1023 Comments

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.

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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*?

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deletedMar 2
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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.

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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.

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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.

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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/

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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?

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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?

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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.

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> 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.

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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.

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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.)

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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.

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>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.

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> 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.

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This is literally propaganda

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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.

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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.

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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.)

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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?

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Please give us some links to the propaganda from the West. Let's see if they can debunked with a quick Google search.

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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.

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Sure, and China... . Give peace a chance.

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deletedMar 1
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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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?

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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.

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People clearly do like having special-interest gods, which is why the idea got reborn as special-interest saints in supposedly monotheistic religions.

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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?

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...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.

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The religion of most East Asians is Ancestor Worship. Why that isn't talked about more, I don't know.

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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.

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America; the cause of -and solution to - all of life's problems.

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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.

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You’re not even going back to Muhammad being visited in the cave by Gabriel?

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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…

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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"]

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You haven't explained how that is at all similar

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They each involve ignoring vast numbers of relevant variables in order to fixate on a single line of connection through time.

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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.

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This is not even a theory of consciousness though.

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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

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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

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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.

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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?

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"We trained our aging program on the person with the most public information about them at every age; Michael Jackson."

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>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...?

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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.

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What taxpayer dollars? What are you talking about? These *are*, precisely, hypothetical lawsuits against generative AI companies being discussed.

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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

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I really get the sense that you're not actually reading any of the comments you are replying to.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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Feb 28·edited Feb 28

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.

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Feb 28·edited Feb 28

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.

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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.

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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).

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> 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.

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Vox is more of a "reality has a liberal bias" type org

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Feb 28·edited Feb 28

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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Makes sense - Scott portrays himself as above all this, then he votes for Elizabeth Warren and gives grant money to "systematic racism" type activists

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What? They've been unambiguously, categorically, undeniably blue for at least the past decade, and in reality longer.

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> Is Google no longer gray tribe?

They haven't been anywhere close to that in a long time.

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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

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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).

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Also, profiling like this is likely to backfire by making the targeted group feel targeted, resulting in political agitation.

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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.

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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.

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founding

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?

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Gun control. Crimes require means as well as motivation.

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founding

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.

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Did that happen every time gun control has been implemented?

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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).

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founding

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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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These are separate classes of risks.

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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.

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Well once you find a single jot of evidence that this homework scraping could accomplish anything, be sure to let us know.

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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?

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Ok, so you've identified the 10K most likely suspects. What now?

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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.]

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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.

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Make use of it how?

Or, to borrow a phrase: what now?

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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.

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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.

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founding

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?

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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.

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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.

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Feb 28·edited Feb 28

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.

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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).

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deletedFeb 27
Comment deleted
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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Feb 27·edited Feb 27

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?

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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.

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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.

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wikipedia says he passed away in 1992. quite lucky of you to have caught the legend on his way out.

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Wow, that is close. Whatever tournament it was, a Danish fellow lost to a Russian fellow.

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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.

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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.

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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

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That was amusing. Thx

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That was a very nice entry, thank you for sharing!

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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!

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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.

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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)_/¯

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Feb 29·edited Feb 29

> But yesterday, February 26 was definitely astronomical winter

What? Astronomical winter would end in early February. You're well into spring by the 26th.

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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?

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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.

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Talmud believes that words are violence? Is this... woke?

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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.

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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).

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>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?

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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This is very good. Imo.

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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.

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>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.

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People are dissatisfied, not bored.

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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.

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Amen to that!

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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This is much closer to my view of it as well.

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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!

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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.

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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.

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Thank you, do you think that a company like Orchid would be better equipped to discuss these issues with us?

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Apr 1·edited Apr 1

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.)

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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)

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Thank you so much! This is a very thoughtful response.

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Why do parents keep things like this secret?

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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.

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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?

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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.

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Can you genetically select for a more neurotypical embryo?

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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.

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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.

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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***.

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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.

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The Sami are no more indigenous than the rest of the country, as far as I can see.

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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".

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The bigger question is why Canada still gives special privileges to members of certain ethnicity instead of making everyone 100% equal.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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> 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.)

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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.

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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.

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My mtDNA is Arabian somehow, even though I am otherwise 100% British Isles. Guess how good my Arabic is?

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I don't see any way that could possibly go wrong.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Feb 27·edited Feb 27

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.

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