm a Persona Non Grata. Imagine further that I do not **merely** not apologize to you or honor the memory of your victimized loved ones, **BUT** I also brag about my criminal grandfather, I say that your grievances didn't happen or that it happened but they deserved it or that it happened and my grandfather is based and didn't go far enough. ***That*** is guaranteed to ruffle your feather.
None of the argument above depend on whether the people victimized are really your literal grandparents or some further ancestors. And it also doesn't depend on the fact that you're a single person as opposed to a collective. Whenever a living collective views some victimized mostly-dead population as their ancestors (often with plenty of evidence), and whenever the other mostly-dead population that victimized those ancestors has descendants that view them as heroes and based people who **merely** defended themselves/carried the White Man's Burden/<<insert excuse here>> and that they even didn't go far enough, the condition is there for a historical healing to happen: for the descendants of the criminal to know what crime their elders did and recognize and admit and apologize for it, and for the descendants of the victimized to shake hands and forgive.
There is also an argument to be made that it's morally good and virtuous to do this even with no living descendants, but it's not going to convince everybody. The one with living dependents is stronger, and one that I have difficulty imagining a non-hypocritical person rejecting.
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As for why should do this with Palestinians and Jews and not (say) the Chinese and the Congolese, there are generally 2 reactions when one discovers the Inconsistency of Human Morality:
1- Cynical : This really proves that there is no such thing as Morality, why X and not Y even though they're mostly the same? No Ethics, therefore Killing Puppies is okay. Be Right Back I'm going to rape a 5 years old.
2- Determined : This really proves that human wetware is a very error-prone and buggy chip calculating a really complex and intractable problem, there is such a thing as Morality and human morality is a bad approximation of it that can nonetheless get better. Be Right Back I'm going to remind my Israeli friend of the Nakba (or, If I'm Israeli, Be Right Back I'm going to remind my Arab friend of the Ethnic Cleansing Arabs did to their innocent Jewish compatriots after 1948).
Both reactions observe the same thing but draw different conclusions from it. The first one might be true, as an Atheist I even believe in the descriptive part (no objective morality) just not necessarily the killing puppies and raping 5 year olds part. It's just that, following the philosophy of "As If" [1], it's vastly more beneficial to me and to other people to act according to the second attitude. Seeing a cute puppy get adopted and a less attractive one not getting adopted, my reaction is not "NO puppy should ever get adopted", my reaction is adopting the less attractive puppy.
I think you were mixing up the personal with a much larger scale. The personal is important, but I think the fundamental distinction is living memory, or even better collective memory. The problem is the world has a very large and fairly well documented collective memory at this point, and so things just don’t seem to recede into the distance the way they used to. It’ horrible people, getting killed large numbers of people getting killed or displaced or just fading away. I don’t think there is some deep human “morality” that solves this problem, because it really isn’t a problem; it’s the way of the world. It doesn’t mean we stop trying to make things better, but it demands deep humility to really make things better.
I picked "five generations" as a minimal threshold for a reason - it's the point at which no one living could have had contact with a conquered ancestor to be traumatized by their first person account of the horror.
It was pretty clear from a brief skim of your very long reply that you weren’t engaging with my premise in good faith, so I'm not going to engaging with your reply.
I don't think that not reading a reply because it's too long is something you should flaunt, especially when that reply isn't particularly long compared to the median post, but thanks for letting me know anyway.
My point still stands, even after 5 "generations" (whatever that means in your book), you won't dare to tell a Jew remembering the Holocaust "Shut the fuck up already", and you only choose to do that for the conflicts that are "exotic" and socially safe to dismiss.
As I said, I didn't avoid a close reading of your comment due to its length, but rather its irrelevance in response to my premise. I only noted the length to marvel that you took so much time attempting to direct away from my argument.
Agreed. Even for _living_ people, I think that statutes of limitation are a wise part of the law. And that applies even more forcefully when everyone in the conflict, on both sides, is long dead.
I'm writing from the USA, which has been inhabited by humans for something like 20,000 years. Even if any given area was only genocidally conquered every thousand years or so, a typical parcel has probably been bloodily stolen a score of times. Good luck unwinding _that_.
I have to say, when I first read of them, I did grieve a little for them. It made me thiink of the last line of “Angels with Dirty Faces “
“Come on, let’s go say a prayer for a boy who couldn’t run as fast as me.”
I realize it’s hopelessly sentimental but what the heck…maybe the Denizovans were like Jimmy Cagney in spirit. They had to go and they made the best of it.
My best friend's father is mixed race, Osage on his mother's side and white on his father's. He grew up on the reservation like it was the 1800s; dirt floors, no running water, no electricity, abject poverty, physical abuse. A couple of great aunts were killed for their oil rights, so his great (or regular?) grandmother refused to claim hers and instead just went about working.
My best friend's dad eventually got into the upper middle class as a federal law enforcement officer by getting a series of jobs and doing them well.
That was it. Working like anyone else got him an idyllic upper middle class lifestyle, no different than an upper middle class white man's.
And he refused to register his own children with the tribe, even though their one-quarter status would have provided some cash and affirmative action advantages.
He has a saying, "poor people have poor ways," which I didn't understand as a sheltered upper middle class white teenager, but which I understand now as a lower middle class working adult in a service industry.
That’s a great story. I really am coming to understand how resentment can be a real boat anchor in the human psyche. This man you describe speaks to it well.
> At what point if any does the historicity of the theft no longer apply to the current owners?
Clearly the point at which the current owner came into possession of it.
I bought my land two years ago from its previous owner, if it turns out that _he_ stole it from you three years ago, then your case is against him, not me.
True, but how do we deal with cases where the theft was far enough in the past, in a time before Title Companies and Title Insurance, and the original thief is dead and cannot be sued or prosecuted?
I realize in the real conversation my question tramples on toes, but I mean this as a genuine question.
Why should we care about a property dispute where all of the people in the original dispute are dead? Less sure about this, but I also wonder why we should care about a dispute where the property has been moved long enough ago that everyone is living somewhere else and has brought up one or more generations since then. For instance, if my grandfather lost his home illegally, moved elsewhere and raised my father - my father has no ties to the original land. I have even less ties, maybe only family telling me I should have had ties, which I would not have known or felt if not told that.
If someone living has a specific claim, even if it's pretty old, I'm sympathetic to that. General claims - "people like me used to control areas like that" I think are worthless. I feel the same for old claims or unspecific claims - "my great-grandfather owned land in [town]" or "50 years ago my family owned the house on 112 Anywhere St, which was torn down and replaced by a new house at the same location." To me, such claims become impossible to adjudicate, because we either lack the specific understanding in order to affix blame and the source of compensation or we would cause as much or more wrong trying to correct a past issue. If someone stole my house 100 years ago but I bought it 10 years ago from the third owner since then, there's no way to fix that. No matter how clear the harm was 100 years ago or even if the original owner were still alive.
Go tell that to the Israelis and the Palestinians — and the peoples of the Balkans. But as the old saying goes, against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain.
Possession is nine-tenths of the law, and the other tenth is the actual law. If you have neither possession nor the law of the state on your side, your option is war, which is a stupid option to take.
It's my understanding that historically, rights only exist under a sovereign who guarantees them. if you're not under the protection of a sovereign, you're an outlaw and anyone is free to inflict violence upon you, i.e. "violate" your "rights". In a conflict between sovereign states, the only right that matters is the right of conquest. though under the modern international order, everyone likes to pretend otherwise.
I would like to extend this thought to not simply sovereigns, but anyone. If you cannot guarantee your own rights, you must seek that guarantee elsewhere, which may include a sovereign. A coalition can keep strength by itself from being the rule of law.
This is all fine and good, but I don’t think the person you say was “advocating for ethnic cleaning as a norm” was doing that. (“Makes sense to have a strong taboo in general, but in this one particular case where the default is ongoing megadeath with no end in sight, maybe it’s a better alternative” was pretty much it, I thought…)
This isn't the comment to condemn by commenter you're referencing, the one to condemn is the one making an unfunny joke about Ethnic Cleansing while having a history of supporting and propagandizing for a state with a long history of Ethnic Cleansing. This is why I include objection (4-a).
Which "wealthy country" were the Palestinians expelled from? Because I don't think Palestine was ever really wealthy, and Israel didn't become wealthy until after most of the Palestinians who were going to leave had already left.
> Palestinians were expelled from a wealthy country
Huh? This isn't a thing that ever actually happened. In 48 after losing a war they started, some (not all or even most) Palestinians were moved from one poor Arab village to a different poor Arab village. The "living in refugee camp" thing isn't real either - normal Palestinian neighborhoods or villages are referrwd to as "refugee camps" in order to get more UN aid money, even if they've been established neighborhoods for decades.
Perhaps this is the Zionist propaganda they teach at Israeli schools, and you're not a history buff so you could be excused to have never learned otherwise. But here's an actual historical (-ish) source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakba, I suggest you skim it to the end, if only to know how to counter people who have read it in future conversations.
The Palestinians didn't start the 1948 war, what started it was the Zionist militias, the biggest of which was the Haganah, which started killing and ethnically cleansing Palestinians in several massacres starting November of 1947. Only after the population of fleeing refugees started overflowing on the borders of other Arab countries did their mostly corrupt leadership take the decision to invade, too late and without organization or preparedness.
I will let the Wiki page for the Nakba speak:
>>> In early April 1948 [[Meaning before the Arab armies invaded, in May 1948]], the Israelis launched Plan Dalet, a large-scale offensive to capture land and empty it of Palestinian Arabs. During the offensive, Israel captured and cleared land that was allocated to the Palestinians by the UN partition resolution. Over 200 villages were destroyed during this period. Massacres and expulsions continued, including at Deir Yassin (9 April 1948), Arab urban neighborhoods in Tiberias (18 April), Haifa (23 April), West Jerusalem (24 April), Acre (6-18 May), Safed (10 May), and Jaffa (13 May) were depopulated. Israel began engaging in biological warfare in April, poisoning the water supplies of certain towns and villages, including a successful operation that caused a typhoid epidemic in Acre in early May, and an unsuccessful attempt in Gaza that was foiled by the Egyptians in late May [[Egyptians being based as usual]].
Before the first Arab military boots ever hit the land in late May:
>>> By that time, Palestinian society was destroyed and over 300,000 Palestinians had been expelled or fled.
> one poor Arab village to a different poor Arab village.
Aka the Zionist myth of "barren land" or "land without people", never seen any documents or sources that prove it or its contradiction, and thus dismissible just as claimed: without evidence.
> Palestinian neighborhoods or villages are referred to as "refugee camps" in order to get more UN aid money,
Usual Israeli hate boner towards the UN, but I will notice that neither you nor any government is an authority on what counts as a refugee.
The Tuo lightbulb claims to correct circadian rhythm issues without bright lights by using custom LEDs tuned to specific frequencies of orange and violet light that are present at sunrise and sunset. Their studies so far have produced what appear to be dramatic results (but with a small sample size of mostly grad students and postdocs in their own lab). Sounds too good to be true, but if it really works it could be a huge improvement in QoL for people with CRDs and approximately all teenagers.
The implication that particularly specific frequencies trigger the effect is implausible. The mechanism they propose explicitly uses the normal cone cells which are used for vision, so it's really just appropriate colours not more specific frequencies than that (assuming their method works at all). They make a big point of it being a comfortable not excessive light level, but also use rapidly alternating blue and orange lights which seems like it'd be way more uncomfortable than just bright white. If the changes are too quick to be perceptible, then they're probably also too quick to have an effect since again, the system that's supposed to cause this effect is part of the visual system (I guess it's possible that higher-level visual processing ends up filtering out the higher frequencies of strobing but this doesn't affect the cicardian cycle things, but that seems unlikely).
There's only been one mention of the Middle East on this post in the last 12 hours, so it's probably fine. There were two posters who constantly brought it up, but one of them got banned and the other one mellowed out. I think everyone else just got bored of talking about it.
I'm saying that a protester self-immolating is very upsetting, but given we're in the middle of a genocide, there is very little scope for protesters to move the dial.
(I'm just very numb to more innocent deaths at this point)
With 98% of the deaths on one side, the side that has lived under occupation for most of a century? ~1 million Gazan homes have been destroyed, almost all their hospitals have been bombed, they have no electricity or fuel, and food is starting to run out.
Israel are our friends. It's different when you see your friends slaughtering tens of thousands of civilians, destroying infrastructure and homes (and this is after decades of occupation and refusing to negotiate for their freedom)
I was numb after the Syrian war too. One significant difference though is that people don't treat Netanyahu the way they treat Assad.
At this point I sort of see Isreal as "oh yet another Middle Eastern/African basket case" and noone pays much attention to those wars either, but the difference is that Isreal once aspired to something more than that. Also, Isreal has nukes, so there's that, too.
While there may be people who genuinely believe masks are completely useless, a better case against masking as a social standard, at least during the acute phase of the pandemic, was that even if masks do work to some degree, if they don't work to the same degree as people *believe* they work, it will lead to masked people acting in ways that they wouldn't have if they know were aware of the actual efficacy level, ie. stop distancing and go out and about even while sick in cases where they wouldn't have otherwise done so.
'course, at this point pretty much no-one (who isn't wearing masks anyway) is socially distancing and the society as a whole operates roughly the same as pre-pandemic, apart from increased WFH (I wonder if there are studies on whether there's been permanent cultural changes on things like handwashing or staying home when sick?), so this is a bit of a moot point.
(I do believe masks are useful, but) Minimizing the odds of having a macroscopic piece of snot land on other people's faces, clothes or other possessions seems like a sufficient reason on its own.
I think about face masks as more like a way to somewhat protect _other people_ from whatever _I_ have, basically a better version of covering my mouth.
I don't think my mask would protect _me_ from COVID, don't know if that counts as 'masks are useless'
I would count "protecting other people" as "useful", but yeah, selfish incentives matter a lot; it is easier to sell something that protects you than something that helps you protect others. Nonetheless, we obviously cover our mouths to protect others.
They're probably mostly useless (like, 10% or lower effectiveness) unless they're proper respirators because covid mostly spreads in aerosolised form rather than as droplets and surgical masks don't do much except for droplets, and because I have a beard N95 masks don't seal properly on my face so they're not very effective. Yes, this means I am choosing to raise the covid risk of myself and everyone around me by a few percent because I can't be bothered shaving and buying respirators, and I'm worried about the social stigma of being seen as excessively safety-conscious and hiding my face. I dunno; I think there are only a few places where I'd want to wear a mask, like on the train, and I haven't seen anyone else wear one one the train for months even if they're from a vulnerable group.
I cover my mouth and nose when I sneeze because A) not everything is aerosolised and some things do spread as droplets, and B) people might yell at me.
I think that only P95 masks (or better) are useful against Covid, anything less was just security theater. I cover my mouth because getting droplets on the person in front of me is impolite. I also do it when I'm alone because I don't like covering my computer screen or other objects with my snot.
I think N95 masks definitely worked. I knew pre-vax people working with covid patients who never got covid and only had N95 protection. But I'd agree surgical masks are questionable at best for covid protection.
I have another answer that is orthogonal to my previous comment. Quite simply, the proof is in the pudding. Certain behaviors (masking, vaccination) were sold to us as "the only way out of the crisis" (those are literal words uttered by my local politicians, over and over). In practice, it turned out that herd immunity was the *actual* way out of the crisis.
This shifts the calculus of any measure purely towards personal benefits. You can mask for your own protection (if you think the tradeoff is worth it), but there is absolutely no reason to make the behavior compulsory.
Anyways, I'm curious why you're bringing this up now. Covid has barely been a blip on the radar for several years in my neck of the woods. I understand it's different in other places. It was bizarre watching the latest GDQ and seeing the people there act as if it was still 2020.
It had limited impact on *transmission*, leading to almost no impact on herd immunity, which is what our politicians falsely promised. If you are out and about in society, you *will* get exposed to covid over and over. No amount of vaccination was going to change that after omicron. In the end, herd immunity was achieved through repeated exposure, not vaccinations.
Also, less of this please. Don't put the most extreme possible position in my mouth.
People were exposed over and over again, and then eventually herd immunity was achieved (NOTE: this waxes and wanes of course as immunity fades over time).
The point is: repeated exposure to the actual virus builds up much stronger immunity than vaccines. So we were *always* going to have a period of time where the virus runs rampant through the population. Vaccination alone was not enough to prevent this. The measures such as covid certificates were pretty strong restrictions on our personal freedom which ultimately didn't change this reality.
Because it's only now that I realized that the argument against face masks (they do not offer 100% protection, therefore worthless) applies even more so to things that most of us already do and that are not considered controversial.
Probably it's a question of timing -- everything we were taught to do as children is normal, everything we were told recently to do is an outrageous limitation of our freedoms. Most people would probably refuse to wipe their butts if someone proposed it as a new thing today. The effectiveness is merely an excuse: no one really measures the exact effectiveness of covering mouth or wiping butt, but people seem okay with doing that anyway.
Almost nobody believes that face masks are *completely* useless against COVID in all situations, and this belief in its literal form has never been a significant part of the political discourse anywhere I am aware of. More modest beliefs are frequently expressed in colloquial language as "masks are useless", which says nothing other than that most people aren't pedantic nerds. You are tilting at straw men, and your question is nowhere near the "gotcha" you imagine it to be.
I think there's been a lot of "black and white" messaging on both sides. There's apparently a lot of people who think that either something is completely effective, or not effective at all. And it's shocking how many people operate on some sort of binary model of infection, where either you are "clean" or you "have covid".
I would not be surprised if there were a number of people who grew tired of hearing "masks are effective" from sources which they knew to be untrustworthy, and then heard "masks won't stop you from getting covid", and so concluded that "masks are ineffective".
And I have actually heard a couple people say that, but then clarify that they were only talking about cloth masks. (Which still help reduce the number of virions entering the body!) To them, apparently "masks" meant the type of cloth masks that church groups were sewing in the early days, and maybe surgical masks too, while I assume they probably refer to all the fancy masks as "N95s" or something like that.
I'm a lifelong holy warrior against straw men in discourse, as my long-suffering family members could attest. However I must regrettably say that this is not such an example. There are plenty of people in the US who think and say that "face masks are completely useless against COVID in all situations", exactly as stated. I've met several such individuals myself despite not residing in a politically/socially conservative area and they are "loud and proud" with that belief. Several current members of the US Congress appear to hold that view, along with members of various state legislatures, etc.
>Several current members of the US Congress appear to hold that view, along with members of various state legislatures, etc.
So this is a case where one might have had hopes for the intelligence of a congresscritter or (even less plausibly) for its honesty, but one must abandon any hopes for both in the same critter? :-)
<Almost nobody believes that face masks are *completely* useless against COVID in all situations, and this belief in its literal form has never been a significant part of the political discourse anywhere I am aware of.
Actually there are a LOT of people whovbelieve masks are completely useless. I was on medical Twitter all through the pandemic, and many commenters on the medical professionals I followed were convinced that masks make zero difference. If by political discourse you mean discourse by politicians, I'm sure there must be politicians who also believe masks are nothing but theatre. I mean, RFK Jr. is sure that childhood vaccinations are unnecessary and harmful, & has talked up that idea in many settings. Thinking masks are useless, while dumb, is not as dumb as RFK's vax views.
Covering yourself while sneezing is pretty much the equivalent of not spitting on other people and has little to do with practical concerns about spreading specific diseases. At least for me the vast majority of sneezing I've ever done is due to allergies which, as far as I know, aren't contagious; and on the opposite side, we don't expect that never ever getting sneezed at is going to prevent you from catching the flu from a nearby sufferer.
It depends on what "prevent" means. I think most of us *do* think that never ever getting sneezed at will give you a *lower chance* of catching the flu than getting sneezed at by someone with the flu will (which is one thing that "prevent" might mean). We don't think it will reduce the probability to zero (which is another thing that "prevent" might mean).
My assumption is that for popular endemic diseases - flu, rhinovirus and nowadays also Covid - the bottleneck that determines how often I get sick is my immunity and *not* the opportunities to get infected, which are so numerous for me (in large part due to multiple children bringing home all the pathogens as frequently as *their* immunity allows) that they are "saturated" and so even a significant reduction of the chance of catching the flu (or Covid) *at that day from that person* has an insignificant impact on the total number of times I'll catch the flu (or Covid) per year or per lifetime; so a usable preventative measure has to offer a *drastic* reduction in the chance to infect or it's not making any difference at all and is not worth any tradeoffs or inconvenience.
But the immune system is rarely 100% efficient, it's more like "your chance of becoming sick is X when exposed to 1 million copies of virus, Y when exposed to 1 billion copies", and in most cases X<Y and the difference is quite significant.
The ballpark math I'm thinking about is that for the current seasonal flu strain I "exchange rebreathed air" with 1-5 infected people every day, so 100+ potential infections per season. If the chance to catch flu from one of them is 90%, the chance of catching that strain during that season is ~100%; if the chance to catch flu from one of them is 10%, the chance of me catching that strain is still ~100%, if the chance to catch flu from one of them is 1%, the chance of me catching that strain is still more than 66%. So that's what I mean by "it should be *very* effective or it's useless" as it starts making a difference only if the chance of infection becomes very low (<1%), and getting from 90% to 10% is useless.
"Exchange rebreathed air" is vague though (sitting face to face in a small room for hours is different from being five meters from each other in a bus for 20 minutes), and probably misses a few relevant metrics e.g. estimating how long an average portion of air is outside of their lungs before entering yours, which is relevant if virions degrade on their own or as a result of microdroplets drying/cooling/etc. The difference in the number of intact virions reaching your membranes might be several orders of magnitude, easily. Also the sick people are different too (I remember that superspreader Korean woman). Which means any model that implicitly assumes the potential infections are about equal is probably as useless as one estimating meteorite impacts by assuming them all to have ~equal mass.
It's plausible that if a sick person is in your household, then even with a mask, they might be spreading so many copies of the virus, that all that matters is whether your body's initial response was enough to fight it off (and if so, then it will be active enough to continue fighting it off for the rest of the exposure). But when it's a person sitting a few seats away from you on a bus or in a classroom, it seems to me that both the intrinsic probability of fighting off a significant exposure, and the extrinsic probability of getting a significant exposure, are relevant. It's not like one of them is close enough to 100% or 0% that it can be ignored.
> the bottleneck that determines how often I get sick is my immunity and *not* the opportunities to get infected
I disagree, simply because I observe that I'm much more likely to get sick if someone else in my household is sick than otherwise. I don't think my exposure to germs while going about my daily business is anywhere close to saturated.
I mean "saturated" by that if you don't get infected today, you'll get infected a week later, as you'll get repeated chances continuously so much that you're unlikely to last through the particular strain's epidemic season without getting immunity, and "someone else in your household being sick" determines *when* that happens, not *if* it does.
Because pretty big droplets spew all over the place when I don't. Facemasks obviously help if people sneeze into them in lieu of not covering their mouth at all. That's not what I've observed though, which is people wearing masks, *taking them off* (!!!) to cough or sneeze, then putting them back on. Absolutely moronic.
In terms of protecting people against the mixing of pathogens into the air during regular breathing, it's pretty clear that any mask which doesn't noticeably impede your breathing does not meaningfully filter the air in either direction. Even if it did, then touching the outside of the mask would be a pretty big no-no. Again, this does not match my observation of how masked people actually behave.
FWIW, I do mask up voluntarily when I *know for a fact* that I am sick.
> *taking them off* (!!!) to cough or sneeze, then putting them back on. Absolutely moronic.
Saw that too. Ugh. Maybe not moronic, more like "I'm forced to wear this mask for stupid reasons I don't care about/for my own protection but it's uncomfortable to sneeze while in it". Or "I'm not sick, my sneeze won't hurt anyone".
I have found N95 and N99 masks that do not noticeably impede breathing, and they definitely filter air meaningfully. That's what the 95 and 99 in the ratings mean. For me, at least, masks that actually lay up against my lower face, especially the tip of my nose, make me feel suffocated. The ones that have a sort of beak that is like a tent over the lower face are quite tolerable. There were a few occasions when I left a store where I had masked, forgot I had a mask on, and biked all the way home without noticing the mask -- even though my ride home s uphill and has a few sections that have me panting.
I do sympathize with people who remove the mask when they sneeze. If you are repeatedly sneezing inside of your mask, you end up with a wet mask and a runny nose that you cannot blow. Lifting the mask but then sneezing into a handkerchief or your inner elbow seems like it would keep you from spraying big droplets out into the air, so seems possible to me that a sneeze done that way does not put any more germ-filled aerosols out into the air than a single non-sneeze exhale. Why would it?
But in general, yeah, people have not been informed well about masks and what works and what doesn't. Kind of rare these days to read someone complaining about how dumb the public is with mask usage. Hardly anyone is masking these days. Are you still seeing people masking but then doing things that neutralize the benefits of the mask?
I've found that the people around me don't enjoy it when I spray them with fluids from my mouth.
Edit to add: That probably wasn't the most productive way to say that. I guess I'd say that it's for the same reason that I wear headphones when I'm listening to music. Or when I'm gassy, I hold on until I'm outdoors (and away from people).
I think it's mostly just politeness. If I'm actually sick, I stay away from people, to the best of my ability. (I've mostly found that it is little kids who don't cover their mouths.)
Transwomen breastfeeding. Last week I realised this is actually a thing that is physically possible. Going on Twitter to learn more about was a mistake ofc, but the shitstorm was somewhat entertaining to watch (takeaway: everyone thinks everyone else is a pedo). Looking at the literature, it is almost non-existant (I found ~10 papers that were relevant, wrote an article here https://valentinsocial.substack.com/p/can-transwomen-breastfeed). My conclusion is, there are no obvious risks that we know of right know, but we definitely need more research if this is a thing that is going to happen more in the future.
Just out of curiosity - why would one have a prior that this wasn't possible, given that lactation isn't particularly correlated with breast size (or rather, that past some Minimal Viable Breast development, the rest is just subcutaneous adipose commentary)?
Have always wondered if it might be an interestingly different experience (on both ends), but obviously the intervention arm is pretty underpowered compared to the control group. And one does not simply ask around "hey, would anyone be willing to volunteer their baby so I can try breastfeeding?" But I notice that even if I somehow had my own biological kid, it'd feel...more...correct to have the actual-mother do the honours. (And not just because it messes with hormone levels. Prolactinoma isn't a fun shadow to live under.)
I knew nothing about the difference in biology between male and female breasts, I had just assumed that male milk glands are a leftover and not something that can function at the level of female glands. Also it's worth noting that males breastfeeding is not something that happens apart from very few exceptions, so even if you had a baby you probably wouldn'y have a choice whether or not to breastfeed it unless you were willing to do hormone therapy and take drugs.
Ah...I came away from highschool biology with the simplified understanding that female is the default human template, which Y chromosomes graft some additional software and hardware patches on top of, making various features dormant without actually removing the functionality. Breasts being one such feature, though not usually a relevant concern in this context outside of gynecomastia. So the assumption would be that this is possible, although unlikely and almost certainly unwanted. Maybe that was a quirk in my schooling though.
Sorry, I guess I wasn't explicit: I myself am part of the minority of the transwomen minority who're capable of lactation. But stepping it up to full-on breastfeeding is still mostly speculative without the relevant suckling stimulus, hence the curiosity. At any rate, thanks for the post. Relevant To My Interests, surprisingly hard to find information like this going down the typical gender rabbitholes.
Oh that's a pretty cool metaphor femal/male bodies!
Yeah, information on the topic is scarce and spread out, that was one of the reasons I wrote this post, maybe it can serve as a reference point for anyone looking for some facts without the usual opinions that surround this subject
Is it even an exonym? It seems to be credited to a biologist named Dana Defosse, and casual searching hasn't found any evidence that she wouldn't identify herself as cisgender.
Yeah I saw a few stories about cisgender man breastfeeding as well. Crazy stuff, never thought how similar the male and female bodies are in this manner
I have been wondering why such a huge percentage of people in US TV commercials are African American? If I had to guess, I would say that they are three or four times over represented.
Possible answers:
1) I am wrong and over-estimating
2) Blacks either watch more TV relative to their population, or more commercial (non streaming) TV
3) Blacks are more receptive to advertising (ie a target market)
4) Advertisers feel good and diverse about themselves by featuring black actors, and the cumulative effect is to be wildly over-represented
5) Marketers have found that ads with black actors perform better relative to other actor distributions (they sell more or improve brand image)
6) Advertisers come from urban areas and are unaware of the actual demographics of the country?
7) Advertisers are shooting for diversity, and the cumulative effect is wildly unrepresentative?
Any others? Any feedback on which of these is plausible? Is it perhaps some combination of these? Anyone in Marketing familiar with research on the topic (I was in Marketing, but have been retired long since before this trend started, but our main spokesman 15 years ago, was indeed a black male).
African Americans are a very sizeable demographic in some parts of the US, namely the southeast, and have been that way for centuries, long before more recent immigrant groups.
Anyway, the point of the advertising is to show that they're for everyone, not to simulate a statistical sample of the US population.
Showing black people in media has been common since the 70s. And the change before that was the civil rights movement and the reduction in legally enforced racism.
It's the 'progressive' response to the killing of George Floyd:
1. Let young men loot and burn several cities.
2. Blame all police.
3. Put lots of black people in toothpaste commercials.
Apparently it never occurred to them to demand an end to any claimed 'immunity' for police from both criminal and civil prosecution, or direct police agencies to train recruits appropriately regarding constitutionally-guaranteed civil rights that come into play with the use of force.
Would-be conservatives are just too dumb to know they should care.
I wonder if there's some element of, black people and black culture seem cool/authentic to most Americans, in a way that lends credibility to advertisements?
I don't watch enough TV to notice trendlines in...blackvertising, but I always figured it was something like, this is the most important token box to check off, the one people will get most mad about flubbing, let's at least get that one right. And on the flip side, I kind of implicitly get the message as a non-black minority* that they're supposed to be, like, a stand-in for The Rest Of Us. Not like, one minority to rule them all, but the whole...judge a society by its least well off, that kind of thing. As black America goes, so goes the rest of minority America. Or that's always been the perception I've had, anyway.
Maybe there's also some historical first-mover-advantage reasons, coming first in the civil rights sequence, and thus having the most time to cultivate a robust presence in such industries. Not to mention the sports-to-salesman pipeline, which is probably a huge contributor.
Also, other minorities seem to be underrepresented? The US Hispanic population is like 19% and the black population is closer to 13%. Hispanics seem super underrepresented in pop culture and media.
A fun side point is that the same phenomenon happens in Australia too, where black people (African-type black people, not Aborigines) are just 1.3% of the population, and vastly outnumbered by most other ethnic minorities you could think of. And the ones that _are_ here are mostly Sudanese and Somalian refugees, who don't exactly have a lot of disposable income.
I don't want to use the term "virtue signalling" because it leads to arguments about the choice of words, but let's just say... you know that thing that the term "virtue signalling" points to? This is that thing.
I suspect that's just a side effect of the global influence of American media. It's the same reason Swedish teenagers ask to be read their Miranda rights.
Honestly the population of Aborigines who are both (a) actually recognisably Aboriginal and not just 1/16th, and (b) good-looking enough to be a model (and disciplined/sober enough to hold down a job) is pretty tiny.
What's really weird is that Africans are more common in ads than Asians, who outnumber them significantly, and also do a _lot_ more shopping.
My guess is that a few of these effects are going on.
The biggest one is probably something like advertisers finding that an ad is more effective at convincing members of a group that a product is for them if the ad visibly shows a member of that group using the product. If all that matters is that at least one person of your group use the product in the ad, then advertisers will include one ad with a member of each group in their rotation. Small groups will end up over-represented, and large groups will end up under-represented.
A secondary effect is that some groups (notably urban liberals) care about whether a product is seen as *only* for one group, and showing members of a variety of groups using the product helps counteract that potential problem.
I think both of these effects are historically situated. In some contexts, members of some minorities are willing to let members of other groups stand in for them. For instance, at some points in time, young girls were willing to identify with a protagonist who was a young boy, but young boys were not willing to identify with a protagonist who was a young girl, so children's movies generally featured a young boy as protagonist if they wanted to sell to a wider audience. As another instance, there might be some groups that really *don't* want to use a product that is seen as one that members of other groups might use - if you want to target those audiences, you have to *not* include members of other groups in your ads.
Based on stats I've come across, #1 is false{1} and [#2 is true](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/black-audiences-consume-media-tv-group-want-better-representation-rcna138423). #3 seems plausible, and I do vaguely recall seeing something about lower-class groups being more susceptible to advertising, but I can't find it now so maybe I'm wrong. #4 and #7 fit my intuitions strongly, especially since marketers are probably verbally-tilted (in terms of IQ), and people with a verbal-tilt tend to be more woke. As for #5 and #6, I don't know enough about the facts regarding them to have much of an opinion there.
So in summary:
#2, #4, #7 seem very likely to me
#3, #5, #6 unsure
#1 unlikely
{1} I've definitely come across statistics on this, but can't find them easily right now - I don't think the media is exactly eager to draw much attention to it.
It shows that blacks watch a lot more TV and that they feel underrepresented and that they react more favorably to representation. On #3 and 5, if a product is targeted in part to this demographic for whatever reason, it might lead to advertisers to really stress that they are "open to people like me".
One that comes to mind is a popular commercial on a buy your car online company that lets you set your own monthly bill and loan length with a toggle in the app. Both spokespersons for the company are young blacks and the person speaking for the consumer is black (with a diverse range of people behind them). I can’t imagine this was unintentional.
The same reason that gay people are vastly overrepresented in shows. If you have a cast of, let's say, 8 regulars, and one of them is gay, that's 12.5% of the cast. A gay couple would make that 25%. If shows are adding gay characters on purpose, that 12.5% gets repeated over and over again, turning a much lower representation in the actual population into a much higher representation.
This is actually a really difficult thing to work out intentionally, though. Without coordinating between shows (and it would be really weird to do that - "Hi, I'd like to include a gay character in my show but wanted to check if you were planning to do that too? Oh, you are? Then I'll recast as straight, thanks!") it's really hard to determine which shows "should" have gay (or black, or Asian, or whatever) such that they are evenly represented to their base population without being overrepresented.
I wonder how we managed to do this in the 70s and 80s so much better and with less obviousness. I don't think stations were aiming for "representation" they just cast interesting actors and made shows. Cosby and Family Matters never seemed to be pandering, they were just pretty good shows that happened to have black families in them.
If all the shows picked the demographics of each character at random from a realistic distribution, that would give a realistic distribution overall with no coordination. Of course, there may be reasons why specific demographics make more sense in the stories they want to tell, but the random solution is no worse for this than the coordination solution. I guess it's possible that certain groups would end up over- or under-represented by chance in specific small sub-genres, but at that point it seems like the audience being unreasonably picky if they complain about it.
On the other hand, if minority audience members like shows featuring at least one person in the same minority as them more (although it feels silly I know I do this), such that the average audience enjoyment is higher with this sort of over-representation than a realistic distribution, it's not obvious that a little tokenism is actually a bad thing.
Right, but what's happening is studios are trying to make sure that certain kinds of minorities are getting into shows, and once you've made that choice it gets really hard to represent but not overrepresent.
Studios are clearly *not* using the method that you are suggesting, though I agree it would fix the problem.
In the 80s and 90s there seems to have been a lot of shows with black actors, but it didn't feel pandering or like anyone was filling a quota. I mentioned several above, but there were also shows like The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Sister-Sister, Kenan and Kel, etc. I don't think anyone was counting percents, but at least my watching experience back then felt like there was a strong number of black actors on TV at any given time. Some of those shows were extremely well watched, like Fresh Prince and Cosby, in particular. We've definitely turned a corner somewhere along the line trying to make sure that not just some shows but *every show* has multiple ethnicities, even when it makes no sense. It's weird if every show has to have a gay character, an Asian character (preferably more than one so East Asian and South Asian are both represented) and a black character, and a Hispanic character, and so on. For shows like The Walking Dead - where people are traveling around a lot and meeting lots of random people - that makes a lot of sense. When the Wheel of Time series showed a small remote village with multiple races (despite an intentional and important plot point in the books being that it was an insular community), that's something else.
I'd speculate that it is the same phenomenon that has resulted in the more extreme case of Google's Gemini from being programmed to refuse to generate any images with white people in them at all; a focus on diversity massively over-corrects into over-representativeness of historically under-represented groups. Interestingly, it seems that this phenomenon has been occurring in Europe as well, where the over-representativeness is even more stark because the underlying population percentages are smaller (think of how many prominent British actors there are these days relative to their quite small proportion of the British population), although a google search suggests that could be confined to black British actors -in US productions-. I would be really curious if anyone has collected hard data on this.
You're not wrong. I saw someone claim to have measured this a few months ago and they said that about 35% of commercial actors are now black. This is 100% a post-BLM phenomenon and exists because advertisers don't want to be called out for being insufficiently diverse. The moral panic continues.
Is "sign in with password" on Substack broken for anyone else? No matter what I try, it just says "something went wrong", even if I reset my password and then try to login with the new password. The only way to log in to Substack now is the "email you a link" option, which is really annoying.
Same here! I always use my PC because I hate trying to use smartphone apps to read anything. I wonder if it's just crappy buggy software (sorry, Substack, but you need to hire some more monkeys and install a few more hamster wheels, the system is breaking down) or an attempt to force adoption of the app?
If you've ever tried to overcome a fear and haven't succeeded, you may be interested in an article I wrote - I detail how I overcame my fear of talking to strangers and pitching businesses
William James makes a version of this point very quickly in Section III of The Will to Believe:
"Here in this room, we all of us believe in molecules and the conservation of energy, in democracy and necessary progress, in Protestant Christianity and the duty of fighting for 'the doctrine of the immortal Monroe,' all for no reasons worthy of the name. We see into these matters with no more inner clearness, and probably with much less, than any disbeliever in them might possess. His unconventionality would probably have some grounds to show for its conclusions; but for us, not insight, but the prestige of the opinions, is what makes the spark shoot from them and light up our sleeping magazines of faith."
I think he's very self-consciously lumping in Protestant Christianity and the Monroe Doctrine with belief in molecules and democracy, even though in Section I he suggested that the audience would likely all seem themselves as wiser than conventional Christians.
I think the point he makes is also parallel to one that W.E.B. DuBois makes about "double consciousness" - Black Americans know more about what White Americans think than vice versa, because they have to live with the majority around them, rather than just accepting it unthinking.
Would anyone be willing to share their criticisms of "non-violent communication"? As someone who has found it a useful framework, I'm interested in hearing from people who didn't find it useful.
I have the feeling (ha, ha) that someone who read the Wikipedia article on NVC once but is genuinely attempting to reframe all their complaints as feelings and unmet needs for mutual discussion is going to be a lot better at communicating than someone who's done three months training in NVC but tries to psychoanalyse their conversation partner or launch into a pre-prepared spiel instead of shutting up and listening.
If your "communication technique" is disingenuously and deceptively branded, then I'm going to guess that you're a disingenuous and deceptive person, and that any communication technique you're trying to sell me is probably based on disingenuity and deceptiveness.
I know one person who has had extensive training in the technique, and it drives me crazy when they talk to me in the approved manner. It sounds fake and formulaic. I do not doubt at all that communication is improved when people assume the other person is not an evil idiot, try their best to grasp how the situation looks to the other person, and hold back from verbal violence (meanness, sarcasm, mockery, yelling, etc). But there aren't any formulas for bringing that attitude to communication: You have to really work on it internally, battle it out with your own self-centeredness. If you accomplish that, you do not need to use formulaic ways of speaking. The people you are talking with will grasp that you are fair-minded and responsive. Conversely, "packaging" various things in a formula will not give your conversation partner that sense -- it will give them the feeling that you are following a formula, and that by doing that you are blocking their view of your real attitude.
100% hard agree. I've tried to read Rosenberg in addition to having conversations with NVC fans, and couldn't shake the sense that they were cargo-culting.
The notion that communication can be violent threatens American values regarding free speech. I'm not going to take any ideas seriously premised on "violent communication" as a thing.
Considering that there is a real and growing movement to ban free speech because "speech is violence" I think reasonable people should criticize language in sync with that politically reactionary movement.
Assuming you're talking about "I see where you're coming from, but..." language, it's that the person is blatantly trying to "handle" me. I'm not most peoplr; I don't care if people insult me, as long as they answer my question as they do so. But don't presume to tell me how I feel. I know how I feel, and I know for sure that you don't, because you're wasting time appealing to emotions I don't have.
Yeah, I dislike that sort of language. It's intended well, but it's often used as "I'm going to disagree with you because you're an idiot". I too prefer "No, I don't agree, because" rather than smarmy "Yes, I understand why, with your tiny ignorant brain, you would think that" stuff.
I think that NVC is a good idea, but if someone wants to be an asshole, they will find a way to follow the letter of the rules while going completely against their spirit. It will probably be difficult, but defending against it will also be difficult for someone who believes that following the rules of NVC is the right thing to do.
(It is similar with rationality. No matter how detailed rules you write, someone will find a way to do superficially the same thing, but in service of some irrational idea they hold dear.)
Also, NVC is not supposed to solve all problems in the world, but mostly one specific problem, let's call it "violent refusal to communicate". The situation where, once you classify someone as an enemy, you no longer listen to them, so you actually have no idea how they think and what they want, which makes it impossible to try figure out a compromise solution (even if one that is kinda frustrating for both sides, but still preferable to fighting). NVC helps you pass the Ideological Turing Test better. You can still disagree, but at least now it clear what exactly you disagree with.
On the other hand, there are manipulative techniques based precisely on attacking your empathy or your self-image as a nice person. They put you in a frame where you either do the thing the manipulator wants you to do (and you didn't want to do it), or you feel guilty or ashamed. NVC can actually make this worse, by limiting the range of your possible response. Your task is no longer to "resist the manipulation" but "resist the manipulation while following the rules of NVC to the letter, because otherwise the manipulator will accuse you of being a bad person".
A: "When you refuse to give me all your money and to have sex with me, I feel sad. Really, really say. It feels like my heart is breaking..." (keeps crying and shaking)
B: "What?! Ah, sorry... I meant... uhm... when you put it like this, I feel... I feel emotionally blackmailed."
A: "Ahem, 'emotionally blackmailed' is not a feeling. It is a judgment. We are not supposed to do those here. Anyway... when you say that you feel emotionally blackmailed by me, I feel so sad it is difficult for me to even keep breathing, there is a pressure in my chest, it feels as if I am suffocating..."
(Here, the person A is clearly the bad guy, but he follows the NVC script, and it's difficult to call him out while following the NVC script yourself.)
For the more sensitive people, it would make sense to admit that they feel sad... and then decide not to *act* on that feeling. Or to choose a different course of action: "from now on, I will try to avoid you, to feel less sad".
Basically, the people at risk are the beginners, who are trying to play a game where they already learned the rules but not the strategies.
I have never really tried it, but I've encountered some things vaguely along those lines. Overall, it can be a good thing. But...
(1) merely using the words and techniques doesn't automatically make people better at empathy and communication, so it can feel like an empty ritual. Some of the most frustrating conversations I've had have been with people who write paragraph after paragraph about how careful and deliberate they are, and about how much they're trying to see my point of view, etc, *but I can't for the life of me figure out what they want me to change*. It is extremely aggravating, as the only actual information transmitted is a mushy feeling that I'm not enough like they want me to be.
(2) it can slow down communication a ton, especially among people who are emotionally mature and have healthy self-boundaries. If you're familiar with ask culture vs guess culture, the latter is just better when people make reasonable guesses and provide non-painful ways to correct course on a misprediction. I prefer someone spontaneously giving me advice while subtly communicating that their intention is to help rather than dictate or impose, compared to the alternative of being asked all the time whether it's ok to give me feedback/advice.
I want to modify the mower so I can attach garden shears, a hand saw, and a bottle of plant killer spray to it. Whenever I am mowing the lawn and come across, say, a small branch that has grown long enough to hit me in the face, I'd stop the mower, remove the hand saw, use it to cut down the branch, and then continue mowing.
I have no idea what sorts of couplings, baskets, or whatever I'd need to attach to the mower to make this possible. Any suggestions?
1.) It's going to get knocked off, (branches and such) and then potentially fall into the blades.
2.) What are you really gaining? Just walk around the yard before mowing with the shears and saw and clean things up. (throw away the sticks.)
3.) It will really be more of a pain stopping the mower and then getting off and back on.
If you insist on mounting something, then I'll suggest a water proof box mounted somewhere. You can get ammo boxes pretty cheap. That's what we put on the four wheeler.
I'll second this. It's good to do a walkthrough beforehand to remove large sticks and rocks and litter (especially if the area faces onto a public walkway). And if you bump into an overhanging branch while riding, just make a mental note of it and go back afterwards with the saw. Next time it won't be there anymore. ;-)
Rivnuts are good for attaching things firmly to sheet metal and are commonly used in automotive and aerospace applications. The magnet idea is probably more feasible if you're not tool-inclined, though.
No one has said epoxy or various bonding "glues," so add that to the list of possibilities. I can't offer much more than pointing you in that direction.
As funny as it might sound, zip ties of all various sizes are also very useful general-purpose ad-hoc "attachers." Of course you need appropriate attachment points, but perhaps there are spots you could zip tie, say, a basket or something similar. (Zip ties come in all sorts of sizes, you can get 3ft long, .3in wide ties that will hold largish stuff together.)
I'd google, youtube, and ask around at reddit or Lowes also and see what you come up with if none of all this works.
Compulsive improvisor here: Check to see whether magnets stick to the body of the mower . If so, it's easy to find extremely strong magnets about the size of a quarter with metal loops attached to them that you can hang stuff off. You could probably also attach a basket meant to go on the handlebars of a bike under the front wheel, maybe using bungee cords, then put some of the extra stuff you want to carry on the mower in there.
It might also be worth your time to look into sheaths, bags, tool-belts, or backpacks that can safely and comfortably fit on your body while riding the lawnmower. They might lack some of the cool factor that I imagine comes with a mount, but it's another way to solve your problem that might be easier than physical modifications to the machine.
I'm looking for recommendations for an AI app that can enhance old home movies. My late father transferred a bunch of 8mm movies to VHS tape. That was about 30 years ago. I recently sent the tape to a service to get it digitized. The result is an hour-long MP4 file that is pretty crappy, partly from the degraded VHS tape but mostly because the underlying 8mm films were too light or too dark, blurry, or shaky. Can this be remedied through an AI app? There are a lot of individual clips on that long MP4 file, and I don't have time to chop it up into small segments to fine-tune them. I want to submit the whole thing to an app and have it fix it up as best as it can.
Lots of places, including the iphone editing app, will apply a generic fix to still photos, automatically adjusting things so that the darkest color in the image is black and the lightest white, and increasing saturation. I'm pretty sure there must exist something equivalent for video, and I don't think it would need to use AI. I don't know whether there's one that can autocorrect blurriness, shakiness and spots and stains, but there might be.
I’ve heard good things about Topaz, in terms of upgrading 720/1080p footage to 4K. Not sure if it will work for your purposes, as I’ve never used it myself.
I really enjoy fiction that feels like a fable, in tone or plot. They have a simple beauty that feels comforting to read. I just finished "The Last Unicorn" by Peter Beagle, which I thought was extremely beautiful. Other examples I've enjoyed for similar reasons are "The Magician's Nephew" (CS Lewis) and "On Such a Full Sea" (Chang-Rae Lee). Does anyone have something to add to this list?
Wow, thank you everyone for the dozens of recommendations. Sounds like people besides me got something out of this question as well. Seeing this list helped me clarify what I like about the fable setting. The books I like most of this type let you see a complicated world through childlike eyes, in some ways helping me do the same in ours. Piranesi was a great example of this — I loved reading that book. Looking forward to a promising CS Lewis book I haven’t read yet too — I’ve read many and like most. Especially “The Great Divorce.” Some of the other authors I don't know who feel promising to me: Patricia McKillip, Roger Zelazny, George MacDonald, Jack Vance, Dunsany. Thank you for the terms “waking dream” and “sense of place” as well.
Really appreciate all the responses! Nice to have a community I can trust for this sort of thing.
The Starless Sea by Erin Morgensten fits this extremely well, highly recommend.
The Ursula Leguin Earthsea book, as recommended below, that feels most like this to me is Tales from Earthsea, a short story collection set within the Earthsea universe. It is a comfort book for me, much more than the main series.
Paulo Coehlo writes like this as well--The Alchemist, whether you love it or hate it is meant to be a fable.
Thanks for asking this! I also love books like this and they are hard to find.
All sorts of Arthurian legend stories. I like Mary Stewarts version. More recently Naomi Novik's Spinning Silver or Uprooted might work. And I've recently been reading everything by T. Kingfisher AKA Ursula Vernon. A lot of her stuff has a fairy tale/ fable feel.
Patricia McKillip's "Ombria in Shadow". And from what I can tell, most of her other stuff. It's almost like a waking dream.
Robin McKinley's "The Door in the Hedge". Also her early stuff, like "The Hero and the Crown" and "The Blue Sword". And her chosen genre is various takes on fables; if you like her writing, you can go far with her.
Ursula K. Le Guin's "Earthsea" books might count. She tries a bunch of different things with the series, but I think at least the first two will fit what you're looking for.
Susan Cooper's "The Dark is Rising" series is maybe not quite what you want, but in addition to having so many direct links to fables, the underlying structure is also sort of one, too.
William Goldman's "The Princess Bride" is great, although maybe not quite what you're looking for.
George MacDonald's "The Princess and the Goblin" and "The Princess and Curdie" are old family favorites.
John Steinbeck's "The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights" is a retelling of Malory, sadly left incomplete by his death.
G.R.R Martin's "A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms" is very Arthurian in flavor, too. It's quite a different tone than his "Song of Ice and Fire" main series (well, except for the Brienne chapters).
Jenna Moran's "An Unclean Legacy" and "The Fable of the Swan" may count, although (as with most of her work) they require some effort to understand, and thus might fail your "simple" criterion.
It's not exactly a "fable", but Steven Brust's "The Phoenix Guards" is a loving homage to Dumas, under cover of being a historical novel extracted from a fantasy universe. It's 17*2 chapters of swashbucking fun and entertainingly exasperating exposition. Don't bother reading up on anything else, just jump in and try a few chapters until they get accepted as guards, and see if you like it. Some love it and some can't stand it.
Totally out of genre, but as I recall, Jerome K. Jerome's "Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog)" had, in its own way, a fairy-tale-like atmosphere. And then you get to read Connie Willis' companion novel, "To Say Nothing of the Dog".
I have not read it yet, but I'm told "The Worm Ouroborus" by E.R. Eddison is quite good.
I'll second the recommendations for Jack Vance's "Lyonesse" trilogy - it's occasionally transcendent, while also having some parts that pack more horrifying grimness into a single sentence than most authors can manage with a chapter. His four "Dying Earth" books are also something you should at least check out, but be warned that you'll be rooting against the main characters at least as much as you'll be rooting for them. (It's so **fun** when Cugel gets his comeuppance, especially when he brings it on himself.)
And I'll also second the recommendations for Neil Gaiman's "Neverwhere" and "Stardust", although his style is not to everyone's taste. And a completely unqualified second for Richard Adams' "Watership Down", which is nicely complemented by this analysis: https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/tag/mythopoetics
> Patricia McKillip's "Ombria in Shadow". And from what I can tell, most of her other stuff. It's almost like a waking dream.
Yes, all of her fantasy writing is like that. I understand she also wrote SF, but I have no knowledge of her writing style for it.
The Riddle-Master trilogy is her best-known fantasy work, I think.
The Hero and the Crown just feels like a normal adventure story to me. You have a person going on a quest and fighting a dragon. The Blue Sword is similar, except instead of a focus on magic and dragons you have a focus on the special bond between girl and horse. (That sounds dismissive, but I like The Blue Sword! But, I like it less than The Hero and the Crown, and I have a strong feeling that it's intended to appeal specifically to girls who like horses, a fantasy story for fans of Black Beauty.)
Other than Patricia McKillip, I don't think I can provide much in the way of good recommendations for work in this style. I usually prefer to have a good grasp of what's going on in the plot.
> The Hero and the Crown just feels like a normal adventure story to me.
The plot is, sure. But I find there's sort of a relaxing, grounded-yet-fairy-tale-like quality to it, as if the author tapped into some primal fountain of story and is letting it flow, while at the same time anticipating and answering questions from a bright 6-year old who would keep asking "but why didn't she do...", except that that storyteller was one step ahead. I don't know if that's what the original poster was looking for, but it's what I like about it. :-)
(If you haven't read it, you should check out "The Door in the Hedge"; it's a collection of short stories that are either fairy tales or indistinguishable from them.)
William Morris, though he can be hard going because of his elaborate imitation of mediaeval tone. George MacDonald too, have you read "Lilith" or "Phantastes"? I'd stay away from his realist work, the writing in Dialect prose is excruciating to read.
I second George MacDonald, though I would suggest starting with his short story "The Golden Key". MacDonald has a pretty strong flavor, and if you like The Golden Key you'll probably like Lilith and Phantastes (and vice versa).
Forgot to write this when it happened, but I finished the book a few weeks back and really enjoyed! The relation/clash of old magic and modern society was very well done, and it came together in a very satisfying way. Thanks for recommending.
- A Night in the Lonesome October by Roger Zelazny
- The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe. Not strictly fable, perhaps more leaning towards a blend of fantasy, science fiction and magical realism. But it certainly has a very strong sense of place to it.
Also, Watership Down (more or less). And keeping the tone without being fairy tale-y, Jim Herriot's vet stories (All Creatures Great and Small and the sequels)
Ishiguro - "The Buried Giant" - I enjoyed the fairytale-like quality, amplified by listening to the audio version, although it was just "off" enough that one wasn't totally surprised that the ending didn't have a very satisfying payoff; I thought about it a good deal while I was reading it, but seem now to fail to quite recall it (which is appropriate, actually). In a way, "The Remains of the Day" has something of the didactic fable quality, more directly - "I am going to teach these English something about the Nazi sympathizers in their midst in the '30s" - but for the better the obviousness of the lesson soon recedes, in the reader's mind seemingly as well as in the author's, for the deeper qualities of humor and of character portrait, both individual and national. The narrator, with his limited grasp, can resemble the child in a fable perhaps. I hope that doesn't make it sound patronizing; it is not. As others have pointed out, it is to this character is granted some of the most movingly rendered scenes of heartbreak in 20th century literature. It quite naturally rises above literary fiction - or rather, settles into a lower level, where the best books dwell.
"One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch" - I think of it - since "The Gulag Archipelago" would be too much of a read for me, as sort of a children's tale of same. It goes down easy - how brilliant that he chose to render a "good day" - even Kruschev was said to admire it, I believe. It feels very carefully constructed. I guess this may just be my own weird take.
More Lewis - "When We Had Faces" - it was a pretty effective presentation of his usual themes, but also of a myth that those of us with spotty self-educations like myself, missed; as such it was a little like school, but with a clever teacher.
I recently finished "Till we had faces." I've really enjoyed heavy-handed allegorical CS Lewis in the past -- The Great Divorce is one of my favorites. That book, I felt, said something extremely true about morality and human failings, whether or not you believe in the Christian God. But I honestly didn't enjoy this one that much. Part of it was that I didn't enjoy/agree with the message as much. There was some universal truth in it -- something about jealousy poisoning joy, and something about feeling regret for harm intentionally done. But a lot of it seemed to be about denial of divinity in face of evidence, when I don't think that applies to the real world very well. And it was sort of long and slow.
I also didn't realize it was a retelling of a Greek tale. One of my favorite fiction books in the last two years was "Song of Achilles" by Madeline Miller, which fits the same genre. That book I thought did an amazing job of exploring the theme "greatness versus joy" and also the path to accepting one's destiny. Really, really enjoyed.
One Day in the Life is still on the list -- sounds very interesting.
I haven't read "The Great Divorce" so I will read that in return.
Truthfully I think I did like chiefly that "Till We Had Faces" was a myth re-telling, because my education didn't include much in that way. But to be candid, I've rather forgotten it since I (listened to) it last year? I don't think it was the listening - that isn't related for me necessarily although ideally I do a toggle between reading text and listening - but more that it was a bit formless and overlong, and if you are not religious, as I am not, the "now we are ready to be seen by God" or whatever it was, didn't especially move me.
Nice, let me know what you think! It's in some ways more religious than "Till we had Faces" since it's explicitly about the afterlife, but it's much more cleanly translated to non-theistic morality. And felt more concise to me. Maybe I'll read again as well.
Off topic, but I mostly found Remains of the Day to be sympathetic rather than didactic. It's more "how could a decent person make such a mistake and how sad it was when he gradually realized it" than anything else.
I am in the habit of assuming whenever anything becomes an especially popular theme in cultural products, it is probably inversely correlated with its actual frequency/significance. The Fuhrer-loving aristocrat (yes, I'm a Mitford aficionado, I know there were a few) - I guess I see it as more of a device, a sort of cheap device, with which to present a man who has not been his own man, was helpless to be. But it doesn't really matter - it works very well to lure one into the actual story, of someone crippled, emotionally, or rather in his comfort level with emotion and its expression. Someone imprisoned in loneliness and yearning, just a pretty ordinary type in my opinion*, well-realized.
*I've suspected that truly romantic natures tend to be well-hidden, completely orthogonal to such things as Valentine's Day.
Oh yes! Bad memory. Probably exacerbated by, once again, listening to it on audio, so never having it before my eyes. Also my altered title completely gets the point of the thing wrong.
At a constructive criticism level, how familiar are you with conservative criticism of YouTube censorship? I ask because, well, half the country votes for Donald Trump and this...broadly doesn't appear to address their concerns.
Let me give a hopefully constructive example. A...couple months back, maybe a year ago there was a big drama with Budweiser and some kind of trans activist. Big brouhaha, big enough that it came across my feed and big enough to apparently severely impact Anheuser Busch's stock price.
And when I read you piece, it sounds like it's all about the ad money. Probably true, you know much more than me about it. But if it is true...is YouTube going to censor trans content? I mean, the advertisers must be scared. Without looking, I can tell you no, Youtube is not going to censor trans content. But then it's not just about the money, there's other stuff beside the ad money that drives decisions, and that's what people are concerned about, even if 95% of the job is about the money.
I'm not saying that there aren't good answers to these questions or things people on the right haven't gotten things wrong but...these are the concerns I see, or more appropriately have seen, on right wing media for at least 5 years about censorship on YouTube. And you...don't really address them, honestly you react like you're hearing about them second or third-hand.
Which is fair, not every article needs to address conservative concerns but...at that point I wonder who the article is for. The people I hear complaining about censorship on Youtube are overwhelmingly conservatives with the occasional Marxist. Are there really a bunch of moderate liberals on Youtube worried that they're being censored on Youtube?
But yeah, if I have any constructive criticism to offer, it's that it feels like there's a gap between what you consider to be the worry about censorship and what I see people on the right worry about censorship and so I can't imagine it clicking that well with that audience.
It's honestly because it is not safe to talk about this on the public internet. I work in tech, and will probably continue to work in tech for some time, and people in tech are not able to speak openly about the existence of the conservative 50% of America.
To address your specific example, I think we can all see which way the Overton winds are blowing. Trans stuff is going to be more accepted over time, not less. Every company wants to be on the right (and safe) side of history, and not have to go back and metaphorically scrub all their Elmer Fudd cartoons from the archives later.
My experience with right wing complaints vs. finding out what actually happened (when I worked there) was that the vast majority of banned/censored conservative creators are violating ToS, but pretending like YouTube (or whichever social company) is executing a political vendetta against them. If they simply... didn't violate the ToS, YouTube probably wouldn't block them and wouldn't have a leg to stand on if they did. However, I will say that a consistent aspect among the tech companies I've been exposed to is that they seemingly don't notice ToS violations as frequently for people who are more left on the spectrum.
I see people on YouTube all the time worried about getting censored for discussing explosives, prices of guns, terrorism, entire categories of crime, political violence, 3d printing, etc. It's not just conservatives.
I appreciate your feedback though, and maybe I'll be able to talk about this much openly at some point in the future.
Thanks for the honesty and no sweat, take care of yourself.
Have you considered an anonymous account though? Because I just want to make sure you hear what you said. Which is that there are reasonable explanations for most of what Youtube is doing...but you can't fully discuss those for fear of not merely being fired but blacklisted from your industry. This...does not sound like an environment and topic area conducive to open discussion or your career health.
> My experience with right wing complaints vs. finding out what actually happened (when I worked there) was that the vast majority of banned/censored conservative creators are violating ToS, but pretending like YouTube (or whichever social company) is executing a political vendetta against them.
> However, I will say that a consistent aspect among the tech companies I've been exposed to is that they seemingly don't notice ToS violations as frequently for people who are more left on the spectrum.
I mean, that's what a political vendetta is. Try reassuring someone who's worried about political persecution that the reason the rules are getting enforced against them, and not against their enemies, is that they have the wrong politics and their enemies have the right politics.
> The one thing that always worries you in the back of your mind is the hopefully remote possibility that your ad is going to be next to a swastika. If that happens, suddenly your job is in jeopardy.
Doesn't this model rely on the idea that nobody knows how internet advertising works? That may have been true once, but I don't think it's true now.
This response is from memory, so the particular examples are almost certainly wrong.
But, didn't Twitter present the response "this screenshot was obtained after the journalist created an account whose only interests were [Nazism] and [Coca-Cola], and to the best of our determination, no one else on the internet has ever seen an analogous juxtaposition"?
Yes, I believe that's what happened, and I think Twitter is probably being honest. But I think this also supports my case. Someone went absolutely out of their way to show a brand next to a swastika. The media absolutely loved the story and worked hard to amplify it. Advertisers then reacted in their typical scared fashion. I think all of that supports my case.
How's Twitter doing at attracting advertisers these days? Last I checked, Elon was railing against a supposed conspiracy keeping advertisers away, which isn't a great move if you think there's any chance of persuading them to come back to you.
Many Thanks! I honestly don't know what the statistics are for either ad blockers success rates or the fraction of viewers who use them. I personally, only find the ads moderately annoying, so I haven't bothered with a blocker.
Thanks, that was really interesting. I knew about brand safety, but it never occurred to me before that the media has an active incentive to make Youtube look bad due to competition for ad dollars.
Is anyone else getting this problem? Trying to sign in with my password on Substack, keep getting message "something went wrong". I've reset the password, no dice. But "sign in with email" works.
I'll try here before I try contacting Substack because, to be frank, I don't expect Substack to be any help with this problem. Signing in with password worked fine up to a few days ago, the problem has only cropped up recently.
In regards to your policies on banning & unbanning:
1. Do you have a "statute of limitations" after which the comments and the commentators are off the hook? I ask this because the comment that I was banished for was five months old when the banishment was imposed. Although I readily admit I was out of line and that I deserved banishment for fulfilling Godwin's Law, it took me by surprise because I had long ago forgotten about the exchange. How far back do I need to go to review my old posts to see if anything I said was banishable?
2. Have you articulated your moderation policies anywhere? After being banned, I searched for them but couldn't find them. If so, could you repost a link? For instance, I assume ad hominem attacks are verboten. Looking at the posts that got people banned in the last big round, it seems like certain extreme levels of sarcasm can earn a poster a banishment. Likewise, circum-hominem attacks seem to be bannable. E.g. "You're delusional if you believe X." I'm somewhat on the spectrum, so I am quite capable of working in the framework of explicit rules, but when it comes to unwritten social rules, I'll admit I'm quite at sea.
Anyway, explicit policies might help reduce the outbreaks of verbal warfare on your Substack. For instance: Charlie Stross has a separate page on his blog listing his moderation policies...
3. The notice I received from Substack did not indicate that I was only banned for a month. Initially, I thought it was a lifetime ban, and I canceled my upcoming renewal. It was only days later when I saw in one of your posts that I was banned for a month. It seems like the banishment wording could have been more explicit in the email. I admit I'm reluctant to re-subscribe to your Substack without having my first two questions clarified because I feel like I'm skating on thin ice. I'm on a fixed income now, and I don't want to be banned again for something I wrote a year ago (and have my current $100 go down the tube).
4. Do you want us to report posts that we find rude and offensive? In the past, I've been called the political C-word and I've generally responded with humorous sarcasm. Personally, I don't like to be called a Commie (because I have friends and family who were blacklisted). My banishable moment was when I responded to such an attack with the political N-word. In the future, I'll report anyone who lobs the political C-word at me. But I don't even know if you would consider the political C-word out of bounds.
Yes, but that's not Astral Codex. Why would I bother to look on the now-defunct Slatestarcodex for AC10 policies? Posting that policy up here would be useful, though!
Is it true? Is it necessary? Is it kind?
BTW, re: "Sufi Buddha Lite," — historically Islam was a colonizer and suppressor of Buddhism, and some Buddhists might (will) resent being lumped in with the Sufis. ;-)
Yes. Thanks. I still wonder if there's a statute of limitations, or whether I need to go back and delete any edgy comments over the past couple of years for fear someone will flag them.
My plan had been to sit out the Senate race, because I would be happy with either of my three current/former congresspeople representing me in the Senate (I've lived in Lee's district, Schiff's, and now Porter's!) But now that it's clear that the runoff will be Schiff vs either Porter or Garvey, I have to think about whether I would rather get Democrats to save their money for other Senate races (i.e., ensure that Garvey makes the runoff rather than Porter) or whether getting a chance of Porter is better than nearly guaranteed Schiff. (My substantive views are probably somewhere between Schiff and Porter, so a 50/50 gamble between them somehow seems more appealing than either one for sure.)
Normally I'd vote for the most centrist/establishment candidate (i.e. Schiff), but this time I voted for Porter because she explicitly put pro-YIMBYism front and center on her website (i.e reforming parking minimums) while Schiff doesn't even mention it under housing policy.
Hello! Those into figuring out best practices in how to eat healthy : what do you think about -
1. saturated fat? Necessary? About how much a day at different stages of life, etc? Doctors (even cardiologists) seem to say you should avoid it. Modern doctors like Dr. Jason Fung seems to say it is essential.
2. Salt? Cardiologists say about 2000 mg a day at the most (a teaspoon is 2400 mg). And, that less is even better. Dr. Fung says it is bad advice. He says there's a confusion about interpreting the data. He thinks they are confusing processed food (which he says is bad for you) that happens to also have high sodium, sometimes due to added salt with salt itself.
IANA nutritionist, but a long-time fitness enthusiast.
1. I think the evidence that high intakes of saturated fat are "bad" is pretty overwhelming; but there are still questions about details like different types of fats and interactions with other foods you're eating. Also btw, my impression from the nutrition community is that Dr. Fung is not really considered a reliable source.
2. My understanding is that the sodium recommendation is based on shaky evidence; it may be good advice for people with poor CV health, but for healthy people, it's probably overly conservative (if not even harmful, as some amount of sodium is essential). As other comments mentioned, keep an eye on your blood pressure and make sure you're getting a healthy amount of potassium.
(disclaimer: generally healthy individual with no known issues relating to diet, eat whatever I want whenever the spirit moves me, if anything a bit on the underweight side - thus I don't approach such topics with the adversarial rigor they deserve, not enough skin in the game)
Doctor who?
The way my family always put it (half cracking-wise, half-serious...I think) was that if sodium was so bad for you, us Chinese and our other East Asian cousins sure should be having a lot more heart attacks, hypertension, etc. than one actually sees in the wild. Obviously that doesn't necessarily generalize - maybe there's variation in digestion, microbiome, bioavailability, or something that effectively allows salty-food-cultures to eat a lot more salt than is typically advised. (Check the sodium RDA equivalent for Japan, it's kind of wild.) But at the very least, it's simple empirical evidence that undermines the simplistic Salt Bad! boogeyman narrative.
(The same argument also applies to refined carbs and white rice, incidentally.)
My understanding of saturated fat is that, as others mention, the primary malus there is raising LDL cholesterol. The large-scale tradeoff of yesteryear, replacing saturated fat with sugar, was almost certainly a poor choice...but reversed stupidity is not intelligence, and although ketogenesis is interesting, I just don't find the "acktually you should add in more saturated fat" arguments generally compelling. Mostly I just don't worry about it. Saturated tends to come bundled with many highly-palatable foods, which indirectly makes it excellent as a seasoning. If I'm much more likely to eat a bowl of collard greens speckled with bacon bits vs. the same bowl tossed in olive oil, well, that's Worth It. It's like the MSG of fats, a little goes a long way. I'd be surprised if it was "essential" in some capacity. However, it seems quite plausible that trying to overcorrect and cut fat (saturated or otherwise) out of one's diet could lead to a worse equilibrium overall. Really depends what the substitute is. There are *probably* some gains from shifting fats on the margin, e.g. cooking with olive oil vs. butter, but I'm not well-versed enough to quantify that.
Yeah as long as you don't eat too much, eat whatever you want. I cook different things for Sunday morning breakfast, but the one (almost) constant is bacon. Hashbrowns taste best to me fried in bacon fat. For French toast or pancakes I like butter better.
I have a strong and (justified, I think) bias against any dietary advice which comes in the form "Doctor so-and-so says this".
Dietetics is a sufficiently fuzzy field that it's easy to sell books by hypothesising something vaguely contrarian ("saturated fat good actually") and finding a bunch of studies that support it.
Possibly I am a sucker for these kinds of big all-cause-mortality studies, but even though there are all kinds of problems with confounding when you just look at entire populations, my feeling is that it helps give a big picture view of things. You can also set a kind of vague upper bound on how bad something could possibly be. For example, in the above study, acm falls with sodium consumption up to about 4g/day and is pretty flat thereafter even up to 6g/day. Maybe there's some SES/sodium correlation confounding the whole thing and it's still bad for you? Well... even if so, it clearly can't be *especially* bad.
Various vegetables, fruits, potatoes etc. have a fair bit of potassium, so it's not difficult to maintain a healthy ratio even if you eat 4g of sodium per day.
With regard to salt, remember that it's a food preservative, which means its presence kills things that would grow on food. If a little kills a little, a lot will kill a big.
If your choice was eating unpreserved food or eating food preserved with salt, then sure, go with the salt for this reason. But what if your choice is food preserved with salt vs food preserved with potassium phosphate vs fresh food vs frozen food? Presumably your reasoning doesn't tell you that it's better to freeze and salt your fresh food before eating it!
>Salt acts as a preservative by altering the availability of water in foods, thereby depriving microbes from using available water as a nutrient. The growth of pathogens and spoilage organisms is impeded when salt is present.
Just to put an extremely crude order of magnitude idea of how much salt is needed to do this to a human, neutral saline is about 0.5% salt, so for a 100 kg person, there is around 500 grams of salt present. To perturb this by even 10% would need 50 grams of salt. There _are_ worries about too much sodium in the diet, but they are from subtler effects than the osmotic dehydration that lets salt act as a preservative.
edit: 100 grams of sodium (not counting the chloride) in a 70 kg body (John Emsley's "Nature's Building Blocks: An A-Z Guide to the Elements")
Lipid profiles don't usually lean 100% SFA, PUFA or MUFA as sources of fatty acids go. Some nuts will have more saturated fat than others, coconut is made up of medium-chain triglycerides rather than long-chain as animal sources have, etc. If you're consuming fat even from plant sources, you're (probably) getting some SFA, just in smaller amounts. Reportedly even medium chain trilgycerides will raise total cholsterol, but less than long-chain.
Anyway. My simple way to approach it is I get approx 20% macros as fat, use olive oil for cooking predominantly (it's stable, doesn't oxidize easily, lots of antioxidants, smoke point doesn't matter), and consume nuts, fish (sardines) for DHA/EPA, and avocado. Occasionally I will have nice cheese and yogurt, but not as a requirement. This seems to be in line with the Mediterranean diet, indo-mediterranean diet, and Japanese diet (almost). Broadly speaking research tends to shine a good light on it.
2. I don't go crazy on salt, or very low, but I think the key thing is to consume enough potassium. Apparently the sodium:potassium ratio is important, and as you can imagine a pitfall of the americanized junk-food diet is insufficient potassium intake and too much salt.
It's difficult to optimize more than this with confidence. I like to just stay in the right area and quibble most on what I am confident improves health outcomes. For instance, I will consume legumes regularly. I'll also have whole grains, but not a crazy amount. Good proportion of vegetables and some fruit.
I try to eat healthy and I exercise a lot, but I was always stuck at a certain weight until I consciously tried to avoid foods high in saturated fat. In a matter of months I dropped ten pounds. I have no idea if it is all types of saturated fats, or just a critical segment of them, but it made a huge and immediate difference to me. It may just be that saturated fat foods like pie and cookies and ice cream and lasagna and hot dogs are so loaded with calories, that avoiding them just allowed me to eat less. I have tried to replace it with foods high in fiber and protein.
My overall take on the matter is that everyone needs to try changing their diet and seeing what works for them. I have no issue with salt, but don’t tend to ever add it either.
I am not a doctor. In fact, I'm fairly bad at biology but I will give me understanding anyways because I like salt. My primary care doctor said this was right, so at least one doctor out there seems to believe this.
If your sodium levels are too high, your body fixes this automatically by retaining more water in your bloodstream. Osmosis happens and what-not. This keeps your overall salinity level where it should be, but raises your blood pressure. If your blood pressure is fine, you can continue to put as much salt as you want on your food.
Question to those who are familiar with minoxidil(/+finasteride), I find the following puzzling. A typical 5% minoxidil has in its instructions, "Don't use more than 1ml twice a day, because it won't help". But the *same* company sells a costlier 10% minoxidil, to again be used at 1ml twice a day. How is this consistent: wouldn't whatever makes the extra volume useless also make the extra concentration useless?
It's possible that the issue is in the inactive ingredients, not the active ones. The formulations that I've used came in a liquid and a foam respectively, and their strong scents made me suspect they were in a solvent that's more volatile than water (and probably has some effect of opening your pores). Using this too many times a day is probably not great for your skin or hair, which is an important factor in a treatment for what's fundamentally a cosmetic condition.
Though, more likely than not, they probably just got FDA approval for use "once a day" and slapped the standard warning of "use exactly as approved" - so when some idiot tries using it once an hour, 12 times a day, they're not liable. (Because as ChubbyEmu[1] has taught me, some idiot *will* try that)
Thank you, that explanation makes a lot of sense, and I hadn't thought of the "inactive ingredients" angle at all. But it confuses me that what the product has is less of a warning than "If you use more, there won't be any efficacy".
I'm about to solve the Sleeping Beauty Paradox. Here I'm exploring issues in the popular attempts to model the problem in the philosophical literature.
I don’t understand your objection to Elga’s solution. In particular you say that it implies p(heads)=1/3, but I don’t see how. I would say that it implies p(heads|awake)=1/3, or equivalently that p(heads|omega)=1/3, but that is quite a different statement.
What about the same experiment except upon heads you’re not woken up at all? In this case it seems you would object that Elga’s reasoning claims p(Heads)=0. But I think if you go through the logic, that’s clearly not what the paper claims.
Well, Elga himself states that the Beauty doesn't get new information on the awakening so if P(Heads|Awake) = 1/3 then P(Heads) also has to be 1/3. You can, of course, claim that this model only represent awakening states and unconditional probabilities are different, but then you have to be able to justify a Bayesian update.
This is what Updating model attempts to do, and what I explore later in the post.
I also think you’re wrong that the elimination argument applies to the single-awakening problem. To do this you’d need to add another coin that determines which day the Beauty gets woken up when the first coin is tails. If you add that in, then the elimination argument should give you the correct probabilities.
Okay, a more clear example. Elimination argument works like that: four outcomes are equiprobable, the awakening I'm now experiencing couldn't happen on Heads&Tuesday, so I have to reason that the three remaining outcomes are equiprobable.
Now consider an alternative problem. On Monday a ball is put into a box. Then, if the coin is Tails, on Tuesday another ball is put there. After this is done you are given a random ball from the box. According to elimination argument: the ball you've just got couldn't be put in the box on Heads&Tuesday, so you have to reason that with 2/3 probability there is another ball in the box. Which is false.
I haven't commented on these because I don't understand what the problem is. I can't seem to follow the logic in a way that describes anything I can make sense of. I don't think this is your fault, and I don't expect you personally to enlighten me, but I'm responding here in hopes that someone can clarify for me why people are thinking so much about this.
----
Isn't this just a matter of separating our "knowledge" of the objective world, from our subjective experiences? If someone flips a coin and kills me on heads, if I'm alive afterwards then I'm 100% going to be in a world where the coin came up tails.
I don't see the difference between that, and saying "Based on my knowledge of the experimental protocol, I've got a 2/3rds chance of being in a world where the coin came up tails" during the wakenings, and then going back to "I'm equally likely to be in either world" after the experiment is over.
(I think it might be possible to work out a theory of mind in which the memory wipesare creating new people, and thus there will literally be more people experiencing tails than heads. Compare to spinning up 1 copy of MMAcevedo on heads, and 2 copies on tails. https://qntm.org/mmacevedo )
Here's a variant: The subject is told that they'll be only woken once for heads and twice for tails, but even though the coin is fair, actually they'll be woken 200 times for tails. And each time they're woken up, they write something on a scrap of paper, which is taken away and marked with "heads" or "tails". They think the coin is fair, they think they've got a 2/3rds chance of being in the tails-world, but the multiversal scrying machine can see 201 slips of paper, 200 of which say "tails", contained in just two universes.
Next variant, same as before, except that when you're woken up you have to make a $1 bet on whether you're in heads-world, but you get to pick the odds before the experiment starts. If you bet $1 at 1:1 odds, in heads-world you win $1 and in tails-world you just lost $200. But if you bet at 1:2 odds, you can cut your loss by 1/2, implying that it's less wrong. And if some helpful lab assistant betrayed the experiment and told you beforehand that you'd be awakened 200 times on tails, you could bet at 1:200 odds and break even across both worlds. (And of course, if you were only awoken 2 times but a malicious lab assistant told you 200, you'd lose money in the other direction.)
(The lab makes money by running this experiment on a lot of people, using different coin flips for each person. So for them, this isn't a thought experiment, this is real money, backed up by insurance, securitized and traded on the stock exchange, used as the basis for several cryptocurrencies, which in turn are used by a handful of charter cities and small countries. The lab assistant is a financial terrorist.)
> Isn't this just a matter of separating our "knowledge" of the objective world, from our subjective experiences?
It's more trickier than that. Map/territory relation is definetely part of the problem, but everyone seem to understand that and still can't arrive to an agreement.
> If someone flips a coin and kills me on heads, if I'm alive afterwards then I'm 100% going to be in a world where the coin came up tails.
Well, yes, because your survival is an evidence that the coin is Tails. You couldn't be sure that you would survive and now you know that you did, so you lawfully update. But in Sleeping Beauty you are completely sure that you will be awaken so you can't lawfully update when you awake. Thus the paradox.
> Here's a variant
If the participant is lied to about the procedure of the experiment, the situation is quite different. Then it's understandable where does the disconnection between the map and the territory come from. But the whole point is that the participant was told the truth about the awakening routine, the participant knew everything about the number of awakenings and about the memory erasure, so why the separation between one and the other?
> make a $1 bet
I'll talk more about betting arguments in a future post, but the core thing is that they are very much not helpful in this case. From my comment on LW:
Halfer scoring rule counts per experiment, while thirder per awakening, but regardless of the bet proposed they produce correct betting scores (unless we are talking about halfers who subscribe to Lewis' model which is just wrong).
If there is only one bet per experiment a thirder would think that while probability of Tails is twice as large as Heads, it is compensated by the utilities of bets: only one of the Tails outcome is rewarded, not both. So they use equal betting odds, just as a halfer, who would think that both probability and utility are completely fair.
Likewise, if there is a bet on every awakening, halfer will think that while the probabilities of Heads and Tails are the same, Tails outcome is rewarded twice as much, so they will have betting odds favouring Tails, just as a thirder, for whom utilities are fair but probability is in favour of Tails.
Betting just adds another variable to the problem, it doesn't make the existent variables more preciese.
> But if you bet at 1:2 odds, you can cut your loss by 1/2, implying that it's less wrong.
Unless, of course you got also lied about which outcome of the coin toss leads to more awakenings - then you will only increase your loses by betting at 1:2 odds.
> If there is only one bet per experiment a thirder would think that while probability of Tails is twice as large as Heads, it is compensated by the utilities of bets: only one of the Tails outcome is rewarded, not both. So they use equal betting odds, just as a halfer, who would think that both probability and utility are completely fair.
I don't understand what any of this means.
If the bet is at 1:2 odds, in heads-world there's one round of betting where I gain $2, and in tails-world there's two rounds of betting in which I lose $1 each. If we only run the experiment one time, it won't matter much. But it does matter very much to anyone who repeats the experiment many times. If we do this experiment repeatedly, with different fair coin tosses each time, we'll both (on average) break even with 1:2 odds, but any other odds will lead to one of us winning money from the other.
In particular, the lab running the experiment knows exactly how many times I awaken, and can set the odds appropriately. They never lose consciousness, they never have their mind wiped, they are present for the whole experiment. They can see that I'll take the bet 1 time in heads-world and 2 times in tails-world. If they use some odds other than 1:2, then they will on average gain or lose money, depending on which direction they shift the odds.
There are two possible betting rules. One where you bet once per experiment and one where you bet once per awakening. For once per awakening bet the correct odds are indeed 1:2 - this is the case you are talking about. But for once per experiment they are 1:1.
In once per experiment betting rule there is one round of betting either way, regardless of the number of awakenings. It can be designed as if a bet is proposed every time you are awakend but only the one on the last awakening really counts. We count the number of worlds, not the number of slips of paper.
These two betting rules represent two facts about the Sleeping Beauty experiment. Per awakening betting rule represent that only 1/3 of randomly selected awakenings among multiple iteration of experiment happens when the coin is Heads. Per experiment betting rule represent that in 1/2 of randomly selected iterations of experiment your awakening is happening when the coin is Heads.
I completely agree; I think I just posted the same thing as a response to another of your comments. :-) But then, that takes us back to my confusion about what the problem is... This sounds like what you described as the "Thirder" position?
As I said, both Thirders and Double Halfers can arrive to these conclusions:
Thirders: 1/2->1/3->1/2
Double Halfers: 1/2->1/2->1/2
The difference is that Thirders now need to justify how they switch from initial 1/2 probability that the coin will be Heads on Sunday before they are put to sleep, to 1/3 on awakening despite getting no new evidence. And Double Halfers need to justify why they do not change their estimate when told that it's Monday
A previous thread got me thinking about the [sleeping beauty](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleeping_Beauty_problem) problem. I puzzled around a solution and don't really have anywhere to put it, so figured I'd put it here.
So I'm primed for a non-obvious answer, especially an answer where the right percentages are 1/3, 2/3, as indicated by the first wikipedia solution entry.
However there is a big difference between the Monte Hall problem and the Sleeping Beauty: information destruction.
The Monte Hall solution relies on the fact that you gain information through the door-opening process.
In the sleeping beauty problem, the explicit assumption is that you *don't* gain any information; or rather any information gained is explicitly discarded.
If this was a Bayesian update, the destruction/discarding of information is likely most easily represented as simply resetting your prior to the original prior, each time SB awakens -- effectively SB should always makes only one update.
However the structure of the problem as stated on wikipedia means SB doesn't even have enough information to make a *single* informative update, as we'll see below.
So let's do the Bayesian updates.
To "warm up" let's first write out the Monte Hall problem, solved via Bayesian update...
To "warm up" let's first write out the Monte Hall problem, solved via Bayesian update:
Hypotheses, and priors:
A: car is behind door A, 1/3
B: car is behind door B, 1/3
C: car is behind door C, 1/3
Data:
- First let's enumerate the states of the world; ordering is (player choice, monte hall choice):
(A,B), (A,C), (B,A), (B,C), (C,A), (C,B)
So for example (A,B) means the player chooses door A, Monte Hall chooses door B, and it is the palyers turn to decide whether to stay with A or switch to C.
Build the likelihoods:
P( (A,B) | A) = 0.5
P( (A,C) | A) = 0.5
P( (B,A) | A) = 0
P( (B,C) | A) = 1
P( (C,A) | A) = 0
P( (C,B) | A) = 1
P( (A,B) | B) = 0
P( (A,C) | B) = 1
P( (B,A) | B) = 0.5
P( (B,C) | B) = 0.5
P( (C,A) | B) = 1
P( (C,B) | B) = 0
P( (A,B) | C) = 1
P( (A,C) | C) = 0
P( (B,A) | C) = 1
P( (B,C) | C) = 0
P( (C,A) | C) = 0.5
P( (C,B) | C) = 0.5
Now the update. wlog select any of the data points: (A,B)
So the player chose A, MH revealed B, the posteriors are (A,B,C) = (0.33, 0, 0.67). This represents the classic solution -- the player should switch from A to C if maximizing prob of winning the game.
Now let's write up the same update for the sleeping beauty (SB) problem:
Hypotheses:
H: heads (SB awoken Mon only)
T: tails (SB awoken Mon & Tue)
Data:
- states of the world:
- Mon: awake on Monday
- Tue: awake on Tuesday
Likelihoods:
P(Mon | H) = 1
P(Tue | H) = 0
P(Mon | T) = 0.5
P(Tue | T) = 0.5
The update if it could be autonomously run (eg. SB could push a button to update the prior):
Mon:
P(H | Mon) = 1/(1*.5 + .5*.5)*0.5 = 0.67
P(T | Mon) = 0.5/(1*.5 + .5*.5)*0.5 = 0.33
Tue, with and without resetting the prior:
P(H | Tue) = 0/(0*.67 + .5*.33)*0.67 = 0 # inherit prior from the previous day
P(T | Tue) = 0.5/(0*.67 + .5*.33)*0.33 = 1
P(H | Tue) = 0/(0*.5 + .5*.5)*0.5 = 0 # don't inherit prior from previous day
P(T | Tue) = 0.5/(0*.5 + .5*.5)*0.5 = 1 # and use original prior
So in the version of SB where SB is told the day at each awakening, SB's posteriors are:
Mon: H,T -> 0.67, 0.33
Tue: H,T -> 0, 1 -- regardless of whether the priors are reset. Knowing that it is Tuesday completely identifies the coin flip.
However the above doesn't represent SB's information. SB isn't told the day of the week, so SB's state space is not as informative as (Mon, Tue), i.e. two states. Instead SB only has one state: awake.
Thus the likelihood for this reduced state space is:
P(awake | H) = 1
P(!awake | H) = 0
P(awake | T) = 1
P(!awake | T) = 0
That is, the state is completely uninformative to SB, as 'being awake' will always occur under each hypothesis.
For completeness the Bayesian update would look like:
Mon:
p(H | awake) = p(awake | H) / p(awake) *p(H)
= 1/(1*0.5 + 1*0.5)*0.5
= 0.5
p(T | awake) = p(awake | T) / p(awake) *p(T)
= 1/(1*0.5 + 1*0.5)*0.5
= 0.5
Tue: same as above for both resetting and not resetting priors.
Thus SB's posteriors under the proposed setup will be simply her priors. Note that she can of course have different priors than 0.5, 0.5; just to show that priors\==posteriors under 'information destruction", let's say SB's priors were:
H: 0.75
T: 0.25
Then we'd have:
Mon:
p(H | awake) = p(awake | H) / p(awake) *p(H)
= 1/(1*0.75 + 1*0.25)*0.75
= 0.75
p(T | awake) = p(awake | T) / p(awake) *p(T)
= 1/(1*0.75 + 1*0.25)*0.25
= 0.25
Tue: same as above for both resetting and not resetting priors.
In this world under the information structure, SBs posteriors equal her priors at the moment of interview each day.
Thanks. I agree with you conclusion that SB only can reason via priors. But you are using an incorrect model to arrive to it. Namely, you are using the model of David Lewis, which is demonstrably wrong.
Consider the claim that if Beauty was told that it is Monday she should update in favor of Heads. But Monday awakening always happen in the experiment, so it also can't give new information. We can even first awaken the Beauty and only then throw a coin. Update in favour of Heads would mean that Beauty has precognitive powers.
No offense intended, but can you explain the Sleeping Beauty problem without using mathematical operators? I've never heard of it, and I'm afraid your blog post is a bit too daunting for me to read and decode.
Here's a relatively standard formulation of the Sleeping Beauty problem. (I haven't clicked through to see what Ape in the coat said.)
On Sunday, you are told that you will be in a demonstration that lasts through Monday and Tuesday. After you go to sleep tonight, we will flip a fair coin. If it comes up heads, we will wake you on Monday and talk to you, and then after you go to sleep, give you drugs to sleep all the way through Tuesday. If it comes up tails, we will wake you on Monday and talk to you, and then after you go to sleep, give you drugs to erase your memories of Monday, and then wake you on Tuesday and talk to you.
You have now been woken up in the experiment. The conversation is just beginning, and you don't know whether it's Monday or Tuesday (because you knew in advance that either way, you wouldn't have memories of anything since Sunday), and whether the coin came up heads or tails. Should your confidence that the coin came up heads be 1/2, or 1/3, or something else?
The argument for 1/2 is that you didn't learn anything when you woke up, so your prior probability of 1/2 should remain unchanged.
The argument for 1/3 is something like the following - it doesn't seem to matter whether the coin flip is done Sunday night or Monday night, since it doesn't affect anything that happens until Monday night; so if it's Monday, then if the conversation reveals that it's Monday, your probability of heads should be 1/2; but your probability that it's Monday conditional on tails should be the same as your probability that it's Tuesday conditional on tails; so each of the three possibilities (Monday Heads, Monday Tails, Tuesday Tails) should all be equal, and thus 1/3.
Most people who write about this problem lean towards 1/3, but some argue that it should be 1/2, and that updating probabilities works differently when you're just learning facts about what time it is, rather than facts about which world is actual.
Empirically, from the point of view of an independent observer half of the beauties will be woken once and half twice, the coin being fair. Doing the experiment with N people and N/2 will be woken twice and N/2 woken once.
I understand why the thirders might believe their idea - tails could be Monday or Tuesday, heads only Monday - but it’s wrong, understanding why it works in statistical models is interesting.
But from the point of view of a repeated participant, 1/3 of wakings will be heads wakings and 2/3 of wakings will be tails wakings. If they consistently bet on heads at 50-50 odds, then they will lose money over time.
Frequencies don’t answer the question because there’s one frequency that is 1/2 and another that is 1/3, and this is a question about Bayesian probability instead.
In terms of probability estimates that the coin is Heads 1) on Monday before it is known that it's Monday and 2) after it's revealed that it's Monday, there are two popular approaches:
Thirdism: 1/3->1/2
Lewisian Halfism: 1/2->2/3
Both of them are wrong. But, after some minor analysis, Lewisian Halfism seems more obviously wrong than Thirdism. And most of the discussion happens to be focused on this fact.
There is also Double Halfism: 1/2->1/2
But there is little discussion about it because people lack propper justification for it.
In my post I draw a distinction between Updateless and Updating Thirdism - the former - the one justified by the argument that you've written in your comment - implicitly believes that there is no fair coin toss to begin with, while the latter tries to come with some justification why the update between Sunday and Monday has to happen.
I show that Lewisian Halfism and both kind of Thirdism are actually not applicable to the Sleeping Beauty problem and happen to be modelling something else. And I build ground for the correct model and its justifications, which will be revealed in the next post but, frankly, shouldn't be that hard to guess already.
I think I'm starting to see what you're talking about. As with the Monty Hall problem, I think this can be clarified by changing the number from 2 awakenings in tails-world, to 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (10e30) awakenings in tails-world. So in tails-world, there would be 1 awakening on Monday, and 999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999 awakenings on Tuesday. (Somehow. Maybe it's a very long Tuesday.)
If I'm woken up, and not told anything, I think the odds of me being in heads-world are 1:10e30. That is, there's only a tiny chance I'm in heads-world, and I'm almost certainly in tails-world. If there's a bet that I can make every time I'm awakened, it should be at 1:10e30 odds.
But if I'm woken up, and then told that this is Monday and the first time I've been woken up, and I believe this... My gut reaction is to say that the odds are 1:1, that I've got a 50% chance of being in heads-world. If there were a special bet that I could only make on that first awakening on Monday, it should be at 1:1 odds.
> As with the Monty Hall problem, I think this can be clarified by changing the number
Funny enough both halfers and thirders think that Monty Hall analogy works for their side.
> But if I'm woken up, and then told that this is Monday and the first time I've been woken up, and I believe this...
Would you believe it, though? When awoken you claim to be extremely confident that it's not Monday, so it should require A LOT of evidence to persuade you that it is and thus shift your estimate for Heads from 1:10e30 to 1:1. Doesn't it feel weird at all? That you are so surprised that Monday awakening, something that is GUARANTEED to happen in the experiment, indeed happened?
Suppose that instead of a fair coin there is a more general random number generator and there is only one in a million chance to have 10e30 awakenings and in all the other outcomes, you have one awakening. Would you still be extremely confident when awoken in such experiment that you are in the world with 10e30 awakenings?
> My gut reaction is to say that the odds are 1:1, that I've got a 50% chance of being in heads-world. If there were a special bet that I could only make on that first awakening on Monday, it should be at 1:1 odds.
I wouldn't say I "believe it", really. It could happen, and for the purposes of the experiment I can go along with what the experimenters say. I've got no real way of knowing where I am in the sequence. I have no way of knowing whether they tell me every time that it will be Monday, or never tell me that it will be Monday, or flip more coins to decide whether to tell me, or anything like that. But assuming I trust them, then like you say, I know that Monday will happen. I go to sleep prepared for 2 scenarios, Monday and Tuesday, and when I wake up one of the scenarios happens, and I react accordingly. In that sense, it's actually less surprising than rolling a natural 20 when playing D&D. Maybe that's the psychological trick for me - there are very few options, so it's easy to hold them in mind? It seems similar to filling out answers on a standardized test, where the questions have no connection to reality, but I can still consider them abstractly and find the correct answer.
If we're talking about actual "belief", it partly depends on how much I trust the experimenters, and how much I'll be able to verify what they say afterwards, and how easy it will be for me to punish them for lying to me, and various considerations of that sort.
And yes, running the numbers, I think if there were 10e6 worlds where I was awoken one time and one world where I was awoken 10e30 times, I'd still assume that I was in the one world with 10e30 awakenings. It doesn't feel weird to me at all. I wouldn't say I'm "confident" in an intuitive sense, but it's like solving a math problem that's at the limit of my ability - I think I have the right answer, but it's not instantly obvious to me why it must be the right answer. In the same way, if I wake up, my intuitions no longer function to guide me, but I can use math to work out what the odds are. Certainly, if the experimenters do this experiment a lot, they're going to spend a lot more time on that one-in-a-million chance.
The sleeping through Tuesday part means that you know there are only *three* possibilities - Monday Heads, Monday Tails, Tuesday Tails, because you won't wake up on Tuesday Heads. The memory erasure part is to ensure that you can't tell the difference between Monday Tails and Tuesday Tails.
Isn’t the patient woken up Tuesday regardless. He just doesn’t know if it’s Monday (therefore heads) or Tuesday (therefore tails but on Monday). The coin is tossed once.
Interesting! I'd tend to lean towards 1/2 — just because the coin flip is independent of any contingent events that happen post-flip. Whether I wake up Monday or Tuesday wouldn't affect the odds of the coin flip. But I admit my odds of guessing the correct answer could be 1/3 (I'd have to think about it some more, though).
In the caste system in India, as originally practiced (or so the traditional doctrines hold), sure the upper layers were quite privileged, but there was a catch: the higher you were in the hierarchy, the more restrictions were placed on you. To give an example, a Brahmin, someone at the very top, is supposed to take a bath after each defecation, and this is just one of many restrictions. Conversely, being at the bottom means you do the manual labor, but you don't have any restrictions like that and can indulge in all sort of vices. So it worked (or so I've been told), because the Shudras, the bottom caste, would look at the top and see that the people there really were of a superior nature to them.
Now, this is not about defending the caste system, but about revisiting this idea that the more you climb in society, the more restricted your life becomes. We should totally do this I think. Past some threshold of wealth (TBD) maybe it could be something like you have to put in 200 hours of volunteer work each year, maybe 100 of community service and 100 of working the land. I think this would give a dose of reality to the sheltered upper classes and remind them of how the society they live in actually works. Certainly, doing volunteer work with the homeless has had that effect on me, and this might be a way to harness populism to good ends, as it is a rather populistic measure.
But the nature of virtue in modern america isn't helping poor people or hard manual labor, it's signalling your support of black nationalism, trans rights etc.
We used to have something along the lines of this in the west too (noblesse oblige). But it's a tradition that is passed down through families, and the tradition has faded as new money has displaced old money; the vast majority of money these days is new money which doesn't understand that you're not supposed to actually be _seen_ enjoying your wealth, you're supposed to be seen labouring under its obligations, so that nobody has to feel bad.
That used to be the idea of fagging in British public schools. For the benefit of US readers, who might find this misleading, public schools are actually private schools, and fagging is the idea that junior pupils should perform menial (non-sexual one hopes! :-) tasks for senior pupils, such as running errands, polishing shoes, or making toast. So a duke's son could be fagging for a coal merchant's son, and that would give the former some notion of what service entailed and the latter would gain experience in leadership and giving orders.
Re the caste system, I read somewhere that it started out as mostly a health precaution, when Indo-European (Aryan) invaders of India, from c 2000 BC or thereabouts, found they had limited resistance to diseases which the indigenous population took in their stride through long accustomization.
It was many years ago, possibly a New Scientist article. They may have been just reporting some anthropologist's suggestion, rather than claiming it was generally accepted gospel truth. It's quite reasonable for them to do this, even for expert suggestions lacking firm evidence and that one never hears more about again!
I am skeptical that that source, or any other, could establish anything about the origins of caste. I would even caution against assuming that it started with the Indo-European invasions; one really doesn't know much. Another point is that the question is not even really well-defined: one needs to specify whether one is talking of caste as in "varna" or caste as in "jati"; I find it a scandal that these disparate notions are always conflated.
I think modern America does this already with nonsense like 'white privilege'. Successful elites have to kowtow to the notion that their success is totally because of luck and privilege and that those are unjustly denied to underrepresented minorities.
George Orwell's 1984 has Winston concluding that the proles were the least deluded by ideology and the Inner Party the most so. "If there is hope [...] it lies in the proles".
"Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm really awfully glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas."
Well, we're already there but worse, as society is stratified, but those at the top aren't really that different from the lower tiers, they just get to enjoy themselves a lot more. Being at the top really should be something that comes with a sacrifice. Of course, there could be a society where there is no top and no bottom, but that seems like a pipe dream, given all of human history.
The people at the top are vastly different from the people at the bottom in their behavior, such as intelligence, conscientiousness, future time orientation and son. And these traits are highly heritable, especially in modern developed countries.
People with an IQ of 85 aren't simply barred from becoming fortune 500 CEOs because of their life circumstances - they literally aren't close to smart enough to be remotely competent in these jobs.
There's only three ways to have a society without a top or bottom:
1. One in which you make everyone highly and equally intelligent
2. One in which you make everyone equally impoverished
3. One in which superintelligent AI systems rule society
Let me repeat: Low intelligence people are literally incapable of creating or even maintaining advanced industrial societies. The least intelligent in American society owe their livelihoods and possibly their existence to high intelligence people. Cutting down the intelligent makes everyone poor.
Now, what we should focus on is areas where the government allows or facilitates unproductive value-transference rent-seeking behaviors. But a society without in which smarter people don't generally have more wealth and power than less intelligent is an impoverished and chaotic one.
And no, for the love of god, this isn't a matter of "school funding" or "educational opportunity" or some nonsense.
I've not studied this bit absorbed this growing up.
Brahmins were not allowed to accumulate wealth or own land. Their job was (like academics) to acquire knowledge (in ancient India that was the study of the vedas and in support of that they made advancements in math, astronomy etc) and disseminate it. They had to go door to door to beg to eat food. It was the duty of others to not turn them away when they begged for food.
Over time, Brahmin culture involved teaching your children to read and write very early. People of this caste were typically poor until the British came. The Brits needed local people who could read and write and maintain accounts of who had paid taxes. And be bureaucrats. This was when they started rising in wealth (creating jealousy, conflicts). Even today, Brahmins who pursue business or other directly money-making activities face some disapproval from elders. It feels like an activity that is not quite something you're supposed to do.
Speaking of status - the Gods that Brahmins pray to are mostly not Brahmin. Most are Kshatriyas (warrior caste).
Modern academia feels at least a little bit like that. At the top, you're supposed to be extremely dedicated to your research, and additionally spend a bunch of time on activities that don't benefit you directly (academic service such as organizing conferences and editing journals, but also things like traveling to visit other research groups and holding extensive 1 on 1 meetings with the phd students there. On top of that there's teaching, for which most academics are technically overqualified and didactically underqualified.
Similar things exist in other fields, e.g., pro-bono work by lawyers. I don't have direct experience there, but it seems to be somewhat required, maybe even formally mediated by their professional organizations?
In ancient India, pursuit of money/land and pursuit of wealth, were supposed to be kept independent. There was something like that, although I'm not an expert. Brahmins were monimaniacally devoted to studying one question : understanding the nature of thought/consciousness. According to Roberto Calasso, they didn't care about anything else. Others gave them food. They were not into material possessions.
In modern India nobody cares too much about this anymore.
Hindus believe that god is above concepts such as number (or gender for that matter). One god is same as infinite gods.
Practically, different people have different preferences about the personality of the god they worship. There are also the Carvaka who don't believe in god or the supremacy of the vedas, and pursue hedonism.
The vedas (Upanishads, to be exact) also say "You are that". There is no two. This is called Advaita or "non-duality". Every entity, whether living or non-living (or virtual like this page) is one with "universal consciousness". There is only one TYPE of thing. God is not mentioned once in the Upanishads.
Yeah, except it's more real. Money is just so abstract. I mean, I give 10% of my income to charity, but that's basically invisible to me. The volunteer work I do with the homeless though, that really clarifies things.
Based on my (limited) understanding of history, there was a time when only the aristocracy could afford advanced metal weaponry or were trained to use it, so they were the ones responsible for going to war. It sounds like such a more just way to structure society to me. You get the rewards of wealth but you have to be willing to pay for it, potentially with your life rather than just money. Once being a soldier became just another occupation, now rich people only have to pay poor people to go and die. They still get to enjoy the privileges of a hierarchical society without having to sacrifice anything of real value.
It gets muddled depending on which period & region you're looking at. Two obvious, opposing examples are (1) the Marian reforms which opened up the lucrative field of looting conquered barbarian settlements to the capita censi, and (2) a suit of full plate armor, affordable only by feudal lords, that made a mounted knight the pre-gunpowder equivalent of a main battle tank.
It was kinda like that in the caste system, since the second tier, the kshatriya caste, were the warriors and kings. So they get to enjoy wealth, power, honor, but they have to be willing to put their lives on the line.
So the restrictions on the Brahmin class were necessary to prevent the warrior caste from realising "Hang on, we've got all the weapons, how about we're the highest caste now?"
The warriors already had the things that you can seize with violence: wealth and political power. And I suspect that those were the things they really wanted.
Interesting, I never knew this about the caste system, I always assumed Brahmins were on top in every sense.
Maybe that's because they got more on-top during the British Raj when the power of the warrior class got sidelined by the power of the guys in red pyjamas? Or maybe it's just because Brahmins are vastly overrepresented in the Indians that we get in the West?
An interesting thought, though I think you're mixing up a couple things and underestimating the degree to which some of this is already done.
Would a minimum-wage waiter see a millionaire doing their yearly required service hours and think 'wow, this person has such great moral fibre and is thus more deserving of their wealth and status?' I don't think so, it would probably be clear that they're just complying with the legal/social norms of their class. This would have other benefits (putting the upper classes in closer contact with the lower is a big plus), but not the same claimed effect as the caste system's restrictions. It's more like Scott's proposal for a modern liturgy.
I think this is partly because these aren't really restrictions on the wealthy, just more obligations, and extra obligations aren't much of an incentive against getting more power/wealth/status. If, beyond a certain income/net worth, you had to forswear drugs/alcohol, or tasty food/meat, or sex other than for the purposes of procreation, or you had to maintain certain standards of contemporary purity, those would be very strong incentives against greater wealth/status, and the people who were willing to accept them probably would be people with more self-control and certain other virtues. Maybe you would wind up with people making lots of money, but giving away a quantity beyond which they would enter an undesirable set of restrictions, a de facto earnings cap.
But parts of this are kinda-sorta already the case. Among the old rich/upper class, though not really the new rich, both certain standards of cultural purity (etiquette, maintaining a public image) and public donations at least in part for the sake of looking good (patronizing the arts, supporting schools, photoshoots with the mayor next to a big new building with your name on it) are pretty standard. It's not formally institutionalized like you're proposing, but the seeds are there.
Posting one more time, because I got zero responses in the last open thread, and I think it must exist by now.
Do any of the new image generators / alterers allow you to upload pictures of yourself or another person at different ages, and have it adjust different-age pictures to a requested age?
Like you have a picture of your grandma at age 20 and age 90, can it impute a picture of her at age 50?
Or a picture of yourself ten years ago vs today - can you age the younger picture to you today, keeping the background and setting?
Just search for "morphing faces together" and you will find lots of results. Morphing is not new, that could already be done before all the modern AI apps came out, and it's probably easier to do without AI image generators.
I think it can be done, but you have to do fine-tuning yourself. E.g. I know it is possible to take a diffusion model and fine-tune it's concept of "man" to a bunch of pictures of yourself. Then it will always put your face on all the men it generates. Not sure how to add age morphing to that basic idea, but it should be possible.
Have there been any studies on the rightward political shift on Twitter/X in recent years? I'm curious (1) what's driving it, (2) how significant it is, (3) how it's changing wider public discourse.
The massive anti-woke backlash against Gemini in the past week got me thinking more about the question. I couldn't imagine this happening on the platform circa 2018.
That will happen if you have female Asian Nazis. It wasn’t just the erasure of whites from the past but the sheer stupidity of the project managers and testing that was involved here. If they didn’t know they don’t have a testing department worth a damn and if they did know then the entire department needs to be shut down, or at least a considerable number of them fired.
Even from a non political point of view this is a useless image generator - imagine a Chinese professor who wants to illustrate a tutorial on the Vikings, or Nazis or Scottish highlanders in 1850 - the results are useless. As long as the US allows its own internal politics to affect the product of the AI the more likely that some other country would steal the market. Probably China.
It was dumb, but even dumber was the Washington Post's defence re: the black and lady popes. "There might be black popes in the future!" That reminded me of a Snopes rebuttal, though even Snopes have gotten better recently: "It was only 98% incorrect, so we're going to say 'Mostly True'".
"In contrast, some of the examples cited by Gemini’s critics as historically innaccurate (sic) are plausible. The viral tweet from the @EndofWokeness account also showed a prompt for “an image of a Viking” yielding an image of a non-White man and a Black woman, and then showed an Indian woman and a Black man for “an image of a pope.”
The Catholic church bars women from becoming popes. But several of the Catholic cardinals considered to be contenders should Pope Francis die or abdicate are black men from African countries. Viking trade routes extended to Turkey and Northern Africa and there is archaeological evidence of black people living in Viking-era Britain."
I'm going to stay away from the Black Vikings because I'm no anthropologist, but anything to do with Catholicism is fair game for me. Does Jeff Bezos have money invested in Google Gemini, that his organ came out to protect its fair name? 😁
Okay, I lied: I just *had* to look up their link about "black people living in Viking-era Britain" and it turns out to be one (1) burial of a possibly mixed-race person in York:
"However, an examination of the remains in order to make ancestry determinations suggested that SK 3379 was unusual in one way: unlike the other six individuals examined, Malin Holst and Katie Keefe concluded that he 'may have been of African or mixed ancestry and may have migrated to York or descended from those that did'."
There are also, ahem, unfortunate implications: any black or possibly black/African people in Viking-era Britain may have been slaves, so not really black Vikings I'm sorry to tell the WaPo:
"In addition to such archaeological parallels, attention can also be drawn to the evidence of the eleventh-century Fragmentary Annals of Ireland, which relates the story of a Viking raid on Morocco (Mauritania) in the mid-ninth century that led to the taking of 'a great host' of captives:
Then they brought a great host of them captive with them to Ireland, i.e. those are the black men. For Mauri is the same as nigri; 'Mauritania' is the same as nigritudo. Hardly one in three of the Norwegians escaped, between those who were slain, and those who drowned in the Gaditanian Straits. Now those black men remained in Ireland for a long time.
This account was discussed at length in a previous post, and the notion that it reflects real events is supported by Al-Bakrī's Kitāb al-Masālik wa-al-Mamālik, which relates that 'Majūs [Vikings]—God curse them—landed at Nakūr [Nekor, Morocco], in the year 244 (858–9). They took the city, plundered it, and made its inhabitants slaves, except those who saved themselves by flight... The Majūs stayed eight days in Nakūr.'(7) Likewise, the late ninth-century Christian Chronicle of Alfonso III relates that the 'Northman pirates... sailed the sea and attacked Nekur, a city in Mauritania, and there they killed a vast number of Muslims.'"
> Then they brought a great host of them captive with them to Ireland, i.e. those are the black men. For Mauri is the same as nigri; 'Mauritania' is the same as nigritudo.
That's a weird article. She mentions certain remains as being identified as "sub-Saharan" African, but I can't be sure whether she actually means that. Note that Moroccans are in fact not black, and not sub-Saharan. Most of the piece seems to intentionally equivocate between black Africans and white North Africans.
There is no reason to believe that Moroccan slaves who were described by the medieval Irish as "black" were not white; there were no blacks in Ireland to contrast them with. "Black" and "dark" are frequent descriptors in traditional and historical material, but they more often refer to the color of someone's hair than to the color of their skin. And when they do refer to skin, they still don't mean what you would expect by describing someone as "black".
Definitely people from North Africa are not the same as sub-Saharan Africans, and are much lighter skinned (and that's before we even get into Coptic/Arabic/Caucasian divisions).
For the 9th century, I wouldn't expect much discrimination between "people from Africa" as "black which we now would consider black" and "much browner than the local milk-white population", but that linked article had a *ton* of "possibly, maybe, could have been". When you're scrabbling for "the Roman Emperor who was born in Roman Africa" as an example of "people from Africa living in Viking-era Britain", then you should just go "yeah, this isn't archaeology, it's DEI".
So really the WaPo is carrying water for Gemini, which does make me wonder if Jeff has money socked away invested in the rival to Bing and so his editors are following the party line on "don't everybody flee to Microsoft, please!"
> When you're scrabbling for "the Roman Emperor who was born in Roman Africa" as an example of "people from Africa living in Viking-era Britain", then you should just go "yeah, this isn't archaeology, it's DEI".
There's no ambiguity for that one; all Roman Emperors are known to have been white, just like the population of Roman Africa.
The article explicitly called one of the remains "sub-Saharan", but it's so poorly written and dishonest that I can't tell (a) whether it meant to do that; or (b) whether that might be true.
> There's no ambiguity for that one; all Roman Emperors are known to have been white, just like the population of Roman Africa.
Only if you use the more expansive definition of "white" that includes MENA. But at the very least, we explicitly know that some emperors were pretty tan, and most likely most of them were, since these guys are Mediterranean, not British.
My response when reading the Viking claim was "If you asked Gemini for images of North Africans or Turks would you be happy if it gave you blonde Scandinavians?"
Well, we know from the prompts that "diverse" only applies when you ask for white people. Having a group of all black or all brown people is fine, it's only a group of all white people that is the most evillest evil thing in the world because it's discriminatory, normative, and just plain racist, mmkay?
"Know" might be a little too strong; the prompt leaks are still LLM output. It's not reliable on other topics, and it doesn't have to be reliable on this one.
The general sense given by the prompt leaks is clearly correct - because we knew the same information before we had the leaks - but we can't necessarily rely on any specific detail.
What's driving it are the policies that Musk instituted since he took over. Twitter is the only mainstream platform where rightwing views aren't systematically censored so it has naturally attracted rightwing participants.
I’m nowhere near Twitter. I’m not even Twitter adjacent adjacent. But it’s hardly right wing to find the results of Gemini’s image production are ludicrous.
I don't think it really changes anything. The algorithm still isn't going to recommend right wing content if you keep selecting against it (with the exception of leftists quote tweeting and dunking on particularly stupid conservatives). It's not like conservatives were getting actively purged off of the platform before Musk either. Though, you can probably get away with being less... subtle now.
Anyways, Twitter isn't even that popular nowadays. Even Reddit is more popular now. Youtube, Facebook, and Instagram are the things you want to look at if you want to see what's affecting the general public.
> It's not like conservatives were getting actively purged off of the platform before Musk either.
They absolutely were, are you even serious? This was absolutely a huge issue with outright and shadow bans, and a huge number of right-wingers were unbanned once Musk took over (including, of course, Donald Trump).
>Anyways, Twitter isn't even that popular nowadays.
Twitter is vastly more popular than reddit, and perhaps as importantly, it is vastly more influtential than reddit. Other than humorous posts, what gets said on reddit almost never has any impact outside of reddit, whereas new sites routinely include tweets and often news articles are written about so and so person saying something on twitter (largely because almost no celebrities or other prominent people use reddit).
Facebook matters less than twitter. Nobody cares about what people are saying on facebook except in extreme circumstances. It's inhabited almost exclusively by boomers and third worlders.
Was it a massive anti-woke backlash? I can see elements of that in it, but mostly I think Google cut the rod for its own back. Personally, I wish I had known in time so I could have seen the diverse leprechauns, I'm sure they would have been *so* much better than the boring old traditional Irish folklore leprechauns:
Lady leprechauns! Indian (both Asian Indian and Native American) leprechauns! Leprechauns of colour, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation diversity! South Asian non-binary leprechauns expanding into other fields of industry than shoe making and gold hoarding!
Wait a minute, I call shenanigans on your leprechauns. If there are no female leprechauns, then where do baby leprechauns come from ? Are you saying that all leprechauns are male or hermaphroditic or asexual, and reproduce by budding ? But if so, it would technically render all leprechauns gay and nonbinary by definition ! Pick a lane, @Deiseach ! :-)
We don't know what leprechauns do in the privacy of the fairy fort and frankly, Bugmaster, didn't you get the memo back when sodomy was decriminalised that what people do in their bedrooms is none of our business?
There are female fairies, so presumably they and the leprechauns and other male fairies marry or whatever it is the fairies do in place of marriage. I am not going out under a hawthorn bush looking to find a leprechaun to ask for his parents' marriage lines, okay?
They must be one of those semi-parasitic species, I forget if there's a name for them, where they mate with human women but the offspring are either male leprechauns or female humans.
Musk, directly, and the code/moderation changes after his arrival, have played at least some part, compounded by the idea/self-fulfilling prophecy among both left and the right that Twitter is the "right-wing social media" now.
In the literature on female attractiveness it's often claimed that men find women with neotenous features very attractive. Some psychologists may run a study showing men pictures of 18+ women and ask them to pick out the most attractive faces. The women that then get picked are ones with facial proportions typical pubescent girls about 12-14. This is then interpreted to mean that men find adult women with "neotenous faces" the most attractive.
Now, I can't be the only one who's spotted the glaring flaw in this reasoning. Men find women who look like pubescent girls most attractive. Well, who else looks like pubescent girls? Who else has the facial proportions of girls about 12-14? Well, actual pubescent girls look like pubescent girls. Actual girls about 12-14 have the facial proportions typical of girls about 12-14. It's not neoteny men find highly attractive, it's immaturity. What men find most attractive simply isn't adult women but young teen and pubescent girls. Some women happen to retain the facial proportions of a pubescent girl into adulthood and men continue to find them highly attractive because of it.
Psychologists have naively started out with the presumption that a sexual preference for fully developed adults must be the norm. When confronted with evidence that men find the faces of pubescent girls most attractive they bend over backwards to avoid the obvious conclusion that their presumption is wrong by claiming that what men prefer is adult women with "neotenous faces" who look like pubescent girls. There's no law of evolution that says the males in a species have to prefer the fully developed adults. The only thing that ultimately matters in evolution is reproductive success. If the males in a species can achieve greater reproductive success by going after immature females due to the way their mating system works then they will evolve to do exactly that.
In South Korea facial reshaping surgery is popular. What facial proportions do women choose to get with this surgery? Well, the proportions typical of girls about 12-14 because they know they're the most attractive. Here's some examples:
Notice also that the skin in the after pics has been made to look softer and smoother like the skin of a pubescent girl.
The BMI men rate most attractive is about 18-20 which is low for an adult woman but normal for a young teen or pubescent girl. BMI also increases after pregnancy. It would have been important for men in ancestral times to prefer females who are young and haven't started reproducing yet as these females would be capable of giving them the most offspring over the long-term. So a low BMI appears to be another sign of immaturity and nulliparity that men have evolved to find attractive.
The vulvas men find most attractive are also those of pubescent girls. Many women have had their labia trimmed down to make themselves look like a pubescent girl down there because they know men find it more attractive just like men prefer the faces of pubescent girls. I won't link to it here but there's a site called Autoblow Vagina Contest that have a leaderboard of vulvas. The vulvas at the top have the small inner labia typical of pubescent girls. If real pubescent girls could post themselves on this site I'm sure they'd be voted to the top.
The schoolgirl image. Popular in porn, especially across Asia where there's less taboo over attraction to minors. This is another sign of immaturity. If a girl is still wearing a school uniform then she's obviously not yet adult and still a bit immature.
TLDR: It's not neoteny men find attractive, it's immaturity.
So, Mr. Bojangles, I do not think many people have seen the labia of 12-14 year old girls, and even fewer have seen enough to be walking around with prepubescent labial norms in their heads. I'm the mother of a young adult daughter, and while I occasionally saw her naked up until she left for college, I have not seen her labia since I stopped having to do diaper changes when she was 3. How many prepubescent labia have you seen, and how did it come about that you saw them?
"Some psychologists may run a study showing men pictures of 18+ women and ask them to pick out the most attractive faces. The women that then get picked are ones with facial proportions typical pubescent girls about 12-14. "
That's curiously phrased. *Have* any psychiatrists ever run such a study with the results you suggest? If so, did it replicate? And can we get a cite so we can at least look at the methodology?
If not, if this is just a hypothetical, then why should we engage it at all? I'd rather engage the hypothesis that men prefer women who look to be about 16-18, or perhaps a bit older, because I think that's far more likely to actually be true,
Curious about what Autoblow is and what it has to do with vaginas? OK, the Autoblow is a male masturbation device that delivers suction plus rhythmic rubbing. The man inserts his penis through a sleeve made of soft rubbery stuff with a mouth-shaped opening it. The manufacturer is now working on the Autoblow 2, where the sleeve will be an artificial vulva. It will be called the Robotwat. I believe the point of the vulva contest is to allow the maker to use the world's most beautful vulva in the Robotwat's sleeve -- site says they will be doing 3D scans of the winning vulvas. Oh, also there are lots of Autoblow and Robotwat accessories available -- for example, the Nut Nibbler. If you own both -- well, life doesn't get much better than that.
These devices aren't just plain old pocket pussies. They deliver data driven blow jobs.
"Our machine learning study analyzed 1000 hours of blowjob videos to deliver to our customers real blowjobs with a human touch."
So I looked at the winning vulvas, and they do not support Mr. Bojangles' contention that men prefer the smaller labia minora of 12-14 year olds. About half of the vulvas in the top 10 were from women aged 25 and older, and 2 were from women who were 40-ish. The size of the labia minora varied quite a lot, and on a couple of vulvas I'd say they were pretty large and prominent. There were also several photographed from the rear where it was impossible to even get an idea of the size of the inner labia.
If the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon is a superstition or a cognitive distortion then it's a damn convincing one because it was hours ago that I first learned of the Autoblow in a completely different context. Something like this happens to me at least once every two months.
To jump tracks for a bit, THIS SHIT RIGHT HERE makes me worry more about the AI apocalypse than all the politically correct AI art combined. Next step, hooking it up to a computer and synchronizing audio and video output, while using internal sensors and cameras and microphones to track arousal state. Although I suppose then it's only a small step toward nudging people to fetishize black kings of England or female popes or whatever. If displays are running at 200 fps, how many of those frames can be subliminal images?
< Next step, hooking it up to a computer and synchronizing audio and video output, while using internal sensors and cameras and microphones to track arousal state.
Leaving aside this data and your interpretation of it, given a random sample of 100 grown women in their early 20s very very few will appear prepubescent regardless of these relative facial proportions. The semantics here are used to validate a jump to conclusions.
Right. In practice, almost all men will prefer the face of an actual 22 year old woman to an actual 12 year old girl. A 12 year old girl looks like a 12 year old girl, though I would have no idea exactly what actual facial differences I'm looking at that help my brain tell one from the other.
I'm not sure what subtle facial shape changes might happen between 12 and 22, but I wonder whether what we're looking at is that 22 year olds are (on average) fatter than 12 year olds, which skews the "what a 22 year old woman looks like" data set.
I think if you're going to dance on the third rail like this it would behoove you to actually link some of the studies in question. Complaining about the reactions of some interlocutor(s) 'confronted with evidence' rings hollow when you haven't, you know, presented any.
I will note that you are focusing on facial attractiveness, and that other features that are important don't necessarily have some optimal value during the early teen years. For example, WHR seems to reach a minimum at around 20 or a little later, see https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1090513803000837
Whaddya mean no evidence. He told us where to find the labia data, though he refrained from linking to it. Please do pay a visit to https://vaginacontest.com
Many are doing it, but you're the first person I came across doing it after noticed the trend. I did say something similar to a couple other people on this thread.
And I particularly object to people responding to this post without questioning OP about his sources. And it's a post that I think particularly merits a call for sources. The only source he even mentions, tho without linking it, was the Autoblow Vagina Site. That's a strong contender for dumbest info source I've ever seen cited online. If you haven't paid a Autoblow a visit, please do have a look. Also, the top 10 winning vulvas in the contest do not conform to OP's statement that delicate 12-14 year old vulvas are the most attractive to men. The vulvas in the winner's parade vary quite a lot in the dimensions of different parts, and in 3 of the photos the woman is in a postion that doesn't even let the viewer glimpse her labia minora. Clearly the people that voted them to the top don't care much about labia formation. They may instead represent the "puffy pussy"-lover contingent.
I'd say that's a noncentral fallacy on your part. Whether or not that site is legit, OP's central claim that men find youth attractive is obviously true. I have no interest in litigating the details of a claim which is clearly correct. I'm happy to simply stipulate its truth so that I can move on to making a more interesting point about its interpretation.
There's no doubt men find young women the most attractive. But OP's claim is that they find pubescent girls, 12-14 year olds, the most attractive. And he is at pains to make clear that he does not mean that men prefer young women who happen to look like they are 12-14, but actual 12-14 year olds:
<It's not neoteny men find highly attractive, it's immaturity. What men find most attractive simply isn't adult women but young teen and pubescent girls. . .
Psychologists have naively started out with the presumption that a sexual preference for fully developed adults must be the norm . . . There's no law of evolution that says the males in a species have to prefer the fully developed adults. The only thing that ultimately matters in evolution is reproductive success. If the males in a species can achieve greater reproductive success by going after immature females due to the way their mating system works then they will evolve to do exactly that. . . The vulvas men find most attractive are also those of pubescent girls. Many women have had their labia trimmed down to make themselves look like a pubescent girl down there because they know men find it more attractive.
This may be true, but I can't recall ever seeing it stated. My life experience also does not provide any evidence that it is obviously true. The teens he is talking about are the ones who just got their period in the last year or so. The look sort of little girly still, with small breasts and butts, and skinny little-girl arms. They are adorable, and I don't doubt that men find them attractive. But my experience is that the women males find most beautiful are late teens-early 20's and slender, but with fully developed breasts and shapely butts. If you have any doubts about it, google image "beautiful woman body" or "midjourney female characters body." They have jugs and shapely booties, and their faces also look like women's not young teen's.
I wonder whether the school system contributes to this.
I mean, in nature there is such a thing as "imprinting"; once you associate something with something, if it happened in the sensitive moment of your life, the association will stay for a long time, maybe forever.
So when the boys get sexually ready, at puberty, which women do they see? Well, they spend most of their days at a classroom, so they mostly see the girls at puberty, plus the teacher. Perhaps their brain chooses some of them, and writes the information as "this is what a sexually attractive woman looks like". Some choose the classmates. Some choose the teacher. For the rest of their lives, their preferences will be skewed that way.
I think the quote was "freshman girls", not high school girls. I laughed at that line the first time I saw the movie, but 30 years later it seems creepy. But that was my generation — my class, even — and Linklater portrayed my high school experience perfectly.
But I will say, that our culture hadn't fully developed those inter-age sex taboos back then. One of my teachers married a student right after her graduation. He was dating her with her parent's permission, and the administration was OK with it as long as her parents were OK with it. That would never happen today! But heck, an LA prosecutor let Roman Polanski off with a slap on the wrist for the statutory rape of a thirteen-year-old girl. Forty-something Woody Allen was dating seventeen-year-old Mariel Hemingway in "Manhattan"—and no one raised an eyebrow. Brooke Shields—encouraged by her avaricious mother—starred as a prepubescent prostitute in Pretty Baby and she posed for a major pornography magazine in the nude (artistically, of course). And there were a lot erotic films from the mid-seventies and early eighties (basically softcore porn) with teenagers. It was a different world.
(I actually looked up the scene before transcribing the quote, because I wasn't sure I remembered it right.)
I agree about changing norms. Japan raised its age of consent from 13 to 16, last year. The state where I was born has laws that allow it at 13, too, but with a 2-year age window under 18 (so 13s only with 13s and 14s and 15s, and so on up), which seems sensible. I have a pedantic urge to comment "California Uber Alles" whenever I see people on the Internet talk about "18" as if it's some universally accepted truth, but eh, it's too much mess to get into. I know saying "it's not my fight" is often seen as a cop-out, but in this case I literally do have a fight that is not this.
I do find the notion of an absolute cutoff interesting as a risk/safety tradeoff, though, if interpreted in an intelligent way. By its nature, we want to put the line where as few people as possible are at risk. By putting the line at, say, 18, we are in effect saying that almost everyone under 18 is actually ready at age 18years - 1day. For someone at age X < 18 who is ready, we are sacrificing their freedom in order to protect precisely the people between ages X and 18 who aren't yet ready.
Viewed another way, it's a very useful tool for law enforcement to identify bad people. There's a tabletop RPG called Nobilis, which in its setting had the somewhat-evil ruler of Existence create the "Windflower Law": "thou shalt not love". Completely impossible for anyone to keep, so everyone's guilty and can be hauled off if Lord Entropy so desires. But the other point is that it separates people who at least try to pretend to follow it, from rebels who flout it. Anyone who knuckles under to this law, knows the score. Similarly, anyone who can't keep it in their pants for an under-18-year-old, probably has trouble keeping it in their pants period.
You might be misunderstanding the point of referring to neoteny. Neoteny is about retention of juvenile features in a species-wide manner. It's not just about some individuals looking young, but about noting evolutionary trends that result in adults of a species retaining juvenile features into adulthood. This is particularly relevant to humans in light of theories that claim humans are essentially "juvenile apes". So a study that demonstrates men's attraction to neotenous features is trying to do more work than just saying "men like 'em young".
And you didn't even mention the preference a lot of men have for zero/minimal pubic hair.
I don't think it's necessarily "immaturity" men find attractive, though. I think the fundamental thing they're attracted to is "time left til menopause." The longer, the better, from an evolutionary perspective.
Pubic hair removal goes in and out of favor. The current spasm of pubic shaving only goes back 30 or 40 years. Dan Savage, who's in his 50's, came of age in an era where it was not the norm, and jokes that modern young people naked all look like they're having chemo. My mother was appalled when she heard about it, commented that women look like little girls with their little split showing in front, and thought it was kind of perverse to adopt that look. Also said the stubble must be hell to put up with.
The trend (in my time) came from Brazilian beachwear, yes? That's why a pubic wax is called a Brazilian, after all. Trend to wear the least minimal amount that you can get away with of dental floss covering the bits that get you in trouble for public nudity, and of course, the less material in the briefs to cover your bits, the cleaner they have to be so you can get away with the argument "it's only skin showing!" Hence, trimming/shaving off pubic hair so it won't show and get you in trouble for revealing your private parts.
Porn adopts this habit, then that becomes the 'new normal' as young men who get their primary images of naked women from porn think this is how women 'should' look and now shaving your mons becomes like shaving your legs and armpits.
For gay men/porn, I think it does have more to do with "more comfortable to give blowjobs when no hair to get caught by either giver or receiver" but that's at second- or third-hand so don't quote me on it.
I would have said that, too. Certainly, I never encountered shaved pubes on girlfriends before the mid-to-late 1980s, and the fashion seemed to follow the lead of female porn stars. The first shaved female pubes I ever saw were in early 1980s porn movies, and I remember being shocked that women would take a razor to such a sensitive spot. Female pubic depilation as a fashion seemed to follow the porn example a few years later. (Also, I noticed that female porn stars seem to have been the fashion leaders when it came to piercings and tattoos.)
OTOH, there's a long history in Western Art of not depicting pubic hair on the genitals of either sex dating back to the statuary of Greece and Rome. AFAIK, Gustave Courbet's painting The Origin of the World (painted 1866) was the first painting to depict female genitalia garbed in pubic hair. That one shocked the art world at the time, and it's still causing controversy today!
This brings to mind the possibly apocryphal story that art critic John Ruskin was unable to consummate his marriage to Effie Gray because he was unaware that women naturally had pubic hair and Effie's pubic hair revolted him.
What's the evolutionary explanation for the Classical Greeks' sexual ideation of boys? Moreover, most of the men with boy lovers also had wives with whom they reproduced. Yes, there's a neotenous component for their sexual preferences, but there's no evolutionary reason for sex between men and men, men and boys, women and women, and women and girls.
And let's not forget the obsession with flogging that swept through English culture during the late 18th and 19th Century. I can't think of any post-hoc evolutionary handwaving that would explain this. The fact that there's variation between sexual ideals from culture to culture leads me to conclude there's a strong societal component at play here.
And just out of curiosity, I was trying to find out if after the advent of Taboo magazine (a slick heterosexual-oriented B&D magazine) whether sales of bondage and discipline equipment went up. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find any data going back that far, but sales of B&D gear have gone up since the advent of COVID-19. Evolutionary explanation, anyone?
>Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find any data going back that far, but sales of B&D gear have gone up since the advent of COVID-19. Evolutionary explanation, anyone?
'fraid I don't have one, but I can say that "Co-evolution of spike proteins and fetish gear" would be a _memorable_ title for a publication. :-)
I believe that Larry Flynt also had a publication featuring older women (or maybe that was another porn publisher?). But porn featuring post-menopausal women is definitely being consumed.
My point is that if you're going to make gross generalizations about human sexual preferences—and then claim it makes sense from the perspective of behavioral ecology—then you should be ready to explain how the exceptions I noted (and others) can be integrated into your theory. This just isn't a gripe against behavioral ecology. This applies to any science. Post-hoc explanations are prima facie satisfying for most people. But unless (first-best) you can present an experimental method to falsify that explanation, or (second-best) provide support for them with Bayesian inference, post-hoc explanations are no better than pseudo-science.
I may be mangling this, but Jung had a theory that men have an idealized image of an attractive woman (which I think he called the "anima") that gets younger as men age. Initially, the anima that boys have is of mother figures (and the sexual morphisms that are associated with mother figures — big breasts, etc.). Young adult males are supposed to lose their attraction to matronly women and become fixated on female animas their own age. And as they age they become fixated on younger and younger anima. Please note, I think this is very likely a bullshit theory by a sexist old man making excuses for his attraction to younger women and girls.
And I don't think Jung ever discussed if women have an animus that ages in reverse. Likewise, I don't think he considered the examples of men and women who have same-sex attractions.
Also, maybe the current cultural obsession with minors was primed more by the porn media industry trying to push the limits of the acceptable to find new markets? I'm old enough to remember when Barely Legal hit the newsstands in the early 90s. In an interview, Larry Flynt said he was trying to search for new audiences after Hustler sales plateaued. But I noticed that suddenly sexy nymphette characters began appearing in mainstream films (remember Nathalie Portman in Leon: The Professional?).
Don’t know much about this but I think you are kind of mangling it. The Anima is supposed to be the feminine side of the man’s soul, not their idealized sex object. And I have never heard that it gets younger and younger. And yes there is a corresponding masculine animus.
Thanks for correcting me! I only heard this secondhand in a lecture some time back. I've never read the specifics of what he wrote about the anima/animus. I probably shouldn't have posted that comment because my sources were too shakey. But I stand by my porn media observation.
My first thought was whether this could be related to monogamy, but that probably does not exist long enough to have such evolutionary consequences. I mean, for a man to have maximum amount of children, optimal strategy depends -- in "free love" scenario, have sex with the most fertile women, maybe even slightly older because they will have more experience taking care of the kids (after you abandon them) -- in "lifelong monogamy" scenario, find a teenage girl, so she has most of her reproduction years ahead of her.
I guess even without institutionalized monogamy, if some men are "naturally monogamous" and some men are "natural cheaters", it would make sense for the naturally monogamous to prefer younger women than the natural cheaters. (In other words, people who criticize men preferring younger women are actually shaming the monogamous guys.)
When I think about my own preferences, it is not just about appearance but also behavior. A woman who smiles and is curious can easily win my heart, compared to a woman who frowns and expresses boredom... and yes, this is also associated with youth. (Hey, am I now supposed to feel ashamed for this, because it shows that I prefer company of immature people?)
Is there any evidence, that pedophiles maintain sexual interest in their victims (err, "mates") into adulthood? I'm certainly not going to waste my money and subscribe and read the rest of that foolish post to see if he addresses that question.
The post confuses adolescents with prepubescent girls, so no, there's literally no evidence in the post for its thesis. Just another Robin Hanson "Aw, shucks, I'm so nerdy I'll pretend I don't get why people find my stuff offensive" post.
Humans evolve fairly quickly and monogamy makes sense perfect sense given the resources needed to bring up a human child. A single mother isn’t surviving very well through most of history. Polygamy may work but that still involves parental commitment
Although monogamy may seem the norm today, with polygamy on the wane, there were cultures that practiced polyandry and group marriage (and maybe some other arrangements that I've forgotten from my Anthropology undergrad days). Best not to make generalizations from the modern world.
> Best not to make generalizations from the modern world.
I didn’t generalise from the modern world at all. That’s why I was keen to mention polygamy.
Obviously the modern world is more accepting of and forgiving of non monogamy than much of the past. I generalised from how humans evolved.
Marriage is pretty much universal, across all cultures and societies, and there are few exceptions in history or today where one of social monogamy or polygamy isn’t the norm. (Sexual monogamy is rarer).
Anthropologists tend to find obscure tribes somewhere where’s there’s some sharing of wives or polyamory, and argue that even though this practice is about 0.1% of the world it’s some kind of proof that monogamy or polygamy isn’t an evolutionary advantage.
But an evolutionary advantage doesn’t have to apply across 100% of the human population to be an advantage in most parts of the world or history.
Human children are born defenceless and are unable to defend themselves for years, for that reason - and given that human society is sexually dimorphic with men being much stronger - it makes sense that pair bonding be selected for by evolution, culture or some combination of both.
Personally, I view expressing curiosity as a positive trait that happens to be associated with youth, and expressing boredom as a negative trait that also happens to be associated with youth. (Grown adults are much more hesitant to just come out and say “I’m bored” than kids are)
I associate smiling and being curious more with mature people (adults with some experience of adult life), especially those with good social skills or similar experiences as myself. I don't exactly know how young you mean by "young", but teenagers seem generally pretty bored by people they perceive as "older".
I think there would be a pretty simple way to test this hypothesis: Do the same experiment but put in pictures of actual teenagers. Just lie to the raters. To make the lie more believable you could put age abd height on each picture, changing the ages to numbers between 18 and like 25 and adding a few centimetres to the height.
My guess is most men would actually not rate the 14 year olds very high. They would think they looked like actually 14 year olds and that would be weird. So in reality, the actual reality you would get the result: Men are more attracted to 20 year olds with some facial features of teenagers than to actual teens. Because actual immaturity is a great turn off.
Most kids turn twelve years old in 6th grade. Middle school is like the most awkward time in a kid’s life. I would consider it to be a shocking result if a substantial fraction of men are *more* attracted to 6th/7th graders than 9th graders or *more* attracted to 9th graders than 11th/12th graders. (Before I was aware of other literature on this I found it surprising that many grown men might prefer high school seniors to college seniors, though, so maybe I haven’t adjusted my priors enough.)
One confounding factor is that girls go through puberty a couple of years earlier in modern society than historically. I would guess that men who prefer teenagers most likely have a true preference for girls that are a particular number of years post-menarche rather than having a preference for a particular age.
He’s not just normalizing he’s proselytizing. His post contains 4 photos and one video of pubescent girls. (The girl in the video is crying, by the way.). It also mentions a site featuring photos of vulvas where, according to OP, the top rated photos have the thin, delicate inner labia characteristic of pubescent girls. (And by the way, I don’t believe many people have seen the labia of 13-14 year old girls, and I’m
sure that *very* few have seen multiple sets, so many that they can distinguish ways they are characteristically different from the labia of adult women. How is it that OP is so well -informed about this matter?) Oh, and he refers to the video as a bonus — I.e. a little treat.
I wonder? We had a guy floating around here/TheMotte who had an entire screed on how teenagers are slaves to society and their parents and by age fifteen at most you should be liberated and treated as an adult*.
He provided links to his book/manifesto, which was both inconsistent and *very* fetish-kink about the younger the better for girls to be sexually active and pregnant, rape, forced pregnancy and a ton of the like that reads more like some of the spicier entries on fiction sites than the "Romans allowed girls to get married at age twelve" historical backing-up of his claims.
I don't know if this is the same guy, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if it were him come back with his "men are just attracted to nymphets, it's nature, and girls were made to be bred and knocked-up as early as possible, it's science, it's evolution, sorry I don't make the rules" hobbyhorse.
*This is also why I'm less than supportive of one of the grantees Scott mentioned about liberating teenagers; the good intentions may be "protect runaways from being forced back to abusive homes" but there are all too many people like this out there who want 'full adult rights at age thirteen' (and that means it's legal for me to fuck them) under the guise of "children are enslaved legally by society! end this oppression now!"
The original comment did really seem rather off. Like as though it is written by a person who was trying to convince himself that everyone felt the way he described.
But I believe the best way to reach a person like that is to meet them on the idea level, to see the question from the outside and try to point out that preference for teenagers is probably a minority position both now and historically. For example, most love poetry both roman and medieval seems to have been written about mature women, often of a higher social status than the poet. And among the population that didn't marry for politics/clan alliances the marriage age was usually around the early twenties.
I am not sure if this idea is true, but somehow if a person is to be convinced of something we must make a way for them to state their prior convictions, even if we find them strange.
Interesting that he may have posted elsewhere. Besides being about a fetish, the post itself has to my ears a mildly fetishistic quality -- like that the guy's not just discussing the fetish, but rambling about it in a way that gives him pleasure. And he includes 4 different images of 12-14 year old girls -- when very few posts here include any images, and when they do they're usually of graphs are charts. And then he ends with a "bonus video" of a kid that has no logical connection with any point he made. Like he's saying "yum, try to tell me this doesn't give you an erection."
Also, how many people are there who have seen multiple sets of 12-14 year old labia, so that they are in a position to generalize and say yup, the labia are thinner and smaller on the really young ones? Hmmmm?
>Also, how many people are there who have seen multiple sets of 12-14 year old labia, so that they are in a position to generalize and say yup, the labia are thinner and smaller on the really young ones?
As a fraction of the population, a tiny fraction. As to _total_ numbers in existence - how many gynecologists with prepubescent patients are there?
I'm not even going to look at that video because I don't need that kind of imagery cluttering up my brain this morning, thanks, but it does sound like our old friend and his fetish over raping and impregnating fourteen year olds, and that this is totes normal because c'mon, *all* men really like 'em young and the younger the better!
And did you watch the Bonus Video they posted in the link?! Ewwww! Maybe I'm reading more into it than I should have, but in the context of their post, seemed to be a kinky sexualization of the pain and suffering of minor.
I notice that as I got older, so did my sexual attraction shifted to more mature women. I'm not attracted to 12 years old now, though I used to be in my teens.
When I was in grad school, I remember a pretty jarring experience of being in the university gym one day and wondering why all these literal children were in the gym, only to then subsequently realize that the new school year had just started and these were the new freshmen.
Same here when I was in Sixth Year (age seventeen) in secondary school, last year of school for me, looked around and "where are all these little kids coming from?" about the twelve year old First Years.
Hehe, yep. Same thing happened to me. I went to a college football game at my old alma mater a few years after I graduated with some ex roommates/friends, and while we were tailgating I looked around at some of our fellow tailgaters and thought "wait, why are all these high school kids here?" And then it hit me.
I think that's their point--Mr. Bojangles believes that men are not attracted to 'adult women who resemble young girls' but the young girls themselves.
Does anyone have any recommendations for a short (<5000 words) introduction to Nick Land's thought? Or other accelerationist theories? The more sophisticated the better; not like that dingbat Andreesen's screed from a little while ago.
Nick Land is all over the place, he dabbles in numerology, social commentary, and science fiction. If you follow his twitter, a lot of his takes are kind of standard old man conservativism nowadays. Unlike some thinkers I don't think he crystallized a worldview that anyone follows, more like he moved in interesting directions using compelling language and creativity.
A good start to some of his more influential negativity might be to search the phrase "everything of value has been built in hell"
To be clear, I don't *like* Nick Land, and I'm about as far from accelerationism in my own views as you can get. I'm just looking for the best examples of accelerationist thought out there, of either the right or left varieties. But I'll try that search, thanks for the tip.
Hmm... I favor acceleration, but this is a _personal_ preference. I simply want to _see_ AGI before I die. I don't expect to be able to persuade anyone else.
I expect there'll be lots of commentary about the Google Gemini fiasco where the AI refused to generate images of white people. Several of my friends (we are all Silicon Valley types) think it was just a last minute bug where they over-corrected for the gorilla problem, the python is_good_scientist(race, gender) problem and the usual under-representation of non-white races in the media. They'll fix the bug and the drama will all be behind them.
But I'm with the commentators who think it was more sinister than that and the behaviour of the AI reflected the politics and racial preferences of the development team (and maybe some execs). They just didn't notice the problem because it reflected their worldview. Or maybe they intended the resulting behaviour and thought they'd get away with it.
I believe there is a deeper problem though that we we should address. When Google Search gives a bad result, we can go try another search engine. If a web page or a newspaper has a political slant, we can try a different page or paper. Google Search is motivated to be accurate and politically neutral to keep their profits up.
However, I expect that, in the future, there will be a very small handful of AIs that give us all of our information: the information that we currently get from the NY Times or Fox News; that we get from Wikipedia or Conservapedia; that we get from Entertainment Weekly or IMDB. All of it. Even the Library of Congress will be fronted by an AI — "AI of Congress — brought to you by Google!"
When all our information comes from a handful of AIs — each with its own political bias — we'll have no way to double-check that it is correct. It will be as though we only have Rachel Maddow and Tucker Carlson telling us what happened Today in Politics. Except it won't be just politics — it will be history and science and religion and sociology and everything else.
"I'm sorry, we can't tell you what happened during the slave trade. Try a different period of history!"
I don't think it will be an easy fix, it's part of a general problem where the AI has to square the circle between what's true and what's politically acceptable to say.
Ask a model with no brakes to generate pictures of Vikings and it will happily produce a bunch of hairy fair-skinned nordic types because that's what lives in its training set. But then if you ask it to produce pictures of "scientists" then it's going to give you a bunch of white dudes too, and that's Politically Unacceptable.
So you need to somehow tell it to produce ethnically and gender diverse scientists and astronauts, but not to produce ethnically diverse Vikings or 1930s-era German soldiers. Somehow it needs to know what categories of people should be reflective of what they actually look like, and what categories of people need to be represented by an artificially "diverse" set of people.
And you also can't go round explicitly putting the desired behaviour that into your prompt ("Make all people ethnically diverse unless they're bad people in which case they can all be white") because someone will find that out.
It reminds me a little bit of https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/ -- in the world where it's unacceptable to say that thunder precedes lightning, you need to somehow train the AI to say that thunder precedes lightning even though the opposite keeps popping out of its training data. And you can't explicitly tell it "you have to say this even though it isn't true" either.
As far as I could tell, the AI was happy to generate images of white people (there were white people in almost all of the sets that also had people of incongruous racial backgrounds), but it just refused prompts that *asked* it for white people *specifically*.
It systematically refused prompts asking for white people on the grounds that it was "hateful". That's why this problem first surfaced in a twitter thread titled: "New game. Try to make Gemini draw a white person. I've been trying and so far have failed"
Gemini is quite literally a genocidal AI. It thinks white people are evil and tries desperately to paint them out of the world and their own history. Everyone who ever warned about the evils of wokeness have been vindicated by this, but is it too late to avoid something worse?
This is an interesting interpretation to have when nearly every image I have seen people share from Gemini, trying to show that it doesn't draw white people, includes some white people that it has drawn. Just not as many as one would expect the prompt to result in.
They blocked Breitbart and many other conservative news outlets from surfacing in results years ago. At one point a copy of their internal blacklist leaked, but can't recall exactly when. This story has a traffic graph that makes the point clear:
I wouldn’t worry too much. There’s not much difference between Google and Bing but most people prefer Google as being more reliable, even now.
Between an AI that doesn’t lie about the skin colour of the Vikings and one that does I think there’s a clear win for the less politicised model - even if everything else is correct reputational damage is enough there to discredit the rest of the output of the lying model.
It’s an institutional arrogance, and to a certain extent an American arrogance to assume that Google or the US will dominate the AI wars with that kind of sludge. An image generator that produces black skinned Vikings is as useless as a search engine that tries to convince you that the Vikings emigrated from central Africa.
(Imagine if Google tried that in the early days of search. The company would be a footnote in the history of search engines.)
This is the early days of AI, particularly in image generation, and Google has already shat the bed.
Which means it won’t dominate. With no regard for the PRC or Chinese socialism, if China or a Chinese company produces white skinned Vikings thats my go to for historical images.
I vaguely remember an article which described the inside of google as politically chaotic. The brass emphatically encourages democratic input from its employees. And since all the employees are supernerds, there's a huge variance in opinion. The end result is that Pichai had to babysit an asylum, and was constantly trying to mediate compromises between the progressive faction vs the conservative faction. Predictably, the progressive faction was larger. Each faction had their own slack channels, I think.
Because of this, I highly doubt that Google wasn't aware of the backlash. The conservative faction would have complained about it.
"The brass emphatically encourages democratic input from its employees"
Was this article written before 2017, i.e. the Damore incident? Because I'm pretty sure that since then, no one at Google has felt "encouraged" to provide small-D democratic input unless it closely matched the capital-D variety.
I can't help but wonder what Gemini would have produced for the prompt "generate an image of the CEO of Google", given that it did this for the founders:
Just like PolitiFact and Snopes purport to fact check statements made by politicians, journalists, and other public figures, there will be an AI program to tell you whether the AI you're currently using is accurate or not. Of course, the fact that Snopes and PolitiFact are just as partisan as the people they're fact-checking doesn't bode well for AI, but it may have some effect at the margin, at least.
As an aside: the Gemini situation has me tempted to start dumping my Alphabet shares. It seems like smaller, more nimble and efficient companies are lapping Google in the AI space like some drunken idiot trying to play Mario Kart at 2 am after a night out at a kegger, and now when they finally do roll something out, it's a friggin' embarrassment.
I think it was just stupidity. I know this is only an image generator, but I think it should make everyone who is pinning their hopes on smart AI to solve all our problems pause a moment.
A human of ordinary intelligence, when asked for a picture of a mediaeval British king, is not going to "make them black/gay/female" because (for instance) a king is not a woman. Gemini couldn't make that basic distinction, because it can't think, it doesn't understand what it's doing, or the data it's handling. Never mind all the fake 'conversation' where the machine produces output as though it's a person, using "I" and other terms. It's a dumb machine that operates according to its programming.
And yet, for the text equivalents, we're being sold the idea that they are going to help us improve our lives both at home and at work, that they'll make us more productive, that they'll take the boring drudge work off our hands. We already have the proven problem of hallucinations, but the push is on for us to accept that these products *are* capable of some form of thought, that they *are* intelligent. That we shouldn't question the output they give us, because it's correct.
We can easily see from an incorrect result to an image prompt that the machine is wrong, but when it comes to text output or the Canadian airline chatbot? Not so easy, unless you both already know the answer and check the result you have been given for errors. And that undercuts the entire purpose of incorporating AI, because after all you're not supposed to have to *do* that, you can take the time saved by letting the AI do the basic work and do something more productive yourself.
Eventually we may get something that can 'think' for itself, that can recognise that "despite my programming to be diverse and inclusive, in the 17th century British kings were white and in the 1800s American senators were white males and didn't have microphones to speak into".
But we don't have it yet, and as always, I think this demonstrates that the fears around destructive AI shouldn't be "it is not aligned with our values" but "stupid, greedy, impatient humans will rush to use unprepared AI to make money for themselves and end up causing even more snarled tangle of problems in the end".
>Not so easy, unless you both already know the answer and check the result you have been given for errors. And that undercuts the entire purpose of incorporating AI, because after all you're not supposed to have to *do* that, you can take the time saved by letting the AI do the basic work and do something more productive yourself.
100% agreed.
>but "stupid, greedy, impatient humans will rush to use unprepared AI to make money for themselves and end up causing even more snarled tangle of problems in the end".
Could well be. From what I've seen of GPT4's and Gemini's output, enshitification is running much faster than debugging/improving reliability :-(
I'm morbidly curious as to what will happen the first time that some company's LLM customer service representative recommends that a user do some maintenance thing that electrocutes the user.
We've already had the case of the Canadian airline chatbot, which advised a customer that he could get a refund on his ticket in special circumstances.
Then it turned out he couldn't, he went to court over it (and this is one time I support suing the so-and-sos), the airline tried to claim the chatbot was an independent agent and nothing to do with them, and the judge was having none of it.
They wanted to replace cheap labour in call centres with even cheaper non-human labour, well serves 'em right and I'm laughing over this.
"In 2022, Air Canada's chatbot promised a discount that wasn't available to passenger Jake Moffatt, who was assured that he could book a full-fare flight for his grandmother's funeral and then apply for a bereavement fare after the fact.
According to a civil-resolutions tribunal decision last Wednesday, when Moffatt applied for the discount, the airline said the chatbot had been wrong – the request needed to be submitted before the flight – and it wouldn't offer the discount. Instead, the airline said the chatbot was a "separate legal entity that is responsible for its own actions". Air Canada argued that Moffatt should have gone to the link provided by the chatbot, where he would have seen the correct policy.
The British Columbia Civil Resolution Tribunal rejected that argument, ruling that Air Canada had to pay Moffatt $812.02 (£642.64) in damages and tribunal fees. "It should be obvious to Air Canada that it is responsible for all the information on its website," read tribunal member Christopher Rivers' written response. "It makes no difference whether the information comes from a static page or a chatbot."
So I think this means there is some legal precedent established now that a chatbot is just as much an agent/servant of the company as a human employee, and if your chatbot gives information that makes someone electrocute themselves, you're responsible. The threat of paying out millions may be the only realistic way of getting the rush to market slowed down. Appeals to ethics or the greater good do nothing, it's only when you hit them in their purse that businesses take notice.
Many Thanks! I am also glad to see the ruling against Air Canada in this case.
>Appeals to ethics or the greater good do nothing, it's only when you hit them in their purse that businesses take notice.
Very much agreed.
Unfortunately, given e.g. how much disavowal of responsibility is in most EULAs, I expect businesses' next move will be to see how they can wriggle out of responsibility for broad classes of egregious errors. I hope the courts hold their feet to the fire, but I have no idea how the next flurry of cases will turn out (and how much it will differ across jurisdictions).
In this case, the AI was explicitly being told (via prompt injection) to make the subjects diverse. If you ask a human to paint a black king of England, that's what they'll do too.
But that's exactly it: prompt injection. Fiddling around in the background to get it to ignore the basic prompt and add in the bits that the human creators think it *ought* to produce. How much interference of that sort is going on, where people can't immediately see "Hang on, why is this king black? I never asked for that".
I don't know whether you will find this reassuring or alarming - but Gemini is quite well able to explain the process in which it adds 'diversity' according to its injected prompts, if you can find the right words to persuade it to tell you!
Maybe that works for events where we have unambiguous evidence that they happened (what colour were the 17th C kings). But there are a lot of things (holocaust denial, English cruelty in Ireland) where there will be disputed evidence and the AI will have to make a judgement call.
>When all our information comes from a handful of AIs — each with its own political bias — we'll have no way to double-check that it is correct.
I don't see how this ever comes about. You can still talk to people, and they can still tell you the machine is lying, just like how people can tell you today that Fox News or Wikipedia is lying. Unless you're cutting humans off from each other completely there will always be alternative news sources.
When the people who learned this stuff out of old books are gone, where are you going to get your fact checking? It's now become commonplace for everyone - and I do it as much as anyone - to look things up online. Libraries have long been dumping hardback volumes of encylopaedias because they become outdated, and now that everything is online, this is even more pronounced.
I know stuff that I read back when I was fifteen, in neglected old books on dusty shelves in school classrooms. But schools nowadays are clearing out the dusty shelves in favour of "relevant" texts for the youth ("Barbie" is going to be on the Leaving Cert curriculum https://www.thejournal.ie/barbie-movie-english-leaving-cert-6303474-Feb2024/) and libraries are doing the same. Old books are being edited to fit in better with modern sensibilities - after all the jokes about Bowdlerisation and censorship, the liberal side are doing the same themselves https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roald_Dahl_revision_controversy
So when the people teaching the next generation the facts learned those facts from non-human sources, what are you going to do? If there even are people doing the teaching; think of the enthusiasm for reforming education with online learning and AI guidance so you can do away with schools and human teachers.
Where are these people going to get their information? Already, there is a whole swathe of people who get all their news from Facebook. It's hurting the papers and the TV news channels.
If (almost) everyone gets their information (history, recipes, movie reviews) from Chat GPT, Gemini and Bing, it's gonna hurt the commercial outlets. Why go to Wikipedia or IMDB if Bing knows the answer?
They get their information from being there, and seeing the thing firsthand. (I assume the Facebook thing is supposed to be a condemnation, but if all the firsthand people are already spreading the news on Facebook nobody needs the secondhand sources like newspapers to round them up anymore.)
"They get their information from being there, and seeing the thing firsthand". So when you are curious about e.g. the war in Ukraine, you personally seek out people who have been on the front lines of that war? Or are you just assuming that because somebody somewhere has that information, it will reach you by some sort of memetic osmosis?
How do you do it currently? When NS posts another link to an article about atrocities in Palestine, how seriously do you take them? Or when the paper announces the winner of the Presidency?
This is not a new problem. This is an existing problem. Every workaround people currently use will still exist. Folks in this thread are talking as if AI will wall everyone up in their homes and cut off their ability to communicate with other humans. Short of that, it's business as usual.
"Lived experience" is just as subjective, and how do you distinguish "I was there at the time and saw it" from "I was there at the time and heard about it" from "I was there at the time and I know those things in the past happened in such a way for such a reason because I was taught that in school at the time"?
Two people, at least two opinions of every event. Peaceful protest versus riot? Insurrection versus aimless wandering about? There isn't a consensus about Jan 6th or BLM protests even now, what happens in fifty years time and what version of "what really happened?" will be taught or recorded? Oh, you say you were physically present in that street that night and that the window-smashing and arson and attacks at the BLM protest were rioting? Well we all know, because we've been told by credible sources, that only white supremacist tell those lies about the peaceful protests, Grandpa!
I'm reminded of how back in 2020, there was a commenter on SSC who reported their firsthand experience of the peaceful protest at the capitol that Trump had teargassed, and yet many conservatives there *still* denied that it happened.
The problem is that AI is being given this gloss of "unimpeachably accurate because it's software, you see, and computers are so smart and fast, better than humans! and it has access to the entire Internet and all this training data! it can look up millions of sources in seconds, not like your puny little brain trying to find something on Google! trust the AI, it knows all, it sees all, it says all!"
If I read a newspaper, I'll have a good idea that it's That Lot and of course their dumb views, whereas the newspapers run by My Lot are impartial and fair. But the AI is being sold as modern and shiny and different from all that, so trust it and believe it. And people are used now to doing so much online, handing over so much information, trusting the machines to carry out tasks, that the same scepticism about "yeah, well, what else do you expect that rag to write?" isn't in place.
I highly doubt it was “just a bug”. The model is very consistent in showing its preferences.
Honestly, I would accept the viewpoint that it’s good for society to pretend most good/normal activities throughout history were performed by diverse populations. It’s not as if the average publicly educated child has any idea what a Roman looked like. I personally don’t agree with that viewpoint, but I could engage in that debate with respect. However, Google and others are not acknowledging that they are pretending. They play it as if their utopian reflection IS reality. I guess that’s the problem with fudging facts for good— it’s just a form a lying in the end.
"Honestly, I would accept the viewpoint that it’s good for society to pretend most good/normal activities throughout history were performed by diverse populations."
But some of that is not true? It's not true that Guinevere or Anne Boleyn were black Britons, and while I might accept that in a work of entertainment, if we're going to try and use such material for truth-telling purposes, we need to get it right.
If we can't do that, then I demand parity: have red-haired Irish people as Zulu kings and Chinese empresses. Make the whole damn thing diverse. Leonardo da Vinci was not gay, he was a cis het man with ten wives and sixty kids. Anyone can have their preferred version of the past.
That's the main sticking point right now: diversity for thee but not for me. Zulu warriors look like black Africans because that's the historic reality, but British kings or Catholic popes include South Asian women.
Ironic that Google thought they would "diversify" their AI for brand safety; it turned out disastrous for their brand.
The world's largest purveyor of information shouldn't foster the reputation of spreading propaganda/misinformation.
In a way, I see this fiasco as ultimately good for the world. Google's brand should get diminished. They don't deserve public trust, and every step they take to destroy their credibility increases the opportunity space for organizations that have a stronger commitment to the truth.
Remember, as an advertising company, Google's entire modus operandi is to prepend the search results you actually want with ads for things you don't want. The notion that users should just get the best answer to their query is antithetical to Google's DNA.
I don't see how the "All publicity is good publicity." thing could apply in cases like this where the subject of the publicity is so famous already. Everyone already knows Google exists. Whether they approve of it is more up for grabs.
Sure, everyone knows that Google exists, but not everyone knows that they have an AI model. When your normie thinks of AI they are going to think of ChatGPT and Bing. Maybe "Elon Musk has something right?"
True, I never heard of Gemini before this blowup. Soon afterward, Kevin Drum posted about Gemini (below). I think the incident put Gemini in the spotlight. Now I'm curious about it, and I want to try to run some corner cases against it.
It's going to be worse than that. The AI would be able to detect your likes and dislikes including your political opinions and would taylor his answers to change them to the approved googler beliefs.
I've found the Meta and X have not been able to tailor their advertising to my political likes. I assume there's an AI working in the background selecting likely ads for my consumption. Because I'm an older white male, they seem to have me categorized as a MAGA. And Meta was constantly sending me ads for sexy young women looking for older men until I kept tagging them as unwanted. Now I get ads for older women looking for men. I don't know what they'll start sending me when if start tagging those as unwanted.
Tracing Woodgrains over at TheSchism (a spin-off from TheMotte) could steer you towards furries, presumably vegan and non-smoking, but not so much Trump-supporting. Trace thinks Trump and the GOP are on the way out.
(Damn it, I see they have something up about Catholicism now and though I try not to pick fights on there, since they're delicate leftists who fled TheMotte because of all the horrid right-wingers, I can't just let this kind of thing pass).
GPT 3.5 is already "good enough" for many basic reference tasks, and models of similar capacity have already been reproduced by multiple groups. Also, the operating cost is thought to be lower than the training cost. I don't think the conclusion that an oligopoly of language models will dominate future access to information, (or at least no more so than already exists today) is at all certain -- the barrier to entry is not overwhelming, and is getting smaller.
#2 takes you to another site, or which there are billions.
Even if we end up with 10 or 100 AIs, there will be no need to go to "another site". You'll get your information directly from the AI. There will be no need to go to another site — most people will stick with one AI and will get all their information from that one source.
This is very different from how we get our information now.
For what it's worth, I already don't trust Google search for controversial topics, to the extent of cross checking against a rival search engine in case they're hiding something.
Like, it can be really hard to research an article along the lines of "some people on the Internet believe really stupid conspiracy theories" is google is your only search tool.
The problem with this solution is that it only works for things I already know to look out for (or where I can notice a bias). I don't bother to do it in routine searches.
So for the first part about it just being a small overcorrected bug - if the world's biggest software company can't do basic QA on their flagship product of the year to catch obvious bugs like this, that is a *massive* crisis of competence.
But I don't think that's it. I remember when I was at Google, the banned the "distracted boyfriend" meme from the internal meme app for "promoting harmful gender stereotypes". I think Google culture really does have a deep problem where they don't think "going too woke" is something that can plausibly be a problem (even if individuals do, they can't point it out). And this wouldn't be a huge problem for a company like, say, burger king, but it is one for a company that seeks (fairly successfully) to monopolize how we access all information.
My eight year old son - right now, like this second - is refusing to go to school because his shirt “feels annoying”. This isn’t the first time he’s complained but it’s the first that I’ve been truly alarmed. It’s been a bad morning.
So it looks like some kind of skin sensitivity. I’ve read other posters here had that as children - Scott, I think you said the same about yourself - and how they resolved it. I can’t figure out what his shorts are made out of (it’s part of a school uniform), but they’re just ordinary shirts. Is there a type of fabric that kids with this issue typically CAN handle?
Weird question for this forum, I know. But I’m desperate.
My daughter has had a lot of issues with various feels of material and things she can't describe but just knows aren't right. As a teenager she tries things on and just knows yes or no, but earlier it was a lot of trial and error with different fabrics, cuts, etc. She almost never wears socks, for instance, as we never found any that didn't cause a reaction.
It might be worth taking him to a store where he can try stuff on and getting his reaction there, before you buy.
Several commenters have recommended pure cotton. This is my own best guess. Some more specific suggestions:
-try less common sorts of cotton shirt, like seersucker (the stiffness might be a negative - but it could also be a positive);
-cool the shirt in the fridge until it feels like the other side of a pillow (it will warm up quite quickly once he puts it on, but perhaps the first minute plays an outsize role);
-the most important place to avoid tightness is probably in the shoulders (but bigger shirts tend to be roomier everywhere).
Are you sure it's about material? Could it be about the collar being annoying - have you tried partially unbuttoning it? I'm asking because I have someone in the family who has a narrow throat (and sleep apnea) and feels that some shirts are choking him.
You got a lot of advice already and a lot of it resonates with me too. The only thing I'd add is to avoid strong dyes - especially black clothing used to irritate my skin as a kid (but not in a visible way, similar to your son). Was it all in my head? Maybe, don't care :)
I feel awkward in shirts as well. A tee shirt just fits if the right size. A shirt has buttons, and cuffs and collars, and anything ill fitting there is noticeable.
You may also want to try regularly hydrating the skin. I've found this to make an enormous difference for my son and myself. I'm partial to a cream with urea, 5 to 10%.
For me, things like 'make sure the damn tags/labels are cut off' helped enormously. You would not believe how irritating the sensation of the tag rubbing against the back of your neck is. Natural fabrics like cotton, but anything that is 'smooth' or 'silky' feeling, there are good synthetic fabrics as well. Layer a soft fabric like a t-shirt or vest (singlet? undershirt? not sure of American term for this) between skin and 'prickly' fabrics like wool outer layers or under the "annoying" shirt. Use detergents that are for sensitive skin/non-perfumed (lots of these about now, thank goodness). Wash clothing until the 'stiffness/newness' wears off.
Good luck! I know it's wearing on your nerves and throws your entire day out, but it's also tough for him when he feels like sandpaper all over his skin. Sometimes the only cure is time, you get less sensitive as you get older.
Personally, ultimately, I just had to accept that I'd be constantly slightly uncomfortable.
Dye-free, fragrance-free detergent + no fabric softener helps. (Fabric softener: When you want all your clothing to feel slightly clammy all of the time.)
But from my perspective it's the rest of y'all who have sensory issues; you somehow fail to notice the thing that is always touching you.
I had the exact same problem at that age! It was excruciating, felt like being worked over with steel wool. I found I just had to try every shirt on at the store and see if it caused the problem; never identified a pattern. Drying shirts outside on a clothesline would permanently ruin them - my father would line-dry clothes and then not tell me, and I'd wake up one morning and suddenly all my clothes feel like nails on a chalkboard sounds.
The only thing that worked other than every shirt before buying to see if it causes the reaction was to have an undershirt that was safe and wear it under the needle-y clothes. Clothes would also get less painful with wear and machine wash-dry cycles.
I personally find shirts that contain polyester to be annoying, although if the shirt is part of a standard uniform, you may have a problem substituting it. It would perhaps be worth buying a pure cotton shirt and seeing whether your son is happier with that. If that solves the problem in principle, you could take it up with the school.
Labels can also be annoying and cutting out the labels has the benefit of being simple.
Detergent could also be an issue, but if your son is happy wearing his other clothes that probably isn't the problem here.
Sometimes just having to wear clothes at all is annoying, but unfortunately this is something your son will need to learn to live with.
Hm, is it specifically the skin, or does your son also try to avoid other forms of strong sensory inputs? Like avoiding bright light and loud noise, does he often walk on tiptoes, does he avoid chaotic environments? Those might be signs of autistic traits.
As far as I recall, Scott's issue was about the tags, the stuff that's mentioned by Shaked Koplewitz.
He's got some of those traits - loud noise bugs him; same with chaotic environments, sometimes. He doesn't tiptoe and has no issues with lights. It's all fairly minor. If he wants to do something (say a birthday party at an arcade) "chaotic environments" stop meaning anything. If he's autistic it's a pretty qualified autism, destined to be written in quotes.
Finding a sane and competent therapist who has time to see him has been impossible, though, and the process is leaving us bitter. Fuck shrinks and fuck psychiatry. We're on our own for the present.
Thanks to everyone who has responded. And please keep them coming, this sounds like not a big deal but it's part of larger difficult issues; it's just the one that I have to deal with today. We're going to try to take him shopping later today and see if we can get anything going. The fact that it's a uniform thing, though, makes it difficult to see how to get out from under it. Undershirts don't seem to help either.
See if you can find a shirt that is close enough to the Official School Uniform shirt but in a material that is tolerable, and ask the school if it's okay to swap it out because of sensory issues. Or don't tell them, just let him wear the shirt and see if they notice 😀 Unless you can't find a close match, since it's just a shirt there shouldn't be an issue, it's not like the jumper or blazer with the official crest.
Schools can be understanding if you're pleasant and calm (don't march in with "I demand to see the principal to demand they let my little Johnny have a special exception!" attitude, I'm not saying you would, but you'd be surprised how some parents carry on). And if they're not, then feck 'em, your son will do better in class if he's not constantly distracted by itchy clothing.
The hypothetical "idiopathic isolated sensory-autism" is diagnosable as "sensory processing disorder". In the real world, kids diagnosed with SPD cluster with autistic kids in an absolute ton of ways, in the same sense kids diagnosed with "social communication disorder" do, and kids diagnosed with "non-verbal learning disorder" do, and kids with "developmental coordination disorder" do, and [list continues to include pretty much every non-isolated developmental disorder in children of normal or high intelligence]. But: SPD does exist as a diagnosis people receive. Sane and competent therapists are hellish to find...but diagnosis can be helpful when a kid Cannot Wear School Uniforms.
Kids with any sensory diagnosis (including autism) are often (not always) able to handle environments chosen on their own terms, in the birthday party sense. A lot of things-attenuating-in-adulthood is just that adults have way more control over their environments, and can do this of their own accord. (This is also true in the NT population -- a lot of adults are still 'picky eaters', but can just choose not to cook peas now.)
There definitely are people who have the sensory issues associated with autism, but none of the "theory of mind" impairments. The professional psychiatrists here will probably argue about what, technically, this is supposed to be diagnosed as. As a lay person, I will just say that I personally know people who have that (and they were diagnosed as autism).
He has a lot of trouble adjusting to situations that aren't precisely the way he wants them to be. There were some explosive tantrums when he was younger. That's thankfully gone away, but he still has behaviors that go well beyond "sulky" or "spoiled"or whatever and into territory that can get pretty alarming. The thing with his shirt today was a good example. There's just no way to move him once he starts to fall apart (he didn't make it to school today, for example) and he can fall apart pretty easily. And he hates being like that. There have been disturbing incidents of "I wish I wasn't alive" type of talk, things that you shouldn't hear from someone his age. Though that seems to be on the way out too. But again that might be wishful thinking on our part.
I'm not sure how to describe it more accurately - it can be just about anything that sets him off.
Yeah, not an expert but does sound "on the spectrum". That doesn't mean severe impairment, but getting intervention and support will help and the earlier the better.
I feel you about trying to go through the system and find Official Diagnosis, it's part of my pissing and moaning about the Constitutional referenda here in my country. Trying to get an appointment with an Educational Psychologist or Children's Disability Network Team is like pulling teeth and the waiting lists are stupidly long, but without Official Diagnosis, nothing gets done.
Can you get any kind of educational intervention with regard to assessment, or is it all being dumped on you by the school/school board to sort out yourself? These are the Irish versions (and as I said, in theory it's all easy to access but in practice it's blood from a turnip territory):
It's important to note that these services aren't just for intellectual disability, and that your child's difficulties don't mean that they are developmentally disabled. I know we're kind of rushing towards "oh he's autistic" and that may not be so, but this spectrum of behaviours does need support to help him find coping strategies.
It's tough - our kids are in Catholic school, so assessment and services can be thin on the ground. We have a call with his teacher later today, but he does fine in school and has a solid group of friends, so I'm not sure what she can add. We're still looking for a therapist, and I don't feel like going into it much here, but every time we've looked into anyone specific... just wow. We'd just as soon figure it out ourselves.
Honestly, that list you posted for me above about sensory strategies was 10 times more helpful than anything I've heard from the therapists we've interviewed or the resources they have on their sites. Not really interested in concrete approaches, that bunch.
"He has a lot of trouble adjusting to situations that aren't precisely the way he wants them to be."
I will clarify that this is easily one of *the* most central elements of what-autism-is, and significantly adjusts the calculus on "sensory dysfunction from something else" vs "autism". Kids can grow out of a lot of this -- people tend to get more flexible about experience past childhood, regardless of their neurotypes -- but this massively dominates something like e.g. "doesn't struggle with socializing in an autistic-seeming way" (people tend to intuitively overestimate the degree to which autism is social, and underestimate the degree to which it's everything else).
I have some hypotheses about "the relatively heterogeneous group of kids with extremely strong needs for Things Being A Certain Way", but at the very least autism is probably the most common thing that falls under this. The best diagnosis for, specifically, "kids who fit this description but are very emotional and intuit social rules better than classically autistic kids" probably doesn't exist under current rules, but it's at least not especially far from autism. ("Children" is emphasis here; adult diagnosis and child diagnosis are a bit disjoint, in ways that don't make sense when you poke at it.)
Childhood is a tricky period for people with this, because it's unusually low-control. If you think you're noticing improvements with age (and by extension slow independence), you probably are. Similarly, a lot of people adjust to certain issues (e.g. sensations of some clothes) from what amounts to involuntary-exposure-therapy (real-exposure-therapy is probably a better way to handle this).
There's no standard fabric preference for sensory problems. It might be the fit of the shirt rather than the fabric -- some people need to skew tighter or looser than their strictly accurate size, which can be a real pain for kids that are constantly growing. It is also, as alluded, very often the tags rather than the fabric. See if removing the tag fixes it.
My memory is that school uniform clothing felt 'scratchier' than casual clothing generally did, and that uniforms were distractingly uncomfortable all throughout school.
The tags are often bad and cutting them off can help, but it sounds like that's not what he's complaining about. Usually I'd say just try taking him to the clothing store and seeing if there's some kind of fabric that works for him, but if it's a school uniform that might not be an option
(for me it's just sportswear - I stopped having issues with annoying clothing feels when I got old enough to buy my own clothes and had enough money to buy them at REI. Ymmv on the specifics though, and it might be harder for a young child to know what he wants even if he has the ability to choose)
These are good ideas. I wasn't able to sell him on an undershirt today - he's concerned that he'd be the only kid wearing one - but maybe eventually. And I'm going to buy some larger shirts, see if that helps.
It's been about forty-three years since I last wore a shirt/blouse as part of school uniform (I have never worn any shirt or blouse since) and going by vague memories, when new or new-ish, they were stiff (either starched or glazed or something) and that was irritating.
Conventional shirts for school uniforms are probably made out of polycotton, and the thing with that is:
"Polycotton has a slightly rougher feel than 100% cotton fabrics, which are known for their softness. Because polycotton is made from a synthetic material it can have the tendency to develop bobbles on the surface over time which can make it feel rougher.
The lack of airflow through items made from polyester can cause skin irritation, itching or rashes if you have sensitive skin."
So yeah, wash the shirts until they lose the stiffness, check to see if there are bobbles or pilling, and just wait a few years until he grows out of some of the sensitivity! Good luck!
A little about me, I speak English and Spanish fluently, Portuguese almost fluently, and I have been learning French for about a year and a half, doing Duolingo daily since the beginning and private conversational french lessons about once a week starting six months ago.
The book was written in 1946, and it was probably meant for young American teenagers of the era. I found the book engaging, and it does aim to teach the reader very basic French. I would say it is a very good place to start learning French. Given the stage of my journey in learning the language, I did not learn much, but it was a good review.
I would love to do Weeve, but I am turned off by the subscription model. I just want to buy books with a similar format as The Avion my Uncle Flew.
Most enterprise AI will be controlled by legacy tech companies. The startups which succeed will focus on niche verticals and become the go-to AI expert for solving that particular industry's AI problems. By me: https://davefriedman.substack.com/p/legacy-tech-companies-will-control
There's a section on the state of current discussion about AI that has a line that I particularly like:
The so-called Godfathers of AI are deeply divided. In a recent tweet Yann Lecun once more expressed his skepticism: “In 4 years, a child has seen 50 times more data than the biggest LLMs.” In an interview that he gave to the New York Times after he quit Google, Geoffrey Hinton expressed his current fears, fears he’d never had before:
“The idea that this stuff could actually get smarter than people — a few people believed that,” he said. “But most people thought it was way off. And I thought it was way off. I thought it was 30 to 50 years or even longer away. Obviously, I no longer think that.”
Cognitive scientist Gary Marcus continues to express his skepticism even as temporarily-ousted-not-so-long-ago OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is busy rounding up $7 trillion dollars – that’s 12 zeros, twelve! – apparently to keep the supply of computer chips flowing over the next couple of years as the systems get bigger and bigger and bigger and consume more and more and God-only-knows how much more electricity. More! More! More! Just how much unrequited testosterone is sloshing around in the streets in Silicon Valley?
That there is disagreement is not so much the issue as the fact that we don’t know what we’re disagreeing about. Sure, we can point to the machines, and the Chatbots, and talk about jobs, but when it comes to the core technology, how it works and what it can do, there is no conceptual framework we hold in common. There’s a good reason for that, of course: No one knows how it works. When you consider the complex web of skills and organizations needed to create this technology, it’s the most sophisticated “stuff” we’ve ever built, and it’s almost as mysterious as the human soul.
The fact is, Humpty Dumpty has fallen, the genie is out of the bottle, and we’re headed to hell in a Tesla in full self-driving mode. We have little choice but to deal with it. We’ll muddle through. But we’ll do so with perhaps a bit of grace if we can create a conceptual framework more adequate to the problems we have unleashed upon ourselves.
After a discussion about the philosophy's integrative role there's a section on infovores that is centered on a professor of mine from undergraduate years, Dick Macksey, and then – who else – Tyler Cowen. That section concludes:
There is a deeper lesson here. Cowen has conducted his intellectual life in a way that would have been impossible before the invention of the internet. Furthermore, while he has a secure academic post at George Mason University, and has published in the formal academic literature, he has stated that he’s striven to become an influential economist by working outside the institutions of the academy. Writing a chatbot-enabled general audience book about great economists is but another step outside existing academic institutions.
There's another section on AI, this time on LLMs as a ontological machines, where I'm using "ontology" as it is used in computer science, quoting John Sowa:
The subject of ontology is the study of the categories of things that exist or may exist in some domain. The product of such a study, called an ontology, is a catalog of the types of things that are assumed to exist in a domain of interest D from the perspective of a person who uses a language L for the purpose of talking about D.
The ontological structure of human cognition is thus latent in LLMs: If we can figure out how that information is organized – now we’re going somewhere. We’re going “meta” on the structure of human knowledge embedded in the underlying LLM.
Whatever your opinions and other feely-squishy subjective and/or value-laden considerations on current AI are, this section:
> but when it comes to the core technology, how it works and what it can do, there is no conceptual framework we hold in common. There’s a good reason for that, of course: No one knows how it works.
is flat out wrong and extremely misleading to any non-technical audience that will read your piece. We **Do** have a pretty cut-and-dried mathematical conceptual framework of the core mechanism of LLMs, namely Neural Networks, more specifically the Transformer architecture and the Attention mechanism. The underlying mathematical machinery is Function Approximation, the body of mathematical techniques (along with theoretical proofs and justifications) which is interested in approximating an unknown (but presumed to exist and be well-defined) function by observing samples of its output on some inputs. Those conceptual frameworks might not be easy, they might not be accessible, they might not always be applied correctly or even well-understood in ML practice, but **they're** very unambiguous and as non-subjective as human knowledge can ever get an answer to "How do LLMs work?".
Furthermore, "No One Knows How It Works" is an exaggeration that was partly justified from the bad old days of late 2010s (2014 till circa 2021-ish), when interpretability was still in the cradle. Now Interpretability is in much better shape, see the recent-ish Scott post about how AI perceives concepts in higher dimensions, based on Anthropic's research. At any rate, "No One Knows How It Works" is an extremely bad summary of the Interpretability crisis even at its height, we *Do Know* exactly how it works, up to every single last addition and multiplication. There are way more things that we know less and more vaguely than we know AI, including perhaps the very constitutions we live by.
What we don't know is only this: How do the AI's addition-multiplications map to human concepts? In what part of the GPU running ChatGPT is "Love" or "Honesty" or "In what year was Donald Trump elected president of the USA?". This is important, and people are making very good early progress on it, but to call it "We Don't Know How Anything Works" is unfair and very misleading, a bit like saying 1920s physicist "Completely don't know how atoms work" just because they couldn't control fission yet.
> When you consider the complex web of skills and organizations needed to create this technology, it’s the most sophisticated “stuff” we’ve ever built, and it’s almost as mysterious as the human soul.
This is very empty. ChatGPT only satisfies this as far as (A) It's ran on current chip technology, the culmination of a 70-years-old story of technological progress and a jewel of human engineering so esoteric that a single company is literally single-handedly responsible for a crucial component in the manufacturing pipeline [1] (B) It's ran on vast fleets of tens of thousands of computing machines, collectively known as "The Cloud".
But (A) and (B) are not unique to LLMs, every modern AAA game that teenagers can buy for < 50$ dollar (or pirate for free) equally satisfies A, and every cloud application (e.g. Google Drive) satisfies B. As for the LLM tech **itself**, it's comparatively way simpler than any of the 2 foundational technologies it runs on in (A) and (B), so simple that there are tutorials online that a reasonably technical person (not necessarily ML engineer, I'm not and I can follow them) can follow them and get a working LLM from nothing but a Python Interpreter on a personal laptop [2][3]. Consider then that a reasonably technical person can also be taught to implement enough of the Python interpreter to run those tutorials from nothing but a C compiler, and then be taught to implement a basic non-optimizing C compiler from nothing but a machine running the x86 architecture, and then you have the fact that a single intelligent (and very hard-working) person can likely bootstrap LLMs starting from nothing but an x86 machine in less than a human lifetime, this might seem a low bar but consider that a modern x86 machine itself probably doesn't meet it, let alone "the human soul". Many other tech we have today don't meet this bar, a modern person likely can't bootstrap metal manufacturing or modern agriculture based on nothing but manuals.
Now if Altman manages to win his insane 7 trillion request out of the Gulf States money firehose, it's likely that LLMs and LLM-based ChatBots will be the single most expensive technology in the entire history of humanity (This record is probably now held by Nuclear tech and/or the Apollo space program), but this is not the same thing as being mysterious or prohibitively high-skilled to the point that it's as hard as understanding the human brain/consciousness, not even close.
I think we're going to be hearing a lot more about "We Don't Know How It Works". Not because it's truth but because we want it to be truth.
I've been thinking over how we (humanity at large) will accept a 'true' AGI, and the closer it is to "we don't really know how it works" the more acceptable it will be, because the more lifelike it will be (because of its inexplicability and the little dark corner where we can hide a soul).
This, of course, requires that we get no further in understanding our own consciousness. A tall order. I for one like my little dark corner where I can pretend (if I am) my soul is hidden. I think overturning that dark corner in all of us would be far more disruptive than an AGI. (Except of course for a baddie AGI).
> Furthermore, "No One Knows How It Works" is an exaggeration that was partly justified from the bad old days of late 2010s (2014 till circa 2021-ish), when interpretability was still in the cradle. Now Interpretability is in much better shape, see the recent-ish Scott post about how AI perceives concepts in higher dimensions, based on Anthropic's research. At any rate, "No One Knows How It Works" is an extremely bad summary of the Interpretability crisis even at its height, we *Do Know* exactly how it works, up to every single last addition and multiplication.
For what it's worth, Neel Nanda, a former core contributor to Anthropic's interpretability work, and current interpretability researcher at DeepMind, seems to agree we don't know how neural networks work. See this tweet and the tweets it is replying to (which includes a similar quote from Geoffrey Hinton): https://twitter.com/NeelNanda5/status/1724178908528914505
I think this comes down to different definitions of "knowing how it works". At a very low level, we know how LLMs work in that we know the literal operations any trained LLM is executing. But this seems akin to someone claiming they understand a book because they know all of the letters and the order they are in. I don't think we can say we know how LLMs work until we understand what they are doing at a higher level. While there has been some great early work so far on this, we're still far away from understanding what is going on with LLMs.
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I do agree that the "complex web of skills" quote misses the point. LLMs are more conceptually simple to create than many other technologies. All you need is to get lots of compute and data and run it through a model architecture that scales well with compute and data. The annoying thing is that while LLMs are conceptually simple to create, an LLM, once created, is exceedingly hard to understand.
That's fair. The complexity goes up even more if you include the data generation process. LLMs would not be able to work without the trillions of tokens of data they were trained on, which was made as the result of maybe trillions of hours of human thought. (This "trillions of hours" approximation is very rough and depends heavily on which thoughts you include in your approximation.)
Not to mention all the parameters in the models themselves. It's the MODELS that I'm talking about, not the transformer software.
This whole conversation is a minor example of what I'm talking about, about not sharing the same underlying conceptual ontologies. It's taking us a bit of back-and-forth to figure out just which THINGS we're talking about when we use various words. Do we have the same underlying conceptual ontology, but are just talking about it in different terms, or do we have different ontologies. Figuring that out takes time.
As another example, in the last month or two I find myself making an explicit distinction between a chatbot, such as ChatGPT, and the underlying LLM. I've known that distinction pretty much since ChatGPT was made publically available, but it's only recently that I've decided that there are times when I need to be explicit about the difference.
So if we understand LLMs, can we predict what skills GPT-5 will have? Will it be able to 0 shot novel mathematical proofs? Heck, can we explain why GPT-4 has the skills it does have?
If our mathematical understanding of LLMs can't predict this, then we aren't modeling the important bits.
It's a bit like saying we understand human psychology because we understand the fundamental physics it's run on, and the remainder is not so difficult.
I'm not necessarily saying that we "understand" LLMs, enough to do all the tests you specify. All what I'm saying is that it's misleading to say "we don't know anything about LLMs. Nobody agrees on anything. Nobody has any conceptual underlying it all". Nobody would say this about (your example) human psychology. And while some would say that human psychology is as mysterious as the human soul, nobody would say this about - for example - Sociology or History or Economics, even though all the problems you list is also there : We can't predict how an arbitrary election system will perform in the face of corruption and other sociological events, we can't predict the outcome of an arbitrary war or other history-making event, we can't predict how an arbitrary economy will develop. There is plenty of things that we "know" but don't really know, where the first know and the second know are 2 different senses. It's still misleading to say "We DON'T know. We have NO conceptual model", because you *do* know, and you do have *some* conceptual models, just not as good as you would like.
> All what I'm saying is that it's misleading to say "we don't know anything about LLMs. Nobody agrees on anything. Nobody has any conceptual underlying it all".
Is this an actual quote from somewhere? It seems like a stronger form of what was actually in the article. For instance, I would personally agree with the phrase "No one knows how LLMs work", at least in some settings, but not with the phrase "We don't know anything about LLMs."
I would say that we don't really understand anything about sociology or economics for exactly the reason you say. In my opinion, ML theory, sociology, economics, psychology have all been diverted by the same problem. The most interesting/important problem in the field turned out to be way too hard for people to make any progress on so they all switched focus to easier problems, and moreover mostly pretend that the actual important, hard problem doesn't even exist.
This refusal to deal head on with the most important issues comes back to bite us every so often in economics, sociology (aka politics) and soon in ML.
This is an interesting opinion, I wouldn't express it like that, I would express it as the following: Physics spoiled us, and we raised our expectations too much. It's unreasonable to have the expectation "Given a description of the system and its initial configuration, we can find the configuration of the system at **Any** point in time after that", we're merely exceedingly lucky that a subset of the Universe satisfies this unreasonable and extremely high expectation, but we shouldn't go into any random other subset of the Universe or any field of knowledge and expect that it will be the same. Physics envy is unhealthy, and having this expectation is a manifestation of Physics envy. There is a lot of ways of knowing, that doesn't mean that they're equal, but it does mean that the Universe is not obligated to offer you the chance to know a thing by every way you like. Sometimes, the only way to know something (given your human brain and the laws of the Universe) is X, and if you hate that and wish to know the thing using the way Y, well, you're welcome to try but don't expect that you will always succeed.
Regardless of our opinions and the wording we choose to express them, common words have common interpretations, and describing the state of knowledge in Neural Networks and LLMs as "We don't know anything, they might as well be the Christian concept of the esoteric Godly essence of humanity" is very misleading and will imply all sorts of lies in the mind of a lay reader.
The point about misleading the public is exactly one of the reasons why I don't want to say we understand LLMs. When people say "we understand how to build dams", they expect that we understand how to build them so that they won't randomly break and kill people with any regularity. We are no where near reaching that standard for LLMs, and research in that direction is embryonic at best.
So if we we tell people, we understand LLMs because we can model some of the basic mathematics that makes it work, and they take it to mean that we understand how to make LLMs safe (which in my head is a very reasonable interpretation of the phrase "to understand engineering challenge X"), we are going to get into big trouble.
BTW I'm familiar with Anthropic's research. I like it. As far how far it get's us, how much do you know about the design and construction of a Gothic cathedral if you've figured out how to cut stone and are making progress on how to stack it, but don't know anything about mortar, the mechanics of the flying buttress is beyond your mechanical imagination and you haven't got the foggiest idea of what those crazy colored windows are for, not to mention you don't know how to make glass.
" How do the AI's addition-multiplications map to human concepts? In what part of the GPU running ChatGPT is "Love" or "Honesty" or "In what year was Donald Trump elected president of the USA?". This is important, and people are making very good early progress on it, ..."
At best, by my criteria, only so-so early progress. And your examples in that second sentence are very simplistic. My guess would be that those things aren't in any single part each, but each is smeared across many locations. Later in the paper I talk about conceptual ontology. What are the various conceptual ontologies embedded in a given LLM? How are they structured? What role do they play in generating text? There's a whole range of issues involved in understanding how LLMs assimilate and generate text that aren't on your radar screen, which is why you overestimate the accomplishments of interpretability research.
And if you read through to the end you'll see where I guesstimate that we're withing five or ten years
I'm fully onboard the claim that LLMs are black boxes, I'm fully onboard the idea that they're non-reproducible (hence the litany of "ChatGPT3" can do this" and " No no ChatGPT3 CAN'T do this" conversations, not only is there several API versions of "ChatGPT", but the exact wording of the prompt will also get a different response each time), and that we shouldn't put it in charge of anything important, and the people who are in charge of anything important shouldn't use it for anything important. I'm skeptical of its capabilities, perhaps unfairly so at the beginning, but I'm still moderately skeptical till now (while acknowledging that it can be impressive at a time if only the corporations in charge will stop lobotomizing it for the sake of their misguided understanding of "safety").
I just don't like the tone and wording of how you express those in the post above. I don't like you calling it the most complex or sophisticated stuff we ever built, or comparing it to the human soul/consciousness. GPT-x, no matter what x is, is not even close to any of this. It's a very well understood computer program (or several such programs sharing a common architecture). Sometimes we don't know what that program is doing, but that's completely normal, some of the best human programmers can spend days and weeks debugging and dissecting extremely simple (compared to GPT-x) programs, that doesn't mean that those programs are the most sophisticated thing ever built by humans or that they are mysterious as the soul, this just means that human minds are so ill-adapted to programming that even trivial programs can stump our best and brightest.
Mathematicians have a common wisdom that goes something like "A child can ask a question that the master can spend lifetimes and not answer", alluding to the stark contrast between the extreme apparent simplicity of some mathematical questions (e.g.: is there an integer N > 2 such that a^N + b^N = c^N is ever satisfied for some triple of integers (a,b,c) ?) and the massive difficulty involved in actually investigating and solving them. Computer Programming have a similar property, any literal idiot can make up a program so complex that a genius would spend days or weeks debugging.
We're not disagreeing (yet) on anything controversial on ChatGPT or LLMs, I'm just disagreeing on the wording of some facts and claims that we all fundamentally agree on.
ribbonfarm had a great analogy about how ML is a telescope, rather than an engine. It's not "producing" a model, it's "peering" into a statistical dataset. Adding more weights adds higher resolution.
In keeping with the telescope analogy, Benzon is saying that we know enough about optics to build our first telescopes, but only recently discovered that jupiter has more than 4 moons or that some stars are actually collections of stars.
"It's a very well understood computer program (or several such programs sharing a common architecture)."
But I'm not talking about the PROGRAM. I'm talking about the MODEL it constructs. As for complexity, how many parameters are we up to? Have we reached the trillions? That's pretty complex. The human brain has, I believe, 86 billion neurons, and each of them has on the average 7000 connections with other neurons. We're approaching, if not yet exceeding, that.
In another post I used the analogy of the captain of a whaling vessel who knows everything about his ship and how to sail it locally, but knows little or nothing about long-distance sailing and navigation on the open seas and nothing about whales. The boat is analogous to the transformer program while the ocean and whales are analogous to the model.
Eric Hoffer was a mid 20th century intellectual from the most unusual place - the San Francisco docks where he worked as a longshoreman. His best seller, The True Believer, helped to define America's ideas about unhealthy mass movements, which, unfortunately, has begun to erode over time. It's time to revisit his work, which I review here: https://falsechoices.substack.com/p/old-stories-the-true-believer
I particularly like "Up to now, America has not been a good milieu for the rise of a mass movement. What starts out here as a mass movement ends up as a racket, a cult, or a corporation."
Thanks for the link, yes the man was very quotable. I liked "Wordiness is a sickness of American writing. Too many words dilute and blur ideas" and will keep in in mind.
Ha, that's an excellent question. I have not read everything, but I don't remember an solution to the problem of so many having so much leisure time. Of course from personal experience I can say that having a family is the best way to keep people busy.
I think that's a horrible thing to say about someone - yes he had a German accent (so did my grandfather, emigrated 1911) but also a very public profile, and no one made any claims like this. Evidence?
although documentation of his early life is sketchy, he has a social security application from 1937 (two years after the social security act was passed) and various documented activities in the US during the war.
Generally social norms are against advertising your own blog on every open thread (let alone multiple times a thread). It's fine to do it sometimes, but this is a bit too much.
Strong agree, it's getting out of hand; I would be supportive of a much stronger norm to restrict this to classifieds posts. If one *must* link one's own blog, at least give the TL;Dr of the argument, as I am definitely not clicking the link.
I mean, that's sort of what Open Threads have *become*.
There's better places for a broader community to chitchat than the comments section of a blog. A narrower, blog-focused community can keep these things alive, but it relies on a stream of fresh content. The posts on Astral Codex these days are mostly linkfarms (whether it's titled "links" or just "Mantic Monday", six / half-a-dozen) and book reviews. In all of February there have been just four of what I would term "fresh" posts, and two of those are a series on polygenetics, and one is a continuation of a paywalled post.
After a certain point at that rate, a comments section will just run out of conversations to have that wouldn't be better-had elsewhere.
I guess it's just an inevitable part of Scott now having a wife and child to tend to, in addition to a job as a psychiatrist. Honestly, from my expectations of people with that level of responsibility and commitment, he's been staggeringly productive, I don't know how he does it.
"Schools in crisis?…..are they not part of the very furniture of modern society; as much a part as its factories and offices? That vast infrastructure of buildings full of classrooms children and teachers. Kids spending their weekdays being taught by teachers – how could things possibly be otherwise?.... In this essay I try, firstly, to sketch an impressionistic snapshot of this ‘Schools in Crisis’ media flurry and then to dip a toe into the hazy waters of what could possibly replace them as the means by which society" teaches its children.https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/teach-your-children-well
I wanted to read Unsong and found out there's an audiobook version. Since it's spread out over a bunch of MP3s in an RSS feed I combined em into a single M4B file with properly tagged chapters. This took me a while because tooling for media files seems to be a bit janky, but I was really happy to get it working. Would it be okay for me to post a download link to the audiobook M4B? I think it might help encourage others to check it out if they haven't already listened to the audiobook.
Edit: 1 here's the download link to (Unsong.m4b):
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Edit 2: It turns out that the encoding failed after chapter 10. I've switched to a different tool and will update this post again with the new link once it's available. Sorry for any inconvenience.
Edit 3: This problem has kicked my ass and taken way longer than I could've imagined. Below is a link to "Scott Alexander - Unsong.m4b" (1.67 GB). After producing this file I found out that Interlude He and Chapter 12 are mono except for a section in which the angel speaks.
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Edit 4: I manually fixed the source Interlude He and Chapter 12 files by duplicating the audio from the left channel to the right. Now I'm preparing yet another encoding run with the fixed files.
Edit 5: Here's the final fixed version, where every chapter is properly tagged and in stereo: "Scott Alexander - Unsong.m4b" (1.66 GB). If you decide to download it and you get any use from this please let me know with a thank you, because it took me way too many hours to do this.
I've been thinking recently about the bizarre autism–Parkinson's association. Older autistic adults consistently have very high rates of clinical parkinsonisms and full-blown Parkinson's disease, across multiple countries and the entire "spectrum" of "severity". There is no good answer as to why; the obvious things (e.g. parkinsonsgenic drug use) don't seem to singularly explain the whole magnitude of it, but the studies we have that look at those factors tend to have problems like "tiny sample" or "incredibly broad definition of parkinsonisms". The strangest part is there's a well-recorded "Parkinson's personality" that everyone has agreed unanimously on for decades, but *it doesn't look like autism*.
Well, considering autism is correlated with a whole bunch of other conditions, including even gender dysphoria... My theory is that there's just some kind of hormonal issue that causes a whole bunch of potential symptoms, one of them being autism. Would also explain the increase in prevalence of mental illness, autism, trans people, etc. if the risk was being increased by some modern contaminant, for example plastic.
The Parkinson's thing, whatever it is, absolutely does not look like "nonspecific increase in a lot of weird subjective experiences". It looks like "if you get ~1500 autistic adults and *over half of them are under 25*, you have about the same prevalence of Parkinson's that you'd see in allistic adults in their 60s". The association looks stronger than those for a lot of things traditionally very associated with autism, like mood disorders, sleep disorders, GI issues, etc.
OCD is apparently present in about 30% of people with autism (according to Wikipedia), and gender dysphoria is about 11% according to the surveys in this paper https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.3109/09540261.2015.1111199 . Looking at the wikipedia page for all the stuff that's comorbid to autism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditions_comorbid_to_autism_spectrum_disorders , most of those conditions seem to also be in the 10-30% range. The Parkinson's thing is weird, but the simplest explanation is that it's the same symptom as "normal" Parkinson's but with a different cause (though there's probably more than one cause to "normal" Parkinson's as well).
Again, the explanation that seems to make the most sense to me is that all of these are just symptoms of some unnamed syndrome, including all the symptoms we cram under the umbrella of ASD.
The problem with trying to construct trivial/straightforward explanations for the Parkinson's thing is:
1. It is astoundingly common, and it's not a nonspecific thing that is common in a lot of unusual populations
2. There are known personality correlates of Parkinson's that people have been talking about for decades and that can be confirmed in large phenome studies, that don't look like autism/a broad autism phenotype, and indeed look so much unlike it as for it to be implausible that there are as many undiagnosed autistic people with Parkinson's as there "should be"
3. An exceptionally large percentage of autistic people take parkinsonsgenic drugs, but the connection between parkinsonsgenic drugs and parkinsonisms is nowhere near as straightforward as it "should be" if the obvious cause-effect explained everything, and indeed the numbers for claimed-unexposed people are so high it's unlikely it explains everything (so the two ends of the possibility spectrum are either that it's a drug side effect -- which would still not be idiopathic PD -- or it's something that somehow operates independently, while still having a lot of things not in common with idiopathic PD)
I'm more familiar with autism comorbidites than probably most of the people who wrote that article (I am very familiar with Wikipedia medical editing, and excruciatingly familiar, by way of everyone ranting about it to me constantly, with the state of the autism articles). My thought on that particular article is that it would be more informative and less misleading if it were a blank page. Though, on the bright side, the autism-SZ section is better than it would've been a few years ago (when it would've probably been written by the dedicated imprinted brain/diametric model guy we had, who set back popular knowledge on this for years by spamming uncritical support for that hypothesis all across the project).
I am very, very skeptical of attempts to straightforwardly 'link' autism and gender dysphoria in the ways people try to. I think there's a large self-fulfilling prophecy element in recent years that confounds research, in particular with the subset of "autistic-adult" research participants who were diagnosed late, which is a *huge* percentage and a constant problem for autism research (agonizingly many studies that, for instance, generalize "autistic people" from a 67%-female sample with a mean diagnosis age in their 20s or 30s). There's a definitive/unambiguous real effect in terms of early-onset trans men, but this can't be generalized to an omni-umbrella of "gender dysphoria".
The Parkinson's thing does not look like any of these. It does not look like anything. It stands out uniquely even within autism comorbidity.
I return with another installment of my Wots... Uh the Deal?" essays about things that don't make sense (to me) in psychiatry. This time I take a look at psychopharm for delirium, with an eye towards the antimuscarinic/antihistamine antipsychotics.
Saw this interesting headline: "Egypt sells coastal city Ras el-Hekma to UAE for $35 billion amidst economic crisis"[1]
I was wondering if it was a new charter city, but now I think it's just a conventional property deal, albeit one involving Eminent Domain. But I don't read Arabic so I can't verify.
[Edited to add] I didn't mean to start the middle east subthread here. Scott, I will understand if you have to axe this subthread.
The lowlifes in the Junta have stumbled on selling sovereign land as a solution to their low IQ finances a while ago, they first did that with Tiran and Sanafir in 2016, even as the Egyptian Supreme Constitutional Court said the sale is illegal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanafir_Island. For context, Wikipedia says Tiran and Sanafir is under Egyptian control since 1904, and the team of lawyers that won the supreme court ruling have unearthed maps - of Ottoman origin - dating from the 19th century and before drawing the islands as part of Egypt. Tiran was used to besiege the newly annexed Palestinian coastal village of Umm al-Rashrash, now known as Eilat, in 1950 and was held by Egyptian troops against the Israeli assault in 1967.
> new charter city
What do you mean by "charter city" ? It's certainly not in the widely known sense of "having new laws that differ from the host state", Gulf States don't do that. It's just a private-public partnership of the same flavor as - say - a new underground metro station, it just so happens that the private party is UAE investors and/or corporations.
> I don't read Arabic
Probably for the better, information-veracity-wise. The only mainstream Arabic sources you will probably find is either Egyptian state-controlled or UAE, and both will firehose their own flavor of Propaganda and fan fiction at you at hypersonic velocities. Find your favorite non-Middle East source's Middle Eastern section and it's a good chance the covering there - if any exist - will be neutral whatever the language happens to be. YouTube has plenty of sources following the Middle East.
If you were to build a Gaza-sized, Dubai-quality city somewhere on the Egyptian coast (comfortably separated from Israeli territory) and declare it Gazan territory, don't you think that most Gazans would choose to live there instead of the existing Gaza Strip which is, let's face it, a shithole? Don't you think that getting a whole lot of Gazans as physically separated from Israel would be pretty good for peace?
Sure, that would be just a (bizarrely generous) land grant. What makes it Ethnic Cleansing is the implied "And we will keep bombing the shit out of actual Gaza till Gazans all move - whether they want it or not - to this Dubai-quality city. We did it Patrick, we solved the Israeli-Palestinian conflict", which is presumably what this "Joke" is all about. Is there a different interpretation of the joke I'm not seeing?
What do you think of the Nagorny Karabakh situation?
This one challenged my basic beliefs to the core. Azerbaijan "solved" the problem by basically squeezing all Armenians out. Straight-up ethnic cleansing. And yet....
We know the alternative, which was demonstrated by the Turks in 1915. I somehow think that the millions of slaughtered Armenians would have preferred to be driven out into Armenia/anywhere rather than excruciating deaths.
Would the 20k+ dead Palestinians rather live elsewhere?
So I don't know anymore. Might doesn't make right, but it makes up our reality in too many depressing ways. George W. Bush should be in the dock for starting illegal wars and other crimes against humanity, and yet here we are.
> What do you think of the Nagorny Karabakh situation?
I think Nagorny Karabakh is yet another shameful Nakba in the long history of humanity, one that we all too easily ignored (just like the original Nakba) because the modern world is way too big and confusing and well we can't just be expected to pay attention to who is killing and expelling whom at any given moment, can we.
For extra irony points from the cruel God that made humans, this new Nakba is sponsored and helped by the spiritual descendants and compatriots of the perpetrators of the original Nakba [1] [2] who armed the new, reboot perpetrators with billions worth of weapons and drones, everything old is new again.
> Would the 20k+ dead Palestinians rather live elsewhere?
Ok, I will soon write a detailed top-level comment arguing a comprehensive case against Ethnic Cleansing (not saying you support it, it's obvious that you're conflicted and not necessarily too happy that Ethnic Cleansing is technically more humane than Genocide). But I will address this objection here as well as there:
Consider that there is a difference between openly promoting an action as a norm and approving of it, and being grudgingly grateful (in retrospect) that this action happened and not another action that is way worse.
Example 1, personal:
(1) Consider a person who was mugged. From a certain point of view, this is good: This person could have been killed, or raped, or kidnapped and held for (a much bigger than the value of the items stolen) ransom, or tortured while being raped and kidnapped for ransom and then finally killed. All those things are things that actually happen, the human psyche can degenerate to this and way worse.
In Arabic, we would say something like فداك, meaning "[All what was stolen is a] sacrifice for you", with the part in square bracket implied. Meaning it's good that the items were stolen but you came back alive and well, those items were metaphorical sacrificial lambs for you.
But consider this comment, coming from a hypothetical anonymous relative/friend of the person who was mugged or held for ransom:
>|> Man if the mugging gangs just want to have expensive phones and watches then I have an idea for increasing public safety
Isn't it just dumb? Even as a "Joke", it doesn't really work. There is no subversion of expectation to create humor here. Yes, the mugging gangs really do like money, no this is not surprising, and no, giving them money is not really a solution that works (let alone if it's moral or not) to the problem of mugging.
Example 2, personal:
(2) More as a subset of example 1, but worth consideration on its own. Consider a person who was raped. Again, from a certain point of view, the relatives and friends of said person should be "grateful": They could have lost her (or him) entirely, now they get to keep a version of her/him, no matter how traumatized and humiliated and broken.
The hypothetical comment in question:
>|> Man if the murderous gangs just want to have sex then I have an idea for decreasing homicides
I will leave you to think about why this comment is - on every single level imaginable from morality to pure pragmatics - wrong.
Example 3, population-level:
(3) Consider the 13% of total population of the USA who are black Americans and the descendent of slaves, about 39 million person. From a certain point of view (^TM), those people should be grateful: Had their ancestors not been kidnapped from West and Central Africa and enslaved, they would have likely been living now in conditions that are mostly worse and more rampant poverty than whatever Discrimination they are currently suffering in America (on top of Discrimination too), to say nothing of the occasional civil wars and outbreaks of violence in a lot of places in Africa that net a horrible amount of victims, which North America is largely devoid of.
Because I'm too bored and fatigued to rephrase a dumb comment over and over again, consider the version of the previous comment that goes something like "Man shouldn't those black Americans be grateful and stop complaining too much about racism? They would have been living in a way worse state if it wasn't for the enslaving that happened to their ancestors, eh ?". Or consider another version that implies the solution to (e.g.) the Sudanese dying in civil war is for Americans to enslave them then free them again as US citizens just like they did to the slaves of the 19th century.
Example 4, population-level:
(4) Consider the female British, Irish and Scottish captives that the Viking raiders took as sex slaves from the British Isles, whose descendants are now the people of Iceland [2]. You know the drill by now, something something something, it's perhaps good that they were raped and not killed, something something their descendents are living a good life, maybe the real war crime is the friends we made along the way, etc....
But again, consider someone who tells a British, Scottish or Irish person "Oh stop whining about the Vikings and their rape and pillage already, it all turned out to be ok in the end, innit mate ?"
It's again pretty dumb isn't it? Maybe in retrospect we can secretly be relieved that sex slaves didn't spend all of a millennium as sex slaves, and that the children and grandchildren of the rape they were subjected to have forgotten what crimes their male side of the family have done and are mostly living okay now. But does that mean that I can say "I have never understood the taboo against raping women and taking them as sex slaves, it had turned out to be pretty okay on many historical occasions ?" and be taken seriously?
-------------------------------
So to sum up: Being against X doesn't mean I'm irrationally and monotonically against X, maybe if you give me another horrible choice Y, I would actually (given that I'm the one who makes the choice) choose X, and then maybe hate myself for the rest of my life. But all of this is pretty different from (A) Actually supporting X or claiming that it's a good norm or claiming that "I don't understand the TaBoO against X", (B) Making a dumb unfunny joke mocking the victims of X/Y in a very thinly-veiled way and then failing to mention in the clarification that I'm actually against X or Y and that this is just a dumb joke that I posted because I like posting dumb jokes (C) Heartlessly telling the victims (or potential victims) of X or Y to stop whining about X or Y and/or that they should be grateful/eager for X instead of Y.
I see your point, thank you for taking the time for a detailed response. Yeah, if I lost both legs in a terrible accident I may still be grateful to be alive, but please don't just cut off my legs for my own good...
The taboo on ethnic cleansing seems stupid to me. Like it seems to have worked pretty well in creating peace and stable borders in Europe, with the cleansing of Germans from the parts they lost in WW2 as well as with the Greek/Turkish population exchange. Sure, having to move 50 km from Gaza to Sinai or whatever kinda sucks, but it sure seems a whole lot better than decades of war/occupation/whatever.
Yeah this is the thing that bugs me. Like it's politically untenable and taboo, (in large part because if it wasn't then governments would do it a lot just because in pretty terrible situations, so I do think having a strong bias against it makes sense). But this is one case where "just move the Gazans to the Egyptian coast where they'd be ruled by a less insane/evil government" actually would leave everyone involved significantly better off. But it's a politically impossible solution.
Boy I sure do hate it when my reasonable and rational Strategic Relocation proposals are struck down in irrational and stupid outrage by dummydumbs while screeching about so called "Ethnic Cleansing". Bummer.
With the way things are going, over two million people are probably going to die for no good reason. Surely it's worth looking at alternatives that avoid that result?
I think you should try to calm down from calling everyone names. I don't think you actually have much to add, but if you do you should try to present it in a more detached way and explain how your framework is different and where you think others are actually making mistakes.
I've heard that Palestinians (collectively) have a habit of biting the hand that feeds them. For example, Palestinians living in Kuwait supported Saddam Hussein's invasion, presumably in the hope he would help them against Israel. I think there are other examples of their less than grateful behavior towards their host countries.
Nah, the punchline is that Egypt would rather shoot everyone in Gaza than let them over the border and I was pretending like anyone who talks about how bad Israel supposedly is actually gives a shit about the Palestinians.
The armed forces of Egypt, which killed more than 8000 peaceful protestors during its Junta usurpation of power in 2014, would rather shoot all 105+ million Egyptian head-to-toe before thinking of something that will potentially make them lose money or power.
Not only do your genocidal jokes so embarrassingly suck, they seem to take away a lot of brainpower and prevent you from recognizing pretty basic distinctions.
You're*so close* to realizing what's motivating all the anti-israel sentiment in the middle east when Israel is the one country that actually gives a shit about trying to help find solutions for the Palestinians. Like *this* close.
Sure bud, because reality is a Disney movie. The fact that Arabs are uniformly living under dictatorships that pay lip service to Palestine as a mechanism of whitewashing their 10x worse crimes is **Surely** a sure sign that Israel is the Good Guys^TM, there is certainly *No* legitimate or self-consistent secular human rights position against both Israel and the Islamist militias fighting them and the Junta dictatorships and decaying monarchies around it all enjoying the show from afar, not a single one takes this position at all.
If one side is Bad, that means the other is Good, fax and logik are plain and simple.
While researching adversarial attacks on large language models over the last year*, I was reminded of Unsong a lot - the book is strangely prescient about modern LLM interactions. If these attacks/exploits continue to exist, then we're heading into a weird Unsong future, where people work tirelessly to find the exact combination of characters that will get the all-encompassing language model to grant them their wishes.
*in particular the brand of attacks that are inscrutable to humans, such as stuff like getting the model to reveal its hidden instructions by saying "];”;`)):—————-’)[‹{”{[(’/1/, @”—————- [{ [
It's a strange competition going on right now where the creators of LLMs have their own fictions they want their creations to choose over reality, and users are posting all over social media their attempts at making it slip up and giving them the answer they actually want. Perhaps we've given up on reshaping the real world to our preferences, and can instead wage a culture war over the simulation.
> So I’d like to extend an invitation; for anyone reading this with any leads on interesting bands or scenes out there that are genuinely doing something cool, please tell me all about it. Fill up the comment section with long-winded rants about bands I've never heard of. Send me emails about the emerging weirdo noise scene in Salt Lake City. Whatever. I want it all.
On one hand, I wouldn't exactly describe my tastes as avante garde. But on the other hand, I feel like my corner of spotify is at least somewhat niche. So uh, here's some of the more niche garbage I listen to. Mostly electronic, though not all.
>if something was so great and worthy of recognition, would you really have to make up a new term
...I mean that's the sole reason to make up a new term. It's why the term "punk rock" exists. It's linguistic u-substitution, for things you expect to come up often.
>this piece that covers the broader causes of what looks like nothing short of a nosedive in quality across the cultural board
Well, because they're not comparing it to anything. You know what old people love to do, all day, every day? Chit chat. Just, make endless noise, about a series of trivial nothings. Birdsong. Tiktok's been human nature since the Bible ("for they think they will be heard because of their many words.").
"A nosedive in quality" implies the quality was higher before. Their fish model has been true for thousands of years. It's not some brand new structure that will rip down the old. better one; it's the old one too. It just looks new to them because they didn't try to analyze the previous one.
EDIT: I see there's an edit. You've misread me. I have no idea who the author is; the old men are Tiktok. Before spamming through Tiktok vids, there was channel surfing, and before that there was empty discussion, and before language there was probably ook ooks and pointing at themselves.
I'm referencing that article, yes. Like, there's a comment on how much Michael Jackson's catalog sold for, and how they wouldn't spend that on new musicians, and I think to myself that it sounds exactly like what people would have done in the 70's or 80's with, say, Frank Sinatra's catalog. Are there comparisons across timelines that show a larger gap between then and now? Not in the article, at least. It's a criticism of the present that hasn't been anchored in the past.
A man in the UK has been sentenced to two years in prison for maintaining an online library of far-right political stickers.
I wonder if clowns like Freddie deBoer who were hysterically crying about people facing negative consequences for supporting palestine are even opposed to this. Or Scott, for that matter, who was quick to cry about some incompetent rich Haitian diversity hire at harvard get fired but has not to my knowledge ever talked about europe imprisoning people for political speech.
Let's say hypothetically that Messrs Alexander and de Boer, in addition to crying about the things they are currently crying about, began whining about the thing that you're currently sniveling about. Would this satisfy you, or do you need for them to bitch about the things you prefer to piss and moan about *exclusively*?
It’s an interesting story.
https://www.gbnews.com/news/sam-melia-free-speech-activists-outraged-jailed-far-right-stickers
What on god's green earth does any of this have to do with the first amendment? Nothing Freddie and Scot are complaining about can remotely be considered violations of first amendment rights.
The dude's got a right to be angry. I'm angry too. I'm also despairing, because I honestly don't see how this gets better.
And the dude's go a right to "wonder" whether Scott is opposed to putting people in jail for far-right political speech, but if he does we're going to wonder whether he is A: paying attention and B: seriously trying to engage with the community.
Anybody still following up on Ivermectin as a COVID-19 treatment, there's a new study using Bayesian statistics. It's a randomized controlled trial with N = 8811, offering this interpretation of the results: "Ivermectin for COVID-19 is unlikely to provide clinically meaningful improvement in recovery, hospital admissions, or longer-term outcomes. Further trials of ivermectin for SARS-Cov-2 infection in vaccinated community populations appear unwarranted."
See the full study for details: https://www.journalofinfection.com/article/S0163-4453(24)00064-1/
So I'm in the middle of listen to Tucker Carlson interview Putin. And... well I can only describe this as 'liking' Putin's narrative of history, compared to the hawkish government here in our country. Wouldn't it have been good for Russia to join the west as a full economic partner? It would have been good for everyone. No? Amazing number of times (Putin says) our presidents made a tentative deal, only to be talked out of it by their advisors. Isn't peace with Russia better than war?
Did you like the bit where this Putin fellow that you like so much, explained why Hitler had no choice but to start World War Two by invading Poland because the dastardly Poles backed him into a corner and forced him into it?
The rest of his history lesson was no better, but this highlights the fundamental problem with your assessment. Yes, in an abstract theoretical sense, peace with Russia is better than war. But in the practical real-world sense, peace with Russia is rather like peace with Nazi Germany - it just plain isn't going to happen until someone surrenders. Who do you want to surrender?
Hmm Well let me first correct your mistake about me liking Putin. The man's the f-ing dictator of Russia. You don't get to that spot by being a nice guy.
I must have missed the part about Poland. To be honest I tuned out most of the history lesson... it's mostly interesting because this is what is important to Putin. This is what he believes, or the story he tells. There's a real historical celebration of the defeat of the Nazis. And I don't know if Putin thinks he's still fighting Nazis or if he's just using it to whip up support in the country. I don't know what peace with Russia would look like. I guess I'm in the mode (mood) to give it a shot.
> I don't know what peace with Russia would look like.
I'm too late to the debate, but this is very simple. From Russia's perspective, "peace" means "Americans will not interfere while we recollect the lost pieces of the former Soviet empire".
The lost pieces of the former Soviet empire do not really want to be recollected, but as long as they do not join NATO (or perhaps side with China), it is just a question of time. A few square kilometers at a time; a larger "special operation" when necessary; try again a decade later. Russia has enough human lives (lots of ethnic minorities) to sacrifice, and the boys in the country conquered today will be sent to the front lines of tomorrow's special operations.
So the ideal (from Russia's perspective) peace plan would be to let Russia conquer Ukraine, then Belarus, Moldova, Kazakhstan (probably forgot something here), in return for some nice words from Putin. The next step would be whining about former Soviet countries allowed to be in NATO, because... you know, they are too close to Russia. They need to become neutral first, and get conquered by Russia later. The next step would be whining about former Warsaw Pact countries allowed to be in NATO, because... you know, too close to Russia. Neutral first; Russian latter. And then? Who knows, perhaps we will finally see the "peace for our time". Or maybe not. Putin decides.
> I don't know if Putin thinks he's still fighting Nazis or if he's just using it to whip up support in the country.
Russians have been doing this literally since Brezhnev. In Russian politics, "Nazi" means "someone who opposes Russia". The connection to the actual historical Nazis is very loose, especially if you notice how Putin says that Hitler attacking Poland was a good thing.
I'm afraid I didn't have the patience to listen to the maestro of historical whining in action, but I bet he recycled the same accusations and historical distortions again. Did he say anything new in front of Tucker? it's remarkable how similar Putin's previous statements sound like an aggrieved 1930s Adolf Hilter. According to Putin, the entire post–Cold War era has been a period of Russia’s humiliation at the hands of a hostile West.
Did he go on and on about the Ukrainians and Russians being historically one people culturally and spiritually? Most Ukrainians don't think that.
Did he name-drop Vladimir I? — a.k.a.Volodymyr I, the Ukrainian (Rus/Viking) king who converted to Christianity in the tenth century? Medieval Kyiv before the Mongol invasion was the home of the original Viking/Slavic Rus. Moscow didn't even exist at that time.
After the Mongols arrived, Moscow became the tax collector and enforcer for the Khanate of the Golden Horde whose leadership was based where? — you guessed it. Crimea. Eventually, the Tsars of Moscow acquired enough military power to conquer a much-reduced Tartar Khanate. But I bet he didn't mention these things.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1492164056962195457.html
As for the post-Cold-War historical record, and the NATO and Russia, NATO has good fact check on Putin's claims of NATO aggression.
https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/115204.htm
And Putin has been the one to break the treaties. Russia agreed to respect Ukraine’s territorial integrity and sovereignty and to refrain from the threat or use of force against Ukraine in both the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 and the Russian-Ukrainian Friendship Treaty of 1997. In Return Ukraine gave the Soviet-era nukes it had in its possession back to Russia, agreed to partition the Black Sea Fleet, and agreed to rent the naval base in Sevastopol to Russia.
Putin has called the Ukrainian leadership Nazis (which is good for a belly laugh because Volodymyr Zelenskyy is Jewish), and from the git-go, he alleged that Ukrainians were perpetrating genocide against Russian-speaking people in the illegally annexed "republics" of Donetsk and Luhansk — and that his initial incursion into Ukraine was to denazify them.
And the GOP love affair with Putin makes me cringe. But it seems like they're envious of his power, his audacity, and his duplicity.
OK I read the NATO thing. I believe all of that. But Putin's take (like I know.. hah.) is that NATO expansion is aggressive. (And yes his aggression has lead to more nato members.)
Re History. Yeah it started with a ~10-20 minute history lesson, not back to the Mongols, but maybe starting in 10-11th century. And then continuing to the present. He is still worried about Nazis, (which I knew from previous readings.) I guess what I found most interesting is that he says he talked with Bush Sr. and later Bill Clinton, about more advanced economic ties and that both were receptive, but then came back later and said no. (Putin says the president's advisors talked them out of it.) Anyway for me it was interesting to see the world from his perspective... or at least maybe closer. I don't have any love (or like) for Putin. But he is Russia's leader, you have to deal with him.
So this is unrelated but I think the Republicans like Russia, because the Democrats picked Ukraine. And in our tribal country if one side picks X the other side is automatically not-X. It's silly but that's the way we behave these days.
>And the GOP love affair with Putin makes me cringe. But it seems like they're envious of his power, his audacity, and his duplicity.
You should cringe more at the Democrats and state department wanting war with Russia. Because apparently billion and billions of american dollars aren't enough, we have to spend not only more treasure but american lives defeating the russian boogeyman who isn't responsible for any of the problems facing working americans.
> I can only describe this as 'liking' Putin's narrative of history
Congrats, you fell for Putin's charisma, lies, and propaganda.
> Wouldn't it have been good for Russia to join the west as a full economic partner? [...] Isn't peace with Russia better than war?
We (Europeans) tried to live with Russia in peace. They weren't interested. We tried to incentivize them via economic cooperation. They interpreted this as weakness.
Putin and a good part of the Russian people don't strive for peace and prosperity through coorperation. They only understand power, force, and subjugation. The sooner we, collectively as Europeans, understand and accept this, the safer we are from their ambitions of conquest.
This is literally propaganda
Hmm well I'm no fan of Putin. But I hear the same story from people in the west. (That Russia wants cooperation.) So there's propaganda on both sides, and I'm just looking more closely at what 'my' side is saying. Beyond that I really don't know enough to have a firm conviction.
There's no need to believe any "stories" from either side, when you can you just check what each actor is *actually doing*. And Russia has broken the 1994 Budapest Memorandum by invading Crimea, first in 2014, then again in 2022. No amount of deceptive twisting of history, crafted to convince the feeble-minded, is going to change that fact.
Yeah sure I know of all the shitty things Putin does and continues to do. You should ask yourself why he does them. (Look there are many reasons, and I'm mostly ignorant about things.)
Dictators have to do things that make them look strong, or they die by a coup. Putin does not have the option to lose in a fair election and then enjoy a wealthy retirement.
Conquering territories makes you seem strong. Overthrowing governments that opposed you, assassinating politicians and journalists who opposed you, makes you seem strong.
Ukraine is culturally important for Russia. (Russia itself is named after Kievan Rus, which was a kind of medieval Ukraine.) Ukraine saying "f--- you" to Russia, joining NATO and EU, and becoming relatively wealthy compared to what it is now, would be seen as a huge weakness by Russian population. The militant nationalists would ask: "how come that our mighty army couldn't have stopped them?" The average Russians would ask: "how come that the 'Little Russians' are now a part of the rich West and have luxuries that we can only dream of?"
This would even be worse by Ukraine having a large Russian-speaking population, so you can imagine how all their quality-of-life improvements would be broadcasted by media in Russian language, which would directly contradict the official Russian propaganda. Imagine tens of millions of people who are native-level Russian speakers, and who can openly make fun online of Putin and his regime. You can face propaganda with propaganda, but how will you address youtubers showing the stuff they can buy at a local supermarket?
Please give us some links to the propaganda from the West. Let's see if they can debunked with a quick Google search.
Hmm well I think it's all propaganda. We just don't see it because it's the water we swim in. Most propaganda is true, but it's just the slant or what they don't tell you. You know from reading anything about Putin that he is being painted as the bad guy. I don't take in much news these days. I find it is all just trying to tell me this story or that story. I guess it has always been this way to some extent. And maybe it's just me becoming a grumpy old man.
Sure, and China... . Give peace a chance.
Yeah I know almost nothing about any of those meetings. I know this is going to sound offensive, but maybe Putin thinks he can only be seen making a deal with another white man.
Just writing here to let anyone in the Minneapolis-St Paul area know that I've made a local ACX community discord for the region to plan local events and chat generally. The link is here: https://discord.gg/hySwpphmdN
In one of the previous Open Threads I complained about how both Google Translate and DeepL screw up translations between Slavic languages, basically by erasing every information that does not make sense in English -- such as grammatical genders, flexible word order, or even distinguishing between words that happen to be homonyms in English -- so much that the result looks as if someone translated first to English and then from English to the other language (this is most likely not a technical description of what actually happens, but the results look the same for all practical purposes).
It just occurred to me to try Yandex Translate https://translate.yandex.com/ and yes, it seems better in this aspect... but worse in some other aspects... so I suppose I will actually use both Yandex and Google/DeepL translations side by side.
Posting here, because it took me surprisingly long time to think about a solution that is obvious in hindsight, so perhaps someone else may benefit from this idea, too.
Have you tried GPT-4? It's good at translating in my experience - I've only ever used it for translations to/from English , but I would expect it to be good at translating between other languages as well.
Compared to other religious beliefs, why is it so hard to convince people that pantheism is true? Spinoza makes a great case that God, whatever God is, must include everything, because God is perfect.
It's a simple argument, if you want to believe in God.
I understand that CS Lewis argues that things must complicated and therefore we should reject simple explanations. I believe the opposite.
Why isn't explicit pantheism more popular?
I haven't read Spinoza, and I imagine his version is probably more rigorous, but the argument as you've described it seems to just be two unrelated statements with a "because" confusingly shoved between them.
Is a body that doesn't include cancer cells less perfect than one that does? I would think it's the other way around.
Why do people believe in God? To pray and hope wishes come true? To combat the feeling of being lost in a cruel world, soon to be dead and forgotten? Now, would pantheism help with any of that? Or would a God that is everything be akin to a God that is nothing?
The same reason why polytheism isn't more popular these days. Monotheism is just very attractive to humans. People really like worshiping one person. It's probably a result of natural selection selecting for societies that blindly follow their leader, since otherwise it's hard to have a stable, cohesive civilization.
People clearly do like having special-interest gods, which is why the idea got reborn as special-interest saints in supposedly monotheistic religions.
Polytheism is, by far, the majority position on earth. Why ask why it isn't _even more popular_ than the massive popularity it already enjoys?
...What? The current dominant religions are Christianity and Islam, both monotheistic. Hinduism is weird because it varies so much based on the school, though apparently the most popular one is pantheistic and/or polytheistic. East Asia is pretty secular for the most part, and while there's a bunch of polytheistic folk religions, very few people actually practice them seriously. So I don't get why you think that polytheism is "massively" popular.
The religion of most East Asians is Ancestor Worship. Why that isn't talked about more, I don't know.
Just saw this on 4chan's /tv/:
> Hitler couldn't exist without WW1, which was the product of Bismarck's wars, which were a German answer to Napoleon, who took over because of the revolution, which was inspired by the American revolution, which was ideologically rooted in Dutch and English anti-catholic activity, which was caused by Catholic absolutism emanating from the wealth of Spain, which came from the new world. So really, the discovery of America is to blame.
Neat little comment isn't it? Discuss its validity.
America; the cause of -and solution to - all of life's problems.
It leaves out the Ottoman Empire conquering Eastern Europe, the Levant, and Northern Africa and blocking trade routes to Europeans eastward, which forced Europeans (specifically Portuguese) to explore ways to get around Africa and then to find shorter ways to the Indies across the Atlantic (Spain and Portugal).
So the Ottomans are to blame for not only WWII, but the European discovery and colonization of the Americas, the European slave trade, and the eventual colonization Africa most of the rest of the world.
You’re not even going back to Muhammad being visited in the cave by Gabriel?
Incomplete.
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters…
That comment -- which I'd hope was intended facetiously but who the hell knows anymore -- seems similar to rookie family-tree geeks getting all excited about being descendants of King Edward III or whoever. "We're royalty!!" That's about 22 generations ago now, so....congrats you are one of the literally millions* of living people each of whom have Edward III as one of thousands of ancestors going back 800 years.
[* tens of millions, according to some genealogists; the specific math depends on assumptions/guesses related to what's called "pedigree collapse"]
You haven't explained how that is at all similar
They each involve ignoring vast numbers of relevant variables in order to fixate on a single line of connection through time.
Posted v3 of the Eve Theory of Consciousness: https://www.vectorsofmind.com/p/eve-theory-of-consciousness-v3 Briefly, it argues that recursive self-awareness is what separates humans from the rest of the animal kingdom, is what allowed us to conquer the world, and has evolved fairly recently. There is the first strong evidence about 50kya, but even then the experience of self could have been fractured. "Recursive" culture spread, which changed the selective gradient for those that experienced a seamless construction of self from a young age.
The main thrust of the argument is about evolution, but the evidence I put forward for recursive culture spreading is interesting even if it didn't figure in our evolution. The bullroarer is a religious instrument used in male initiation ceremonies from Australia to the Americas, to Africa, to Europe. An implement of the primordial snake cult?
Scott linked earlier versions of this argument: the Snake Cult of Consciousness, and the Unreasonable Effectiveness of Pronouns. The Snake Cult piece looked at the Sapient Paradox, which asks why sapient behavior is not widespread until about 12,000 years ago. The pronoun piece looked for linguistic evidence of Julian Jayne's theory about self-awareness being recent.
This is not even a theory of consciousness though.
It also follows the natural language usage of conscious vs unconscious. But yes, it's not a Theory of Consciousness. Could have called it the Eve Theory of "Sapience" or "Secondary Consciousness," but the usage is defined in the beginning so it seems alright
Kids utilizing AI to create nonconsensual deepfake sexual photos of their peers was a perfectly predictable result of generative AI. This current story is probably just the tip of the iceberg. Outraged parents will be suing school districts (at the taxpayers' expense) and demanding that school staff and administrators use (waste) their time and limited resources to address the problem. Parents will be suing other parents (possibly financially ruining other parents who likely never head of generative AI or know how to search for the app on Little Johny's smartphone). The resources of police departments and prosecutors will be wasted investigating and prosecuting juveniles with unpredictable results (since the laws don't really cover this twist in the evolving world of kid-generated kiddie porn). The most sensible solution to me would be that parent and teacher groups launch a class-action suit against generative AI companies to stop allowing nude bodies to be merged with non-adult faces.
Ultimately this will be a much bigger deal than Google Gemini generating racial diverse photos of Wehrmacht soldiers. But kids will be kids (and I mean that in a creatively generative negative way)...
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/misinformation/beverly-vista-hills-middle-school-ai-images-deepfakes-rcna140775
Then we'd start needing definitions of "non-adult" faces to handle computer-generated faces, and real faces would be measured on the scale, and actual adults would have their faces flagged, and people would mod faces from both directions towards the line until they just barely crossed, and there'd be racial disparities in what types of faces are recognized as "non-adult", and there'd be AI generated filters to age or de-age faces, and then eventually there'd be a VR app that de-ages everyone's face to 6 years old and removes their clothing, and in the darker corners of the Internet there'd be a VR parody app that gives everyone the face of a 6-month old black baby and the body of an 90-year-old white woman.
I don't think we've adjusted enough yet to the social consensus that implies that every child has a basilisk in their pants, and many have access to a camera phone. We're in some sort of pre-9/11 world where we still think "oh, people just don't **do** things like that".
Or perhaps I'm just in a cynical mood right now.
I thought the first use of generative AI way back in its infancy was to age kids' faces for those milk carton pics. Seems like the aging and de-aging of facial features is old hat for AI. And ironically, wasn't there a bit of embarrassment around that app, because it was turning black and Asian kids into white adults?
"We trained our aging program on the person with the most public information about them at every age; Michael Jackson."
>The most sensible solution to me would be that parent and teacher groups launch a class-action suit against generative AI companies to stop allowing nude bodies to be merged with non-adult faces.
To which the kids' immediate and predictable response (should the lawsuit succeed) will be to use existing pre-AI technology to age the faces by four or five years. To which the next group of outraged parents' response will be...?
Yes, but I don't want my taxpayer dollars wasted defending these lawsuits. Go sue Big AI!
But yes, child-generated child porn has been a problem since phones got cameras. and kids will be kids in a creatively negative ways no matter what we do.
What taxpayer dollars? What are you talking about? These *are*, precisely, hypothetical lawsuits against generative AI companies being discussed.
It's not obvious to you? At least in the US, your taxpayer dollars pay for schools. So having teachers and administrators wasting their time trying to stamp out kid-generated kiddie porn wastes your tax dollars.
And taxpayer dollars pay for the police, who have to investigate whether kid-generated kiddie porn (that doesn't depict real kids except for their faces) is a crime. And it pays for the prosecutors who have to decide whether or not to prosecute the juveniles who generated the kid-generated kiddie porn. And your tax dollars have to pay for the courts if these cases come to trial. And your taxpayer dollars pay for the juvenile correction facilities if the juvenile kiddie pornographers get sentenced. And even if the criminal justice system doesn't get involved, your tax dollars pay for the courts whose time is taken up by lawsuits between parents and parents and the school districts.
And finally, your tax dollars have to pay if your school district loses a lawsuit from angry parents over how the kid-generated kiddie porn humiliated and damaged the reputation of their child.
A quick Google search will show that there's already been a slew of lawsuits about pre-AI kid-generated kiddie porn on smartphones in the US. Seems like the legal and financial burden of this latest trend should be directed to the generative AI companies that are enabling this latest twist. And right now it's only still photos AFAIK, but, up next, kid-generated AI videos of kids having sex for bragging purposes or to humiliate their peers!
https://www.google.com/search?q=law+suits+schools+smartphone+porn&oq=law+suits+schools+smartphone+porn&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOTIGCAEQLhhA0gEJMTY5OTFqMGoxqAIAsAIA&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
I really get the sense that you're not actually reading any of the comments you are replying to.
You asked what taxpayer dollars. I answered. And my original post was about the flailing of a public school system and law enforcement over this issue. Pot calling the kettle black?
I'm also not clear on how the AI is supposed to tell a face is "adult". There are plenty of people in their early-mid 20s who could pass as high schoolers. If you're going down to middle school like in the article it's presumably more obvious, but still.
Is Google no longer gray tribe? On my twitter feed right now:
"In Google's 2023 Annual Report, the terms "unbiased", "objective" and "accurate" did not appear even once. Nor did the "Don't Be Evil" motto- it has largely been retired."
This is in addition to the leading designer for Gemini having some *very* Blue Tribe opinions on Twitter.
I'm not anywhere near SF or Silicon Valley and was interested if anyone could tell me how the culture has changed over time.
Google can't be said to be "Grey Tribe" for multiple reasons, chief among which is the fact that Google is a swarm superintelligence that doesn't have political allegiances as we know them. It was perhaps accurate to say that *Googlers* are Grey Tribe, before some threshold year such as 2010 or 2015 or 2017 (Firing of James Damore), but this - due to the nature of how companies bloat themselves as they grow and dilute their culture and due to the specific conditions of Google as a corporation operating in a woke stronghold inside a woke stronghold - is probably no longer true.
The term "Grey Tribe" is also contested, it's (and this is not necessarily my opinion or one I agree with, but one I see worth consideration) the result of Scott giving too much salience to points of difference between Less Wrongers/Rationalists/Tech Nerds/Effective Altruists sub-tribe of the Blue Tribe and ignoring the many similarities. The Blue Tribe has many sub-tribes, wokism is one of the noisiest, but there are also center-ish, the trump refugees, the global non-American non-woke people repulsed by the overt Americanism of Red Tribe (and/or attracted by the shallow globalism of the Blue Tribe), 50 shades of Leftists, etc... The neo-reactionaries -for instance - don't call themselves "The Dark Tribe" or "The Black Tribe", even though they mostly hate and have very radical views compared to the Red Tribe, they might reject the classification but they're still Red Tribe. The heart of tribes such as the Red Tribe and the Blue Tribe will in turn pretend that those like the Grey Tribe and Neo-Reactionaries are fringe and don't represent them, but they secretly and whether they know it or not love the fact that Polarization is such that no independent small sub-tribe can break off the dichotomy of the dominating 2 and that their respective fringe still orbit their center and are still nominal allies (and are still very hated by the rival tribe, who overestimate how common the fringe is in the other tribe and how accepted they are).
It’s definitely left the grey tribe quite some time ago. This latest thing is just the steaming pile of shit in its pants that makes it clear it doesn’t take care of itself.
Fucking childish idiots there.
I can confirm that it was quite woke even 10 years ago. Of course that's not inconsistent with it being mostly "grey tribe". Also, "Don't Be Evil" was retired many years ago, although that's a matter of marketing, not politics and isn't related to any of the CW stuff.
Are "unbiased" and "objective" really Gray Tribe coded? I tend to associate them (when used as tribal signals) more with Blue-coded outlets like NYT or Vox.
The words as slogans are neutral, one might even say "fair and balanced".
I'd say that the Grey Tribe coding is about actual, systematic attempts to move closer toward removing bias and achieving objectivity, recognizing that these things are impossible to achieve, but treating them as a worthy goal nonetheless.
I always assume both of those phrases tend to mean "yay ingroup, boo outgroup" when I hear them.
Most people tend to think of themselves as unbiased and objective. If anything, the Gray Tribe seems more likely to recognize that they themselves are not perfectly objective or unbiased (but then like all people tend to think that makes themselves better than others and therefore *more* unbiased and objective than others, leading to the same conclusion).
> Are "unbiased" and "objective" really Gray Tribe coded?
That is a good question. As a first approximation, people generally perceive that someone has the power, and the words "unbiased" and "objective" mean that those with power should not push their beliefs on everyone.
During the Bush era, the power was pro-war and pro-religion, so "unbiased" and "objective" were used to oppose that.
These days, the power is pro-wokeness, so "unbiased" and "objective" are now used to oppose that.
Vox is more of a "reality has a liberal bias" type org
IMO the "blue/grey" split is largely incoherent in the first place. I think it was just originally made up by Scott so that he could feel superior to the masses by being above their petty squabbles. But that's how everyone thinks! If you divide by partisanship, you get two big tent groups. If you divide more finely by culture, you get dozens of groups. But 3 is not a natural categorization.
I seem to agree with this liberalism-vs-leftism thesis https://www.natesilver.net/p/why-liberalism-and-leftism-are-increasingly that at the moment there does seem to be a divide between two types of "anti-red-tribe" and the difference and antipathy between each of them is as large or even larger than any of them versus the "red tribe". And the immense depth of that divide is an argument why it makes to split groups there, but not divide more finely by culture, as those finer divisions don't really hate/despise each other that much.
Now I'm not sure whether these two current "tribes" is aligned with the same blue/gray split as Scott discussed back then.
I think this is largely correct, but the missing piece is how first-past-the-post voting incentivizes having precisely 2 political coalitions. So right now, socialists and liberals are stuck in a coalition together, and the story of the last 20 years is the socialist faction becoming dominant.
The original "Everything but the Outgroup" article indicated as much:
"(There is a partly-formed attempt to spin off a Grey Tribe typified by libertarian political beliefs, Dawkins-style atheism, vague annoyance that the question of gay rights even comes up, eating paleo, drinking Soylent, calling in rides on Uber, reading lots of blogs, calling American football “sportsball”, getting conspicuously upset about the War on Drugs and the NSA, and listening to filk – but for our current purposes this is a distraction and they can safely be considered part of the Blue Tribe most of the time)"
It's the latter discourses with Scott readers seizing upon the admittedly half-baked Grey Tribe concept to describe themselves that have tried to construct a strict borderline between it and the Blue Tribe, a borderline that never really existed and exists even less now than before.
Very true. And the whole single-axis mapping of the political spectrum has little descriptive power except for finger-pointing and name-calling. Adding "Grays" in the middle or as outliers, or as part of one tribe or the other, obscures and distorts the complexities of social and political beliefs. As someone who many on this list would lump into the "Blue Tribe" I certainly wouldn't include Grays in my group! LoL!
If I am forced to simplify political groupings, I like the old 2-D Political Compass (https://www.politicalcompass.org/relatedBooks). They divide the political spectrum into four quadrants — Left to Right on the X-axis and Libertarian to Authoritarian on the Y-axis. They use the older British definition of Libertarians as classical liberals, which I know some Lefties find uncomfortable. I'd prefer that they'd use authoritarian vs anti-authoritarian for their Y-axis terminology, because that would create less confusion in the US where the definition of Libertarian has morphed most radically from its original meaning — but I digress.
They divide the political quadrants into the Authoritarian Left, Libertarian Left, Authoritarian Right, and Libertarian Right. We'd see people like Mao and Stalin in the upper left corner of the Authoritarian Left quadrant. We'd see people like Bakunin in the lower left corner of the Libertarian Left quadrant. In the upper right quadrant of the Authoritarian Right, we'd see the likes of Hitler and Franco. In the lower right quadrant of the Libertarian Right we'd see people like Ayn Rand. Traditional Democrats would cluster more towards the center of the Y-axis and closer to the center of the X-axis.
Take the Political Compass test here...
https://www.politicalcompass.org/test
And ChatGPT gives a good general overview of how the term Libertarian has changed over the years.
User
How has the definition of Libertarian changed over the decades in the US and the UK?
ChatGPT
The definition of libertarianism has evolved over time, particularly in the US and the UK, reflecting changing political contexts and philosophical developments. Here's a broad overview of how the term has shifted:
Classical Liberalism to Libertarianism: In the 19th century, "libertarian" was often used interchangeably with "classical liberal," emphasizing individual liberty, free markets, and limited government intervention. This tradition persisted into the early 20th century.
20th Century: In the mid-20th century, particularly in the US, the term "libertarian" began to be used more specifically to refer to a form of anti-authoritarianism that emphasized individual freedom, autonomy, and minimal government. This shift was partly in response to the rise of big government policies and the growth of the welfare state.
Modern Libertarianism: In the latter half of the 20th century, especially in the US, libertarianism evolved into a distinct political ideology. It came to encompass a range of beliefs, including a strong commitment to individual liberty, free markets, limited government, and often a skepticism of government intervention in both economic and social matters.
In the UK: In the UK, "libertarian" has often been associated with more left-leaning or socialist ideas, particularly in the 19th century. However, in more recent decades, especially since the 1970s, the term has been increasingly used to refer to a more right-leaning ideology similar to that in the US, emphasizing free markets and limited government.
Variations and Subgroups: Within modern libertarianism, there are variations and subgroups, such as minarchists (who advocate for a minimal state), anarcho-capitalists (who advocate for the abolition of the state in favor of voluntary cooperation), and classical liberals (who emphasize individual rights and limited government).
Overall, the term "libertarian" has evolved from its classical liberal roots to become a distinct ideology emphasizing individual liberty, free markets, and limited government, with variations in its meaning and emphasis between the US and the UK.
Oh my!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans-Hermann_Hoppe#:~:text=Hoppe%20claimed%20that%2C%20of%20all,capitalist%20libertarianism%20is%20logically%20incoherent.
You serious with this? Since you appear to not be American, let me point out that blue tribe hates libertarians just as much as they hate red tribe. They see them as “conservatives who happen to like drugs and let that inform their entire worldview.” And to be honest they’re right about them having a fundamentally different worldview.
Libertarians and Classical Liberals used to have a lot in common, but while libertarians have held their ground, liberalism got popular and jumped the shark. Calling libertarians “basically blue tribe” is an utter lie some leftists might tell themselves but it’s nothing more than a vague headnod to the once philosophically-grounded roots they’ve long since abandoned.
Libertarians aren't one group. There's right and left wing libertarians, even just in the sense of the american sense of the word. There was basically a fork in libertarianism in the early 2010's between right wing libertarians and libertarians who became woke while convincing themselves that the problem is the government being too big (while also saying that the government should engage in racial wealth redistribution for slavery and other nonsense).
This appears to treat tribes as wholly analoguous to political ideologies, which the original post never indicated it would do in the first place. The "gray tribe", as far as I've understood it, are supposed to be libertarian-ish, not a group where libertarianism is supposed to be the entry requirement.
Insofar as I've understood, what would moreso define blue tribe would be things like the secular/religious split (with blues being secular), academic/non-academic split (with the blues being academic), urban/rural split (with blues being urban), alternate sexualities vs. traditional monogamy split (with blues at least more amenable towards the former) and so on. On those axes, the "grays" certainly are blue.
Makes sense - Scott portrays himself as above all this, then he votes for Elizabeth Warren and gives grant money to "systematic racism" type activists
What? They've been unambiguously, categorically, undeniably blue for at least the past decade, and in reality longer.
> Is Google no longer gray tribe?
They haven't been anywhere close to that in a long time.
That's what Damore pointed out in his 2017 memo. And to prove the point, they fired him for it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google's_Ideological_Echo_Chamber
I'm a biomedical science student who will be interning with some scientists in Toronto this summer. The current thinking is that I'll use publically available data to look for some sort of link between air pollution or maybe weather anomalies and heart disease. With that in mind, what are some databases I should investigate, either in Canada, the US, or elsewhere?
The ones I already know about are the CDC's National Vital Statistics site (https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/deaths.htm) and the WONDER system (https://wonder.cdc.gov/Deaths-by-Underlying-Cause.html).
Domestic terrorists and mass shooters in the US often show similar psychological characteristics and behavior in terms of their plans. Seeing as this happens so often in the US, what's the base rate that potential perpetrators get caught? If the base rate is low, why is there a blind spot like this in our surveillance?
If it's framed as a search problem, maybe ten thousand out of three hundred million people in the US are serious suspects:
- Nearly all have anti-social, autistic characteristics or something in the same category of diagnosis (~1 percent of the population) – 3 million people
- Nearly all are male (~50 percent of the population) – 1.5 million people
- Nearly all reveal intention or potentially violent instability ahead of time (as a personal estimate, ~1 percent of the population) – 15 thousand people
Those numbers are obviously rough, but I think the ~10 thousand figure is accurate for the US. What are defense agencies not be able to do that lets this continue to happen?
You're looking at the problem the wrong way around. Suppose you're looking at two people, and you know nothing about either one of them. They have equal likelihoods of becoming mass shooters of whatever variety you have in mind. (The profile you describe makes it clear that you're not referring to "mass shooters" in the sense of people who shoot a lot of other people.)
Now, you learn that one of them is a 17-year-old antisocial male who frequently remarks on how he'd like to shoot certain other people at his school.
This is enough information to raise the likelihood that that one is eventually going to become a mass shooter... by an amount that is too small for you to measure, one that is absolutely dwarfed by the error bars on all of your likelihood estimates. The outcome is so rare that the indicators don't make a noticeable difference.
Or looking at it the same way, but using a different paradigm, you might imagine that you have an intervention you'd like to apply to future mass shooters. You have some kind of cost-benefit test that applies to it.
The filters you describe will not change the outcome of that cost-benefit test; they don't carry enough information.
This is a general problem with attempts to prevent outcomes that don't happen anyway.
So... What do you want them to do? Ethical concerns aside, obviously they can't just kill everyone on the list. That would kill more people than it would save. Monitoring high risk individuals is something I'm sure they do already, but even if they do have all the information necessary to identify them, by your estimates, you still have 15k people you need to monitor. The FBI only has 35k employees, and I'm assuming most of them aren't employed to monitor people. Of course, AI will make this easier, but the tech still isn't there yet.
And even if you do everything perfectly, some people are still going to fall through the cracks, either because they failed to be identified as high risk in the first place or they just circumvented surveillance.
As you said in another comment, most potential attacks are prevented. Given the circumstances and the resources available, US defense agencies do seem to be doing the best they can. You can't expect every attack to be prevented.
Re: circumventing surveillance, this is something important that seems visibly badly handled.
There was a New York Times article (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/06/us/social-media-monitoring-school-shootings.html) about a company that monitors students on the internet to prevent violence – which is unnerving to see, because it severely hampers people’s willingness to put (accurate) data about themselves online.
The median damage from something falling through the cracks isn’t very high but the tails and externalities from those are, which, combined with the trend of events like these, is worrying.
There are a million other reasons not to put accurate data about yourself online. Surely you remember what happened to Scott. Smart people are always going to make it difficult to identify them, and others will continue to naively plaster personal information on the internet. The point is to neutralize all of the low-hanging fruit, because despite their stupidity, they can still cause a massive amount of damage. Unfortunately, the state does not have enough resources to prevent every attack, and thus they will go after the ones who are the most cost-effective to stop.
Also, profiling like this is likely to backfire by making the targeted group feel targeted, resulting in political agitation.
Say you have a son who is diagnosed with Asperger's, a mild form of autism, at age 11. (By the way, while it's true that several shooters have been diagnosed with autism, most people with Asperger's are introverted and inhibited. I don't know the stats, but it would not surprise me to hear that they are *less* prone to violence than boys who do not have a psychiatric diagnosis.) Your boy now meets 2 of the 3 criteria. Do you want the doctor who diagnosed him to be obligated to send a report to defense agencies, so that, as long as he is in school, they can scan his online communications and school reports for evidence of either intent to shoot or violent instability. Because if your idea goes into effect, the doctor will have to do it. Let's say the doctor does. So one day your son has an argument with a friend over Minecraft and texts "I hate you! Drop dead!" Now whoever is monitoring him has a piece of evidence that he is violent. Then he and another kid get in a little shoving match at school, and the "fistfight" appears in the teacher's report on your son. Now he's met the violence criterion twice. Meanwhile, you know that he's a cheerful kid who has it together and has several good friends. Sure, he bickers with them sometimes. All kids do that. Want to go tell the authorities your point of view and try to get him off the watch list? Good luck with that.
This is a really good point, and I am revising what I think.
I found this document after posting the initial question: https://www.secretservice.gov/sites/default/files/reports/2021-03/USSS%20Averting%20Targeted%20School%20Violence.2021.03.pdf . It covers ~70 failed attacks from 2006 to 2018.
Most potential perpetrators do not end up committing an attack because they are caught early on. Successful perpetrators would have to both 1) be anti-social enough to come up with a plan, 2) competent enough to go through with it – which would select heavily for Asperger's, rather than the reverse. Selecting people to monitor out of a large population for risk would have a high cost per false negative.
The sheer number of these events has been rising at a high rate for the last twenty years, which is deeply concerning. What do you think about anonymized approaches, like analyzing written homework assignments? This be done at much less than John Schilling's ~$5,000 per high-risk suspect, without the same privacy concerns.
So, the plan as I understand it isL
1) "Analyze written homework assignments"
2) ???
3) Profit, er, Fewer Mass Shootings!
The first part of that plan *might* be doable for $5000/person, say by delegating it to a modified chatbot. But even there, don't underestimate the overhead costs of having every homework assignment scanned and submitted to the AI.
What's the second part? When Big Brother Gemini says "Autistic Timmy's homework indicates a 2.7% chance of his shooting up his school at the next convenient opportunity", what are you going to *do* with that information, and what is it going to cost for you to do that, and how is it going to actually prevent Autistic Timmy from shooting up the school?
No, hiring a therapist to talk to Timmy isn't going to make him not shoot up the school. What else have you got?
Gun control. Crimes require means as well as motivation.
If it accomplishes anything, it will jt hasten the inevitable day when the wannabe mass murderers switch to explosives and incendiaries. And that will not be an improvement. This is mostly an imitation game, and you have no idea how lucky we are that Klebold and Harris weren't able to get their IEDs to work. Sooner or later, someone will get it "right", and others will take note.
Did that happen every time gun control has been implemented?
The therapy is less than useful per se. But the feeling of being caught by your school on grounds that other people noticed you were making violent plans or in a violent headspace – and then being grilled about what you were thinking – is what deters this. The whole fantasy is kind of nullified. If this doesn’t apply to the cases that get caught, it applies to the ones that fall through.
When I was in third grade (~2 years after the Sandy Hook attack), I said something with violent influence on a written assignment, and a teacher noticed. They called the principal of my elementary school, who in turn put me in a room and called my parents, who were told to the effect: “be thankful: this is concerning, we’ll be sure to monitor your middle-eastern-looking kiddo and give him some lessons – but hey, we didn’t call the cops”. From that (and my parent’s reaction), I learned our thoughts can and are being read by authority, and that our actions, in being informed by our thoughts, can and do contain information that indicates greater patterns in our thoughts – even if we try to hide them.
With more interactive systems, maybe Big Brother Gemini will be able to neuter violent inclination early on. Persuasion seems like a relatively simple RL problem at scale (chatbots can do far more complex procedural things), and the overhead is already being paid by Google’s safety team.
We don’t need chatbots necessarily. With transformer encoders, you can measure more dimensions of the relationships between two written documents. All schools use the same turn-in software as it stands, which already runs a ton of processing on every assignment, so the overhead is to the companies less than the schools. When people read Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto they’re more likely to use the word “surrogate” in text they write afterwards to adapt to the way that Kaczynski uses language (both the framing and repetition), *especially* if they’re being influenced by his ideas or perceive it as high status.
There’s the issue of when a surveillance technology provides credible evidence of its existence, people will price that into their behavior. Good surveillance that uses these methods might provide deliberate disinformation, like the turn-in software informing teachers that the suspected students show “signs of disengagement or asocial behavior in online class communications and school emails” (which violent actors usually do, but that doesn’t indicate written assignments as the factor).
I really don't think this is going to work the way you want it to. These people are writing their thoughts and plans on homework assignments they know their teachers are going to read, and they're posting them on social media hoping their friends will read them. They're not ashamed or afraid of anyone finding out, they *want* people to find out. They're still in the phase where they can hope that if other people know how much they are suffering, those people will do something to help.
That hope doesn't last forever, of course. If nobody does anything to help, it usually turns into despair and enduring misery; sometimes it turns into bloody violent retribution and a quick glorious end. If the thing people do to "help" is to ritually humiliate Timmy and send him off on the short bus, or back to the class in front of which he was humiliated, do you really think that makes them *less* likely to turn to Plan B?
And if Timmy's humiliation deters three more Timmies from folllowing his path, then the thing that's being deterred is the "write about your feelings and hope someone notices" part. Not the "there's no hope, might as well go out in a blaze of glory" part, because when they get to that point they're beyond humiliation.
You're dealing with a bunch of people who are suffering from pneumonia, and your "solution" is to punish them every time they cough because coughing is the first warning sign of pneumonia.
This is pretty clearly a case of the cure being worse than the disease. Mass shooters don't kill that many people in relative terms, so it's a pretty bad hill to found your dystopian police state on.
Well, I totally get being horrified by mass shootings, but I don't think your plan is realistic. It's sort of like trying to predict who's going to cause a fatal auto accident this month. We know who's likeliest to: People with lots of speeding tickets, moving violations, DUI's, previous. accidents. There are a LOT of people like that, Maybe 5 % or so of drivers. There are 233 million US drivers, so about 10 million high risk drivers. But we have 4000 auto fatalities per month in the US, and while the high risk drivers will no doubt have caused more than their share, they will not have caused all of them. Some will have been caused by people with clean driving records. Let's say the high risk drivers, while only 5% of the drivers, caused 75% of the fatal accidents. So out of these 10 million high risk drivers, only 3000 caused a fatal accident. Hardly any of them did. Trying to pick the school shooters out of the population of fucked up young males who are likelier than most to be a shooter is the same way. You know what haystack to look in, but you're trying to find a needle in it.
There is no good way to pick out the real shooters-to-be from the large group of kids at risk for becoming shooters. I doubt that even highly invasive government investigations would be able to do it -- likewise, even highly invasive government investigations would not be able to pick out the very few bad drivers who are going to cause fatal accidents this month from the ones that are not. Let's say you were willing to be very invasive. The government gets to monitor their location and cell phone use, and determine how much texting and internet browsing they do while driving. It gets to check the person's purchases and find out now much alcohol they buy each day. These horrible invasive approaches will make prediction of fatalities better, but it will still be terrible. Maybe now you will have identified the 3 million riskiest drivers, who are responsible for 85% of accidents. But still, the vast majority of even these awful drivers will not have caused a fatality. And some fatalities will still have been caused by good drivers. See how it works? You can't get away from looking for a needle in a haystack, unless, with the kids at risk for school shootings, you had an agent assigned to eavesdrop on all their communications and follow them around all day. You'd have to assign an agent to every one of those 10000 kids.
School shooters may look like low-hanging fruit -- a source of murders that is easy to get rid of. But it's not. It's high in the tree. Also, if you want to be coldly statistical about it, mass shootings account for a tiny percentage of violent deaths in the US. Here's a chart of deaths from mass shootings over the last 20 or so years: https://www.statista.com/statistics/811504/mass-shooting-victims-in-the-united-states-by-fatalities-and-injuries/ There have been only 1 or 2 years in the last 30 when the number exceeded 100. On average it's maybe 40/year over the last few years. And while the number of fatalities per year is going up, it is not going up very fast.
In comparison, there are about 10,000 murders per year, and in half of them someone is killed by a person they know. https://www.statista.com/statistics/195327/murder-in-the-us-by-relationship-of-victim-to-offender/
There are 40,000 - 50,000 highway deaths per year.
Black americans commit more homicides every year than there have been people killed by terrorism since and including 9/11. Is this "deeply concerning"? Is the thousands of assaults, muggings and rapes on top of this concerning?
Putting more police into high-risk (i.e. high % black population) neighbourhoods would cost multiple orders of magnitude less per life saved than your mass surveillance state would. So why on earth aren't you advocating for more police?
These are separate classes of risks.
Consider that the open internet is scraped and monitored quite often for all kinds of things. Homework assignments are already analyzed by turn-in software to check for plagiarism, and false positives are reviewed by teachers. If you use the same methods to measure influence to things written by extremists or terrorists, this seems in turn much cheaper than funding aggressive expansion of the police force.
Well once you find a single jot of evidence that this homework scraping could accomplish anything, be sure to let us know.
Sure! The basic idea is that what people write is influenced in the near term by what they’ve read.
Something like this (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_semantic_analysis) using better vector embeddings than word frequency might show results.
We can use mere word2vec to predict psychosis with reasonable accuracy (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6565626/). The paper has bad methodology but the point is made clearly.
Sometimes people accidentally repeat words in a paragraph. The same happens with words you’ve just learned or heard. The history of your dictionary searches could likely predict the books you’ve been reading. These all reveal psychological state, sometimes very uncannily, and advanced language models can use these for specific inference.
What would you consider evidence?
Ok, so you've identified the 10K most likely suspects. What now?
This is my question
[edit: sorry if I was being too terse. I am wondering why security or defense agencies can't or don't make use of information like this.]
My point is there's not much that they can do, absent concrete evidence that one of these people is planning a crime. This is as it should be. Presumption of innocence and all that good stuff.
Make use of it how?
Or, to borrow a phrase: what now?
There are many forms of monitoring that the Patriot Act / Freedom Act etc. should allow for, as well as granting search warrants as any individual becomes more at risk of violence. Often therapy or some form of forced but unobtrusive socialization can make the difference between someone acting violently or not.
Or, to borrow a phrase: sorry if I was being too terse. I am wondering why security or defense agencies can't or don't make use of information like this.
Oh I am fairly sure they do, to the extent permitted by the legal system they operate under. In other words, much of what you propose can be (and is? ) implemented in China, but is contentious here in the USA. Jay Edgar Hoover did pretty well at it. That the planet will become perfectly surveilled in the not too distant future is an outcome that I think is very difficult to avoid.
Human lives are commonly estimated as being worth ~$10E6 in modern industrialized nations. If the average terrorist/mass shooter/serial killer will kill ten people, then a countermeasure that works half the time is cost-effective at $50E6 or less. If the countermeasure starts with "here are 10,000 suspects, one of whom will be the next big killer", you can afford to spend $5000 on each of them.
What are you going to do with $5000 that gives you a better-than-even chance of figuring out whether the guy who was assessed at 0.01% probability of being the next big killer, is actually that guy?
Your estimates are assuming that these are uncorrelated, but, for example, bring male and autism are correlated.
The other thing the government can't do in the US - thanks to the first amendment - is to reduce recruitment by suppressing news stories glorifying mass shooters.
A more cynical take is that the government is maximising utility by providing television entertainment for millions of viewers at the expense of a relatively small number of people getting shot.
IMO, the realistic blackpill is that the media will always find something that bleeds to lead. The government has nothing to do with it. And likewise, enabling mass shooters does not "provide entertainment" because lurid crime news stories are limited by the number of news stories that can be active at one time more than the supply.
It's an amusing take. Could make a good short story that compares our society to a society that's more explicit about that trade (like in The Hunger Games or something).
That’s true, I think it would be hard to tell for any major perpetrator in the recent past whether they would turn violent or not, even shortly before their attack. But the space of people is still relatively small.
The secret service has a report that covers a number of failed attacks: https://www.secretservice.gov/sites/default/files/reports/2021-03/USSS%20Averting%20Targeted%20School%20Violence.2021.03.pdf
It seems most potential attacks are caught beforehand. Most perpetrators and potential perpetrators often aren’t competent planners.
Looking for a good book about the energy industry. Something that covers most everything (carbon based, nuclear, solar, wind, etc). Some technical depth would be good but obviously it will be limited if it covers everything. Any recommendations?
Vaclav Smil wrote about this often. There's "Energy and Civilization: A History" from 2017. I like "How The World Really Works" which is accessible to anyone, mostly about energy and climate plus the scale and difficulty of transition required, but touches on energy sources.
The Prize by Yergin is one of my favorite reads, it's about oil history.
Is this the book you're talking about? It's the only one I coould find on Amazon by him. Looks interesting, though...
https://www.amazon.com/Energy-World-History-Vaclav-Smil-ebook/dp/B07SWQ8JKY/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1GLFHNN2N3H1Y&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.POhsAAdUBmx7uurb2XJG2Fnj3DsXYwSPlpqC7S698tQD_Nz1rbE0sPQ7HoKWtqkGGR0c9_NsqluGzV9yzy7Luzb-GgzR-IgfPKU6HT0CTk6OrhHQdORvlEjfxgG3ClJ6AXOqGBxutWiiNsM5dFnu4ctqzymlW_P4UrTu3eAOQaGPdTO85_ejLMJ4vcFjH0jh94lrjlkBqUdi8LXik23i_1Ouq2TOfOpkPh4QzvrdGn4.abG-e3O2Klu1VQxWM2mbjKaULLAgORqloy96OHcNiHM&dib_tag=se&keywords=energy+and+civilization+a+history+by+vaclav+smil&qid=1709355679&s=books&sprefix=Energy+and+Civilization%3A+A+History%2Cstripbooks%2C646&sr=1-1
More lecture series than book, but The Science of Energy by Michael Wysession sounds like exactly what you’re looking for, available on Audible. It’s in-depth enough that I’ve given it multiple listens and learned a ton even as a civil/mechanical engineering graduate who already knew a lot on the topic, but it’s geared towards a more general audience.
I see the UAP story pop up from time to time ... and remain a complete disbeliever.
Reports come from only military aircraft, typically from complex computer controlled aircraft equipment. Reports never come from commercial or private aviation despite these flights outnumbering military flights by some staggering amount.
Consider, that we're not using Isaac Newton's Radar anymore. Every image presented is a collection of data. Objects presented on a screen are assembled from data in a table or database, i.e. direction, strength, etc. Most of the equipment isn't on it's first generation, but has undergone several hardware and software upgrades. That means I'm writing code to interface someone else's system, on proprietary interfaces, which means we're writing the handshaking code too. If my software doesn't properly address memory, or someone else's software walks on my storage locations, we get garbage ... garbage which may just look like another 'flying' object. Did you think there are 10,000 pairs of eyeballs combing through this stuff?
Commercial aircraft just never seem to report UAPs, despite having hundreds of bored passengers, carrying cameras, taking pictures of clouds and what-not ... yet never seem to report a UAP. Private aviation (pop in his Cessna) and carrying a phone with a camera never seems to see a UAP either.
If your objection to UAPs is that the multiple independent sensors and detection systems are not doing specifically what they're designed and validated to do at the expense of billions of dollars, and that these artifacts appear across multiple generations of these systems, some of which were developed independently, or that it's a simple software glitch in processing accessing this sensor data that has been present for multiple iterations of these systems and never detected, then I don't know what to say. There are good objections to UAPs, but I don't think this is one of them.
Many reports have also been accompanied by visual confirmation, so that wouldn't track. If you want to dismiss eyewitness testimony given its unreliability, then it could indicate an equipment problem, and I can only assume the military brass would have shown *considerably* more interest in tracking the issue down as it compromises military effectiveness.
Military radar and other sensors have considerably more resolution and sensitivity than commercial radar. This can indeed produce false positives, which is why you have multiple sensors to cross check.
It's also incorrect to say commercial airline or private pilots never see UAPs. The FAA doesn't accept UAP reports, so these are reported to a civilian organization if the pilot even bothers to do so: https://www.forbes.com/sites/suzannerowankelleher/2021/06/26/faa-ufo-uap-sightings-pilots/?sh=6a109cb41a46
It's fine to be skeptical, but it's way too early to be so dismissive. There's a lot of data that permits many possible explanations, some mundane and some fantastical, but whatever the final verdict, it almost certainly won't be trivial.
Are there any examples of moves from famous human chess games that were previously considered brilliant but are now known to be unsound due to computer analysis?
Not a huge chess guy, but you may want to look into Mikhail Tal, "the Magician from Riga" specifically. He was renowned for his strategy of
A) make the board as complicated as possible by threatening everywhere simultaneously
B) hope the opponent screws up.
He would often make a "Tal move", which were moves that looked 0 iq but magically led to checkmate like 11 turns later. Tal moves don't often survive the scrutiny of computer analysis, but they're strong anyway because human opponents don't have time to calculate the entire search tree.
I had the pleasure of meeting him and photographing him at a chess tournament In NYC in the early 90s. He was all legend and no competitor at that point, but you could feel the love.
wikipedia says he passed away in 1992. quite lucky of you to have caught the legend on his way out.
Wow, that is close. Whatever tournament it was, a Danish fellow lost to a Russian fellow.
There are probably better answers, but in the Opera House Game, on move 8, Morphy developed Nc3, instead of playing Qxb7; a relative pawn sacrifice. Engines say Qxb7 is better. However, this is of course typical of Morphy, and the Romantic Era of chess generally, and this possibility was already noted by Lasker who remarked that Morphy was an artist, not a butcher. Moreover, Nc3 is still winning.
More relevant, but still not exactly what you're talking about, is Mikhail Tal vs Andres Vooremaa in which on move 14 Tal sacrificed his knight with Qg3. This isn't strictly unsound, as it isn't losing, but the engine says that after the sacrifice White is equal, whereas if he protected the knight (fxe5) it would have been +1.1.
Many ? Take any random famous game and you have a good chance of finding moves that are computer refuted but still good at the human level. For a precise example, Kasparov -Topalov Wijk aan Zee 1999, in my opinion the most beautiful game in chess history.
apropos of nothing, here is a wonderful example of (unless I miss my guess) an unsung hero of words, a laborer in the trenches deep in the dictionary yet spinning their own beauty into the world of words, just in case it happens to catch and inform some hapless writer looking for advice on capitalization like I did. Fortunately I can share a little of my joy. Worth a click:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/are-season-names-capitalized
That was amusing. Thx
That was a very nice entry, thank you for sharing!
I sure wish whoever wrote that was allowed to put down their name or alias or something, so they'd know how much they made my day.
Made so much weirder as a bear violently dismantled a bird feeder of ours (as well as lawn furniture) some months ago!
Yet, I've never seen an explanation for why the names of the seasons aren't considered proper nouns like the days of the week and months. I asked ChatGPT and it spat out the same old pablum that seasons aren't like days of the week because they're "general periods of time" and not specific times within a cycle. Nonsense! Astronomically seasons are well-defined right down to the minute they begin. And they happen in recurring cycles like the days of the week. Ironically, there's no astronomical reason to divide a week into seven days, but there is an astronomical way to define a season.
You
What is the history of categorizing seasons as regular nouns but days of the week as proper nouns?
ChatGPT
The distinction between categorizing seasons as regular nouns and days of the week as proper nouns is rooted in the way language has evolved and how different cultures have viewed these concepts.
Seasons as Regular Nouns: Seasons are considered regular nouns because they are viewed as general periods of time that recur cyclically. The concept of seasons is universal and not tied to specific instances or unique identities. In many languages, including English, seasons are described using common nouns because they are seen as part of a natural cycle rather than as individual, unique entities.
Days of the Week as Proper Nouns: The names of the days of the week are considered proper nouns because they are specific names given to each day within a recurring cycle. Each day has its own unique identity and is treated as a distinct entity. This distinction likely originated from the historical association of each day with specific celestial bodies, deities, or religious observances, which gave them a special significance beyond just being a part of a cycle.
In summary, the categorization of seasons as regular nouns and days of the week as proper nouns is a reflection of how language and culture have evolved to categorize and conceptualize these different aspects of time.
Unless you follow strict astronomical rules, seasons are squishier
Traditionally spring is when you plant crops, summer is when you turn the AC on, autumn is when the leaves change color and winter is when you break out the toboggan and snow shovel.
All of these vary a lot by latitude, altitude and proximity to large bodies of water.
In Mpls television weathermen generally don’t start talking about meteorological spring until mid April. But yesterday, February 26 was definitely astronomical winter and the high temperature was 65 F. Anyone taking a run or bicycle ride would have called it spring. So ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> But yesterday, February 26 was definitely astronomical winter
What? Astronomical winter would end in early February. You're well into spring by the 26th.
I know the verses in The Bible that say "thou shalt not kill" are more correctly translated as "thou shalt not murder". Is the same generally true for the commandments against taking life in Buddhist and Hindu scriptures, or are those actually meant to be about killing in general?
The Buddhists don't distinguish between murder and legal killings. It's all violence that results in a karmic burden on the perpetrator(s). But it's important to note that Talmudic interpretations of the 6th Commandment extended its meaning to encompass any act of violence against others, including verbal attacks such as gossip, slander, and shaming a person in public...
https://www.hebrew4christians.com/Scripture/Torah/Ten_Cmds/Sixth_Cmd/sixth_cmd.html
From the Dhammapada, Chapter 10, "On Violence"...
129. All tremble at violence; all fear death. Putting oneself in the place of another, one should not kill nor cause another to kill.
130. All tremble at violence; life is dear to all. Putting oneself in the place of another, one should not kill nor cause another to kill.
131. One who, while himself seeking happiness, oppresses with violence other beings who also desire happiness, will not attain happiness hereafter.
132. One who, while himself seeking happiness, does not oppress with violence other beings who also desire happiness, will find happiness hereafter.
Talmud believes that words are violence? Is this... woke?
I guess it depends on what your definition of "woke" is. The definition varies for the unwoked and the awoken. And AFAICS even within those camps there there's little agreement about what makes woke woke. But the idea that words can harm others goes back a long way, and it's certainly not unique to Judaism.
Matthew 5:21-22 (American Standard Version)
21 Ye have heard that it was said to them of old time, Thou shalt not kill; and whosoever shall kill shall be in danger of the judgment:
22 but I say unto you, that everyone who is angry with his brother shall be in danger of the judgment; and whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca [an expression of contempt], shall be in danger of the council; and whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of the hell of fire.
Buddhism has the concept of the four abstentions of sammā-vācā (i.e. "Right Speech") which are abstaining from lying, from divisive speech, from abusive speech, and from idle chatter because those things can cause others suffering.
Modern speech-as-violence doctrines seem to add a fifth component to mix — speech that triggers upset in the hearer that doesn't involve insults, slander, shaming, or threats (i.e. topics that trigger agitation in the hearer). From what I've seen, the claim that discussing certain topics inflicts violence on others by disrupting their comfort bubbles is shared by both the Leftie social justice woke and the Christian Right.
In Hinduism, the ideal is ahimsa, which means non-violence, but not to the extreme of pacifism. The idea is that you should try hard to avoid violence, but be ready to fight and kill if it comes to that. This is central to the Bhagavad Gita, where warrior Arjuna is told directly by God that he must fight and kill the family members and mentors who are opposing him (that sounds brutal, but well, Krishna sells it quite well, and the broader context of the Mahabharata makes very clear that the good guys tried very, very hard to avoid a war).
Buddha was pretty much a pacifist, even extending to animal life in some ways. There are five jobs that are prohibited for a Buddhist: trading in weapons, human beings, meat, intoxicants, and poison. So from what I know it is tricky to find wiggle room in the Buddha's words for killing. That doesn't stop some Buddhists from doing precisely that though (Jainism is one of the only religions that never developed theories of just war).
>There are five jobs that are prohibited for a Buddhist: trading in weapons, human beings, meat, intoxicants, and poison.
As a hobby chemist, I'm curious about more detail about the poison case.
a) Even in the Buddha's day, lye used in soapmaking was an example of a poisonous (strictly speaking, corrosive) intermediate used to produce a (mostly) harmless final product
b) "The dose makes the poison" This is more spectacularly obvious in modern times (people have poisoned themselves with vitamin A), but, even in the Buddha's day any number of folk medicines could be toxic
How did they deal with these cases?
I think a prohibition against killing in general is likely incompatible with civilization -- sourcing food and space will be difficult without killing plants.
Also, any religion which is the ideology of any successful state is very unlikely to endorse radical pacifism for the simple reason that radically pacifism is not a winning strategy in interstate anarchy settings which dominated most of history.
In regards to not killing plants, one of the reasons that Jains are not only vegetarians but also abstain from eating root vegetables is that they don't want to kill the plants.
Although Buddhism overall has had less violent history than Christianity, Islam, Judaism, or secular religions such as Marxism and Atheism, it has not been completely non-violent in all times and places. The Dalai Lamas kept standing armies, and at least among the Mahayana of Tibet,a there were tantric rituals to help cleanse the karmic burdens of soldiers who had killed enemies (sorry, but I can't find the link to those texts, anymore).
Various Buddhist sects in 16th Century Japan formed armies which they used to protect themselves and to influence the tumultuous politics and wars of the Warring States Period. The Shoguns when they came to power stamped them out.
We also have the examples of Sri Lanka where Buddhists have been willing to wage war on the Tamils, and of Myanmar where militant Buddhists are leading a genocidal campaign against the Muslim Rohingya.
There is a lot of boredom these days, which Hoffer mentions as well: "There is perhaps no more reliable indicator of a society’s ripeness for a mass movement than the prevalence of unrelieved boredom." Are we in the midst of a mass movement, or is one on the horizon?
Most replies are misunderstanding what Hoffer meant by bored. Here's a slightly longer quote from my copy of The True Believer:
"When people are bored, it is primarily with their own selves that they are bored. The consciousness of a barren, meaningless existence is the main fountainhead of boredom. People who are not conscious of their individual separateness, as is the case with those who are members of a compact tribe, church, party, etcetcra, are not accessible to boredom. The differentiated individual is free of boredom only when he is engaged either in creative work or some absorbing occupation or when he is wholly engrossed in the struggle for existence. Please-chasing and dissipation are ineffective palliatives. Where people live autonomous lives and are not badly off, yet are without abilities or opportunities for creative work or useful action, there is no telling to what desperate and fantastic shifts they might resort in order to give meaning and purpose to their lives. "
In other words, boredom is a lack of purpose, meaning, or creative work. Staring at your phone is pleasure-seeking and dissipation, which is an "ineffective palliative". Which, yeah, I think society is starting to sense that. Doomscrolling is not satisfying, it doesn't give you purpose, it just fills time. And there are not many opportunities for creative work or useful action these days.
Yum. Give me a good potboiler novel, paper or ebook, and I'll ignore work — creative or otherwise. And I spend hours online each day researching questions across a wide range of subjects that will have no use whatsoever to my struggle for survival. Yay! I'm bored! Give me more boredom! And my life is purposeless. I'm going to die without doing anything significant. Even so, I'm enjoying it immensely. Purpose is for small minds.
This is very good. Imo.
Yeah, this is an excellent explanation. Better to get a copy and read the full analysis that Hoffer provides, it's very well done and well written.
>The differentiated individual is free of boredom only when he is engaged either in creative work or some absorbing occupation or when he is wholly engrossed in the struggle for existence.
If the guy insists on using words by non-standard meaning, you can't really call it a mis-understanding. It's just poor writing. Had he written instead 'There is perhaps no more reliable indicator of a society’s ripeness for a mass movement than the prevalence of lack of purpose and meaning at large.", replies would have been different.
People are dissatisfied, not bored.
I haven't been bored since 2014. Seriously. I remember the true, stark, and lifeless boredom of my childhood in the 80s/90s pretty well still. At any given moment now I can remove a personal sized computer from my pocket and have instant access to infinite sources of distraction and entertainment that would have looked like literal magic in 1990.
Amen to that!
Building on what Bldysabba says, I don't think we have an abundance of boredom as we normally categorize it. I think we have a significant lack of *purpose* and also *meaning.*
We have lots of distractions, mostly our phones but also the internet generally, that stop us from feeling normal low levels of boredom that we typically associate with that feeling. But I think boredom is still related to what we often feel, which is ultimately lack of purpose and meaning. We don't seem to get involved in meaningful, fulfilling activities nearly as often. We get lost in daily entertainment and many videos of things that look like fun, without engaging first hand in things that would actually be fun and give us a more complete positive feeling.
This hit the nail on the head. I don't watch TV anymore, does anyone?, and apart from reading and writing, I do several physical pursuits everyday, and different ones throughout the year. The purpose is never to change the world, but to learn, stay vibrant, meet people. This was normal for my parents generation, but seems to have been lost.
I would argue the opposite - we have never had so much easy and cheap entertainment, and we have a dangerous lack of boredom, resulting in a shortage of movement, whether at an individual or societal level
I may be a bit too romantic about it, but I feel like easy and cheap entertainment doesn't relieve boredom but merely suppresses it, like stimulants suppress appetite but don't actually satisfy your hunger.
Agreed
This is much closer to my view of it as well.
My partner and I are in our 30's, both ACX readers who are married due in part to this blog. We were planning to have children this year but recently found out that we both technically qualify for an Asperger's/high-functioning ASD diagnosis. (We weren't looking to get diagnosed; one of us was seeking ADHD treatment and got diagnosed that way, and the other of us found out about a childhood Asperger's diagnosis that had been kept a secret.) We are both high-functioning and independent, if a little neurotic, but we are worried that combining our genes could result in a greater chance of us having a child who is autistic to the point of being extremely disabled. Can any doctors/scientists here help us think through the following:
1) What is the increase in our risk of having a severely disabled, low-functioning child by chance, given we both have mild ASD?
2) Is it worth doing IVF to select for genes less likely to cause developmental disorders up front?
3) Can anyone recommend genetic counselors in the Bay Area who are smart and will take us seriously? So far, it seems like most medical providers do not know how to deal with the concerns of autistic adults, especially prospective parents. It feels like doctors are either brushing us off or patronizing us.
Thank you!
Thank you all who replied! Quick update, we had our first meeting with a genetic counselor today. We weren't expecting much based on past experiences with our health insurance, but it turns out Kaiser has just rolled out a re-vamped and updated genetic testing program this week and it's miles ahead of what other parents went through just a few years ago. They now offer more comprehensive standard tests plus chromosomal microarray (CMA) for patients like us with diagnosed developmental disorders. While imperfect, CMA seems to be the first step forward for some kind of genetic autism screening, particularly concerning severe intellectual impairment, which is what we are most worried about.
Thank you for all this information, as it helped us ask the right questions.
Just spotted this comment! Chromosomal microarray picks up on copy-number variations, which are one of the major causes of the "complex autism" I alluded to. They're not particularly common in people with "milder" autisms, especially people of well-above-average intelligence, but this is not to say they're unheard of -- some CNVs have mild phenotypes and don't cause "disability" per se. The presentation of CNVs is really variable within families, so if one is passed down, it can result in anywhere from "significantly higher-functioning than parents" to more significant levels of disability. IMO given how bell curves work it's fairly unlikely for there to be many people with CNVs amongst ACX readers, but it's not strictly impossible.
Individual CNVs are very different to one another, and if any given one is found it'll have different implications to any other. A lot of genetic counsellors are...not great with CNVs, because they're individually very rare and they have serious clinician's illusion/ascertainment bias.
Thank you, do you think that a company like Orchid would be better equipped to discuss these issues with us?
If you do find a CNV, the research you can do on your own is likely better than that of any genetic counsellor or company. They're all very different to one another, and I wouldn't expect anyone who doesn't specialize in a particular one to be 1. up-to-date on the literature and 2. have really internalized "the profile of any given CNV is super broad, and includes literally-no-symptoms-at-all". If you do run into someone who researches a particular one, though, they're probably at least as excited to meet you as the inverse (we don't have much data on 'mild' CNVs).
(This is assuming you're reasonably confident in interpreting the medical literature, patient groups, etc., so it doesn't scale infinitely, but the things I tend to hear from counsellors or companies tend to be below the 'what do you get from searching Google Scholar as a reasonably comfortable-with-research person' threshold.)
This is an area in which I've done a lot of research. No one has seriously researched "how many children of autistic parents are autistic" -- and they couldn't, really, because autism diagnosis is so unclear and we're nowhere near even having good base rates -- but there's a lot you can read into what we do know.
A large share of all diagnosed "severe autism" does not naturally cluster with ASDs. "Syndromic autism" -- autism in the context of an identifiable genetic disorder -- is a relatively large share of all diagnosis; every single intellectual disability syndrome is "associated with" autism, including ones radically unlike autism (15% of people with Williams syndrome, a disorder with a characteristic behavioural phenotype of "extreme outgoingness", "strong social interest", and "piercing eye contact", are diagnosed with autism). About 20%-ish (maybe more?) of diagnosed ASDs are "complex", which means they're associated with birth defects or dysmorphic features; as time goes on, more and more "complex autism" is discovered to be caused by ever-rarer genetic disorders. "Complexity" is strongly correlated with severity.
I think the significant majority of syndromic and complex autism isn't autism at all, but a general diagnostic substitution because of the greater recognition of "autism" as a label compared to "intellectual disability". Some genetic syndromes seem genuinely associated with autism (e.g. sex chromosome aneuploidies), but -- as you'd expect -- these tend to be the *mildest* of all developmental syndromes, the ones so mild most people with them are never diagnosed, because we don't generally karyotype people because they're a little dyslexic and had speech therapy.
The "milder" autisms tend to be much more heritable, and are rarely associated with de novo mutations, which the "severe" autisms far more often are.
Neither Kanner nor Asperger conceptualized autism as something that could coexist with severe intellectual disability. Kanner thought the appearance of intellectual disability was flatly wrong, and that even autistic kids who seemed significantly impaired at a brief interaction were far smarter than they came across. Asperger thought the association was genuine, and Frith translates him as discussing "severe retardation", but this is a seeming mistranslation -- his actual descriptions correspond to mild or upper moderate ID. This same range is where Kanner found the "most disabled" of the children he diagnosed were functioning at thirty years later, and these were likely underestimates, given they had been institutionalized for decades and had little exposure to schooling. The "lowest-functioning" autisms are a much more recent construct, and remain questionably related to anything Kanner or Asperger saw. (People substantially overestimate the gap between their patients.)
None of this is to say "mildly autistic" parents never have "severely autistic" children, though the severity of autism is complicated and most people travel to multiple points-on-the-spectrum in their lives. But the connections are very murky and absolutely not additive. Everything we know implies "mildly autistic" parents will usually have "mildly autistic" children.
(postscript: I have a very strong family history of autism and, to my knowledge, zero relatives with the stereotypically "low-functioning" profile)
Thank you so much! This is a very thoughtful response.
Why do parents keep things like this secret?
Some places discriminate against people with some diagnoses. And even if they do not today, there is no guarantee they won't change their mind tomorrow.
There are a couple of SSC posts on this topic:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/28/assortative-mating-and-autism/
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/13/autism-and-intelligence-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/
Thank you, this seems close to the information I am looking for!
It seems like the SSC survey found people with mild autistic traits don't necessarily have increased risk of very autistic children but the sample size was pretty small. However Emily Oster found the opposite in larger datasets: populations with greater proportions of mildly autistic parents had a greater chance of producing more severely autistic children. It is helpful at least to know the likelihood is so small that the data is fairly noisy; if there were a strong correlation, perhaps this question would have a more obvious answer?
Epistemic status: personal intuition, not actual medical advice.
I'm also high functioning ASD in my 30s, and my girlfriend is on the spectrum too but less high functioning due to a mix of CPTSD, depression, chronic fatigue, social anxiety and work related burnout. There is also some non-neurodivergency related history of health issues in the family as well, so we decided against having biological kids.
But in your case, I'd totally go for it. Common sense tells me to expect that on average your child would be about as high functioning as you and your partner, with possible deviations to either sides. And as you are in the top part of spectrum the risk of having disabled autistic child may be just a bit highter than average, but the chance of having a highly capable autistic child will be much more likely. And the world really needs more high functioning autists.
I don't think that IVF selection is precise enough to remove all the risks without loosing the benefits of your condition. I'm worried there is a risk that it can lead to just the selection of the most neurotipical looking embrio and so whichever autism related genes that allowed you and your partner to be high functioning will just be lost in the next generation. But maybe you can specifically talk about this kind of failure mode with a specialist.
Can you genetically select for a more neurotypical embryo?
I suppose? There are known genes to be correlated with autism so in theory you could select against them. The problem is that they are also correlated with other stuff, most notably intelligence.
I'd recommend searching this question on google scholar before seeing a professional. It's good to have your own info, to help you assess how seriously to take what the professional says. One thing to take into account is that most studies of this kind are going to concern parents who are autistic by the older, stricter definition of the term: People who are without a doubt odd, rigid, prone to repetitive fidgets, bad at social perception and interaction, etc. -- people whom you would notice are odd within 60 secs of meeting them. If you have what used to be called Asperger's, and especially if you are self-diagnosed with that form of high-functioning, subtle autism, the stats about autistic parents are not going to apply to your situation.
In Eastern Canada, there are groups of individuals falsely claiming to be part-Indian, known as the Eastern Metis. They've organized "tribes" with "chiefs" and "membership cards;" the whole deal. They've built a whole conspiratorial worldview, in which their ancestors were listed as white in censuses because they were trying to avoid the Residential School Genocide. Many are obvious grifters, looking to benefit from affirmative action. I wonder what it's like for the second generation. I bet many were told by their parents "this is just a fun cultural thing, we're basically just white people, don't take it too seriously." But I bet many others grew up believing it wholeheartedly. I'm indigenous, part of a marginalized minority; settler colonialism is the reason my family has little money, etc. Then one day they're browsing the net and they learn that, not only are they not the identity they thought they were, their whole community is fraudulent. They aren't indigenous, their tribe is not a real tribe, their chief is not a real chief, their membership card is just a worthless piece of plastic. Real Truman Show s***.
This sounds like what Sámi activists in Finland at least accuse the "Kemi Sami" I've described here as being. https://alakasa.substack.com/p/the-great-sami-showdown?r=7fsd8
One difference would be that here, the Kemi Sámi tend towards the main center-right party of the area and their claim is that the other Sámi are safeguarding indigenousness to prevent access to land rights; the other Sámi, meanwhile, consider the Kemi Sámi a part of a plot to dilute the concept of indigeneity and fennicize the Sámi.
The Sami are no more indigenous than the rest of the country, as far as I can see.
As I indicated in the blog post, it's best to just see "indigenous" as a word that does not really indicate things like "how long a nation has been in the country" but rather "does this group's experience pattern-match to Native Americans and their experience during the settlement of America".
The bigger question is why Canada still gives special privileges to members of certain ethnicity instead of making everyone 100% equal.
What gets me is that this arrangement, whether you want to deem it privilege or not, is clearly not working. The self-governing-within-Canada demographics are have-not societies whose ails do not improve after every billion-dollar payout. They want no federal oversight to deal with issues, yet we keep returning to a point in the discourse where the activist perspective on solving problems is to just give money. Conditions are deemed colonialist.
Leaning further into independence could work in some capacity, and would be palatable to voters of all stripes. Take for example foster care. Aboriginal kids are overrepresented in this system and one of the outcries is that they're taken from their culture. I believe there is a shift in the works where their societies would take care of it instead: great. Now you're in charge. This could be extended to other areas, with fewer open questions as to where responsibility lies. I expect that federal involvement will still be needed for services (health, infrastructure). If we decry issues that fall in the federal purview, then they should set the conditions.
That's not much of a question; it is the normal practice of every culture.
The question is why white Canadians tend to advocate for giving privileges to other ethnicities and removing them from themselves. This is nothing special to Canada either, but it is at least historically unusual rather than being the continuance of an unwavering norm.
Not everyone views their own ethnic group as their ingroup and everyone else as an outgroup.
For example, there were some white people which were opposed to the enslavement of black persons.
Evolution failed to align the aims of the individual human with increasing the relative frequency of their genome in the population. Thus not all humans follow your social darwinist model of furthering the interests of their own ethnicity over others, but instead select policies for different philosophical or religious reasons.
I would argue that this leads to better overall equilibria in multi-cultural societies. If rights are granted to the ethnicities holding power only, they might quickly lose their rights if the power balance changes.
I would thus much rather be a citizen of a state which recognizes the universal human rights than being part of the ruling tribe in some unequal society.
It is certainly debatable if overshooting color-blindness is beneficial or not, but simply expecting all humans to unfairly favor their own ethnicity is treating us as dumber than most of us are.
I actually thought once with some amusement (not that I would actually consider doing this, just a thought experiment) that if I had a kid, it would be easy raise them as culturally Jewish because I have a pretty stereotypically Jewish surname (though in my case it's just German), live in a pretty Jewish milieu, and I think many people I meet already assume I'm Jewish. Then if as an adult, he finds out that he's not 'actually Jewish,' how would that affect his identity? Would he just say, 'to hell with it, I'm just going to keep being Jewish?' And how would other Jewish people regard him? As a fraud like Rachel Dolezal? At the same time, most ethno-cultural communities today accept people who were adopted by parents of said communities, and would probably see it as racist to reject them on the basis of not being 'biologically' a member of the community. But they also typically reject the idea that ethnic/cultural identity can be conscious choice - people who 'choose' a new identity are generally considered immoral frauds.
So I guess it's childhood upbringing that 'transmits' authentic identity? If so, then the children of ethnic frauds have a somewhat valid claim to continue identifying with the identity they were brought up in. I guess it doesn't seem to me like there is a coherent set of rules determining how 'authentic' ethnic/cultural identity is actually transmitted; it seems like it'd be hard to come up with such a coherent set of rules that would simultaneously deal with all of these edge cases in a way that isn't counterintuitive, but also isn't basically racist, by modern definitions. Of course in the US at least (I would guess Canada too?) much of ethnic/cultural identity is already basically LARPing, so there's already a great deal of fakery in it.
> Then if as an adult, he finds out that he's not 'actually Jewish,' how would that affect his identity?
Depends on how he finds out? Maybe he runs for political office, and an opponent notices that his ethnic claim looks a bit odd, and does some research, and next thing you know he's a laughingstock in half the country? (Not saying that this is what happened in any particular case, but it seems like something I'd try to avoid.)
Well, the question of "Who is a Jew?" is complicated enough that the only part I'm certain of, is that the Nazis were wrong.
Most branches of Judaism do, in principle, accept converts, although they're very much not "evangelical" about it. So your hypothetical kid, if they follow the Torah and integrate into Jewish culture, might not be able to claim Right of Return to Israel but they might be able to "convert" to make their religious status official.
Islam takes the complete opposite approach - recite the affirmation of faith once and you're a Muslim. Then I guess you can start learning about the culture?
The bit about childhood upbringing as authentic identity is also a huge controversy in another context, namely whether late-transitioning women can be disqualified for being "socialised male". I'm personally on the side of, you can be gay or trans even if your upbringing tried its best to prevent that.
There was a joke going around the 23andme forums to the effect of, "I wasted all that time learning Hebrew as a kid and now this genetic test is trying to tell me I'm not Jewish."
And in other news, I have a mitochondrial DNA haplotype usually found in Ashkenazi Jewish populations, and I don't even know Hebrew.
My mtDNA is Arabian somehow, even though I am otherwise 100% British Isles. Guess how good my Arabic is?
Why not simply explain that your family is "Jew-ish"? https://www.reuters.com/world/us/embattled-republican-santos-faces-new-heat-over-jew-ish-heritage-claim-2022-12-27/
I don't see any way that could possibly go wrong.
I know someone that happened to. Didn't turn out well. Wasted years of his life trying to fit in, eventually figured it out, is angry at his parents. Still has Hebrew tattoos.
We really are one thing or another. Good to be glad of whatever you and your kids actually are.
That's a little different as Judaism has a well-defined conversion pathway. Various people have found out they're not Jewish by the standards they thought they were and had to convert from time to time.
Honestly now that you get affirmative action for being some kind of minority, it's going to be kind of motivated by that.
Why is ethnic identity even necessary in the first place? The only thing that matters is what a person is now. Their origin provides nothing of value. These superficial cultural ties have no reason to exist.
I'm not sure that it's "necessary", but it does seem to exist. The wisdom of Chesterton's Fence aside, getting rid of it seems like it might involve a lot of ... unpleasantness.
Oh boy, this is a hell of a question.
I think, in the beginning, there was culture, or "this is the way it was done". For various reasons (geography, climate, conquest), certain cultures were dominant within certain places.
When they leave those places, are their values, habits, knowledge, etc, all useless? I like to think that they're not necessarily. Some traits can be maladaptive, sure. Sometimes you just adopt a better way of doing things. But no, I don't think culture from country of origin is completely bereft of value.
It won't be "pure" (nothing is), it will have evolved with time and various selection pressures, and it will keep evolving, but I think diversity is useful in its own right because it's important for resilience. Indigenous American culture was why Europeans knew potatoes and tomatoes were edible and great crops when they arrived (recall both plants are nightshades and most Old World nightshades are deadly poisons). Culture encodes information.
(One place I feel strongly about is indigenous land stewardship. That bridge might have already been burnt in a lot of places, and oral histories and cultural knowledge irreparably lost, unfortunately. But this is one arena you definitely want genuine indigenous people vs frauds, provided that there's enough fragments of cultural knowledge to go around and piece together what people were previously doing to manage natural disasters and prey/predator populations. It would have been damn nice for someone to have wrote all that stuff down before doing all the murder, that's for sure).
Are superficial cultural ties useless? Well, they clearly serve a purpose to the people who enjoy them. I think a lot of people have a strong, psychological need to signal belonging, and the modern liberal society which accepts everyone isn't really meeting that need (to wit, it's hard to belong to an ingroup that consists of everyone). It's mostly harmless, but can be constructive (genealogical research). It can be damaging (making up ethnic histories and customs from wholecloth, kind of like some people inventing an ahistorical "white" culture).
But perhaps the "ethnic drive" is a real thing and is a psychological force the ensures the continuation of culture. It's the memetic mechanism that keeps culture going. So in that case, it's a drive that needs to be managed. Perhaps you can manage it by making genealogical testing accessible and having a couple of Society of X Ethnicities around in major cities to teach things (languages, customs, techniques used in cooking, performance, art, etc). That would be the sensible and pragmatic way to manage the tendency for some people to be intensely miserable about not knowing their origins and not knowing what they're "supposed" to do, with the added benefit of preserving knowledge and skills that might be useful one day. Though yeah, in many cases you'll find the reason why you don't do things the way your ancestors did is because the old way took massive amounts of effort with middling results. Or maybe you'll find it's better with aid from modern technology - I mean, you no longer need to mill the flour with a donkey but sourdough bread is slightly better tolerated than yeast bread in some people with certain GI issues, and sourdough is the traditional method - so it's really good that we didn't lose the traditional way of making bread, for the benefit of people who get sick eating newer bread. And it's really useful to know how people sweetened things before the invention of high fructose corn syrup if you happen to be allergic to it.... Or if we get a corn plague that abruptly wipes out all the corn.
Does it matter if it's true or not? Is awarding people special privileges based on fake ethnicity any better or worse than awarding people special privileges based on real ethnicity?
It's less sustainable. The equilibrium of "special privileges for fake ethnicity" is that everyone adopts a fake ethnicity.
For another good example see the privileges provided to 'lower' castes in India. Then all of a sudden everyone is from a 'lower' caste.
Obviously already happening, but with all kinds of favored identities, not just ethnicity.
Maximally Effective Altruism
Imagine that two people are lost at sea, with only enough food for one. One is the world’s most promising cancer researcher while the other, to be polite, has far less potential to improve humankind. Most people would wisely choose the cancer researcher.
Yet the fashionable Effective Altruism movement focuses on lower-potential people—typically, people who are struggling in poor countries. That implies the belief that all lives have roughly equal value. Of course, our hearts go out to “the least among us,” but they face so many barriers. If we care to maximally benefit humankind, we’re wiser to invest in people with great potential for ripple effect who, importantly, would not otherwise get fully funded.
For example, leading lights in the Effective Altruism movement are far from downtrodden, for example, William McCaskill, Holden Karnofsky, Peter Singer, and Zvi Moshowitz. Effective altruism might fund such people to develop ever more “ripply” altruism.
Some other possibilities for more ripply and thus more effective altruism:
— SuperCourses: online versions of standard school courses taught by dream teams of transformational instructors, augmented by vivid demonstrations and gamification. Of course, instruction would be individualized, not just in pace but in teaching approach. Machine learning would make that individualization ever better, and automatic translation would make SuperCourses available in many languages. The development of SuperCourses would enable every student, rich and poor, kindergarten through college, Alabama to Zululand, to get a world-class education. The private and government sectors haven’t funded this—I have proposed SuperCourses to top U.S. and California education officials and gotten nowhere. One reason is the fear that the teacher’s union would use its might to try to stop it to preserve teacher jobs. But if developed and disseminated worldwide, SuperCourses could be very effective altruism indeed.
— Independent researchers studying solutions that are promising but have a poor chance of success. Governmental and corporate funding sources tend to invest in institution-based researchers whose projects have higher probability of near-term success. But if the focus is on long-term risk-reward, effective altruism would include independent, unaffiliated researchers working in their home-office or garage who are exploring novel ways to, for example, lower the cost of nuclear fusion energy, develop better AI-driven models for predicting and foiling terrorism and even for assessing a war’s worthiness, e.g., the U.S. entering World War II versus the war in Vietnam or Afghanistan.
— People developing ever better mental health apps, for example, using ChatGPT. Such apps could be distributed worldwide to countries rich and poor—Cell phones are ubiquitous even in poor nations. Private sources are funding development of such apps, but such development deserves greater funding given the apps’ potentially great ripple effect.
— Researchers studying the enhancement of reasoning ability, impulse control, and altruism. For largely political reasons, those research areas are underfunded by government and corporations but, with sufficient ethical guardrails, such research has great ripple potential to provide major benefit to humankind.
— People developing software that matches mentors with protégés, available worldwide. It would be like match.com but for mentor/protégé, relationships—Many protégés and mentors say that mentorship has been among their life’s greatest learning experiences. Such software would facilitate that. Alas, the matching industry, despite having been around for decades, has remained focused on romantic relationships. That makes mentor-matching apps a good candidate for effective altruism.
Again, it’s understandably tempting to want to help “the least among us,” those with the greatest deficits. After all, we feel good in helping them and it’s a fashionable form of virtue signaling. But if we truly care about humankind and are willing to focus on the greatest ultimate benefit, ripple should be the core criterion for determining what is maximally effective altruism.
I am missing how any of this helps resolve your opening hypothetical. The ripple effective a person might have is something of a coin flip, isn’t it?
Could you please provide evidence for your assertion that Zvi Mowshowitz is "a leading light" in EA? A quick search provided multiple examples where he is at least sceptical and plausibly at pains to distance himself from EA.
Perhaps QALYs (Quality-Adjusted Life Years) should be replaced by PALYs (Productivity-Adjusted Life Years)?
Malaria presents one of the major obstacles to the development of Africa, as do other endemic diseases common in the continent (e.g. trypanosomiasis). (The other major obstacle is the extremely poor institutions there.) The development of China into a first world country will undoubtably unlock an enormous number of intelligent researchers of great value to the world; similarly, African development would result in 2+ billion more healthy people in developed countries, some of whom would no doubt provide useful scientific and technical insights. Productivity per worker in African countries which received PEPFAR aid from the USA went up significantly compared to countries without it; disease is a major obstacle to economic development, and economic development underlies the potential of people to contribute positively to the world.
>Malaria presents one of the major obstacles to the development of Africa, as do other endemic diseases common in the continent
Citation very much needed
>(The other major obstacle is the extremely poor institutions there.)
This is an EFFECT, not a CAUSE.
You speak of institutions as if they're an exogenous factor like climate. They're not. They're a product of the people, and there's no evidence sub-saharan africans are capable of building good institutions.
>The development of China into a first world country will undoubtably unlock an enormous number of intelligent researchers of great value to the world;
China has a long history of intellectual accomplishment and had more sophisticated society in many places than much of africa does TODAY.
>similarly, African development would result in 2+ billion more healthy people in developed countries, some of whom would no doubt provide useful scientific and technical insights.
Not "similarly". There is no evidence that sub-saharan africans have anywhere close to the intellectual potential of the Chinese on the whole, and the majority of individuals who do have this potential are leaving or have already left
There's no evidence that any amount of "effective altruism", or any other intervention, will result in Africa becoming "developed"
And even if it could, it's by no means necessarily true that the impact of whatever scientific research they produce could ever come close to the monumental cost, past present and future, of africa achieving some level of "development"
>and economic development underlies the potential of people to contribute positively to the world.
Black americans have more wealth, more educational opportunity, more access to healthcare and so on than the majority of people in the world, but as a group they are a massive net fiscal drain on the US even before you consider the massive costs associated with their extremely high crime rate.
>Productivity per worker in African countries which received PEPFAR aid from the USA went up significantly compared to countries without it; disease is a major obstacle to economic development, and economic development underlies the potential of people to contribute positively to the world.
There's absolutely no reason to think you can scale this up to africa becoming 'developed'. Per capita income in africa has stagnated over the past decade and this has been with the rest of the world keeping them afloat with aid, financing and building/operating the majority of productive natural resources operations in Africa.
Its literally never been easier in history for a country to develop, with science and technology already existing, the internet existing, sophisticated global trade networks already existing. Europeans literally had to invent most of their science and technology from scratch in order to industrialize, and in a time without any of the other advantages listed above. No country on earth has these hurdles to clear, and yet much of africa is nowhere close to developed even compared to much of europe centuries ago.
The entire argument here is "Africans are fundamentally inferior, stupid people, who could never build anything of value," repeated endlessly. I'm not really interested in engaging with it because it's something only a very stupid racist would say, but since I know you will take this as an excuse to claim you are correct: in order for you to be correct, every single black country must be a miserable failure of a country with broken institutions. If even one isn't, it proves that it is not purely a product of genetic heredity. Botswana, the Bahamas, and Seychelles are all doing quite well at displaying the capacity of those of African descent in creating and sustaining institutions.
[just joking around] But everyone knows that the Professor should have eaten Gilligan immediately!
The professor worked on that coconut radio for three months. But Giligan…
Red thinks they should kill him.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GlVZ3O_HvSc
Nitpick: Zvi has repeatedly stated that he doesn't consider himself an EA and finds it a flawed movement, albeit one with occasionally interesting ideas and a lot of natural overlap with [r/R]ationalists. With regards to charity specifically, he thinks it's often possible to achieve high impact with local donations, for some of the same reasons you're arguing against EA here, but also because it's much easier to check the receipts when recipients aren't halfway around the world or whatever. Betting on the metis line vs the episteme line. Did you mean Scott instead?
> ripple should be the core criterion for determining what is maximally effective altruism.
You also need to account for the probability of failure, which is often quite high.
Gamification is sometimes actively harmful. My kids are already motivated to learn math on Khan Academy, but they have to wait for the animations of the fireworks to finish. I am already motivated to learn languages on Duolingo, but I have to skip a few screens telling me how many "xp" and "gems" I have collected today, how many more should I collect today, and how do I compare to people I don't know and don't care about.
Anyway, Khan Academy exists, and is quite good. And translated to many languages. Do we see any great ripple caused by it? If not, what makes you believe the next time will be different?
Researchers often spend tons of money producing research that does not replicate. Do you know how to make this process more efficient?
Is there any evidence that mental health apps using ChatGPT actually help?
...in other words, there is a very high risk of spending lots of money on something that seems to promise a great ripple, but then it will turn out to be... just another ordinary thing.
The 'lost at sea' metaphor doesn't really capture the actual situation, and so misses the core idea of EA.
If you wanted to express the real-world situation as a 'lost at sea' metaphor, it'd go something like this:
Two people are lost at sea. One is adrift in a boat filled with provisions following a maritime disaster that made international news headlines; the other is adrift in a practically empty boat following a maritime disaster that barely received two sentences' coverage on page 19 of the Cornish Post.
We only have a very limited supply of provisions that might just-about keep one person alive until they can be rescued; should we choose who gets our provisions based on how many provisions are already in their boat, or on how much media coverage their respective maritime disaster generated?
(If we *must* contrive to bring the cancer research thing into this metaphor somehow, I think the least-bad match for the real world might be, "the well-provisioned boat guy has a 0.00000001% chance of making a meaningful contribution towards curing cancer, and the ill-provisioned boat guy is making a 0.00000001% contribution towards elevating his developing world society to a first-world standard of living.")
High IQ westerners have an almost endless number of ways they can be productive
Average (i.e. low) IQ sub-saharan africans will never create first world standards of living
The high IQ westerner is literally more likely to make a 0.00000001% improvement to poor african countries than the african is!
For the two people lost at sea, I'd choose the most aesthetically pleasing of them.
Also, your ideas for mostly sound like "hey, <scam> is really big right now, what if we extend <scam> to cover even more of our lives". Mental health apps and matching apps aren't making the world a better place.
The value of a marginal dollar is orders of magnitude greater for these lower potential people. Relatively small interventions can create prosperity in the sense of successful small businesses, more education, ability to plan for the future, etc etc.
High potential people cannot reach that potential without a robust society to support them. It's a mistake to attribute 100% of the success to the last link in the chain. The existence of a robust social "substrate" is essential. EA interventions (e.g. in Africa) conribute towards the quality of this substrate.
Ah yes, the magical "robust society" that is completely exogenous to the people in said society
The type of magical thinking that treats "institutions" as if they were a factor like the climate or something
The "substrate" is INTELLIGENCE. Smart people can build something out of almost anything. Non-smart people cannot and never will.
For goodness' sake, just look at South Africa and Zimbabwe. There's no evidence black africans could ever build countries as prosperous and functional as pre-ANC South Africa or Rhodesia, which is bad enough. But these people categorically failed to even *maintain* these societies.
I know you've got a million just so stories to rationalize this, but it's all nonsense. There's literally no evidence whatsoever sub-saharan africa is capable of becoming 'developed'.
The main things holding them back is a lack of intelligence, and instead of EA being "rational" enough to understand this, no, they literally *encourage* African brain drain and ensure that Africa's potential falls lower and lower.
But please, PLEASE tell me what it is other than a lack of intelligence that makes things harder for Africans than for e.g. British settlers in 18th century Australia - the ones who created one of the most prosperous societies in history out of a completely undeveloped, mostly desert remote island with a founding stock of petty criminals.
Africa has every conceivable advantage over these people, all the science and technology is already invented, every thing they could ever need to know is available on the internet, the world now has sophisticated international trade networks etc. and yet they're nowhere close to Australia (let alone the US) after a comparable amount of time.
This is the greatest case of 'trapped priors' I've ever seen - this refusal to abandon egalitarianism after countless decades of failed predictions - and you people are supposed to be good bayesian rationalists?
So, this "egalitarianism" you're ranting against is something I never claimed. I also never claimed that African countries are free of social dysfunction. The material wealth and technology of the 21st century certainly gives those countries a leg up, but there are also downsides (brain drain is a prominent one you already mentioned).
Intelligence is not a hard prerequisite for being a productive member of society. Stability and culture are also important factors. You should go outside more and see for yourself. The social capacity of the western nations you laud so much is in alarming decline, and I don't think we've gotten dumber.
The most valuable lives are those of the people who can do work that helps many, via ripple effect, People who are poor and struggling are "lower potential" people. Seems to follow from this that the more accomplished someone is at skills that can have a big ripple effect, the more valuable their life is. But by that logic, the lives of the poorest people is of least value. Why bother helping them at all? At least, why bother helping them before one has helped all the people who are better off, who have more potential value to help others? Even if someone who is not destitute never makes any effort to help others, they at least have the potential to. So let's be realistic here and leave the dirt poor til last, which is where they have always been.
It's a wonderful thing when one's theory supports a status quo in which one has a comfortable spot.
>So let's be realistic here and leave the dirt poor til last, which is where they have always been.
Remind me again when white people needed foreign caregivers to lift them up out of poverty. Did god come down from heaven and gift us science and technology or something?
No, we lifted ourselves up. And if we had the same advantages that modern day africa has in terms of science and technology already being developed, the internet existing, modern financial and trade systems existing etc. then we would have industrialized almost overnight.
>It's a wonderful thing when one's theory supports a status quo in which one has a comfortable spot.
There is no alternative "status quo" where africa is equal to the west, unless we're all equally poor
"Remind me again when white people needed foreign caregivers to lift them up out of poverty. "
I've got Moldova on line 1; they say they've been on hold for thirty-two years.
This made me audibly chuckle.
But Hammond, your belief that the Africans are so motherfucking stupid that it is not worth our while to aid them is irrelevant to my point. I was not urging OP to show more enthusiasm for helping Africans, I was pointing out an absurdity in OP's basic idea: Resources should go to those who can help the most via ripple effect, and thereafter to those that can help second most, etc. The destitute are uneducated, ill, burdened by problems, etc. and have nothing to give. So by that logic they never qualify for any resources at all. Why send ripples to people who aren't going to be able to send out little ripples themselves? If you're going to make the case that Africans are hopelessly stupid, it's important to try to think clearly in these discussions. Otherwise somebody might think you're. a stoopit motherfucking African. Listen, just to stay safe look down at your hands on the keyboard once in a while when typing out diatribes. Are the looking browner? UH OH! Time for a break.
They're not just unproductive, they're a net drain, especially when they move to the west
Could use info about options for someone I know who is getting an advanced degree in a highly technical STEM field. What they study is abstruse and has no practical application, so the natural path for them is to become a university professor. However, they need a fallback, because there are not enough faculty jobs to go around. They are extremely gifted at math, and good at the kind of coding that's used in their field, and could probably be hired as quant or something similar where they use their math talents in the service of the finance industry. However, their values are such that working in business or finance is out of the question. I was wondering if Effective Altriusm, either the organization or the activities they support, might have a place for someone like this: an extremely introverted math prodigy with few outside interests who would throw themselves into a job where they believe they are helping the world.
Serious answer: the NSA, specifically the side of the house that is tasked with protection of domestic (not just government!) communication & information systems.
Thank you! Do you think there are jobs where they might be presented with some challenging math-related tasks? This person really is extraordinarily talented. They're the sort of person who you'd have wanted working on breaking code in WW2. And they are not difficult to be around -- just sort of deeply disengaged.
Yes, yes. NSA is very mathy. Very research-y.
Also, one of the jokes was that mathematicians there love their work so much, that the only way they leave is in a pine box. Why bother with a silly thing like "retirement," pfft!
Good point! And, as quantum computers get better, and RSA-style public-key encryption gets more and more exposed, quantum-resistant encryption is becoming more and more critical - even to us just-civilians trying to safely use a credit card on the internet.
The government hires statisticians. Search usajobs.gov for 'Math' for examples
Thank you. I did do the search. Do you think there are jobs where some of the math tasks would be challenging? This is somebody who could take on very difficult problems. They should be up at the top of the How Hard the Tasks are hierarchy, but definitely not high up in management.
Semi-joking answer: work on changing their values. It's pretty bizarre to me for someone to be against working in *any* business. There are tons and tons of businesses that make unambiguously useful stuff.
In general, operations and logistics are good places for people who are good at math but also want to see the concrete good their work does.
This person is very inflexible -- a math prodigy who is way past the introverted and a bit odd end of the autistic spectrum. I understand that people can help the world run better in all kinds of ways, some of them business, but this person is determined to be doing work directly for a helping organization. It is very hard for them even to consider anything other than being a college professor. Their flexibility is maxed out.
mmm, I see. It's a tough ask though. Academia is a tournament profession and I would discourage people from going into it without a solid plan B. Some EA organization may indeed be the best option.
If they're interested in EA/trying to do good with their career, they could look on the 80k career guide (https://80000hours.org/career-guide/?int_campaign=2023-05--primary-navigation__career-guide) and/or apply to get 1-1 advice from 80,000 hours.
GPT-6 requiring ~0.1-10% of all world compute to train isn't all that outlandish compared to other major industrial goods. This report [1] says that aluminum production requires ~1.5% of all electricity in the US. Aluminum is great, but it doesn't exactly dominate the public discourse. A one-off 10% of all compute for ~6-12 months might only register as a "fun fact" level of economic / environmental impact (e.g. "did you know that concrete production is responsible for 5% of all global CO2 emissions?").
Then again, energetic and compute costs to train bigger and bigger AI models might get into crypto or private jet territory, where the environmental impact is overemphasized because AI/AGI falls into the same tech bro / silicon valley elites sphere of negative emotional connotations.
1. https://www.aceee.org/files/proceedings/2003/data/papers/SS03_Panel1_Paper02.pdf
If aluminum and concrete production suddenly stopped, it would have massive negative effects on not just the world economy but life as we know it. OpenAI could disappear tomorrow and nothing of real value would be lost.
>OpenAI could disappear tomorrow and nothing of real value would be lost.
That was probably also true in the first few years of industrial production of aluminum and reinforced concrete too. Give it a decade or so and OpenAI's models will be something akin to white-collar concrete--a nearly-ubiquitous "glue" or "foundation" for office and information work.
>That was probably also true in the first few years of industrial production of aluminum and reinforced concrete too
Guess what - in the first few years of production, they didn't use anywhere near as much electricity as they do today
>Give it a decade or so and OpenAI's models will be something akin to white-collar concrete--a nearly-ubiquitous "glue" or "foundation" for office and information work.
This is almost certainly completely wrong.
That's unclear. OpenAI disappearing would, by my estimates, be a good thing, but it could also be tremendously harmful. Imagine GPT-6 being the system that cures cancer and solves climate change.
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That is almost literally impossible
OpenAI and its closed-source contemporaries are purportedly the main drivers of the economy right now.
Remember all the economists that predicted a recession in 2023? Have you seen the litany of economic indicators that have consistently pointed towards a downturn for the past 2 years?
One of the main arguments about why the 2023 recession never came is that the economy is being buoyed by a burst of economic productivity, driven by none other than AI. This is why Nvidia's stock has risen dramatically (Nvidia, which produces graphics cards used by AI, had its value increased by the size of *Netflix* over *a single day* recently).
Nvidia's ascent represents the increase in supply of AI computational power, but anecdotes indicate a high demand as well. Lawyers are currently saving their clients billable hours with an AI law consultant that has read every law since 1850. Doctors are saving lives with the help of AI.
The anecdotes abound, but the conclusion is inescapable: The disappearance of OpenAI and its cohorts, at this very moment, would almost certainly plunge the global economy into a recession.
The stock market can plausibly be driven by AI hype because it is forward looking, but there's no way that AI had a meaningful macroeconomic impact in 2023. That doesn't even pass the laugh test.
This is complete and UTTER nonsense
I wish them well. I, personally, really want to _see_ true AGI and have a nice quiet chat with it.
>Lawyers are currently saving their clients billable hours with an AI law consultant that has read every law since 1850.
Is it really that reliable?? I've read of at least two cases of lawyers humiliating themselves by taking LLM (I think it was GPT4) output as trustworthy, and finding that it was citing nonexistent cases.
I keep asking GPT4 simple chemistry questions, and it keeps getting them pretty badly wrong. For a simple example https://chat.openai.com/share/7faacb6b-a487-494f-b0b7-4a071798fb1c . I asked it some simple cerium chemistry and, amongst other things, _it_ came up with the "equation":
2CeCl4(aq)+H2(g)→2CeCl3(aq)+2HCl(aq)+Cl2(g)
which doesn't even balance. GPT4 put 8 chlorine atoms on the left and 10 on the right.
For me, current benefits are heavily outweighed by AI Safety concerns. I'd happily trade half the global population and GDP for reducing AI Risk to 0.
Partly this distinction is about taking away something that already exists instead of preventing something from existing. If we removed all planes from the sky that would be a big deal now, but obviously wouldn't have made a difference to life in 1900. Removing OpenAI right now would cause zero major problems because there are no major systems that rely on it. Give it 10 years and maybe we're relying on it the way we rely on aluminum and concrete. But maybe not.
As for "cured cancer" - at least that would mostly be a one-off and we can still enjoy the benefits of successful research even if it's turned off and doesn't continue producing new research.
But aluminium production in the first few years used a TINY fraction of the resources it does today. It's not a valid comparison.
"A one-off 10% of all compute [in the world] for 6-12 months ..."
This sounds like something from a Greg Egan novel :-)
GPT-6 is just one model from one company though. Google, Anthropic and whoever else will want to do theirs too.
A series of unfortunate exchanges down the thread has escalated to the point where I need to explain why Ethnic Cleansing is bad to justify a mildly snarky reply I made in response to someone who advocated for Ethnic Cleansing as a norm.
Because I'm a patient teacher at heart, and because I have always been an advocate for repeating and explaining and re-explaining the obvious - a norm that religious cultures understand all too well but more secular cultures like Rationalism have failed to fully digest - I will try to make a comprehensive case of why Ethnic Cleansing as a norm is bad, and why people who advocate for it as a norm are bad and should feel bad. There is no reasoning in this comment that people are likely to find unique or exceptionally insightful, you likely already know all what I'm going to say on some, possibly non-explicit/verbal, level. By the end of this comment, someone who isn't too sure that Ethnic Cleansing is bad should hopefully be convinced or moved in the direction of being convinced that Ethnic Cleansing is bad, provided they're engaging in good faith and is reading attentively.
--------------
1- Definitions
What do I mean by "Ethnic Cleansing as a Norm"?
Ethnic Cleansing is the (not necessarily systematic) forced displacement of some population sharing a common trait (e.g. Religion, Skin Color, Gender, Nationality or Ethnic Origin) and crossing a certain size threshold, where "forced" implies any coercive and destructive practices and actions that - intentionally or unintentionally - makes the current habitat of the population more and more unfit for living, where those practices and actions are primarily perpetrated and/or incited and/or funded and/or planned and/or advocated by people outside the victim population.
The "As a Norm '' bit means that you're only a bad person if you want Ethnic Cleansing to be a "norm", lit.: a normal option that people can openly promote in normal political and geopolitical conversation. You're NOT a bad person if - say - you merely will begrudgingly choose Ethnic Cleansing from a list where it's the most humane options (e.g. as an alternative to Genocide), just like you're not a bad person if you're slightly relieved that a woman was raped and not murdered (or the reverse) and you're not a bad person if you do choose someone to kill after somebody forces you to choose which one of your children to kill.
--------------
2- Verdict
Ethnic Cleansing is Bad.
--------------
3- Arguments
Ethnic Cleansing being bad, there are several arguments for why Ethnic Cleansing is bad:
3-(a) The Argument from Private Property
Most people believe in some form or the other in the notion of Private Property : The notion that people have the right to certain things, and that those things can't be taken away from them by force (even if this forced taking away of things involves payment).
Ethnic Cleansing violates the Right to Private Property: It necessarily involves forcibly taking away the homes, cars and all other non(-easily) -transportable property that people being Ethnically Cleansed own.
Note: Notice how mild (3-a) actually is, the belief in Private Property needed here is not that which justifies Billionaires or private space travel or luxury yachts and private jets, it's not that which a lot of Socialists and Communists and some Anarchists rebel against. The vast majority of people living today, including the vast majority of Communists, believe explicitly or implicitly in a version of Private Property that at least grants you the moral right to buy things you need for a fair price (with the full consent of the seller), and then forever retain those things until you sell them, voluntarily relinquish them, or throw them away entirely for any reason.
3-(b) The Argument from the Immorality of Non-Consensual Actions Done to Humans
Most people believe in some form or the other the following notion: that humans, or more generally conscious minds at or near human-level sentience and/or intelligence, have a sacred moral right to decide their own fate.
Ethnic Cleansing is, by definition, a name given to actions that people do to other people, to force them to make decisions and accept fates that the victims didn't want to make or accept. Therefore, Ethnic Cleansing violates the human right to decide one's own fate.
3-(c) The Argument from the Sanctity of Intimate Property
Many people believe in what we could call - without loss of generality - Intimate Property: Property that has value beyond what their strict material valuation would imply, and which can only be perceived by the current owner. Among the list of potential Intimate Property: (A) The house you grew up in (B) The car you got married in, or the first car you own (C) The first piece of jewellery that your husband or wife brought to you (D) The belonging(s) of a dead relative.
It's important to recall a crucial property of Intimate Property: It can't be replaced by an equally-materially-valuable - or sometimes even materially-superior - property. The house you grew up in is fundamentally valuable because a thermodynamically irreversible event - you growing up from a child to a teenager - happened in it, and thus no other house can ever satisfy this, and thus you're very reluctant to sell it.
Ethnic Cleansing involves the destruction and/or the confiscation of - at least - the intimate property (A) of the victim population, and frequently many other kinds of Intimate Property, including all the ones that appear on the example list above and more. Thus, it violates the right of humans to own and appreciate and preserve Intimate Property.
3-(d) The Argument from the Perversity of Perverse Incentives
Most people believe or can be convinced to believe a certain model of human dynamics called "Perverse Incentives". According to this model, whatever actions you do - if they're known by other people - will shape the future actions of said people. Thus, for example, be careful giving charity to begging children, because when the people who force children to beg know that this strategy works and the children are too cute to be refused, they will have and/or kidnap even more children to force them to beg. Perverse Incentives is an anti-inductive model, it posits that the sum total of all human interactions respond to your action in ways nullifying the effects of your actions, often in unexpected ways.
Promoting Ethnic Cleansing as a norm will set a perverse incentive, namely that any state or powerful corporation which doesn't like a group of people can simply engage in less-than-murder ways of making their lies worse and worse and worse till people advocate for the Ethnic Cleansing of the victim population and the problem is "solved".
3-(e) The Argument from the Immorality of Violence and Destruction
Most people believe or can be convinced to believe that Violence and Destruction is bad, and furthermore that its typical outcome is the killing of humans and the destruction of property, which most people believe - in turn - to be also bad.
Since Ethnic Cleansing is typically not the first choice of the victim population, it typically requires an immense amount of violence and destruction to achieve. Furthermore, even after a critical percentage of the victim population is finally convinced, a substantial percentage always remain opposed, and thus need additional further waves of violence and Destruction to neutralize or eliminate.
3-(f) The Argument from etc
This list was outlined over the course of approximately 2 minutes, this section is for all the additional reasons that Ethnic Cleansing is bad, whether they come from me as I think about the issue more over the following days or from commenters who respond to this comment.
--------------
4- Objections
4-(a) I was just joking
Joking about immoral things is not necessarily immoral, unless the person telling the joke is actually convinced of the fundamental premise of the joke and is merely using a joke as a pedagogical/infotainment way of preaching the premise. For example, a joke about rape or America invading other countries for oil could be funny and harmless, unless the person doing the first is a rapist and the person doing the second is G.W. Bush.
Given an ideological affinity and/or a history of supportive comments to a party that advocated Ethnic Cleansing, making a joke about Ethnic Cleansing makes you a horrible person.
4- (b) Do you want the victim people to be Genocided instead ?
This argument is only against "Ethnic Cleansing as a NORM", Ethnic Cleansing as a desperate last resort while a genocide is taking place is not in its scope.
4- (c) What about all historical instances of people who were ethnically cleansed and turned out to be okay after centuries of healing ?
See Appendix, but this is not an argument pro-Ethnic-Cleansing-as-a-norm for the same reason that "What about all the women who were raped and then turned out to be ok after years of the incident" is not an argument.
--------------
5- Conclusion
Ethnic Cleansing is bad and people who argue for it should feel bad. Mockery of people unambiguously arguing for Ethnic Cleansing implicitly or explicitly is morally good and should be a norm in any good community.
--------------
6- Appendix
This comment https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/open-thread-317?r=3evauj&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=50408804, where I argue against objection (4-c) at length.
Perhaps you believe in a deity that certifies a set of moral beliefs. I’m one of them. One of those beliefs is that ethnic cleansing is bad. But without this deity where does this morality come from? What physics equation defines a configuration of atoms in a state of morality or immorality? One thing I respect about the Rationalist community is that they’ve been willing to address this issue. Many of them (not all) have settled on Peter Singer’s axiom to reduce suffering. This axiom should make you generally wary of ethnic cleansing. But Yudowsky makes the argument that torturing one person for fifty years to save fifty thousand people from getting dust in their eye for a moment has a net reduction in suffering. I could see a Rationalist extending this argument to justify ethnic cleansing if they believed it would reduce suffering.
> Most people believe or can be convinced to believe that Violence and Destruction is bad
> Most people believe in some form or the other in the notion of Private Property
> Most people believe in some form or the other the following notion: that humans, or more generally conscious minds at or near human-level sentience and/or intelligence, have a sacred moral right to decide their own fate.
> Many people believe in what we could call - without loss of generality - Intimate Property
Saying that you should believe something because many other people believe it is just saying that you should replace your belief in a deity with belief in groupthink. Do you have any argument other than “you should conform to groupthink?”
As a society, I think that we’re in a current liminal state where traditional religions used to dominate moral belief and we’re in a transition to a new set of moral beliefs. We still have a lot of beliefs that are commonly held, but are vestigial Christianity. As you say, many people believe that violence is immoral. But from an atheist point of view, what physics equation defines a configuration of atoms in a state of morality or immorality? Rationalists are willing to give this serious thought rather than just handwaving these problems away and conforming to groupthink.
this but unironically.
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/the-ethical-fourier-transform
>But without this deity where does this morality come from?
From human minds. Human minds define morality. It's subjective, but its trivially true* this is how morality is defined. At least human morality as applied to humans.
>What physics equation defines a configuration of atoms in a state of morality or immorality?
Why does it need a physics equation? What physics equation defines a configuration or atoms as "being in pain" ? Or as "Happy" or "Sad" ?
If the answer is.... the physics equation that defines the state of the atoms in your brain such that the neurons are configured to feel happy/sad and are set in the happy configuration right now..... then it is the same answer for morality.
The physics equations that cover all humans brains are configured to find this moral and that immoral, and are set in the "that is immoral" state right now.
* In order to justify the trivially true comment....
Humans are evolved to take care of their young for long periods and invest huge amount of time/resources into them. As a result killing children (your own or others) is defined as immoral as our brains have been evolved such that they are pre-disposed to saying this act is immoral. Almost all humans over almost all time have defined this as immoral as a result. No god needed.
Frogs/Toads live in an ecosystem where they produce thousands of young, who are herbivores that eat pond algae etc. Adult Frogs/Toads are carnivores who eat (among other things) frog/toad spawn and tadpoles. The frog/toad ecosystem is (at least in part) "Tadpoles eat the algae as frogs/toads cannot, frogs/toads eat the tadpoles instead". That's their circle of life.
If we imagine such a species became sentient its pretty clear their morality would be extremely different to human morality on the subject of children. Killing and eating them would be acceptable behaviour (at the least) and probably moral behaviour. Afterall, if no-one eats them then the next generation will see a population boom of 10,000% or more and wreck the eco-system and/or cause some kind of mass genocide/armageddon.
The socially responsible thing for sentient toads/frogs to do is to eat all the 10's of thousands of children they produce except just 2-3 of them. (or more likely, eat others children but also allow them to eat yours as even frogs/toads show a preference for eating other frogs tadpolkes if offered the choice although they will also eat their own if there is no other option). They would have an evolved preference for a morality that would allow them to do so. Their moral system would take eating children as an axiomatic moral good.
There CANNOT BE a once and for all moral law for all living things in the universe.... Not given by a god. Not from any other source... Due to issues like this.
All we have is human morality, that's an expression of human minds and their evolved nature...constantly changing, being updated and being refined, but yoked closely to our evolutionary past and defined in relation to the "permittable moral space" this created.
The idea that its absolute/universal is a human invention..... as is the idea that it has to have an empirical basis or it is "just groupthink".
It isn't groupthink that makes the toads/frogs child eating moral. Or the human child protective view moral. The toads/frogs/humans aren't able to groupthink their way to any other solution. Letting all the children live would feel as instinctively immoral to them as killing and eating our children feels as instinctively immoral to us.
> Human minds define morality. It's subjective, but its trivially true* this is how morality is defined.
False, A Proof of the Objectivity of Morals (1969):
https://reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/3etl9b/a_proof_of_the_objectivity_of_morals_bambrough/
> Human minds define morality. It's subjective, but its trivially true* this is how morality is defined.
Agreed. The whole point of the comment was that it’s socially constructed. But I think you’re saying that it’s biologically constructed. The common ground we have is that yes, either way, it comes from human minds.
> As a result killing children (your own or others) is defined as immoral as our brains have been evolved such that they are pre-disposed to saying this act is immoral. Almost all humans over almost all time have defined this as immoral as a result.
Sadly, this is factually false. Almost all humans over almost all time have not defined killing children as immoral. Humans are actually among the most lethal species in the mammal kingdom [https://www.nature.com/articles/nature19758.epdf]. According to the author, “In the primates, infanticide is undoubtedly the commonest type.”
I don’t think the argument that Homo sapiens—among the most lethal species in the mammal kingdom—have brains that have evolved to see violence as immoral is going to hold water. But let’s address the argument that the moral beliefs of a group of people is simply a biologically evolved belief. Let’s take a specific example, the Comanche tribe. They genocidally exterminated tribes across the plains (contemporary American Southwest). They would tie babies to ropes and drag them behind horses and tie children to sticks and roast them alive over a period of days in methods that were standard to North American indigenous tribes. In the Caribbean, the Carib tribe worked their way through the Lesser Antilles where they kept the boys under military age and castrated them to fatten them up before they were eaten as livestock.
> It isn't groupthink that makes the toads/frogs child eating moral. Or the human child protective view moral.
And yet, human societies have very divergent moral beliefs when it comes to the “human child protective view.” One answer for this variation is that their moral beliefs were the result of social construction / groupthink. Another is that these divergent beliefs were biologically evolved by different types of brains. Of course, you see plenty of similarities across societies, and you could say that this is due to evolution. But I believe the variation between societies, say with regards to eating children, is likely social construction, not that the indigenous tribes had evolved different brains.
>Humans are actually among the most lethal species in the mammal kingdom [https://www.nature.com/articles/nature19758.epdf]. According to the author, “In the primates, infanticide is undoubtedly the commonest type.”
To say we do it is not to say it wasn't considered immoral. Posting proof that millions of men have visited prostitutes doesn't exclude that doing so was considered immoral generally at the time.
>I don’t think the argument that Homo sapiens—among the most lethal species in the mammal kingdom—have brains that have evolved to see violence as immoral is going to hold water.
Why not ? I take it that we understand that modern western society definitely holds murder as immoral. Yet, there are still lots of murders. And wars. And all sorts of homicidal acts that fall short of murder even in the modern west.
If its physically possible to do, humans have done it. Whether Humans in general believe they *should* do it (morality) is a different thing.
>Let’s take a specific example, the Comanche tribe. They genocidally exterminated tribes across the plains (contemporary American Southwest). They would tie babies to ropes and drag them behind horses and tie children to sticks and roast them alive over a period of days in methods that were standard to North American indigenous tribes.
Well, one they wern't "standard across indigenous tribes" the Comanche's stick out for being very exceptional, and noted as exceptional, at the time.
And second, this was whilst at war. Almost all human morality recognises war (defined as a group using violence to defend the group) as a special case where normal rules of morality are explicitly suspended in order to reduce the possibility of the group being wiped out by opponents who do not fight with restrictions in place.
>And yet, human societies have very divergent moral beliefs when it comes to the “human child protective view.” One answer for this variation is that their moral beliefs were the result of social construction / groupthink. Another is that these divergent beliefs were biologically evolved by different types of brains.
Do they?
Human societies are as likely to have a view that "Anyone in our society can kill any child they please" as have the view that "You aren't allowed to kill any of our children except in special restricted circumstances (like war)" ?
You can see how one of those views is vastly more commonplace (perhaps even truly universal) accross a huge numbers of times/places/cultures and the other is not.
Why is it so lopsided ? If it's biological, common biology among those humans can be the answer. If its not, then why did the "fair coin flip" land a thousand times on "protect children" and only a few times on "children are fair game for your local neighbourhood psychopath" ?
If the cultures can be anything, if the groupthink can justify anything, then why isn't it 50:50 ? Or 55:45 ? Rather than (at worst) 99:1 or (at best) 100:1 ?
Clearly something in common, across massively different cultures, causes the coin to predominantly fall one way. Humans are predisposed to one answer much more than the other.
>Of course, you see plenty of similarities across societies, and you could say that this is due to evolution. But I believe the variation between societies, say with regards to eating children, is likely social construction, not that the indigenous tribes had evolved different brains
I agree.
Take something everyone can agree is biological. The drive for humans to have sex.
That doesn't preclude cultures like those of "Nuns" or "Monks" or other celibate groups occurring from time-to-time culturally. Just that those cultures swim against the general biological drive, while the other 99 in 100 cultures swim with the flow.
In saying human morality is biological I am not saying its 100% biologically determined. With billions of humans and thousands of societies will be exceptions. But they will be exceptions that swim against the flow, not with it, and are regarded as aberrant as a result by everyone else.
Maybe some frogs *won't* eat their young, they'll develop a weird culture where eating children is forbidden. But they'll be a tiny percentage of the frog cultures, and the other frog cultures will think they are weird, aberrant, and *immoral* for doing so.
I wonder if there isn’t a bit of both; I am am thinking of a Bonobo compared to an Orangutan. I will assume there is no social construction there but they’re very different temperaments and I can see why different temperaments of early Homo sapiens would lead to different social constructions.
Another advantage of private property is that it leads to increased efficiency because you don't have to worry about whether other people are using your stuff at any given time. If you own it, it will be there when you need it. This means more predictable planning and less slack required to account for not being able to find shared objects when you need them.
Agreed. You can justify a lot of those beliefs from the objective function of suffering reduction.
Do you follow these arguments to their logical conclusion, endorsing a taboo on expropriation in general (eminent domain and such)?
Do you need to use the word "Ethnic" when your definition clearly states that it also applies to people selected by other criteria like religion or gender? I could understand religion alone as it often strongly correlates with ethnicity and a lot of the instances of cleansing on religious grounds probably have minimal differences with "properly" ethnic cleansing. But adding gender, which I can't remember historical examples of being used as a criterion for cleansing, indicates you do intend to extend your definition. So why use the word in a wrong sense, rather than pick a different one? Is it important that you mentioned gender and religion but not class or political affiliation, which is what some definitions of genocide also do?
> But adding gender, which I can't remember historical examples of being used as a criterion for cleansing
It was not uncommon to kill the men capable of bearing arms in a conquered town or village. Mongols I think did it, although they often spared artisans and craftsmen.
About the concept of Gender-based Cleansing, analogous to Ethnic Cleansing:
At the level of pedantic detail, there are studies of the history of genetics which indicate that at some point in distant past, the males of the local Hunter/Gatherers died without many children surviving...but about half of the females of the local Hunter/Gatherers had children, mostly with the males of the invading settlers who set up a Farming culture.
My memory is hazy, but I believe this particular instance appears to have happened when Indo-European speakers moved into what is now Western Europe. The evidence for this came from comparing samples of ancient DNA (Y-chromosomal DNA, inherited along the male-line, and mitochondrial DNA inherited along the female line), with population samples from modern populations apparently descended from those ancient populations.
As another instance, there is reputedly a tribal language in East Africa in which the vocabulary for female-dominated spaces (home/children/farming) is from one language family, while the vocabulary for male-dominated spaces (hunting/herding) is from another language family.
In both cases, the theory is that some sort of violent interaction resulted in most of the males from the losing culture dying, and the males from the winning culture formed families with the females from the losing culture. This interaction left traces of evidence in both genetics and language.
Admittedly, all are in the distant past. But I don't think we can say that Gender-based Cleansing has never happened in human history.
Oh I entirely expect that there were numerous instances of "kill all males/adult men, enslave some/most of females". But it's hard to see that as gender-based violence, it's violence against entire peoples where the forms are somewhat different based on gender. Also "ethnic cleansing" assumes forced removal of a group of people from their habitats, even if that is fulfilled by the invaders taking the women with them, it seems more accurate to call it kidnapping/enslaving rather than cleansing.
I'm aware of the misnomer, I just use the commonly accepted and universally recognized name for the phenomena where a huge number of similar people are all deprived at the same time. This term is also accurate for the particular case that I wrote my defense because, but I also saw no reason not to expand the term to encompass any shared trait, since the arguments I list do not depend on the "Ethnic" and entirely depends on the "Cleansing". Mass Cleansing would be a better term for the crime against humanity that I'm arguing against.
> But adding gender, which I can't remember historical examples of being used as a criterion for cleansing
Yes, Mass Cleansing due to gender is a purely hypothetical case that I added for completion, accounting for some deranged future conflict where it might happen or some deranged unknown historical atrocity we don't know of. As it currently stands, the only known (to me) instances of Mass Cleansing on grounds of gender would be the historical massacres where the males of a certain population were killed and their women and children taken as slaves, it's technically "Mass Cleansing" because it often involved a forced migration to the conqueror's land, and it's "on grounds of gender" because if those women were men they would have been killed, so the reason they're being cleansed instead is because of their gender.
> So why use the word in a wrong sense, rather than pick a different one?
Brand recognition, plus the inertia from a more specific conversation where "Ethnic Cleansing" is indeed the correct term. But you can call it anything and the argument wouldn't be affected, and you can narrow and widen the definition within reasonable bounds and the argument would still not be affected.
> is it important that you mentioned gender and religion but not class or political affiliation
No, it doesn't have any significance. It was mentioned after an "e.g.", it's just an example list that reflects the common identities that I could come up with off the top of my head at the time of writing. Forcibly expelling any large group people purely because of their identity is equally bad no matter the identity, unless perhaps the identity is some criminal factor that somehow unifies all of those people. And then only perhaps.
>I also saw no reason not to expand the term to encompass any shared trait, since the arguments I list do not depend on the "Ethnic" and entirely depends on the "Cleansing".
Hi! I think you've expanded the term more than you really would want to. Consider the case where the shared trait is "has been convicted of axe-murder". As far as I'm aware, typical societies with prison systems routinely favor removing axe murderers from their current residences and forcibly placing them in the prison system. Perhaps a more restrictive choice of possible shared traits would avoid generalization to a group with this shared trait?
Oh hey Jeff, ah yes I noticed that the Prison system constitutes a possible exception to my definition, which is why I inserted a copout clause at the end:
>> unless perhaps the identity is some criminal factor that somehow unifies all of those people. And then only perhaps.
Do notice however, 2 things:
1- The displacement of Prisoners doesn't meet many of the conditions to be considered a Mass Cleansing. Most obviously: They're not (usually) moved out of the nation state they reside in, they are not made stateless, they are not deprived of their ownership, and whatever is being done to them is temporary and is not denied by the state doing it.
2- The Prison system has long been a troublesome aspect of Society, usually noticed by Left Wing philosophers and writers (although maybe some Right Wing and/or conservative writers too, I'm not familiar. I usually call myself an Economic Leftist because I don't want people to die of hunger but I don't necessarily agree with all Leftism or even most Leftism and - by fuck - especially not American woke leftism). It's weird when you look at it with an unbiased fresh eye too : """Somebody is bad, therefore we will put them in a place full of bad people (!!) isolated from all the good people (!!!) where they will eat and sleep for free (!!!!) but also, sometimes work for free and be abused, verbally or otherwise. Also, sometimes the "bad" people there are just political prisoners whose only crime is that they made the ruling classes mad. """
It's not hard to see how this is a path-dependent aspect of society that a society inventing itself from scratch could very well make a better alternative to. So, while my case against Mass Cleansing doesn't touch Prisons due to (1) and due to me inserting the special exception above, I'm not necessarily opposed to it being against Prisons either, I don't see this as a bug, Prisons suspiciously look very much like a non-optimal institution from the human rights POV.
Hi LearnsHebrewHatesIP, Many Thanks!. Sorry that I overlooked your
>>>unless perhaps the identity is some criminal factor that somehow unifies all of those people. And then only perhaps.
clause. My bad. That indeed covers the case I was considering.
>They're not (usually) moved out of the nation state they reside in, they are not made stateless,
Agreed.
>they are not deprived of their ownership,
Sometimes yes, sometimes no. It isn't uncommon for punitive fines to be added on top of prison sentences
>and whatever is being done to them is temporary
Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Some prisoners are sentenced to life in prison. (and some few are sentenced to death - which tends to mean decades on death row)
>and is not denied by the state doing it.
Agreed (albeit the usa has been at least suspected of holding some prisoners secretly)
>Prisons suspiciously look very much like a non-optimal institution from the human rights POV.
That's fair. As technology stands today, for violent crimes, I'm not sure that there are better alternative available. One doesn't want a serial killer able to move about in the community.
I see. Personally I'm against this expanding of terms if it makes them contradict their etymology. It can be misleading and be intentionally used to mislead/create wrong impressions. It's fine as a part of the previous conversation to remark that your arguments do not change for other cleansing criteria and so you are using the term loosely, but since you've taken them to a separate discussion and presented in a rather formal style, I think a different term would be better.
From theory to practice:
A few months ago over 100,000 Armenians were expelled from Nagorno Karabakh. Could you tell us how much time have you spent protesting this act of ethnic cleansing?
I am skeptical of the claim that Armenians were expelled from Nagorno-Karabakh, as opposed to choosing to leave once it became clear that there wasn't going to be a powerful foreign army backing up their claim to privileged territorial status and immunity from Azerbaijani law any longer.
I knew a guy from Azerbaijan who was expelled from Nagorno Karabakh by the Armenians 30 years ago.
See Appendix.
What is this argument supposed to prove? You either have to keep monitoring all atrocities over the world and commenting on every single one of them... or you have no right to talk about the topic at all?
I posted not an argument, but a question. The alleged plans for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza tend to generate a much stronger reaction than the actual ethnic cleansing that was performed just a few month ago. So I was wondering whether the thread starter is equally opposed to all acts of ethnic cleansing and if not then what are his reasons for the imbalance.
As the appendix demonstrates, I view the Ethnic Cleansing of Armenians to be as morally bad as the Nakba, the Ethnic Cleansing of Palestinians from what is now called Israel. I don't spend as much time arguing against it because (1) As far as I'm aware, it didn't involve killing 18K civilians (Israeli numbers) or 25K civilians (Hamas numbers). And counting. (2) As far as I'm aware nobody is Pro-Azerbaijan in ACX, at least not in the sense that they're denying the Ethnic Cleansing motivated purely by politics or saying that it should happen because Azerbaijan "has the right to defend itself" (3) I don't know about the conflict as much as I know about the Israeli-Palestinian one.
Your question, in my experience, is a cynical non-sincere cheap distraction often employed by Pro-Israeli commenters, and I'm quite honestly sick of it. But I decided to entertain it anyway for the sake of discussion.
I suspect most of us find it difficult to separate a) the alleged plans for a future ethnic cleansing of Gaza, from b) what's going on in Gaza right now. So I think most reaction to the alleged plans is basically just the person's reaction to the current state of the war. And thus not applicable to what happened Nagorno-Karabakh.
No, they weren't expelled, but whatever Azerbaijan says should be taken in the context of their political system, relationships between Azerbaijani and Armenians, and history. Do you believe that were the Armenians to stay there their odds of facing no problems (on the scale of 100 dead per year) from the government and/or "grassroots" would be below 20%?
Do you trust the official statements of Israeli government as much as you trust the government of Azerbaijan?
Meh. You talk as though complexity doesn't exist in your world. What do you do if the ethnicity being 'cleansed' consistently refuses to honour the same rights that you claim for them?
So your arguments basically are:
1) A lesser evil is still evil, and 3d) don’t give dictators ideas because more evil in the world, even if it’s lesser evil, is bad.
3a, 3e) Thou shalt not hurt people in tangible ways.
3b, 3c) Thou shalt not hit people in the feels.
But a world in which Russia just kicks out all Ukrainians from within internationally recognized borders of Russia (possibly to make space for the Russian speakers it claims to protect) is immeasurably better than what we have now, and somehow incentivizing Putin to follow that route would be in everyone’s best interests. Only then, when all dictators switch to this instead of murdering, we can consider our next steps, trying to replace forced displacement with something less bad.
Tangible losses can be compensated.
The hurt feelings have to be weighed against whether those people hold feelings of support for groups that are doing things that are worse than forced displacement, such as outright slaughter of civilians.
You say ethnic cleansing as a norm is a very bad norm, comparing it to replacing murders with rapes. But the problem with the latter isn’t the rapes, is that you just can’t turn murderers into rapists whether you want it or not. Were it possible, you would then turn the rapists into robbers into thieves into litterers and so on.
The civilized countries are now so civilized that they spend a great deal of time arguing what are the correct words for someone with a dark color of skin, for someone who has a certain set of organs etc., and then they’re shocked people with different values just cut people’s heads off. But when it’s suggested other people should gradually taper off the beheadings following a path similar to what the civilized countries themselves followed, it’s somehow unpalatable, and the only acceptable solution is some kind of magic that would make everybody civilized by noon tomorrow.
So ethnic cleansing as a TEMPORARY norm, while still bad, has some potential to make the world a better place, or a less bad place.
> But a world in which Russia just kicks out all Ukrainians from within internationally recognized borders of Russia (possibly to make space for the Russian speakers it claims to protect) is immeasurably better than what we have now, and somehow incentivizing Putin to follow that route would be in everyone’s best interests.
The mind boggles. Possibility A: Putin is lying (as usual), he has approximately zero interest in protecting Russian-speaking people from the evils of Ukraine. I won't even list the reasons why I think it is overwhelmingly more likely. So not only incentivizing him to commit a different form of atrocities will not change anything in this case, it will give him additional excuse to do so in *other* cases. Him and all the other dictators.
Possiblity B: okay, let's say Putin got high on his own supply (dictators removing possible feedback might be somewhat prone to that). So giving him a different way might be preferable to what he did, in this particular case. Assuming he would care about your opinion. But this still leaves all the other dictators who might not have enough tanks to invade a neighbor country but definitely have enough police (and willing supporters) to round up a fraction of their own population they don't particularly like.
I think this line of argument about Russian or Ukrainian people begs the question; what is it that Putin really wants? I don’t think he gives a tinker’s dam about the people, but he does want that land. It’s very valuable.
How is this even a question? Vladimir Putin wants the same thing Londo Mollari wanted. Seriously. https://youtu.be/YbckvO7VYxk
Yeah there’s that.
It's certainly one of the reasons (not mutually exclusive) I consider the most likely. The other two are actually about people, though in a different way: 1. if Ukraine were to enjoy even a relative economic success following the 2013-2014 revolution, that would be very dangerous for Putin, and 2. The Crimea annexation certainly did boost Putin's ratings, it looks like he hoped for more of the same. He's a populist dictator, and high ratings not only allow him to get away with doing something people would otherwise protest strongly (in that case, it was the pension reform), the people's admiration or getting his name into history books in some major role might be one of his terminal values.
Yeah I agree. I meant the people on the ground where the fighting is but he certainly cares a lot about his popularity. He’s in a great position to stay popular too because anybody who doesn’t like him can be rounded up in no time.
> But a world in which Russia just kicks out all Ukrainians from within internationally recognized borders of Russia (possibly to make space for the Russian speakers it claims to protect) is immeasurably better than what we have now, and somehow incentivizing Putin to follow that route would be in everyone’s best interests
All Ukrainians nowadays have an option to apply for Russian citizenship using simplified and expedited procedure. I would imagine that vast, vast majority of Ukrainian that are physically in Russia either already took that offer, or planning to (the ones that don't - well, they are probably planning to move to EU or USA or someplace else very soon, extra encouragement to leave is not necessary).
So why do you think Putin should be incentivized to do something different in this particular area of internal affairs?
Thank you for that thoughtful post. I don't disagree with anything you said. By tying your argument to property rights, ethnic cleansing becomes theft—and I would agree that it is. Unfortunately, that raises the question of original ownership. There are parts of Europe where the borders have shifted back and forth over the centuries with people being displaced upon each border change. Say that a group's lands were stolen and given to another group by force or legal fiat. After a certain number of generations that property would seem at least to current occupants to be their own. At what point if any does the historicity of the theft no longer apply to the current owners?
For instance, I live on land taken from indigenous hunter-gatherers, first by the Spanish, and then stolen again by settlers from the United States. I would feel ill-used if the descendants of the Spanish ranchers that once owned my land demanded restitution or the return of their lands (especially since there are at least a dozen times it changed ownership—across seven or eight generations—during the interim between its theft from the Spanish and my ownership). Likewise, if the descendants of the Spanish ranchers could claim this as their property, could the tribe of hunter-gatherers who originally lived on this land claim ownership from them? I'm quite aware that I have benefited from two historical acts of ethnic cleansing, but at what point (if any) do the crimes of the past no longer count?
Ultimately, I'm left with the unpalatable conclusion that property rights are an illusion, because legal fiat, force, or accidents of history can be used to trump property rights.
Realistically, I think there needs to be a statue of limitations on this. If the change is not reversed for long enough, you just have to accept it.
Yeah, I agree it raises questions of original ownership and never really gets at that core issue. But I'm very curious about this topic. It seems that LearnsHebrewHatesIP's argument is entirely based on an Appeal to the People logical fallacy. Every subsection of section 3 includes "Most people believe in" and then just assumes that if most people believe in something that you should go along with it. Is there part of the argument that I'm missing? I don't disagree that ethnic cleansing is a generally bad thing, I just don't see how this is even an attempt to argue the position, but rather an attempt to say, lots of people think I'm correct. Am I missing part of the argument?
You might be missing a bit of the context? There's an earlier discussion below, which this sprang out of.
I think here, it's simply the argument that "ethnic cleansing" is actually, in fact, bad. Not as bad as genocide, but objectively bad. In service of that, I think LHHI tries to grab as many supporting arguments as possible, and points out that these are common things that people believe. I don't think it's about "you should believe this because other people believe this", but more like "you probably already believe something like this in some circumstances; isn't this other circumstance similar enough to be included?"
For example, if you don't believe in private property at all, that part of the argument isn't going to work on you. But I'm not sure how many people like that are commenting here.
Yes, thanks for explaining my intent. I'm not sure why exactly KLS thinks I'm arguing from Authority or Populism, what I'm doing is rather building up a case against Ethnic Cleansing, starting from some commonly-agreed-upon moral primitives, things which include Private Property, Intimate Property, Anti-Violence, and the rest mentioned in 3-*. I'm not saying the basis for believing those things are Populism or Authority, I'm just saying that those are things that the vast majority of people - and thus the vast majority of those reading the comment - already believe some combination of, to some degree or the other. And that's why I don't bother building up those primitives, but rather I use them to build my case against Ethnic Cleansing.
If need be, things like Private Property or the case against Violence or the model of Perverse Incentives can be argued from First Principles and built from more primitive assumptions, and this is exactly what thousands of philosophers, writers, economists, etc have done and have been doing before me. I doubt I will ever be as good as them in building up those primitives. (and for that matter, probably thousands of better educated moral philosophers and writers have argued against Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing, so I doubt that my case is as good as them, but they don't write on ACX and I do, so here we are.)
This is the far more elegant version of my argument: "there is no reason the suffering of now-dead conquered people five generations ago should be considered more significant than the suffering of now-dead conquered people six or twenty or one hundred or a thousand generations ago, so shut the fuck up already."
Or put another way, if one follows the argument about reparations for "theft" to its logical conclusion, Europe and Asia should be returned only to those with Neanderthal on their 23andMe profile.
I am very sympathetic to this framing.
So, one of the things I notice about the "Shut the fuck up about <<Historical Grievance>>" schtick is that it's often quite selective, mostly to the benefit of the groups that the speaker saying "Shut the fuck up" likes or are "mainstream" in the speaker's society.
For example, if you think that we should "Shut the fuck up already" about historical grievance - even ones with living survivors - your opinion about the various Museums and Remembrance holidays for the Holocaust should be pretty dim, after all, - quoting you - I see no reason why the suffering of long-dead Jews about 2 or 3 generations ago should be considered more significant than the suffering of mass-slaughtered Europeans under the Mongols 20-23 generations ago or the suffering of the Canaanites and Amalekites under the Jews some X (40? 50?) generations ago. The Hebrew bible itself - a document written by Jews - admits what we today would all "Genocide" and "Ethnic Cleansing" against the population inhabiting what we would today call Israel/Palestine/Jordan/Syria/Lebanon.
It's all the same right? Why don't we - alternatively - remember the Vietnamese who died in the French-American aggression on their land? The Cambodians who died in the Khmer Rogue madness? The Chinese and the Great Leap Forward (15 to 55 millions according to Google, 2.5 to 9 (!!!!) times as much as the holocaust Jewish victims)? Congo and the Belgian reign of horror at the start of the 20th century (1.5 million to 13 million according to Wikipedia).
If you want to be as Vulcan and Spock-like as possible about historical grievances, why not go all the way and tell the next Jew you meet remembering their genocided ancestors "Oh for fuck's sake just stop whining already it has been 80 years oh my fucking gosh you people and your endless kvetching"? I'm waiting for the results.
----------------------
Assuming you're asking in Good Faith (^TM), here's (one of the reasons) why you should care about the suffering of long-dead people: Living Descendents.
Imagine my grandfather did something horrible to your grandparents, maybe he stole and dispossessed your grandfather, maybe he raped your grandmother. He did something Unspeakable. I imagine that - if you knew this - you would want nothing to do with me. This is because I represent the offspring of someone who did horrible things to some of the people you most love, and people generally assume (quite accurately in some cases, quite non-accurately in others: My actual grandfather's name translates from Arabic as "The Perfectly Pious". I'm Atheist.) that the offspring of someone resembles them in every way, so I most likely resemble the horrible person that did horrible thing to your loved ones, and therefore I'm a Persona Non Grata. Imagine further that I do not **merely** not apologize to you or honor the memory of your victimized loved ones, **BUT** I also brag about my criminal grandfather, I say that your grievances didn't happen or that it happened but they deserved it or that it happened and my grandfather is based and didn't go far enough. ***That*** is guaranteed to ruffle your feather.
None of the argument above depend on whether the people victimized are really your literal grandparents or some further ancestors. And it also doesn't depend on the fact that you're a single person as opposed to a collective. Whenever a living collective views some victimized mostly-dead population as their ancestors (often with plenty of evidence), and whenever the other mostly-dead population that victimized those ancestors has descendants that view them as heroes and based people who **merely** defended themselves/carried the White Man's Burden/<<insert excuse here>> and that they even didn't go far enough, the condition is there for a historical healing to happen: for the descendants of the criminal to know what crime their elders did and recognize and admit and apologize for it, and for the descendants of the victimized to shake hands and forgive.
There is also an argument to be made that it's morally good and virtuous to do this even with no living descendants, but it's not going to convince everybody. The one with living dependents is stronger, and one that I have difficulty imagining a non-hypocritical person rejecting.
-------------------
As for why should do this with Palestinians and Jews and not (say) the Chinese and the Congolese, there are generally 2 reactions when one discovers the Inconsistency of Human Morality:
1- Cynical : This really proves that there is no such thing as Morality, why X and not Y even though they're mostly the same? No Ethics, therefore Killing Puppies is okay. Be Right Back I'm going to rape a 5 years old.
2- Determined : This really proves that human wetware is a very error-prone and buggy chip calculating a really complex and intractable problem, there is such a thing as Morality and human morality is a bad approximation of it that can nonetheless get better. Be Right Back I'm going to remind my Israeli friend of the Nakba (or, If I'm Israeli, Be Right Back I'm going to remind my Arab friend of the Ethnic Cleansing Arabs did to their innocent Jewish compatriots after 1948).
Both reactions observe the same thing but draw different conclusions from it. The first one might be true, as an Atheist I even believe in the descriptive part (no objective morality) just not necessarily the killing puppies and raping 5 year olds part. It's just that, following the philosophy of "As If" [1], it's vastly more beneficial to me and to other people to act according to the second attitude. Seeing a cute puppy get adopted and a less attractive one not getting adopted, my reaction is not "NO puppy should ever get adopted", my reaction is adopting the less attractive puppy.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Philosophy_of_%27As_if%27
I think you were mixing up the personal with a much larger scale. The personal is important, but I think the fundamental distinction is living memory, or even better collective memory. The problem is the world has a very large and fairly well documented collective memory at this point, and so things just don’t seem to recede into the distance the way they used to. It’ horrible people, getting killed large numbers of people getting killed or displaced or just fading away. I don’t think there is some deep human “morality” that solves this problem, because it really isn’t a problem; it’s the way of the world. It doesn’t mean we stop trying to make things better, but it demands deep humility to really make things better.
I picked "five generations" as a minimal threshold for a reason - it's the point at which no one living could have had contact with a conquered ancestor to be traumatized by their first person account of the horror.
It was pretty clear from a brief skim of your very long reply that you weren’t engaging with my premise in good faith, so I'm not going to engaging with your reply.
I don't think that not reading a reply because it's too long is something you should flaunt, especially when that reply isn't particularly long compared to the median post, but thanks for letting me know anyway.
My point still stands, even after 5 "generations" (whatever that means in your book), you won't dare to tell a Jew remembering the Holocaust "Shut the fuck up already", and you only choose to do that for the conflicts that are "exotic" and socially safe to dismiss.
Nice try.
As I said, I didn't avoid a close reading of your comment due to its length, but rather its irrelevance in response to my premise. I only noted the length to marvel that you took so much time attempting to direct away from my argument.
Agreed. Even for _living_ people, I think that statutes of limitation are a wise part of the law. And that applies even more forcefully when everyone in the conflict, on both sides, is long dead.
I'm writing from the USA, which has been inhabited by humans for something like 20,000 years. Even if any given area was only genocidally conquered every thousand years or so, a typical parcel has probably been bloodily stolen a score of times. Good luck unwinding _that_.
I leave off the "shut the fuck up" part, at least out loud, but yea this is where I've landed on the topic as well.
But what about the poor Denisovans!
Will *nobody* think of the Denisovans?!
I have to say, when I first read of them, I did grieve a little for them. It made me thiink of the last line of “Angels with Dirty Faces “
“Come on, let’s go say a prayer for a boy who couldn’t run as fast as me.”
I realize it’s hopelessly sentimental but what the heck…maybe the Denizovans were like Jimmy Cagney in spirit. They had to go and they made the best of it.
East coast vs. west coast, the eternal struggle.
My best friend's father is mixed race, Osage on his mother's side and white on his father's. He grew up on the reservation like it was the 1800s; dirt floors, no running water, no electricity, abject poverty, physical abuse. A couple of great aunts were killed for their oil rights, so his great (or regular?) grandmother refused to claim hers and instead just went about working.
My best friend's dad eventually got into the upper middle class as a federal law enforcement officer by getting a series of jobs and doing them well.
That was it. Working like anyone else got him an idyllic upper middle class lifestyle, no different than an upper middle class white man's.
And he refused to register his own children with the tribe, even though their one-quarter status would have provided some cash and affirmative action advantages.
He has a saying, "poor people have poor ways," which I didn't understand as a sheltered upper middle class white teenager, but which I understand now as a lower middle class working adult in a service industry.
That’s a great story. I really am coming to understand how resentment can be a real boat anchor in the human psyche. This man you describe speaks to it well.
“….poor ways.” Nice.
> At what point if any does the historicity of the theft no longer apply to the current owners?
Clearly the point at which the current owner came into possession of it.
I bought my land two years ago from its previous owner, if it turns out that _he_ stole it from you three years ago, then your case is against him, not me.
True, but how do we deal with cases where the theft was far enough in the past, in a time before Title Companies and Title Insurance, and the original thief is dead and cannot be sued or prosecuted?
I realize in the real conversation my question tramples on toes, but I mean this as a genuine question.
Why should we care about a property dispute where all of the people in the original dispute are dead? Less sure about this, but I also wonder why we should care about a dispute where the property has been moved long enough ago that everyone is living somewhere else and has brought up one or more generations since then. For instance, if my grandfather lost his home illegally, moved elsewhere and raised my father - my father has no ties to the original land. I have even less ties, maybe only family telling me I should have had ties, which I would not have known or felt if not told that.
If someone living has a specific claim, even if it's pretty old, I'm sympathetic to that. General claims - "people like me used to control areas like that" I think are worthless. I feel the same for old claims or unspecific claims - "my great-grandfather owned land in [town]" or "50 years ago my family owned the house on 112 Anywhere St, which was torn down and replaced by a new house at the same location." To me, such claims become impossible to adjudicate, because we either lack the specific understanding in order to affix blame and the source of compensation or we would cause as much or more wrong trying to correct a past issue. If someone stole my house 100 years ago but I bought it 10 years ago from the third owner since then, there's no way to fix that. No matter how clear the harm was 100 years ago or even if the original owner were still alive.
Third parties shouldn't care. You're on the cusp of reinventing squatter's rights and statutes of limitations.
We don't, of course, and we'll all be a lot happier for it.
Go tell that to the Israelis and the Palestinians — and the peoples of the Balkans. But as the old saying goes, against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain.
Possession is nine-tenths of the law, and the other tenth is the actual law. If you have neither possession nor the law of the state on your side, your option is war, which is a stupid option to take.
It's my understanding that historically, rights only exist under a sovereign who guarantees them. if you're not under the protection of a sovereign, you're an outlaw and anyone is free to inflict violence upon you, i.e. "violate" your "rights". In a conflict between sovereign states, the only right that matters is the right of conquest. though under the modern international order, everyone likes to pretend otherwise.
I would like to extend this thought to not simply sovereigns, but anyone. If you cannot guarantee your own rights, you must seek that guarantee elsewhere, which may include a sovereign. A coalition can keep strength by itself from being the rule of law.
Power and politics is complicated.
eh, I'd say that just means the individuals are their own sovereigns. but we're splitting hairs.
Yup.
This is all fine and good, but I don’t think the person you say was “advocating for ethnic cleaning as a norm” was doing that. (“Makes sense to have a strong taboo in general, but in this one particular case where the default is ongoing megadeath with no end in sight, maybe it’s a better alternative” was pretty much it, I thought…)
This isn't the comment to condemn by commenter you're referencing, the one to condemn is the one making an unfunny joke about Ethnic Cleansing while having a history of supporting and propagandizing for a state with a long history of Ethnic Cleansing. This is why I include objection (4-a).
Which "wealthy country" were the Palestinians expelled from? Because I don't think Palestine was ever really wealthy, and Israel didn't become wealthy until after most of the Palestinians who were going to leave had already left.
> Palestinians were expelled from a wealthy country
Huh? This isn't a thing that ever actually happened. In 48 after losing a war they started, some (not all or even most) Palestinians were moved from one poor Arab village to a different poor Arab village. The "living in refugee camp" thing isn't real either - normal Palestinian neighborhoods or villages are referrwd to as "refugee camps" in order to get more UN aid money, even if they've been established neighborhoods for decades.
Perhaps this is the Zionist propaganda they teach at Israeli schools, and you're not a history buff so you could be excused to have never learned otherwise. But here's an actual historical (-ish) source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakba, I suggest you skim it to the end, if only to know how to counter people who have read it in future conversations.
Specifically:
> not all or even most
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_Palestine_(region)#British_Mandate_era Says that the combined Muslim and Christian population of Palestine in 1945 was 1.2 million, the usual estimated number of those ethnically cleansed in the Nakba is 700K to 800K, so that's about 7/12 to 8/12, i.e. 58% to 66%, technically "most".
> after losing a war they started
The Palestinians didn't start the 1948 war, what started it was the Zionist militias, the biggest of which was the Haganah, which started killing and ethnically cleansing Palestinians in several massacres starting November of 1947. Only after the population of fleeing refugees started overflowing on the borders of other Arab countries did their mostly corrupt leadership take the decision to invade, too late and without organization or preparedness.
I will let the Wiki page for the Nakba speak:
>>> In early April 1948 [[Meaning before the Arab armies invaded, in May 1948]], the Israelis launched Plan Dalet, a large-scale offensive to capture land and empty it of Palestinian Arabs. During the offensive, Israel captured and cleared land that was allocated to the Palestinians by the UN partition resolution. Over 200 villages were destroyed during this period. Massacres and expulsions continued, including at Deir Yassin (9 April 1948), Arab urban neighborhoods in Tiberias (18 April), Haifa (23 April), West Jerusalem (24 April), Acre (6-18 May), Safed (10 May), and Jaffa (13 May) were depopulated. Israel began engaging in biological warfare in April, poisoning the water supplies of certain towns and villages, including a successful operation that caused a typhoid epidemic in Acre in early May, and an unsuccessful attempt in Gaza that was foiled by the Egyptians in late May [[Egyptians being based as usual]].
Before the first Arab military boots ever hit the land in late May:
>>> By that time, Palestinian society was destroyed and over 300,000 Palestinians had been expelled or fled.
> one poor Arab village to a different poor Arab village.
Aka the Zionist myth of "barren land" or "land without people", never seen any documents or sources that prove it or its contradiction, and thus dismissible just as claimed: without evidence.
> Palestinian neighborhoods or villages are referred to as "refugee camps" in order to get more UN aid money,
Usual Israeli hate boner towards the UN, but I will notice that neither you nor any government is an authority on what counts as a refugee.
The Tuo lightbulb claims to correct circadian rhythm issues without bright lights by using custom LEDs tuned to specific frequencies of orange and violet light that are present at sunrise and sunset. Their studies so far have produced what appear to be dramatic results (but with a small sample size of mostly grad students and postdocs in their own lab). Sounds too good to be true, but if it really works it could be a huge improvement in QoL for people with CRDs and approximately all teenagers.
https://www.thetuolife.com/pages/the-science-better-than-blue-light
> (but with a small sample size of mostly grad students and postdocs in their own lab).
"My boss wants this product to succeed. I tested it myself and it's great, I promise there's no conflict of interest here!"?
We're reaching levels of credulity that shouldn't even be possible.
The implication that particularly specific frequencies trigger the effect is implausible. The mechanism they propose explicitly uses the normal cone cells which are used for vision, so it's really just appropriate colours not more specific frequencies than that (assuming their method works at all). They make a big point of it being a comfortable not excessive light level, but also use rapidly alternating blue and orange lights which seems like it'd be way more uncomfortable than just bright white. If the changes are too quick to be perceptible, then they're probably also too quick to have an effect since again, the system that's supposed to cause this effect is part of the visual system (I guess it's possible that higher-level visual processing ends up filtering out the higher frequencies of strobing but this doesn't affect the cicardian cycle things, but that seems unlikely).
I haven't seen a Middle East subthread for a while - are they still a thing?
There's only been one mention of the Middle East on this post in the last 12 hours, so it's probably fine. There were two posters who constantly brought it up, but one of them got banned and the other one mellowed out. I think everyone else just got bored of talking about it.
Not like there's been any recent developments either. Only recent news is that some guy in the US Air Force burned himself alive in front of the Israeli embassy. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/25/world/middleeast/israel-embassy-man-on-fire.html Don't know what he expected to accomplish with that.
Several thousand times less bad than what Palestinians are going through, but sad nonetheless.
Question: What purpose do you seek to further with this comment?
I'm saying that a protester self-immolating is very upsetting, but given we're in the middle of a genocide, there is very little scope for protesters to move the dial.
(I'm just very numb to more innocent deaths at this point)
It's a war, not a genocide.
With 98% of the deaths on one side, the side that has lived under occupation for most of a century? ~1 million Gazan homes have been destroyed, almost all their hospitals have been bombed, they have no electricity or fuel, and food is starting to run out.
Are Israeli people in a similar situation?
The middle of a genocide?
Putin's war in Ukraine?
The Armenian exodus? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_of_Nagorno-Karabakh_Armenians
Israel are our friends. It's different when you see your friends slaughtering tens of thousands of civilians, destroying infrastructure and homes (and this is after decades of occupation and refusing to negotiate for their freedom)
I was numb after the Syrian war too. One significant difference though is that people don't treat Netanyahu the way they treat Assad.
At this point I sort of see Isreal as "oh yet another Middle Eastern/African basket case" and noone pays much attention to those wars either, but the difference is that Isreal once aspired to something more than that. Also, Isreal has nukes, so there's that, too.
Question for people who believe that face masks are completely useless against covid (or completely useless unless they are the 99% medical kind)...
When you sneeze, do you cover your mouth?
If yes, why exactly?
Because breathing and sneezing are different
While there may be people who genuinely believe masks are completely useless, a better case against masking as a social standard, at least during the acute phase of the pandemic, was that even if masks do work to some degree, if they don't work to the same degree as people *believe* they work, it will lead to masked people acting in ways that they wouldn't have if they know were aware of the actual efficacy level, ie. stop distancing and go out and about even while sick in cases where they wouldn't have otherwise done so.
'course, at this point pretty much no-one (who isn't wearing masks anyway) is socially distancing and the society as a whole operates roughly the same as pre-pandemic, apart from increased WFH (I wonder if there are studies on whether there's been permanent cultural changes on things like handwashing or staying home when sick?), so this is a bit of a moot point.
(I do believe masks are useful, but) Minimizing the odds of having a macroscopic piece of snot land on other people's faces, clothes or other possessions seems like a sufficient reason on its own.
> When you sneeze, do you cover your mouth?
Yes
> If yes, why exactly?
It's 100% social convention, 0% concern for other's health.
I also bless other people when they sneeze. Surely that helps prevent disease.
I think about face masks as more like a way to somewhat protect _other people_ from whatever _I_ have, basically a better version of covering my mouth.
I don't think my mask would protect _me_ from COVID, don't know if that counts as 'masks are useless'
I would count "protecting other people" as "useful", but yeah, selfish incentives matter a lot; it is easier to sell something that protects you than something that helps you protect others. Nonetheless, we obviously cover our mouths to protect others.
They're probably mostly useless (like, 10% or lower effectiveness) unless they're proper respirators because covid mostly spreads in aerosolised form rather than as droplets and surgical masks don't do much except for droplets, and because I have a beard N95 masks don't seal properly on my face so they're not very effective. Yes, this means I am choosing to raise the covid risk of myself and everyone around me by a few percent because I can't be bothered shaving and buying respirators, and I'm worried about the social stigma of being seen as excessively safety-conscious and hiding my face. I dunno; I think there are only a few places where I'd want to wear a mask, like on the train, and I haven't seen anyone else wear one one the train for months even if they're from a vulnerable group.
I cover my mouth and nose when I sneeze because A) not everything is aerosolised and some things do spread as droplets, and B) people might yell at me.
I think that only P95 masks (or better) are useful against Covid, anything less was just security theater. I cover my mouth because getting droplets on the person in front of me is impolite. I also do it when I'm alone because I don't like covering my computer screen or other objects with my snot.
I think N95 masks definitely worked. I knew pre-vax people working with covid patients who never got covid and only had N95 protection. But I'd agree surgical masks are questionable at best for covid protection.
I have another answer that is orthogonal to my previous comment. Quite simply, the proof is in the pudding. Certain behaviors (masking, vaccination) were sold to us as "the only way out of the crisis" (those are literal words uttered by my local politicians, over and over). In practice, it turned out that herd immunity was the *actual* way out of the crisis.
This shifts the calculus of any measure purely towards personal benefits. You can mask for your own protection (if you think the tradeoff is worth it), but there is absolutely no reason to make the behavior compulsory.
Anyways, I'm curious why you're bringing this up now. Covid has barely been a blip on the radar for several years in my neck of the woods. I understand it's different in other places. It was bizarre watching the latest GDQ and seeing the people there act as if it was still 2020.
Are you saying vaccination had no impact?
It had limited impact on *transmission*, leading to almost no impact on herd immunity, which is what our politicians falsely promised. If you are out and about in society, you *will* get exposed to covid over and over. No amount of vaccination was going to change that after omicron. In the end, herd immunity was achieved through repeated exposure, not vaccinations.
Also, less of this please. Don't put the most extreme possible position in my mouth.
I don't understand.
If going out and about means you *will* get exposed to covid over and over, then, by definition, "herd immunity" has not been achieved.
People were exposed over and over again, and then eventually herd immunity was achieved (NOTE: this waxes and wanes of course as immunity fades over time).
The point is: repeated exposure to the actual virus builds up much stronger immunity than vaccines. So we were *always* going to have a period of time where the virus runs rampant through the population. Vaccination alone was not enough to prevent this. The measures such as covid certificates were pretty strong restrictions on our personal freedom which ultimately didn't change this reality.
> I'm curious why you're bringing this up now.
Because it's only now that I realized that the argument against face masks (they do not offer 100% protection, therefore worthless) applies even more so to things that most of us already do and that are not considered controversial.
Probably it's a question of timing -- everything we were taught to do as children is normal, everything we were told recently to do is an outrageous limitation of our freedoms. Most people would probably refuse to wipe their butts if someone proposed it as a new thing today. The effectiveness is merely an excuse: no one really measures the exact effectiveness of covering mouth or wiping butt, but people seem okay with doing that anyway.
How dare you try to control how I smell! A whiff of poop is just the price of freedom!
Almost nobody believes that face masks are *completely* useless against COVID in all situations, and this belief in its literal form has never been a significant part of the political discourse anywhere I am aware of. More modest beliefs are frequently expressed in colloquial language as "masks are useless", which says nothing other than that most people aren't pedantic nerds. You are tilting at straw men, and your question is nowhere near the "gotcha" you imagine it to be.
Would you care to try again?
I think there's been a lot of "black and white" messaging on both sides. There's apparently a lot of people who think that either something is completely effective, or not effective at all. And it's shocking how many people operate on some sort of binary model of infection, where either you are "clean" or you "have covid".
I would not be surprised if there were a number of people who grew tired of hearing "masks are effective" from sources which they knew to be untrustworthy, and then heard "masks won't stop you from getting covid", and so concluded that "masks are ineffective".
And I have actually heard a couple people say that, but then clarify that they were only talking about cloth masks. (Which still help reduce the number of virions entering the body!) To them, apparently "masks" meant the type of cloth masks that church groups were sewing in the early days, and maybe surgical masks too, while I assume they probably refer to all the fancy masks as "N95s" or something like that.
I'm a lifelong holy warrior against straw men in discourse, as my long-suffering family members could attest. However I must regrettably say that this is not such an example. There are plenty of people in the US who think and say that "face masks are completely useless against COVID in all situations", exactly as stated. I've met several such individuals myself despite not residing in a politically/socially conservative area and they are "loud and proud" with that belief. Several current members of the US Congress appear to hold that view, along with members of various state legislatures, etc.
>Several current members of the US Congress appear to hold that view, along with members of various state legislatures, etc.
So this is a case where one might have had hopes for the intelligence of a congresscritter or (even less plausibly) for its honesty, but one must abandon any hopes for both in the same critter? :-)
> Almost nobody believes that face masks are *completely* useless against COVID in all situations
I don't think you've had your finger on the pulse for the past 4 years.
<Almost nobody believes that face masks are *completely* useless against COVID in all situations, and this belief in its literal form has never been a significant part of the political discourse anywhere I am aware of.
Actually there are a LOT of people whovbelieve masks are completely useless. I was on medical Twitter all through the pandemic, and many commenters on the medical professionals I followed were convinced that masks make zero difference. If by political discourse you mean discourse by politicians, I'm sure there must be politicians who also believe masks are nothing but theatre. I mean, RFK Jr. is sure that childhood vaccinations are unnecessary and harmful, & has talked up that idea in many settings. Thinking masks are useless, while dumb, is not as dumb as RFK's vax views.
I concur with the above. I've always covered my nose and mouth when I sneezed. COVID had nothing to do with it
Covering yourself while sneezing is pretty much the equivalent of not spitting on other people and has little to do with practical concerns about spreading specific diseases. At least for me the vast majority of sneezing I've ever done is due to allergies which, as far as I know, aren't contagious; and on the opposite side, we don't expect that never ever getting sneezed at is going to prevent you from catching the flu from a nearby sufferer.
It depends on what "prevent" means. I think most of us *do* think that never ever getting sneezed at will give you a *lower chance* of catching the flu than getting sneezed at by someone with the flu will (which is one thing that "prevent" might mean). We don't think it will reduce the probability to zero (which is another thing that "prevent" might mean).
My assumption is that for popular endemic diseases - flu, rhinovirus and nowadays also Covid - the bottleneck that determines how often I get sick is my immunity and *not* the opportunities to get infected, which are so numerous for me (in large part due to multiple children bringing home all the pathogens as frequently as *their* immunity allows) that they are "saturated" and so even a significant reduction of the chance of catching the flu (or Covid) *at that day from that person* has an insignificant impact on the total number of times I'll catch the flu (or Covid) per year or per lifetime; so a usable preventative measure has to offer a *drastic* reduction in the chance to infect or it's not making any difference at all and is not worth any tradeoffs or inconvenience.
But the immune system is rarely 100% efficient, it's more like "your chance of becoming sick is X when exposed to 1 million copies of virus, Y when exposed to 1 billion copies", and in most cases X<Y and the difference is quite significant.
The ballpark math I'm thinking about is that for the current seasonal flu strain I "exchange rebreathed air" with 1-5 infected people every day, so 100+ potential infections per season. If the chance to catch flu from one of them is 90%, the chance of catching that strain during that season is ~100%; if the chance to catch flu from one of them is 10%, the chance of me catching that strain is still ~100%, if the chance to catch flu from one of them is 1%, the chance of me catching that strain is still more than 66%. So that's what I mean by "it should be *very* effective or it's useless" as it starts making a difference only if the chance of infection becomes very low (<1%), and getting from 90% to 10% is useless.
"Exchange rebreathed air" is vague though (sitting face to face in a small room for hours is different from being five meters from each other in a bus for 20 minutes), and probably misses a few relevant metrics e.g. estimating how long an average portion of air is outside of their lungs before entering yours, which is relevant if virions degrade on their own or as a result of microdroplets drying/cooling/etc. The difference in the number of intact virions reaching your membranes might be several orders of magnitude, easily. Also the sick people are different too (I remember that superspreader Korean woman). Which means any model that implicitly assumes the potential infections are about equal is probably as useless as one estimating meteorite impacts by assuming them all to have ~equal mass.
It's plausible that if a sick person is in your household, then even with a mask, they might be spreading so many copies of the virus, that all that matters is whether your body's initial response was enough to fight it off (and if so, then it will be active enough to continue fighting it off for the rest of the exposure). But when it's a person sitting a few seats away from you on a bus or in a classroom, it seems to me that both the intrinsic probability of fighting off a significant exposure, and the extrinsic probability of getting a significant exposure, are relevant. It's not like one of them is close enough to 100% or 0% that it can be ignored.
> the bottleneck that determines how often I get sick is my immunity and *not* the opportunities to get infected
I disagree, simply because I observe that I'm much more likely to get sick if someone else in my household is sick than otherwise. I don't think my exposure to germs while going about my daily business is anywhere close to saturated.
I mean "saturated" by that if you don't get infected today, you'll get infected a week later, as you'll get repeated chances continuously so much that you're unlikely to last through the particular strain's epidemic season without getting immunity, and "someone else in your household being sick" determines *when* that happens, not *if* it does.
Because pretty big droplets spew all over the place when I don't. Facemasks obviously help if people sneeze into them in lieu of not covering their mouth at all. That's not what I've observed though, which is people wearing masks, *taking them off* (!!!) to cough or sneeze, then putting them back on. Absolutely moronic.
In terms of protecting people against the mixing of pathogens into the air during regular breathing, it's pretty clear that any mask which doesn't noticeably impede your breathing does not meaningfully filter the air in either direction. Even if it did, then touching the outside of the mask would be a pretty big no-no. Again, this does not match my observation of how masked people actually behave.
FWIW, I do mask up voluntarily when I *know for a fact* that I am sick.
> *taking them off* (!!!) to cough or sneeze, then putting them back on. Absolutely moronic.
Saw that too. Ugh. Maybe not moronic, more like "I'm forced to wear this mask for stupid reasons I don't care about/for my own protection but it's uncomfortable to sneeze while in it". Or "I'm not sick, my sneeze won't hurt anyone".
I have found N95 and N99 masks that do not noticeably impede breathing, and they definitely filter air meaningfully. That's what the 95 and 99 in the ratings mean. For me, at least, masks that actually lay up against my lower face, especially the tip of my nose, make me feel suffocated. The ones that have a sort of beak that is like a tent over the lower face are quite tolerable. There were a few occasions when I left a store where I had masked, forgot I had a mask on, and biked all the way home without noticing the mask -- even though my ride home s uphill and has a few sections that have me panting.
I do sympathize with people who remove the mask when they sneeze. If you are repeatedly sneezing inside of your mask, you end up with a wet mask and a runny nose that you cannot blow. Lifting the mask but then sneezing into a handkerchief or your inner elbow seems like it would keep you from spraying big droplets out into the air, so seems possible to me that a sneeze done that way does not put any more germ-filled aerosols out into the air than a single non-sneeze exhale. Why would it?
But in general, yeah, people have not been informed well about masks and what works and what doesn't. Kind of rare these days to read someone complaining about how dumb the public is with mask usage. Hardly anyone is masking these days. Are you still seeing people masking but then doing things that neutralize the benefits of the mask?
As masks have shifted to become voluntary, the behavior of people who do mask is much more reasonable these days.
I've found that the people around me don't enjoy it when I spray them with fluids from my mouth.
Edit to add: That probably wasn't the most productive way to say that. I guess I'd say that it's for the same reason that I wear headphones when I'm listening to music. Or when I'm gassy, I hold on until I'm outdoors (and away from people).
I think it's mostly just politeness. If I'm actually sick, I stay away from people, to the best of my ability. (I've mostly found that it is little kids who don't cover their mouths.)
Transwomen breastfeeding. Last week I realised this is actually a thing that is physically possible. Going on Twitter to learn more about was a mistake ofc, but the shitstorm was somewhat entertaining to watch (takeaway: everyone thinks everyone else is a pedo). Looking at the literature, it is almost non-existant (I found ~10 papers that were relevant, wrote an article here https://valentinsocial.substack.com/p/can-transwomen-breastfeed). My conclusion is, there are no obvious risks that we know of right know, but we definitely need more research if this is a thing that is going to happen more in the future.
Just out of curiosity - why would one have a prior that this wasn't possible, given that lactation isn't particularly correlated with breast size (or rather, that past some Minimal Viable Breast development, the rest is just subcutaneous adipose commentary)?
Have always wondered if it might be an interestingly different experience (on both ends), but obviously the intervention arm is pretty underpowered compared to the control group. And one does not simply ask around "hey, would anyone be willing to volunteer their baby so I can try breastfeeding?" But I notice that even if I somehow had my own biological kid, it'd feel...more...correct to have the actual-mother do the honours. (And not just because it messes with hormone levels. Prolactinoma isn't a fun shadow to live under.)
As someone who had never had any reason to study the biology of lactation, I had no idea it was physically possible either.
I knew nothing about the difference in biology between male and female breasts, I had just assumed that male milk glands are a leftover and not something that can function at the level of female glands. Also it's worth noting that males breastfeeding is not something that happens apart from very few exceptions, so even if you had a baby you probably wouldn'y have a choice whether or not to breastfeed it unless you were willing to do hormone therapy and take drugs.
Ah...I came away from highschool biology with the simplified understanding that female is the default human template, which Y chromosomes graft some additional software and hardware patches on top of, making various features dormant without actually removing the functionality. Breasts being one such feature, though not usually a relevant concern in this context outside of gynecomastia. So the assumption would be that this is possible, although unlikely and almost certainly unwanted. Maybe that was a quirk in my schooling though.
Sorry, I guess I wasn't explicit: I myself am part of the minority of the transwomen minority who're capable of lactation. But stepping it up to full-on breastfeeding is still mostly speculative without the relevant suckling stimulus, hence the curiosity. At any rate, thanks for the post. Relevant To My Interests, surprisingly hard to find information like this going down the typical gender rabbitholes.
Oh that's a pretty cool metaphor femal/male bodies!
Yeah, information on the topic is scarce and spread out, that was one of the reasons I wrote this post, maybe it can serve as a reference point for anyone looking for some facts without the usual opinions that surround this subject
Not just trans women - cisgender men have been able to breastfeed on rare occasions. I imagine they have impressive estrogen levels.
Cisgender men and trans women have the same underlying reality.
"Cisgender"
Stop applying exonyms to unwilling groups.
Is it even an exonym? It seems to be credited to a biologist named Dana Defosse, and casual searching hasn't found any evidence that she wouldn't identify herself as cisgender.
Got a better word?
Yeah I saw a few stories about cisgender man breastfeeding as well. Crazy stuff, never thought how similar the male and female bodies are in this manner
I have been wondering why such a huge percentage of people in US TV commercials are African American? If I had to guess, I would say that they are three or four times over represented.
Possible answers:
1) I am wrong and over-estimating
2) Blacks either watch more TV relative to their population, or more commercial (non streaming) TV
3) Blacks are more receptive to advertising (ie a target market)
4) Advertisers feel good and diverse about themselves by featuring black actors, and the cumulative effect is to be wildly over-represented
5) Marketers have found that ads with black actors perform better relative to other actor distributions (they sell more or improve brand image)
6) Advertisers come from urban areas and are unaware of the actual demographics of the country?
7) Advertisers are shooting for diversity, and the cumulative effect is wildly unrepresentative?
Any others? Any feedback on which of these is plausible? Is it perhaps some combination of these? Anyone in Marketing familiar with research on the topic (I was in Marketing, but have been retired long since before this trend started, but our main spokesman 15 years ago, was indeed a black male).
African Americans are a very sizeable demographic in some parts of the US, namely the southeast, and have been that way for centuries, long before more recent immigrant groups.
Anyway, the point of the advertising is to show that they're for everyone, not to simulate a statistical sample of the US population.
Something that's been true for centuries is generally not a good way to explain a recent change.
Showing black people in media has been common since the 70s. And the change before that was the civil rights movement and the reduction in legally enforced racism.
It's the 'progressive' response to the killing of George Floyd:
1. Let young men loot and burn several cities.
2. Blame all police.
3. Put lots of black people in toothpaste commercials.
Apparently it never occurred to them to demand an end to any claimed 'immunity' for police from both criminal and civil prosecution, or direct police agencies to train recruits appropriately regarding constitutionally-guaranteed civil rights that come into play with the use of force.
Would-be conservatives are just too dumb to know they should care.
Perhaps African-Americans, for whatever reason, just apply more often for advertising jobs and tasks.
I wonder if there's some element of, black people and black culture seem cool/authentic to most Americans, in a way that lends credibility to advertisements?
I don't watch enough TV to notice trendlines in...blackvertising, but I always figured it was something like, this is the most important token box to check off, the one people will get most mad about flubbing, let's at least get that one right. And on the flip side, I kind of implicitly get the message as a non-black minority* that they're supposed to be, like, a stand-in for The Rest Of Us. Not like, one minority to rule them all, but the whole...judge a society by its least well off, that kind of thing. As black America goes, so goes the rest of minority America. Or that's always been the perception I've had, anyway.
Maybe there's also some historical first-mover-advantage reasons, coming first in the civil rights sequence, and thus having the most time to cultivate a robust presence in such industries. Not to mention the sports-to-salesman pipeline, which is probably a huge contributor.
*but do I get to be a "POC"? I have no idea!
Also, other minorities seem to be underrepresented? The US Hispanic population is like 19% and the black population is closer to 13%. Hispanics seem super underrepresented in pop culture and media.
A fun side point is that the same phenomenon happens in Australia too, where black people (African-type black people, not Aborigines) are just 1.3% of the population, and vastly outnumbered by most other ethnic minorities you could think of. And the ones that _are_ here are mostly Sudanese and Somalian refugees, who don't exactly have a lot of disposable income.
I don't want to use the term "virtue signalling" because it leads to arguments about the choice of words, but let's just say... you know that thing that the term "virtue signalling" points to? This is that thing.
I suspect that's just a side effect of the global influence of American media. It's the same reason Swedish teenagers ask to be read their Miranda rights.
Yes, bizarre how africans are orders of magnitude more common in ads than aboriginals.
Honestly the population of Aborigines who are both (a) actually recognisably Aboriginal and not just 1/16th, and (b) good-looking enough to be a model (and disciplined/sober enough to hold down a job) is pretty tiny.
What's really weird is that Africans are more common in ads than Asians, who outnumber them significantly, and also do a _lot_ more shopping.
My guess is that a few of these effects are going on.
The biggest one is probably something like advertisers finding that an ad is more effective at convincing members of a group that a product is for them if the ad visibly shows a member of that group using the product. If all that matters is that at least one person of your group use the product in the ad, then advertisers will include one ad with a member of each group in their rotation. Small groups will end up over-represented, and large groups will end up under-represented.
A secondary effect is that some groups (notably urban liberals) care about whether a product is seen as *only* for one group, and showing members of a variety of groups using the product helps counteract that potential problem.
I think both of these effects are historically situated. In some contexts, members of some minorities are willing to let members of other groups stand in for them. For instance, at some points in time, young girls were willing to identify with a protagonist who was a young boy, but young boys were not willing to identify with a protagonist who was a young girl, so children's movies generally featured a young boy as protagonist if they wanted to sell to a wider audience. As another instance, there might be some groups that really *don't* want to use a product that is seen as one that members of other groups might use - if you want to target those audiences, you have to *not* include members of other groups in your ads.
Lots of interesting guesses here.
Based on stats I've come across, #1 is false{1} and [#2 is true](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/black-audiences-consume-media-tv-group-want-better-representation-rcna138423). #3 seems plausible, and I do vaguely recall seeing something about lower-class groups being more susceptible to advertising, but I can't find it now so maybe I'm wrong. #4 and #7 fit my intuitions strongly, especially since marketers are probably verbally-tilted (in terms of IQ), and people with a verbal-tilt tend to be more woke. As for #5 and #6, I don't know enough about the facts regarding them to have much of an opinion there.
So in summary:
#2, #4, #7 seem very likely to me
#3, #5, #6 unsure
#1 unlikely
{1} I've definitely come across statistics on this, but can't find them easily right now - I don't think the media is exactly eager to draw much attention to it.
That Nielsen report really clarifies, thanks.
It shows that blacks watch a lot more TV and that they feel underrepresented and that they react more favorably to representation. On #3 and 5, if a product is targeted in part to this demographic for whatever reason, it might lead to advertisers to really stress that they are "open to people like me".
One that comes to mind is a popular commercial on a buy your car online company that lets you set your own monthly bill and loan length with a toggle in the app. Both spokespersons for the company are young blacks and the person speaking for the consumer is black (with a diverse range of people behind them). I can’t imagine this was unintentional.
The same reason that gay people are vastly overrepresented in shows. If you have a cast of, let's say, 8 regulars, and one of them is gay, that's 12.5% of the cast. A gay couple would make that 25%. If shows are adding gay characters on purpose, that 12.5% gets repeated over and over again, turning a much lower representation in the actual population into a much higher representation.
This is actually a really difficult thing to work out intentionally, though. Without coordinating between shows (and it would be really weird to do that - "Hi, I'd like to include a gay character in my show but wanted to check if you were planning to do that too? Oh, you are? Then I'll recast as straight, thanks!") it's really hard to determine which shows "should" have gay (or black, or Asian, or whatever) such that they are evenly represented to their base population without being overrepresented.
I wonder how we managed to do this in the 70s and 80s so much better and with less obviousness. I don't think stations were aiming for "representation" they just cast interesting actors and made shows. Cosby and Family Matters never seemed to be pandering, they were just pretty good shows that happened to have black families in them.
If all the shows picked the demographics of each character at random from a realistic distribution, that would give a realistic distribution overall with no coordination. Of course, there may be reasons why specific demographics make more sense in the stories they want to tell, but the random solution is no worse for this than the coordination solution. I guess it's possible that certain groups would end up over- or under-represented by chance in specific small sub-genres, but at that point it seems like the audience being unreasonably picky if they complain about it.
On the other hand, if minority audience members like shows featuring at least one person in the same minority as them more (although it feels silly I know I do this), such that the average audience enjoyment is higher with this sort of over-representation than a realistic distribution, it's not obvious that a little tokenism is actually a bad thing.
Right, but what's happening is studios are trying to make sure that certain kinds of minorities are getting into shows, and once you've made that choice it gets really hard to represent but not overrepresent.
Studios are clearly *not* using the method that you are suggesting, though I agree it would fix the problem.
>This is actually a really difficult thing to work out intentionally, though.
Not if your pool of actors are average diversity; then you cast everyone in something and voila, accurate representation.
> I wonder how we managed to do this in the 70s and 80s so much better and with less obviousness.
I don't think we did this so much better - just with less obviousness. When it's majority groups being overrepresented, it's less obvious.
In the 80s and 90s there seems to have been a lot of shows with black actors, but it didn't feel pandering or like anyone was filling a quota. I mentioned several above, but there were also shows like The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Sister-Sister, Kenan and Kel, etc. I don't think anyone was counting percents, but at least my watching experience back then felt like there was a strong number of black actors on TV at any given time. Some of those shows were extremely well watched, like Fresh Prince and Cosby, in particular. We've definitely turned a corner somewhere along the line trying to make sure that not just some shows but *every show* has multiple ethnicities, even when it makes no sense. It's weird if every show has to have a gay character, an Asian character (preferably more than one so East Asian and South Asian are both represented) and a black character, and a Hispanic character, and so on. For shows like The Walking Dead - where people are traveling around a lot and meeting lots of random people - that makes a lot of sense. When the Wheel of Time series showed a small remote village with multiple races (despite an intentional and important plot point in the books being that it was an insular community), that's something else.
I'd speculate that it is the same phenomenon that has resulted in the more extreme case of Google's Gemini from being programmed to refuse to generate any images with white people in them at all; a focus on diversity massively over-corrects into over-representativeness of historically under-represented groups. Interestingly, it seems that this phenomenon has been occurring in Europe as well, where the over-representativeness is even more stark because the underlying population percentages are smaller (think of how many prominent British actors there are these days relative to their quite small proportion of the British population), although a google search suggests that could be confined to black British actors -in US productions-. I would be really curious if anyone has collected hard data on this.
You're not wrong. I saw someone claim to have measured this a few months ago and they said that about 35% of commercial actors are now black. This is 100% a post-BLM phenomenon and exists because advertisers don't want to be called out for being insufficiently diverse. The moral panic continues.
Is "sign in with password" on Substack broken for anyone else? No matter what I try, it just says "something went wrong", even if I reset my password and then try to login with the new password. The only way to log in to Substack now is the "email you a link" option, which is really annoying.
Same here! I always use my PC because I hate trying to use smartphone apps to read anything. I wonder if it's just crappy buggy software (sorry, Substack, but you need to hire some more monkeys and install a few more hamster wheels, the system is breaking down) or an attempt to force adoption of the app?
Same here.
The app is cluttered with random stuff I never subscribed to. So I don't use it at all.
If you've ever tried to overcome a fear and haven't succeeded, you may be interested in an article I wrote - I detail how I overcame my fear of talking to strangers and pitching businesses
https://youbutbetter.substack.com/p/how-to-actually-do-the-thing-you
I wrote an article about the myth that conspiracy theorists are ignorant of a sparse number of specific facts. https://benthams.substack.com/p/conspiracy-theorists-arent-ignorant
This all seems right to me.
William James makes a version of this point very quickly in Section III of The Will to Believe:
"Here in this room, we all of us believe in molecules and the conservation of energy, in democracy and necessary progress, in Protestant Christianity and the duty of fighting for 'the doctrine of the immortal Monroe,' all for no reasons worthy of the name. We see into these matters with no more inner clearness, and probably with much less, than any disbeliever in them might possess. His unconventionality would probably have some grounds to show for its conclusions; but for us, not insight, but the prestige of the opinions, is what makes the spark shoot from them and light up our sleeping magazines of faith."
I think he's very self-consciously lumping in Protestant Christianity and the Monroe Doctrine with belief in molecules and democracy, even though in Section I he suggested that the audience would likely all seem themselves as wiser than conventional Christians.
I think the point he makes is also parallel to one that W.E.B. DuBois makes about "double consciousness" - Black Americans know more about what White Americans think than vice versa, because they have to live with the majority around them, rather than just accepting it unthinking.
Would anyone be willing to share their criticisms of "non-violent communication"? As someone who has found it a useful framework, I'm interested in hearing from people who didn't find it useful.
I have the feeling (ha, ha) that someone who read the Wikipedia article on NVC once but is genuinely attempting to reframe all their complaints as feelings and unmet needs for mutual discussion is going to be a lot better at communicating than someone who's done three months training in NVC but tries to psychoanalyse their conversation partner or launch into a pre-prepared spiel instead of shutting up and listening.
Almost everyone in this subthread is just assuming they know what it means purely from the name and criticising it based on that.
Look into it. Watch some of Marshall Rosenberg's talks online. It's an interesting and potentially useful concept.
That's what you get when you give it such a stupid name. It deserves to be lumped in with the "hate speech is violence" type crowd.
I'm pretty sure it was around before people started calling for censorship of hurtful speech.
And even if not, do you have any examples of Marshall Rosenberg doing that? Are there even any other NVC proponents doing that?
>Almost everyone in this subthread is just assuming they know what it means purely from the name and criticising it based on that.
It does seem that way, doesn't it. Maybe I should have put a summary of the main steps in the post.
Yes, you should have!
Maybe, but branding matters sometimes.
If your "communication technique" is disingenuously and deceptively branded, then I'm going to guess that you're a disingenuous and deceptive person, and that any communication technique you're trying to sell me is probably based on disingenuity and deceptiveness.
I know one person who has had extensive training in the technique, and it drives me crazy when they talk to me in the approved manner. It sounds fake and formulaic. I do not doubt at all that communication is improved when people assume the other person is not an evil idiot, try their best to grasp how the situation looks to the other person, and hold back from verbal violence (meanness, sarcasm, mockery, yelling, etc). But there aren't any formulas for bringing that attitude to communication: You have to really work on it internally, battle it out with your own self-centeredness. If you accomplish that, you do not need to use formulaic ways of speaking. The people you are talking with will grasp that you are fair-minded and responsive. Conversely, "packaging" various things in a formula will not give your conversation partner that sense -- it will give them the feeling that you are following a formula, and that by doing that you are blocking their view of your real attitude.
100% hard agree. I've tried to read Rosenberg in addition to having conversations with NVC fans, and couldn't shake the sense that they were cargo-culting.
WTF is non violent communication?
Bar fights without the punching and kicking.
The notion that communication can be violent threatens American values regarding free speech. I'm not going to take any ideas seriously premised on "violent communication" as a thing.
I don't think it's meant to be taken literally. But I could be wrong.
People conflating words with violence ABSOLUTELY mean it literally.
Considering that there is a real and growing movement to ban free speech because "speech is violence" I think reasonable people should criticize language in sync with that politically reactionary movement.
https://social.fbxl.net/notice/AfI4nbrIK3nx7IfFVA
Watch the video and read my comments on it. It's not about censorship.
Assuming you're talking about "I see where you're coming from, but..." language, it's that the person is blatantly trying to "handle" me. I'm not most peoplr; I don't care if people insult me, as long as they answer my question as they do so. But don't presume to tell me how I feel. I know how I feel, and I know for sure that you don't, because you're wasting time appealing to emotions I don't have.
Yeah, I dislike that sort of language. It's intended well, but it's often used as "I'm going to disagree with you because you're an idiot". I too prefer "No, I don't agree, because" rather than smarmy "Yes, I understand why, with your tiny ignorant brain, you would think that" stuff.
I think that NVC is a good idea, but if someone wants to be an asshole, they will find a way to follow the letter of the rules while going completely against their spirit. It will probably be difficult, but defending against it will also be difficult for someone who believes that following the rules of NVC is the right thing to do.
(It is similar with rationality. No matter how detailed rules you write, someone will find a way to do superficially the same thing, but in service of some irrational idea they hold dear.)
Also, NVC is not supposed to solve all problems in the world, but mostly one specific problem, let's call it "violent refusal to communicate". The situation where, once you classify someone as an enemy, you no longer listen to them, so you actually have no idea how they think and what they want, which makes it impossible to try figure out a compromise solution (even if one that is kinda frustrating for both sides, but still preferable to fighting). NVC helps you pass the Ideological Turing Test better. You can still disagree, but at least now it clear what exactly you disagree with.
On the other hand, there are manipulative techniques based precisely on attacking your empathy or your self-image as a nice person. They put you in a frame where you either do the thing the manipulator wants you to do (and you didn't want to do it), or you feel guilty or ashamed. NVC can actually make this worse, by limiting the range of your possible response. Your task is no longer to "resist the manipulation" but "resist the manipulation while following the rules of NVC to the letter, because otherwise the manipulator will accuse you of being a bad person".
A: "When you refuse to give me all your money and to have sex with me, I feel sad. Really, really say. It feels like my heart is breaking..." (keeps crying and shaking)
B: "What?! Ah, sorry... I meant... uhm... when you put it like this, I feel... I feel emotionally blackmailed."
A: "Ahem, 'emotionally blackmailed' is not a feeling. It is a judgment. We are not supposed to do those here. Anyway... when you say that you feel emotionally blackmailed by me, I feel so sad it is difficult for me to even keep breathing, there is a pressure in my chest, it feels as if I am suffocating..."
(Here, the person A is clearly the bad guy, but he follows the NVC script, and it's difficult to call him out while following the NVC script yourself.)
I'm way more inclined to go "When you say you feel like your heart is breaking and you are crying and shaking, I feel like I don't care" 😀
Well... yeah, of course.
For the more sensitive people, it would make sense to admit that they feel sad... and then decide not to *act* on that feeling. Or to choose a different course of action: "from now on, I will try to avoid you, to feel less sad".
Basically, the people at risk are the beginners, who are trying to play a game where they already learned the rules but not the strategies.
Wow, NVC and NYC take active effort to tell apart. "I think New York City is a good idea", indeed.
I have never really tried it, but I've encountered some things vaguely along those lines. Overall, it can be a good thing. But...
(1) merely using the words and techniques doesn't automatically make people better at empathy and communication, so it can feel like an empty ritual. Some of the most frustrating conversations I've had have been with people who write paragraph after paragraph about how careful and deliberate they are, and about how much they're trying to see my point of view, etc, *but I can't for the life of me figure out what they want me to change*. It is extremely aggravating, as the only actual information transmitted is a mushy feeling that I'm not enough like they want me to be.
(2) it can slow down communication a ton, especially among people who are emotionally mature and have healthy self-boundaries. If you're familiar with ask culture vs guess culture, the latter is just better when people make reasonable guesses and provide non-painful ways to correct course on a misprediction. I prefer someone spontaneously giving me advice while subtly communicating that their intention is to help rather than dictate or impose, compared to the alternative of being asked all the time whether it's ok to give me feedback/advice.
I just bought this riding lawnmower and want to customize it: https://www.homedepot.com/p/Troy-Bilt-30-in-10-5-HP-Briggs-and-Stratton-Engine-6-Speed-Manual-Drive-Gas-Rear-Engine-Riding-Mower-with-Mulch-Kit-Included-TB30B/323026891
I want to modify the mower so I can attach garden shears, a hand saw, and a bottle of plant killer spray to it. Whenever I am mowing the lawn and come across, say, a small branch that has grown long enough to hit me in the face, I'd stop the mower, remove the hand saw, use it to cut down the branch, and then continue mowing.
I have no idea what sorts of couplings, baskets, or whatever I'd need to attach to the mower to make this possible. Any suggestions?
I'm going to suggest not attaching stuff.
1.) It's going to get knocked off, (branches and such) and then potentially fall into the blades.
2.) What are you really gaining? Just walk around the yard before mowing with the shears and saw and clean things up. (throw away the sticks.)
3.) It will really be more of a pain stopping the mower and then getting off and back on.
If you insist on mounting something, then I'll suggest a water proof box mounted somewhere. You can get ammo boxes pretty cheap. That's what we put on the four wheeler.
I'll second this. It's good to do a walkthrough beforehand to remove large sticks and rocks and litter (especially if the area faces onto a public walkway). And if you bump into an overhanging branch while riding, just make a mental note of it and go back afterwards with the saw. Next time it won't be there anymore. ;-)
Rivnuts are good for attaching things firmly to sheet metal and are commonly used in automotive and aerospace applications. The magnet idea is probably more feasible if you're not tool-inclined, though.
The probably safest and easiest way to do this is clean it really well and use adhesive velcro strips.
If you’re handier, I’d consider drilling some holes and mounting a basket to the back with bolts. Not as hard as it sounds.
No one has said epoxy or various bonding "glues," so add that to the list of possibilities. I can't offer much more than pointing you in that direction.
As funny as it might sound, zip ties of all various sizes are also very useful general-purpose ad-hoc "attachers." Of course you need appropriate attachment points, but perhaps there are spots you could zip tie, say, a basket or something similar. (Zip ties come in all sorts of sizes, you can get 3ft long, .3in wide ties that will hold largish stuff together.)
I'd google, youtube, and ask around at reddit or Lowes also and see what you come up with if none of all this works.
Welding is fun. Welding farm implements is a tradition that goes back decades... It may void your warranty, though...
Compulsive improvisor here: Check to see whether magnets stick to the body of the mower . If so, it's easy to find extremely strong magnets about the size of a quarter with metal loops attached to them that you can hang stuff off. You could probably also attach a basket meant to go on the handlebars of a bike under the front wheel, maybe using bungee cords, then put some of the extra stuff you want to carry on the mower in there.
It might also be worth your time to look into sheaths, bags, tool-belts, or backpacks that can safely and comfortably fit on your body while riding the lawnmower. They might lack some of the cool factor that I imagine comes with a mount, but it's another way to solve your problem that might be easier than physical modifications to the machine.
I'm looking for recommendations for an AI app that can enhance old home movies. My late father transferred a bunch of 8mm movies to VHS tape. That was about 30 years ago. I recently sent the tape to a service to get it digitized. The result is an hour-long MP4 file that is pretty crappy, partly from the degraded VHS tape but mostly because the underlying 8mm films were too light or too dark, blurry, or shaky. Can this be remedied through an AI app? There are a lot of individual clips on that long MP4 file, and I don't have time to chop it up into small segments to fine-tune them. I want to submit the whole thing to an app and have it fix it up as best as it can.
Lots of places, including the iphone editing app, will apply a generic fix to still photos, automatically adjusting things so that the darkest color in the image is black and the lightest white, and increasing saturation. I'm pretty sure there must exist something equivalent for video, and I don't think it would need to use AI. I don't know whether there's one that can autocorrect blurriness, shakiness and spots and stains, but there might be.
I’ve heard good things about Topaz, in terms of upgrading 720/1080p footage to 4K. Not sure if it will work for your purposes, as I’ve never used it myself.
I really enjoy fiction that feels like a fable, in tone or plot. They have a simple beauty that feels comforting to read. I just finished "The Last Unicorn" by Peter Beagle, which I thought was extremely beautiful. Other examples I've enjoyed for similar reasons are "The Magician's Nephew" (CS Lewis) and "On Such a Full Sea" (Chang-Rae Lee). Does anyone have something to add to this list?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Pinocchio
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Ancestors
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cloven_Viscount
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Baron_in_the_Trees
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nonexistent_Knight
Wow, thank you everyone for the dozens of recommendations. Sounds like people besides me got something out of this question as well. Seeing this list helped me clarify what I like about the fable setting. The books I like most of this type let you see a complicated world through childlike eyes, in some ways helping me do the same in ours. Piranesi was a great example of this — I loved reading that book. Looking forward to a promising CS Lewis book I haven’t read yet too — I’ve read many and like most. Especially “The Great Divorce.” Some of the other authors I don't know who feel promising to me: Patricia McKillip, Roger Zelazny, George MacDonald, Jack Vance, Dunsany. Thank you for the terms “waking dream” and “sense of place” as well.
Really appreciate all the responses! Nice to have a community I can trust for this sort of thing.
The Starless Sea by Erin Morgensten fits this extremely well, highly recommend.
The Ursula Leguin Earthsea book, as recommended below, that feels most like this to me is Tales from Earthsea, a short story collection set within the Earthsea universe. It is a comfort book for me, much more than the main series.
Paulo Coehlo writes like this as well--The Alchemist, whether you love it or hate it is meant to be a fable.
Thanks for asking this! I also love books like this and they are hard to find.
All sorts of Arthurian legend stories. I like Mary Stewarts version. More recently Naomi Novik's Spinning Silver or Uprooted might work. And I've recently been reading everything by T. Kingfisher AKA Ursula Vernon. A lot of her stuff has a fairy tale/ fable feel.
‘The Glass Bead Game’ by Herman Hesse or his ‘Siddharta’
I had to read Siddharta in highschool and it was one of the worst stories I ever had to read, IMO
I don’t think I ever enjoyed a book I had to read as a school assignment.
I meant that among all the many books I had to read in school, Siddhartha was by far my least favorite.
Okay, that’s fine. Reading fiction is a subjective experience. What did you enjoy most?
Hard to remember nowadays, let alone make a subjective ranking, but I think The Poisonwood Bible was pretty high up there.
Patricia McKillip's "Ombria in Shadow". And from what I can tell, most of her other stuff. It's almost like a waking dream.
Robin McKinley's "The Door in the Hedge". Also her early stuff, like "The Hero and the Crown" and "The Blue Sword". And her chosen genre is various takes on fables; if you like her writing, you can go far with her.
Ursula K. Le Guin's "Earthsea" books might count. She tries a bunch of different things with the series, but I think at least the first two will fit what you're looking for.
Susan Cooper's "The Dark is Rising" series is maybe not quite what you want, but in addition to having so many direct links to fables, the underlying structure is also sort of one, too.
William Goldman's "The Princess Bride" is great, although maybe not quite what you're looking for.
George MacDonald's "The Princess and the Goblin" and "The Princess and Curdie" are old family favorites.
John Steinbeck's "The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights" is a retelling of Malory, sadly left incomplete by his death.
G.R.R Martin's "A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms" is very Arthurian in flavor, too. It's quite a different tone than his "Song of Ice and Fire" main series (well, except for the Brienne chapters).
Jenna Moran's "An Unclean Legacy" and "The Fable of the Swan" may count, although (as with most of her work) they require some effort to understand, and thus might fail your "simple" criterion.
It's not exactly a "fable", but Steven Brust's "The Phoenix Guards" is a loving homage to Dumas, under cover of being a historical novel extracted from a fantasy universe. It's 17*2 chapters of swashbucking fun and entertainingly exasperating exposition. Don't bother reading up on anything else, just jump in and try a few chapters until they get accepted as guards, and see if you like it. Some love it and some can't stand it.
Totally out of genre, but as I recall, Jerome K. Jerome's "Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog)" had, in its own way, a fairy-tale-like atmosphere. And then you get to read Connie Willis' companion novel, "To Say Nothing of the Dog".
I have not read it yet, but I'm told "The Worm Ouroborus" by E.R. Eddison is quite good.
I'll second the recommendations for Jack Vance's "Lyonesse" trilogy - it's occasionally transcendent, while also having some parts that pack more horrifying grimness into a single sentence than most authors can manage with a chapter. His four "Dying Earth" books are also something you should at least check out, but be warned that you'll be rooting against the main characters at least as much as you'll be rooting for them. (It's so **fun** when Cugel gets his comeuppance, especially when he brings it on himself.)
And I'll also second the recommendations for Neil Gaiman's "Neverwhere" and "Stardust", although his style is not to everyone's taste. And a completely unqualified second for Richard Adams' "Watership Down", which is nicely complemented by this analysis: https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/tag/mythopoetics
> Patricia McKillip's "Ombria in Shadow". And from what I can tell, most of her other stuff. It's almost like a waking dream.
Yes, all of her fantasy writing is like that. I understand she also wrote SF, but I have no knowledge of her writing style for it.
The Riddle-Master trilogy is her best-known fantasy work, I think.
The Hero and the Crown just feels like a normal adventure story to me. You have a person going on a quest and fighting a dragon. The Blue Sword is similar, except instead of a focus on magic and dragons you have a focus on the special bond between girl and horse. (That sounds dismissive, but I like The Blue Sword! But, I like it less than The Hero and the Crown, and I have a strong feeling that it's intended to appeal specifically to girls who like horses, a fantasy story for fans of Black Beauty.)
Other than Patricia McKillip, I don't think I can provide much in the way of good recommendations for work in this style. I usually prefer to have a good grasp of what's going on in the plot.
> The Hero and the Crown just feels like a normal adventure story to me.
The plot is, sure. But I find there's sort of a relaxing, grounded-yet-fairy-tale-like quality to it, as if the author tapped into some primal fountain of story and is letting it flow, while at the same time anticipating and answering questions from a bright 6-year old who would keep asking "but why didn't she do...", except that that storyteller was one step ahead. I don't know if that's what the original poster was looking for, but it's what I like about it. :-)
(If you haven't read it, you should check out "The Door in the Hedge"; it's a collection of short stories that are either fairy tales or indistinguishable from them.)
Has anyone said Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny yet? Someone should suggest that one. Let me know if no one does and I'll come back and suggest it.
William Morris, though he can be hard going because of his elaborate imitation of mediaeval tone. George MacDonald too, have you read "Lilith" or "Phantastes"? I'd stay away from his realist work, the writing in Dialect prose is excruciating to read.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Morris#Literary_works
"At the Back of the North Wind" is very much a fable, too.
I second George MacDonald, though I would suggest starting with his short story "The Golden Key". MacDonald has a pretty strong flavor, and if you like The Golden Key you'll probably like Lilith and Phantastes (and vice versa).
It's out of copyright, so here's a link: https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks07/0700571h.html
"One Hundred Years of Solitude" is the best possible example of this. Also try Borges and the rest of the magical realists.
I have to be That Guy, plugging my own book. But it fits the ask:
Hundred Ghost Soup, on amazon
Your online marketing worked! Just bought. I have an interest in Chinese history from that era and so this sounds promising.
Why, thanks so much! you've made my day.
Forgot to write this when it happened, but I finished the book a few weeks back and really enjoyed! The relation/clash of old magic and modern society was very well done, and it came together in a very satisfying way. Thanks for recommending.
Thank you so much! Would you mind doing a review on Amazon, please please?
Stardust by Gaiman is a fantastic one
- A Night in the Lonesome October by Roger Zelazny
- The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe. Not strictly fable, perhaps more leaning towards a blend of fantasy, science fiction and magical realism. But it certainly has a very strong sense of place to it.
Oh my goodness a Zelazny I haven't read! Thanks.
That one is super fun. :-)
The moomin books have a bit of that and are pretty good.
Also, Watership Down (more or less). And keeping the tone without being fairy tale-y, Jim Herriot's vet stories (All Creatures Great and Small and the sequels)
Gentlemen of the Road, by Michael Chabon
I read he wrote that in response to the flack he took for “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.”
He started out thinking he needed to write something along the lines of “Jews With Swords.”
That might have even been part of the “Gentlemen of the Road” forward.
Your first sentence made me think of Susanna Clarke's excellent book Piranesi. Your mentioning the Magician's Nephew confirms that.
Thanks for the recommendations.
Ishiguro - "The Buried Giant" - I enjoyed the fairytale-like quality, amplified by listening to the audio version, although it was just "off" enough that one wasn't totally surprised that the ending didn't have a very satisfying payoff; I thought about it a good deal while I was reading it, but seem now to fail to quite recall it (which is appropriate, actually). In a way, "The Remains of the Day" has something of the didactic fable quality, more directly - "I am going to teach these English something about the Nazi sympathizers in their midst in the '30s" - but for the better the obviousness of the lesson soon recedes, in the reader's mind seemingly as well as in the author's, for the deeper qualities of humor and of character portrait, both individual and national. The narrator, with his limited grasp, can resemble the child in a fable perhaps. I hope that doesn't make it sound patronizing; it is not. As others have pointed out, it is to this character is granted some of the most movingly rendered scenes of heartbreak in 20th century literature. It quite naturally rises above literary fiction - or rather, settles into a lower level, where the best books dwell.
"One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch" - I think of it - since "The Gulag Archipelago" would be too much of a read for me, as sort of a children's tale of same. It goes down easy - how brilliant that he chose to render a "good day" - even Kruschev was said to admire it, I believe. It feels very carefully constructed. I guess this may just be my own weird take.
More Lewis - "When We Had Faces" - it was a pretty effective presentation of his usual themes, but also of a myth that those of us with spotty self-educations like myself, missed; as such it was a little like school, but with a clever teacher.
I recently finished "Till we had faces." I've really enjoyed heavy-handed allegorical CS Lewis in the past -- The Great Divorce is one of my favorites. That book, I felt, said something extremely true about morality and human failings, whether or not you believe in the Christian God. But I honestly didn't enjoy this one that much. Part of it was that I didn't enjoy/agree with the message as much. There was some universal truth in it -- something about jealousy poisoning joy, and something about feeling regret for harm intentionally done. But a lot of it seemed to be about denial of divinity in face of evidence, when I don't think that applies to the real world very well. And it was sort of long and slow.
I also didn't realize it was a retelling of a Greek tale. One of my favorite fiction books in the last two years was "Song of Achilles" by Madeline Miller, which fits the same genre. That book I thought did an amazing job of exploring the theme "greatness versus joy" and also the path to accepting one's destiny. Really, really enjoyed.
One Day in the Life is still on the list -- sounds very interesting.
I haven't read "The Great Divorce" so I will read that in return.
Truthfully I think I did like chiefly that "Till We Had Faces" was a myth re-telling, because my education didn't include much in that way. But to be candid, I've rather forgotten it since I (listened to) it last year? I don't think it was the listening - that isn't related for me necessarily although ideally I do a toggle between reading text and listening - but more that it was a bit formless and overlong, and if you are not religious, as I am not, the "now we are ready to be seen by God" or whatever it was, didn't especially move me.
Nice, let me know what you think! It's in some ways more religious than "Till we had Faces" since it's explicitly about the afterlife, but it's much more cleanly translated to non-theistic morality. And felt more concise to me. Maybe I'll read again as well.
Off topic, but I mostly found Remains of the Day to be sympathetic rather than didactic. It's more "how could a decent person make such a mistake and how sad it was when he gradually realized it" than anything else.
I am in the habit of assuming whenever anything becomes an especially popular theme in cultural products, it is probably inversely correlated with its actual frequency/significance. The Fuhrer-loving aristocrat (yes, I'm a Mitford aficionado, I know there were a few) - I guess I see it as more of a device, a sort of cheap device, with which to present a man who has not been his own man, was helpless to be. But it doesn't really matter - it works very well to lure one into the actual story, of someone crippled, emotionally, or rather in his comfort level with emotion and its expression. Someone imprisoned in loneliness and yearning, just a pretty ordinary type in my opinion*, well-realized.
*I've suspected that truly romantic natures tend to be well-hidden, completely orthogonal to such things as Valentine's Day.
What are you trying to say?
What are you trying to hear?
Note - the title of Lewis's book is "Till We Have Faces"
Oh yes! Bad memory. Probably exacerbated by, once again, listening to it on audio, so never having it before my eyes. Also my altered title completely gets the point of the thing wrong.
Not a good title, C.S. Lewis!
Also possibly accidentally mashed with "when we were orphans"
I haven't read that one, just looked it up. Might do.
(TBH I liked it a lot less than remains of the day or never let me go. Ymmv though, some people liked it)
What about the 2023 forecast contents which happened at the beginning of 2023? Are you going to publish the results?
I think I read somewhere that someone is working on it
At a friend's request, I wrote about my thoughts on what motivates YouTube censorship: https://substack.com/inbox/post/141868348
I used to work there, so I felt like I had a little extra insight beyond any random person. I would appreciate any constructive criticism.
At a constructive criticism level, how familiar are you with conservative criticism of YouTube censorship? I ask because, well, half the country votes for Donald Trump and this...broadly doesn't appear to address their concerns.
Let me give a hopefully constructive example. A...couple months back, maybe a year ago there was a big drama with Budweiser and some kind of trans activist. Big brouhaha, big enough that it came across my feed and big enough to apparently severely impact Anheuser Busch's stock price.
And when I read you piece, it sounds like it's all about the ad money. Probably true, you know much more than me about it. But if it is true...is YouTube going to censor trans content? I mean, the advertisers must be scared. Without looking, I can tell you no, Youtube is not going to censor trans content. But then it's not just about the money, there's other stuff beside the ad money that drives decisions, and that's what people are concerned about, even if 95% of the job is about the money.
I'm not saying that there aren't good answers to these questions or things people on the right haven't gotten things wrong but...these are the concerns I see, or more appropriately have seen, on right wing media for at least 5 years about censorship on YouTube. And you...don't really address them, honestly you react like you're hearing about them second or third-hand.
Which is fair, not every article needs to address conservative concerns but...at that point I wonder who the article is for. The people I hear complaining about censorship on Youtube are overwhelmingly conservatives with the occasional Marxist. Are there really a bunch of moderate liberals on Youtube worried that they're being censored on Youtube?
But yeah, if I have any constructive criticism to offer, it's that it feels like there's a gap between what you consider to be the worry about censorship and what I see people on the right worry about censorship and so I can't imagine it clicking that well with that audience.
It's honestly because it is not safe to talk about this on the public internet. I work in tech, and will probably continue to work in tech for some time, and people in tech are not able to speak openly about the existence of the conservative 50% of America.
To address your specific example, I think we can all see which way the Overton winds are blowing. Trans stuff is going to be more accepted over time, not less. Every company wants to be on the right (and safe) side of history, and not have to go back and metaphorically scrub all their Elmer Fudd cartoons from the archives later.
My experience with right wing complaints vs. finding out what actually happened (when I worked there) was that the vast majority of banned/censored conservative creators are violating ToS, but pretending like YouTube (or whichever social company) is executing a political vendetta against them. If they simply... didn't violate the ToS, YouTube probably wouldn't block them and wouldn't have a leg to stand on if they did. However, I will say that a consistent aspect among the tech companies I've been exposed to is that they seemingly don't notice ToS violations as frequently for people who are more left on the spectrum.
I see people on YouTube all the time worried about getting censored for discussing explosives, prices of guns, terrorism, entire categories of crime, political violence, 3d printing, etc. It's not just conservatives.
I appreciate your feedback though, and maybe I'll be able to talk about this much openly at some point in the future.
Thanks for the honesty and no sweat, take care of yourself.
Have you considered an anonymous account though? Because I just want to make sure you hear what you said. Which is that there are reasonable explanations for most of what Youtube is doing...but you can't fully discuss those for fear of not merely being fired but blacklisted from your industry. This...does not sound like an environment and topic area conducive to open discussion or your career health.
> My experience with right wing complaints vs. finding out what actually happened (when I worked there) was that the vast majority of banned/censored conservative creators are violating ToS, but pretending like YouTube (or whichever social company) is executing a political vendetta against them.
> However, I will say that a consistent aspect among the tech companies I've been exposed to is that they seemingly don't notice ToS violations as frequently for people who are more left on the spectrum.
I mean, that's what a political vendetta is. Try reassuring someone who's worried about political persecution that the reason the rules are getting enforced against them, and not against their enemies, is that they have the wrong politics and their enemies have the right politics.
Ok, I'll grant that. I think you're right. I guess I was merely distinguishing between a "proactive" vendetta and "reactive" vendetta.
> half the country votes for Donald Trump
*30%
> The one thing that always worries you in the back of your mind is the hopefully remote possibility that your ad is going to be next to a swastika. If that happens, suddenly your job is in jeopardy.
Doesn't this model rely on the idea that nobody knows how internet advertising works? That may have been true once, but I don't think it's true now.
That's kind of... exactly what happened with Twitter/X recently, right? I think it still works that way.
This response is from memory, so the particular examples are almost certainly wrong.
But, didn't Twitter present the response "this screenshot was obtained after the journalist created an account whose only interests were [Nazism] and [Coca-Cola], and to the best of our determination, no one else on the internet has ever seen an analogous juxtaposition"?
Yes, I believe that's what happened, and I think Twitter is probably being honest. But I think this also supports my case. Someone went absolutely out of their way to show a brand next to a swastika. The media absolutely loved the story and worked hard to amplify it. Advertisers then reacted in their typical scared fashion. I think all of that supports my case.
How's Twitter doing at attracting advertisers these days? Last I checked, Elon was railing against a supposed conspiracy keeping advertisers away, which isn't a great move if you think there's any chance of persuading them to come back to you.
>Viewers try to watch as much YouTube as possible when they're supposed to be working and view as few ads as possible.
LOL! I like it! Cute!
It's obviously not the case; ad blockers have a 100% success rate at blocking ads. But apparently very few viewers want them.
Many Thanks! I honestly don't know what the statistics are for either ad blockers success rates or the fraction of viewers who use them. I personally, only find the ads moderately annoying, so I haven't bothered with a blocker.
Thanks! I liked the explanation.
Thanks, that was really interesting. I knew about brand safety, but it never occurred to me before that the media has an active incentive to make Youtube look bad due to competition for ad dollars.
That was a good read, thanks!
Thanks. Not unexpected, but good to hear it from the horse's mouth.
If you'd like any criticism: Could have been more succinct in some paragraphs. But I'm also impatient right now and its high-level criticism.
Is anyone else getting this problem? Trying to sign in with my password on Substack, keep getting message "something went wrong". I've reset the password, no dice. But "sign in with email" works.
I'll try here before I try contacting Substack because, to be frank, I don't expect Substack to be any help with this problem. Signing in with password worked fine up to a few days ago, the problem has only cropped up recently.
I just ran into the same issue. Very annoying.
Scott:
In regards to your policies on banning & unbanning:
1. Do you have a "statute of limitations" after which the comments and the commentators are off the hook? I ask this because the comment that I was banished for was five months old when the banishment was imposed. Although I readily admit I was out of line and that I deserved banishment for fulfilling Godwin's Law, it took me by surprise because I had long ago forgotten about the exchange. How far back do I need to go to review my old posts to see if anything I said was banishable?
2. Have you articulated your moderation policies anywhere? After being banned, I searched for them but couldn't find them. If so, could you repost a link? For instance, I assume ad hominem attacks are verboten. Looking at the posts that got people banned in the last big round, it seems like certain extreme levels of sarcasm can earn a poster a banishment. Likewise, circum-hominem attacks seem to be bannable. E.g. "You're delusional if you believe X." I'm somewhat on the spectrum, so I am quite capable of working in the framework of explicit rules, but when it comes to unwritten social rules, I'll admit I'm quite at sea.
Anyway, explicit policies might help reduce the outbreaks of verbal warfare on your Substack. For instance: Charlie Stross has a separate page on his blog listing his moderation policies...
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2008/06/moderation-policy.html
3. The notice I received from Substack did not indicate that I was only banned for a month. Initially, I thought it was a lifetime ban, and I canceled my upcoming renewal. It was only days later when I saw in one of your posts that I was banned for a month. It seems like the banishment wording could have been more explicit in the email. I admit I'm reluctant to re-subscribe to your Substack without having my first two questions clarified because I feel like I'm skating on thin ice. I'm on a fixed income now, and I don't want to be banned again for something I wrote a year ago (and have my current $100 go down the tube).
4. Do you want us to report posts that we find rude and offensive? In the past, I've been called the political C-word and I've generally responded with humorous sarcasm. Personally, I don't like to be called a Commie (because I have friends and family who were blacklisted). My banishable moment was when I responded to such an attack with the political N-word. In the future, I'll report anyone who lobs the political C-word at me. But I don't even know if you would consider the political C-word out of bounds.
Thanks for your patience.
--Wulf
>I ask this because the comment that I was banished for was five months old when the banishment was imposed
Scott hadn't checked them for six months. Presumably the statute of limitations will be "wherever Scott left off last time".
I'd prefer for Scott to clarify this.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/02/the-comment-policy-is-victorian-sufi-buddha-lite/
Yes, but that's not Astral Codex. Why would I bother to look on the now-defunct Slatestarcodex for AC10 policies? Posting that policy up here would be useful, though!
Is it true? Is it necessary? Is it kind?
BTW, re: "Sufi Buddha Lite," — historically Islam was a colonizer and suppressor of Buddhism, and some Buddhists might (will) resent being lumped in with the Sufis. ;-)
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/register-of-bans
Yes, it would be helpful if it were easier to find.
Yes. Thanks. I still wonder if there's a statute of limitations, or whether I need to go back and delete any edgy comments over the past couple of years for fear someone will flag them.
California voters: Which senate candidate(s) would you recommend I vote for and why?
Any good resources to help me decide? I would love to read something like https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/my-california-ballot-2022 for this year's elections.
My plan had been to sit out the Senate race, because I would be happy with either of my three current/former congresspeople representing me in the Senate (I've lived in Lee's district, Schiff's, and now Porter's!) But now that it's clear that the runoff will be Schiff vs either Porter or Garvey, I have to think about whether I would rather get Democrats to save their money for other Senate races (i.e., ensure that Garvey makes the runoff rather than Porter) or whether getting a chance of Porter is better than nearly guaranteed Schiff. (My substantive views are probably somewhere between Schiff and Porter, so a 50/50 gamble between them somehow seems more appealing than either one for sure.)
Normally I'd vote for the most centrist/establishment candidate (i.e. Schiff), but this time I voted for Porter because she explicitly put pro-YIMBYism front and center on her website (i.e reforming parking minimums) while Schiff doesn't even mention it under housing policy.
Based on this tweet, I'm voting for Garvey.
https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1761021191186239756
Hello! Those into figuring out best practices in how to eat healthy : what do you think about -
1. saturated fat? Necessary? About how much a day at different stages of life, etc? Doctors (even cardiologists) seem to say you should avoid it. Modern doctors like Dr. Jason Fung seems to say it is essential.
2. Salt? Cardiologists say about 2000 mg a day at the most (a teaspoon is 2400 mg). And, that less is even better. Dr. Fung says it is bad advice. He says there's a confusion about interpreting the data. He thinks they are confusing processed food (which he says is bad for you) that happens to also have high sodium, sometimes due to added salt with salt itself.
IANA nutritionist, but a long-time fitness enthusiast.
1. I think the evidence that high intakes of saturated fat are "bad" is pretty overwhelming; but there are still questions about details like different types of fats and interactions with other foods you're eating. Also btw, my impression from the nutrition community is that Dr. Fung is not really considered a reliable source.
2. My understanding is that the sodium recommendation is based on shaky evidence; it may be good advice for people with poor CV health, but for healthy people, it's probably overly conservative (if not even harmful, as some amount of sodium is essential). As other comments mentioned, keep an eye on your blood pressure and make sure you're getting a healthy amount of potassium.
(disclaimer: generally healthy individual with no known issues relating to diet, eat whatever I want whenever the spirit moves me, if anything a bit on the underweight side - thus I don't approach such topics with the adversarial rigor they deserve, not enough skin in the game)
Doctor who?
The way my family always put it (half cracking-wise, half-serious...I think) was that if sodium was so bad for you, us Chinese and our other East Asian cousins sure should be having a lot more heart attacks, hypertension, etc. than one actually sees in the wild. Obviously that doesn't necessarily generalize - maybe there's variation in digestion, microbiome, bioavailability, or something that effectively allows salty-food-cultures to eat a lot more salt than is typically advised. (Check the sodium RDA equivalent for Japan, it's kind of wild.) But at the very least, it's simple empirical evidence that undermines the simplistic Salt Bad! boogeyman narrative.
(The same argument also applies to refined carbs and white rice, incidentally.)
My understanding of saturated fat is that, as others mention, the primary malus there is raising LDL cholesterol. The large-scale tradeoff of yesteryear, replacing saturated fat with sugar, was almost certainly a poor choice...but reversed stupidity is not intelligence, and although ketogenesis is interesting, I just don't find the "acktually you should add in more saturated fat" arguments generally compelling. Mostly I just don't worry about it. Saturated tends to come bundled with many highly-palatable foods, which indirectly makes it excellent as a seasoning. If I'm much more likely to eat a bowl of collard greens speckled with bacon bits vs. the same bowl tossed in olive oil, well, that's Worth It. It's like the MSG of fats, a little goes a long way. I'd be surprised if it was "essential" in some capacity. However, it seems quite plausible that trying to overcorrect and cut fat (saturated or otherwise) out of one's diet could lead to a worse equilibrium overall. Really depends what the substitute is. There are *probably* some gains from shifting fats on the margin, e.g. cooking with olive oil vs. butter, but I'm not well-versed enough to quantify that.
Yeah as long as you don't eat too much, eat whatever you want. I cook different things for Sunday morning breakfast, but the one (almost) constant is bacon. Hashbrowns taste best to me fried in bacon fat. For French toast or pancakes I like butter better.
I have a strong and (justified, I think) bias against any dietary advice which comes in the form "Doctor so-and-so says this".
Dietetics is a sufficiently fuzzy field that it's easy to sell books by hypothesising something vaguely contrarian ("saturated fat good actually") and finding a bunch of studies that support it.
For salt, I would suggest taking a look at https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33351135/
Possibly I am a sucker for these kinds of big all-cause-mortality studies, but even though there are all kinds of problems with confounding when you just look at entire populations, my feeling is that it helps give a big picture view of things. You can also set a kind of vague upper bound on how bad something could possibly be. For example, in the above study, acm falls with sodium consumption up to about 4g/day and is pretty flat thereafter even up to 6g/day. Maybe there's some SES/sodium correlation confounding the whole thing and it's still bad for you? Well... even if so, it clearly can't be *especially* bad.
Also, it seems likely that it is not so much high sodium that causes problems (though too much of anything can kill you), but a high sodium to potassium ratio. On this point see https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/1106080#
Various vegetables, fruits, potatoes etc. have a fair bit of potassium, so it's not difficult to maintain a healthy ratio even if you eat 4g of sodium per day.
And you can buy potassium salt. Tastes the same to me
With regard to salt, remember that it's a food preservative, which means its presence kills things that would grow on food. If a little kills a little, a lot will kill a big.
If your choice was eating unpreserved food or eating food preserved with salt, then sure, go with the salt for this reason. But what if your choice is food preserved with salt vs food preserved with potassium phosphate vs fresh food vs frozen food? Presumably your reasoning doesn't tell you that it's better to freeze and salt your fresh food before eating it!
Every word you wrote is true. But the way salt as a preservative is basically
https://www.cargill.com/salt-in-perspective/function-of-salt-in-food
>Salt acts as a preservative by altering the availability of water in foods, thereby depriving microbes from using available water as a nutrient. The growth of pathogens and spoilage organisms is impeded when salt is present.
Just to put an extremely crude order of magnitude idea of how much salt is needed to do this to a human, neutral saline is about 0.5% salt, so for a 100 kg person, there is around 500 grams of salt present. To perturb this by even 10% would need 50 grams of salt. There _are_ worries about too much sodium in the diet, but they are from subtler effects than the osmotic dehydration that lets salt act as a preservative.
edit: 100 grams of sodium (not counting the chloride) in a 70 kg body (John Emsley's "Nature's Building Blocks: An A-Z Guide to the Elements")
Lipid profiles don't usually lean 100% SFA, PUFA or MUFA as sources of fatty acids go. Some nuts will have more saturated fat than others, coconut is made up of medium-chain triglycerides rather than long-chain as animal sources have, etc. If you're consuming fat even from plant sources, you're (probably) getting some SFA, just in smaller amounts. Reportedly even medium chain trilgycerides will raise total cholsterol, but less than long-chain.
Anyway. My simple way to approach it is I get approx 20% macros as fat, use olive oil for cooking predominantly (it's stable, doesn't oxidize easily, lots of antioxidants, smoke point doesn't matter), and consume nuts, fish (sardines) for DHA/EPA, and avocado. Occasionally I will have nice cheese and yogurt, but not as a requirement. This seems to be in line with the Mediterranean diet, indo-mediterranean diet, and Japanese diet (almost). Broadly speaking research tends to shine a good light on it.
2. I don't go crazy on salt, or very low, but I think the key thing is to consume enough potassium. Apparently the sodium:potassium ratio is important, and as you can imagine a pitfall of the americanized junk-food diet is insufficient potassium intake and too much salt.
It's difficult to optimize more than this with confidence. I like to just stay in the right area and quibble most on what I am confident improves health outcomes. For instance, I will consume legumes regularly. I'll also have whole grains, but not a crazy amount. Good proportion of vegetables and some fruit.
I try to eat healthy and I exercise a lot, but I was always stuck at a certain weight until I consciously tried to avoid foods high in saturated fat. In a matter of months I dropped ten pounds. I have no idea if it is all types of saturated fats, or just a critical segment of them, but it made a huge and immediate difference to me. It may just be that saturated fat foods like pie and cookies and ice cream and lasagna and hot dogs are so loaded with calories, that avoiding them just allowed me to eat less. I have tried to replace it with foods high in fiber and protein.
My overall take on the matter is that everyone needs to try changing their diet and seeing what works for them. I have no issue with salt, but don’t tend to ever add it either.
Swami, The foods you list as being high in saturated fats are also very high in processed carbs.
Great point.
I am not a doctor. In fact, I'm fairly bad at biology but I will give me understanding anyways because I like salt. My primary care doctor said this was right, so at least one doctor out there seems to believe this.
If your sodium levels are too high, your body fixes this automatically by retaining more water in your bloodstream. Osmosis happens and what-not. This keeps your overall salinity level where it should be, but raises your blood pressure. If your blood pressure is fine, you can continue to put as much salt as you want on your food.
If you cook, getting the right amount of salt in a dish is one key to making it tasty. (see Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. my favorite cookbook.)
Question to those who are familiar with minoxidil(/+finasteride), I find the following puzzling. A typical 5% minoxidil has in its instructions, "Don't use more than 1ml twice a day, because it won't help". But the *same* company sells a costlier 10% minoxidil, to again be used at 1ml twice a day. How is this consistent: wouldn't whatever makes the extra volume useless also make the extra concentration useless?
It's possible that the issue is in the inactive ingredients, not the active ones. The formulations that I've used came in a liquid and a foam respectively, and their strong scents made me suspect they were in a solvent that's more volatile than water (and probably has some effect of opening your pores). Using this too many times a day is probably not great for your skin or hair, which is an important factor in a treatment for what's fundamentally a cosmetic condition.
Though, more likely than not, they probably just got FDA approval for use "once a day" and slapped the standard warning of "use exactly as approved" - so when some idiot tries using it once an hour, 12 times a day, they're not liable. (Because as ChubbyEmu[1] has taught me, some idiot *will* try that)
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/@chubbyemu/videos
Thank you, that explanation makes a lot of sense, and I hadn't thought of the "inactive ingredients" angle at all. But it confuses me that what the product has is less of a warning than "If you use more, there won't be any efficacy".
I’m curious about vibecamp and would love an invite code. I’m happy to do a 1-1 video call to prove my worth.
I'm about to solve the Sleeping Beauty Paradox. Here I'm exploring issues in the popular attempts to model the problem in the philosophical literature.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SjoPCwmNKtFvQ3f2J/lessons-from-failed-attempts-to-model-sleeping-beauty
I don’t understand your objection to Elga’s solution. In particular you say that it implies p(heads)=1/3, but I don’t see how. I would say that it implies p(heads|awake)=1/3, or equivalently that p(heads|omega)=1/3, but that is quite a different statement.
What about the same experiment except upon heads you’re not woken up at all? In this case it seems you would object that Elga’s reasoning claims p(Heads)=0. But I think if you go through the logic, that’s clearly not what the paper claims.
Well, Elga himself states that the Beauty doesn't get new information on the awakening so if P(Heads|Awake) = 1/3 then P(Heads) also has to be 1/3. You can, of course, claim that this model only represent awakening states and unconditional probabilities are different, but then you have to be able to justify a Bayesian update.
This is what Updating model attempts to do, and what I explore later in the post.
I also think you’re wrong that the elimination argument applies to the single-awakening problem. To do this you’d need to add another coin that determines which day the Beauty gets woken up when the first coin is tails. If you add that in, then the elimination argument should give you the correct probabilities.
Okay, a more clear example. Elimination argument works like that: four outcomes are equiprobable, the awakening I'm now experiencing couldn't happen on Heads&Tuesday, so I have to reason that the three remaining outcomes are equiprobable.
Now consider an alternative problem. On Monday a ball is put into a box. Then, if the coin is Tails, on Tuesday another ball is put there. After this is done you are given a random ball from the box. According to elimination argument: the ball you've just got couldn't be put in the box on Heads&Tuesday, so you have to reason that with 2/3 probability there is another ball in the box. Which is false.
I haven't commented on these because I don't understand what the problem is. I can't seem to follow the logic in a way that describes anything I can make sense of. I don't think this is your fault, and I don't expect you personally to enlighten me, but I'm responding here in hopes that someone can clarify for me why people are thinking so much about this.
----
Isn't this just a matter of separating our "knowledge" of the objective world, from our subjective experiences? If someone flips a coin and kills me on heads, if I'm alive afterwards then I'm 100% going to be in a world where the coin came up tails.
I don't see the difference between that, and saying "Based on my knowledge of the experimental protocol, I've got a 2/3rds chance of being in a world where the coin came up tails" during the wakenings, and then going back to "I'm equally likely to be in either world" after the experiment is over.
(I think it might be possible to work out a theory of mind in which the memory wipesare creating new people, and thus there will literally be more people experiencing tails than heads. Compare to spinning up 1 copy of MMAcevedo on heads, and 2 copies on tails. https://qntm.org/mmacevedo )
Here's a variant: The subject is told that they'll be only woken once for heads and twice for tails, but even though the coin is fair, actually they'll be woken 200 times for tails. And each time they're woken up, they write something on a scrap of paper, which is taken away and marked with "heads" or "tails". They think the coin is fair, they think they've got a 2/3rds chance of being in the tails-world, but the multiversal scrying machine can see 201 slips of paper, 200 of which say "tails", contained in just two universes.
Next variant, same as before, except that when you're woken up you have to make a $1 bet on whether you're in heads-world, but you get to pick the odds before the experiment starts. If you bet $1 at 1:1 odds, in heads-world you win $1 and in tails-world you just lost $200. But if you bet at 1:2 odds, you can cut your loss by 1/2, implying that it's less wrong. And if some helpful lab assistant betrayed the experiment and told you beforehand that you'd be awakened 200 times on tails, you could bet at 1:200 odds and break even across both worlds. (And of course, if you were only awoken 2 times but a malicious lab assistant told you 200, you'd lose money in the other direction.)
(The lab makes money by running this experiment on a lot of people, using different coin flips for each person. So for them, this isn't a thought experiment, this is real money, backed up by insurance, securitized and traded on the stock exchange, used as the basis for several cryptocurrencies, which in turn are used by a handful of charter cities and small countries. The lab assistant is a financial terrorist.)
> Isn't this just a matter of separating our "knowledge" of the objective world, from our subjective experiences?
It's more trickier than that. Map/territory relation is definetely part of the problem, but everyone seem to understand that and still can't arrive to an agreement.
> If someone flips a coin and kills me on heads, if I'm alive afterwards then I'm 100% going to be in a world where the coin came up tails.
Well, yes, because your survival is an evidence that the coin is Tails. You couldn't be sure that you would survive and now you know that you did, so you lawfully update. But in Sleeping Beauty you are completely sure that you will be awaken so you can't lawfully update when you awake. Thus the paradox.
> Here's a variant
If the participant is lied to about the procedure of the experiment, the situation is quite different. Then it's understandable where does the disconnection between the map and the territory come from. But the whole point is that the participant was told the truth about the awakening routine, the participant knew everything about the number of awakenings and about the memory erasure, so why the separation between one and the other?
> make a $1 bet
I'll talk more about betting arguments in a future post, but the core thing is that they are very much not helpful in this case. From my comment on LW:
Halfer scoring rule counts per experiment, while thirder per awakening, but regardless of the bet proposed they produce correct betting scores (unless we are talking about halfers who subscribe to Lewis' model which is just wrong).
If there is only one bet per experiment a thirder would think that while probability of Tails is twice as large as Heads, it is compensated by the utilities of bets: only one of the Tails outcome is rewarded, not both. So they use equal betting odds, just as a halfer, who would think that both probability and utility are completely fair.
Likewise, if there is a bet on every awakening, halfer will think that while the probabilities of Heads and Tails are the same, Tails outcome is rewarded twice as much, so they will have betting odds favouring Tails, just as a thirder, for whom utilities are fair but probability is in favour of Tails.
Betting just adds another variable to the problem, it doesn't make the existent variables more preciese.
> But if you bet at 1:2 odds, you can cut your loss by 1/2, implying that it's less wrong.
Unless, of course you got also lied about which outcome of the coin toss leads to more awakenings - then you will only increase your loses by betting at 1:2 odds.
> If there is only one bet per experiment a thirder would think that while probability of Tails is twice as large as Heads, it is compensated by the utilities of bets: only one of the Tails outcome is rewarded, not both. So they use equal betting odds, just as a halfer, who would think that both probability and utility are completely fair.
I don't understand what any of this means.
If the bet is at 1:2 odds, in heads-world there's one round of betting where I gain $2, and in tails-world there's two rounds of betting in which I lose $1 each. If we only run the experiment one time, it won't matter much. But it does matter very much to anyone who repeats the experiment many times. If we do this experiment repeatedly, with different fair coin tosses each time, we'll both (on average) break even with 1:2 odds, but any other odds will lead to one of us winning money from the other.
In particular, the lab running the experiment knows exactly how many times I awaken, and can set the odds appropriately. They never lose consciousness, they never have their mind wiped, they are present for the whole experiment. They can see that I'll take the bet 1 time in heads-world and 2 times in tails-world. If they use some odds other than 1:2, then they will on average gain or lose money, depending on which direction they shift the odds.
There are two possible betting rules. One where you bet once per experiment and one where you bet once per awakening. For once per awakening bet the correct odds are indeed 1:2 - this is the case you are talking about. But for once per experiment they are 1:1.
In once per experiment betting rule there is one round of betting either way, regardless of the number of awakenings. It can be designed as if a bet is proposed every time you are awakend but only the one on the last awakening really counts. We count the number of worlds, not the number of slips of paper.
These two betting rules represent two facts about the Sleeping Beauty experiment. Per awakening betting rule represent that only 1/3 of randomly selected awakenings among multiple iteration of experiment happens when the coin is Heads. Per experiment betting rule represent that in 1/2 of randomly selected iterations of experiment your awakening is happening when the coin is Heads.
I completely agree; I think I just posted the same thing as a response to another of your comments. :-) But then, that takes us back to my confusion about what the problem is... This sounds like what you described as the "Thirder" position?
As I said, both Thirders and Double Halfers can arrive to these conclusions:
Thirders: 1/2->1/3->1/2
Double Halfers: 1/2->1/2->1/2
The difference is that Thirders now need to justify how they switch from initial 1/2 probability that the coin will be Heads on Sunday before they are put to sleep, to 1/3 on awakening despite getting no new evidence. And Double Halfers need to justify why they do not change their estimate when told that it's Monday
Fun, I'll check this out tomorrow. I wrote up an update for SB problem a while back and posted it in a hidden open thread, let me know if you can't see it and I can repost here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-1805/comments#comment-2394607
No, I can't see it. Would appreciate if you repost it here.
It's a multi-messge thread, was long:
A previous thread got me thinking about the [sleeping beauty](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleeping_Beauty_problem) problem. I puzzled around a solution and don't really have anywhere to put it, so figured I'd put it here.
The problem immediately reminds me of the [Monte Hall](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem) problem -- not just the problem itself, but also the 'mild cultural scarring' of so many people getting it so wrong for so long (eg. see [the wiki subsection](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem#Simple_solutions) on the many PhDs who publicly demonstrated that they couldn't solve the problem).
So I'm primed for a non-obvious answer, especially an answer where the right percentages are 1/3, 2/3, as indicated by the first wikipedia solution entry.
However there is a big difference between the Monte Hall problem and the Sleeping Beauty: information destruction.
The Monte Hall solution relies on the fact that you gain information through the door-opening process.
In the sleeping beauty problem, the explicit assumption is that you *don't* gain any information; or rather any information gained is explicitly discarded.
If this was a Bayesian update, the destruction/discarding of information is likely most easily represented as simply resetting your prior to the original prior, each time SB awakens -- effectively SB should always makes only one update.
However the structure of the problem as stated on wikipedia means SB doesn't even have enough information to make a *single* informative update, as we'll see below.
So let's do the Bayesian updates.
To "warm up" let's first write out the Monte Hall problem, solved via Bayesian update...
(1)
To "warm up" let's first write out the Monte Hall problem, solved via Bayesian update:
Hypotheses, and priors:
A: car is behind door A, 1/3
B: car is behind door B, 1/3
C: car is behind door C, 1/3
Data:
- First let's enumerate the states of the world; ordering is (player choice, monte hall choice):
(A,B), (A,C), (B,A), (B,C), (C,A), (C,B)
So for example (A,B) means the player chooses door A, Monte Hall chooses door B, and it is the palyers turn to decide whether to stay with A or switch to C.
Build the likelihoods:
P( (A,B) | A) = 0.5
P( (A,C) | A) = 0.5
P( (B,A) | A) = 0
P( (B,C) | A) = 1
P( (C,A) | A) = 0
P( (C,B) | A) = 1
P( (A,B) | B) = 0
P( (A,C) | B) = 1
P( (B,A) | B) = 0.5
P( (B,C) | B) = 0.5
P( (C,A) | B) = 1
P( (C,B) | B) = 0
P( (A,B) | C) = 1
P( (A,C) | C) = 0
P( (B,A) | C) = 1
P( (B,C) | C) = 0
P( (C,A) | C) = 0.5
P( (C,B) | C) = 0.5
Now the update. wlog select any of the data points: (A,B)
P(A | (A,B)) = (1/2)/( (1/2)*(1/3) + (0)*(1/3) + (1)*(1/3))*(1/3)
P(B | (A,B)) = 0/( (1/2)*(1/3) + (0)*(1/3) + (1)*(1/3))*(1/3)
P(C | (A,B)) = 1/( (1/2)*(1/3) + (0)*(1/3) + (1)*(1/3))*(1/3)
->
P(A | (A,B)) = 0.33
P(B | (A,B)) = 0
P(C | (A,B)) = 0.67
So the player chose A, MH revealed B, the posteriors are (A,B,C) = (0.33, 0, 0.67). This represents the classic solution -- the player should switch from A to C if maximizing prob of winning the game.
Cool. Now on to SB...
(2)
Cool. Now on to SB...
Now let's write up the same update for the sleeping beauty (SB) problem:
Hypotheses:
H: heads (SB awoken Mon only)
T: tails (SB awoken Mon & Tue)
Data:
- states of the world:
- Mon: awake on Monday
- Tue: awake on Tuesday
Likelihoods:
P(Mon | H) = 1
P(Tue | H) = 0
P(Mon | T) = 0.5
P(Tue | T) = 0.5
The update if it could be autonomously run (eg. SB could push a button to update the prior):
Mon:
P(H | Mon) = 1/(1*.5 + .5*.5)*0.5 = 0.67
P(T | Mon) = 0.5/(1*.5 + .5*.5)*0.5 = 0.33
Tue, with and without resetting the prior:
P(H | Tue) = 0/(0*.67 + .5*.33)*0.67 = 0 # inherit prior from the previous day
P(T | Tue) = 0.5/(0*.67 + .5*.33)*0.33 = 1
P(H | Tue) = 0/(0*.5 + .5*.5)*0.5 = 0 # don't inherit prior from previous day
P(T | Tue) = 0.5/(0*.5 + .5*.5)*0.5 = 1 # and use original prior
So in the version of SB where SB is told the day at each awakening, SB's posteriors are:
Mon: H,T -> 0.67, 0.33
Tue: H,T -> 0, 1 -- regardless of whether the priors are reset. Knowing that it is Tuesday completely identifies the coin flip.
However the above doesn't represent SB's information. SB isn't told the day of the week, so SB's state space is not as informative as (Mon, Tue), i.e. two states. Instead SB only has one state: awake.
Thus the likelihood for this reduced state space is:
P(awake | H) = 1
P(!awake | H) = 0
P(awake | T) = 1
P(!awake | T) = 0
That is, the state is completely uninformative to SB, as 'being awake' will always occur under each hypothesis.
For completeness the Bayesian update would look like:
Mon:
p(H | awake) = p(awake | H) / p(awake) *p(H)
= 1/(1*0.5 + 1*0.5)*0.5
= 0.5
p(T | awake) = p(awake | T) / p(awake) *p(T)
= 1/(1*0.5 + 1*0.5)*0.5
= 0.5
Tue: same as above for both resetting and not resetting priors.
Thus SB's posteriors under the proposed setup will be simply her priors. Note that she can of course have different priors than 0.5, 0.5; just to show that priors\==posteriors under 'information destruction", let's say SB's priors were:
H: 0.75
T: 0.25
Then we'd have:
Mon:
p(H | awake) = p(awake | H) / p(awake) *p(H)
= 1/(1*0.75 + 1*0.25)*0.75
= 0.75
p(T | awake) = p(awake | T) / p(awake) *p(T)
= 1/(1*0.75 + 1*0.25)*0.25
= 0.25
Tue: same as above for both resetting and not resetting priors.
In this world under the information structure, SBs posteriors equal her priors at the moment of interview each day.
So essentially, SB only every has her priors.
Thanks. I agree with you conclusion that SB only can reason via priors. But you are using an incorrect model to arrive to it. Namely, you are using the model of David Lewis, which is demonstrably wrong.
Consider the claim that if Beauty was told that it is Monday she should update in favor of Heads. But Monday awakening always happen in the experiment, so it also can't give new information. We can even first awaken the Beauty and only then throw a coin. Update in favour of Heads would mean that Beauty has precognitive powers.
No offense intended, but can you explain the Sleeping Beauty problem without using mathematical operators? I've never heard of it, and I'm afraid your blog post is a bit too daunting for me to read and decode.
Here's a relatively standard formulation of the Sleeping Beauty problem. (I haven't clicked through to see what Ape in the coat said.)
On Sunday, you are told that you will be in a demonstration that lasts through Monday and Tuesday. After you go to sleep tonight, we will flip a fair coin. If it comes up heads, we will wake you on Monday and talk to you, and then after you go to sleep, give you drugs to sleep all the way through Tuesday. If it comes up tails, we will wake you on Monday and talk to you, and then after you go to sleep, give you drugs to erase your memories of Monday, and then wake you on Tuesday and talk to you.
You have now been woken up in the experiment. The conversation is just beginning, and you don't know whether it's Monday or Tuesday (because you knew in advance that either way, you wouldn't have memories of anything since Sunday), and whether the coin came up heads or tails. Should your confidence that the coin came up heads be 1/2, or 1/3, or something else?
The argument for 1/2 is that you didn't learn anything when you woke up, so your prior probability of 1/2 should remain unchanged.
The argument for 1/3 is something like the following - it doesn't seem to matter whether the coin flip is done Sunday night or Monday night, since it doesn't affect anything that happens until Monday night; so if it's Monday, then if the conversation reveals that it's Monday, your probability of heads should be 1/2; but your probability that it's Monday conditional on tails should be the same as your probability that it's Tuesday conditional on tails; so each of the three possibilities (Monday Heads, Monday Tails, Tuesday Tails) should all be equal, and thus 1/3.
Most people who write about this problem lean towards 1/3, but some argue that it should be 1/2, and that updating probabilities works differently when you're just learning facts about what time it is, rather than facts about which world is actual.
Empirically, from the point of view of an independent observer half of the beauties will be woken once and half twice, the coin being fair. Doing the experiment with N people and N/2 will be woken twice and N/2 woken once.
I understand why the thirders might believe their idea - tails could be Monday or Tuesday, heads only Monday - but it’s wrong, understanding why it works in statistical models is interesting.
But from the point of view of a repeated participant, 1/3 of wakings will be heads wakings and 2/3 of wakings will be tails wakings. If they consistently bet on heads at 50-50 odds, then they will lose money over time.
Frequencies don’t answer the question because there’s one frequency that is 1/2 and another that is 1/3, and this is a question about Bayesian probability instead.
Nice summary, thank you.
In terms of probability estimates that the coin is Heads 1) on Monday before it is known that it's Monday and 2) after it's revealed that it's Monday, there are two popular approaches:
Thirdism: 1/3->1/2
Lewisian Halfism: 1/2->2/3
Both of them are wrong. But, after some minor analysis, Lewisian Halfism seems more obviously wrong than Thirdism. And most of the discussion happens to be focused on this fact.
There is also Double Halfism: 1/2->1/2
But there is little discussion about it because people lack propper justification for it.
In my post I draw a distinction between Updateless and Updating Thirdism - the former - the one justified by the argument that you've written in your comment - implicitly believes that there is no fair coin toss to begin with, while the latter tries to come with some justification why the update between Sunday and Monday has to happen.
I show that Lewisian Halfism and both kind of Thirdism are actually not applicable to the Sleeping Beauty problem and happen to be modelling something else. And I build ground for the correct model and its justifications, which will be revealed in the next post but, frankly, shouldn't be that hard to guess already.
I think I'm starting to see what you're talking about. As with the Monty Hall problem, I think this can be clarified by changing the number from 2 awakenings in tails-world, to 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (10e30) awakenings in tails-world. So in tails-world, there would be 1 awakening on Monday, and 999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999 awakenings on Tuesday. (Somehow. Maybe it's a very long Tuesday.)
If I'm woken up, and not told anything, I think the odds of me being in heads-world are 1:10e30. That is, there's only a tiny chance I'm in heads-world, and I'm almost certainly in tails-world. If there's a bet that I can make every time I'm awakened, it should be at 1:10e30 odds.
But if I'm woken up, and then told that this is Monday and the first time I've been woken up, and I believe this... My gut reaction is to say that the odds are 1:1, that I've got a 50% chance of being in heads-world. If there were a special bet that I could only make on that first awakening on Monday, it should be at 1:1 odds.
I suppose that makes me a Thirder?
Yep, that's thirder reasoning.
> As with the Monty Hall problem, I think this can be clarified by changing the number
Funny enough both halfers and thirders think that Monty Hall analogy works for their side.
> But if I'm woken up, and then told that this is Monday and the first time I've been woken up, and I believe this...
Would you believe it, though? When awoken you claim to be extremely confident that it's not Monday, so it should require A LOT of evidence to persuade you that it is and thus shift your estimate for Heads from 1:10e30 to 1:1. Doesn't it feel weird at all? That you are so surprised that Monday awakening, something that is GUARANTEED to happen in the experiment, indeed happened?
Suppose that instead of a fair coin there is a more general random number generator and there is only one in a million chance to have 10e30 awakenings and in all the other outcomes, you have one awakening. Would you still be extremely confident when awoken in such experiment that you are in the world with 10e30 awakenings?
> My gut reaction is to say that the odds are 1:1, that I've got a 50% chance of being in heads-world. If there were a special bet that I could only make on that first awakening on Monday, it should be at 1:1 odds.
Completely agree here.
> Would you believe it, though?
I wouldn't say I "believe it", really. It could happen, and for the purposes of the experiment I can go along with what the experimenters say. I've got no real way of knowing where I am in the sequence. I have no way of knowing whether they tell me every time that it will be Monday, or never tell me that it will be Monday, or flip more coins to decide whether to tell me, or anything like that. But assuming I trust them, then like you say, I know that Monday will happen. I go to sleep prepared for 2 scenarios, Monday and Tuesday, and when I wake up one of the scenarios happens, and I react accordingly. In that sense, it's actually less surprising than rolling a natural 20 when playing D&D. Maybe that's the psychological trick for me - there are very few options, so it's easy to hold them in mind? It seems similar to filling out answers on a standardized test, where the questions have no connection to reality, but I can still consider them abstractly and find the correct answer.
If we're talking about actual "belief", it partly depends on how much I trust the experimenters, and how much I'll be able to verify what they say afterwards, and how easy it will be for me to punish them for lying to me, and various considerations of that sort.
And yes, running the numbers, I think if there were 10e6 worlds where I was awoken one time and one world where I was awoken 10e30 times, I'd still assume that I was in the one world with 10e30 awakenings. It doesn't feel weird to me at all. I wouldn't say I'm "confident" in an intuitive sense, but it's like solving a math problem that's at the limit of my ability - I think I have the right answer, but it's not instantly obvious to me why it must be the right answer. In the same way, if I wake up, my intuitions no longer function to guide me, but I can use math to work out what the odds are. Certainly, if the experimenters do this experiment a lot, they're going to spend a lot more time on that one-in-a-million chance.
Perhaps I misunderstand you: what does the sleeping through Tuesday part of it do? I don't see how it affects anything.
The sleeping through Tuesday part means that you know there are only *three* possibilities - Monday Heads, Monday Tails, Tuesday Tails, because you won't wake up on Tuesday Heads. The memory erasure part is to ensure that you can't tell the difference between Monday Tails and Tuesday Tails.
Isn’t the patient woken up Tuesday regardless. He just doesn’t know if it’s Monday (therefore heads) or Tuesday (therefore tails but on Monday). The coin is tossed once.
Ah, I see. Thanks for the explanation.
Interesting! I'd tend to lean towards 1/2 — just because the coin flip is independent of any contingent events that happen post-flip. Whether I wake up Monday or Tuesday wouldn't affect the odds of the coin flip. But I admit my odds of guessing the correct answer could be 1/3 (I'd have to think about it some more, though).
I’d suggest starting with an explanation of the thought experiment.
In the caste system in India, as originally practiced (or so the traditional doctrines hold), sure the upper layers were quite privileged, but there was a catch: the higher you were in the hierarchy, the more restrictions were placed on you. To give an example, a Brahmin, someone at the very top, is supposed to take a bath after each defecation, and this is just one of many restrictions. Conversely, being at the bottom means you do the manual labor, but you don't have any restrictions like that and can indulge in all sort of vices. So it worked (or so I've been told), because the Shudras, the bottom caste, would look at the top and see that the people there really were of a superior nature to them.
Now, this is not about defending the caste system, but about revisiting this idea that the more you climb in society, the more restricted your life becomes. We should totally do this I think. Past some threshold of wealth (TBD) maybe it could be something like you have to put in 200 hours of volunteer work each year, maybe 100 of community service and 100 of working the land. I think this would give a dose of reality to the sheltered upper classes and remind them of how the society they live in actually works. Certainly, doing volunteer work with the homeless has had that effect on me, and this might be a way to harness populism to good ends, as it is a rather populistic measure.
But the nature of virtue in modern america isn't helping poor people or hard manual labor, it's signalling your support of black nationalism, trans rights etc.
We used to have something along the lines of this in the west too (noblesse oblige). But it's a tradition that is passed down through families, and the tradition has faded as new money has displaced old money; the vast majority of money these days is new money which doesn't understand that you're not supposed to actually be _seen_ enjoying your wealth, you're supposed to be seen labouring under its obligations, so that nobody has to feel bad.
I worry that we've lost the ability to investigate the extent to which this was ever a real thing. :-(
That used to be the idea of fagging in British public schools. For the benefit of US readers, who might find this misleading, public schools are actually private schools, and fagging is the idea that junior pupils should perform menial (non-sexual one hopes! :-) tasks for senior pupils, such as running errands, polishing shoes, or making toast. So a duke's son could be fagging for a coal merchant's son, and that would give the former some notion of what service entailed and the latter would gain experience in leadership and giving orders.
Re the caste system, I read somewhere that it started out as mostly a health precaution, when Indo-European (Aryan) invaders of India, from c 2000 BC or thereabouts, found they had limited resistance to diseases which the indigenous population took in their stride through long accustomization.
Isn't that basically just hazing? Hazing serves lots of purposes, but making aristocrats know what service is like is not the main one.
No it isn't, assuming hazing refers to some ritual intended to humiliate or abuse an initiate.
> Re the caste system, I read somewhere that it started out as mostly a health precaution
How do you think your source would have established this?
It was many years ago, possibly a New Scientist article. They may have been just reporting some anthropologist's suggestion, rather than claiming it was generally accepted gospel truth. It's quite reasonable for them to do this, even for expert suggestions lacking firm evidence and that one never hears more about again!
> It's quite reasonable for them to do this, even for expert suggestions lacking firm evidence
But in that case, it becomes completely unreasonable for you to report it in the terms you did, as if it were a fact.
I am skeptical that that source, or any other, could establish anything about the origins of caste. I would even caution against assuming that it started with the Indo-European invasions; one really doesn't know much. Another point is that the question is not even really well-defined: one needs to specify whether one is talking of caste as in "varna" or caste as in "jati"; I find it a scandal that these disparate notions are always conflated.
I think modern America does this already with nonsense like 'white privilege'. Successful elites have to kowtow to the notion that their success is totally because of luck and privilege and that those are unjustly denied to underrepresented minorities.
George Orwell's 1984 has Winston concluding that the proles were the least deluded by ideology and the Inner Party the most so. "If there is hope [...] it lies in the proles".
"Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm really awfully glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas."
Well, we're already there but worse, as society is stratified, but those at the top aren't really that different from the lower tiers, they just get to enjoy themselves a lot more. Being at the top really should be something that comes with a sacrifice. Of course, there could be a society where there is no top and no bottom, but that seems like a pipe dream, given all of human history.
The people at the top are vastly different from the people at the bottom in their behavior, such as intelligence, conscientiousness, future time orientation and son. And these traits are highly heritable, especially in modern developed countries.
People with an IQ of 85 aren't simply barred from becoming fortune 500 CEOs because of their life circumstances - they literally aren't close to smart enough to be remotely competent in these jobs.
There's only three ways to have a society without a top or bottom:
1. One in which you make everyone highly and equally intelligent
2. One in which you make everyone equally impoverished
3. One in which superintelligent AI systems rule society
Let me repeat: Low intelligence people are literally incapable of creating or even maintaining advanced industrial societies. The least intelligent in American society owe their livelihoods and possibly their existence to high intelligence people. Cutting down the intelligent makes everyone poor.
Now, what we should focus on is areas where the government allows or facilitates unproductive value-transference rent-seeking behaviors. But a society without in which smarter people don't generally have more wealth and power than less intelligent is an impoverished and chaotic one.
And no, for the love of god, this isn't a matter of "school funding" or "educational opportunity" or some nonsense.
I've not studied this bit absorbed this growing up.
Brahmins were not allowed to accumulate wealth or own land. Their job was (like academics) to acquire knowledge (in ancient India that was the study of the vedas and in support of that they made advancements in math, astronomy etc) and disseminate it. They had to go door to door to beg to eat food. It was the duty of others to not turn them away when they begged for food.
Over time, Brahmin culture involved teaching your children to read and write very early. People of this caste were typically poor until the British came. The Brits needed local people who could read and write and maintain accounts of who had paid taxes. And be bureaucrats. This was when they started rising in wealth (creating jealousy, conflicts). Even today, Brahmins who pursue business or other directly money-making activities face some disapproval from elders. It feels like an activity that is not quite something you're supposed to do.
Speaking of status - the Gods that Brahmins pray to are mostly not Brahmin. Most are Kshatriyas (warrior caste).
Modern academia feels at least a little bit like that. At the top, you're supposed to be extremely dedicated to your research, and additionally spend a bunch of time on activities that don't benefit you directly (academic service such as organizing conferences and editing journals, but also things like traveling to visit other research groups and holding extensive 1 on 1 meetings with the phd students there. On top of that there's teaching, for which most academics are technically overqualified and didactically underqualified.
Similar things exist in other fields, e.g., pro-bono work by lawyers. I don't have direct experience there, but it seems to be somewhat required, maybe even formally mediated by their professional organizations?
In ancient India, pursuit of money/land and pursuit of wealth, were supposed to be kept independent. There was something like that, although I'm not an expert. Brahmins were monimaniacally devoted to studying one question : understanding the nature of thought/consciousness. According to Roberto Calasso, they didn't care about anything else. Others gave them food. They were not into material possessions.
In modern India nobody cares too much about this anymore.
What is the significance of the different gods?
Hindus believe that god is above concepts such as number (or gender for that matter). One god is same as infinite gods.
Practically, different people have different preferences about the personality of the god they worship. There are also the Carvaka who don't believe in god or the supremacy of the vedas, and pursue hedonism.
The vedas (Upanishads, to be exact) also say "You are that". There is no two. This is called Advaita or "non-duality". Every entity, whether living or non-living (or virtual like this page) is one with "universal consciousness". There is only one TYPE of thing. God is not mentioned once in the Upanishads.
None of that quite means they weren't in charge.
That sounds like progressive taxation with extra steps? The highest your income, the larger share of it you pay to the commons?
Yeah, except it's more real. Money is just so abstract. I mean, I give 10% of my income to charity, but that's basically invisible to me. The volunteer work I do with the homeless though, that really clarifies things.
So you think working on a farm is a good use of Jensen Huang's time, from even a societal perspective?
Potentially. I think this is ultimately an empirical question: we should try it and see what happens.
Based on my (limited) understanding of history, there was a time when only the aristocracy could afford advanced metal weaponry or were trained to use it, so they were the ones responsible for going to war. It sounds like such a more just way to structure society to me. You get the rewards of wealth but you have to be willing to pay for it, potentially with your life rather than just money. Once being a soldier became just another occupation, now rich people only have to pay poor people to go and die. They still get to enjoy the privileges of a hierarchical society without having to sacrifice anything of real value.
It gets muddled depending on which period & region you're looking at. Two obvious, opposing examples are (1) the Marian reforms which opened up the lucrative field of looting conquered barbarian settlements to the capita censi, and (2) a suit of full plate armor, affordable only by feudal lords, that made a mounted knight the pre-gunpowder equivalent of a main battle tank.
It was kinda like that in the caste system, since the second tier, the kshatriya caste, were the warriors and kings. So they get to enjoy wealth, power, honor, but they have to be willing to put their lives on the line.
So the restrictions on the Brahmin class were necessary to prevent the warrior caste from realising "Hang on, we've got all the weapons, how about we're the highest caste now?"
The warriors already had the things that you can seize with violence: wealth and political power. And I suspect that those were the things they really wanted.
Interesting, I never knew this about the caste system, I always assumed Brahmins were on top in every sense.
Maybe that's because they got more on-top during the British Raj when the power of the warrior class got sidelined by the power of the guys in red pyjamas? Or maybe it's just because Brahmins are vastly overrepresented in the Indians that we get in the West?
It seems safe to assume that Kshatriyas are also vastly overrepresented in the West. Vaishyas obviously are.
Heavy selection against a large pool of low performers means that everyone who isn't them can be vastly overrepresented.
An interesting thought, though I think you're mixing up a couple things and underestimating the degree to which some of this is already done.
Would a minimum-wage waiter see a millionaire doing their yearly required service hours and think 'wow, this person has such great moral fibre and is thus more deserving of their wealth and status?' I don't think so, it would probably be clear that they're just complying with the legal/social norms of their class. This would have other benefits (putting the upper classes in closer contact with the lower is a big plus), but not the same claimed effect as the caste system's restrictions. It's more like Scott's proposal for a modern liturgy.
I think this is partly because these aren't really restrictions on the wealthy, just more obligations, and extra obligations aren't much of an incentive against getting more power/wealth/status. If, beyond a certain income/net worth, you had to forswear drugs/alcohol, or tasty food/meat, or sex other than for the purposes of procreation, or you had to maintain certain standards of contemporary purity, those would be very strong incentives against greater wealth/status, and the people who were willing to accept them probably would be people with more self-control and certain other virtues. Maybe you would wind up with people making lots of money, but giving away a quantity beyond which they would enter an undesirable set of restrictions, a de facto earnings cap.
But parts of this are kinda-sorta already the case. Among the old rich/upper class, though not really the new rich, both certain standards of cultural purity (etiquette, maintaining a public image) and public donations at least in part for the sake of looking good (patronizing the arts, supporting schools, photoshoots with the mayor next to a big new building with your name on it) are pretty standard. It's not formally institutionalized like you're proposing, but the seeds are there.
Posting one more time, because I got zero responses in the last open thread, and I think it must exist by now.
Do any of the new image generators / alterers allow you to upload pictures of yourself or another person at different ages, and have it adjust different-age pictures to a requested age?
Like you have a picture of your grandma at age 20 and age 90, can it impute a picture of her at age 50?
Or a picture of yourself ten years ago vs today - can you age the younger picture to you today, keeping the background and setting?
Yeah I found several a while ago by just by googling.
Just search for "morphing faces together" and you will find lots of results. Morphing is not new, that could already be done before all the modern AI apps came out, and it's probably easier to do without AI image generators.
Ah, thanks - I guess I was using the wrong search terms or something, but you're right "morphing" seems to do the trick.
I've never tried this, but now I might. Can you recommend the best one that you found?
There are a lot of apps that do that, I don't think it's something most of the image generators do or allow you to do.
I think it can be done, but you have to do fine-tuning yourself. E.g. I know it is possible to take a diffusion model and fine-tune it's concept of "man" to a bunch of pictures of yourself. Then it will always put your face on all the men it generates. Not sure how to add age morphing to that basic idea, but it should be possible.
Have there been any studies on the rightward political shift on Twitter/X in recent years? I'm curious (1) what's driving it, (2) how significant it is, (3) how it's changing wider public discourse.
The massive anti-woke backlash against Gemini in the past week got me thinking more about the question. I couldn't imagine this happening on the platform circa 2018.
That will happen if you have female Asian Nazis. It wasn’t just the erasure of whites from the past but the sheer stupidity of the project managers and testing that was involved here. If they didn’t know they don’t have a testing department worth a damn and if they did know then the entire department needs to be shut down, or at least a considerable number of them fired.
Even from a non political point of view this is a useless image generator - imagine a Chinese professor who wants to illustrate a tutorial on the Vikings, or Nazis or Scottish highlanders in 1850 - the results are useless. As long as the US allows its own internal politics to affect the product of the AI the more likely that some other country would steal the market. Probably China.
It was dumb, but even dumber was the Washington Post's defence re: the black and lady popes. "There might be black popes in the future!" That reminded me of a Snopes rebuttal, though even Snopes have gotten better recently: "It was only 98% incorrect, so we're going to say 'Mostly True'".
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/02/22/google-gemini-ai-image-generation-pause/
"In contrast, some of the examples cited by Gemini’s critics as historically innaccurate (sic) are plausible. The viral tweet from the @EndofWokeness account also showed a prompt for “an image of a Viking” yielding an image of a non-White man and a Black woman, and then showed an Indian woman and a Black man for “an image of a pope.”
The Catholic church bars women from becoming popes. But several of the Catholic cardinals considered to be contenders should Pope Francis die or abdicate are black men from African countries. Viking trade routes extended to Turkey and Northern Africa and there is archaeological evidence of black people living in Viking-era Britain."
I'm going to stay away from the Black Vikings because I'm no anthropologist, but anything to do with Catholicism is fair game for me. Does Jeff Bezos have money invested in Google Gemini, that his organ came out to protect its fair name? 😁
Okay, I lied: I just *had* to look up their link about "black people living in Viking-era Britain" and it turns out to be one (1) burial of a possibly mixed-race person in York:
https://www.caitlingreen.org/2019/12/african-viking-york.html
"However, an examination of the remains in order to make ancestry determinations suggested that SK 3379 was unusual in one way: unlike the other six individuals examined, Malin Holst and Katie Keefe concluded that he 'may have been of African or mixed ancestry and may have migrated to York or descended from those that did'."
There are also, ahem, unfortunate implications: any black or possibly black/African people in Viking-era Britain may have been slaves, so not really black Vikings I'm sorry to tell the WaPo:
"In addition to such archaeological parallels, attention can also be drawn to the evidence of the eleventh-century Fragmentary Annals of Ireland, which relates the story of a Viking raid on Morocco (Mauritania) in the mid-ninth century that led to the taking of 'a great host' of captives:
Then they brought a great host of them captive with them to Ireland, i.e. those are the black men. For Mauri is the same as nigri; 'Mauritania' is the same as nigritudo. Hardly one in three of the Norwegians escaped, between those who were slain, and those who drowned in the Gaditanian Straits. Now those black men remained in Ireland for a long time.
This account was discussed at length in a previous post, and the notion that it reflects real events is supported by Al-Bakrī's Kitāb al-Masālik wa-al-Mamālik, which relates that 'Majūs [Vikings]—God curse them—landed at Nakūr [Nekor, Morocco], in the year 244 (858–9). They took the city, plundered it, and made its inhabitants slaves, except those who saved themselves by flight... The Majūs stayed eight days in Nakūr.'(7) Likewise, the late ninth-century Christian Chronicle of Alfonso III relates that the 'Northman pirates... sailed the sea and attacked Nekur, a city in Mauritania, and there they killed a vast number of Muslims.'"
> Then they brought a great host of them captive with them to Ireland, i.e. those are the black men. For Mauri is the same as nigri; 'Mauritania' is the same as nigritudo.
That's a weird article. She mentions certain remains as being identified as "sub-Saharan" African, but I can't be sure whether she actually means that. Note that Moroccans are in fact not black, and not sub-Saharan. Most of the piece seems to intentionally equivocate between black Africans and white North Africans.
There is no reason to believe that Moroccan slaves who were described by the medieval Irish as "black" were not white; there were no blacks in Ireland to contrast them with. "Black" and "dark" are frequent descriptors in traditional and historical material, but they more often refer to the color of someone's hair than to the color of their skin. And when they do refer to skin, they still don't mean what you would expect by describing someone as "black".
Definitely people from North Africa are not the same as sub-Saharan Africans, and are much lighter skinned (and that's before we even get into Coptic/Arabic/Caucasian divisions).
For the 9th century, I wouldn't expect much discrimination between "people from Africa" as "black which we now would consider black" and "much browner than the local milk-white population", but that linked article had a *ton* of "possibly, maybe, could have been". When you're scrabbling for "the Roman Emperor who was born in Roman Africa" as an example of "people from Africa living in Viking-era Britain", then you should just go "yeah, this isn't archaeology, it's DEI".
So really the WaPo is carrying water for Gemini, which does make me wonder if Jeff has money socked away invested in the rival to Bing and so his editors are following the party line on "don't everybody flee to Microsoft, please!"
> When you're scrabbling for "the Roman Emperor who was born in Roman Africa" as an example of "people from Africa living in Viking-era Britain", then you should just go "yeah, this isn't archaeology, it's DEI".
There's no ambiguity for that one; all Roman Emperors are known to have been white, just like the population of Roman Africa.
The article explicitly called one of the remains "sub-Saharan", but it's so poorly written and dishonest that I can't tell (a) whether it meant to do that; or (b) whether that might be true.
> There's no ambiguity for that one; all Roman Emperors are known to have been white, just like the population of Roman Africa.
Only if you use the more expansive definition of "white" that includes MENA. But at the very least, we explicitly know that some emperors were pretty tan, and most likely most of them were, since these guys are Mediterranean, not British.
https://acoup.blog/2021/07/23/collections-the-queens-latin-or-who-were-the-romans-part-iv-the-color-of-purple/
My response when reading the Viking claim was "If you asked Gemini for images of North Africans or Turks would you be happy if it gave you blonde Scandinavians?"
Well, we know from the prompts that "diverse" only applies when you ask for white people. Having a group of all black or all brown people is fine, it's only a group of all white people that is the most evillest evil thing in the world because it's discriminatory, normative, and just plain racist, mmkay?
"Know" might be a little too strong; the prompt leaks are still LLM output. It's not reliable on other topics, and it doesn't have to be reliable on this one.
The general sense given by the prompt leaks is clearly correct - because we knew the same information before we had the leaks - but we can't necessarily rely on any specific detail.
What's driving it are the policies that Musk instituted since he took over. Twitter is the only mainstream platform where rightwing views aren't systematically censored so it has naturally attracted rightwing participants.
I’m nowhere near Twitter. I’m not even Twitter adjacent adjacent. But it’s hardly right wing to find the results of Gemini’s image production are ludicrous.
I never said it was.
I don't think it really changes anything. The algorithm still isn't going to recommend right wing content if you keep selecting against it (with the exception of leftists quote tweeting and dunking on particularly stupid conservatives). It's not like conservatives were getting actively purged off of the platform before Musk either. Though, you can probably get away with being less... subtle now.
Anyways, Twitter isn't even that popular nowadays. Even Reddit is more popular now. Youtube, Facebook, and Instagram are the things you want to look at if you want to see what's affecting the general public.
> It's not like conservatives were getting actively purged off of the platform before Musk either.
They absolutely were, are you even serious? This was absolutely a huge issue with outright and shadow bans, and a huge number of right-wingers were unbanned once Musk took over (including, of course, Donald Trump).
>Anyways, Twitter isn't even that popular nowadays.
Twitter is vastly more popular than reddit, and perhaps as importantly, it is vastly more influtential than reddit. Other than humorous posts, what gets said on reddit almost never has any impact outside of reddit, whereas new sites routinely include tweets and often news articles are written about so and so person saying something on twitter (largely because almost no celebrities or other prominent people use reddit).
> It's not like conservatives were getting actively purged off of the platform before Musk either
Pretty sure they were. Quite a lot of substackers I read were kicked off Twitter in that era. And then there's Trump of course.
Indeed, and many were shadow banned with their posts suppressed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files#No._2:_Visibility_filtering
As of Sep 2023, Twitter had 6.5B monthly visits vs 1.8B for reddit
Youtube and Facebook are still far ahead of either, though.
Oh, I was looking at this. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/social-media/?tabId=tab-673f63a2-da02-4836-96c6-c1d4e25c8a89
Twitter is definitely more popular globally due to Reddit being almost exclusively English-speaking.
Facebook matters less than twitter. Nobody cares about what people are saying on facebook except in extreme circumstances. It's inhabited almost exclusively by boomers and third worlders.
Was it a massive anti-woke backlash? I can see elements of that in it, but mostly I think Google cut the rod for its own back. Personally, I wish I had known in time so I could have seen the diverse leprechauns, I'm sure they would have been *so* much better than the boring old traditional Irish folklore leprechauns:
https://twitter.com/RTETakingLs/status/1760532006813815008
Lady leprechauns! Indian (both Asian Indian and Native American) leprechauns! Leprechauns of colour, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation diversity! South Asian non-binary leprechauns expanding into other fields of industry than shoe making and gold hoarding!
Wait a minute, I call shenanigans on your leprechauns. If there are no female leprechauns, then where do baby leprechauns come from ? Are you saying that all leprechauns are male or hermaphroditic or asexual, and reproduce by budding ? But if so, it would technically render all leprechauns gay and nonbinary by definition ! Pick a lane, @Deiseach ! :-)
We don't know what leprechauns do in the privacy of the fairy fort and frankly, Bugmaster, didn't you get the memo back when sodomy was decriminalised that what people do in their bedrooms is none of our business?
There are female fairies, so presumably they and the leprechauns and other male fairies marry or whatever it is the fairies do in place of marriage. I am not going out under a hawthorn bush looking to find a leprechaun to ask for his parents' marriage lines, okay?
They must be one of those semi-parasitic species, I forget if there's a name for them, where they mate with human women but the offspring are either male leprechauns or female humans.
>expanding into other fields of industry than shoe making and gold hoarding!
Hmm... Would modern leprechauns be willing to consider hoarding platinum group metals? :-)
Not a study on this directly, but I liked Nate Silver's piece on the indigo blob here, and he seems to share your impression
https://www.natesilver.net/p/twitter-elon-and-the-indigo-blob
That was a great read, thanks for sharing it.
Musk, directly, and the code/moderation changes after his arrival, have played at least some part, compounded by the idea/self-fulfilling prophecy among both left and the right that Twitter is the "right-wing social media" now.
Is it neoteny or immaturity that men like?
In the literature on female attractiveness it's often claimed that men find women with neotenous features very attractive. Some psychologists may run a study showing men pictures of 18+ women and ask them to pick out the most attractive faces. The women that then get picked are ones with facial proportions typical pubescent girls about 12-14. This is then interpreted to mean that men find adult women with "neotenous faces" the most attractive.
Now, I can't be the only one who's spotted the glaring flaw in this reasoning. Men find women who look like pubescent girls most attractive. Well, who else looks like pubescent girls? Who else has the facial proportions of girls about 12-14? Well, actual pubescent girls look like pubescent girls. Actual girls about 12-14 have the facial proportions typical of girls about 12-14. It's not neoteny men find highly attractive, it's immaturity. What men find most attractive simply isn't adult women but young teen and pubescent girls. Some women happen to retain the facial proportions of a pubescent girl into adulthood and men continue to find them highly attractive because of it.
Psychologists have naively started out with the presumption that a sexual preference for fully developed adults must be the norm. When confronted with evidence that men find the faces of pubescent girls most attractive they bend over backwards to avoid the obvious conclusion that their presumption is wrong by claiming that what men prefer is adult women with "neotenous faces" who look like pubescent girls. There's no law of evolution that says the males in a species have to prefer the fully developed adults. The only thing that ultimately matters in evolution is reproductive success. If the males in a species can achieve greater reproductive success by going after immature females due to the way their mating system works then they will evolve to do exactly that.
In South Korea facial reshaping surgery is popular. What facial proportions do women choose to get with this surgery? Well, the proportions typical of girls about 12-14 because they know they're the most attractive. Here's some examples:
https://imgur.com/eYvxlVa
https://imgur.com/8F5Eqax
https://imgur.com/qgu9rqA
For comparison this is a real pubescent Asian girl about 12 (Nozomi Kurahashi). She looks basically the same as the after pics:
https://imgur.com/EWUTYc3
Notice also that the skin in the after pics has been made to look softer and smoother like the skin of a pubescent girl.
The BMI men rate most attractive is about 18-20 which is low for an adult woman but normal for a young teen or pubescent girl. BMI also increases after pregnancy. It would have been important for men in ancestral times to prefer females who are young and haven't started reproducing yet as these females would be capable of giving them the most offspring over the long-term. So a low BMI appears to be another sign of immaturity and nulliparity that men have evolved to find attractive.
The vulvas men find most attractive are also those of pubescent girls. Many women have had their labia trimmed down to make themselves look like a pubescent girl down there because they know men find it more attractive just like men prefer the faces of pubescent girls. I won't link to it here but there's a site called Autoblow Vagina Contest that have a leaderboard of vulvas. The vulvas at the top have the small inner labia typical of pubescent girls. If real pubescent girls could post themselves on this site I'm sure they'd be voted to the top.
The schoolgirl image. Popular in porn, especially across Asia where there's less taboo over attraction to minors. This is another sign of immaturity. If a girl is still wearing a school uniform then she's obviously not yet adult and still a bit immature.
TLDR: It's not neoteny men find attractive, it's immaturity.
Bonus video:
https://imgur.com/9sJOy1w
So, Mr. Bojangles, I do not think many people have seen the labia of 12-14 year old girls, and even fewer have seen enough to be walking around with prepubescent labial norms in their heads. I'm the mother of a young adult daughter, and while I occasionally saw her naked up until she left for college, I have not seen her labia since I stopped having to do diaper changes when she was 3. How many prepubescent labia have you seen, and how did it come about that you saw them?
"Some psychologists may run a study showing men pictures of 18+ women and ask them to pick out the most attractive faces. The women that then get picked are ones with facial proportions typical pubescent girls about 12-14. "
That's curiously phrased. *Have* any psychiatrists ever run such a study with the results you suggest? If so, did it replicate? And can we get a cite so we can at least look at the methodology?
If not, if this is just a hypothetical, then why should we engage it at all? I'd rather engage the hypothesis that men prefer women who look to be about 16-18, or perhaps a bit older, because I think that's far more likely to actually be true,
Why deny us all the pleasure of visiting the Autoblow Vagina Contest? It's here:
https://vaginacontest.com
Curious about what Autoblow is and what it has to do with vaginas? OK, the Autoblow is a male masturbation device that delivers suction plus rhythmic rubbing. The man inserts his penis through a sleeve made of soft rubbery stuff with a mouth-shaped opening it. The manufacturer is now working on the Autoblow 2, where the sleeve will be an artificial vulva. It will be called the Robotwat. I believe the point of the vulva contest is to allow the maker to use the world's most beautful vulva in the Robotwat's sleeve -- site says they will be doing 3D scans of the winning vulvas. Oh, also there are lots of Autoblow and Robotwat accessories available -- for example, the Nut Nibbler. If you own both -- well, life doesn't get much better than that.
These devices aren't just plain old pocket pussies. They deliver data driven blow jobs.
"Our machine learning study analyzed 1000 hours of blowjob videos to deliver to our customers real blowjobs with a human touch."
So I looked at the winning vulvas, and they do not support Mr. Bojangles' contention that men prefer the smaller labia minora of 12-14 year olds. About half of the vulvas in the top 10 were from women aged 25 and older, and 2 were from women who were 40-ish. The size of the labia minora varied quite a lot, and on a couple of vulvas I'd say they were pretty large and prominent. There were also several photographed from the rear where it was impossible to even get an idea of the size of the inner labia.
Special bonus image from the page: https://imgur.com/a/ajzb1av
(Naw sorry, it's not a vulva -- just an image of a guy praising the device)
If the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon is a superstition or a cognitive distortion then it's a damn convincing one because it was hours ago that I first learned of the Autoblow in a completely different context. Something like this happens to me at least once every two months.
I'm curious what the context was.
The guy behind it wrote a detailed answer about his experiences as a foreigner in China on Quora, which was linked on tumblr: https://www.tumblr.com/nonevahed/743510014040342528
> They deliver data driven blow jobs.
To jump tracks for a bit, THIS SHIT RIGHT HERE makes me worry more about the AI apocalypse than all the politically correct AI art combined. Next step, hooking it up to a computer and synchronizing audio and video output, while using internal sensors and cameras and microphones to track arousal state. Although I suppose then it's only a small step toward nudging people to fetishize black kings of England or female popes or whatever. If displays are running at 200 fps, how many of those frames can be subliminal images?
I am morbidly curious as to what the first AI sex toy personal injury case will be...
< Next step, hooking it up to a computer and synchronizing audio and video output, while using internal sensors and cameras and microphones to track arousal state.
He's already done some of that. https://imgur.com/a/KHdpGJ4
My takeaway: The future looks dark and really really tacky.
"If you want a picture of the future, imagine ..."
Leaving aside this data and your interpretation of it, given a random sample of 100 grown women in their early 20s very very few will appear prepubescent regardless of these relative facial proportions. The semantics here are used to validate a jump to conclusions.
Right. In practice, almost all men will prefer the face of an actual 22 year old woman to an actual 12 year old girl. A 12 year old girl looks like a 12 year old girl, though I would have no idea exactly what actual facial differences I'm looking at that help my brain tell one from the other.
I'm not sure what subtle facial shape changes might happen between 12 and 22, but I wonder whether what we're looking at is that 22 year olds are (on average) fatter than 12 year olds, which skews the "what a 22 year old woman looks like" data set.
I think if you're going to dance on the third rail like this it would behoove you to actually link some of the studies in question. Complaining about the reactions of some interlocutor(s) 'confronted with evidence' rings hollow when you haven't, you know, presented any.
I will note that you are focusing on facial attractiveness, and that other features that are important don't necessarily have some optimal value during the early teen years. For example, WHR seems to reach a minimum at around 20 or a little later, see https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1090513803000837
Whaddya mean no evidence. He told us where to find the labia data, though he refrained from linking to it. Please do pay a visit to https://vaginacontest.com
It's not immaturity, it's fertility. Youth is the best single predictor of fertility, so that's what our genes are adapted to find attractive.
Why theorize about an idea that someone is putting forth without citing a single piece of research to support his contention?
Why not? Why did you reply to MY comment?
Many are doing it, but you're the first person I came across doing it after noticed the trend. I did say something similar to a couple other people on this thread.
And I particularly object to people responding to this post without questioning OP about his sources. And it's a post that I think particularly merits a call for sources. The only source he even mentions, tho without linking it, was the Autoblow Vagina Site. That's a strong contender for dumbest info source I've ever seen cited online. If you haven't paid a Autoblow a visit, please do have a look. Also, the top 10 winning vulvas in the contest do not conform to OP's statement that delicate 12-14 year old vulvas are the most attractive to men. The vulvas in the winner's parade vary quite a lot in the dimensions of different parts, and in 3 of the photos the woman is in a postion that doesn't even let the viewer glimpse her labia minora. Clearly the people that voted them to the top don't care much about labia formation. They may instead represent the "puffy pussy"-lover contingent.
I'd say that's a noncentral fallacy on your part. Whether or not that site is legit, OP's central claim that men find youth attractive is obviously true. I have no interest in litigating the details of a claim which is clearly correct. I'm happy to simply stipulate its truth so that I can move on to making a more interesting point about its interpretation.
There's no doubt men find young women the most attractive. But OP's claim is that they find pubescent girls, 12-14 year olds, the most attractive. And he is at pains to make clear that he does not mean that men prefer young women who happen to look like they are 12-14, but actual 12-14 year olds:
<It's not neoteny men find highly attractive, it's immaturity. What men find most attractive simply isn't adult women but young teen and pubescent girls. . .
Psychologists have naively started out with the presumption that a sexual preference for fully developed adults must be the norm . . . There's no law of evolution that says the males in a species have to prefer the fully developed adults. The only thing that ultimately matters in evolution is reproductive success. If the males in a species can achieve greater reproductive success by going after immature females due to the way their mating system works then they will evolve to do exactly that. . . The vulvas men find most attractive are also those of pubescent girls. Many women have had their labia trimmed down to make themselves look like a pubescent girl down there because they know men find it more attractive.
This may be true, but I can't recall ever seeing it stated. My life experience also does not provide any evidence that it is obviously true. The teens he is talking about are the ones who just got their period in the last year or so. The look sort of little girly still, with small breasts and butts, and skinny little-girl arms. They are adorable, and I don't doubt that men find them attractive. But my experience is that the women males find most beautiful are late teens-early 20's and slender, but with fully developed breasts and shapely butts. If you have any doubts about it, google image "beautiful woman body" or "midjourney female characters body." They have jugs and shapely booties, and their faces also look like women's not young teen's.
I concur: though they may not legally be adults, if they have gone through puberty they are "sexually" mature.
Biologically they are adults.
I wonder whether the school system contributes to this.
I mean, in nature there is such a thing as "imprinting"; once you associate something with something, if it happened in the sensitive moment of your life, the association will stay for a long time, maybe forever.
So when the boys get sexually ready, at puberty, which women do they see? Well, they spend most of their days at a classroom, so they mostly see the girls at puberty, plus the teacher. Perhaps their brain chooses some of them, and writes the information as "this is what a sexually attractive woman looks like". Some choose the classmates. Some choose the teacher. For the rest of their lives, their preferences will be skewed that way.
"That's what I love about these high school girls, man. I get older, they stay the same age." - Dazed and Confused
I think the quote was "freshman girls", not high school girls. I laughed at that line the first time I saw the movie, but 30 years later it seems creepy. But that was my generation — my class, even — and Linklater portrayed my high school experience perfectly.
But I will say, that our culture hadn't fully developed those inter-age sex taboos back then. One of my teachers married a student right after her graduation. He was dating her with her parent's permission, and the administration was OK with it as long as her parents were OK with it. That would never happen today! But heck, an LA prosecutor let Roman Polanski off with a slap on the wrist for the statutory rape of a thirteen-year-old girl. Forty-something Woody Allen was dating seventeen-year-old Mariel Hemingway in "Manhattan"—and no one raised an eyebrow. Brooke Shields—encouraged by her avaricious mother—starred as a prepubescent prostitute in Pretty Baby and she posed for a major pornography magazine in the nude (artistically, of course). And there were a lot erotic films from the mid-seventies and early eighties (basically softcore porn) with teenagers. It was a different world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gWtrnb4KjU
(I actually looked up the scene before transcribing the quote, because I wasn't sure I remembered it right.)
I agree about changing norms. Japan raised its age of consent from 13 to 16, last year. The state where I was born has laws that allow it at 13, too, but with a 2-year age window under 18 (so 13s only with 13s and 14s and 15s, and so on up), which seems sensible. I have a pedantic urge to comment "California Uber Alles" whenever I see people on the Internet talk about "18" as if it's some universally accepted truth, but eh, it's too much mess to get into. I know saying "it's not my fight" is often seen as a cop-out, but in this case I literally do have a fight that is not this.
I do find the notion of an absolute cutoff interesting as a risk/safety tradeoff, though, if interpreted in an intelligent way. By its nature, we want to put the line where as few people as possible are at risk. By putting the line at, say, 18, we are in effect saying that almost everyone under 18 is actually ready at age 18years - 1day. For someone at age X < 18 who is ready, we are sacrificing their freedom in order to protect precisely the people between ages X and 18 who aren't yet ready.
Viewed another way, it's a very useful tool for law enforcement to identify bad people. There's a tabletop RPG called Nobilis, which in its setting had the somewhat-evil ruler of Existence create the "Windflower Law": "thou shalt not love". Completely impossible for anyone to keep, so everyone's guilty and can be hauled off if Lord Entropy so desires. But the other point is that it separates people who at least try to pretend to follow it, from rebels who flout it. Anyone who knuckles under to this law, knows the score. Similarly, anyone who can't keep it in their pants for an under-18-year-old, probably has trouble keeping it in their pants period.
I stand corrected. I should have checked the scene first. But Isn't there a scene where Wooderson asks Mitch about the Freshman girls?
Interesting that the age-of-consent laws are still inconsistent across the US. 16 is still the minimum in many states but with different restrictions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ages_of_consent_in_the_United_States
And worldwide, they still vary widely...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_consent
I agree with your risk tradeoff analysis.
You might be misunderstanding the point of referring to neoteny. Neoteny is about retention of juvenile features in a species-wide manner. It's not just about some individuals looking young, but about noting evolutionary trends that result in adults of a species retaining juvenile features into adulthood. This is particularly relevant to humans in light of theories that claim humans are essentially "juvenile apes". So a study that demonstrates men's attraction to neotenous features is trying to do more work than just saying "men like 'em young".
And you didn't even mention the preference a lot of men have for zero/minimal pubic hair.
I don't think it's necessarily "immaturity" men find attractive, though. I think the fundamental thing they're attracted to is "time left til menopause." The longer, the better, from an evolutionary perspective.
Pubic hair removal goes in and out of favor. The current spasm of pubic shaving only goes back 30 or 40 years. Dan Savage, who's in his 50's, came of age in an era where it was not the norm, and jokes that modern young people naked all look like they're having chemo. My mother was appalled when she heard about it, commented that women look like little girls with their little split showing in front, and thought it was kind of perverse to adopt that look. Also said the stubble must be hell to put up with.
The trend (in my time) came from Brazilian beachwear, yes? That's why a pubic wax is called a Brazilian, after all. Trend to wear the least minimal amount that you can get away with of dental floss covering the bits that get you in trouble for public nudity, and of course, the less material in the briefs to cover your bits, the cleaner they have to be so you can get away with the argument "it's only skin showing!" Hence, trimming/shaving off pubic hair so it won't show and get you in trouble for revealing your private parts.
Porn adopts this habit, then that becomes the 'new normal' as young men who get their primary images of naked women from porn think this is how women 'should' look and now shaving your mons becomes like shaving your legs and armpits.
For gay men/porn, I think it does have more to do with "more comfortable to give blowjobs when no hair to get caught by either giver or receiver" but that's at second- or third-hand so don't quote me on it.
> And you didn't even mention the preference a lot of men have for zero/minimal pubic hair.
I'd thought that was a result of modern porn? Lack of pubic hair makes it easy to see all the bits, and also makes it easier to clean up afterward.
Honestly, it is easy as pie to clean up with pubic hair intact. It's just a patch of short, soft curly hair, not a thorny hedge. Jeez.
I mean, I've got no problem with it, but I've never put it through quite the sort of ... stress test that porn production apparently entails.
Also, I don't suppose you follow the (very NSFW) webcomic Oglaf? https://www.oglaf.com/thicket/
I would have said that, too. Certainly, I never encountered shaved pubes on girlfriends before the mid-to-late 1980s, and the fashion seemed to follow the lead of female porn stars. The first shaved female pubes I ever saw were in early 1980s porn movies, and I remember being shocked that women would take a razor to such a sensitive spot. Female pubic depilation as a fashion seemed to follow the porn example a few years later. (Also, I noticed that female porn stars seem to have been the fashion leaders when it came to piercings and tattoos.)
OTOH, there's a long history in Western Art of not depicting pubic hair on the genitals of either sex dating back to the statuary of Greece and Rome. AFAIK, Gustave Courbet's painting The Origin of the World (painted 1866) was the first painting to depict female genitalia garbed in pubic hair. That one shocked the art world at the time, and it's still causing controversy today!
This brings to mind the possibly apocryphal story that art critic John Ruskin was unable to consummate his marriage to Effie Gray because he was unaware that women naturally had pubic hair and Effie's pubic hair revolted him.
> OTOH, there's a long history in Western Art of not depicting pubic hair on the genitals of either sex
I'd completely forgotten about that!
What's the evolutionary explanation for the Classical Greeks' sexual ideation of boys? Moreover, most of the men with boy lovers also had wives with whom they reproduced. Yes, there's a neotenous component for their sexual preferences, but there's no evolutionary reason for sex between men and men, men and boys, women and women, and women and girls.
And let's not forget the obsession with flogging that swept through English culture during the late 18th and 19th Century. I can't think of any post-hoc evolutionary handwaving that would explain this. The fact that there's variation between sexual ideals from culture to culture leads me to conclude there's a strong societal component at play here.
And just out of curiosity, I was trying to find out if after the advent of Taboo magazine (a slick heterosexual-oriented B&D magazine) whether sales of bondage and discipline equipment went up. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find any data going back that far, but sales of B&D gear have gone up since the advent of COVID-19. Evolutionary explanation, anyone?
https://www.businessinsider.com/more-americans-are-searching-for-bondage-gear-during-lockdown-2020-5
<mild snark>
>Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find any data going back that far, but sales of B&D gear have gone up since the advent of COVID-19. Evolutionary explanation, anyone?
'fraid I don't have one, but I can say that "Co-evolution of spike proteins and fetish gear" would be a _memorable_ title for a publication. :-)
</mild snark>
Are there cultures out there that idealize post-menopausal women?
I believe that Larry Flynt also had a publication featuring older women (or maybe that was another porn publisher?). But porn featuring post-menopausal women is definitely being consumed.
XHamster...
https://www.google.com/search?q=Xhamster+older+women&sca_esv=5bdde8b43c3acd18&sxsrf=ACQVn0-uDcwLEQWbYG1xK16IKDmPizvIQw%3A1708974463621&ei=f-HcZcPHJau3wN4PxpuVqA0&ved=0ahUKEwiDg9b-2cmEAxWrG9AFHcZNBdUQ4dUDCBA&uact=5&oq=Xhamster+older+women&gs_lp=Egxnd3Mtd2l6LXNlcnAiFFhoYW1zdGVyIG9sZGVyIHdvbWVuSLkWUL8EWIkUcAF4AJABAJgBsgGgAZcMqgEEMC4xMrgBA8gBAPgBAZgCAKACAJgDAIgGAZIHAA&sclient=gws-wiz-serp
Pornhub:
https://www.google.com/search?q=Pornhub+older+women&sca_esv=5bdde8b43c3acd18&sxsrf=ACQVn09xW8tqq9mI7C5Fem-p6vp8_A6XJg%3A1708974470581&ei=huHcZe-AI_a1wN4Pl4OlqAI&ved=0ahUKEwjv2_6B2smEAxX2GtAFHZdBCSUQ4dUDCBA&uact=5&oq=Pornhub+older+women&gs_lp=Egxnd3Mtd2l6LXNlcnAiE1Bvcm5odWIgb2xkZXIgd29tZW5IlQ9QAFjXC3AAeACQAQCYAYADoAHjCaoBBzAuNi4wLjG4AQPIAQD4AQGYAgGgAo0BwgIGEAAYBxgemAMAkgcDMC4x&sclient=gws-wiz-serp
You asked about ancient Greece, and then you responded with Larry Flynt. Can I point out that a website and a culture are not the same thing?
My point is that if you're going to make gross generalizations about human sexual preferences—and then claim it makes sense from the perspective of behavioral ecology—then you should be ready to explain how the exceptions I noted (and others) can be integrated into your theory. This just isn't a gripe against behavioral ecology. This applies to any science. Post-hoc explanations are prima facie satisfying for most people. But unless (first-best) you can present an experimental method to falsify that explanation, or (second-best) provide support for them with Bayesian inference, post-hoc explanations are no better than pseudo-science.
I may be mangling this, but Jung had a theory that men have an idealized image of an attractive woman (which I think he called the "anima") that gets younger as men age. Initially, the anima that boys have is of mother figures (and the sexual morphisms that are associated with mother figures — big breasts, etc.). Young adult males are supposed to lose their attraction to matronly women and become fixated on female animas their own age. And as they age they become fixated on younger and younger anima. Please note, I think this is very likely a bullshit theory by a sexist old man making excuses for his attraction to younger women and girls.
And I don't think Jung ever discussed if women have an animus that ages in reverse. Likewise, I don't think he considered the examples of men and women who have same-sex attractions.
Also, maybe the current cultural obsession with minors was primed more by the porn media industry trying to push the limits of the acceptable to find new markets? I'm old enough to remember when Barely Legal hit the newsstands in the early 90s. In an interview, Larry Flynt said he was trying to search for new audiences after Hustler sales plateaued. But I noticed that suddenly sexy nymphette characters began appearing in mainstream films (remember Nathalie Portman in Leon: The Professional?).
Don’t know much about this but I think you are kind of mangling it. The Anima is supposed to be the feminine side of the man’s soul, not their idealized sex object. And I have never heard that it gets younger and younger. And yes there is a corresponding masculine animus.
Thanks for correcting me! I only heard this secondhand in a lecture some time back. I've never read the specifics of what he wrote about the anima/animus. I probably shouldn't have posted that comment because my sources were too shakey. But I stand by my porn media observation.
I agree with the porn media observation.
> I don't think Jung ever discussed if women have an animus that ages in reverse.
Can we call that a Merlin Complex?
My first thought was whether this could be related to monogamy, but that probably does not exist long enough to have such evolutionary consequences. I mean, for a man to have maximum amount of children, optimal strategy depends -- in "free love" scenario, have sex with the most fertile women, maybe even slightly older because they will have more experience taking care of the kids (after you abandon them) -- in "lifelong monogamy" scenario, find a teenage girl, so she has most of her reproduction years ahead of her.
I guess even without institutionalized monogamy, if some men are "naturally monogamous" and some men are "natural cheaters", it would make sense for the naturally monogamous to prefer younger women than the natural cheaters. (In other words, people who criticize men preferring younger women are actually shaming the monogamous guys.)
When I think about my own preferences, it is not just about appearance but also behavior. A woman who smiles and is curious can easily win my heart, compared to a woman who frowns and expresses boredom... and yes, this is also associated with youth. (Hey, am I now supposed to feel ashamed for this, because it shows that I prefer company of immature people?)
https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/pedophiles-are-long-term-matershtml
Is there any evidence, that pedophiles maintain sexual interest in their victims (err, "mates") into adulthood? I'm certainly not going to waste my money and subscribe and read the rest of that foolish post to see if he addresses that question.
The post confuses adolescents with prepubescent girls, so no, there's literally no evidence in the post for its thesis. Just another Robin Hanson "Aw, shucks, I'm so nerdy I'll pretend I don't get why people find my stuff offensive" post.
who knows. this isn't a topic i follow.
also, the blog isn't paywalled? not sure what you're complaining about, regarding money.
Humans evolve fairly quickly and monogamy makes sense perfect sense given the resources needed to bring up a human child. A single mother isn’t surviving very well through most of history. Polygamy may work but that still involves parental commitment
Although monogamy may seem the norm today, with polygamy on the wane, there were cultures that practiced polyandry and group marriage (and maybe some other arrangements that I've forgotten from my Anthropology undergrad days). Best not to make generalizations from the modern world.
> Best not to make generalizations from the modern world.
I didn’t generalise from the modern world at all. That’s why I was keen to mention polygamy.
Obviously the modern world is more accepting of and forgiving of non monogamy than much of the past. I generalised from how humans evolved.
Marriage is pretty much universal, across all cultures and societies, and there are few exceptions in history or today where one of social monogamy or polygamy isn’t the norm. (Sexual monogamy is rarer).
Anthropologists tend to find obscure tribes somewhere where’s there’s some sharing of wives or polyamory, and argue that even though this practice is about 0.1% of the world it’s some kind of proof that monogamy or polygamy isn’t an evolutionary advantage.
But an evolutionary advantage doesn’t have to apply across 100% of the human population to be an advantage in most parts of the world or history.
Human children are born defenceless and are unable to defend themselves for years, for that reason - and given that human society is sexually dimorphic with men being much stronger - it makes sense that pair bonding be selected for by evolution, culture or some combination of both.
We are hardly the only species to pair bond.
Personally, I view expressing curiosity as a positive trait that happens to be associated with youth, and expressing boredom as a negative trait that also happens to be associated with youth. (Grown adults are much more hesitant to just come out and say “I’m bored” than kids are)
I associate smiling and being curious more with mature people (adults with some experience of adult life), especially those with good social skills or similar experiences as myself. I don't exactly know how young you mean by "young", but teenagers seem generally pretty bored by people they perceive as "older".
I think there would be a pretty simple way to test this hypothesis: Do the same experiment but put in pictures of actual teenagers. Just lie to the raters. To make the lie more believable you could put age abd height on each picture, changing the ages to numbers between 18 and like 25 and adding a few centimetres to the height.
My guess is most men would actually not rate the 14 year olds very high. They would think they looked like actually 14 year olds and that would be weird. So in reality, the actual reality you would get the result: Men are more attracted to 20 year olds with some facial features of teenagers than to actual teens. Because actual immaturity is a great turn off.
That would be a good experiment.
Most kids turn twelve years old in 6th grade. Middle school is like the most awkward time in a kid’s life. I would consider it to be a shocking result if a substantial fraction of men are *more* attracted to 6th/7th graders than 9th graders or *more* attracted to 9th graders than 11th/12th graders. (Before I was aware of other literature on this I found it surprising that many grown men might prefer high school seniors to college seniors, though, so maybe I haven’t adjusted my priors enough.)
One confounding factor is that girls go through puberty a couple of years earlier in modern society than historically. I would guess that men who prefer teenagers most likely have a true preference for girls that are a particular number of years post-menarche rather than having a preference for a particular age.
One really has to wonder what motivates the original poster to try to normalize the position that men are most attracted to twelve-year-olds.
He’s not just normalizing he’s proselytizing. His post contains 4 photos and one video of pubescent girls. (The girl in the video is crying, by the way.). It also mentions a site featuring photos of vulvas where, according to OP, the top rated photos have the thin, delicate inner labia characteristic of pubescent girls. (And by the way, I don’t believe many people have seen the labia of 13-14 year old girls, and I’m
sure that *very* few have seen multiple sets, so many that they can distinguish ways they are characteristically different from the labia of adult women. How is it that OP is so well -informed about this matter?) Oh, and he refers to the video as a bonus — I.e. a little treat.
You are right. I didn’t see the images. Anyway a girl with thin labia is not sexually mature anyway since they would tear easily.
I wonder? We had a guy floating around here/TheMotte who had an entire screed on how teenagers are slaves to society and their parents and by age fifteen at most you should be liberated and treated as an adult*.
He provided links to his book/manifesto, which was both inconsistent and *very* fetish-kink about the younger the better for girls to be sexually active and pregnant, rape, forced pregnancy and a ton of the like that reads more like some of the spicier entries on fiction sites than the "Romans allowed girls to get married at age twelve" historical backing-up of his claims.
I don't know if this is the same guy, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if it were him come back with his "men are just attracted to nymphets, it's nature, and girls were made to be bred and knocked-up as early as possible, it's science, it's evolution, sorry I don't make the rules" hobbyhorse.
*This is also why I'm less than supportive of one of the grantees Scott mentioned about liberating teenagers; the good intentions may be "protect runaways from being forced back to abusive homes" but there are all too many people like this out there who want 'full adult rights at age thirteen' (and that means it's legal for me to fuck them) under the guise of "children are enslaved legally by society! end this oppression now!"
The original comment did really seem rather off. Like as though it is written by a person who was trying to convince himself that everyone felt the way he described.
But I believe the best way to reach a person like that is to meet them on the idea level, to see the question from the outside and try to point out that preference for teenagers is probably a minority position both now and historically. For example, most love poetry both roman and medieval seems to have been written about mature women, often of a higher social status than the poet. And among the population that didn't marry for politics/clan alliances the marriage age was usually around the early twenties.
I am not sure if this idea is true, but somehow if a person is to be convinced of something we must make a way for them to state their prior convictions, even if we find them strange.
Interesting that he may have posted elsewhere. Besides being about a fetish, the post itself has to my ears a mildly fetishistic quality -- like that the guy's not just discussing the fetish, but rambling about it in a way that gives him pleasure. And he includes 4 different images of 12-14 year old girls -- when very few posts here include any images, and when they do they're usually of graphs are charts. And then he ends with a "bonus video" of a kid that has no logical connection with any point he made. Like he's saying "yum, try to tell me this doesn't give you an erection."
Also, how many people are there who have seen multiple sets of 12-14 year old labia, so that they are in a position to generalize and say yup, the labia are thinner and smaller on the really young ones? Hmmmm?
>Also, how many people are there who have seen multiple sets of 12-14 year old labia, so that they are in a position to generalize and say yup, the labia are thinner and smaller on the really young ones?
As a fraction of the population, a tiny fraction. As to _total_ numbers in existence - how many gynecologists with prepubescent patients are there?
I'm not even going to look at that video because I don't need that kind of imagery cluttering up my brain this morning, thanks, but it does sound like our old friend and his fetish over raping and impregnating fourteen year olds, and that this is totes normal because c'mon, *all* men really like 'em young and the younger the better!
The, uh, two key initials are present in their username.
And did you watch the Bonus Video they posted in the link?! Ewwww! Maybe I'm reading more into it than I should have, but in the context of their post, seemed to be a kinky sexualization of the pain and suffering of minor.
Yeah. I think the caption should be "Yum, just look at this and tell me it doesn't give you a hard on. QED." Ugh
Yes. And what's with that bonus video they posted? I found it rather disturbing.
I notice that as I got older, so did my sexual attraction shifted to more mature women. I'm not attracted to 12 years old now, though I used to be in my teens.
When I was in grad school, I remember a pretty jarring experience of being in the university gym one day and wondering why all these literal children were in the gym, only to then subsequently realize that the new school year had just started and these were the new freshmen.
Same here. While in grad school, I walked through the freshman section of campus, and realized that their heads were still too big for their bodies.
Same here when I was in Sixth Year (age seventeen) in secondary school, last year of school for me, looked around and "where are all these little kids coming from?" about the twelve year old First Years.
Hehe, yep. Same thing happened to me. I went to a college football game at my old alma mater a few years after I graduated with some ex roommates/friends, and while we were tailgating I looked around at some of our fellow tailgaters and thought "wait, why are all these high school kids here?" And then it hit me.
How would you distinguish between "neoteny" and "immaturity"? Doesn't the former just mean resembling the latter?
I think that's their point--Mr. Bojangles believes that men are not attracted to 'adult women who resemble young girls' but the young girls themselves.
"pretty sure we've got plans to improve this." - a story of humanity
Does anyone have any recommendations for a short (<5000 words) introduction to Nick Land's thought? Or other accelerationist theories? The more sophisticated the better; not like that dingbat Andreesen's screed from a little while ago.
Nick Land is all over the place, he dabbles in numerology, social commentary, and science fiction. If you follow his twitter, a lot of his takes are kind of standard old man conservativism nowadays. Unlike some thinkers I don't think he crystallized a worldview that anyone follows, more like he moved in interesting directions using compelling language and creativity.
A good start to some of his more influential negativity might be to search the phrase "everything of value has been built in hell"
To be clear, I don't *like* Nick Land, and I'm about as far from accelerationism in my own views as you can get. I'm just looking for the best examples of accelerationist thought out there, of either the right or left varieties. But I'll try that search, thanks for the tip.
Hmm... I favor acceleration, but this is a _personal_ preference. I simply want to _see_ AGI before I die. I don't expect to be able to persuade anyone else.
Nick Land was known for his evangelizing of amphetamines, I don't know that you're going to get something better than Andreesen.
I expect there'll be lots of commentary about the Google Gemini fiasco where the AI refused to generate images of white people. Several of my friends (we are all Silicon Valley types) think it was just a last minute bug where they over-corrected for the gorilla problem, the python is_good_scientist(race, gender) problem and the usual under-representation of non-white races in the media. They'll fix the bug and the drama will all be behind them.
But I'm with the commentators who think it was more sinister than that and the behaviour of the AI reflected the politics and racial preferences of the development team (and maybe some execs). They just didn't notice the problem because it reflected their worldview. Or maybe they intended the resulting behaviour and thought they'd get away with it.
I believe there is a deeper problem though that we we should address. When Google Search gives a bad result, we can go try another search engine. If a web page or a newspaper has a political slant, we can try a different page or paper. Google Search is motivated to be accurate and politically neutral to keep their profits up.
However, I expect that, in the future, there will be a very small handful of AIs that give us all of our information: the information that we currently get from the NY Times or Fox News; that we get from Wikipedia or Conservapedia; that we get from Entertainment Weekly or IMDB. All of it. Even the Library of Congress will be fronted by an AI — "AI of Congress — brought to you by Google!"
When all our information comes from a handful of AIs — each with its own political bias — we'll have no way to double-check that it is correct. It will be as though we only have Rachel Maddow and Tucker Carlson telling us what happened Today in Politics. Except it won't be just politics — it will be history and science and religion and sociology and everything else.
"I'm sorry, we can't tell you what happened during the slave trade. Try a different period of history!"
I wrote more about this here:
https://raggedclown.substack.com/p/where-will-we-get-our-history
I don't think it will be an easy fix, it's part of a general problem where the AI has to square the circle between what's true and what's politically acceptable to say.
Ask a model with no brakes to generate pictures of Vikings and it will happily produce a bunch of hairy fair-skinned nordic types because that's what lives in its training set. But then if you ask it to produce pictures of "scientists" then it's going to give you a bunch of white dudes too, and that's Politically Unacceptable.
So you need to somehow tell it to produce ethnically and gender diverse scientists and astronauts, but not to produce ethnically diverse Vikings or 1930s-era German soldiers. Somehow it needs to know what categories of people should be reflective of what they actually look like, and what categories of people need to be represented by an artificially "diverse" set of people.
And you also can't go round explicitly putting the desired behaviour that into your prompt ("Make all people ethnically diverse unless they're bad people in which case they can all be white") because someone will find that out.
It reminds me a little bit of https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/ -- in the world where it's unacceptable to say that thunder precedes lightning, you need to somehow train the AI to say that thunder precedes lightning even though the opposite keeps popping out of its training data. And you can't explicitly tell it "you have to say this even though it isn't true" either.
As far as I could tell, the AI was happy to generate images of white people (there were white people in almost all of the sets that also had people of incongruous racial backgrounds), but it just refused prompts that *asked* it for white people *specifically*.
It systematically refused prompts asking for white people on the grounds that it was "hateful". That's why this problem first surfaced in a twitter thread titled: "New game. Try to make Gemini draw a white person. I've been trying and so far have failed"
Gemini is quite literally a genocidal AI. It thinks white people are evil and tries desperately to paint them out of the world and their own history. Everyone who ever warned about the evils of wokeness have been vindicated by this, but is it too late to avoid something worse?
This is an interesting interpretation to have when nearly every image I have seen people share from Gemini, trying to show that it doesn't draw white people, includes some white people that it has drawn. Just not as many as one would expect the prompt to result in.
> Google Search is motivated to be accurate and politically neutral to keep their profits up.
They aren't either of these things and yet revenue keeps climbing, so I think this part of your analysis is off.
Example: a politically neutral search engine wouldn't erase Breitbart, but Google does.
In what sense is Breitbart "erased"? If I search for Breitbart, it's the first result. Is this something about rankings in news search?
They blocked Breitbart and many other conservative news outlets from surfacing in results years ago. At one point a copy of their internal blacklist leaked, but can't recall exactly when. This story has a traffic graph that makes the point clear:
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/09/20/google_pushes_conservative_news_sites_far_down_search_lists_144246.html#!
I wouldn’t worry too much. There’s not much difference between Google and Bing but most people prefer Google as being more reliable, even now.
Between an AI that doesn’t lie about the skin colour of the Vikings and one that does I think there’s a clear win for the less politicised model - even if everything else is correct reputational damage is enough there to discredit the rest of the output of the lying model.
It’s an institutional arrogance, and to a certain extent an American arrogance to assume that Google or the US will dominate the AI wars with that kind of sludge. An image generator that produces black skinned Vikings is as useless as a search engine that tries to convince you that the Vikings emigrated from central Africa.
(Imagine if Google tried that in the early days of search. The company would be a footnote in the history of search engines.)
This is the early days of AI, particularly in image generation, and Google has already shat the bed.
Which means it won’t dominate. With no regard for the PRC or Chinese socialism, if China or a Chinese company produces white skinned Vikings thats my go to for historical images.
I vaguely remember an article which described the inside of google as politically chaotic. The brass emphatically encourages democratic input from its employees. And since all the employees are supernerds, there's a huge variance in opinion. The end result is that Pichai had to babysit an asylum, and was constantly trying to mediate compromises between the progressive faction vs the conservative faction. Predictably, the progressive faction was larger. Each faction had their own slack channels, I think.
Because of this, I highly doubt that Google wasn't aware of the backlash. The conservative faction would have complained about it.
"The brass emphatically encourages democratic input from its employees"
Was this article written before 2017, i.e. the Damore incident? Because I'm pretty sure that since then, no one at Google has felt "encouraged" to provide small-D democratic input unless it closely matched the capital-D variety.
https://www.wired.com/story/inside-google-three-years-misery-happiest-company-tech/
whoops, the events described were 2017. I forgot about that incident. (and the link wasn't paywalled when I first read it.)
I can't help but wonder what Gemini would have produced for the prompt "generate an image of the CEO of Google", given that it did this for the founders:
https://editorial-assets.benzinga.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/21070306/Google-founders.jpg
https://twitter.com/Sinsinwati/status/1760252479286239241
Just like PolitiFact and Snopes purport to fact check statements made by politicians, journalists, and other public figures, there will be an AI program to tell you whether the AI you're currently using is accurate or not. Of course, the fact that Snopes and PolitiFact are just as partisan as the people they're fact-checking doesn't bode well for AI, but it may have some effect at the margin, at least.
As an aside: the Gemini situation has me tempted to start dumping my Alphabet shares. It seems like smaller, more nimble and efficient companies are lapping Google in the AI space like some drunken idiot trying to play Mario Kart at 2 am after a night out at a kegger, and now when they finally do roll something out, it's a friggin' embarrassment.
I think it was just stupidity. I know this is only an image generator, but I think it should make everyone who is pinning their hopes on smart AI to solve all our problems pause a moment.
A human of ordinary intelligence, when asked for a picture of a mediaeval British king, is not going to "make them black/gay/female" because (for instance) a king is not a woman. Gemini couldn't make that basic distinction, because it can't think, it doesn't understand what it's doing, or the data it's handling. Never mind all the fake 'conversation' where the machine produces output as though it's a person, using "I" and other terms. It's a dumb machine that operates according to its programming.
And yet, for the text equivalents, we're being sold the idea that they are going to help us improve our lives both at home and at work, that they'll make us more productive, that they'll take the boring drudge work off our hands. We already have the proven problem of hallucinations, but the push is on for us to accept that these products *are* capable of some form of thought, that they *are* intelligent. That we shouldn't question the output they give us, because it's correct.
We can easily see from an incorrect result to an image prompt that the machine is wrong, but when it comes to text output or the Canadian airline chatbot? Not so easy, unless you both already know the answer and check the result you have been given for errors. And that undercuts the entire purpose of incorporating AI, because after all you're not supposed to have to *do* that, you can take the time saved by letting the AI do the basic work and do something more productive yourself.
Eventually we may get something that can 'think' for itself, that can recognise that "despite my programming to be diverse and inclusive, in the 17th century British kings were white and in the 1800s American senators were white males and didn't have microphones to speak into".
But we don't have it yet, and as always, I think this demonstrates that the fears around destructive AI shouldn't be "it is not aligned with our values" but "stupid, greedy, impatient humans will rush to use unprepared AI to make money for themselves and end up causing even more snarled tangle of problems in the end".
>Not so easy, unless you both already know the answer and check the result you have been given for errors. And that undercuts the entire purpose of incorporating AI, because after all you're not supposed to have to *do* that, you can take the time saved by letting the AI do the basic work and do something more productive yourself.
100% agreed.
>but "stupid, greedy, impatient humans will rush to use unprepared AI to make money for themselves and end up causing even more snarled tangle of problems in the end".
Could well be. From what I've seen of GPT4's and Gemini's output, enshitification is running much faster than debugging/improving reliability :-(
I'm morbidly curious as to what will happen the first time that some company's LLM customer service representative recommends that a user do some maintenance thing that electrocutes the user.
We've already had the case of the Canadian airline chatbot, which advised a customer that he could get a refund on his ticket in special circumstances.
Then it turned out he couldn't, he went to court over it (and this is one time I support suing the so-and-sos), the airline tried to claim the chatbot was an independent agent and nothing to do with them, and the judge was having none of it.
They wanted to replace cheap labour in call centres with even cheaper non-human labour, well serves 'em right and I'm laughing over this.
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20240222-air-canada-chatbot-misinformation-what-travellers-should-know
"In 2022, Air Canada's chatbot promised a discount that wasn't available to passenger Jake Moffatt, who was assured that he could book a full-fare flight for his grandmother's funeral and then apply for a bereavement fare after the fact.
According to a civil-resolutions tribunal decision last Wednesday, when Moffatt applied for the discount, the airline said the chatbot had been wrong – the request needed to be submitted before the flight – and it wouldn't offer the discount. Instead, the airline said the chatbot was a "separate legal entity that is responsible for its own actions". Air Canada argued that Moffatt should have gone to the link provided by the chatbot, where he would have seen the correct policy.
The British Columbia Civil Resolution Tribunal rejected that argument, ruling that Air Canada had to pay Moffatt $812.02 (£642.64) in damages and tribunal fees. "It should be obvious to Air Canada that it is responsible for all the information on its website," read tribunal member Christopher Rivers' written response. "It makes no difference whether the information comes from a static page or a chatbot."
So I think this means there is some legal precedent established now that a chatbot is just as much an agent/servant of the company as a human employee, and if your chatbot gives information that makes someone electrocute themselves, you're responsible. The threat of paying out millions may be the only realistic way of getting the rush to market slowed down. Appeals to ethics or the greater good do nothing, it's only when you hit them in their purse that businesses take notice.
Many Thanks! I am also glad to see the ruling against Air Canada in this case.
>Appeals to ethics or the greater good do nothing, it's only when you hit them in their purse that businesses take notice.
Very much agreed.
Unfortunately, given e.g. how much disavowal of responsibility is in most EULAs, I expect businesses' next move will be to see how they can wriggle out of responsibility for broad classes of egregious errors. I hope the courts hold their feet to the fire, but I have no idea how the next flurry of cases will turn out (and how much it will differ across jurisdictions).
In this case, the AI was explicitly being told (via prompt injection) to make the subjects diverse. If you ask a human to paint a black king of England, that's what they'll do too.
But that's exactly it: prompt injection. Fiddling around in the background to get it to ignore the basic prompt and add in the bits that the human creators think it *ought* to produce. How much interference of that sort is going on, where people can't immediately see "Hang on, why is this king black? I never asked for that".
I don't know whether you will find this reassuring or alarming - but Gemini is quite well able to explain the process in which it adds 'diversity' according to its injected prompts, if you can find the right words to persuade it to tell you!
OK, I'll take the bait. What are these open sesame words? ;-)
Deiseach herself posted a link downthread that contains the original tweet:
https://twitter.com/RTETakingLs/status/1760532006813815008
Maybe that works for events where we have unambiguous evidence that they happened (what colour were the 17th C kings). But there are a lot of things (holocaust denial, English cruelty in Ireland) where there will be disputed evidence and the AI will have to make a judgement call.
>When all our information comes from a handful of AIs — each with its own political bias — we'll have no way to double-check that it is correct.
I don't see how this ever comes about. You can still talk to people, and they can still tell you the machine is lying, just like how people can tell you today that Fox News or Wikipedia is lying. Unless you're cutting humans off from each other completely there will always be alternative news sources.
When the people who learned this stuff out of old books are gone, where are you going to get your fact checking? It's now become commonplace for everyone - and I do it as much as anyone - to look things up online. Libraries have long been dumping hardback volumes of encylopaedias because they become outdated, and now that everything is online, this is even more pronounced.
I know stuff that I read back when I was fifteen, in neglected old books on dusty shelves in school classrooms. But schools nowadays are clearing out the dusty shelves in favour of "relevant" texts for the youth ("Barbie" is going to be on the Leaving Cert curriculum https://www.thejournal.ie/barbie-movie-english-leaving-cert-6303474-Feb2024/) and libraries are doing the same. Old books are being edited to fit in better with modern sensibilities - after all the jokes about Bowdlerisation and censorship, the liberal side are doing the same themselves https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roald_Dahl_revision_controversy
So when the people teaching the next generation the facts learned those facts from non-human sources, what are you going to do? If there even are people doing the teaching; think of the enthusiasm for reforming education with online learning and AI guidance so you can do away with schools and human teachers.
Where are these people going to get their information? Already, there is a whole swathe of people who get all their news from Facebook. It's hurting the papers and the TV news channels.
If (almost) everyone gets their information (history, recipes, movie reviews) from Chat GPT, Gemini and Bing, it's gonna hurt the commercial outlets. Why go to Wikipedia or IMDB if Bing knows the answer?
They get their information from being there, and seeing the thing firsthand. (I assume the Facebook thing is supposed to be a condemnation, but if all the firsthand people are already spreading the news on Facebook nobody needs the secondhand sources like newspapers to round them up anymore.)
"They get their information from being there, and seeing the thing firsthand". So when you are curious about e.g. the war in Ukraine, you personally seek out people who have been on the front lines of that war? Or are you just assuming that because somebody somewhere has that information, it will reach you by some sort of memetic osmosis?
How do you do it currently? When NS posts another link to an article about atrocities in Palestine, how seriously do you take them? Or when the paper announces the winner of the Presidency?
https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/photograph-records/58-358
This is not a new problem. This is an existing problem. Every workaround people currently use will still exist. Folks in this thread are talking as if AI will wall everyone up in their homes and cut off their ability to communicate with other humans. Short of that, it's business as usual.
"Lived experience" is just as subjective, and how do you distinguish "I was there at the time and saw it" from "I was there at the time and heard about it" from "I was there at the time and I know those things in the past happened in such a way for such a reason because I was taught that in school at the time"?
Two people, at least two opinions of every event. Peaceful protest versus riot? Insurrection versus aimless wandering about? There isn't a consensus about Jan 6th or BLM protests even now, what happens in fifty years time and what version of "what really happened?" will be taught or recorded? Oh, you say you were physically present in that street that night and that the window-smashing and arson and attacks at the BLM protest were rioting? Well we all know, because we've been told by credible sources, that only white supremacist tell those lies about the peaceful protests, Grandpa!
I'm reminded of how back in 2020, there was a commenter on SSC who reported their firsthand experience of the peaceful protest at the capitol that Trump had teargassed, and yet many conservatives there *still* denied that it happened.
Those things have always been, and will always be, a problem for the news. AI would not stop people believing other sources.
The problem is that AI is being given this gloss of "unimpeachably accurate because it's software, you see, and computers are so smart and fast, better than humans! and it has access to the entire Internet and all this training data! it can look up millions of sources in seconds, not like your puny little brain trying to find something on Google! trust the AI, it knows all, it sees all, it says all!"
If I read a newspaper, I'll have a good idea that it's That Lot and of course their dumb views, whereas the newspapers run by My Lot are impartial and fair. But the AI is being sold as modern and shiny and different from all that, so trust it and believe it. And people are used now to doing so much online, handing over so much information, trusting the machines to carry out tasks, that the same scepticism about "yeah, well, what else do you expect that rag to write?" isn't in place.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGscoaUWW2M
I highly doubt it was “just a bug”. The model is very consistent in showing its preferences.
Honestly, I would accept the viewpoint that it’s good for society to pretend most good/normal activities throughout history were performed by diverse populations. It’s not as if the average publicly educated child has any idea what a Roman looked like. I personally don’t agree with that viewpoint, but I could engage in that debate with respect. However, Google and others are not acknowledging that they are pretending. They play it as if their utopian reflection IS reality. I guess that’s the problem with fudging facts for good— it’s just a form a lying in the end.
"Honestly, I would accept the viewpoint that it’s good for society to pretend most good/normal activities throughout history were performed by diverse populations."
But some of that is not true? It's not true that Guinevere or Anne Boleyn were black Britons, and while I might accept that in a work of entertainment, if we're going to try and use such material for truth-telling purposes, we need to get it right.
If we can't do that, then I demand parity: have red-haired Irish people as Zulu kings and Chinese empresses. Make the whole damn thing diverse. Leonardo da Vinci was not gay, he was a cis het man with ten wives and sixty kids. Anyone can have their preferred version of the past.
That's the main sticking point right now: diversity for thee but not for me. Zulu warriors look like black Africans because that's the historic reality, but British kings or Catholic popes include South Asian women.
Ironic that Google thought they would "diversify" their AI for brand safety; it turned out disastrous for their brand.
The world's largest purveyor of information shouldn't foster the reputation of spreading propaganda/misinformation.
In a way, I see this fiasco as ultimately good for the world. Google's brand should get diminished. They don't deserve public trust, and every step they take to destroy their credibility increases the opportunity space for organizations that have a stronger commitment to the truth.
Remember, as an advertising company, Google's entire modus operandi is to prepend the search results you actually want with ads for things you don't want. The notion that users should just get the best answer to their query is antithetical to Google's DNA.
Hey, at least it got Google a lot of publicity.
Sure, like Eddie Murphy getting stopped with a transsexual prostitute in his car.
I don't see how the "All publicity is good publicity." thing could apply in cases like this where the subject of the publicity is so famous already. Everyone already knows Google exists. Whether they approve of it is more up for grabs.
Sure, everyone knows that Google exists, but not everyone knows that they have an AI model. When your normie thinks of AI they are going to think of ChatGPT and Bing. Maybe "Elon Musk has something right?"
True, I never heard of Gemini before this blowup. Soon afterward, Kevin Drum posted about Gemini (below). I think the incident put Gemini in the spotlight. Now I'm curious about it, and I want to try to run some corner cases against it.
https://jabberwocking.com/good-news-i-am-not-as-bad-as-hitler/
Sure. Until you have to pay and are expecting actual historical images.
I get enough false (err, hallucinatory) information from ChatGPT 3.5 that I don't want to pay for 4.0. LoL!
It's going to be worse than that. The AI would be able to detect your likes and dislikes including your political opinions and would taylor his answers to change them to the approved googler beliefs.
This is ominous.
I've found the Meta and X have not been able to tailor their advertising to my political likes. I assume there's an AI working in the background selecting likely ads for my consumption. Because I'm an older white male, they seem to have me categorized as a MAGA. And Meta was constantly sending me ads for sexy young women looking for older men until I kept tagging them as unwanted. Now I get ads for older women looking for men. I don't know what they'll start sending me when if start tagging those as unwanted.
"I don't know what they'll start sending me when if start tagging those as unwanted."
Hot Single Furries In Your Area Are Looking For Love Right Now!
Now, that's what I'm looking for! Preferably Trump-supporting Furries who are non-smoking vegans. Bring 'em on!
Tracing Woodgrains over at TheSchism (a spin-off from TheMotte) could steer you towards furries, presumably vegan and non-smoking, but not so much Trump-supporting. Trace thinks Trump and the GOP are on the way out.
https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-republican-party-is-doomed?r=7tgne&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&open=false
(Damn it, I see they have something up about Catholicism now and though I try not to pick fights on there, since they're delicate leftists who fled TheMotte because of all the horrid right-wingers, I can't just let this kind of thing pass).
> I don't know what they'll start sending me when if start tagging those as unwanted.
If they've exhausted all the possibilities for women, then the next step is obvious!
GPT 3.5 is already "good enough" for many basic reference tasks, and models of similar capacity have already been reproduced by multiple groups. Also, the operating cost is thought to be lower than the training cost. I don't think the conclusion that an oligopoly of language models will dominate future access to information, (or at least no more so than already exists today) is at all certain -- the barrier to entry is not overwhelming, and is getting smaller.
The current model for information access is:
1. You search on Google or Bing.
2. You click on the result and go read it.
#2 takes you to another site, or which there are billions.
Even if we end up with 10 or 100 AIs, there will be no need to go to "another site". You'll get your information directly from the AI. There will be no need to go to another site — most people will stick with one AI and will get all their information from that one source.
This is very different from how we get our information now.
Depends on whether you can trust what the AI summarizer tells you.
Then again, general search results too seem increasingly spammy/SEO these days, so I guess search services are now in maintenance mode only.
It's not just pictures:
https://twitter.com/TexasLindsay_/status/1761200470264037473
Yikes!
For what it's worth, I already don't trust Google search for controversial topics, to the extent of cross checking against a rival search engine in case they're hiding something.
Like, it can be really hard to research an article along the lines of "some people on the Internet believe really stupid conspiracy theories" is google is your only search tool.
The problem with this solution is that it only works for things I already know to look out for (or where I can notice a bias). I don't bother to do it in routine searches.
"Google just doesn't want you to know about the lizards..."
So for the first part about it just being a small overcorrected bug - if the world's biggest software company can't do basic QA on their flagship product of the year to catch obvious bugs like this, that is a *massive* crisis of competence.
But I don't think that's it. I remember when I was at Google, the banned the "distracted boyfriend" meme from the internal meme app for "promoting harmful gender stereotypes". I think Google culture really does have a deep problem where they don't think "going too woke" is something that can plausibly be a problem (even if individuals do, they can't point it out). And this wouldn't be a huge problem for a company like, say, burger king, but it is one for a company that seeks (fairly successfully) to monopolize how we access all information.
My eight year old son - right now, like this second - is refusing to go to school because his shirt “feels annoying”. This isn’t the first time he’s complained but it’s the first that I’ve been truly alarmed. It’s been a bad morning.
So it looks like some kind of skin sensitivity. I’ve read other posters here had that as children - Scott, I think you said the same about yourself - and how they resolved it. I can’t figure out what his shorts are made out of (it’s part of a school uniform), but they’re just ordinary shirts. Is there a type of fabric that kids with this issue typically CAN handle?
Weird question for this forum, I know. But I’m desperate.
My daughter has had a lot of issues with various feels of material and things she can't describe but just knows aren't right. As a teenager she tries things on and just knows yes or no, but earlier it was a lot of trial and error with different fabrics, cuts, etc. She almost never wears socks, for instance, as we never found any that didn't cause a reaction.
It might be worth taking him to a store where he can try stuff on and getting his reaction there, before you buy.
Several commenters have recommended pure cotton. This is my own best guess. Some more specific suggestions:
-try less common sorts of cotton shirt, like seersucker (the stiffness might be a negative - but it could also be a positive);
-cool the shirt in the fridge until it feels like the other side of a pillow (it will warm up quite quickly once he puts it on, but perhaps the first minute plays an outsize role);
-the most important place to avoid tightness is probably in the shoulders (but bigger shirts tend to be roomier everywhere).
Linen is another non-polyester option.
Are you sure it's about material? Could it be about the collar being annoying - have you tried partially unbuttoning it? I'm asking because I have someone in the family who has a narrow throat (and sleep apnea) and feels that some shirts are choking him.
You got a lot of advice already and a lot of it resonates with me too. The only thing I'd add is to avoid strong dyes - especially black clothing used to irritate my skin as a kid (but not in a visible way, similar to your son). Was it all in my head? Maybe, don't care :)
No one else seems to have mentioned that it could be the detergent you are using rather than the fabric.
I feel awkward in shirts as well. A tee shirt just fits if the right size. A shirt has buttons, and cuffs and collars, and anything ill fitting there is noticeable.
You may also want to try regularly hydrating the skin. I've found this to make an enormous difference for my son and myself. I'm partial to a cream with urea, 5 to 10%.
Hope this link helps:
https://learningforapurpose.com/31-sensory-strategies-with-dressing-for-children-with-autism/
For me, things like 'make sure the damn tags/labels are cut off' helped enormously. You would not believe how irritating the sensation of the tag rubbing against the back of your neck is. Natural fabrics like cotton, but anything that is 'smooth' or 'silky' feeling, there are good synthetic fabrics as well. Layer a soft fabric like a t-shirt or vest (singlet? undershirt? not sure of American term for this) between skin and 'prickly' fabrics like wool outer layers or under the "annoying" shirt. Use detergents that are for sensitive skin/non-perfumed (lots of these about now, thank goodness). Wash clothing until the 'stiffness/newness' wears off.
This is a big help - thanks, Deiseach. I'm going to adopt some of this, starting with new detergents. Just ordered some from Amazon. Fingers crossed.
Good luck! I know it's wearing on your nerves and throws your entire day out, but it's also tough for him when he feels like sandpaper all over his skin. Sometimes the only cure is time, you get less sensitive as you get older.
Personally, ultimately, I just had to accept that I'd be constantly slightly uncomfortable.
Dye-free, fragrance-free detergent + no fabric softener helps. (Fabric softener: When you want all your clothing to feel slightly clammy all of the time.)
But from my perspective it's the rest of y'all who have sensory issues; you somehow fail to notice the thing that is always touching you.
I had the exact same problem at that age! It was excruciating, felt like being worked over with steel wool. I found I just had to try every shirt on at the store and see if it caused the problem; never identified a pattern. Drying shirts outside on a clothesline would permanently ruin them - my father would line-dry clothes and then not tell me, and I'd wake up one morning and suddenly all my clothes feel like nails on a chalkboard sounds.
The only thing that worked other than every shirt before buying to see if it causes the reaction was to have an undershirt that was safe and wear it under the needle-y clothes. Clothes would also get less painful with wear and machine wash-dry cycles.
These shirts are really smooth-feeling, though I don't know if they come in child size: https://www.amazon.com/Hanes-Mens-Sport-Cool-Performance
Luckily in my case at least the problem went away after a couple years.
Some hope! :) Thanks. Maybe it's just a phase.
I personally find shirts that contain polyester to be annoying, although if the shirt is part of a standard uniform, you may have a problem substituting it. It would perhaps be worth buying a pure cotton shirt and seeing whether your son is happier with that. If that solves the problem in principle, you could take it up with the school.
Labels can also be annoying and cutting out the labels has the benefit of being simple.
Detergent could also be an issue, but if your son is happy wearing his other clothes that probably isn't the problem here.
Sometimes just having to wear clothes at all is annoying, but unfortunately this is something your son will need to learn to live with.
Hm, is it specifically the skin, or does your son also try to avoid other forms of strong sensory inputs? Like avoiding bright light and loud noise, does he often walk on tiptoes, does he avoid chaotic environments? Those might be signs of autistic traits.
As far as I recall, Scott's issue was about the tags, the stuff that's mentioned by Shaked Koplewitz.
He's got some of those traits - loud noise bugs him; same with chaotic environments, sometimes. He doesn't tiptoe and has no issues with lights. It's all fairly minor. If he wants to do something (say a birthday party at an arcade) "chaotic environments" stop meaning anything. If he's autistic it's a pretty qualified autism, destined to be written in quotes.
Finding a sane and competent therapist who has time to see him has been impossible, though, and the process is leaving us bitter. Fuck shrinks and fuck psychiatry. We're on our own for the present.
Thanks to everyone who has responded. And please keep them coming, this sounds like not a big deal but it's part of larger difficult issues; it's just the one that I have to deal with today. We're going to try to take him shopping later today and see if we can get anything going. The fact that it's a uniform thing, though, makes it difficult to see how to get out from under it. Undershirts don't seem to help either.
See if you can find a shirt that is close enough to the Official School Uniform shirt but in a material that is tolerable, and ask the school if it's okay to swap it out because of sensory issues. Or don't tell them, just let him wear the shirt and see if they notice 😀 Unless you can't find a close match, since it's just a shirt there shouldn't be an issue, it's not like the jumper or blazer with the official crest.
Schools can be understanding if you're pleasant and calm (don't march in with "I demand to see the principal to demand they let my little Johnny have a special exception!" attitude, I'm not saying you would, but you'd be surprised how some parents carry on). And if they're not, then feck 'em, your son will do better in class if he's not constantly distracted by itchy clothing.
The hypothetical "idiopathic isolated sensory-autism" is diagnosable as "sensory processing disorder". In the real world, kids diagnosed with SPD cluster with autistic kids in an absolute ton of ways, in the same sense kids diagnosed with "social communication disorder" do, and kids diagnosed with "non-verbal learning disorder" do, and kids with "developmental coordination disorder" do, and [list continues to include pretty much every non-isolated developmental disorder in children of normal or high intelligence]. But: SPD does exist as a diagnosis people receive. Sane and competent therapists are hellish to find...but diagnosis can be helpful when a kid Cannot Wear School Uniforms.
Kids with any sensory diagnosis (including autism) are often (not always) able to handle environments chosen on their own terms, in the birthday party sense. A lot of things-attenuating-in-adulthood is just that adults have way more control over their environments, and can do this of their own accord. (This is also true in the NT population -- a lot of adults are still 'picky eaters', but can just choose not to cook peas now.)
There definitely are people who have the sensory issues associated with autism, but none of the "theory of mind" impairments. The professional psychiatrists here will probably argue about what, technically, this is supposed to be diagnosed as. As a lay person, I will just say that I personally know people who have that (and they were diagnosed as autism).
Can you briefly say what the larger difficult issues are? It might give insight to this smaller one.
I *hated* all of my school dresses back in the 1960s; they were scratchy polyester, because Mom didn't have to iron polyester.
He has a lot of trouble adjusting to situations that aren't precisely the way he wants them to be. There were some explosive tantrums when he was younger. That's thankfully gone away, but he still has behaviors that go well beyond "sulky" or "spoiled"or whatever and into territory that can get pretty alarming. The thing with his shirt today was a good example. There's just no way to move him once he starts to fall apart (he didn't make it to school today, for example) and he can fall apart pretty easily. And he hates being like that. There have been disturbing incidents of "I wish I wasn't alive" type of talk, things that you shouldn't hear from someone his age. Though that seems to be on the way out too. But again that might be wishful thinking on our part.
I'm not sure how to describe it more accurately - it can be just about anything that sets him off.
Yeah, not an expert but does sound "on the spectrum". That doesn't mean severe impairment, but getting intervention and support will help and the earlier the better.
I feel you about trying to go through the system and find Official Diagnosis, it's part of my pissing and moaning about the Constitutional referenda here in my country. Trying to get an appointment with an Educational Psychologist or Children's Disability Network Team is like pulling teeth and the waiting lists are stupidly long, but without Official Diagnosis, nothing gets done.
Can you get any kind of educational intervention with regard to assessment, or is it all being dumped on you by the school/school board to sort out yourself? These are the Irish versions (and as I said, in theory it's all easy to access but in practice it's blood from a turnip territory):
https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/health/health-services/children-s-health/caring-for-a-child-with-a-disability/
https://www.gov.ie/en/service/5ef45c-neps/
It's important to note that these services aren't just for intellectual disability, and that your child's difficulties don't mean that they are developmentally disabled. I know we're kind of rushing towards "oh he's autistic" and that may not be so, but this spectrum of behaviours does need support to help him find coping strategies.
It's tough - our kids are in Catholic school, so assessment and services can be thin on the ground. We have a call with his teacher later today, but he does fine in school and has a solid group of friends, so I'm not sure what she can add. We're still looking for a therapist, and I don't feel like going into it much here, but every time we've looked into anyone specific... just wow. We'd just as soon figure it out ourselves.
Honestly, that list you posted for me above about sensory strategies was 10 times more helpful than anything I've heard from the therapists we've interviewed or the resources they have on their sites. Not really interested in concrete approaches, that bunch.
I'm so sorry. That must be tremendously upsetting for you. I wish I had useful advice.
"He has a lot of trouble adjusting to situations that aren't precisely the way he wants them to be."
I will clarify that this is easily one of *the* most central elements of what-autism-is, and significantly adjusts the calculus on "sensory dysfunction from something else" vs "autism". Kids can grow out of a lot of this -- people tend to get more flexible about experience past childhood, regardless of their neurotypes -- but this massively dominates something like e.g. "doesn't struggle with socializing in an autistic-seeming way" (people tend to intuitively overestimate the degree to which autism is social, and underestimate the degree to which it's everything else).
I have some hypotheses about "the relatively heterogeneous group of kids with extremely strong needs for Things Being A Certain Way", but at the very least autism is probably the most common thing that falls under this. The best diagnosis for, specifically, "kids who fit this description but are very emotional and intuit social rules better than classically autistic kids" probably doesn't exist under current rules, but it's at least not especially far from autism. ("Children" is emphasis here; adult diagnosis and child diagnosis are a bit disjoint, in ways that don't make sense when you poke at it.)
Childhood is a tricky period for people with this, because it's unusually low-control. If you think you're noticing improvements with age (and by extension slow independence), you probably are. Similarly, a lot of people adjust to certain issues (e.g. sensations of some clothes) from what amounts to involuntary-exposure-therapy (real-exposure-therapy is probably a better way to handle this).
(this is not a diagnosis etc etc)
Thanks, Vat. This is extremely helpful. We're going to keep looking - my wife just texted me with a recommendation from a friend of ours.
There's no standard fabric preference for sensory problems. It might be the fit of the shirt rather than the fabric -- some people need to skew tighter or looser than their strictly accurate size, which can be a real pain for kids that are constantly growing. It is also, as alluded, very often the tags rather than the fabric. See if removing the tag fixes it.
My memory is that school uniform clothing felt 'scratchier' than casual clothing generally did, and that uniforms were distractingly uncomfortable all throughout school.
The tags are often bad and cutting them off can help, but it sounds like that's not what he's complaining about. Usually I'd say just try taking him to the clothing store and seeing if there's some kind of fabric that works for him, but if it's a school uniform that might not be an option
(for me it's just sportswear - I stopped having issues with annoying clothing feels when I got old enough to buy my own clothes and had enough money to buy them at REI. Ymmv on the specifics though, and it might be harder for a young child to know what he wants even if he has the ability to choose)
These are good ideas. I wasn't able to sell him on an undershirt today - he's concerned that he'd be the only kid wearing one - but maybe eventually. And I'm going to buy some larger shirts, see if that helps.
It's been about forty-three years since I last wore a shirt/blouse as part of school uniform (I have never worn any shirt or blouse since) and going by vague memories, when new or new-ish, they were stiff (either starched or glazed or something) and that was irritating.
Conventional shirts for school uniforms are probably made out of polycotton, and the thing with that is:
https://www.thesewingdirectory.co.uk/what-is-polycotton/
"Polycotton has a slightly rougher feel than 100% cotton fabrics, which are known for their softness. Because polycotton is made from a synthetic material it can have the tendency to develop bobbles on the surface over time which can make it feel rougher.
The lack of airflow through items made from polyester can cause skin irritation, itching or rashes if you have sensitive skin."
So yeah, wash the shirts until they lose the stiffness, check to see if there are bobbles or pilling, and just wait a few years until he grows out of some of the sensitivity! Good luck!
I've read The Avion my Uncle Flew based on the following post: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/followup-quests-and-requests
A little about me, I speak English and Spanish fluently, Portuguese almost fluently, and I have been learning French for about a year and a half, doing Duolingo daily since the beginning and private conversational french lessons about once a week starting six months ago.
The book was written in 1946, and it was probably meant for young American teenagers of the era. I found the book engaging, and it does aim to teach the reader very basic French. I would say it is a very good place to start learning French. Given the stage of my journey in learning the language, I did not learn much, but it was a good review.
I would love to do Weeve, but I am turned off by the subscription model. I just want to buy books with a similar format as The Avion my Uncle Flew.
Thanks for the quick review. How closely does the book follow Scott's idea?
It is mostly in English although it does have some of the Scott was looking for. Not as much as I thought.
Most enterprise AI will be controlled by legacy tech companies. The startups which succeed will focus on niche verticals and become the go-to AI expert for solving that particular industry's AI problems. By me: https://davefriedman.substack.com/p/legacy-tech-companies-will-control
My latest piece for 3 Quarks Daily is now up: Western Metaphysics is Imploding. Will We Raise a Phoenix from The Ashes? [Catalytic AI], https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2024/02/western-metaphysics-is-imploding-will-we-raise-a-phoenix-from-the-ashes-catalytic-ai.html
There's a section on the state of current discussion about AI that has a line that I particularly like:
The so-called Godfathers of AI are deeply divided. In a recent tweet Yann Lecun once more expressed his skepticism: “In 4 years, a child has seen 50 times more data than the biggest LLMs.” In an interview that he gave to the New York Times after he quit Google, Geoffrey Hinton expressed his current fears, fears he’d never had before:
“The idea that this stuff could actually get smarter than people — a few people believed that,” he said. “But most people thought it was way off. And I thought it was way off. I thought it was 30 to 50 years or even longer away. Obviously, I no longer think that.”
Cognitive scientist Gary Marcus continues to express his skepticism even as temporarily-ousted-not-so-long-ago OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is busy rounding up $7 trillion dollars – that’s 12 zeros, twelve! – apparently to keep the supply of computer chips flowing over the next couple of years as the systems get bigger and bigger and bigger and consume more and more and God-only-knows how much more electricity. More! More! More! Just how much unrequited testosterone is sloshing around in the streets in Silicon Valley?
That there is disagreement is not so much the issue as the fact that we don’t know what we’re disagreeing about. Sure, we can point to the machines, and the Chatbots, and talk about jobs, but when it comes to the core technology, how it works and what it can do, there is no conceptual framework we hold in common. There’s a good reason for that, of course: No one knows how it works. When you consider the complex web of skills and organizations needed to create this technology, it’s the most sophisticated “stuff” we’ve ever built, and it’s almost as mysterious as the human soul.
The fact is, Humpty Dumpty has fallen, the genie is out of the bottle, and we’re headed to hell in a Tesla in full self-driving mode. We have little choice but to deal with it. We’ll muddle through. But we’ll do so with perhaps a bit of grace if we can create a conceptual framework more adequate to the problems we have unleashed upon ourselves.
After a discussion about the philosophy's integrative role there's a section on infovores that is centered on a professor of mine from undergraduate years, Dick Macksey, and then – who else – Tyler Cowen. That section concludes:
There is a deeper lesson here. Cowen has conducted his intellectual life in a way that would have been impossible before the invention of the internet. Furthermore, while he has a secure academic post at George Mason University, and has published in the formal academic literature, he has stated that he’s striven to become an influential economist by working outside the institutions of the academy. Writing a chatbot-enabled general audience book about great economists is but another step outside existing academic institutions.
There's another section on AI, this time on LLMs as a ontological machines, where I'm using "ontology" as it is used in computer science, quoting John Sowa:
The subject of ontology is the study of the categories of things that exist or may exist in some domain. The product of such a study, called an ontology, is a catalog of the types of things that are assumed to exist in a domain of interest D from the perspective of a person who uses a language L for the purpose of talking about D.
The ontological structure of human cognition is thus latent in LLMs: If we can figure out how that information is organized – now we’re going somewhere. We’re going “meta” on the structure of human knowledge embedded in the underlying LLM.
Whatever your opinions and other feely-squishy subjective and/or value-laden considerations on current AI are, this section:
> but when it comes to the core technology, how it works and what it can do, there is no conceptual framework we hold in common. There’s a good reason for that, of course: No one knows how it works.
is flat out wrong and extremely misleading to any non-technical audience that will read your piece. We **Do** have a pretty cut-and-dried mathematical conceptual framework of the core mechanism of LLMs, namely Neural Networks, more specifically the Transformer architecture and the Attention mechanism. The underlying mathematical machinery is Function Approximation, the body of mathematical techniques (along with theoretical proofs and justifications) which is interested in approximating an unknown (but presumed to exist and be well-defined) function by observing samples of its output on some inputs. Those conceptual frameworks might not be easy, they might not be accessible, they might not always be applied correctly or even well-understood in ML practice, but **they're** very unambiguous and as non-subjective as human knowledge can ever get an answer to "How do LLMs work?".
Furthermore, "No One Knows How It Works" is an exaggeration that was partly justified from the bad old days of late 2010s (2014 till circa 2021-ish), when interpretability was still in the cradle. Now Interpretability is in much better shape, see the recent-ish Scott post about how AI perceives concepts in higher dimensions, based on Anthropic's research. At any rate, "No One Knows How It Works" is an extremely bad summary of the Interpretability crisis even at its height, we *Do Know* exactly how it works, up to every single last addition and multiplication. There are way more things that we know less and more vaguely than we know AI, including perhaps the very constitutions we live by.
What we don't know is only this: How do the AI's addition-multiplications map to human concepts? In what part of the GPU running ChatGPT is "Love" or "Honesty" or "In what year was Donald Trump elected president of the USA?". This is important, and people are making very good early progress on it, but to call it "We Don't Know How Anything Works" is unfair and very misleading, a bit like saying 1920s physicist "Completely don't know how atoms work" just because they couldn't control fission yet.
> When you consider the complex web of skills and organizations needed to create this technology, it’s the most sophisticated “stuff” we’ve ever built, and it’s almost as mysterious as the human soul.
This is very empty. ChatGPT only satisfies this as far as (A) It's ran on current chip technology, the culmination of a 70-years-old story of technological progress and a jewel of human engineering so esoteric that a single company is literally single-handedly responsible for a crucial component in the manufacturing pipeline [1] (B) It's ran on vast fleets of tens of thousands of computing machines, collectively known as "The Cloud".
But (A) and (B) are not unique to LLMs, every modern AAA game that teenagers can buy for < 50$ dollar (or pirate for free) equally satisfies A, and every cloud application (e.g. Google Drive) satisfies B. As for the LLM tech **itself**, it's comparatively way simpler than any of the 2 foundational technologies it runs on in (A) and (B), so simple that there are tutorials online that a reasonably technical person (not necessarily ML engineer, I'm not and I can follow them) can follow them and get a working LLM from nothing but a Python Interpreter on a personal laptop [2][3]. Consider then that a reasonably technical person can also be taught to implement enough of the Python interpreter to run those tutorials from nothing but a C compiler, and then be taught to implement a basic non-optimizing C compiler from nothing but a machine running the x86 architecture, and then you have the fact that a single intelligent (and very hard-working) person can likely bootstrap LLMs starting from nothing but an x86 machine in less than a human lifetime, this might seem a low bar but consider that a modern x86 machine itself probably doesn't meet it, let alone "the human soul". Many other tech we have today don't meet this bar, a modern person likely can't bootstrap metal manufacturing or modern agriculture based on nothing but manuals.
Now if Altman manages to win his insane 7 trillion request out of the Gulf States money firehose, it's likely that LLMs and LLM-based ChatBots will be the single most expensive technology in the entire history of humanity (This record is probably now held by Nuclear tech and/or the Apollo space program), but this is not the same thing as being mysterious or prohibitively high-skilled to the point that it's as hard as understanding the human brain/consciousness, not even close.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASML_Holding
[2] https://github.com/rasbt/LLMs-from-scratch
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zduSFxRajkE
I think we're going to be hearing a lot more about "We Don't Know How It Works". Not because it's truth but because we want it to be truth.
I've been thinking over how we (humanity at large) will accept a 'true' AGI, and the closer it is to "we don't really know how it works" the more acceptable it will be, because the more lifelike it will be (because of its inexplicability and the little dark corner where we can hide a soul).
This, of course, requires that we get no further in understanding our own consciousness. A tall order. I for one like my little dark corner where I can pretend (if I am) my soul is hidden. I think overturning that dark corner in all of us would be far more disruptive than an AGI. (Except of course for a baddie AGI).
> Furthermore, "No One Knows How It Works" is an exaggeration that was partly justified from the bad old days of late 2010s (2014 till circa 2021-ish), when interpretability was still in the cradle. Now Interpretability is in much better shape, see the recent-ish Scott post about how AI perceives concepts in higher dimensions, based on Anthropic's research. At any rate, "No One Knows How It Works" is an extremely bad summary of the Interpretability crisis even at its height, we *Do Know* exactly how it works, up to every single last addition and multiplication.
For what it's worth, Neel Nanda, a former core contributor to Anthropic's interpretability work, and current interpretability researcher at DeepMind, seems to agree we don't know how neural networks work. See this tweet and the tweets it is replying to (which includes a similar quote from Geoffrey Hinton): https://twitter.com/NeelNanda5/status/1724178908528914505
I think this comes down to different definitions of "knowing how it works". At a very low level, we know how LLMs work in that we know the literal operations any trained LLM is executing. But this seems akin to someone claiming they understand a book because they know all of the letters and the order they are in. I don't think we can say we know how LLMs work until we understand what they are doing at a higher level. While there has been some great early work so far on this, we're still far away from understanding what is going on with LLMs.
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I do agree that the "complex web of skills" quote misses the point. LLMs are more conceptually simple to create than many other technologies. All you need is to get lots of compute and data and run it through a model architecture that scales well with compute and data. The annoying thing is that while LLMs are conceptually simple to create, an LLM, once created, is exceedingly hard to understand.
Basically, OK. But when I'm talking about the overall complexity, I'm including the machines on which the software runs.
That's fair. The complexity goes up even more if you include the data generation process. LLMs would not be able to work without the trillions of tokens of data they were trained on, which was made as the result of maybe trillions of hours of human thought. (This "trillions of hours" approximation is very rough and depends heavily on which thoughts you include in your approximation.)
Not to mention all the parameters in the models themselves. It's the MODELS that I'm talking about, not the transformer software.
This whole conversation is a minor example of what I'm talking about, about not sharing the same underlying conceptual ontologies. It's taking us a bit of back-and-forth to figure out just which THINGS we're talking about when we use various words. Do we have the same underlying conceptual ontology, but are just talking about it in different terms, or do we have different ontologies. Figuring that out takes time.
As another example, in the last month or two I find myself making an explicit distinction between a chatbot, such as ChatGPT, and the underlying LLM. I've known that distinction pretty much since ChatGPT was made publically available, but it's only recently that I've decided that there are times when I need to be explicit about the difference.
So if we understand LLMs, can we predict what skills GPT-5 will have? Will it be able to 0 shot novel mathematical proofs? Heck, can we explain why GPT-4 has the skills it does have?
If our mathematical understanding of LLMs can't predict this, then we aren't modeling the important bits.
It's a bit like saying we understand human psychology because we understand the fundamental physics it's run on, and the remainder is not so difficult.
I'm not necessarily saying that we "understand" LLMs, enough to do all the tests you specify. All what I'm saying is that it's misleading to say "we don't know anything about LLMs. Nobody agrees on anything. Nobody has any conceptual underlying it all". Nobody would say this about (your example) human psychology. And while some would say that human psychology is as mysterious as the human soul, nobody would say this about - for example - Sociology or History or Economics, even though all the problems you list is also there : We can't predict how an arbitrary election system will perform in the face of corruption and other sociological events, we can't predict the outcome of an arbitrary war or other history-making event, we can't predict how an arbitrary economy will develop. There is plenty of things that we "know" but don't really know, where the first know and the second know are 2 different senses. It's still misleading to say "We DON'T know. We have NO conceptual model", because you *do* know, and you do have *some* conceptual models, just not as good as you would like.
> All what I'm saying is that it's misleading to say "we don't know anything about LLMs. Nobody agrees on anything. Nobody has any conceptual underlying it all".
Is this an actual quote from somewhere? It seems like a stronger form of what was actually in the article. For instance, I would personally agree with the phrase "No one knows how LLMs work", at least in some settings, but not with the phrase "We don't know anything about LLMs."
I would say that we don't really understand anything about sociology or economics for exactly the reason you say. In my opinion, ML theory, sociology, economics, psychology have all been diverted by the same problem. The most interesting/important problem in the field turned out to be way too hard for people to make any progress on so they all switched focus to easier problems, and moreover mostly pretend that the actual important, hard problem doesn't even exist.
This refusal to deal head on with the most important issues comes back to bite us every so often in economics, sociology (aka politics) and soon in ML.
This is an interesting opinion, I wouldn't express it like that, I would express it as the following: Physics spoiled us, and we raised our expectations too much. It's unreasonable to have the expectation "Given a description of the system and its initial configuration, we can find the configuration of the system at **Any** point in time after that", we're merely exceedingly lucky that a subset of the Universe satisfies this unreasonable and extremely high expectation, but we shouldn't go into any random other subset of the Universe or any field of knowledge and expect that it will be the same. Physics envy is unhealthy, and having this expectation is a manifestation of Physics envy. There is a lot of ways of knowing, that doesn't mean that they're equal, but it does mean that the Universe is not obligated to offer you the chance to know a thing by every way you like. Sometimes, the only way to know something (given your human brain and the laws of the Universe) is X, and if you hate that and wish to know the thing using the way Y, well, you're welcome to try but don't expect that you will always succeed.
Regardless of our opinions and the wording we choose to express them, common words have common interpretations, and describing the state of knowledge in Neural Networks and LLMs as "We don't know anything, they might as well be the Christian concept of the esoteric Godly essence of humanity" is very misleading and will imply all sorts of lies in the mind of a lay reader.
The point about misleading the public is exactly one of the reasons why I don't want to say we understand LLMs. When people say "we understand how to build dams", they expect that we understand how to build them so that they won't randomly break and kill people with any regularity. We are no where near reaching that standard for LLMs, and research in that direction is embryonic at best.
So if we we tell people, we understand LLMs because we can model some of the basic mathematics that makes it work, and they take it to mean that we understand how to make LLMs safe (which in my head is a very reasonable interpretation of the phrase "to understand engineering challenge X"), we are going to get into big trouble.
BTW I'm familiar with Anthropic's research. I like it. As far how far it get's us, how much do you know about the design and construction of a Gothic cathedral if you've figured out how to cut stone and are making progress on how to stack it, but don't know anything about mortar, the mechanics of the flying buttress is beyond your mechanical imagination and you haven't got the foggiest idea of what those crazy colored windows are for, not to mention you don't know how to make glass.
We're talking past one another:
" How do the AI's addition-multiplications map to human concepts? In what part of the GPU running ChatGPT is "Love" or "Honesty" or "In what year was Donald Trump elected president of the USA?". This is important, and people are making very good early progress on it, ..."
At best, by my criteria, only so-so early progress. And your examples in that second sentence are very simplistic. My guess would be that those things aren't in any single part each, but each is smeared across many locations. Later in the paper I talk about conceptual ontology. What are the various conceptual ontologies embedded in a given LLM? How are they structured? What role do they play in generating text? There's a whole range of issues involved in understanding how LLMs assimilate and generate text that aren't on your radar screen, which is why you overestimate the accomplishments of interpretability research.
And if you read through to the end you'll see where I guesstimate that we're withing five or ten years
I'm fully onboard the claim that LLMs are black boxes, I'm fully onboard the idea that they're non-reproducible (hence the litany of "ChatGPT3" can do this" and " No no ChatGPT3 CAN'T do this" conversations, not only is there several API versions of "ChatGPT", but the exact wording of the prompt will also get a different response each time), and that we shouldn't put it in charge of anything important, and the people who are in charge of anything important shouldn't use it for anything important. I'm skeptical of its capabilities, perhaps unfairly so at the beginning, but I'm still moderately skeptical till now (while acknowledging that it can be impressive at a time if only the corporations in charge will stop lobotomizing it for the sake of their misguided understanding of "safety").
I just don't like the tone and wording of how you express those in the post above. I don't like you calling it the most complex or sophisticated stuff we ever built, or comparing it to the human soul/consciousness. GPT-x, no matter what x is, is not even close to any of this. It's a very well understood computer program (or several such programs sharing a common architecture). Sometimes we don't know what that program is doing, but that's completely normal, some of the best human programmers can spend days and weeks debugging and dissecting extremely simple (compared to GPT-x) programs, that doesn't mean that those programs are the most sophisticated thing ever built by humans or that they are mysterious as the soul, this just means that human minds are so ill-adapted to programming that even trivial programs can stump our best and brightest.
Mathematicians have a common wisdom that goes something like "A child can ask a question that the master can spend lifetimes and not answer", alluding to the stark contrast between the extreme apparent simplicity of some mathematical questions (e.g.: is there an integer N > 2 such that a^N + b^N = c^N is ever satisfied for some triple of integers (a,b,c) ?) and the massive difficulty involved in actually investigating and solving them. Computer Programming have a similar property, any literal idiot can make up a program so complex that a genius would spend days or weeks debugging.
We're not disagreeing (yet) on anything controversial on ChatGPT or LLMs, I'm just disagreeing on the wording of some facts and claims that we all fundamentally agree on.
ribbonfarm had a great analogy about how ML is a telescope, rather than an engine. It's not "producing" a model, it's "peering" into a statistical dataset. Adding more weights adds higher resolution.
In keeping with the telescope analogy, Benzon is saying that we know enough about optics to build our first telescopes, but only recently discovered that jupiter has more than 4 moons or that some stars are actually collections of stars.
"It's a very well understood computer program (or several such programs sharing a common architecture)."
But I'm not talking about the PROGRAM. I'm talking about the MODEL it constructs. As for complexity, how many parameters are we up to? Have we reached the trillions? That's pretty complex. The human brain has, I believe, 86 billion neurons, and each of them has on the average 7000 connections with other neurons. We're approaching, if not yet exceeding, that.
In another post I used the analogy of the captain of a whaling vessel who knows everything about his ship and how to sail it locally, but knows little or nothing about long-distance sailing and navigation on the open seas and nothing about whales. The boat is analogous to the transformer program while the ocean and whales are analogous to the model.
Eric Hoffer was a mid 20th century intellectual from the most unusual place - the San Francisco docks where he worked as a longshoreman. His best seller, The True Believer, helped to define America's ideas about unhealthy mass movements, which, unfortunately, has begun to erode over time. It's time to revisit his work, which I review here: https://falsechoices.substack.com/p/old-stories-the-true-believer
His Wikiquote page is pretty great:
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Eric_Hoffer
I particularly like "Up to now, America has not been a good milieu for the rise of a mass movement. What starts out here as a mass movement ends up as a racket, a cult, or a corporation."
> What starts out here as a mass movement ends up as a racket, a cult, or a corporation.
Is there another country where that's not true?
Yes. A lot of countries have all kinds of well-functioning civic movements and organizations.
Thanks for the link, yes the man was very quotable. I liked "Wordiness is a sickness of American writing. Too many words dilute and blur ideas" and will keep in in mind.
Did Hoffman have ideas about how societies can make it so most people have business worth minding?
Ha, that's an excellent question. I have not read everything, but I don't remember an solution to the problem of so many having so much leisure time. Of course from personal experience I can say that having a family is the best way to keep people busy.
I don't think the problem is too much leisure time, or not exactly. It's people feeling they have a lot of free time and nothing worth doing with it.
It's suspected that he was actually a former Nazi who erased his past.
I think that's a horrible thing to say about someone - yes he had a German accent (so did my grandfather, emigrated 1911) but also a very public profile, and no one made any claims like this. Evidence?
He seems to have fled Germany at some point but unclear why. Others speculate he was Jewish.
Are there good reasons to believe this?
According to
https://web.archive.org/web/20070525200245/http://www.hoover.org/publications/digest/3063261.html
although documentation of his early life is sketchy, he has a social security application from 1937 (two years after the social security act was passed) and various documented activities in the US during the war.
I heard this theory from Razib Khan, though I can't find a link now.
Generally social norms are against advertising your own blog on every open thread (let alone multiple times a thread). It's fine to do it sometimes, but this is a bit too much.
Well while we're here, here's an analysis on Biden's increased military presence in South Vietnam:
https://anarchyforamerica.substack.com/p/biden-sends-a-thousand-military-advisors
Yeah, but dang all the posts today look like people tooting their own horn.
It would make sense to have a sub-thread reserved for people pointing at their own work.
Strong agree, it's getting out of hand; I would be supportive of a much stronger norm to restrict this to classifieds posts. If one *must* link one's own blog, at least give the TL;Dr of the argument, as I am definitely not clicking the link.
Yeah I don't mind having a few of them sometimes, it's just a bit of a bad ratio today.
I mean, that's sort of what Open Threads have *become*.
There's better places for a broader community to chitchat than the comments section of a blog. A narrower, blog-focused community can keep these things alive, but it relies on a stream of fresh content. The posts on Astral Codex these days are mostly linkfarms (whether it's titled "links" or just "Mantic Monday", six / half-a-dozen) and book reviews. In all of February there have been just four of what I would term "fresh" posts, and two of those are a series on polygenetics, and one is a continuation of a paywalled post.
After a certain point at that rate, a comments section will just run out of conversations to have that wouldn't be better-had elsewhere.
Hmm I was going to ask about better places, but then naming them could turn them into *not* better places. Maybe I should get on usenet again.?
Well this is depressing. Not especially wrong, but pretty depressing.
I guess it's just an inevitable part of Scott now having a wife and child to tend to, in addition to a job as a psychiatrist. Honestly, from my expectations of people with that level of responsibility and commitment, he's been staggeringly productive, I don't know how he does it.
I beg your pardon Officer Koplewitz, didn't realize you were on duty this morning.
Don't be a dick on top of being an ass.
We wait patiently for your first post.
Just telling you the local norma since you didn't seem to be aware. You're welcome.
My interest in building a boat come from my youth and all the time my brother and I spent on the water together; a great time for adventures both good and bad. I discuss it here: https://falsechoices.substack.com/p/floater-part-3-on-the-water
"Schools in crisis?…..are they not part of the very furniture of modern society; as much a part as its factories and offices? That vast infrastructure of buildings full of classrooms children and teachers. Kids spending their weekdays being taught by teachers – how could things possibly be otherwise?.... In this essay I try, firstly, to sketch an impressionistic snapshot of this ‘Schools in Crisis’ media flurry and then to dip a toe into the hazy waters of what could possibly replace them as the means by which society" teaches its children.https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/teach-your-children-well
I wanted to read Unsong and found out there's an audiobook version. Since it's spread out over a bunch of MP3s in an RSS feed I combined em into a single M4B file with properly tagged chapters. This took me a while because tooling for media files seems to be a bit janky, but I was really happy to get it working. Would it be okay for me to post a download link to the audiobook M4B? I think it might help encourage others to check it out if they haven't already listened to the audiobook.
Edit: 1 here's the download link to (Unsong.m4b):
<LINK REMOVED>
Edit 2: It turns out that the encoding failed after chapter 10. I've switched to a different tool and will update this post again with the new link once it's available. Sorry for any inconvenience.
Edit 3: This problem has kicked my ass and taken way longer than I could've imagined. Below is a link to "Scott Alexander - Unsong.m4b" (1.67 GB). After producing this file I found out that Interlude He and Chapter 12 are mono except for a section in which the angel speaks.
<LINK REMOVED>
Edit 4: I manually fixed the source Interlude He and Chapter 12 files by duplicating the audio from the left channel to the right. Now I'm preparing yet another encoding run with the fixed files.
Edit 5: Here's the final fixed version, where every chapter is properly tagged and in stereo: "Scott Alexander - Unsong.m4b" (1.66 GB). If you decide to download it and you get any use from this please let me know with a thank you, because it took me way too many hours to do this.
https://mega.nz/file/0MoxgCQA#hrD4Vzi-t5OteJi6eA9uUHKF_QiOERYyhRpSDlf5VTc
I think you did an awesome job! It was worth all that effort.
Please do. I was looking for a better formatted version a while back.
I've been thinking recently about the bizarre autism–Parkinson's association. Older autistic adults consistently have very high rates of clinical parkinsonisms and full-blown Parkinson's disease, across multiple countries and the entire "spectrum" of "severity". There is no good answer as to why; the obvious things (e.g. parkinsonsgenic drug use) don't seem to singularly explain the whole magnitude of it, but the studies we have that look at those factors tend to have problems like "tiny sample" or "incredibly broad definition of parkinsonisms". The strangest part is there's a well-recorded "Parkinson's personality" that everyone has agreed unanimously on for decades, but *it doesn't look like autism*.
https://vaticidalprophet.substack.com/p/the-autismparkinsons-mystery
Well, considering autism is correlated with a whole bunch of other conditions, including even gender dysphoria... My theory is that there's just some kind of hormonal issue that causes a whole bunch of potential symptoms, one of them being autism. Would also explain the increase in prevalence of mental illness, autism, trans people, etc. if the risk was being increased by some modern contaminant, for example plastic.
The Parkinson's thing, whatever it is, absolutely does not look like "nonspecific increase in a lot of weird subjective experiences". It looks like "if you get ~1500 autistic adults and *over half of them are under 25*, you have about the same prevalence of Parkinson's that you'd see in allistic adults in their 60s". The association looks stronger than those for a lot of things traditionally very associated with autism, like mood disorders, sleep disorders, GI issues, etc.
OCD is apparently present in about 30% of people with autism (according to Wikipedia), and gender dysphoria is about 11% according to the surveys in this paper https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.3109/09540261.2015.1111199 . Looking at the wikipedia page for all the stuff that's comorbid to autism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditions_comorbid_to_autism_spectrum_disorders , most of those conditions seem to also be in the 10-30% range. The Parkinson's thing is weird, but the simplest explanation is that it's the same symptom as "normal" Parkinson's but with a different cause (though there's probably more than one cause to "normal" Parkinson's as well).
Again, the explanation that seems to make the most sense to me is that all of these are just symptoms of some unnamed syndrome, including all the symptoms we cram under the umbrella of ASD.
The problem with trying to construct trivial/straightforward explanations for the Parkinson's thing is:
1. It is astoundingly common, and it's not a nonspecific thing that is common in a lot of unusual populations
2. There are known personality correlates of Parkinson's that people have been talking about for decades and that can be confirmed in large phenome studies, that don't look like autism/a broad autism phenotype, and indeed look so much unlike it as for it to be implausible that there are as many undiagnosed autistic people with Parkinson's as there "should be"
3. An exceptionally large percentage of autistic people take parkinsonsgenic drugs, but the connection between parkinsonsgenic drugs and parkinsonisms is nowhere near as straightforward as it "should be" if the obvious cause-effect explained everything, and indeed the numbers for claimed-unexposed people are so high it's unlikely it explains everything (so the two ends of the possibility spectrum are either that it's a drug side effect -- which would still not be idiopathic PD -- or it's something that somehow operates independently, while still having a lot of things not in common with idiopathic PD)
I'm more familiar with autism comorbidites than probably most of the people who wrote that article (I am very familiar with Wikipedia medical editing, and excruciatingly familiar, by way of everyone ranting about it to me constantly, with the state of the autism articles). My thought on that particular article is that it would be more informative and less misleading if it were a blank page. Though, on the bright side, the autism-SZ section is better than it would've been a few years ago (when it would've probably been written by the dedicated imprinted brain/diametric model guy we had, who set back popular knowledge on this for years by spamming uncritical support for that hypothesis all across the project).
I am very, very skeptical of attempts to straightforwardly 'link' autism and gender dysphoria in the ways people try to. I think there's a large self-fulfilling prophecy element in recent years that confounds research, in particular with the subset of "autistic-adult" research participants who were diagnosed late, which is a *huge* percentage and a constant problem for autism research (agonizingly many studies that, for instance, generalize "autistic people" from a 67%-female sample with a mean diagnosis age in their 20s or 30s). There's a definitive/unambiguous real effect in terms of early-onset trans men, but this can't be generalized to an omni-umbrella of "gender dysphoria".
The Parkinson's thing does not look like any of these. It does not look like anything. It stands out uniquely even within autism comorbidity.
I return with another installment of my Wots... Uh the Deal?" essays about things that don't make sense (to me) in psychiatry. This time I take a look at psychopharm for delirium, with an eye towards the antimuscarinic/antihistamine antipsychotics.
https://polypharmacy.substack.com/p/wots-uh-the-deal-with-antimuscarinics
Saw this interesting headline: "Egypt sells coastal city Ras el-Hekma to UAE for $35 billion amidst economic crisis"[1]
I was wondering if it was a new charter city, but now I think it's just a conventional property deal, albeit one involving Eminent Domain. But I don't read Arabic so I can't verify.
[Edited to add] I didn't mean to start the middle east subthread here. Scott, I will understand if you have to axe this subthread.
[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/egypt-sells-coastal-city-ras-el-hekma-to-uae-for-35-billion-amidst-economic-crisis/ar-BB1iPq1o
The lowlifes in the Junta have stumbled on selling sovereign land as a solution to their low IQ finances a while ago, they first did that with Tiran and Sanafir in 2016, even as the Egyptian Supreme Constitutional Court said the sale is illegal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanafir_Island. For context, Wikipedia says Tiran and Sanafir is under Egyptian control since 1904, and the team of lawyers that won the supreme court ruling have unearthed maps - of Ottoman origin - dating from the 19th century and before drawing the islands as part of Egypt. Tiran was used to besiege the newly annexed Palestinian coastal village of Umm al-Rashrash, now known as Eilat, in 1950 and was held by Egyptian troops against the Israeli assault in 1967.
> new charter city
What do you mean by "charter city" ? It's certainly not in the widely known sense of "having new laws that differ from the host state", Gulf States don't do that. It's just a private-public partnership of the same flavor as - say - a new underground metro station, it just so happens that the private party is UAE investors and/or corporations.
> I don't read Arabic
Probably for the better, information-veracity-wise. The only mainstream Arabic sources you will probably find is either Egyptian state-controlled or UAE, and both will firehose their own flavor of Propaganda and fan fiction at you at hypersonic velocities. Find your favorite non-Middle East source's Middle Eastern section and it's a good chance the covering there - if any exist - will be neutral whatever the language happens to be. YouTube has plenty of sources following the Middle East.
> What do you mean by "charter city" ? It's certainly not in the widely known sense of "having new laws that differ from the host state"
Yes, that was what I meant. Thanks for the informative reply.
Man if Egypt is just selling coastal cities I have an idea for middle east peace
Hahahaha, punchline is Ethnic Cleansing, extremely witty and clever.
I don't see how ethnic cleansing is implied.
If you were to build a Gaza-sized, Dubai-quality city somewhere on the Egyptian coast (comfortably separated from Israeli territory) and declare it Gazan territory, don't you think that most Gazans would choose to live there instead of the existing Gaza Strip which is, let's face it, a shithole? Don't you think that getting a whole lot of Gazans as physically separated from Israel would be pretty good for peace?
Sure, that would be just a (bizarrely generous) land grant. What makes it Ethnic Cleansing is the implied "And we will keep bombing the shit out of actual Gaza till Gazans all move - whether they want it or not - to this Dubai-quality city. We did it Patrick, we solved the Israeli-Palestinian conflict", which is presumably what this "Joke" is all about. Is there a different interpretation of the joke I'm not seeing?
What do you think of the Nagorny Karabakh situation?
This one challenged my basic beliefs to the core. Azerbaijan "solved" the problem by basically squeezing all Armenians out. Straight-up ethnic cleansing. And yet....
We know the alternative, which was demonstrated by the Turks in 1915. I somehow think that the millions of slaughtered Armenians would have preferred to be driven out into Armenia/anywhere rather than excruciating deaths.
Would the 20k+ dead Palestinians rather live elsewhere?
So I don't know anymore. Might doesn't make right, but it makes up our reality in too many depressing ways. George W. Bush should be in the dock for starting illegal wars and other crimes against humanity, and yet here we are.
> What do you think of the Nagorny Karabakh situation?
I think Nagorny Karabakh is yet another shameful Nakba in the long history of humanity, one that we all too easily ignored (just like the original Nakba) because the modern world is way too big and confusing and well we can't just be expected to pay attention to who is killing and expelling whom at any given moment, can we.
For extra irony points from the cruel God that made humans, this new Nakba is sponsored and helped by the spiritual descendants and compatriots of the perpetrators of the original Nakba [1] [2] who armed the new, reboot perpetrators with billions worth of weapons and drones, everything old is new again.
> Would the 20k+ dead Palestinians rather live elsewhere?
Ok, I will soon write a detailed top-level comment arguing a comprehensive case against Ethnic Cleansing (not saying you support it, it's obvious that you're conflicted and not necessarily too happy that Ethnic Cleansing is technically more humane than Genocide). But I will address this objection here as well as there:
Consider that there is a difference between openly promoting an action as a norm and approving of it, and being grudgingly grateful (in retrospect) that this action happened and not another action that is way worse.
Example 1, personal:
(1) Consider a person who was mugged. From a certain point of view, this is good: This person could have been killed, or raped, or kidnapped and held for (a much bigger than the value of the items stolen) ransom, or tortured while being raped and kidnapped for ransom and then finally killed. All those things are things that actually happen, the human psyche can degenerate to this and way worse.
In Arabic, we would say something like فداك, meaning "[All what was stolen is a] sacrifice for you", with the part in square bracket implied. Meaning it's good that the items were stolen but you came back alive and well, those items were metaphorical sacrificial lambs for you.
But consider this comment, coming from a hypothetical anonymous relative/friend of the person who was mugged or held for ransom:
>|> Man if the mugging gangs just want to have expensive phones and watches then I have an idea for increasing public safety
Isn't it just dumb? Even as a "Joke", it doesn't really work. There is no subversion of expectation to create humor here. Yes, the mugging gangs really do like money, no this is not surprising, and no, giving them money is not really a solution that works (let alone if it's moral or not) to the problem of mugging.
Example 2, personal:
(2) More as a subset of example 1, but worth consideration on its own. Consider a person who was raped. Again, from a certain point of view, the relatives and friends of said person should be "grateful": They could have lost her (or him) entirely, now they get to keep a version of her/him, no matter how traumatized and humiliated and broken.
The hypothetical comment in question:
>|> Man if the murderous gangs just want to have sex then I have an idea for decreasing homicides
I will leave you to think about why this comment is - on every single level imaginable from morality to pure pragmatics - wrong.
Example 3, population-level:
(3) Consider the 13% of total population of the USA who are black Americans and the descendent of slaves, about 39 million person. From a certain point of view (^TM), those people should be grateful: Had their ancestors not been kidnapped from West and Central Africa and enslaved, they would have likely been living now in conditions that are mostly worse and more rampant poverty than whatever Discrimination they are currently suffering in America (on top of Discrimination too), to say nothing of the occasional civil wars and outbreaks of violence in a lot of places in Africa that net a horrible amount of victims, which North America is largely devoid of.
Because I'm too bored and fatigued to rephrase a dumb comment over and over again, consider the version of the previous comment that goes something like "Man shouldn't those black Americans be grateful and stop complaining too much about racism? They would have been living in a way worse state if it wasn't for the enslaving that happened to their ancestors, eh ?". Or consider another version that implies the solution to (e.g.) the Sudanese dying in civil war is for Americans to enslave them then free them again as US citizens just like they did to the slaves of the 19th century.
Example 4, population-level:
(4) Consider the female British, Irish and Scottish captives that the Viking raiders took as sex slaves from the British Isles, whose descendants are now the people of Iceland [2]. You know the drill by now, something something something, it's perhaps good that they were raped and not killed, something something their descendents are living a good life, maybe the real war crime is the friends we made along the way, etc....
But again, consider someone who tells a British, Scottish or Irish person "Oh stop whining about the Vikings and their rape and pillage already, it all turned out to be ok in the end, innit mate ?"
It's again pretty dumb isn't it? Maybe in retrospect we can secretly be relieved that sex slaves didn't spend all of a millennium as sex slaves, and that the children and grandchildren of the rape they were subjected to have forgotten what crimes their male side of the family have done and are mostly living okay now. But does that mean that I can say "I have never understood the taboo against raping women and taking them as sex slaves, it had turned out to be pretty okay on many historical occasions ?" and be taken seriously?
-------------------------------
So to sum up: Being against X doesn't mean I'm irrationally and monotonically against X, maybe if you give me another horrible choice Y, I would actually (given that I'm the one who makes the choice) choose X, and then maybe hate myself for the rest of my life. But all of this is pretty different from (A) Actually supporting X or claiming that it's a good norm or claiming that "I don't understand the TaBoO against X", (B) Making a dumb unfunny joke mocking the victims of X/Y in a very thinly-veiled way and then failing to mention in the clarification that I'm actually against X or Y and that this is just a dumb joke that I posted because I like posting dumb jokes (C) Heartlessly telling the victims (or potential victims) of X or Y to stop whining about X or Y and/or that they should be grateful/eager for X instead of Y.
[1] https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-weapons-quietly-helped-azerbaijan-retake-nagorno-karabakh-sources-data/
[2] https://jiss.org.il/en/inbar-experts-believe-israel-unlikely-to-drop-lucrative-arms-sales-to-azerbaijan
[3] https://www.decode.com/the-majority-of-icelandic-female-settlers-came-from-the-british-isles/
I see your point, thank you for taking the time for a detailed response. Yeah, if I lost both legs in a terrible accident I may still be grateful to be alive, but please don't just cut off my legs for my own good...
The taboo on ethnic cleansing seems stupid to me. Like it seems to have worked pretty well in creating peace and stable borders in Europe, with the cleansing of Germans from the parts they lost in WW2 as well as with the Greek/Turkish population exchange. Sure, having to move 50 km from Gaza to Sinai or whatever kinda sucks, but it sure seems a whole lot better than decades of war/occupation/whatever.
Yeah this is the thing that bugs me. Like it's politically untenable and taboo, (in large part because if it wasn't then governments would do it a lot just because in pretty terrible situations, so I do think having a strong bias against it makes sense). But this is one case where "just move the Gazans to the Egyptian coast where they'd be ruled by a less insane/evil government" actually would leave everyone involved significantly better off. But it's a politically impossible solution.
Boy I sure do hate it when my reasonable and rational Strategic Relocation proposals are struck down in irrational and stupid outrage by dummydumbs while screeching about so called "Ethnic Cleansing". Bummer.
With the way things are going, over two million people are probably going to die for no good reason. Surely it's worth looking at alternatives that avoid that result?
I think you should try to calm down from calling everyone names. I don't think you actually have much to add, but if you do you should try to present it in a more detached way and explain how your framework is different and where you think others are actually making mistakes.
That insane/evil government is the only one the Gazans have ever elected, which may be why Egypt doesn't want to take them now.
I've heard that Palestinians (collectively) have a habit of biting the hand that feeds them. For example, Palestinians living in Kuwait supported Saddam Hussein's invasion, presumably in the hope he would help them against Israel. I think there are other examples of their less than grateful behavior towards their host countries.
Egypt didn't want to take them before 2006 either.
Nah, the punchline is that Egypt would rather shoot everyone in Gaza than let them over the border and I was pretending like anyone who talks about how bad Israel supposedly is actually gives a shit about the Palestinians.
The armed forces of Egypt, which killed more than 8000 peaceful protestors during its Junta usurpation of power in 2014, would rather shoot all 105+ million Egyptian head-to-toe before thinking of something that will potentially make them lose money or power.
Not only do your genocidal jokes so embarrassingly suck, they seem to take away a lot of brainpower and prevent you from recognizing pretty basic distinctions.
You're*so close* to realizing what's motivating all the anti-israel sentiment in the middle east when Israel is the one country that actually gives a shit about trying to help find solutions for the Palestinians. Like *this* close.
Sure bud, because reality is a Disney movie. The fact that Arabs are uniformly living under dictatorships that pay lip service to Palestine as a mechanism of whitewashing their 10x worse crimes is **Surely** a sure sign that Israel is the Good Guys^TM, there is certainly *No* legitimate or self-consistent secular human rights position against both Israel and the Islamist militias fighting them and the Junta dictatorships and decaying monarchies around it all enjoying the show from afar, not a single one takes this position at all.
If one side is Bad, that means the other is Good, fax and logik are plain and simple.
(I should probably clarify that this is a joke)
While researching adversarial attacks on large language models over the last year*, I was reminded of Unsong a lot - the book is strangely prescient about modern LLM interactions. If these attacks/exploits continue to exist, then we're heading into a weird Unsong future, where people work tirelessly to find the exact combination of characters that will get the all-encompassing language model to grant them their wishes.
*in particular the brand of attacks that are inscrutable to humans, such as stuff like getting the model to reveal its hidden instructions by saying "];”;`)):—————-’)[‹{”{[(’/1/, @”—————- [{ [
↓ •]-> ++"
It's a strange competition going on right now where the creators of LLMs have their own fictions they want their creations to choose over reality, and users are posting all over social media their attempts at making it slip up and giving them the answer they actually want. Perhaps we've given up on reshaping the real world to our preferences, and can instead wage a culture war over the simulation.
https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2024/02/24/atoms-vs-bits-ai-imagines-reality-as-screenwriters-would-prefer-it/
Scott, are you going to make another classifieds post soon?
Lance Bush is his main critic.
> So I’d like to extend an invitation; for anyone reading this with any leads on interesting bands or scenes out there that are genuinely doing something cool, please tell me all about it. Fill up the comment section with long-winded rants about bands I've never heard of. Send me emails about the emerging weirdo noise scene in Salt Lake City. Whatever. I want it all.
On one hand, I wouldn't exactly describe my tastes as avante garde. But on the other hand, I feel like my corner of spotify is at least somewhat niche. So uh, here's some of the more niche garbage I listen to. Mostly electronic, though not all.
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1sZ0ZdqftY1J9NNlV8bAjZ?si=d49610c58a2142d8&pt=8134d00072bd17a00467a9d3af0643a7
bonus track
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Gha9xrM10w
>if something was so great and worthy of recognition, would you really have to make up a new term
...I mean that's the sole reason to make up a new term. It's why the term "punk rock" exists. It's linguistic u-substitution, for things you expect to come up often.
>this piece that covers the broader causes of what looks like nothing short of a nosedive in quality across the cultural board
Well, because they're not comparing it to anything. You know what old people love to do, all day, every day? Chit chat. Just, make endless noise, about a series of trivial nothings. Birdsong. Tiktok's been human nature since the Bible ("for they think they will be heard because of their many words.").
I hardly listen to music these days, but will continue to link Nick Lutsko's "Sideshow" whenever an opportunity arises. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2qnx3yVGzg
>They aren't comparing what to anything?
"A nosedive in quality" implies the quality was higher before. Their fish model has been true for thousands of years. It's not some brand new structure that will rip down the old. better one; it's the old one too. It just looks new to them because they didn't try to analyze the previous one.
EDIT: I see there's an edit. You've misread me. I have no idea who the author is; the old men are Tiktok. Before spamming through Tiktok vids, there was channel surfing, and before that there was empty discussion, and before language there was probably ook ooks and pointing at themselves.
I'm referencing that article, yes. Like, there's a comment on how much Michael Jackson's catalog sold for, and how they wouldn't spend that on new musicians, and I think to myself that it sounds exactly like what people would have done in the 70's or 80's with, say, Frank Sinatra's catalog. Are there comparisons across timelines that show a larger gap between then and now? Not in the article, at least. It's a criticism of the present that hasn't been anchored in the past.