A man in the UK has been sentenced to two years in prison for maintaining an online library of far-right political stickers.
I wonder if clowns like Freddie deBoer who were hysterically crying about people facing negative consequences for supporting palestine are even opposed to this. Or Scott, for that matter, who was quick to cry about some incompetent rich Haitian diversity hire at harvard get fired but has not to my knowledge ever talked about europe imprisoning people for political speech.
Let's say hypothetically that Messrs Alexander and de Boer, in addition to crying about the things they are currently crying about, began whining about the thing that you're currently sniveling about. Would this satisfy you, or do you need for them to bitch about the things you prefer to piss and moan about *exclusively*?
And the dude's go a right to "wonder" whether Scott is opposed to putting people in jail for far-right political speech, but if he does we're going to wonder whether he is A: paying attention and B: seriously trying to engage with the community.
Anybody still following up on Ivermectin as a COVID-19 treatment, there's a new study using Bayesian statistics. It's a randomized controlled trial with N = 8811, offering this interpretation of the results: "Ivermectin for COVID-19 is unlikely to provide clinically meaningful improvement in recovery, hospital admissions, or longer-term outcomes. Further trials of ivermectin for SARS-Cov-2 infection in vaccinated community populations appear unwarranted."
So I'm in the middle of listen to Tucker Carlson interview Putin. And... well I can only describe this as 'liking' Putin's narrative of history, compared to the hawkish government here in our country. Wouldn't it have been good for Russia to join the west as a full economic partner? It would have been good for everyone. No? Amazing number of times (Putin says) our presidents made a tentative deal, only to be talked out of it by their advisors. Isn't peace with Russia better than war?
Did you like the bit where this Putin fellow that you like so much, explained why Hitler had no choice but to start World War Two by invading Poland because the dastardly Poles backed him into a corner and forced him into it?
The rest of his history lesson was no better, but this highlights the fundamental problem with your assessment. Yes, in an abstract theoretical sense, peace with Russia is better than war. But in the practical real-world sense, peace with Russia is rather like peace with Nazi Germany - it just plain isn't going to happen until someone surrenders. Who do you want to surrender?
Hmm Well let me first correct your mistake about me liking Putin. The man's the f-ing dictator of Russia. You don't get to that spot by being a nice guy.
I must have missed the part about Poland. To be honest I tuned out most of the history lesson... it's mostly interesting because this is what is important to Putin. This is what he believes, or the story he tells. There's a real historical celebration of the defeat of the Nazis. And I don't know if Putin thinks he's still fighting Nazis or if he's just using it to whip up support in the country. I don't know what peace with Russia would look like. I guess I'm in the mode (mood) to give it a shot.
> I don't know what peace with Russia would look like.
I'm too late to the debate, but this is very simple. From Russia's perspective, "peace" means "Americans will not interfere while we recollect the lost pieces of the former Soviet empire".
The lost pieces of the former Soviet empire do not really want to be recollected, but as long as they do not join NATO (or perhaps side with China), it is just a question of time. A few square kilometers at a time; a larger "special operation" when necessary; try again a decade later. Russia has enough human lives (lots of ethnic minorities) to sacrifice, and the boys in the country conquered today will be sent to the front lines of tomorrow's special operations.
So the ideal (from Russia's perspective) peace plan would be to let Russia conquer Ukraine, then Belarus, Moldova, Kazakhstan (probably forgot something here), in return for some nice words from Putin. The next step would be whining about former Soviet countries allowed to be in NATO, because... you know, they are too close to Russia. They need to become neutral first, and get conquered by Russia later. The next step would be whining about former Warsaw Pact countries allowed to be in NATO, because... you know, too close to Russia. Neutral first; Russian latter. And then? Who knows, perhaps we will finally see the "peace for our time". Or maybe not. Putin decides.
> I don't know if Putin thinks he's still fighting Nazis or if he's just using it to whip up support in the country.
Russians have been doing this literally since Brezhnev. In Russian politics, "Nazi" means "someone who opposes Russia". The connection to the actual historical Nazis is very loose, especially if you notice how Putin says that Hitler attacking Poland was a good thing.
I'm afraid I didn't have the patience to listen to the maestro of historical whining in action, but I bet he recycled the same accusations and historical distortions again. Did he say anything new in front of Tucker? it's remarkable how similar Putin's previous statements sound like an aggrieved 1930s Adolf Hilter. According to Putin, the entire post–Cold War era has been a period of Russia’s humiliation at the hands of a hostile West.
Did he go on and on about the Ukrainians and Russians being historically one people culturally and spiritually? Most Ukrainians don't think that.
Did he name-drop Vladimir I? — a.k.a.Volodymyr I, the Ukrainian (Rus/Viking) king who converted to Christianity in the tenth century? Medieval Kyiv before the Mongol invasion was the home of the original Viking/Slavic Rus. Moscow didn't even exist at that time.
After the Mongols arrived, Moscow became the tax collector and enforcer for the Khanate of the Golden Horde whose leadership was based where? — you guessed it. Crimea. Eventually, the Tsars of Moscow acquired enough military power to conquer a much-reduced Tartar Khanate. But I bet he didn't mention these things.
And Putin has been the one to break the treaties. Russia agreed to respect Ukraine’s territorial integrity and sovereignty and to refrain from the threat or use of force against Ukraine in both the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 and the Russian-Ukrainian Friendship Treaty of 1997. In Return Ukraine gave the Soviet-era nukes it had in its possession back to Russia, agreed to partition the Black Sea Fleet, and agreed to rent the naval base in Sevastopol to Russia.
Putin has called the Ukrainian leadership Nazis (which is good for a belly laugh because Volodymyr Zelenskyy is Jewish), and from the git-go, he alleged that Ukrainians were perpetrating genocide against Russian-speaking people in the illegally annexed "republics" of Donetsk and Luhansk — and that his initial incursion into Ukraine was to denazify them.
And the GOP love affair with Putin makes me cringe. But it seems like they're envious of his power, his audacity, and his duplicity.
OK I read the NATO thing. I believe all of that. But Putin's take (like I know.. hah.) is that NATO expansion is aggressive. (And yes his aggression has lead to more nato members.)
Re History. Yeah it started with a ~10-20 minute history lesson, not back to the Mongols, but maybe starting in 10-11th century. And then continuing to the present. He is still worried about Nazis, (which I knew from previous readings.) I guess what I found most interesting is that he says he talked with Bush Sr. and later Bill Clinton, about more advanced economic ties and that both were receptive, but then came back later and said no. (Putin says the president's advisors talked them out of it.) Anyway for me it was interesting to see the world from his perspective... or at least maybe closer. I don't have any love (or like) for Putin. But he is Russia's leader, you have to deal with him.
So this is unrelated but I think the Republicans like Russia, because the Democrats picked Ukraine. And in our tribal country if one side picks X the other side is automatically not-X. It's silly but that's the way we behave these days.
> I can only describe this as 'liking' Putin's narrative of history
Congrats, you fell for Putin's charisma, lies, and propaganda.
> Wouldn't it have been good for Russia to join the west as a full economic partner? [...] Isn't peace with Russia better than war?
We (Europeans) tried to live with Russia in peace. They weren't interested. We tried to incentivize them via economic cooperation. They interpreted this as weakness.
Putin and a good part of the Russian people don't strive for peace and prosperity through coorperation. They only understand power, force, and subjugation. The sooner we, collectively as Europeans, understand and accept this, the safer we are from their ambitions of conquest.
Hmm well I'm no fan of Putin. But I hear the same story from people in the west. (That Russia wants cooperation.) So there's propaganda on both sides, and I'm just looking more closely at what 'my' side is saying. Beyond that I really don't know enough to have a firm conviction.
There's no need to believe any "stories" from either side, when you can you just check what each actor is *actually doing*. And Russia has broken the 1994 Budapest Memorandum by invading Crimea, first in 2014, then again in 2022. No amount of deceptive twisting of history, crafted to convince the feeble-minded, is going to change that fact.
Yeah sure I know of all the shitty things Putin does and continues to do. You should ask yourself why he does them. (Look there are many reasons, and I'm mostly ignorant about things.)
Dictators have to do things that make them look strong, or they die by a coup. Putin does not have the option to lose in a fair election and then enjoy a wealthy retirement.
Conquering territories makes you seem strong. Overthrowing governments that opposed you, assassinating politicians and journalists who opposed you, makes you seem strong.
Ukraine is culturally important for Russia. (Russia itself is named after Kievan Rus, which was a kind of medieval Ukraine.) Ukraine saying "f--- you" to Russia, joining NATO and EU, and becoming relatively wealthy compared to what it is now, would be seen as a huge weakness by Russian population. The militant nationalists would ask: "how come that our mighty army couldn't have stopped them?" The average Russians would ask: "how come that the 'Little Russians' are now a part of the rich West and have luxuries that we can only dream of?"
This would even be worse by Ukraine having a large Russian-speaking population, so you can imagine how all their quality-of-life improvements would be broadcasted by media in Russian language, which would directly contradict the official Russian propaganda. Imagine tens of millions of people who are native-level Russian speakers, and who can openly make fun online of Putin and his regime. You can face propaganda with propaganda, but how will you address youtubers showing the stuff they can buy at a local supermarket?
Hmm well I think it's all propaganda. We just don't see it because it's the water we swim in. Most propaganda is true, but it's just the slant or what they don't tell you. You know from reading anything about Putin that he is being painted as the bad guy. I don't take in much news these days. I find it is all just trying to tell me this story or that story. I guess it has always been this way to some extent. And maybe it's just me becoming a grumpy old man.
Yeah I know almost nothing about any of those meetings. I know this is going to sound offensive, but maybe Putin thinks he can only be seen making a deal with another white man.
Just writing here to let anyone in the Minneapolis-St Paul area know that I've made a local ACX community discord for the region to plan local events and chat generally. The link is here: https://discord.gg/hySwpphmdN
In one of the previous Open Threads I complained about how both Google Translate and DeepL screw up translations between Slavic languages, basically by erasing every information that does not make sense in English -- such as grammatical genders, flexible word order, or even distinguishing between words that happen to be homonyms in English -- so much that the result looks as if someone translated first to English and then from English to the other language (this is most likely not a technical description of what actually happens, but the results look the same for all practical purposes).
It just occurred to me to try Yandex Translate https://translate.yandex.com/ and yes, it seems better in this aspect... but worse in some other aspects... so I suppose I will actually use both Yandex and Google/DeepL translations side by side.
Posting here, because it took me surprisingly long time to think about a solution that is obvious in hindsight, so perhaps someone else may benefit from this idea, too.
Have you tried GPT-4? It's good at translating in my experience - I've only ever used it for translations to/from English , but I would expect it to be good at translating between other languages as well.
Compared to other religious beliefs, why is it so hard to convince people that pantheism is true? Spinoza makes a great case that God, whatever God is, must include everything, because God is perfect.
It's a simple argument, if you want to believe in God.
I understand that CS Lewis argues that things must complicated and therefore we should reject simple explanations. I believe the opposite.
I haven't read Spinoza, and I imagine his version is probably more rigorous, but the argument as you've described it seems to just be two unrelated statements with a "because" confusingly shoved between them.
Is a body that doesn't include cancer cells less perfect than one that does? I would think it's the other way around.
Why do people believe in God? To pray and hope wishes come true? To combat the feeling of being lost in a cruel world, soon to be dead and forgotten? Now, would pantheism help with any of that? Or would a God that is everything be akin to a God that is nothing?
> Hitler couldn't exist without WW1, which was the product of Bismarck's wars, which were a German answer to Napoleon, who took over because of the revolution, which was inspired by the American revolution, which was ideologically rooted in Dutch and English anti-catholic activity, which was caused by Catholic absolutism emanating from the wealth of Spain, which came from the new world. So really, the discovery of America is to blame.
Neat little comment isn't it? Discuss its validity.
It leaves out the Ottoman Empire conquering Eastern Europe, the Levant, and Northern Africa and blocking trade routes to Europeans eastward, which forced Europeans (specifically Portuguese) to explore ways to get around Africa and then to find shorter ways to the Indies across the Atlantic (Spain and Portugal).
So the Ottomans are to blame for not only WWII, but the European discovery and colonization of the Americas, the European slave trade, and the eventual colonization Africa most of the rest of the world.
That comment -- which I'd hope was intended facetiously but who the hell knows anymore -- seems similar to rookie family-tree geeks getting all excited about being descendants of King Edward III or whoever. "We're royalty!!" That's about 22 generations ago now, so....congrats you are one of the literally millions* of living people each of whom have Edward III as one of thousands of ancestors going back 800 years.
[* tens of millions, according to some genealogists; the specific math depends on assumptions/guesses related to what's called "pedigree collapse"]
Posted v3 of the Eve Theory of Consciousness: https://www.vectorsofmind.com/p/eve-theory-of-consciousness-v3 Briefly, it argues that recursive self-awareness is what separates humans from the rest of the animal kingdom, is what allowed us to conquer the world, and has evolved fairly recently. There is the first strong evidence about 50kya, but even then the experience of self could have been fractured. "Recursive" culture spread, which changed the selective gradient for those that experienced a seamless construction of self from a young age.
The main thrust of the argument is about evolution, but the evidence I put forward for recursive culture spreading is interesting even if it didn't figure in our evolution. The bullroarer is a religious instrument used in male initiation ceremonies from Australia to the Americas, to Africa, to Europe. An implement of the primordial snake cult?
Scott linked earlier versions of this argument: the Snake Cult of Consciousness, and the Unreasonable Effectiveness of Pronouns. The Snake Cult piece looked at the Sapient Paradox, which asks why sapient behavior is not widespread until about 12,000 years ago. The pronoun piece looked for linguistic evidence of Julian Jayne's theory about self-awareness being recent.
It also follows the natural language usage of conscious vs unconscious. But yes, it's not a Theory of Consciousness. Could have called it the Eve Theory of "Sapience" or "Secondary Consciousness," but the usage is defined in the beginning so it seems alright
Kids utilizing AI to create nonconsensual deepfake sexual photos of their peers was a perfectly predictable result of generative AI. This current story is probably just the tip of the iceberg. Outraged parents will be suing school districts (at the taxpayers' expense) and demanding that school staff and administrators use (waste) their time and limited resources to address the problem. Parents will be suing other parents (possibly financially ruining other parents who likely never head of generative AI or know how to search for the app on Little Johny's smartphone). The resources of police departments and prosecutors will be wasted investigating and prosecuting juveniles with unpredictable results (since the laws don't really cover this twist in the evolving world of kid-generated kiddie porn). The most sensible solution to me would be that parent and teacher groups launch a class-action suit against generative AI companies to stop allowing nude bodies to be merged with non-adult faces.
Ultimately this will be a much bigger deal than Google Gemini generating racial diverse photos of Wehrmacht soldiers. But kids will be kids (and I mean that in a creatively generative negative way)...
Then we'd start needing definitions of "non-adult" faces to handle computer-generated faces, and real faces would be measured on the scale, and actual adults would have their faces flagged, and people would mod faces from both directions towards the line until they just barely crossed, and there'd be racial disparities in what types of faces are recognized as "non-adult", and there'd be AI generated filters to age or de-age faces, and then eventually there'd be a VR app that de-ages everyone's face to 6 years old and removes their clothing, and in the darker corners of the Internet there'd be a VR parody app that gives everyone the face of a 6-month old black baby and the body of an 90-year-old white woman.
I don't think we've adjusted enough yet to the social consensus that implies that every child has a basilisk in their pants, and many have access to a camera phone. We're in some sort of pre-9/11 world where we still think "oh, people just don't **do** things like that".
I thought the first use of generative AI way back in its infancy was to age kids' faces for those milk carton pics. Seems like the aging and de-aging of facial features is old hat for AI. And ironically, wasn't there a bit of embarrassment around that app, because it was turning black and Asian kids into white adults?
>The most sensible solution to me would be that parent and teacher groups launch a class-action suit against generative AI companies to stop allowing nude bodies to be merged with non-adult faces.
To which the kids' immediate and predictable response (should the lawsuit succeed) will be to use existing pre-AI technology to age the faces by four or five years. To which the next group of outraged parents' response will be...?
Yes, but I don't want my taxpayer dollars wasted defending these lawsuits. Go sue Big AI!
But yes, child-generated child porn has been a problem since phones got cameras. and kids will be kids in a creatively negative ways no matter what we do.
It's not obvious to you? At least in the US, your taxpayer dollars pay for schools. So having teachers and administrators wasting their time trying to stamp out kid-generated kiddie porn wastes your tax dollars.
And taxpayer dollars pay for the police, who have to investigate whether kid-generated kiddie porn (that doesn't depict real kids except for their faces) is a crime. And it pays for the prosecutors who have to decide whether or not to prosecute the juveniles who generated the kid-generated kiddie porn. And your tax dollars have to pay for the courts if these cases come to trial. And your taxpayer dollars pay for the juvenile correction facilities if the juvenile kiddie pornographers get sentenced. And even if the criminal justice system doesn't get involved, your tax dollars pay for the courts whose time is taken up by lawsuits between parents and parents and the school districts.
And finally, your tax dollars have to pay if your school district loses a lawsuit from angry parents over how the kid-generated kiddie porn humiliated and damaged the reputation of their child.
A quick Google search will show that there's already been a slew of lawsuits about pre-AI kid-generated kiddie porn on smartphones in the US. Seems like the legal and financial burden of this latest trend should be directed to the generative AI companies that are enabling this latest twist. And right now it's only still photos AFAIK, but, up next, kid-generated AI videos of kids having sex for bragging purposes or to humiliate their peers!
You asked what taxpayer dollars. I answered. And my original post was about the flailing of a public school system and law enforcement over this issue. Pot calling the kettle black?
I'm also not clear on how the AI is supposed to tell a face is "adult". There are plenty of people in their early-mid 20s who could pass as high schoolers. If you're going down to middle school like in the article it's presumably more obvious, but still.
Is Google no longer gray tribe? On my twitter feed right now:
"In Google's 2023 Annual Report, the terms "unbiased", "objective" and "accurate" did not appear even once. Nor did the "Don't Be Evil" motto- it has largely been retired."
This is in addition to the leading designer for Gemini having some *very* Blue Tribe opinions on Twitter.
I'm not anywhere near SF or Silicon Valley and was interested if anyone could tell me how the culture has changed over time.
It’s definitely left the grey tribe quite some time ago. This latest thing is just the steaming pile of shit in its pants that makes it clear it doesn’t take care of itself.
I can confirm that it was quite woke even 10 years ago. Of course that's not inconsistent with it being mostly "grey tribe". Also, "Don't Be Evil" was retired many years ago, although that's a matter of marketing, not politics and isn't related to any of the CW stuff.
Are "unbiased" and "objective" really Gray Tribe coded? I tend to associate them (when used as tribal signals) more with Blue-coded outlets like NYT or Vox.
The words as slogans are neutral, one might even say "fair and balanced".
I'd say that the Grey Tribe coding is about actual, systematic attempts to move closer toward removing bias and achieving objectivity, recognizing that these things are impossible to achieve, but treating them as a worthy goal nonetheless.
I always assume both of those phrases tend to mean "yay ingroup, boo outgroup" when I hear them.
Most people tend to think of themselves as unbiased and objective. If anything, the Gray Tribe seems more likely to recognize that they themselves are not perfectly objective or unbiased (but then like all people tend to think that makes themselves better than others and therefore *more* unbiased and objective than others, leading to the same conclusion).
> Are "unbiased" and "objective" really Gray Tribe coded?
That is a good question. As a first approximation, people generally perceive that someone has the power, and the words "unbiased" and "objective" mean that those with power should not push their beliefs on everyone.
During the Bush era, the power was pro-war and pro-religion, so "unbiased" and "objective" were used to oppose that.
These days, the power is pro-wokeness, so "unbiased" and "objective" are now used to oppose that.
IMO the "blue/grey" split is largely incoherent in the first place. I think it was just originally made up by Scott so that he could feel superior to the masses by being above their petty squabbles. But that's how everyone thinks! If you divide by partisanship, you get two big tent groups. If you divide more finely by culture, you get dozens of groups. But 3 is not a natural categorization.
I seem to agree with this liberalism-vs-leftism thesis https://www.natesilver.net/p/why-liberalism-and-leftism-are-increasingly that at the moment there does seem to be a divide between two types of "anti-red-tribe" and the difference and antipathy between each of them is as large or even larger than any of them versus the "red tribe". And the immense depth of that divide is an argument why it makes to split groups there, but not divide more finely by culture, as those finer divisions don't really hate/despise each other that much.
Now I'm not sure whether these two current "tribes" is aligned with the same blue/gray split as Scott discussed back then.
I think this is largely correct, but the missing piece is how first-past-the-post voting incentivizes having precisely 2 political coalitions. So right now, socialists and liberals are stuck in a coalition together, and the story of the last 20 years is the socialist faction becoming dominant.
The original "Everything but the Outgroup" article indicated as much:
"(There is a partly-formed attempt to spin off a Grey Tribe typified by libertarian political beliefs, Dawkins-style atheism, vague annoyance that the question of gay rights even comes up, eating paleo, drinking Soylent, calling in rides on Uber, reading lots of blogs, calling American football “sportsball”, getting conspicuously upset about the War on Drugs and the NSA, and listening to filk – but for our current purposes this is a distraction and they can safely be considered part of the Blue Tribe most of the time)"
It's the latter discourses with Scott readers seizing upon the admittedly half-baked Grey Tribe concept to describe themselves that have tried to construct a strict borderline between it and the Blue Tribe, a borderline that never really existed and exists even less now than before.
Very true. And the whole single-axis mapping of the political spectrum has little descriptive power except for finger-pointing and name-calling. Adding "Grays" in the middle or as outliers, or as part of one tribe or the other, obscures and distorts the complexities of social and political beliefs. As someone who many on this list would lump into the "Blue Tribe" I certainly wouldn't include Grays in my group! LoL!
If I am forced to simplify political groupings, I like the old 2-D Political Compass (https://www.politicalcompass.org/relatedBooks). They divide the political spectrum into four quadrants — Left to Right on the X-axis and Libertarian to Authoritarian on the Y-axis. They use the older British definition of Libertarians as classical liberals, which I know some Lefties find uncomfortable. I'd prefer that they'd use authoritarian vs anti-authoritarian for their Y-axis terminology, because that would create less confusion in the US where the definition of Libertarian has morphed most radically from its original meaning — but I digress.
They divide the political quadrants into the Authoritarian Left, Libertarian Left, Authoritarian Right, and Libertarian Right. We'd see people like Mao and Stalin in the upper left corner of the Authoritarian Left quadrant. We'd see people like Bakunin in the lower left corner of the Libertarian Left quadrant. In the upper right quadrant of the Authoritarian Right, we'd see the likes of Hitler and Franco. In the lower right quadrant of the Libertarian Right we'd see people like Ayn Rand. Traditional Democrats would cluster more towards the center of the Y-axis and closer to the center of the X-axis.
And ChatGPT gives a good general overview of how the term Libertarian has changed over the years.
User
How has the definition of Libertarian changed over the decades in the US and the UK?
ChatGPT
The definition of libertarianism has evolved over time, particularly in the US and the UK, reflecting changing political contexts and philosophical developments. Here's a broad overview of how the term has shifted:
Classical Liberalism to Libertarianism: In the 19th century, "libertarian" was often used interchangeably with "classical liberal," emphasizing individual liberty, free markets, and limited government intervention. This tradition persisted into the early 20th century.
20th Century: In the mid-20th century, particularly in the US, the term "libertarian" began to be used more specifically to refer to a form of anti-authoritarianism that emphasized individual freedom, autonomy, and minimal government. This shift was partly in response to the rise of big government policies and the growth of the welfare state.
Modern Libertarianism: In the latter half of the 20th century, especially in the US, libertarianism evolved into a distinct political ideology. It came to encompass a range of beliefs, including a strong commitment to individual liberty, free markets, limited government, and often a skepticism of government intervention in both economic and social matters.
In the UK: In the UK, "libertarian" has often been associated with more left-leaning or socialist ideas, particularly in the 19th century. However, in more recent decades, especially since the 1970s, the term has been increasingly used to refer to a more right-leaning ideology similar to that in the US, emphasizing free markets and limited government.
Variations and Subgroups: Within modern libertarianism, there are variations and subgroups, such as minarchists (who advocate for a minimal state), anarcho-capitalists (who advocate for the abolition of the state in favor of voluntary cooperation), and classical liberals (who emphasize individual rights and limited government).
Overall, the term "libertarian" has evolved from its classical liberal roots to become a distinct ideology emphasizing individual liberty, free markets, and limited government, with variations in its meaning and emphasis between the US and the UK.
You serious with this? Since you appear to not be American, let me point out that blue tribe hates libertarians just as much as they hate red tribe. They see them as “conservatives who happen to like drugs and let that inform their entire worldview.” And to be honest they’re right about them having a fundamentally different worldview.
Libertarians and Classical Liberals used to have a lot in common, but while libertarians have held their ground, liberalism got popular and jumped the shark. Calling libertarians “basically blue tribe” is an utter lie some leftists might tell themselves but it’s nothing more than a vague headnod to the once philosophically-grounded roots they’ve long since abandoned.
This appears to treat tribes as wholly analoguous to political ideologies, which the original post never indicated it would do in the first place. The "gray tribe", as far as I've understood it, are supposed to be libertarian-ish, not a group where libertarianism is supposed to be the entry requirement.
Insofar as I've understood, what would moreso define blue tribe would be things like the secular/religious split (with blues being secular), academic/non-academic split (with the blues being academic), urban/rural split (with blues being urban), alternate sexualities vs. traditional monogamy split (with blues at least more amenable towards the former) and so on. On those axes, the "grays" certainly are blue.
I'm a biomedical science student who will be interning with some scientists in Toronto this summer. The current thinking is that I'll use publically available data to look for some sort of link between air pollution or maybe weather anomalies and heart disease. With that in mind, what are some databases I should investigate, either in Canada, the US, or elsewhere?
Domestic terrorists and mass shooters in the US often show similar psychological characteristics and behavior in terms of their plans. Seeing as this happens so often in the US, what's the base rate that potential perpetrators get caught? If the base rate is low, why is there a blind spot like this in our surveillance?
If it's framed as a search problem, maybe ten thousand out of three hundred million people in the US are serious suspects:
- Nearly all have anti-social, autistic characteristics or something in the same category of diagnosis (~1 percent of the population) – 3 million people
- Nearly all are male (~50 percent of the population) – 1.5 million people
- Nearly all reveal intention or potentially violent instability ahead of time (as a personal estimate, ~1 percent of the population) – 15 thousand people
Those numbers are obviously rough, but I think the ~10 thousand figure is accurate for the US. What are defense agencies not be able to do that lets this continue to happen?
You're looking at the problem the wrong way around. Suppose you're looking at two people, and you know nothing about either one of them. They have equal likelihoods of becoming mass shooters of whatever variety you have in mind. (The profile you describe makes it clear that you're not referring to "mass shooters" in the sense of people who shoot a lot of other people.)
Now, you learn that one of them is a 17-year-old antisocial male who frequently remarks on how he'd like to shoot certain other people at his school.
This is enough information to raise the likelihood that that one is eventually going to become a mass shooter... by an amount that is too small for you to measure, one that is absolutely dwarfed by the error bars on all of your likelihood estimates. The outcome is so rare that the indicators don't make a noticeable difference.
Or looking at it the same way, but using a different paradigm, you might imagine that you have an intervention you'd like to apply to future mass shooters. You have some kind of cost-benefit test that applies to it.
The filters you describe will not change the outcome of that cost-benefit test; they don't carry enough information.
This is a general problem with attempts to prevent outcomes that don't happen anyway.
Say you have a son who is diagnosed with Asperger's, a mild form of autism, at age 11. (By the way, while it's true that several shooters have been diagnosed with autism, most people with Asperger's are introverted and inhibited. I don't know the stats, but it would not surprise me to hear that they are *less* prone to violence than boys who do not have a psychiatric diagnosis.) Your boy now meets 2 of the 3 criteria. Do you want the doctor who diagnosed him to be obligated to send a report to defense agencies, so that, as long as he is in school, they can scan his online communications and school reports for evidence of either intent to shoot or violent instability. Because if your idea goes into effect, the doctor will have to do it. Let's say the doctor does. So one day your son has an argument with a friend over Minecraft and texts "I hate you! Drop dead!" Now whoever is monitoring him has a piece of evidence that he is violent. Then he and another kid get in a little shoving match at school, and the "fistfight" appears in the teacher's report on your son. Now he's met the violence criterion twice. Meanwhile, you know that he's a cheerful kid who has it together and has several good friends. Sure, he bickers with them sometimes. All kids do that. Want to go tell the authorities your point of view and try to get him off the watch list? Good luck with that.
Most potential perpetrators do not end up committing an attack because they are caught early on. Successful perpetrators would have to both 1) be anti-social enough to come up with a plan, 2) competent enough to go through with it – which would select heavily for Asperger's, rather than the reverse. Selecting people to monitor out of a large population for risk would have a high cost per false negative.
The sheer number of these events has been rising at a high rate for the last twenty years, which is deeply concerning. What do you think about anonymized approaches, like analyzing written homework assignments? This be done at much less than John Schilling's ~$5,000 per high-risk suspect, without the same privacy concerns.
The first part of that plan *might* be doable for $5000/person, say by delegating it to a modified chatbot. But even there, don't underestimate the overhead costs of having every homework assignment scanned and submitted to the AI.
What's the second part? When Big Brother Gemini says "Autistic Timmy's homework indicates a 2.7% chance of his shooting up his school at the next convenient opportunity", what are you going to *do* with that information, and what is it going to cost for you to do that, and how is it going to actually prevent Autistic Timmy from shooting up the school?
No, hiring a therapist to talk to Timmy isn't going to make him not shoot up the school. What else have you got?
If it accomplishes anything, it will jt hasten the inevitable day when the wannabe mass murderers switch to explosives and incendiaries. And that will not be an improvement. This is mostly an imitation game, and you have no idea how lucky we are that Klebold and Harris weren't able to get their IEDs to work. Sooner or later, someone will get it "right", and others will take note.
The therapy is less than useful per se. But the feeling of being caught by your school on grounds that other people noticed you were making violent plans or in a violent headspace – and then being grilled about what you were thinking – is what deters this. The whole fantasy is kind of nullified. If this doesn’t apply to the cases that get caught, it applies to the ones that fall through.
When I was in third grade (~2 years after the Sandy Hook attack), I said something with violent influence on a written assignment, and a teacher noticed. They called the principal of my elementary school, who in turn put me in a room and called my parents, who were told to the effect: “be thankful: this is concerning, we’ll be sure to monitor your middle-eastern-looking kiddo and give him some lessons – but hey, we didn’t call the cops”. From that (and my parent’s reaction), I learned our thoughts can and are being read by authority, and that our actions, in being informed by our thoughts, can and do contain information that indicates greater patterns in our thoughts – even if we try to hide them.
With more interactive systems, maybe Big Brother Gemini will be able to neuter violent inclination early on. Persuasion seems like a relatively simple RL problem at scale (chatbots can do far more complex procedural things), and the overhead is already being paid by Google’s safety team.
We don’t need chatbots necessarily. With transformer encoders, you can measure more dimensions of the relationships between two written documents. All schools use the same turn-in software as it stands, which already runs a ton of processing on every assignment, so the overhead is to the companies less than the schools. When people read Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto they’re more likely to use the word “surrogate” in text they write afterwards to adapt to the way that Kaczynski uses language (both the framing and repetition), *especially* if they’re being influenced by his ideas or perceive it as high status.
There’s the issue of when a surveillance technology provides credible evidence of its existence, people will price that into their behavior. Good surveillance that uses these methods might provide deliberate disinformation, like the turn-in software informing teachers that the suspected students show “signs of disengagement or asocial behavior in online class communications and school emails” (which violent actors usually do, but that doesn’t indicate written assignments as the factor).
I really don't think this is going to work the way you want it to. These people are writing their thoughts and plans on homework assignments they know their teachers are going to read, and they're posting them on social media hoping their friends will read them. They're not ashamed or afraid of anyone finding out, they *want* people to find out. They're still in the phase where they can hope that if other people know how much they are suffering, those people will do something to help.
That hope doesn't last forever, of course. If nobody does anything to help, it usually turns into despair and enduring misery; sometimes it turns into bloody violent retribution and a quick glorious end. If the thing people do to "help" is to ritually humiliate Timmy and send him off on the short bus, or back to the class in front of which he was humiliated, do you really think that makes them *less* likely to turn to Plan B?
And if Timmy's humiliation deters three more Timmies from folllowing his path, then the thing that's being deterred is the "write about your feelings and hope someone notices" part. Not the "there's no hope, might as well go out in a blaze of glory" part, because when they get to that point they're beyond humiliation.
You're dealing with a bunch of people who are suffering from pneumonia, and your "solution" is to punish them every time they cough because coughing is the first warning sign of pneumonia.
This is pretty clearly a case of the cure being worse than the disease. Mass shooters don't kill that many people in relative terms, so it's a pretty bad hill to found your dystopian police state on.
Well, I totally get being horrified by mass shootings, but I don't think your plan is realistic. It's sort of like trying to predict who's going to cause a fatal auto accident this month. We know who's likeliest to: People with lots of speeding tickets, moving violations, DUI's, previous. accidents. There are a LOT of people like that, Maybe 5 % or so of drivers. There are 233 million US drivers, so about 10 million high risk drivers. But we have 4000 auto fatalities per month in the US, and while the high risk drivers will no doubt have caused more than their share, they will not have caused all of them. Some will have been caused by people with clean driving records. Let's say the high risk drivers, while only 5% of the drivers, caused 75% of the fatal accidents. So out of these 10 million high risk drivers, only 3000 caused a fatal accident. Hardly any of them did. Trying to pick the school shooters out of the population of fucked up young males who are likelier than most to be a shooter is the same way. You know what haystack to look in, but you're trying to find a needle in it.
There is no good way to pick out the real shooters-to-be from the large group of kids at risk for becoming shooters. I doubt that even highly invasive government investigations would be able to do it -- likewise, even highly invasive government investigations would not be able to pick out the very few bad drivers who are going to cause fatal accidents this month from the ones that are not. Let's say you were willing to be very invasive. The government gets to monitor their location and cell phone use, and determine how much texting and internet browsing they do while driving. It gets to check the person's purchases and find out now much alcohol they buy each day. These horrible invasive approaches will make prediction of fatalities better, but it will still be terrible. Maybe now you will have identified the 3 million riskiest drivers, who are responsible for 85% of accidents. But still, the vast majority of even these awful drivers will not have caused a fatality. And some fatalities will still have been caused by good drivers. See how it works? You can't get away from looking for a needle in a haystack, unless, with the kids at risk for school shootings, you had an agent assigned to eavesdrop on all their communications and follow them around all day. You'd have to assign an agent to every one of those 10000 kids.
School shooters may look like low-hanging fruit -- a source of murders that is easy to get rid of. But it's not. It's high in the tree. Also, if you want to be coldly statistical about it, mass shootings account for a tiny percentage of violent deaths in the US. Here's a chart of deaths from mass shootings over the last 20 or so years: https://www.statista.com/statistics/811504/mass-shooting-victims-in-the-united-states-by-fatalities-and-injuries/ There have been only 1 or 2 years in the last 30 when the number exceeded 100. On average it's maybe 40/year over the last few years. And while the number of fatalities per year is going up, it is not going up very fast.
Consider that the open internet is scraped and monitored quite often for all kinds of things. Homework assignments are already analyzed by turn-in software to check for plagiarism, and false positives are reviewed by teachers. If you use the same methods to measure influence to things written by extremists or terrorists, this seems in turn much cheaper than funding aggressive expansion of the police force.
Sometimes people accidentally repeat words in a paragraph. The same happens with words you’ve just learned or heard. The history of your dictionary searches could likely predict the books you’ve been reading. These all reveal psychological state, sometimes very uncannily, and advanced language models can use these for specific inference.
My point is there's not much that they can do, absent concrete evidence that one of these people is planning a crime. This is as it should be. Presumption of innocence and all that good stuff.
There are many forms of monitoring that the Patriot Act / Freedom Act etc. should allow for, as well as granting search warrants as any individual becomes more at risk of violence. Often therapy or some form of forced but unobtrusive socialization can make the difference between someone acting violently or not.
Or, to borrow a phrase: sorry if I was being too terse. I am wondering why security or defense agencies can't or don't make use of information like this.
Oh I am fairly sure they do, to the extent permitted by the legal system they operate under. In other words, much of what you propose can be (and is? ) implemented in China, but is contentious here in the USA. Jay Edgar Hoover did pretty well at it. That the planet will become perfectly surveilled in the not too distant future is an outcome that I think is very difficult to avoid.
Human lives are commonly estimated as being worth ~$10E6 in modern industrialized nations. If the average terrorist/mass shooter/serial killer will kill ten people, then a countermeasure that works half the time is cost-effective at $50E6 or less. If the countermeasure starts with "here are 10,000 suspects, one of whom will be the next big killer", you can afford to spend $5000 on each of them.
What are you going to do with $5000 that gives you a better-than-even chance of figuring out whether the guy who was assessed at 0.01% probability of being the next big killer, is actually that guy?
Your estimates are assuming that these are uncorrelated, but, for example, bring male and autism are correlated.
The other thing the government can't do in the US - thanks to the first amendment - is to reduce recruitment by suppressing news stories glorifying mass shooters.
A more cynical take is that the government is maximising utility by providing television entertainment for millions of viewers at the expense of a relatively small number of people getting shot.
IMO, the realistic blackpill is that the media will always find something that bleeds to lead. The government has nothing to do with it. And likewise, enabling mass shooters does not "provide entertainment" because lurid crime news stories are limited by the number of news stories that can be active at one time more than the supply.
It's an amusing take. Could make a good short story that compares our society to a society that's more explicit about that trade (like in The Hunger Games or something).
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.
That’s true, I think it would be hard to tell for any major perpetrator in the recent past whether they would turn violent or not, even shortly before their attack. But the space of people is still relatively small.
Looking for a good book about the energy industry. Something that covers most everything (carbon based, nuclear, solar, wind, etc). Some technical depth would be good but obviously it will be limited if it covers everything. Any recommendations?
Vaclav Smil wrote about this often. There's "Energy and Civilization: A History" from 2017. I like "How The World Really Works" which is accessible to anyone, mostly about energy and climate plus the scale and difficulty of transition required, but touches on energy sources.
The Prize by Yergin is one of my favorite reads, it's about oil history.
More lecture series than book, but The Science of Energy by Michael Wysession sounds like exactly what you’re looking for, available on Audible. It’s in-depth enough that I’ve given it multiple listens and learned a ton even as a civil/mechanical engineering graduate who already knew a lot on the topic, but it’s geared towards a more general audience.
I see the UAP story pop up from time to time ... and remain a complete disbeliever.
Reports come from only military aircraft, typically from complex computer controlled aircraft equipment. Reports never come from commercial or private aviation despite these flights outnumbering military flights by some staggering amount.
Consider, that we're not using Isaac Newton's Radar anymore. Every image presented is a collection of data. Objects presented on a screen are assembled from data in a table or database, i.e. direction, strength, etc. Most of the equipment isn't on it's first generation, but has undergone several hardware and software upgrades. That means I'm writing code to interface someone else's system, on proprietary interfaces, which means we're writing the handshaking code too. If my software doesn't properly address memory, or someone else's software walks on my storage locations, we get garbage ... garbage which may just look like another 'flying' object. Did you think there are 10,000 pairs of eyeballs combing through this stuff?
Commercial aircraft just never seem to report UAPs, despite having hundreds of bored passengers, carrying cameras, taking pictures of clouds and what-not ... yet never seem to report a UAP. Private aviation (pop in his Cessna) and carrying a phone with a camera never seems to see a UAP either.
If your objection to UAPs is that the multiple independent sensors and detection systems are not doing specifically what they're designed and validated to do at the expense of billions of dollars, and that these artifacts appear across multiple generations of these systems, some of which were developed independently, or that it's a simple software glitch in processing accessing this sensor data that has been present for multiple iterations of these systems and never detected, then I don't know what to say. There are good objections to UAPs, but I don't think this is one of them.
Many reports have also been accompanied by visual confirmation, so that wouldn't track. If you want to dismiss eyewitness testimony given its unreliability, then it could indicate an equipment problem, and I can only assume the military brass would have shown *considerably* more interest in tracking the issue down as it compromises military effectiveness.
Military radar and other sensors have considerably more resolution and sensitivity than commercial radar. This can indeed produce false positives, which is why you have multiple sensors to cross check.
It's fine to be skeptical, but it's way too early to be so dismissive. There's a lot of data that permits many possible explanations, some mundane and some fantastical, but whatever the final verdict, it almost certainly won't be trivial.
Are there any examples of moves from famous human chess games that were previously considered brilliant but are now known to be unsound due to computer analysis?
Not a huge chess guy, but you may want to look into Mikhail Tal, "the Magician from Riga" specifically. He was renowned for his strategy of
A) make the board as complicated as possible by threatening everywhere simultaneously
B) hope the opponent screws up.
He would often make a "Tal move", which were moves that looked 0 iq but magically led to checkmate like 11 turns later. Tal moves don't often survive the scrutiny of computer analysis, but they're strong anyway because human opponents don't have time to calculate the entire search tree.
I had the pleasure of meeting him and photographing him at a chess tournament In NYC in the early 90s. He was all legend and no competitor at that point, but you could feel the love.
There are probably better answers, but in the Opera House Game, on move 8, Morphy developed Nc3, instead of playing Qxb7; a relative pawn sacrifice. Engines say Qxb7 is better. However, this is of course typical of Morphy, and the Romantic Era of chess generally, and this possibility was already noted by Lasker who remarked that Morphy was an artist, not a butcher. Moreover, Nc3 is still winning.
More relevant, but still not exactly what you're talking about, is Mikhail Tal vs Andres Vooremaa in which on move 14 Tal sacrificed his knight with Qg3. This isn't strictly unsound, as it isn't losing, but the engine says that after the sacrifice White is equal, whereas if he protected the knight (fxe5) it would have been +1.1.
Many ? Take any random famous game and you have a good chance of finding moves that are computer refuted but still good at the human level. For a precise example, Kasparov -Topalov Wijk aan Zee 1999, in my opinion the most beautiful game in chess history.
apropos of nothing, here is a wonderful example of (unless I miss my guess) an unsung hero of words, a laborer in the trenches deep in the dictionary yet spinning their own beauty into the world of words, just in case it happens to catch and inform some hapless writer looking for advice on capitalization like I did. Fortunately I can share a little of my joy. Worth a click:
Yet, I've never seen an explanation for why the names of the seasons aren't considered proper nouns like the days of the week and months. I asked ChatGPT and it spat out the same old pablum that seasons aren't like days of the week because they're "general periods of time" and not specific times within a cycle. Nonsense! Astronomically seasons are well-defined right down to the minute they begin. And they happen in recurring cycles like the days of the week. Ironically, there's no astronomical reason to divide a week into seven days, but there is an astronomical way to define a season.
You
What is the history of categorizing seasons as regular nouns but days of the week as proper nouns?
ChatGPT
The distinction between categorizing seasons as regular nouns and days of the week as proper nouns is rooted in the way language has evolved and how different cultures have viewed these concepts.
Seasons as Regular Nouns: Seasons are considered regular nouns because they are viewed as general periods of time that recur cyclically. The concept of seasons is universal and not tied to specific instances or unique identities. In many languages, including English, seasons are described using common nouns because they are seen as part of a natural cycle rather than as individual, unique entities.
Days of the Week as Proper Nouns: The names of the days of the week are considered proper nouns because they are specific names given to each day within a recurring cycle. Each day has its own unique identity and is treated as a distinct entity. This distinction likely originated from the historical association of each day with specific celestial bodies, deities, or religious observances, which gave them a special significance beyond just being a part of a cycle.
In summary, the categorization of seasons as regular nouns and days of the week as proper nouns is a reflection of how language and culture have evolved to categorize and conceptualize these different aspects of time.
I know the verses in The Bible that say "thou shalt not kill" are more correctly translated as "thou shalt not murder". Is the same generally true for the commandments against taking life in Buddhist and Hindu scriptures, or are those actually meant to be about killing in general?
The Buddhists don't distinguish between murder and legal killings. It's all violence that results in a karmic burden on the perpetrator(s). But it's important to note that Talmudic interpretations of the 6th Commandment extended its meaning to encompass any act of violence against others, including verbal attacks such as gossip, slander, and shaming a person in public...
I guess it depends on what your definition of "woke" is. The definition varies for the unwoked and the awoken. And AFAICS even within those camps there there's little agreement about what makes woke woke. But the idea that words can harm others goes back a long way, and it's certainly not unique to Judaism.
Matthew 5:21-22 (American Standard Version)
21 Ye have heard that it was said to them of old time, Thou shalt not kill; and whosoever shall kill shall be in danger of the judgment:
22 but I say unto you, that everyone who is angry with his brother shall be in danger of the judgment; and whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca [an expression of contempt], shall be in danger of the council; and whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of the hell of fire.
Buddhism has the concept of the four abstentions of sammā-vācā (i.e. "Right Speech") which are abstaining from lying, from divisive speech, from abusive speech, and from idle chatter because those things can cause others suffering.
Modern speech-as-violence doctrines seem to add a fifth component to mix — speech that triggers upset in the hearer that doesn't involve insults, slander, shaming, or threats (i.e. topics that trigger agitation in the hearer). From what I've seen, the claim that discussing certain topics inflicts violence on others by disrupting their comfort bubbles is shared by both the Leftie social justice woke and the Christian Right.
In Hinduism, the ideal is ahimsa, which means non-violence, but not to the extreme of pacifism. The idea is that you should try hard to avoid violence, but be ready to fight and kill if it comes to that. This is central to the Bhagavad Gita, where warrior Arjuna is told directly by God that he must fight and kill the family members and mentors who are opposing him (that sounds brutal, but well, Krishna sells it quite well, and the broader context of the Mahabharata makes very clear that the good guys tried very, very hard to avoid a war).
Buddha was pretty much a pacifist, even extending to animal life in some ways. There are five jobs that are prohibited for a Buddhist: trading in weapons, human beings, meat, intoxicants, and poison. So from what I know it is tricky to find wiggle room in the Buddha's words for killing. That doesn't stop some Buddhists from doing precisely that though (Jainism is one of the only religions that never developed theories of just war).
>There are five jobs that are prohibited for a Buddhist: trading in weapons, human beings, meat, intoxicants, and poison.
As a hobby chemist, I'm curious about more detail about the poison case.
a) Even in the Buddha's day, lye used in soapmaking was an example of a poisonous (strictly speaking, corrosive) intermediate used to produce a (mostly) harmless final product
b) "The dose makes the poison" This is more spectacularly obvious in modern times (people have poisoned themselves with vitamin A), but, even in the Buddha's day any number of folk medicines could be toxic
I think a prohibition against killing in general is likely incompatible with civilization -- sourcing food and space will be difficult without killing plants.
Also, any religion which is the ideology of any successful state is very unlikely to endorse radical pacifism for the simple reason that radically pacifism is not a winning strategy in interstate anarchy settings which dominated most of history.
In regards to not killing plants, one of the reasons that Jains are not only vegetarians but also abstain from eating root vegetables is that they don't want to kill the plants.
Although Buddhism overall has had less violent history than Christianity, Islam, Judaism, or secular religions such as Marxism and Atheism, it has not been completely non-violent in all times and places. The Dalai Lamas kept standing armies, and at least among the Mahayana of Tibet,a there were tantric rituals to help cleanse the karmic burdens of soldiers who had killed enemies (sorry, but I can't find the link to those texts, anymore).
Various Buddhist sects in 16th Century Japan formed armies which they used to protect themselves and to influence the tumultuous politics and wars of the Warring States Period. The Shoguns when they came to power stamped them out.
We also have the examples of Sri Lanka where Buddhists have been willing to wage war on the Tamils, and of Myanmar where militant Buddhists are leading a genocidal campaign against the Muslim Rohingya.
There is a lot of boredom these days, which Hoffer mentions as well: "There is perhaps no more reliable indicator of a society’s ripeness for a mass movement than the prevalence of unrelieved boredom." Are we in the midst of a mass movement, or is one on the horizon?
Most replies are misunderstanding what Hoffer meant by bored. Here's a slightly longer quote from my copy of The True Believer:
"When people are bored, it is primarily with their own selves that they are bored. The consciousness of a barren, meaningless existence is the main fountainhead of boredom. People who are not conscious of their individual separateness, as is the case with those who are members of a compact tribe, church, party, etcetcra, are not accessible to boredom. The differentiated individual is free of boredom only when he is engaged either in creative work or some absorbing occupation or when he is wholly engrossed in the struggle for existence. Please-chasing and dissipation are ineffective palliatives. Where people live autonomous lives and are not badly off, yet are without abilities or opportunities for creative work or useful action, there is no telling to what desperate and fantastic shifts they might resort in order to give meaning and purpose to their lives. "
In other words, boredom is a lack of purpose, meaning, or creative work. Staring at your phone is pleasure-seeking and dissipation, which is an "ineffective palliative". Which, yeah, I think society is starting to sense that. Doomscrolling is not satisfying, it doesn't give you purpose, it just fills time. And there are not many opportunities for creative work or useful action these days.
Yum. Give me a good potboiler novel, paper or ebook, and I'll ignore work — creative or otherwise. And I spend hours online each day researching questions across a wide range of subjects that will have no use whatsoever to my struggle for survival. Yay! I'm bored! Give me more boredom! And my life is purposeless. I'm going to die without doing anything significant. Even so, I'm enjoying it immensely. Purpose is for small minds.
>The differentiated individual is free of boredom only when he is engaged either in creative work or some absorbing occupation or when he is wholly engrossed in the struggle for existence.
If the guy insists on using words by non-standard meaning, you can't really call it a mis-understanding. It's just poor writing. Had he written instead 'There is perhaps no more reliable indicator of a society’s ripeness for a mass movement than the prevalence of lack of purpose and meaning at large.", replies would have been different.
I haven't been bored since 2014. Seriously. I remember the true, stark, and lifeless boredom of my childhood in the 80s/90s pretty well still. At any given moment now I can remove a personal sized computer from my pocket and have instant access to infinite sources of distraction and entertainment that would have looked like literal magic in 1990.
Building on what Bldysabba says, I don't think we have an abundance of boredom as we normally categorize it. I think we have a significant lack of *purpose* and also *meaning.*
We have lots of distractions, mostly our phones but also the internet generally, that stop us from feeling normal low levels of boredom that we typically associate with that feeling. But I think boredom is still related to what we often feel, which is ultimately lack of purpose and meaning. We don't seem to get involved in meaningful, fulfilling activities nearly as often. We get lost in daily entertainment and many videos of things that look like fun, without engaging first hand in things that would actually be fun and give us a more complete positive feeling.
This hit the nail on the head. I don't watch TV anymore, does anyone?, and apart from reading and writing, I do several physical pursuits everyday, and different ones throughout the year. The purpose is never to change the world, but to learn, stay vibrant, meet people. This was normal for my parents generation, but seems to have been lost.
I would argue the opposite - we have never had so much easy and cheap entertainment, and we have a dangerous lack of boredom, resulting in a shortage of movement, whether at an individual or societal level
I may be a bit too romantic about it, but I feel like easy and cheap entertainment doesn't relieve boredom but merely suppresses it, like stimulants suppress appetite but don't actually satisfy your hunger.
My partner and I are in our 30's, both ACX readers who are married due in part to this blog. We were planning to have children this year but recently found out that we both technically qualify for an Asperger's/high-functioning ASD diagnosis. (We weren't looking to get diagnosed; one of us was seeking ADHD treatment and got diagnosed that way, and the other of us found out about a childhood Asperger's diagnosis that had been kept a secret.) We are both high-functioning and independent, if a little neurotic, but we are worried that combining our genes could result in a greater chance of us having a child who is autistic to the point of being extremely disabled. Can any doctors/scientists here help us think through the following:
1) What is the increase in our risk of having a severely disabled, low-functioning child by chance, given we both have mild ASD?
2) Is it worth doing IVF to select for genes less likely to cause developmental disorders up front?
3) Can anyone recommend genetic counselors in the Bay Area who are smart and will take us seriously? So far, it seems like most medical providers do not know how to deal with the concerns of autistic adults, especially prospective parents. It feels like doctors are either brushing us off or patronizing us.
Thank you all who replied! Quick update, we had our first meeting with a genetic counselor today. We weren't expecting much based on past experiences with our health insurance, but it turns out Kaiser has just rolled out a re-vamped and updated genetic testing program this week and it's miles ahead of what other parents went through just a few years ago. They now offer more comprehensive standard tests plus chromosomal microarray (CMA) for patients like us with diagnosed developmental disorders. While imperfect, CMA seems to be the first step forward for some kind of genetic autism screening, particularly concerning severe intellectual impairment, which is what we are most worried about.
Thank you for all this information, as it helped us ask the right questions.
Just spotted this comment! Chromosomal microarray picks up on copy-number variations, which are one of the major causes of the "complex autism" I alluded to. They're not particularly common in people with "milder" autisms, especially people of well-above-average intelligence, but this is not to say they're unheard of -- some CNVs have mild phenotypes and don't cause "disability" per se. The presentation of CNVs is really variable within families, so if one is passed down, it can result in anywhere from "significantly higher-functioning than parents" to more significant levels of disability. IMO given how bell curves work it's fairly unlikely for there to be many people with CNVs amongst ACX readers, but it's not strictly impossible.
Individual CNVs are very different to one another, and if any given one is found it'll have different implications to any other. A lot of genetic counsellors are...not great with CNVs, because they're individually very rare and they have serious clinician's illusion/ascertainment bias.
If you do find a CNV, the research you can do on your own is likely better than that of any genetic counsellor or company. They're all very different to one another, and I wouldn't expect anyone who doesn't specialize in a particular one to be 1. up-to-date on the literature and 2. have really internalized "the profile of any given CNV is super broad, and includes literally-no-symptoms-at-all". If you do run into someone who researches a particular one, though, they're probably at least as excited to meet you as the inverse (we don't have much data on 'mild' CNVs).
(This is assuming you're reasonably confident in interpreting the medical literature, patient groups, etc., so it doesn't scale infinitely, but the things I tend to hear from counsellors or companies tend to be below the 'what do you get from searching Google Scholar as a reasonably comfortable-with-research person' threshold.)
This is an area in which I've done a lot of research. No one has seriously researched "how many children of autistic parents are autistic" -- and they couldn't, really, because autism diagnosis is so unclear and we're nowhere near even having good base rates -- but there's a lot you can read into what we do know.
A large share of all diagnosed "severe autism" does not naturally cluster with ASDs. "Syndromic autism" -- autism in the context of an identifiable genetic disorder -- is a relatively large share of all diagnosis; every single intellectual disability syndrome is "associated with" autism, including ones radically unlike autism (15% of people with Williams syndrome, a disorder with a characteristic behavioural phenotype of "extreme outgoingness", "strong social interest", and "piercing eye contact", are diagnosed with autism). About 20%-ish (maybe more?) of diagnosed ASDs are "complex", which means they're associated with birth defects or dysmorphic features; as time goes on, more and more "complex autism" is discovered to be caused by ever-rarer genetic disorders. "Complexity" is strongly correlated with severity.
I think the significant majority of syndromic and complex autism isn't autism at all, but a general diagnostic substitution because of the greater recognition of "autism" as a label compared to "intellectual disability". Some genetic syndromes seem genuinely associated with autism (e.g. sex chromosome aneuploidies), but -- as you'd expect -- these tend to be the *mildest* of all developmental syndromes, the ones so mild most people with them are never diagnosed, because we don't generally karyotype people because they're a little dyslexic and had speech therapy.
The "milder" autisms tend to be much more heritable, and are rarely associated with de novo mutations, which the "severe" autisms far more often are.
Neither Kanner nor Asperger conceptualized autism as something that could coexist with severe intellectual disability. Kanner thought the appearance of intellectual disability was flatly wrong, and that even autistic kids who seemed significantly impaired at a brief interaction were far smarter than they came across. Asperger thought the association was genuine, and Frith translates him as discussing "severe retardation", but this is a seeming mistranslation -- his actual descriptions correspond to mild or upper moderate ID. This same range is where Kanner found the "most disabled" of the children he diagnosed were functioning at thirty years later, and these were likely underestimates, given they had been institutionalized for decades and had little exposure to schooling. The "lowest-functioning" autisms are a much more recent construct, and remain questionably related to anything Kanner or Asperger saw. (People substantially overestimate the gap between their patients.)
None of this is to say "mildly autistic" parents never have "severely autistic" children, though the severity of autism is complicated and most people travel to multiple points-on-the-spectrum in their lives. But the connections are very murky and absolutely not additive. Everything we know implies "mildly autistic" parents will usually have "mildly autistic" children.
(postscript: I have a very strong family history of autism and, to my knowledge, zero relatives with the stereotypically "low-functioning" profile)
Some places discriminate against people with some diagnoses. And even if they do not today, there is no guarantee they won't change their mind tomorrow.
Thank you, this seems close to the information I am looking for!
It seems like the SSC survey found people with mild autistic traits don't necessarily have increased risk of very autistic children but the sample size was pretty small. However Emily Oster found the opposite in larger datasets: populations with greater proportions of mildly autistic parents had a greater chance of producing more severely autistic children. It is helpful at least to know the likelihood is so small that the data is fairly noisy; if there were a strong correlation, perhaps this question would have a more obvious answer?
Epistemic status: personal intuition, not actual medical advice.
I'm also high functioning ASD in my 30s, and my girlfriend is on the spectrum too but less high functioning due to a mix of CPTSD, depression, chronic fatigue, social anxiety and work related burnout. There is also some non-neurodivergency related history of health issues in the family as well, so we decided against having biological kids.
But in your case, I'd totally go for it. Common sense tells me to expect that on average your child would be about as high functioning as you and your partner, with possible deviations to either sides. And as you are in the top part of spectrum the risk of having disabled autistic child may be just a bit highter than average, but the chance of having a highly capable autistic child will be much more likely. And the world really needs more high functioning autists.
I don't think that IVF selection is precise enough to remove all the risks without loosing the benefits of your condition. I'm worried there is a risk that it can lead to just the selection of the most neurotipical looking embrio and so whichever autism related genes that allowed you and your partner to be high functioning will just be lost in the next generation. But maybe you can specifically talk about this kind of failure mode with a specialist.
I suppose? There are known genes to be correlated with autism so in theory you could select against them. The problem is that they are also correlated with other stuff, most notably intelligence.
I'd recommend searching this question on google scholar before seeing a professional. It's good to have your own info, to help you assess how seriously to take what the professional says. One thing to take into account is that most studies of this kind are going to concern parents who are autistic by the older, stricter definition of the term: People who are without a doubt odd, rigid, prone to repetitive fidgets, bad at social perception and interaction, etc. -- people whom you would notice are odd within 60 secs of meeting them. If you have what used to be called Asperger's, and especially if you are self-diagnosed with that form of high-functioning, subtle autism, the stats about autistic parents are not going to apply to your situation.
In Eastern Canada, there are groups of individuals falsely claiming to be part-Indian, known as the Eastern Metis. They've organized "tribes" with "chiefs" and "membership cards;" the whole deal. They've built a whole conspiratorial worldview, in which their ancestors were listed as white in censuses because they were trying to avoid the Residential School Genocide. Many are obvious grifters, looking to benefit from affirmative action. I wonder what it's like for the second generation. I bet many were told by their parents "this is just a fun cultural thing, we're basically just white people, don't take it too seriously." But I bet many others grew up believing it wholeheartedly. I'm indigenous, part of a marginalized minority; settler colonialism is the reason my family has little money, etc. Then one day they're browsing the net and they learn that, not only are they not the identity they thought they were, their whole community is fraudulent. They aren't indigenous, their tribe is not a real tribe, their chief is not a real chief, their membership card is just a worthless piece of plastic. Real Truman Show s***.
One difference would be that here, the Kemi Sámi tend towards the main center-right party of the area and their claim is that the other Sámi are safeguarding indigenousness to prevent access to land rights; the other Sámi, meanwhile, consider the Kemi Sámi a part of a plot to dilute the concept of indigeneity and fennicize the Sámi.
As I indicated in the blog post, it's best to just see "indigenous" as a word that does not really indicate things like "how long a nation has been in the country" but rather "does this group's experience pattern-match to Native Americans and their experience during the settlement of America".
What gets me is that this arrangement, whether you want to deem it privilege or not, is clearly not working. The self-governing-within-Canada demographics are have-not societies whose ails do not improve after every billion-dollar payout. They want no federal oversight to deal with issues, yet we keep returning to a point in the discourse where the activist perspective on solving problems is to just give money. Conditions are deemed colonialist.
Leaning further into independence could work in some capacity, and would be palatable to voters of all stripes. Take for example foster care. Aboriginal kids are overrepresented in this system and one of the outcries is that they're taken from their culture. I believe there is a shift in the works where their societies would take care of it instead: great. Now you're in charge. This could be extended to other areas, with fewer open questions as to where responsibility lies. I expect that federal involvement will still be needed for services (health, infrastructure). If we decry issues that fall in the federal purview, then they should set the conditions.
That's not much of a question; it is the normal practice of every culture.
The question is why white Canadians tend to advocate for giving privileges to other ethnicities and removing them from themselves. This is nothing special to Canada either, but it is at least historically unusual rather than being the continuance of an unwavering norm.
Not everyone views their own ethnic group as their ingroup and everyone else as an outgroup.
For example, there were some white people which were opposed to the enslavement of black persons.
Evolution failed to align the aims of the individual human with increasing the relative frequency of their genome in the population. Thus not all humans follow your social darwinist model of furthering the interests of their own ethnicity over others, but instead select policies for different philosophical or religious reasons.
I would argue that this leads to better overall equilibria in multi-cultural societies. If rights are granted to the ethnicities holding power only, they might quickly lose their rights if the power balance changes.
I would thus much rather be a citizen of a state which recognizes the universal human rights than being part of the ruling tribe in some unequal society.
It is certainly debatable if overshooting color-blindness is beneficial or not, but simply expecting all humans to unfairly favor their own ethnicity is treating us as dumber than most of us are.
I actually thought once with some amusement (not that I would actually consider doing this, just a thought experiment) that if I had a kid, it would be easy raise them as culturally Jewish because I have a pretty stereotypically Jewish surname (though in my case it's just German), live in a pretty Jewish milieu, and I think many people I meet already assume I'm Jewish. Then if as an adult, he finds out that he's not 'actually Jewish,' how would that affect his identity? Would he just say, 'to hell with it, I'm just going to keep being Jewish?' And how would other Jewish people regard him? As a fraud like Rachel Dolezal? At the same time, most ethno-cultural communities today accept people who were adopted by parents of said communities, and would probably see it as racist to reject them on the basis of not being 'biologically' a member of the community. But they also typically reject the idea that ethnic/cultural identity can be conscious choice - people who 'choose' a new identity are generally considered immoral frauds.
So I guess it's childhood upbringing that 'transmits' authentic identity? If so, then the children of ethnic frauds have a somewhat valid claim to continue identifying with the identity they were brought up in. I guess it doesn't seem to me like there is a coherent set of rules determining how 'authentic' ethnic/cultural identity is actually transmitted; it seems like it'd be hard to come up with such a coherent set of rules that would simultaneously deal with all of these edge cases in a way that isn't counterintuitive, but also isn't basically racist, by modern definitions. Of course in the US at least (I would guess Canada too?) much of ethnic/cultural identity is already basically LARPing, so there's already a great deal of fakery in it.
> Then if as an adult, he finds out that he's not 'actually Jewish,' how would that affect his identity?
Depends on how he finds out? Maybe he runs for political office, and an opponent notices that his ethnic claim looks a bit odd, and does some research, and next thing you know he's a laughingstock in half the country? (Not saying that this is what happened in any particular case, but it seems like something I'd try to avoid.)
Well, the question of "Who is a Jew?" is complicated enough that the only part I'm certain of, is that the Nazis were wrong.
Most branches of Judaism do, in principle, accept converts, although they're very much not "evangelical" about it. So your hypothetical kid, if they follow the Torah and integrate into Jewish culture, might not be able to claim Right of Return to Israel but they might be able to "convert" to make their religious status official.
Islam takes the complete opposite approach - recite the affirmation of faith once and you're a Muslim. Then I guess you can start learning about the culture?
The bit about childhood upbringing as authentic identity is also a huge controversy in another context, namely whether late-transitioning women can be disqualified for being "socialised male". I'm personally on the side of, you can be gay or trans even if your upbringing tried its best to prevent that.
There was a joke going around the 23andme forums to the effect of, "I wasted all that time learning Hebrew as a kid and now this genetic test is trying to tell me I'm not Jewish."
And in other news, I have a mitochondrial DNA haplotype usually found in Ashkenazi Jewish populations, and I don't even know Hebrew.
I know someone that happened to. Didn't turn out well. Wasted years of his life trying to fit in, eventually figured it out, is angry at his parents. Still has Hebrew tattoos.
We really are one thing or another. Good to be glad of whatever you and your kids actually are.
That's a little different as Judaism has a well-defined conversion pathway. Various people have found out they're not Jewish by the standards they thought they were and had to convert from time to time.
Honestly now that you get affirmative action for being some kind of minority, it's going to be kind of motivated by that.
I'm not sure that it's "necessary", but it does seem to exist. The wisdom of Chesterton's Fence aside, getting rid of it seems like it might involve a lot of ... unpleasantness.
I think, in the beginning, there was culture, or "this is the way it was done". For various reasons (geography, climate, conquest), certain cultures were dominant within certain places.
When they leave those places, are their values, habits, knowledge, etc, all useless? I like to think that they're not necessarily. Some traits can be maladaptive, sure. Sometimes you just adopt a better way of doing things. But no, I don't think culture from country of origin is completely bereft of value.
It won't be "pure" (nothing is), it will have evolved with time and various selection pressures, and it will keep evolving, but I think diversity is useful in its own right because it's important for resilience. Indigenous American culture was why Europeans knew potatoes and tomatoes were edible and great crops when they arrived (recall both plants are nightshades and most Old World nightshades are deadly poisons). Culture encodes information.
(One place I feel strongly about is indigenous land stewardship. That bridge might have already been burnt in a lot of places, and oral histories and cultural knowledge irreparably lost, unfortunately. But this is one arena you definitely want genuine indigenous people vs frauds, provided that there's enough fragments of cultural knowledge to go around and piece together what people were previously doing to manage natural disasters and prey/predator populations. It would have been damn nice for someone to have wrote all that stuff down before doing all the murder, that's for sure).
Are superficial cultural ties useless? Well, they clearly serve a purpose to the people who enjoy them. I think a lot of people have a strong, psychological need to signal belonging, and the modern liberal society which accepts everyone isn't really meeting that need (to wit, it's hard to belong to an ingroup that consists of everyone). It's mostly harmless, but can be constructive (genealogical research). It can be damaging (making up ethnic histories and customs from wholecloth, kind of like some people inventing an ahistorical "white" culture).
But perhaps the "ethnic drive" is a real thing and is a psychological force the ensures the continuation of culture. It's the memetic mechanism that keeps culture going. So in that case, it's a drive that needs to be managed. Perhaps you can manage it by making genealogical testing accessible and having a couple of Society of X Ethnicities around in major cities to teach things (languages, customs, techniques used in cooking, performance, art, etc). That would be the sensible and pragmatic way to manage the tendency for some people to be intensely miserable about not knowing their origins and not knowing what they're "supposed" to do, with the added benefit of preserving knowledge and skills that might be useful one day. Though yeah, in many cases you'll find the reason why you don't do things the way your ancestors did is because the old way took massive amounts of effort with middling results. Or maybe you'll find it's better with aid from modern technology - I mean, you no longer need to mill the flour with a donkey but sourdough bread is slightly better tolerated than yeast bread in some people with certain GI issues, and sourdough is the traditional method - so it's really good that we didn't lose the traditional way of making bread, for the benefit of people who get sick eating newer bread. And it's really useful to know how people sweetened things before the invention of high fructose corn syrup if you happen to be allergic to it.... Or if we get a corn plague that abruptly wipes out all the corn.
Does it matter if it's true or not? Is awarding people special privileges based on fake ethnicity any better or worse than awarding people special privileges based on real ethnicity?
Imagine that two people are lost at sea, with only enough food for one. One is the world’s most promising cancer researcher while the other, to be polite, has far less potential to improve humankind. Most people would wisely choose the cancer researcher.
Yet the fashionable Effective Altruism movement focuses on lower-potential people—typically, people who are struggling in poor countries. That implies the belief that all lives have roughly equal value. Of course, our hearts go out to “the least among us,” but they face so many barriers. If we care to maximally benefit humankind, we’re wiser to invest in people with great potential for ripple effect who, importantly, would not otherwise get fully funded.
For example, leading lights in the Effective Altruism movement are far from downtrodden, for example, William McCaskill, Holden Karnofsky, Peter Singer, and Zvi Moshowitz. Effective altruism might fund such people to develop ever more “ripply” altruism.
Some other possibilities for more ripply and thus more effective altruism:
— SuperCourses: online versions of standard school courses taught by dream teams of transformational instructors, augmented by vivid demonstrations and gamification. Of course, instruction would be individualized, not just in pace but in teaching approach. Machine learning would make that individualization ever better, and automatic translation would make SuperCourses available in many languages. The development of SuperCourses would enable every student, rich and poor, kindergarten through college, Alabama to Zululand, to get a world-class education. The private and government sectors haven’t funded this—I have proposed SuperCourses to top U.S. and California education officials and gotten nowhere. One reason is the fear that the teacher’s union would use its might to try to stop it to preserve teacher jobs. But if developed and disseminated worldwide, SuperCourses could be very effective altruism indeed.
— Independent researchers studying solutions that are promising but have a poor chance of success. Governmental and corporate funding sources tend to invest in institution-based researchers whose projects have higher probability of near-term success. But if the focus is on long-term risk-reward, effective altruism would include independent, unaffiliated researchers working in their home-office or garage who are exploring novel ways to, for example, lower the cost of nuclear fusion energy, develop better AI-driven models for predicting and foiling terrorism and even for assessing a war’s worthiness, e.g., the U.S. entering World War II versus the war in Vietnam or Afghanistan.
— People developing ever better mental health apps, for example, using ChatGPT. Such apps could be distributed worldwide to countries rich and poor—Cell phones are ubiquitous even in poor nations. Private sources are funding development of such apps, but such development deserves greater funding given the apps’ potentially great ripple effect.
— Researchers studying the enhancement of reasoning ability, impulse control, and altruism. For largely political reasons, those research areas are underfunded by government and corporations but, with sufficient ethical guardrails, such research has great ripple potential to provide major benefit to humankind.
— People developing software that matches mentors with protégés, available worldwide. It would be like match.com but for mentor/protégé, relationships—Many protégés and mentors say that mentorship has been among their life’s greatest learning experiences. Such software would facilitate that. Alas, the matching industry, despite having been around for decades, has remained focused on romantic relationships. That makes mentor-matching apps a good candidate for effective altruism.
Again, it’s understandably tempting to want to help “the least among us,” those with the greatest deficits. After all, we feel good in helping them and it’s a fashionable form of virtue signaling. But if we truly care about humankind and are willing to focus on the greatest ultimate benefit, ripple should be the core criterion for determining what is maximally effective altruism.
Could you please provide evidence for your assertion that Zvi Mowshowitz is "a leading light" in EA? A quick search provided multiple examples where he is at least sceptical and plausibly at pains to distance himself from EA.
Malaria presents one of the major obstacles to the development of Africa, as do other endemic diseases common in the continent (e.g. trypanosomiasis). (The other major obstacle is the extremely poor institutions there.) The development of China into a first world country will undoubtably unlock an enormous number of intelligent researchers of great value to the world; similarly, African development would result in 2+ billion more healthy people in developed countries, some of whom would no doubt provide useful scientific and technical insights. Productivity per worker in African countries which received PEPFAR aid from the USA went up significantly compared to countries without it; disease is a major obstacle to economic development, and economic development underlies the potential of people to contribute positively to the world.
The entire argument here is "Africans are fundamentally inferior, stupid people, who could never build anything of value," repeated endlessly. I'm not really interested in engaging with it because it's something only a very stupid racist would say, but since I know you will take this as an excuse to claim you are correct: in order for you to be correct, every single black country must be a miserable failure of a country with broken institutions. If even one isn't, it proves that it is not purely a product of genetic heredity. Botswana, the Bahamas, and Seychelles are all doing quite well at displaying the capacity of those of African descent in creating and sustaining institutions.
Nitpick: Zvi has repeatedly stated that he doesn't consider himself an EA and finds it a flawed movement, albeit one with occasionally interesting ideas and a lot of natural overlap with [r/R]ationalists. With regards to charity specifically, he thinks it's often possible to achieve high impact with local donations, for some of the same reasons you're arguing against EA here, but also because it's much easier to check the receipts when recipients aren't halfway around the world or whatever. Betting on the metis line vs the episteme line. Did you mean Scott instead?
> ripple should be the core criterion for determining what is maximally effective altruism.
You also need to account for the probability of failure, which is often quite high.
Gamification is sometimes actively harmful. My kids are already motivated to learn math on Khan Academy, but they have to wait for the animations of the fireworks to finish. I am already motivated to learn languages on Duolingo, but I have to skip a few screens telling me how many "xp" and "gems" I have collected today, how many more should I collect today, and how do I compare to people I don't know and don't care about.
Anyway, Khan Academy exists, and is quite good. And translated to many languages. Do we see any great ripple caused by it? If not, what makes you believe the next time will be different?
Researchers often spend tons of money producing research that does not replicate. Do you know how to make this process more efficient?
Is there any evidence that mental health apps using ChatGPT actually help?
...in other words, there is a very high risk of spending lots of money on something that seems to promise a great ripple, but then it will turn out to be... just another ordinary thing.
The 'lost at sea' metaphor doesn't really capture the actual situation, and so misses the core idea of EA.
If you wanted to express the real-world situation as a 'lost at sea' metaphor, it'd go something like this:
Two people are lost at sea. One is adrift in a boat filled with provisions following a maritime disaster that made international news headlines; the other is adrift in a practically empty boat following a maritime disaster that barely received two sentences' coverage on page 19 of the Cornish Post.
We only have a very limited supply of provisions that might just-about keep one person alive until they can be rescued; should we choose who gets our provisions based on how many provisions are already in their boat, or on how much media coverage their respective maritime disaster generated?
(If we *must* contrive to bring the cancer research thing into this metaphor somehow, I think the least-bad match for the real world might be, "the well-provisioned boat guy has a 0.00000001% chance of making a meaningful contribution towards curing cancer, and the ill-provisioned boat guy is making a 0.00000001% contribution towards elevating his developing world society to a first-world standard of living.")
For the two people lost at sea, I'd choose the most aesthetically pleasing of them.
Also, your ideas for mostly sound like "hey, <scam> is really big right now, what if we extend <scam> to cover even more of our lives". Mental health apps and matching apps aren't making the world a better place.
The value of a marginal dollar is orders of magnitude greater for these lower potential people. Relatively small interventions can create prosperity in the sense of successful small businesses, more education, ability to plan for the future, etc etc.
High potential people cannot reach that potential without a robust society to support them. It's a mistake to attribute 100% of the success to the last link in the chain. The existence of a robust social "substrate" is essential. EA interventions (e.g. in Africa) conribute towards the quality of this substrate.
So, this "egalitarianism" you're ranting against is something I never claimed. I also never claimed that African countries are free of social dysfunction. The material wealth and technology of the 21st century certainly gives those countries a leg up, but there are also downsides (brain drain is a prominent one you already mentioned).
Intelligence is not a hard prerequisite for being a productive member of society. Stability and culture are also important factors. You should go outside more and see for yourself. The social capacity of the western nations you laud so much is in alarming decline, and I don't think we've gotten dumber.
The most valuable lives are those of the people who can do work that helps many, via ripple effect, People who are poor and struggling are "lower potential" people. Seems to follow from this that the more accomplished someone is at skills that can have a big ripple effect, the more valuable their life is. But by that logic, the lives of the poorest people is of least value. Why bother helping them at all? At least, why bother helping them before one has helped all the people who are better off, who have more potential value to help others? Even if someone who is not destitute never makes any effort to help others, they at least have the potential to. So let's be realistic here and leave the dirt poor til last, which is where they have always been.
It's a wonderful thing when one's theory supports a status quo in which one has a comfortable spot.
But Hammond, your belief that the Africans are so motherfucking stupid that it is not worth our while to aid them is irrelevant to my point. I was not urging OP to show more enthusiasm for helping Africans, I was pointing out an absurdity in OP's basic idea: Resources should go to those who can help the most via ripple effect, and thereafter to those that can help second most, etc. The destitute are uneducated, ill, burdened by problems, etc. and have nothing to give. So by that logic they never qualify for any resources at all. Why send ripples to people who aren't going to be able to send out little ripples themselves? If you're going to make the case that Africans are hopelessly stupid, it's important to try to think clearly in these discussions. Otherwise somebody might think you're. a stoopit motherfucking African. Listen, just to stay safe look down at your hands on the keyboard once in a while when typing out diatribes. Are the looking browner? UH OH! Time for a break.
Could use info about options for someone I know who is getting an advanced degree in a highly technical STEM field. What they study is abstruse and has no practical application, so the natural path for them is to become a university professor. However, they need a fallback, because there are not enough faculty jobs to go around. They are extremely gifted at math, and good at the kind of coding that's used in their field, and could probably be hired as quant or something similar where they use their math talents in the service of the finance industry. However, their values are such that working in business or finance is out of the question. I was wondering if Effective Altriusm, either the organization or the activities they support, might have a place for someone like this: an extremely introverted math prodigy with few outside interests who would throw themselves into a job where they believe they are helping the world.
Serious answer: the NSA, specifically the side of the house that is tasked with protection of domestic (not just government!) communication & information systems.
Thank you! Do you think there are jobs where they might be presented with some challenging math-related tasks? This person really is extraordinarily talented. They're the sort of person who you'd have wanted working on breaking code in WW2. And they are not difficult to be around -- just sort of deeply disengaged.
Also, one of the jokes was that mathematicians there love their work so much, that the only way they leave is in a pine box. Why bother with a silly thing like "retirement," pfft!
Good point! And, as quantum computers get better, and RSA-style public-key encryption gets more and more exposed, quantum-resistant encryption is becoming more and more critical - even to us just-civilians trying to safely use a credit card on the internet.
Thank you. I did do the search. Do you think there are jobs where some of the math tasks would be challenging? This is somebody who could take on very difficult problems. They should be up at the top of the How Hard the Tasks are hierarchy, but definitely not high up in management.
Semi-joking answer: work on changing their values. It's pretty bizarre to me for someone to be against working in *any* business. There are tons and tons of businesses that make unambiguously useful stuff.
In general, operations and logistics are good places for people who are good at math but also want to see the concrete good their work does.
This person is very inflexible -- a math prodigy who is way past the introverted and a bit odd end of the autistic spectrum. I understand that people can help the world run better in all kinds of ways, some of them business, but this person is determined to be doing work directly for a helping organization. It is very hard for them even to consider anything other than being a college professor. Their flexibility is maxed out.
mmm, I see. It's a tough ask though. Academia is a tournament profession and I would discourage people from going into it without a solid plan B. Some EA organization may indeed be the best option.
GPT-6 requiring ~0.1-10% of all world compute to train isn't all that outlandish compared to other major industrial goods. This report [1] says that aluminum production requires ~1.5% of all electricity in the US. Aluminum is great, but it doesn't exactly dominate the public discourse. A one-off 10% of all compute for ~6-12 months might only register as a "fun fact" level of economic / environmental impact (e.g. "did you know that concrete production is responsible for 5% of all global CO2 emissions?").
Then again, energetic and compute costs to train bigger and bigger AI models might get into crypto or private jet territory, where the environmental impact is overemphasized because AI/AGI falls into the same tech bro / silicon valley elites sphere of negative emotional connotations.
If aluminum and concrete production suddenly stopped, it would have massive negative effects on not just the world economy but life as we know it. OpenAI could disappear tomorrow and nothing of real value would be lost.
>OpenAI could disappear tomorrow and nothing of real value would be lost.
That was probably also true in the first few years of industrial production of aluminum and reinforced concrete too. Give it a decade or so and OpenAI's models will be something akin to white-collar concrete--a nearly-ubiquitous "glue" or "foundation" for office and information work.
That's unclear. OpenAI disappearing would, by my estimates, be a good thing, but it could also be tremendously harmful. Imagine GPT-6 being the system that cures cancer and solves climate change.
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OpenAI and its closed-source contemporaries are purportedly the main drivers of the economy right now.
Remember all the economists that predicted a recession in 2023? Have you seen the litany of economic indicators that have consistently pointed towards a downturn for the past 2 years?
One of the main arguments about why the 2023 recession never came is that the economy is being buoyed by a burst of economic productivity, driven by none other than AI. This is why Nvidia's stock has risen dramatically (Nvidia, which produces graphics cards used by AI, had its value increased by the size of *Netflix* over *a single day* recently).
Nvidia's ascent represents the increase in supply of AI computational power, but anecdotes indicate a high demand as well. Lawyers are currently saving their clients billable hours with an AI law consultant that has read every law since 1850. Doctors are saving lives with the help of AI.
The anecdotes abound, but the conclusion is inescapable: The disappearance of OpenAI and its cohorts, at this very moment, would almost certainly plunge the global economy into a recession.
The stock market can plausibly be driven by AI hype because it is forward looking, but there's no way that AI had a meaningful macroeconomic impact in 2023. That doesn't even pass the laugh test.
I wish them well. I, personally, really want to _see_ true AGI and have a nice quiet chat with it.
>Lawyers are currently saving their clients billable hours with an AI law consultant that has read every law since 1850.
Is it really that reliable?? I've read of at least two cases of lawyers humiliating themselves by taking LLM (I think it was GPT4) output as trustworthy, and finding that it was citing nonexistent cases.
I keep asking GPT4 simple chemistry questions, and it keeps getting them pretty badly wrong. For a simple example https://chat.openai.com/share/7faacb6b-a487-494f-b0b7-4a071798fb1c . I asked it some simple cerium chemistry and, amongst other things, _it_ came up with the "equation":
2CeCl4(aq)+H2(g)→2CeCl3(aq)+2HCl(aq)+Cl2(g)
which doesn't even balance. GPT4 put 8 chlorine atoms on the left and 10 on the right.
Partly this distinction is about taking away something that already exists instead of preventing something from existing. If we removed all planes from the sky that would be a big deal now, but obviously wouldn't have made a difference to life in 1900. Removing OpenAI right now would cause zero major problems because there are no major systems that rely on it. Give it 10 years and maybe we're relying on it the way we rely on aluminum and concrete. But maybe not.
As for "cured cancer" - at least that would mostly be a one-off and we can still enjoy the benefits of successful research even if it's turned off and doesn't continue producing new research.
The Tuo lightbulb claims to correct circadian rhythm issues without bright lights by using custom LEDs tuned to specific frequencies of orange and violet light that are present at sunrise and sunset. Their studies so far have produced what appear to be dramatic results (but with a small sample size of mostly grad students and postdocs in their own lab). Sounds too good to be true, but if it really works it could be a huge improvement in QoL for people with CRDs and approximately all teenagers.
The implication that particularly specific frequencies trigger the effect is implausible. The mechanism they propose explicitly uses the normal cone cells which are used for vision, so it's really just appropriate colours not more specific frequencies than that (assuming their method works at all). They make a big point of it being a comfortable not excessive light level, but also use rapidly alternating blue and orange lights which seems like it'd be way more uncomfortable than just bright white. If the changes are too quick to be perceptible, then they're probably also too quick to have an effect since again, the system that's supposed to cause this effect is part of the visual system (I guess it's possible that higher-level visual processing ends up filtering out the higher frequencies of strobing but this doesn't affect the cicardian cycle things, but that seems unlikely).
I'm saying that a protester self-immolating is very upsetting, but given we're in the middle of a genocide, there is very little scope for protesters to move the dial.
(I'm just very numb to more innocent deaths at this point)
Israel are our friends. It's different when you see your friends slaughtering tens of thousands of civilians, destroying infrastructure and homes (and this is after decades of occupation and refusing to negotiate for their freedom)
I was numb after the Syrian war too. One significant difference though is that people don't treat Netanyahu the way they treat Assad.
At this point I sort of see Isreal as "oh yet another Middle Eastern/African basket case" and noone pays much attention to those wars either, but the difference is that Isreal once aspired to something more than that. Also, Isreal has nukes, so there's that, too.
With 98% of the deaths on one side, the side that has lived under occupation for most of a century? ~1 million Gazan homes have been destroyed, almost all their hospitals have been bombed, they have no electricity or fuel, and food is starting to run out.
While there may be people who genuinely believe masks are completely useless, a better case against masking as a social standard, at least during the acute phase of the pandemic, was that even if masks do work to some degree, if they don't work to the same degree as people *believe* they work, it will lead to masked people acting in ways that they wouldn't have if they know were aware of the actual efficacy level, ie. stop distancing and go out and about even while sick in cases where they wouldn't have otherwise done so.
'course, at this point pretty much no-one (who isn't wearing masks anyway) is socially distancing and the society as a whole operates roughly the same as pre-pandemic, apart from increased WFH (I wonder if there are studies on whether there's been permanent cultural changes on things like handwashing or staying home when sick?), so this is a bit of a moot point.
(I do believe masks are useful, but) Minimizing the odds of having a macroscopic piece of snot land on other people's faces, clothes or other possessions seems like a sufficient reason on its own.
I think about face masks as more like a way to somewhat protect _other people_ from whatever _I_ have, basically a better version of covering my mouth.
I don't think my mask would protect _me_ from COVID, don't know if that counts as 'masks are useless'
I would count "protecting other people" as "useful", but yeah, selfish incentives matter a lot; it is easier to sell something that protects you than something that helps you protect others. Nonetheless, we obviously cover our mouths to protect others.
They're probably mostly useless (like, 10% or lower effectiveness) unless they're proper respirators because covid mostly spreads in aerosolised form rather than as droplets and surgical masks don't do much except for droplets, and because I have a beard N95 masks don't seal properly on my face so they're not very effective. Yes, this means I am choosing to raise the covid risk of myself and everyone around me by a few percent because I can't be bothered shaving and buying respirators, and I'm worried about the social stigma of being seen as excessively safety-conscious and hiding my face. I dunno; I think there are only a few places where I'd want to wear a mask, like on the train, and I haven't seen anyone else wear one one the train for months even if they're from a vulnerable group.
I cover my mouth and nose when I sneeze because A) not everything is aerosolised and some things do spread as droplets, and B) people might yell at me.
I think that only P95 masks (or better) are useful against Covid, anything less was just security theater. I cover my mouth because getting droplets on the person in front of me is impolite. I also do it when I'm alone because I don't like covering my computer screen or other objects with my snot.
I think N95 masks definitely worked. I knew pre-vax people working with covid patients who never got covid and only had N95 protection. But I'd agree surgical masks are questionable at best for covid protection.
I have another answer that is orthogonal to my previous comment. Quite simply, the proof is in the pudding. Certain behaviors (masking, vaccination) were sold to us as "the only way out of the crisis" (those are literal words uttered by my local politicians, over and over). In practice, it turned out that herd immunity was the *actual* way out of the crisis.
This shifts the calculus of any measure purely towards personal benefits. You can mask for your own protection (if you think the tradeoff is worth it), but there is absolutely no reason to make the behavior compulsory.
Anyways, I'm curious why you're bringing this up now. Covid has barely been a blip on the radar for several years in my neck of the woods. I understand it's different in other places. It was bizarre watching the latest GDQ and seeing the people there act as if it was still 2020.
It had limited impact on *transmission*, leading to almost no impact on herd immunity, which is what our politicians falsely promised. If you are out and about in society, you *will* get exposed to covid over and over. No amount of vaccination was going to change that after omicron. In the end, herd immunity was achieved through repeated exposure, not vaccinations.
Also, less of this please. Don't put the most extreme possible position in my mouth.
People were exposed over and over again, and then eventually herd immunity was achieved (NOTE: this waxes and wanes of course as immunity fades over time).
The point is: repeated exposure to the actual virus builds up much stronger immunity than vaccines. So we were *always* going to have a period of time where the virus runs rampant through the population. Vaccination alone was not enough to prevent this. The measures such as covid certificates were pretty strong restrictions on our personal freedom which ultimately didn't change this reality.
Because it's only now that I realized that the argument against face masks (they do not offer 100% protection, therefore worthless) applies even more so to things that most of us already do and that are not considered controversial.
Probably it's a question of timing -- everything we were taught to do as children is normal, everything we were told recently to do is an outrageous limitation of our freedoms. Most people would probably refuse to wipe their butts if someone proposed it as a new thing today. The effectiveness is merely an excuse: no one really measures the exact effectiveness of covering mouth or wiping butt, but people seem okay with doing that anyway.
Almost nobody believes that face masks are *completely* useless against COVID in all situations, and this belief in its literal form has never been a significant part of the political discourse anywhere I am aware of. More modest beliefs are frequently expressed in colloquial language as "masks are useless", which says nothing other than that most people aren't pedantic nerds. You are tilting at straw men, and your question is nowhere near the "gotcha" you imagine it to be.
I think there's been a lot of "black and white" messaging on both sides. There's apparently a lot of people who think that either something is completely effective, or not effective at all. And it's shocking how many people operate on some sort of binary model of infection, where either you are "clean" or you "have covid".
I would not be surprised if there were a number of people who grew tired of hearing "masks are effective" from sources which they knew to be untrustworthy, and then heard "masks won't stop you from getting covid", and so concluded that "masks are ineffective".
And I have actually heard a couple people say that, but then clarify that they were only talking about cloth masks. (Which still help reduce the number of virions entering the body!) To them, apparently "masks" meant the type of cloth masks that church groups were sewing in the early days, and maybe surgical masks too, while I assume they probably refer to all the fancy masks as "N95s" or something like that.
I'm a lifelong holy warrior against straw men in discourse, as my long-suffering family members could attest. However I must regrettably say that this is not such an example. There are plenty of people in the US who think and say that "face masks are completely useless against COVID in all situations", exactly as stated. I've met several such individuals myself despite not residing in a politically/socially conservative area and they are "loud and proud" with that belief. Several current members of the US Congress appear to hold that view, along with members of various state legislatures, etc.
>Several current members of the US Congress appear to hold that view, along with members of various state legislatures, etc.
So this is a case where one might have had hopes for the intelligence of a congresscritter or (even less plausibly) for its honesty, but one must abandon any hopes for both in the same critter? :-)
<Almost nobody believes that face masks are *completely* useless against COVID in all situations, and this belief in its literal form has never been a significant part of the political discourse anywhere I am aware of.
Actually there are a LOT of people whovbelieve masks are completely useless. I was on medical Twitter all through the pandemic, and many commenters on the medical professionals I followed were convinced that masks make zero difference. If by political discourse you mean discourse by politicians, I'm sure there must be politicians who also believe masks are nothing but theatre. I mean, RFK Jr. is sure that childhood vaccinations are unnecessary and harmful, & has talked up that idea in many settings. Thinking masks are useless, while dumb, is not as dumb as RFK's vax views.
Covering yourself while sneezing is pretty much the equivalent of not spitting on other people and has little to do with practical concerns about spreading specific diseases. At least for me the vast majority of sneezing I've ever done is due to allergies which, as far as I know, aren't contagious; and on the opposite side, we don't expect that never ever getting sneezed at is going to prevent you from catching the flu from a nearby sufferer.
It depends on what "prevent" means. I think most of us *do* think that never ever getting sneezed at will give you a *lower chance* of catching the flu than getting sneezed at by someone with the flu will (which is one thing that "prevent" might mean). We don't think it will reduce the probability to zero (which is another thing that "prevent" might mean).
My assumption is that for popular endemic diseases - flu, rhinovirus and nowadays also Covid - the bottleneck that determines how often I get sick is my immunity and *not* the opportunities to get infected, which are so numerous for me (in large part due to multiple children bringing home all the pathogens as frequently as *their* immunity allows) that they are "saturated" and so even a significant reduction of the chance of catching the flu (or Covid) *at that day from that person* has an insignificant impact on the total number of times I'll catch the flu (or Covid) per year or per lifetime; so a usable preventative measure has to offer a *drastic* reduction in the chance to infect or it's not making any difference at all and is not worth any tradeoffs or inconvenience.
But the immune system is rarely 100% efficient, it's more like "your chance of becoming sick is X when exposed to 1 million copies of virus, Y when exposed to 1 billion copies", and in most cases X<Y and the difference is quite significant.
The ballpark math I'm thinking about is that for the current seasonal flu strain I "exchange rebreathed air" with 1-5 infected people every day, so 100+ potential infections per season. If the chance to catch flu from one of them is 90%, the chance of catching that strain during that season is ~100%; if the chance to catch flu from one of them is 10%, the chance of me catching that strain is still ~100%, if the chance to catch flu from one of them is 1%, the chance of me catching that strain is still more than 66%. So that's what I mean by "it should be *very* effective or it's useless" as it starts making a difference only if the chance of infection becomes very low (<1%), and getting from 90% to 10% is useless.
"Exchange rebreathed air" is vague though (sitting face to face in a small room for hours is different from being five meters from each other in a bus for 20 minutes), and probably misses a few relevant metrics e.g. estimating how long an average portion of air is outside of their lungs before entering yours, which is relevant if virions degrade on their own or as a result of microdroplets drying/cooling/etc. The difference in the number of intact virions reaching your membranes might be several orders of magnitude, easily. Also the sick people are different too (I remember that superspreader Korean woman). Which means any model that implicitly assumes the potential infections are about equal is probably as useless as one estimating meteorite impacts by assuming them all to have ~equal mass.
It's plausible that if a sick person is in your household, then even with a mask, they might be spreading so many copies of the virus, that all that matters is whether your body's initial response was enough to fight it off (and if so, then it will be active enough to continue fighting it off for the rest of the exposure). But when it's a person sitting a few seats away from you on a bus or in a classroom, it seems to me that both the intrinsic probability of fighting off a significant exposure, and the extrinsic probability of getting a significant exposure, are relevant. It's not like one of them is close enough to 100% or 0% that it can be ignored.
> the bottleneck that determines how often I get sick is my immunity and *not* the opportunities to get infected
I disagree, simply because I observe that I'm much more likely to get sick if someone else in my household is sick than otherwise. I don't think my exposure to germs while going about my daily business is anywhere close to saturated.
I mean "saturated" by that if you don't get infected today, you'll get infected a week later, as you'll get repeated chances continuously so much that you're unlikely to last through the particular strain's epidemic season without getting immunity, and "someone else in your household being sick" determines *when* that happens, not *if* it does.
Because pretty big droplets spew all over the place when I don't. Facemasks obviously help if people sneeze into them in lieu of not covering their mouth at all. That's not what I've observed though, which is people wearing masks, *taking them off* (!!!) to cough or sneeze, then putting them back on. Absolutely moronic.
In terms of protecting people against the mixing of pathogens into the air during regular breathing, it's pretty clear that any mask which doesn't noticeably impede your breathing does not meaningfully filter the air in either direction. Even if it did, then touching the outside of the mask would be a pretty big no-no. Again, this does not match my observation of how masked people actually behave.
FWIW, I do mask up voluntarily when I *know for a fact* that I am sick.
> *taking them off* (!!!) to cough or sneeze, then putting them back on. Absolutely moronic.
Saw that too. Ugh. Maybe not moronic, more like "I'm forced to wear this mask for stupid reasons I don't care about/for my own protection but it's uncomfortable to sneeze while in it". Or "I'm not sick, my sneeze won't hurt anyone".
I have found N95 and N99 masks that do not noticeably impede breathing, and they definitely filter air meaningfully. That's what the 95 and 99 in the ratings mean. For me, at least, masks that actually lay up against my lower face, especially the tip of my nose, make me feel suffocated. The ones that have a sort of beak that is like a tent over the lower face are quite tolerable. There were a few occasions when I left a store where I had masked, forgot I had a mask on, and biked all the way home without noticing the mask -- even though my ride home s uphill and has a few sections that have me panting.
I do sympathize with people who remove the mask when they sneeze. If you are repeatedly sneezing inside of your mask, you end up with a wet mask and a runny nose that you cannot blow. Lifting the mask but then sneezing into a handkerchief or your inner elbow seems like it would keep you from spraying big droplets out into the air, so seems possible to me that a sneeze done that way does not put any more germ-filled aerosols out into the air than a single non-sneeze exhale. Why would it?
But in general, yeah, people have not been informed well about masks and what works and what doesn't. Kind of rare these days to read someone complaining about how dumb the public is with mask usage. Hardly anyone is masking these days. Are you still seeing people masking but then doing things that neutralize the benefits of the mask?
I've found that the people around me don't enjoy it when I spray them with fluids from my mouth.
Edit to add: That probably wasn't the most productive way to say that. I guess I'd say that it's for the same reason that I wear headphones when I'm listening to music. Or when I'm gassy, I hold on until I'm outdoors (and away from people).
I think it's mostly just politeness. If I'm actually sick, I stay away from people, to the best of my ability. (I've mostly found that it is little kids who don't cover their mouths.)
Transwomen breastfeeding. Last week I realised this is actually a thing that is physically possible. Going on Twitter to learn more about was a mistake ofc, but the shitstorm was somewhat entertaining to watch (takeaway: everyone thinks everyone else is a pedo). Looking at the literature, it is almost non-existant (I found ~10 papers that were relevant, wrote an article here https://valentinsocial.substack.com/p/can-transwomen-breastfeed). My conclusion is, there are no obvious risks that we know of right know, but we definitely need more research if this is a thing that is going to happen more in the future.
Just out of curiosity - why would one have a prior that this wasn't possible, given that lactation isn't particularly correlated with breast size (or rather, that past some Minimal Viable Breast development, the rest is just subcutaneous adipose commentary)?
Have always wondered if it might be an interestingly different experience (on both ends), but obviously the intervention arm is pretty underpowered compared to the control group. And one does not simply ask around "hey, would anyone be willing to volunteer their baby so I can try breastfeeding?" But I notice that even if I somehow had my own biological kid, it'd feel...more...correct to have the actual-mother do the honours. (And not just because it messes with hormone levels. Prolactinoma isn't a fun shadow to live under.)
I knew nothing about the difference in biology between male and female breasts, I had just assumed that male milk glands are a leftover and not something that can function at the level of female glands. Also it's worth noting that males breastfeeding is not something that happens apart from very few exceptions, so even if you had a baby you probably wouldn'y have a choice whether or not to breastfeed it unless you were willing to do hormone therapy and take drugs.
Ah...I came away from highschool biology with the simplified understanding that female is the default human template, which Y chromosomes graft some additional software and hardware patches on top of, making various features dormant without actually removing the functionality. Breasts being one such feature, though not usually a relevant concern in this context outside of gynecomastia. So the assumption would be that this is possible, although unlikely and almost certainly unwanted. Maybe that was a quirk in my schooling though.
Sorry, I guess I wasn't explicit: I myself am part of the minority of the transwomen minority who're capable of lactation. But stepping it up to full-on breastfeeding is still mostly speculative without the relevant suckling stimulus, hence the curiosity. At any rate, thanks for the post. Relevant To My Interests, surprisingly hard to find information like this going down the typical gender rabbitholes.
Oh that's a pretty cool metaphor femal/male bodies!
Yeah, information on the topic is scarce and spread out, that was one of the reasons I wrote this post, maybe it can serve as a reference point for anyone looking for some facts without the usual opinions that surround this subject
Is it even an exonym? It seems to be credited to a biologist named Dana Defosse, and casual searching hasn't found any evidence that she wouldn't identify herself as cisgender.
Yeah I saw a few stories about cisgender man breastfeeding as well. Crazy stuff, never thought how similar the male and female bodies are in this manner
I have been wondering why such a huge percentage of people in US TV commercials are African American? If I had to guess, I would say that they are three or four times over represented.
Possible answers:
1) I am wrong and over-estimating
2) Blacks either watch more TV relative to their population, or more commercial (non streaming) TV
3) Blacks are more receptive to advertising (ie a target market)
4) Advertisers feel good and diverse about themselves by featuring black actors, and the cumulative effect is to be wildly over-represented
5) Marketers have found that ads with black actors perform better relative to other actor distributions (they sell more or improve brand image)
6) Advertisers come from urban areas and are unaware of the actual demographics of the country?
7) Advertisers are shooting for diversity, and the cumulative effect is wildly unrepresentative?
Any others? Any feedback on which of these is plausible? Is it perhaps some combination of these? Anyone in Marketing familiar with research on the topic (I was in Marketing, but have been retired long since before this trend started, but our main spokesman 15 years ago, was indeed a black male).
African Americans are a very sizeable demographic in some parts of the US, namely the southeast, and have been that way for centuries, long before more recent immigrant groups.
Anyway, the point of the advertising is to show that they're for everyone, not to simulate a statistical sample of the US population.
Showing black people in media has been common since the 70s. And the change before that was the civil rights movement and the reduction in legally enforced racism.
It's the 'progressive' response to the killing of George Floyd:
1. Let young men loot and burn several cities.
2. Blame all police.
3. Put lots of black people in toothpaste commercials.
Apparently it never occurred to them to demand an end to any claimed 'immunity' for police from both criminal and civil prosecution, or direct police agencies to train recruits appropriately regarding constitutionally-guaranteed civil rights that come into play with the use of force.
Would-be conservatives are just too dumb to know they should care.
I wonder if there's some element of, black people and black culture seem cool/authentic to most Americans, in a way that lends credibility to advertisements?
I don't watch enough TV to notice trendlines in...blackvertising, but I always figured it was something like, this is the most important token box to check off, the one people will get most mad about flubbing, let's at least get that one right. And on the flip side, I kind of implicitly get the message as a non-black minority* that they're supposed to be, like, a stand-in for The Rest Of Us. Not like, one minority to rule them all, but the whole...judge a society by its least well off, that kind of thing. As black America goes, so goes the rest of minority America. Or that's always been the perception I've had, anyway.
Maybe there's also some historical first-mover-advantage reasons, coming first in the civil rights sequence, and thus having the most time to cultivate a robust presence in such industries. Not to mention the sports-to-salesman pipeline, which is probably a huge contributor.
Also, other minorities seem to be underrepresented? The US Hispanic population is like 19% and the black population is closer to 13%. Hispanics seem super underrepresented in pop culture and media.
A fun side point is that the same phenomenon happens in Australia too, where black people (African-type black people, not Aborigines) are just 1.3% of the population, and vastly outnumbered by most other ethnic minorities you could think of. And the ones that _are_ here are mostly Sudanese and Somalian refugees, who don't exactly have a lot of disposable income.
I don't want to use the term "virtue signalling" because it leads to arguments about the choice of words, but let's just say... you know that thing that the term "virtue signalling" points to? This is that thing.
I suspect that's just a side effect of the global influence of American media. It's the same reason Swedish teenagers ask to be read their Miranda rights.
Honestly the population of Aborigines who are both (a) actually recognisably Aboriginal and not just 1/16th, and (b) good-looking enough to be a model (and disciplined/sober enough to hold down a job) is pretty tiny.
What's really weird is that Africans are more common in ads than Asians, who outnumber them significantly, and also do a _lot_ more shopping.
My guess is that a few of these effects are going on.
The biggest one is probably something like advertisers finding that an ad is more effective at convincing members of a group that a product is for them if the ad visibly shows a member of that group using the product. If all that matters is that at least one person of your group use the product in the ad, then advertisers will include one ad with a member of each group in their rotation. Small groups will end up over-represented, and large groups will end up under-represented.
A secondary effect is that some groups (notably urban liberals) care about whether a product is seen as *only* for one group, and showing members of a variety of groups using the product helps counteract that potential problem.
I think both of these effects are historically situated. In some contexts, members of some minorities are willing to let members of other groups stand in for them. For instance, at some points in time, young girls were willing to identify with a protagonist who was a young boy, but young boys were not willing to identify with a protagonist who was a young girl, so children's movies generally featured a young boy as protagonist if they wanted to sell to a wider audience. As another instance, there might be some groups that really *don't* want to use a product that is seen as one that members of other groups might use - if you want to target those audiences, you have to *not* include members of other groups in your ads.
Based on stats I've come across, #1 is false{1} and [#2 is true](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/black-audiences-consume-media-tv-group-want-better-representation-rcna138423). #3 seems plausible, and I do vaguely recall seeing something about lower-class groups being more susceptible to advertising, but I can't find it now so maybe I'm wrong. #4 and #7 fit my intuitions strongly, especially since marketers are probably verbally-tilted (in terms of IQ), and people with a verbal-tilt tend to be more woke. As for #5 and #6, I don't know enough about the facts regarding them to have much of an opinion there.
So in summary:
#2, #4, #7 seem very likely to me
#3, #5, #6 unsure
#1 unlikely
{1} I've definitely come across statistics on this, but can't find them easily right now - I don't think the media is exactly eager to draw much attention to it.
It shows that blacks watch a lot more TV and that they feel underrepresented and that they react more favorably to representation. On #3 and 5, if a product is targeted in part to this demographic for whatever reason, it might lead to advertisers to really stress that they are "open to people like me".
One that comes to mind is a popular commercial on a buy your car online company that lets you set your own monthly bill and loan length with a toggle in the app. Both spokespersons for the company are young blacks and the person speaking for the consumer is black (with a diverse range of people behind them). I can’t imagine this was unintentional.
The same reason that gay people are vastly overrepresented in shows. If you have a cast of, let's say, 8 regulars, and one of them is gay, that's 12.5% of the cast. A gay couple would make that 25%. If shows are adding gay characters on purpose, that 12.5% gets repeated over and over again, turning a much lower representation in the actual population into a much higher representation.
This is actually a really difficult thing to work out intentionally, though. Without coordinating between shows (and it would be really weird to do that - "Hi, I'd like to include a gay character in my show but wanted to check if you were planning to do that too? Oh, you are? Then I'll recast as straight, thanks!") it's really hard to determine which shows "should" have gay (or black, or Asian, or whatever) such that they are evenly represented to their base population without being overrepresented.
I wonder how we managed to do this in the 70s and 80s so much better and with less obviousness. I don't think stations were aiming for "representation" they just cast interesting actors and made shows. Cosby and Family Matters never seemed to be pandering, they were just pretty good shows that happened to have black families in them.
If all the shows picked the demographics of each character at random from a realistic distribution, that would give a realistic distribution overall with no coordination. Of course, there may be reasons why specific demographics make more sense in the stories they want to tell, but the random solution is no worse for this than the coordination solution. I guess it's possible that certain groups would end up over- or under-represented by chance in specific small sub-genres, but at that point it seems like the audience being unreasonably picky if they complain about it.
On the other hand, if minority audience members like shows featuring at least one person in the same minority as them more (although it feels silly I know I do this), such that the average audience enjoyment is higher with this sort of over-representation than a realistic distribution, it's not obvious that a little tokenism is actually a bad thing.
Right, but what's happening is studios are trying to make sure that certain kinds of minorities are getting into shows, and once you've made that choice it gets really hard to represent but not overrepresent.
Studios are clearly *not* using the method that you are suggesting, though I agree it would fix the problem.
In the 80s and 90s there seems to have been a lot of shows with black actors, but it didn't feel pandering or like anyone was filling a quota. I mentioned several above, but there were also shows like The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Sister-Sister, Kenan and Kel, etc. I don't think anyone was counting percents, but at least my watching experience back then felt like there was a strong number of black actors on TV at any given time. Some of those shows were extremely well watched, like Fresh Prince and Cosby, in particular. We've definitely turned a corner somewhere along the line trying to make sure that not just some shows but *every show* has multiple ethnicities, even when it makes no sense. It's weird if every show has to have a gay character, an Asian character (preferably more than one so East Asian and South Asian are both represented) and a black character, and a Hispanic character, and so on. For shows like The Walking Dead - where people are traveling around a lot and meeting lots of random people - that makes a lot of sense. When the Wheel of Time series showed a small remote village with multiple races (despite an intentional and important plot point in the books being that it was an insular community), that's something else.
I'd speculate that it is the same phenomenon that has resulted in the more extreme case of Google's Gemini from being programmed to refuse to generate any images with white people in them at all; a focus on diversity massively over-corrects into over-representativeness of historically under-represented groups. Interestingly, it seems that this phenomenon has been occurring in Europe as well, where the over-representativeness is even more stark because the underlying population percentages are smaller (think of how many prominent British actors there are these days relative to their quite small proportion of the British population), although a google search suggests that could be confined to black British actors -in US productions-. I would be really curious if anyone has collected hard data on this.
You're not wrong. I saw someone claim to have measured this a few months ago and they said that about 35% of commercial actors are now black. This is 100% a post-BLM phenomenon and exists because advertisers don't want to be called out for being insufficiently diverse. The moral panic continues.
Is "sign in with password" on Substack broken for anyone else? No matter what I try, it just says "something went wrong", even if I reset my password and then try to login with the new password. The only way to log in to Substack now is the "email you a link" option, which is really annoying.
Same here! I always use my PC because I hate trying to use smartphone apps to read anything. I wonder if it's just crappy buggy software (sorry, Substack, but you need to hire some more monkeys and install a few more hamster wheels, the system is breaking down) or an attempt to force adoption of the app?
If you've ever tried to overcome a fear and haven't succeeded, you may be interested in an article I wrote - I detail how I overcame my fear of talking to strangers and pitching businesses
William James makes a version of this point very quickly in Section III of The Will to Believe:
"Here in this room, we all of us believe in molecules and the conservation of energy, in democracy and necessary progress, in Protestant Christianity and the duty of fighting for 'the doctrine of the immortal Monroe,' all for no reasons worthy of the name. We see into these matters with no more inner clearness, and probably with much less, than any disbeliever in them might possess. His unconventionality would probably have some grounds to show for its conclusions; but for us, not insight, but the prestige of the opinions, is what makes the spark shoot from them and light up our sleeping magazines of faith."
I think he's very self-consciously lumping in Protestant Christianity and the Monroe Doctrine with belief in molecules and democracy, even though in Section I he suggested that the audience would likely all seem themselves as wiser than conventional Christians.
I think the point he makes is also parallel to one that W.E.B. DuBois makes about "double consciousness" - Black Americans know more about what White Americans think than vice versa, because they have to live with the majority around them, rather than just accepting it unthinking.
Would anyone be willing to share their criticisms of "non-violent communication"? As someone who has found it a useful framework, I'm interested in hearing from people who didn't find it useful.
I have the feeling (ha, ha) that someone who read the Wikipedia article on NVC once but is genuinely attempting to reframe all their complaints as feelings and unmet needs for mutual discussion is going to be a lot better at communicating than someone who's done three months training in NVC but tries to psychoanalyse their conversation partner or launch into a pre-prepared spiel instead of shutting up and listening.
I know one person who has had extensive training in the technique, and it drives me crazy when they talk to me in the approved manner. It sounds fake and formulaic. I do not doubt at all that communication is improved when people assume the other person is not an evil idiot, try their best to grasp how the situation looks to the other person, and hold back from verbal violence (meanness, sarcasm, mockery, yelling, etc). But there aren't any formulas for bringing that attitude to communication: You have to really work on it internally, battle it out with your own self-centeredness. If you accomplish that, you do not need to use formulaic ways of speaking. The people you are talking with will grasp that you are fair-minded and responsive. Conversely, "packaging" various things in a formula will not give your conversation partner that sense -- it will give them the feeling that you are following a formula, and that by doing that you are blocking their view of your real attitude.
100% hard agree. I've tried to read Rosenberg in addition to having conversations with NVC fans, and couldn't shake the sense that they were cargo-culting.
The notion that communication can be violent threatens American values regarding free speech. I'm not going to take any ideas seriously premised on "violent communication" as a thing.
Considering that there is a real and growing movement to ban free speech because "speech is violence" I think reasonable people should criticize language in sync with that politically reactionary movement.
Assuming you're talking about "I see where you're coming from, but..." language, it's that the person is blatantly trying to "handle" me. I'm not most peoplr; I don't care if people insult me, as long as they answer my question as they do so. But don't presume to tell me how I feel. I know how I feel, and I know for sure that you don't, because you're wasting time appealing to emotions I don't have.
Yeah, I dislike that sort of language. It's intended well, but it's often used as "I'm going to disagree with you because you're an idiot". I too prefer "No, I don't agree, because" rather than smarmy "Yes, I understand why, with your tiny ignorant brain, you would think that" stuff.
I think that NVC is a good idea, but if someone wants to be an asshole, they will find a way to follow the letter of the rules while going completely against their spirit. It will probably be difficult, but defending against it will also be difficult for someone who believes that following the rules of NVC is the right thing to do.
(It is similar with rationality. No matter how detailed rules you write, someone will find a way to do superficially the same thing, but in service of some irrational idea they hold dear.)
Also, NVC is not supposed to solve all problems in the world, but mostly one specific problem, let's call it "violent refusal to communicate". The situation where, once you classify someone as an enemy, you no longer listen to them, so you actually have no idea how they think and what they want, which makes it impossible to try figure out a compromise solution (even if one that is kinda frustrating for both sides, but still preferable to fighting). NVC helps you pass the Ideological Turing Test better. You can still disagree, but at least now it clear what exactly you disagree with.
On the other hand, there are manipulative techniques based precisely on attacking your empathy or your self-image as a nice person. They put you in a frame where you either do the thing the manipulator wants you to do (and you didn't want to do it), or you feel guilty or ashamed. NVC can actually make this worse, by limiting the range of your possible response. Your task is no longer to "resist the manipulation" but "resist the manipulation while following the rules of NVC to the letter, because otherwise the manipulator will accuse you of being a bad person".
A: "When you refuse to give me all your money and to have sex with me, I feel sad. Really, really say. It feels like my heart is breaking..." (keeps crying and shaking)
B: "What?! Ah, sorry... I meant... uhm... when you put it like this, I feel... I feel emotionally blackmailed."
A: "Ahem, 'emotionally blackmailed' is not a feeling. It is a judgment. We are not supposed to do those here. Anyway... when you say that you feel emotionally blackmailed by me, I feel so sad it is difficult for me to even keep breathing, there is a pressure in my chest, it feels as if I am suffocating..."
(Here, the person A is clearly the bad guy, but he follows the NVC script, and it's difficult to call him out while following the NVC script yourself.)
For the more sensitive people, it would make sense to admit that they feel sad... and then decide not to *act* on that feeling. Or to choose a different course of action: "from now on, I will try to avoid you, to feel less sad".
Basically, the people at risk are the beginners, who are trying to play a game where they already learned the rules but not the strategies.
I have never really tried it, but I've encountered some things vaguely along those lines. Overall, it can be a good thing. But...
(1) merely using the words and techniques doesn't automatically make people better at empathy and communication, so it can feel like an empty ritual. Some of the most frustrating conversations I've had have been with people who write paragraph after paragraph about how careful and deliberate they are, and about how much they're trying to see my point of view, etc, *but I can't for the life of me figure out what they want me to change*. It is extremely aggravating, as the only actual information transmitted is a mushy feeling that I'm not enough like they want me to be.
(2) it can slow down communication a ton, especially among people who are emotionally mature and have healthy self-boundaries. If you're familiar with ask culture vs guess culture, the latter is just better when people make reasonable guesses and provide non-painful ways to correct course on a misprediction. I prefer someone spontaneously giving me advice while subtly communicating that their intention is to help rather than dictate or impose, compared to the alternative of being asked all the time whether it's ok to give me feedback/advice.
If your "communication technique" is disingenuously and deceptively branded, then I'm going to guess that you're a disingenuous and deceptive person, and that any communication technique you're trying to sell me is probably based on disingenuity and deceptiveness.
I want to modify the mower so I can attach garden shears, a hand saw, and a bottle of plant killer spray to it. Whenever I am mowing the lawn and come across, say, a small branch that has grown long enough to hit me in the face, I'd stop the mower, remove the hand saw, use it to cut down the branch, and then continue mowing.
I have no idea what sorts of couplings, baskets, or whatever I'd need to attach to the mower to make this possible. Any suggestions?
1.) It's going to get knocked off, (branches and such) and then potentially fall into the blades.
2.) What are you really gaining? Just walk around the yard before mowing with the shears and saw and clean things up. (throw away the sticks.)
3.) It will really be more of a pain stopping the mower and then getting off and back on.
If you insist on mounting something, then I'll suggest a water proof box mounted somewhere. You can get ammo boxes pretty cheap. That's what we put on the four wheeler.
I'll second this. It's good to do a walkthrough beforehand to remove large sticks and rocks and litter (especially if the area faces onto a public walkway). And if you bump into an overhanging branch while riding, just make a mental note of it and go back afterwards with the saw. Next time it won't be there anymore. ;-)
Rivnuts are good for attaching things firmly to sheet metal and are commonly used in automotive and aerospace applications. The magnet idea is probably more feasible if you're not tool-inclined, though.
No one has said epoxy or various bonding "glues," so add that to the list of possibilities. I can't offer much more than pointing you in that direction.
As funny as it might sound, zip ties of all various sizes are also very useful general-purpose ad-hoc "attachers." Of course you need appropriate attachment points, but perhaps there are spots you could zip tie, say, a basket or something similar. (Zip ties come in all sorts of sizes, you can get 3ft long, .3in wide ties that will hold largish stuff together.)
I'd google, youtube, and ask around at reddit or Lowes also and see what you come up with if none of all this works.
Compulsive improvisor here: Check to see whether magnets stick to the body of the mower . If so, it's easy to find extremely strong magnets about the size of a quarter with metal loops attached to them that you can hang stuff off. You could probably also attach a basket meant to go on the handlebars of a bike under the front wheel, maybe using bungee cords, then put some of the extra stuff you want to carry on the mower in there.
It might also be worth your time to look into sheaths, bags, tool-belts, or backpacks that can safely and comfortably fit on your body while riding the lawnmower. They might lack some of the cool factor that I imagine comes with a mount, but it's another way to solve your problem that might be easier than physical modifications to the machine.
I'm looking for recommendations for an AI app that can enhance old home movies. My late father transferred a bunch of 8mm movies to VHS tape. That was about 30 years ago. I recently sent the tape to a service to get it digitized. The result is an hour-long MP4 file that is pretty crappy, partly from the degraded VHS tape but mostly because the underlying 8mm films were too light or too dark, blurry, or shaky. Can this be remedied through an AI app? There are a lot of individual clips on that long MP4 file, and I don't have time to chop it up into small segments to fine-tune them. I want to submit the whole thing to an app and have it fix it up as best as it can.
Lots of places, including the iphone editing app, will apply a generic fix to still photos, automatically adjusting things so that the darkest color in the image is black and the lightest white, and increasing saturation. I'm pretty sure there must exist something equivalent for video, and I don't think it would need to use AI. I don't know whether there's one that can autocorrect blurriness, shakiness and spots and stains, but there might be.
I’ve heard good things about Topaz, in terms of upgrading 720/1080p footage to 4K. Not sure if it will work for your purposes, as I’ve never used it myself.
I really enjoy fiction that feels like a fable, in tone or plot. They have a simple beauty that feels comforting to read. I just finished "The Last Unicorn" by Peter Beagle, which I thought was extremely beautiful. Other examples I've enjoyed for similar reasons are "The Magician's Nephew" (CS Lewis) and "On Such a Full Sea" (Chang-Rae Lee). Does anyone have something to add to this list?
Wow, thank you everyone for the dozens of recommendations. Sounds like people besides me got something out of this question as well. Seeing this list helped me clarify what I like about the fable setting. The books I like most of this type let you see a complicated world through childlike eyes, in some ways helping me do the same in ours. Piranesi was a great example of this — I loved reading that book. Looking forward to a promising CS Lewis book I haven’t read yet too — I’ve read many and like most. Especially “The Great Divorce.” Some of the other authors I don't know who feel promising to me: Patricia McKillip, Roger Zelazny, George MacDonald, Jack Vance, Dunsany. Thank you for the terms “waking dream” and “sense of place” as well.
Really appreciate all the responses! Nice to have a community I can trust for this sort of thing.
The Starless Sea by Erin Morgensten fits this extremely well, highly recommend.
The Ursula Leguin Earthsea book, as recommended below, that feels most like this to me is Tales from Earthsea, a short story collection set within the Earthsea universe. It is a comfort book for me, much more than the main series.
Paulo Coehlo writes like this as well--The Alchemist, whether you love it or hate it is meant to be a fable.
Thanks for asking this! I also love books like this and they are hard to find.
All sorts of Arthurian legend stories. I like Mary Stewarts version. More recently Naomi Novik's Spinning Silver or Uprooted might work. And I've recently been reading everything by T. Kingfisher AKA Ursula Vernon. A lot of her stuff has a fairy tale/ fable feel.
Patricia McKillip's "Ombria in Shadow". And from what I can tell, most of her other stuff. It's almost like a waking dream.
Robin McKinley's "The Door in the Hedge". Also her early stuff, like "The Hero and the Crown" and "The Blue Sword". And her chosen genre is various takes on fables; if you like her writing, you can go far with her.
Ursula K. Le Guin's "Earthsea" books might count. She tries a bunch of different things with the series, but I think at least the first two will fit what you're looking for.
Susan Cooper's "The Dark is Rising" series is maybe not quite what you want, but in addition to having so many direct links to fables, the underlying structure is also sort of one, too.
William Goldman's "The Princess Bride" is great, although maybe not quite what you're looking for.
George MacDonald's "The Princess and the Goblin" and "The Princess and Curdie" are old family favorites.
John Steinbeck's "The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights" is a retelling of Malory, sadly left incomplete by his death.
G.R.R Martin's "A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms" is very Arthurian in flavor, too. It's quite a different tone than his "Song of Ice and Fire" main series (well, except for the Brienne chapters).
Jenna Moran's "An Unclean Legacy" and "The Fable of the Swan" may count, although (as with most of her work) they require some effort to understand, and thus might fail your "simple" criterion.
It's not exactly a "fable", but Steven Brust's "The Phoenix Guards" is a loving homage to Dumas, under cover of being a historical novel extracted from a fantasy universe. It's 17*2 chapters of swashbucking fun and entertainingly exasperating exposition. Don't bother reading up on anything else, just jump in and try a few chapters until they get accepted as guards, and see if you like it. Some love it and some can't stand it.
Totally out of genre, but as I recall, Jerome K. Jerome's "Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog)" had, in its own way, a fairy-tale-like atmosphere. And then you get to read Connie Willis' companion novel, "To Say Nothing of the Dog".
I have not read it yet, but I'm told "The Worm Ouroborus" by E.R. Eddison is quite good.
I'll second the recommendations for Jack Vance's "Lyonesse" trilogy - it's occasionally transcendent, while also having some parts that pack more horrifying grimness into a single sentence than most authors can manage with a chapter. His four "Dying Earth" books are also something you should at least check out, but be warned that you'll be rooting against the main characters at least as much as you'll be rooting for them. (It's so **fun** when Cugel gets his comeuppance, especially when he brings it on himself.)
And I'll also second the recommendations for Neil Gaiman's "Neverwhere" and "Stardust", although his style is not to everyone's taste. And a completely unqualified second for Richard Adams' "Watership Down", which is nicely complemented by this analysis: https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/tag/mythopoetics
> Patricia McKillip's "Ombria in Shadow". And from what I can tell, most of her other stuff. It's almost like a waking dream.
Yes, all of her fantasy writing is like that. I understand she also wrote SF, but I have no knowledge of her writing style for it.
The Riddle-Master trilogy is her best-known fantasy work, I think.
The Hero and the Crown just feels like a normal adventure story to me. You have a person going on a quest and fighting a dragon. The Blue Sword is similar, except instead of a focus on magic and dragons you have a focus on the special bond between girl and horse. (That sounds dismissive, but I like The Blue Sword! But, I like it less than The Hero and the Crown, and I have a strong feeling that it's intended to appeal specifically to girls who like horses, a fantasy story for fans of Black Beauty.)
Other than Patricia McKillip, I don't think I can provide much in the way of good recommendations for work in this style. I usually prefer to have a good grasp of what's going on in the plot.
> The Hero and the Crown just feels like a normal adventure story to me.
The plot is, sure. But I find there's sort of a relaxing, grounded-yet-fairy-tale-like quality to it, as if the author tapped into some primal fountain of story and is letting it flow, while at the same time anticipating and answering questions from a bright 6-year old who would keep asking "but why didn't she do...", except that that storyteller was one step ahead. I don't know if that's what the original poster was looking for, but it's what I like about it. :-)
(If you haven't read it, you should check out "The Door in the Hedge"; it's a collection of short stories that are either fairy tales or indistinguishable from them.)
William Morris, though he can be hard going because of his elaborate imitation of mediaeval tone. George MacDonald too, have you read "Lilith" or "Phantastes"? I'd stay away from his realist work, the writing in Dialect prose is excruciating to read.
I second George MacDonald, though I would suggest starting with his short story "The Golden Key". MacDonald has a pretty strong flavor, and if you like The Golden Key you'll probably like Lilith and Phantastes (and vice versa).
Forgot to write this when it happened, but I finished the book a few weeks back and really enjoyed! The relation/clash of old magic and modern society was very well done, and it came together in a very satisfying way. Thanks for recommending.
- A Night in the Lonesome October by Roger Zelazny
- The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe. Not strictly fable, perhaps more leaning towards a blend of fantasy, science fiction and magical realism. But it certainly has a very strong sense of place to it.
Also, Watership Down (more or less). And keeping the tone without being fairy tale-y, Jim Herriot's vet stories (All Creatures Great and Small and the sequels)
Ishiguro - "The Buried Giant" - I enjoyed the fairytale-like quality, amplified by listening to the audio version, although it was just "off" enough that one wasn't totally surprised that the ending didn't have a very satisfying payoff; I thought about it a good deal while I was reading it, but seem now to fail to quite recall it (which is appropriate, actually). In a way, "The Remains of the Day" has something of the didactic fable quality, more directly - "I am going to teach these English something about the Nazi sympathizers in their midst in the '30s" - but for the better the obviousness of the lesson soon recedes, in the reader's mind seemingly as well as in the author's, for the deeper qualities of humor and of character portrait, both individual and national. The narrator, with his limited grasp, can resemble the child in a fable perhaps. I hope that doesn't make it sound patronizing; it is not. As others have pointed out, it is to this character is granted some of the most movingly rendered scenes of heartbreak in 20th century literature. It quite naturally rises above literary fiction - or rather, settles into a lower level, where the best books dwell.
"One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch" - I think of it - since "The Gulag Archipelago" would be too much of a read for me, as sort of a children's tale of same. It goes down easy - how brilliant that he chose to render a "good day" - even Kruschev was said to admire it, I believe. It feels very carefully constructed. I guess this may just be my own weird take.
More Lewis - "When We Had Faces" - it was a pretty effective presentation of his usual themes, but also of a myth that those of us with spotty self-educations like myself, missed; as such it was a little like school, but with a clever teacher.
I recently finished "Till we had faces." I've really enjoyed heavy-handed allegorical CS Lewis in the past -- The Great Divorce is one of my favorites. That book, I felt, said something extremely true about morality and human failings, whether or not you believe in the Christian God. But I honestly didn't enjoy this one that much. Part of it was that I didn't enjoy/agree with the message as much. There was some universal truth in it -- something about jealousy poisoning joy, and something about feeling regret for harm intentionally done. But a lot of it seemed to be about denial of divinity in face of evidence, when I don't think that applies to the real world very well. And it was sort of long and slow.
I also didn't realize it was a retelling of a Greek tale. One of my favorite fiction books in the last two years was "Song of Achilles" by Madeline Miller, which fits the same genre. That book I thought did an amazing job of exploring the theme "greatness versus joy" and also the path to accepting one's destiny. Really, really enjoyed.
One Day in the Life is still on the list -- sounds very interesting.
I haven't read "The Great Divorce" so I will read that in return.
Truthfully I think I did like chiefly that "Till We Had Faces" was a myth re-telling, because my education didn't include much in that way. But to be candid, I've rather forgotten it since I (listened to) it last year? I don't think it was the listening - that isn't related for me necessarily although ideally I do a toggle between reading text and listening - but more that it was a bit formless and overlong, and if you are not religious, as I am not, the "now we are ready to be seen by God" or whatever it was, didn't especially move me.
Nice, let me know what you think! It's in some ways more religious than "Till we had Faces" since it's explicitly about the afterlife, but it's much more cleanly translated to non-theistic morality. And felt more concise to me. Maybe I'll read again as well.
Off topic, but I mostly found Remains of the Day to be sympathetic rather than didactic. It's more "how could a decent person make such a mistake and how sad it was when he gradually realized it" than anything else.
I am in the habit of assuming whenever anything becomes an especially popular theme in cultural products, it is probably inversely correlated with its actual frequency/significance. The Fuhrer-loving aristocrat (yes, I'm a Mitford aficionado, I know there were a few) - I guess I see it as more of a device, a sort of cheap device, with which to present a man who has not been his own man, was helpless to be. But it doesn't really matter - it works very well to lure one into the actual story, of someone crippled, emotionally, or rather in his comfort level with emotion and its expression. Someone imprisoned in loneliness and yearning, just a pretty ordinary type in my opinion*, well-realized.
*I've suspected that truly romantic natures tend to be well-hidden, completely orthogonal to such things as Valentine's Day.
Oh yes! Bad memory. Probably exacerbated by, once again, listening to it on audio, so never having it before my eyes. Also my altered title completely gets the point of the thing wrong.
At a constructive criticism level, how familiar are you with conservative criticism of YouTube censorship? I ask because, well, half the country votes for Donald Trump and this...broadly doesn't appear to address their concerns.
Let me give a hopefully constructive example. A...couple months back, maybe a year ago there was a big drama with Budweiser and some kind of trans activist. Big brouhaha, big enough that it came across my feed and big enough to apparently severely impact Anheuser Busch's stock price.
And when I read you piece, it sounds like it's all about the ad money. Probably true, you know much more than me about it. But if it is true...is YouTube going to censor trans content? I mean, the advertisers must be scared. Without looking, I can tell you no, Youtube is not going to censor trans content. But then it's not just about the money, there's other stuff beside the ad money that drives decisions, and that's what people are concerned about, even if 95% of the job is about the money.
I'm not saying that there aren't good answers to these questions or things people on the right haven't gotten things wrong but...these are the concerns I see, or more appropriately have seen, on right wing media for at least 5 years about censorship on YouTube. And you...don't really address them, honestly you react like you're hearing about them second or third-hand.
Which is fair, not every article needs to address conservative concerns but...at that point I wonder who the article is for. The people I hear complaining about censorship on Youtube are overwhelmingly conservatives with the occasional Marxist. Are there really a bunch of moderate liberals on Youtube worried that they're being censored on Youtube?
But yeah, if I have any constructive criticism to offer, it's that it feels like there's a gap between what you consider to be the worry about censorship and what I see people on the right worry about censorship and so I can't imagine it clicking that well with that audience.
It's honestly because it is not safe to talk about this on the public internet. I work in tech, and will probably continue to work in tech for some time, and people in tech are not able to speak openly about the existence of the conservative 50% of America.
To address your specific example, I think we can all see which way the Overton winds are blowing. Trans stuff is going to be more accepted over time, not less. Every company wants to be on the right (and safe) side of history, and not have to go back and metaphorically scrub all their Elmer Fudd cartoons from the archives later.
My experience with right wing complaints vs. finding out what actually happened (when I worked there) was that the vast majority of banned/censored conservative creators are violating ToS, but pretending like YouTube (or whichever social company) is executing a political vendetta against them. If they simply... didn't violate the ToS, YouTube probably wouldn't block them and wouldn't have a leg to stand on if they did. However, I will say that a consistent aspect among the tech companies I've been exposed to is that they seemingly don't notice ToS violations as frequently for people who are more left on the spectrum.
I see people on YouTube all the time worried about getting censored for discussing explosives, prices of guns, terrorism, entire categories of crime, political violence, 3d printing, etc. It's not just conservatives.
I appreciate your feedback though, and maybe I'll be able to talk about this much openly at some point in the future.
Thanks for the honesty and no sweat, take care of yourself.
Have you considered an anonymous account though? Because I just want to make sure you hear what you said. Which is that there are reasonable explanations for most of what Youtube is doing...but you can't fully discuss those for fear of not merely being fired but blacklisted from your industry. This...does not sound like an environment and topic area conducive to open discussion or your career health.
> My experience with right wing complaints vs. finding out what actually happened (when I worked there) was that the vast majority of banned/censored conservative creators are violating ToS, but pretending like YouTube (or whichever social company) is executing a political vendetta against them.
> However, I will say that a consistent aspect among the tech companies I've been exposed to is that they seemingly don't notice ToS violations as frequently for people who are more left on the spectrum.
I mean, that's what a political vendetta is. Try reassuring someone who's worried about political persecution that the reason the rules are getting enforced against them, and not against their enemies, is that they have the wrong politics and their enemies have the right politics.
> The one thing that always worries you in the back of your mind is the hopefully remote possibility that your ad is going to be next to a swastika. If that happens, suddenly your job is in jeopardy.
Doesn't this model rely on the idea that nobody knows how internet advertising works? That may have been true once, but I don't think it's true now.
This response is from memory, so the particular examples are almost certainly wrong.
But, didn't Twitter present the response "this screenshot was obtained after the journalist created an account whose only interests were [Nazism] and [Coca-Cola], and to the best of our determination, no one else on the internet has ever seen an analogous juxtaposition"?
Yes, I believe that's what happened, and I think Twitter is probably being honest. But I think this also supports my case. Someone went absolutely out of their way to show a brand next to a swastika. The media absolutely loved the story and worked hard to amplify it. Advertisers then reacted in their typical scared fashion. I think all of that supports my case.
How's Twitter doing at attracting advertisers these days? Last I checked, Elon was railing against a supposed conspiracy keeping advertisers away, which isn't a great move if you think there's any chance of persuading them to come back to you.
Many Thanks! I honestly don't know what the statistics are for either ad blockers success rates or the fraction of viewers who use them. I personally, only find the ads moderately annoying, so I haven't bothered with a blocker.
Thanks, that was really interesting. I knew about brand safety, but it never occurred to me before that the media has an active incentive to make Youtube look bad due to competition for ad dollars.
Is anyone else getting this problem? Trying to sign in with my password on Substack, keep getting message "something went wrong". I've reset the password, no dice. But "sign in with email" works.
I'll try here before I try contacting Substack because, to be frank, I don't expect Substack to be any help with this problem. Signing in with password worked fine up to a few days ago, the problem has only cropped up recently.
In regards to your policies on banning & unbanning:
1. Do you have a "statute of limitations" after which the comments and the commentators are off the hook? I ask this because the comment that I was banished for was five months old when the banishment was imposed. Although I readily admit I was out of line and that I deserved banishment for fulfilling Godwin's Law, it took me by surprise because I had long ago forgotten about the exchange. How far back do I need to go to review my old posts to see if anything I said was banishable?
2. Have you articulated your moderation policies anywhere? After being banned, I searched for them but couldn't find them. If so, could you repost a link? For instance, I assume ad hominem attacks are verboten. Looking at the posts that got people banned in the last big round, it seems like certain extreme levels of sarcasm can earn a poster a banishment. Likewise, circum-hominem attacks seem to be bannable. E.g. "You're delusional if you believe X." I'm somewhat on the spectrum, so I am quite capable of working in the framework of explicit rules, but when it comes to unwritten social rules, I'll admit I'm quite at sea.
Anyway, explicit policies might help reduce the outbreaks of verbal warfare on your Substack. For instance: Charlie Stross has a separate page on his blog listing his moderation policies...
3. The notice I received from Substack did not indicate that I was only banned for a month. Initially, I thought it was a lifetime ban, and I canceled my upcoming renewal. It was only days later when I saw in one of your posts that I was banned for a month. It seems like the banishment wording could have been more explicit in the email. I admit I'm reluctant to re-subscribe to your Substack without having my first two questions clarified because I feel like I'm skating on thin ice. I'm on a fixed income now, and I don't want to be banned again for something I wrote a year ago (and have my current $100 go down the tube).
4. Do you want us to report posts that we find rude and offensive? In the past, I've been called the political C-word and I've generally responded with humorous sarcasm. Personally, I don't like to be called a Commie (because I have friends and family who were blacklisted). My banishable moment was when I responded to such an attack with the political N-word. In the future, I'll report anyone who lobs the political C-word at me. But I don't even know if you would consider the political C-word out of bounds.
Yes, but that's not Astral Codex. Why would I bother to look on the now-defunct Slatestarcodex for AC10 policies? Posting that policy up here would be useful, though!
Is it true? Is it necessary? Is it kind?
BTW, re: "Sufi Buddha Lite," — historically Islam was a colonizer and suppressor of Buddhism, and some Buddhists might (will) resent being lumped in with the Sufis. ;-)
Yes. Thanks. I still wonder if there's a statute of limitations, or whether I need to go back and delete any edgy comments over the past couple of years for fear someone will flag them.
My plan had been to sit out the Senate race, because I would be happy with either of my three current/former congresspeople representing me in the Senate (I've lived in Lee's district, Schiff's, and now Porter's!) But now that it's clear that the runoff will be Schiff vs either Porter or Garvey, I have to think about whether I would rather get Democrats to save their money for other Senate races (i.e., ensure that Garvey makes the runoff rather than Porter) or whether getting a chance of Porter is better than nearly guaranteed Schiff. (My substantive views are probably somewhere between Schiff and Porter, so a 50/50 gamble between them somehow seems more appealing than either one for sure.)
Normally I'd vote for the most centrist/establishment candidate (i.e. Schiff), but this time I voted for Porter because she explicitly put pro-YIMBYism front and center on her website (i.e reforming parking minimums) while Schiff doesn't even mention it under housing policy.
Hello! Those into figuring out best practices in how to eat healthy : what do you think about -
1. saturated fat? Necessary? About how much a day at different stages of life, etc? Doctors (even cardiologists) seem to say you should avoid it. Modern doctors like Dr. Jason Fung seems to say it is essential.
2. Salt? Cardiologists say about 2000 mg a day at the most (a teaspoon is 2400 mg). And, that less is even better. Dr. Fung says it is bad advice. He says there's a confusion about interpreting the data. He thinks they are confusing processed food (which he says is bad for you) that happens to also have high sodium, sometimes due to added salt with salt itself.
IANA nutritionist, but a long-time fitness enthusiast.
1. I think the evidence that high intakes of saturated fat are "bad" is pretty overwhelming; but there are still questions about details like different types of fats and interactions with other foods you're eating. Also btw, my impression from the nutrition community is that Dr. Fung is not really considered a reliable source.
2. My understanding is that the sodium recommendation is based on shaky evidence; it may be good advice for people with poor CV health, but for healthy people, it's probably overly conservative (if not even harmful, as some amount of sodium is essential). As other comments mentioned, keep an eye on your blood pressure and make sure you're getting a healthy amount of potassium.
(disclaimer: generally healthy individual with no known issues relating to diet, eat whatever I want whenever the spirit moves me, if anything a bit on the underweight side - thus I don't approach such topics with the adversarial rigor they deserve, not enough skin in the game)
Doctor who?
The way my family always put it (half cracking-wise, half-serious...I think) was that if sodium was so bad for you, us Chinese and our other East Asian cousins sure should be having a lot more heart attacks, hypertension, etc. than one actually sees in the wild. Obviously that doesn't necessarily generalize - maybe there's variation in digestion, microbiome, bioavailability, or something that effectively allows salty-food-cultures to eat a lot more salt than is typically advised. (Check the sodium RDA equivalent for Japan, it's kind of wild.) But at the very least, it's simple empirical evidence that undermines the simplistic Salt Bad! boogeyman narrative.
(The same argument also applies to refined carbs and white rice, incidentally.)
My understanding of saturated fat is that, as others mention, the primary malus there is raising LDL cholesterol. The large-scale tradeoff of yesteryear, replacing saturated fat with sugar, was almost certainly a poor choice...but reversed stupidity is not intelligence, and although ketogenesis is interesting, I just don't find the "acktually you should add in more saturated fat" arguments generally compelling. Mostly I just don't worry about it. Saturated tends to come bundled with many highly-palatable foods, which indirectly makes it excellent as a seasoning. If I'm much more likely to eat a bowl of collard greens speckled with bacon bits vs. the same bowl tossed in olive oil, well, that's Worth It. It's like the MSG of fats, a little goes a long way. I'd be surprised if it was "essential" in some capacity. However, it seems quite plausible that trying to overcorrect and cut fat (saturated or otherwise) out of one's diet could lead to a worse equilibrium overall. Really depends what the substitute is. There are *probably* some gains from shifting fats on the margin, e.g. cooking with olive oil vs. butter, but I'm not well-versed enough to quantify that.
Yeah as long as you don't eat too much, eat whatever you want. I cook different things for Sunday morning breakfast, but the one (almost) constant is bacon. Hashbrowns taste best to me fried in bacon fat. For French toast or pancakes I like butter better.
I have a strong and (justified, I think) bias against any dietary advice which comes in the form "Doctor so-and-so says this".
Dietetics is a sufficiently fuzzy field that it's easy to sell books by hypothesising something vaguely contrarian ("saturated fat good actually") and finding a bunch of studies that support it.
Possibly I am a sucker for these kinds of big all-cause-mortality studies, but even though there are all kinds of problems with confounding when you just look at entire populations, my feeling is that it helps give a big picture view of things. You can also set a kind of vague upper bound on how bad something could possibly be. For example, in the above study, acm falls with sodium consumption up to about 4g/day and is pretty flat thereafter even up to 6g/day. Maybe there's some SES/sodium correlation confounding the whole thing and it's still bad for you? Well... even if so, it clearly can't be *especially* bad.
Various vegetables, fruits, potatoes etc. have a fair bit of potassium, so it's not difficult to maintain a healthy ratio even if you eat 4g of sodium per day.
With regard to salt, remember that it's a food preservative, which means its presence kills things that would grow on food. If a little kills a little, a lot will kill a big.
If your choice was eating unpreserved food or eating food preserved with salt, then sure, go with the salt for this reason. But what if your choice is food preserved with salt vs food preserved with potassium phosphate vs fresh food vs frozen food? Presumably your reasoning doesn't tell you that it's better to freeze and salt your fresh food before eating it!
>Salt acts as a preservative by altering the availability of water in foods, thereby depriving microbes from using available water as a nutrient. The growth of pathogens and spoilage organisms is impeded when salt is present.
Just to put an extremely crude order of magnitude idea of how much salt is needed to do this to a human, neutral saline is about 0.5% salt, so for a 100 kg person, there is around 500 grams of salt present. To perturb this by even 10% would need 50 grams of salt. There _are_ worries about too much sodium in the diet, but they are from subtler effects than the osmotic dehydration that lets salt act as a preservative.
edit: 100 grams of sodium (not counting the chloride) in a 70 kg body (John Emsley's "Nature's Building Blocks: An A-Z Guide to the Elements")
Lipid profiles don't usually lean 100% SFA, PUFA or MUFA as sources of fatty acids go. Some nuts will have more saturated fat than others, coconut is made up of medium-chain triglycerides rather than long-chain as animal sources have, etc. If you're consuming fat even from plant sources, you're (probably) getting some SFA, just in smaller amounts. Reportedly even medium chain trilgycerides will raise total cholsterol, but less than long-chain.
Anyway. My simple way to approach it is I get approx 20% macros as fat, use olive oil for cooking predominantly (it's stable, doesn't oxidize easily, lots of antioxidants, smoke point doesn't matter), and consume nuts, fish (sardines) for DHA/EPA, and avocado. Occasionally I will have nice cheese and yogurt, but not as a requirement. This seems to be in line with the Mediterranean diet, indo-mediterranean diet, and Japanese diet (almost). Broadly speaking research tends to shine a good light on it.
2. I don't go crazy on salt, or very low, but I think the key thing is to consume enough potassium. Apparently the sodium:potassium ratio is important, and as you can imagine a pitfall of the americanized junk-food diet is insufficient potassium intake and too much salt.
It's difficult to optimize more than this with confidence. I like to just stay in the right area and quibble most on what I am confident improves health outcomes. For instance, I will consume legumes regularly. I'll also have whole grains, but not a crazy amount. Good proportion of vegetables and some fruit.
I try to eat healthy and I exercise a lot, but I was always stuck at a certain weight until I consciously tried to avoid foods high in saturated fat. In a matter of months I dropped ten pounds. I have no idea if it is all types of saturated fats, or just a critical segment of them, but it made a huge and immediate difference to me. It may just be that saturated fat foods like pie and cookies and ice cream and lasagna and hot dogs are so loaded with calories, that avoiding them just allowed me to eat less. I have tried to replace it with foods high in fiber and protein.
My overall take on the matter is that everyone needs to try changing their diet and seeing what works for them. I have no issue with salt, but don’t tend to ever add it either.
I am not a doctor. In fact, I'm fairly bad at biology but I will give me understanding anyways because I like salt. My primary care doctor said this was right, so at least one doctor out there seems to believe this.
If your sodium levels are too high, your body fixes this automatically by retaining more water in your bloodstream. Osmosis happens and what-not. This keeps your overall salinity level where it should be, but raises your blood pressure. If your blood pressure is fine, you can continue to put as much salt as you want on your food.
Question to those who are familiar with minoxidil(/+finasteride), I find the following puzzling. A typical 5% minoxidil has in its instructions, "Don't use more than 1ml twice a day, because it won't help". But the *same* company sells a costlier 10% minoxidil, to again be used at 1ml twice a day. How is this consistent: wouldn't whatever makes the extra volume useless also make the extra concentration useless?
It's possible that the issue is in the inactive ingredients, not the active ones. The formulations that I've used came in a liquid and a foam respectively, and their strong scents made me suspect they were in a solvent that's more volatile than water (and probably has some effect of opening your pores). Using this too many times a day is probably not great for your skin or hair, which is an important factor in a treatment for what's fundamentally a cosmetic condition.
Though, more likely than not, they probably just got FDA approval for use "once a day" and slapped the standard warning of "use exactly as approved" - so when some idiot tries using it once an hour, 12 times a day, they're not liable. (Because as ChubbyEmu[1] has taught me, some idiot *will* try that)
Thank you, that explanation makes a lot of sense, and I hadn't thought of the "inactive ingredients" angle at all. But it confuses me that what the product has is less of a warning than "If you use more, there won't be any efficacy".
I'm about to solve the Sleeping Beauty Paradox. Here I'm exploring issues in the popular attempts to model the problem in the philosophical literature.
I don’t understand your objection to Elga’s solution. In particular you say that it implies p(heads)=1/3, but I don’t see how. I would say that it implies p(heads|awake)=1/3, or equivalently that p(heads|omega)=1/3, but that is quite a different statement.
What about the same experiment except upon heads you’re not woken up at all? In this case it seems you would object that Elga’s reasoning claims p(Heads)=0. But I think if you go through the logic, that’s clearly not what the paper claims.
Well, Elga himself states that the Beauty doesn't get new information on the awakening so if P(Heads|Awake) = 1/3 then P(Heads) also has to be 1/3. You can, of course, claim that this model only represent awakening states and unconditional probabilities are different, but then you have to be able to justify a Bayesian update.
This is what Updating model attempts to do, and what I explore later in the post.
I also think you’re wrong that the elimination argument applies to the single-awakening problem. To do this you’d need to add another coin that determines which day the Beauty gets woken up when the first coin is tails. If you add that in, then the elimination argument should give you the correct probabilities.
Okay, a more clear example. Elimination argument works like that: four outcomes are equiprobable, the awakening I'm now experiencing couldn't happen on Heads&Tuesday, so I have to reason that the three remaining outcomes are equiprobable.
Now consider an alternative problem. On Monday a ball is put into a box. Then, if the coin is Tails, on Tuesday another ball is put there. After this is done you are given a random ball from the box. According to elimination argument: the ball you've just got couldn't be put in the box on Heads&Tuesday, so you have to reason that with 2/3 probability there is another ball in the box. Which is false.
I haven't commented on these because I don't understand what the problem is. I can't seem to follow the logic in a way that describes anything I can make sense of. I don't think this is your fault, and I don't expect you personally to enlighten me, but I'm responding here in hopes that someone can clarify for me why people are thinking so much about this.
----
Isn't this just a matter of separating our "knowledge" of the objective world, from our subjective experiences? If someone flips a coin and kills me on heads, if I'm alive afterwards then I'm 100% going to be in a world where the coin came up tails.
I don't see the difference between that, and saying "Based on my knowledge of the experimental protocol, I've got a 2/3rds chance of being in a world where the coin came up tails" during the wakenings, and then going back to "I'm equally likely to be in either world" after the experiment is over.
(I think it might be possible to work out a theory of mind in which the memory wipesare creating new people, and thus there will literally be more people experiencing tails than heads. Compare to spinning up 1 copy of MMAcevedo on heads, and 2 copies on tails. https://qntm.org/mmacevedo )
Here's a variant: The subject is told that they'll be only woken once for heads and twice for tails, but even though the coin is fair, actually they'll be woken 200 times for tails. And each time they're woken up, they write something on a scrap of paper, which is taken away and marked with "heads" or "tails". They think the coin is fair, they think they've got a 2/3rds chance of being in the tails-world, but the multiversal scrying machine can see 201 slips of paper, 200 of which say "tails", contained in just two universes.
Next variant, same as before, except that when you're woken up you have to make a $1 bet on whether you're in heads-world, but you get to pick the odds before the experiment starts. If you bet $1 at 1:1 odds, in heads-world you win $1 and in tails-world you just lost $200. But if you bet at 1:2 odds, you can cut your loss by 1/2, implying that it's less wrong. And if some helpful lab assistant betrayed the experiment and told you beforehand that you'd be awakened 200 times on tails, you could bet at 1:200 odds and break even across both worlds. (And of course, if you were only awoken 2 times but a malicious lab assistant told you 200, you'd lose money in the other direction.)
(The lab makes money by running this experiment on a lot of people, using different coin flips for each person. So for them, this isn't a thought experiment, this is real money, backed up by insurance, securitized and traded on the stock exchange, used as the basis for several cryptocurrencies, which in turn are used by a handful of charter cities and small countries. The lab assistant is a financial terrorist.)
> Isn't this just a matter of separating our "knowledge" of the objective world, from our subjective experiences?
It's more trickier than that. Map/territory relation is definetely part of the problem, but everyone seem to understand that and still can't arrive to an agreement.
> If someone flips a coin and kills me on heads, if I'm alive afterwards then I'm 100% going to be in a world where the coin came up tails.
Well, yes, because your survival is an evidence that the coin is Tails. You couldn't be sure that you would survive and now you know that you did, so you lawfully update. But in Sleeping Beauty you are completely sure that you will be awaken so you can't lawfully update when you awake. Thus the paradox.
> Here's a variant
If the participant is lied to about the procedure of the experiment, the situation is quite different. Then it's understandable where does the disconnection between the map and the territory come from. But the whole point is that the participant was told the truth about the awakening routine, the participant knew everything about the number of awakenings and about the memory erasure, so why the separation between one and the other?
> make a $1 bet
I'll talk more about betting arguments in a future post, but the core thing is that they are very much not helpful in this case. From my comment on LW:
Halfer scoring rule counts per experiment, while thirder per awakening, but regardless of the bet proposed they produce correct betting scores (unless we are talking about halfers who subscribe to Lewis' model which is just wrong).
If there is only one bet per experiment a thirder would think that while probability of Tails is twice as large as Heads, it is compensated by the utilities of bets: only one of the Tails outcome is rewarded, not both. So they use equal betting odds, just as a halfer, who would think that both probability and utility are completely fair.
Likewise, if there is a bet on every awakening, halfer will think that while the probabilities of Heads and Tails are the same, Tails outcome is rewarded twice as much, so they will have betting odds favouring Tails, just as a thirder, for whom utilities are fair but probability is in favour of Tails.
Betting just adds another variable to the problem, it doesn't make the existent variables more preciese.
> But if you bet at 1:2 odds, you can cut your loss by 1/2, implying that it's less wrong.
Unless, of course you got also lied about which outcome of the coin toss leads to more awakenings - then you will only increase your loses by betting at 1:2 odds.
> If there is only one bet per experiment a thirder would think that while probability of Tails is twice as large as Heads, it is compensated by the utilities of bets: only one of the Tails outcome is rewarded, not both. So they use equal betting odds, just as a halfer, who would think that both probability and utility are completely fair.
I don't understand what any of this means.
If the bet is at 1:2 odds, in heads-world there's one round of betting where I gain $2, and in tails-world there's two rounds of betting in which I lose $1 each. If we only run the experiment one time, it won't matter much. But it does matter very much to anyone who repeats the experiment many times. If we do this experiment repeatedly, with different fair coin tosses each time, we'll both (on average) break even with 1:2 odds, but any other odds will lead to one of us winning money from the other.
In particular, the lab running the experiment knows exactly how many times I awaken, and can set the odds appropriately. They never lose consciousness, they never have their mind wiped, they are present for the whole experiment. They can see that I'll take the bet 1 time in heads-world and 2 times in tails-world. If they use some odds other than 1:2, then they will on average gain or lose money, depending on which direction they shift the odds.
There are two possible betting rules. One where you bet once per experiment and one where you bet once per awakening. For once per awakening bet the correct odds are indeed 1:2 - this is the case you are talking about. But for once per experiment they are 1:1.
In once per experiment betting rule there is one round of betting either way, regardless of the number of awakenings. It can be designed as if a bet is proposed every time you are awakend but only the one on the last awakening really counts. We count the number of worlds, not the number of slips of paper.
These two betting rules represent two facts about the Sleeping Beauty experiment. Per awakening betting rule represent that only 1/3 of randomly selected awakenings among multiple iteration of experiment happens when the coin is Heads. Per experiment betting rule represent that in 1/2 of randomly selected iterations of experiment your awakening is happening when the coin is Heads.
I completely agree; I think I just posted the same thing as a response to another of your comments. :-) But then, that takes us back to my confusion about what the problem is... This sounds like what you described as the "Thirder" position?
As I said, both Thirders and Double Halfers can arrive to these conclusions:
Thirders: 1/2->1/3->1/2
Double Halfers: 1/2->1/2->1/2
The difference is that Thirders now need to justify how they switch from initial 1/2 probability that the coin will be Heads on Sunday before they are put to sleep, to 1/3 on awakening despite getting no new evidence. And Double Halfers need to justify why they do not change their estimate when told that it's Monday
A previous thread got me thinking about the [sleeping beauty](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleeping_Beauty_problem) problem. I puzzled around a solution and don't really have anywhere to put it, so figured I'd put it here.
So I'm primed for a non-obvious answer, especially an answer where the right percentages are 1/3, 2/3, as indicated by the first wikipedia solution entry.
However there is a big difference between the Monte Hall problem and the Sleeping Beauty: information destruction.
The Monte Hall solution relies on the fact that you gain information through the door-opening process.
In the sleeping beauty problem, the explicit assumption is that you *don't* gain any information; or rather any information gained is explicitly discarded.
If this was a Bayesian update, the destruction/discarding of information is likely most easily represented as simply resetting your prior to the original prior, each time SB awakens -- effectively SB should always makes only one update.
However the structure of the problem as stated on wikipedia means SB doesn't even have enough information to make a *single* informative update, as we'll see below.
So let's do the Bayesian updates.
To "warm up" let's first write out the Monte Hall problem, solved via Bayesian update...
To "warm up" let's first write out the Monte Hall problem, solved via Bayesian update:
Hypotheses, and priors:
A: car is behind door A, 1/3
B: car is behind door B, 1/3
C: car is behind door C, 1/3
Data:
- First let's enumerate the states of the world; ordering is (player choice, monte hall choice):
(A,B), (A,C), (B,A), (B,C), (C,A), (C,B)
So for example (A,B) means the player chooses door A, Monte Hall chooses door B, and it is the palyers turn to decide whether to stay with A or switch to C.
Build the likelihoods:
P( (A,B) | A) = 0.5
P( (A,C) | A) = 0.5
P( (B,A) | A) = 0
P( (B,C) | A) = 1
P( (C,A) | A) = 0
P( (C,B) | A) = 1
P( (A,B) | B) = 0
P( (A,C) | B) = 1
P( (B,A) | B) = 0.5
P( (B,C) | B) = 0.5
P( (C,A) | B) = 1
P( (C,B) | B) = 0
P( (A,B) | C) = 1
P( (A,C) | C) = 0
P( (B,A) | C) = 1
P( (B,C) | C) = 0
P( (C,A) | C) = 0.5
P( (C,B) | C) = 0.5
Now the update. wlog select any of the data points: (A,B)
So the player chose A, MH revealed B, the posteriors are (A,B,C) = (0.33, 0, 0.67). This represents the classic solution -- the player should switch from A to C if maximizing prob of winning the game.
Now let's write up the same update for the sleeping beauty (SB) problem:
Hypotheses:
H: heads (SB awoken Mon only)
T: tails (SB awoken Mon & Tue)
Data:
- states of the world:
- Mon: awake on Monday
- Tue: awake on Tuesday
Likelihoods:
P(Mon | H) = 1
P(Tue | H) = 0
P(Mon | T) = 0.5
P(Tue | T) = 0.5
The update if it could be autonomously run (eg. SB could push a button to update the prior):
Mon:
P(H | Mon) = 1/(1*.5 + .5*.5)*0.5 = 0.67
P(T | Mon) = 0.5/(1*.5 + .5*.5)*0.5 = 0.33
Tue, with and without resetting the prior:
P(H | Tue) = 0/(0*.67 + .5*.33)*0.67 = 0 # inherit prior from the previous day
P(T | Tue) = 0.5/(0*.67 + .5*.33)*0.33 = 1
P(H | Tue) = 0/(0*.5 + .5*.5)*0.5 = 0 # don't inherit prior from previous day
P(T | Tue) = 0.5/(0*.5 + .5*.5)*0.5 = 1 # and use original prior
So in the version of SB where SB is told the day at each awakening, SB's posteriors are:
Mon: H,T -> 0.67, 0.33
Tue: H,T -> 0, 1 -- regardless of whether the priors are reset. Knowing that it is Tuesday completely identifies the coin flip.
However the above doesn't represent SB's information. SB isn't told the day of the week, so SB's state space is not as informative as (Mon, Tue), i.e. two states. Instead SB only has one state: awake.
Thus the likelihood for this reduced state space is:
P(awake | H) = 1
P(!awake | H) = 0
P(awake | T) = 1
P(!awake | T) = 0
That is, the state is completely uninformative to SB, as 'being awake' will always occur under each hypothesis.
For completeness the Bayesian update would look like:
Mon:
p(H | awake) = p(awake | H) / p(awake) *p(H)
= 1/(1*0.5 + 1*0.5)*0.5
= 0.5
p(T | awake) = p(awake | T) / p(awake) *p(T)
= 1/(1*0.5 + 1*0.5)*0.5
= 0.5
Tue: same as above for both resetting and not resetting priors.
Thus SB's posteriors under the proposed setup will be simply her priors. Note that she can of course have different priors than 0.5, 0.5; just to show that priors\==posteriors under 'information destruction", let's say SB's priors were:
H: 0.75
T: 0.25
Then we'd have:
Mon:
p(H | awake) = p(awake | H) / p(awake) *p(H)
= 1/(1*0.75 + 1*0.25)*0.75
= 0.75
p(T | awake) = p(awake | T) / p(awake) *p(T)
= 1/(1*0.75 + 1*0.25)*0.25
= 0.25
Tue: same as above for both resetting and not resetting priors.
In this world under the information structure, SBs posteriors equal her priors at the moment of interview each day.
Thanks. I agree with you conclusion that SB only can reason via priors. But you are using an incorrect model to arrive to it. Namely, you are using the model of David Lewis, which is demonstrably wrong.
Consider the claim that if Beauty was told that it is Monday she should update in favor of Heads. But Monday awakening always happen in the experiment, so it also can't give new information. We can even first awaken the Beauty and only then throw a coin. Update in favour of Heads would mean that Beauty has precognitive powers.
No offense intended, but can you explain the Sleeping Beauty problem without using mathematical operators? I've never heard of it, and I'm afraid your blog post is a bit too daunting for me to read and decode.
Here's a relatively standard formulation of the Sleeping Beauty problem. (I haven't clicked through to see what Ape in the coat said.)
On Sunday, you are told that you will be in a demonstration that lasts through Monday and Tuesday. After you go to sleep tonight, we will flip a fair coin. If it comes up heads, we will wake you on Monday and talk to you, and then after you go to sleep, give you drugs to sleep all the way through Tuesday. If it comes up tails, we will wake you on Monday and talk to you, and then after you go to sleep, give you drugs to erase your memories of Monday, and then wake you on Tuesday and talk to you.
You have now been woken up in the experiment. The conversation is just beginning, and you don't know whether it's Monday or Tuesday (because you knew in advance that either way, you wouldn't have memories of anything since Sunday), and whether the coin came up heads or tails. Should your confidence that the coin came up heads be 1/2, or 1/3, or something else?
The argument for 1/2 is that you didn't learn anything when you woke up, so your prior probability of 1/2 should remain unchanged.
The argument for 1/3 is something like the following - it doesn't seem to matter whether the coin flip is done Sunday night or Monday night, since it doesn't affect anything that happens until Monday night; so if it's Monday, then if the conversation reveals that it's Monday, your probability of heads should be 1/2; but your probability that it's Monday conditional on tails should be the same as your probability that it's Tuesday conditional on tails; so each of the three possibilities (Monday Heads, Monday Tails, Tuesday Tails) should all be equal, and thus 1/3.
Most people who write about this problem lean towards 1/3, but some argue that it should be 1/2, and that updating probabilities works differently when you're just learning facts about what time it is, rather than facts about which world is actual.
In terms of probability estimates that the coin is Heads 1) on Monday before it is known that it's Monday and 2) after it's revealed that it's Monday, there are two popular approaches:
Thirdism: 1/3->1/2
Lewisian Halfism: 1/2->2/3
Both of them are wrong. But, after some minor analysis, Lewisian Halfism seems more obviously wrong than Thirdism. And most of the discussion happens to be focused on this fact.
There is also Double Halfism: 1/2->1/2
But there is little discussion about it because people lack propper justification for it.
In my post I draw a distinction between Updateless and Updating Thirdism - the former - the one justified by the argument that you've written in your comment - implicitly believes that there is no fair coin toss to begin with, while the latter tries to come with some justification why the update between Sunday and Monday has to happen.
I show that Lewisian Halfism and both kind of Thirdism are actually not applicable to the Sleeping Beauty problem and happen to be modelling something else. And I build ground for the correct model and its justifications, which will be revealed in the next post but, frankly, shouldn't be that hard to guess already.
I think I'm starting to see what you're talking about. As with the Monty Hall problem, I think this can be clarified by changing the number from 2 awakenings in tails-world, to 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (10e30) awakenings in tails-world. So in tails-world, there would be 1 awakening on Monday, and 999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999 awakenings on Tuesday. (Somehow. Maybe it's a very long Tuesday.)
If I'm woken up, and not told anything, I think the odds of me being in heads-world are 1:10e30. That is, there's only a tiny chance I'm in heads-world, and I'm almost certainly in tails-world. If there's a bet that I can make every time I'm awakened, it should be at 1:10e30 odds.
But if I'm woken up, and then told that this is Monday and the first time I've been woken up, and I believe this... My gut reaction is to say that the odds are 1:1, that I've got a 50% chance of being in heads-world. If there were a special bet that I could only make on that first awakening on Monday, it should be at 1:1 odds.
> As with the Monty Hall problem, I think this can be clarified by changing the number
Funny enough both halfers and thirders think that Monty Hall analogy works for their side.
> But if I'm woken up, and then told that this is Monday and the first time I've been woken up, and I believe this...
Would you believe it, though? When awoken you claim to be extremely confident that it's not Monday, so it should require A LOT of evidence to persuade you that it is and thus shift your estimate for Heads from 1:10e30 to 1:1. Doesn't it feel weird at all? That you are so surprised that Monday awakening, something that is GUARANTEED to happen in the experiment, indeed happened?
Suppose that instead of a fair coin there is a more general random number generator and there is only one in a million chance to have 10e30 awakenings and in all the other outcomes, you have one awakening. Would you still be extremely confident when awoken in such experiment that you are in the world with 10e30 awakenings?
> My gut reaction is to say that the odds are 1:1, that I've got a 50% chance of being in heads-world. If there were a special bet that I could only make on that first awakening on Monday, it should be at 1:1 odds.
I wouldn't say I "believe it", really. It could happen, and for the purposes of the experiment I can go along with what the experimenters say. I've got no real way of knowing where I am in the sequence. I have no way of knowing whether they tell me every time that it will be Monday, or never tell me that it will be Monday, or flip more coins to decide whether to tell me, or anything like that. But assuming I trust them, then like you say, I know that Monday will happen. I go to sleep prepared for 2 scenarios, Monday and Tuesday, and when I wake up one of the scenarios happens, and I react accordingly. In that sense, it's actually less surprising than rolling a natural 20 when playing D&D. Maybe that's the psychological trick for me - there are very few options, so it's easy to hold them in mind? It seems similar to filling out answers on a standardized test, where the questions have no connection to reality, but I can still consider them abstractly and find the correct answer.
If we're talking about actual "belief", it partly depends on how much I trust the experimenters, and how much I'll be able to verify what they say afterwards, and how easy it will be for me to punish them for lying to me, and various considerations of that sort.
And yes, running the numbers, I think if there were 10e6 worlds where I was awoken one time and one world where I was awoken 10e30 times, I'd still assume that I was in the one world with 10e30 awakenings. It doesn't feel weird to me at all. I wouldn't say I'm "confident" in an intuitive sense, but it's like solving a math problem that's at the limit of my ability - I think I have the right answer, but it's not instantly obvious to me why it must be the right answer. In the same way, if I wake up, my intuitions no longer function to guide me, but I can use math to work out what the odds are. Certainly, if the experimenters do this experiment a lot, they're going to spend a lot more time on that one-in-a-million chance.
The sleeping through Tuesday part means that you know there are only *three* possibilities - Monday Heads, Monday Tails, Tuesday Tails, because you won't wake up on Tuesday Heads. The memory erasure part is to ensure that you can't tell the difference between Monday Tails and Tuesday Tails.
Interesting! I'd tend to lean towards 1/2 — just because the coin flip is independent of any contingent events that happen post-flip. Whether I wake up Monday or Tuesday wouldn't affect the odds of the coin flip. But I admit my odds of guessing the correct answer could be 1/3 (I'd have to think about it some more, though).
But from the point of view of a repeated participant, 1/3 of wakings will be heads wakings and 2/3 of wakings will be tails wakings. If they consistently bet on heads at 50-50 odds, then they will lose money over time.
Frequencies don’t answer the question because there’s one frequency that is 1/2 and another that is 1/3, and this is a question about Bayesian probability instead.
In the caste system in India, as originally practiced (or so the traditional doctrines hold), sure the upper layers were quite privileged, but there was a catch: the higher you were in the hierarchy, the more restrictions were placed on you. To give an example, a Brahmin, someone at the very top, is supposed to take a bath after each defecation, and this is just one of many restrictions. Conversely, being at the bottom means you do the manual labor, but you don't have any restrictions like that and can indulge in all sort of vices. So it worked (or so I've been told), because the Shudras, the bottom caste, would look at the top and see that the people there really were of a superior nature to them.
Now, this is not about defending the caste system, but about revisiting this idea that the more you climb in society, the more restricted your life becomes. We should totally do this I think. Past some threshold of wealth (TBD) maybe it could be something like you have to put in 200 hours of volunteer work each year, maybe 100 of community service and 100 of working the land. I think this would give a dose of reality to the sheltered upper classes and remind them of how the society they live in actually works. Certainly, doing volunteer work with the homeless has had that effect on me, and this might be a way to harness populism to good ends, as it is a rather populistic measure.
We used to have something along the lines of this in the west too (noblesse oblige). But it's a tradition that is passed down through families, and the tradition has faded as new money has displaced old money; the vast majority of money these days is new money which doesn't understand that you're not supposed to actually be _seen_ enjoying your wealth, you're supposed to be seen labouring under its obligations, so that nobody has to feel bad.
That used to be the idea of fagging in British public schools. For the benefit of US readers, who might find this misleading, public schools are actually private schools, and fagging is the idea that junior pupils should perform menial (non-sexual one hopes! :-) tasks for senior pupils, such as running errands, polishing shoes, or making toast. So a duke's son could be fagging for a coal merchant's son, and that would give the former some notion of what service entailed and the latter would gain experience in leadership and giving orders.
Re the caste system, I read somewhere that it started out as mostly a health precaution, when Indo-European (Aryan) invaders of India, from c 2000 BC or thereabouts, found they had limited resistance to diseases which the indigenous population took in their stride through long accustomization.
It was many years ago, possibly a New Scientist article. They may have been just reporting some anthropologist's suggestion, rather than claiming it was generally accepted gospel truth. It's quite reasonable for them to do this, even for expert suggestions lacking firm evidence and that one never hears more about again!
I am skeptical that that source, or any other, could establish anything about the origins of caste. I would even caution against assuming that it started with the Indo-European invasions; one really doesn't know much. Another point is that the question is not even really well-defined: one needs to specify whether one is talking of caste as in "varna" or caste as in "jati"; I find it a scandal that these disparate notions are always conflated.
I think modern America does this already with nonsense like 'white privilege'. Successful elites have to kowtow to the notion that their success is totally because of luck and privilege and that those are unjustly denied to underrepresented minorities.
George Orwell's 1984 has Winston concluding that the proles were the least deluded by ideology and the Inner Party the most so. "If there is hope [...] it lies in the proles".
"Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm really awfully glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas."
Well, we're already there but worse, as society is stratified, but those at the top aren't really that different from the lower tiers, they just get to enjoy themselves a lot more. Being at the top really should be something that comes with a sacrifice. Of course, there could be a society where there is no top and no bottom, but that seems like a pipe dream, given all of human history.
I've not studied this bit absorbed this growing up.
Brahmins were not allowed to accumulate wealth or own land. Their job was (like academics) to acquire knowledge (in ancient India that was the study of the vedas and in support of that they made advancements in math, astronomy etc) and disseminate it. They had to go door to door to beg to eat food. It was the duty of others to not turn them away when they begged for food.
Over time, Brahmin culture involved teaching your children to read and write very early. People of this caste were typically poor until the British came. The Brits needed local people who could read and write and maintain accounts of who had paid taxes. And be bureaucrats. This was when they started rising in wealth (creating jealousy, conflicts). Even today, Brahmins who pursue business or other directly money-making activities face some disapproval from elders. It feels like an activity that is not quite something you're supposed to do.
Speaking of status - the Gods that Brahmins pray to are mostly not Brahmin. Most are Kshatriyas (warrior caste).
Modern academia feels at least a little bit like that. At the top, you're supposed to be extremely dedicated to your research, and additionally spend a bunch of time on activities that don't benefit you directly (academic service such as organizing conferences and editing journals, but also things like traveling to visit other research groups and holding extensive 1 on 1 meetings with the phd students there. On top of that there's teaching, for which most academics are technically overqualified and didactically underqualified.
Similar things exist in other fields, e.g., pro-bono work by lawyers. I don't have direct experience there, but it seems to be somewhat required, maybe even formally mediated by their professional organizations?
In ancient India, pursuit of money/land and pursuit of wealth, were supposed to be kept independent. There was something like that, although I'm not an expert. Brahmins were monimaniacally devoted to studying one question : understanding the nature of thought/consciousness. According to Roberto Calasso, they didn't care about anything else. Others gave them food. They were not into material possessions.
In modern India nobody cares too much about this anymore.
Hindus believe that god is above concepts such as number (or gender for that matter). One god is same as infinite gods.
Practically, different people have different preferences about the personality of the god they worship. There are also the Carvaka who don't believe in god or the supremacy of the vedas, and pursue hedonism.
The vedas (Upanishads, to be exact) also say "You are that". There is no two. This is called Advaita or "non-duality". Every entity, whether living or non-living (or virtual like this page) is one with "universal consciousness". There is only one TYPE of thing. God is not mentioned once in the Upanishads.
Yeah, except it's more real. Money is just so abstract. I mean, I give 10% of my income to charity, but that's basically invisible to me. The volunteer work I do with the homeless though, that really clarifies things.
Based on my (limited) understanding of history, there was a time when only the aristocracy could afford advanced metal weaponry or were trained to use it, so they were the ones responsible for going to war. It sounds like such a more just way to structure society to me. You get the rewards of wealth but you have to be willing to pay for it, potentially with your life rather than just money. Once being a soldier became just another occupation, now rich people only have to pay poor people to go and die. They still get to enjoy the privileges of a hierarchical society without having to sacrifice anything of real value.
It gets muddled depending on which period & region you're looking at. Two obvious, opposing examples are (1) the Marian reforms which opened up the lucrative field of looting conquered barbarian settlements to the capita censi, and (2) a suit of full plate armor, affordable only by feudal lords, that made a mounted knight the pre-gunpowder equivalent of a main battle tank.
It was kinda like that in the caste system, since the second tier, the kshatriya caste, were the warriors and kings. So they get to enjoy wealth, power, honor, but they have to be willing to put their lives on the line.
So the restrictions on the Brahmin class were necessary to prevent the warrior caste from realising "Hang on, we've got all the weapons, how about we're the highest caste now?"
The warriors already had the things that you can seize with violence: wealth and political power. And I suspect that those were the things they really wanted.
Interesting, I never knew this about the caste system, I always assumed Brahmins were on top in every sense.
Maybe that's because they got more on-top during the British Raj when the power of the warrior class got sidelined by the power of the guys in red pyjamas? Or maybe it's just because Brahmins are vastly overrepresented in the Indians that we get in the West?
An interesting thought, though I think you're mixing up a couple things and underestimating the degree to which some of this is already done.
Would a minimum-wage waiter see a millionaire doing their yearly required service hours and think 'wow, this person has such great moral fibre and is thus more deserving of their wealth and status?' I don't think so, it would probably be clear that they're just complying with the legal/social norms of their class. This would have other benefits (putting the upper classes in closer contact with the lower is a big plus), but not the same claimed effect as the caste system's restrictions. It's more like Scott's proposal for a modern liturgy.
I think this is partly because these aren't really restrictions on the wealthy, just more obligations, and extra obligations aren't much of an incentive against getting more power/wealth/status. If, beyond a certain income/net worth, you had to forswear drugs/alcohol, or tasty food/meat, or sex other than for the purposes of procreation, or you had to maintain certain standards of contemporary purity, those would be very strong incentives against greater wealth/status, and the people who were willing to accept them probably would be people with more self-control and certain other virtues. Maybe you would wind up with people making lots of money, but giving away a quantity beyond which they would enter an undesirable set of restrictions, a de facto earnings cap.
But parts of this are kinda-sorta already the case. Among the old rich/upper class, though not really the new rich, both certain standards of cultural purity (etiquette, maintaining a public image) and public donations at least in part for the sake of looking good (patronizing the arts, supporting schools, photoshoots with the mayor next to a big new building with your name on it) are pretty standard. It's not formally institutionalized like you're proposing, but the seeds are there.
Posting one more time, because I got zero responses in the last open thread, and I think it must exist by now.
Do any of the new image generators / alterers allow you to upload pictures of yourself or another person at different ages, and have it adjust different-age pictures to a requested age?
Like you have a picture of your grandma at age 20 and age 90, can it impute a picture of her at age 50?
Or a picture of yourself ten years ago vs today - can you age the younger picture to you today, keeping the background and setting?
Just search for "morphing faces together" and you will find lots of results. Morphing is not new, that could already be done before all the modern AI apps came out, and it's probably easier to do without AI image generators.
I think it can be done, but you have to do fine-tuning yourself. E.g. I know it is possible to take a diffusion model and fine-tune it's concept of "man" to a bunch of pictures of yourself. Then it will always put your face on all the men it generates. Not sure how to add age morphing to that basic idea, but it should be possible.
Have there been any studies on the rightward political shift on Twitter/X in recent years? I'm curious (1) what's driving it, (2) how significant it is, (3) how it's changing wider public discourse.
The massive anti-woke backlash against Gemini in the past week got me thinking more about the question. I couldn't imagine this happening on the platform circa 2018.
What's driving it are the policies that Musk instituted since he took over. Twitter is the only mainstream platform where rightwing views aren't systematically censored so it has naturally attracted rightwing participants.
Was it a massive anti-woke backlash? I can see elements of that in it, but mostly I think Google cut the rod for its own back. Personally, I wish I had known in time so I could have seen the diverse leprechauns, I'm sure they would have been *so* much better than the boring old traditional Irish folklore leprechauns:
Lady leprechauns! Indian (both Asian Indian and Native American) leprechauns! Leprechauns of colour, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation diversity! South Asian non-binary leprechauns expanding into other fields of industry than shoe making and gold hoarding!
Wait a minute, I call shenanigans on your leprechauns. If there are no female leprechauns, then where do baby leprechauns come from ? Are you saying that all leprechauns are male or hermaphroditic or asexual, and reproduce by budding ? But if so, it would technically render all leprechauns gay and nonbinary by definition ! Pick a lane, @Deiseach ! :-)
We don't know what leprechauns do in the privacy of the fairy fort and frankly, Bugmaster, didn't you get the memo back when sodomy was decriminalised that what people do in their bedrooms is none of our business?
There are female fairies, so presumably they and the leprechauns and other male fairies marry or whatever it is the fairies do in place of marriage. I am not going out under a hawthorn bush looking to find a leprechaun to ask for his parents' marriage lines, okay?
They must be one of those semi-parasitic species, I forget if there's a name for them, where they mate with human women but the offspring are either male leprechauns or female humans.
Musk, directly, and the code/moderation changes after his arrival, have played at least some part, compounded by the idea/self-fulfilling prophecy among both left and the right that Twitter is the "right-wing social media" now.
It was dumb, but even dumber was the Washington Post's defence re: the black and lady popes. "There might be black popes in the future!" That reminded me of a Snopes rebuttal, though even Snopes have gotten better recently: "It was only 98% incorrect, so we're going to say 'Mostly True'".
"In contrast, some of the examples cited by Gemini’s critics as historically innaccurate (sic) are plausible. The viral tweet from the @EndofWokeness account also showed a prompt for “an image of a Viking” yielding an image of a non-White man and a Black woman, and then showed an Indian woman and a Black man for “an image of a pope.”
The Catholic church bars women from becoming popes. But several of the Catholic cardinals considered to be contenders should Pope Francis die or abdicate are black men from African countries. Viking trade routes extended to Turkey and Northern Africa and there is archaeological evidence of black people living in Viking-era Britain."
I'm going to stay away from the Black Vikings because I'm no anthropologist, but anything to do with Catholicism is fair game for me. Does Jeff Bezos have money invested in Google Gemini, that his organ came out to protect its fair name? 😁
Okay, I lied: I just *had* to look up their link about "black people living in Viking-era Britain" and it turns out to be one (1) burial of a possibly mixed-race person in York:
"However, an examination of the remains in order to make ancestry determinations suggested that SK 3379 was unusual in one way: unlike the other six individuals examined, Malin Holst and Katie Keefe concluded that he 'may have been of African or mixed ancestry and may have migrated to York or descended from those that did'."
There are also, ahem, unfortunate implications: any black or possibly black/African people in Viking-era Britain may have been slaves, so not really black Vikings I'm sorry to tell the WaPo:
"In addition to such archaeological parallels, attention can also be drawn to the evidence of the eleventh-century Fragmentary Annals of Ireland, which relates the story of a Viking raid on Morocco (Mauritania) in the mid-ninth century that led to the taking of 'a great host' of captives:
Then they brought a great host of them captive with them to Ireland, i.e. those are the black men. For Mauri is the same as nigri; 'Mauritania' is the same as nigritudo. Hardly one in three of the Norwegians escaped, between those who were slain, and those who drowned in the Gaditanian Straits. Now those black men remained in Ireland for a long time.
This account was discussed at length in a previous post, and the notion that it reflects real events is supported by Al-Bakrī's Kitāb al-Masālik wa-al-Mamālik, which relates that 'Majūs [Vikings]—God curse them—landed at Nakūr [Nekor, Morocco], in the year 244 (858–9). They took the city, plundered it, and made its inhabitants slaves, except those who saved themselves by flight... The Majūs stayed eight days in Nakūr.'(7) Likewise, the late ninth-century Christian Chronicle of Alfonso III relates that the 'Northman pirates... sailed the sea and attacked Nekur, a city in Mauritania, and there they killed a vast number of Muslims.'"
> Then they brought a great host of them captive with them to Ireland, i.e. those are the black men. For Mauri is the same as nigri; 'Mauritania' is the same as nigritudo.
That's a weird article. She mentions certain remains as being identified as "sub-Saharan" African, but I can't be sure whether she actually means that. Note that Moroccans are in fact not black, and not sub-Saharan. Most of the piece seems to intentionally equivocate between black Africans and white North Africans.
There is no reason to believe that Moroccan slaves who were described by the medieval Irish as "black" were not white; there were no blacks in Ireland to contrast them with. "Black" and "dark" are frequent descriptors in traditional and historical material, but they more often refer to the color of someone's hair than to the color of their skin. And when they do refer to skin, they still don't mean what you would expect by describing someone as "black".
Definitely people from North Africa are not the same as sub-Saharan Africans, and are much lighter skinned (and that's before we even get into Coptic/Arabic/Caucasian divisions).
For the 9th century, I wouldn't expect much discrimination between "people from Africa" as "black which we now would consider black" and "much browner than the local milk-white population", but that linked article had a *ton* of "possibly, maybe, could have been". When you're scrabbling for "the Roman Emperor who was born in Roman Africa" as an example of "people from Africa living in Viking-era Britain", then you should just go "yeah, this isn't archaeology, it's DEI".
So really the WaPo is carrying water for Gemini, which does make me wonder if Jeff has money socked away invested in the rival to Bing and so his editors are following the party line on "don't everybody flee to Microsoft, please!"
> When you're scrabbling for "the Roman Emperor who was born in Roman Africa" as an example of "people from Africa living in Viking-era Britain", then you should just go "yeah, this isn't archaeology, it's DEI".
There's no ambiguity for that one; all Roman Emperors are known to have been white, just like the population of Roman Africa.
The article explicitly called one of the remains "sub-Saharan", but it's so poorly written and dishonest that I can't tell (a) whether it meant to do that; or (b) whether that might be true.
> There's no ambiguity for that one; all Roman Emperors are known to have been white, just like the population of Roman Africa.
Only if you use the more expansive definition of "white" that includes MENA. But at the very least, we explicitly know that some emperors were pretty tan, and most likely most of them were, since these guys are Mediterranean, not British.
My response when reading the Viking claim was "If you asked Gemini for images of North Africans or Turks would you be happy if it gave you blonde Scandinavians?"
Well, we know from the prompts that "diverse" only applies when you ask for white people. Having a group of all black or all brown people is fine, it's only a group of all white people that is the most evillest evil thing in the world because it's discriminatory, normative, and just plain racist, mmkay?
"Know" might be a little too strong; the prompt leaks are still LLM output. It's not reliable on other topics, and it doesn't have to be reliable on this one.
The general sense given by the prompt leaks is clearly correct - because we knew the same information before we had the leaks - but we can't necessarily rely on any specific detail.
In the literature on female attractiveness it's often claimed that men find women with neotenous features very attractive. Some psychologists may run a study showing men pictures of 18+ women and ask them to pick out the most attractive faces. The women that then get picked are ones with facial proportions typical pubescent girls about 12-14. This is then interpreted to mean that men find adult women with "neotenous faces" the most attractive.
Now, I can't be the only one who's spotted the glaring flaw in this reasoning. Men find women who look like pubescent girls most attractive. Well, who else looks like pubescent girls? Who else has the facial proportions of girls about 12-14? Well, actual pubescent girls look like pubescent girls. Actual girls about 12-14 have the facial proportions typical of girls about 12-14. It's not neoteny men find highly attractive, it's immaturity. What men find most attractive simply isn't adult women but young teen and pubescent girls. Some women happen to retain the facial proportions of a pubescent girl into adulthood and men continue to find them highly attractive because of it.
Psychologists have naively started out with the presumption that a sexual preference for fully developed adults must be the norm. When confronted with evidence that men find the faces of pubescent girls most attractive they bend over backwards to avoid the obvious conclusion that their presumption is wrong by claiming that what men prefer is adult women with "neotenous faces" who look like pubescent girls. There's no law of evolution that says the males in a species have to prefer the fully developed adults. The only thing that ultimately matters in evolution is reproductive success. If the males in a species can achieve greater reproductive success by going after immature females due to the way their mating system works then they will evolve to do exactly that.
In South Korea facial reshaping surgery is popular. What facial proportions do women choose to get with this surgery? Well, the proportions typical of girls about 12-14 because they know they're the most attractive. Here's some examples:
Notice also that the skin in the after pics has been made to look softer and smoother like the skin of a pubescent girl.
The BMI men rate most attractive is about 18-20 which is low for an adult woman but normal for a young teen or pubescent girl. BMI also increases after pregnancy. It would have been important for men in ancestral times to prefer females who are young and haven't started reproducing yet as these females would be capable of giving them the most offspring over the long-term. So a low BMI appears to be another sign of immaturity and nulliparity that men have evolved to find attractive.
The vulvas men find most attractive are also those of pubescent girls. Many women have had their labia trimmed down to make themselves look like a pubescent girl down there because they know men find it more attractive just like men prefer the faces of pubescent girls. I won't link to it here but there's a site called Autoblow Vagina Contest that have a leaderboard of vulvas. The vulvas at the top have the small inner labia typical of pubescent girls. If real pubescent girls could post themselves on this site I'm sure they'd be voted to the top.
The schoolgirl image. Popular in porn, especially across Asia where there's less taboo over attraction to minors. This is another sign of immaturity. If a girl is still wearing a school uniform then she's obviously not yet adult and still a bit immature.
TLDR: It's not neoteny men find attractive, it's immaturity.
So, Mr. Bojangles, I do not think many people have seen the labia of 12-14 year old girls, and even fewer have seen enough to be walking around with prepubescent labial norms in their heads. I'm the mother of a young adult daughter, and while I occasionally saw her naked up until she left for college, I have not seen her labia since I stopped having to do diaper changes when she was 3. How many prepubescent labia have you seen, and how did it come about that you saw them?
"Some psychologists may run a study showing men pictures of 18+ women and ask them to pick out the most attractive faces. The women that then get picked are ones with facial proportions typical pubescent girls about 12-14. "
That's curiously phrased. *Have* any psychiatrists ever run such a study with the results you suggest? If so, did it replicate? And can we get a cite so we can at least look at the methodology?
If not, if this is just a hypothetical, then why should we engage it at all? I'd rather engage the hypothesis that men prefer women who look to be about 16-18, or perhaps a bit older, because I think that's far more likely to actually be true,
Curious about what Autoblow is and what it has to do with vaginas? OK, the Autoblow is a male masturbation device that delivers suction plus rhythmic rubbing. The man inserts his penis through a sleeve made of soft rubbery stuff with a mouth-shaped opening it. The manufacturer is now working on the Autoblow 2, where the sleeve will be an artificial vulva. It will be called the Robotwat. I believe the point of the vulva contest is to allow the maker to use the world's most beautful vulva in the Robotwat's sleeve -- site says they will be doing 3D scans of the winning vulvas. Oh, also there are lots of Autoblow and Robotwat accessories available -- for example, the Nut Nibbler. If you own both -- well, life doesn't get much better than that.
These devices aren't just plain old pocket pussies. They deliver data driven blow jobs.
"Our machine learning study analyzed 1000 hours of blowjob videos to deliver to our customers real blowjobs with a human touch."
So I looked at the winning vulvas, and they do not support Mr. Bojangles' contention that men prefer the smaller labia minora of 12-14 year olds. About half of the vulvas in the top 10 were from women aged 25 and older, and 2 were from women who were 40-ish. The size of the labia minora varied quite a lot, and on a couple of vulvas I'd say they were pretty large and prominent. There were also several photographed from the rear where it was impossible to even get an idea of the size of the inner labia.
If the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon is a superstition or a cognitive distortion then it's a damn convincing one because it was hours ago that I first learned of the Autoblow in a completely different context. Something like this happens to me at least once every two months.
To jump tracks for a bit, THIS SHIT RIGHT HERE makes me worry more about the AI apocalypse than all the politically correct AI art combined. Next step, hooking it up to a computer and synchronizing audio and video output, while using internal sensors and cameras and microphones to track arousal state. Although I suppose then it's only a small step toward nudging people to fetishize black kings of England or female popes or whatever. If displays are running at 200 fps, how many of those frames can be subliminal images?
< Next step, hooking it up to a computer and synchronizing audio and video output, while using internal sensors and cameras and microphones to track arousal state.
Leaving aside this data and your interpretation of it, given a random sample of 100 grown women in their early 20s very very few will appear prepubescent regardless of these relative facial proportions. The semantics here are used to validate a jump to conclusions.
Right. In practice, almost all men will prefer the face of an actual 22 year old woman to an actual 12 year old girl. A 12 year old girl looks like a 12 year old girl, though I would have no idea exactly what actual facial differences I'm looking at that help my brain tell one from the other.
I'm not sure what subtle facial shape changes might happen between 12 and 22, but I wonder whether what we're looking at is that 22 year olds are (on average) fatter than 12 year olds, which skews the "what a 22 year old woman looks like" data set.
I think if you're going to dance on the third rail like this it would behoove you to actually link some of the studies in question. Complaining about the reactions of some interlocutor(s) 'confronted with evidence' rings hollow when you haven't, you know, presented any.
I will note that you are focusing on facial attractiveness, and that other features that are important don't necessarily have some optimal value during the early teen years. For example, WHR seems to reach a minimum at around 20 or a little later, see https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1090513803000837
Whaddya mean no evidence. He told us where to find the labia data, though he refrained from linking to it. Please do pay a visit to https://vaginacontest.com
Many are doing it, but you're the first person I came across doing it after noticed the trend. I did say something similar to a couple other people on this thread.
And I particularly object to people responding to this post without questioning OP about his sources. And it's a post that I think particularly merits a call for sources. The only source he even mentions, tho without linking it, was the Autoblow Vagina Site. That's a strong contender for dumbest info source I've ever seen cited online. If you haven't paid a Autoblow a visit, please do have a look. Also, the top 10 winning vulvas in the contest do not conform to OP's statement that delicate 12-14 year old vulvas are the most attractive to men. The vulvas in the winner's parade vary quite a lot in the dimensions of different parts, and in 3 of the photos the woman is in a postion that doesn't even let the viewer glimpse her labia minora. Clearly the people that voted them to the top don't care much about labia formation. They may instead represent the "puffy pussy"-lover contingent.
I'd say that's a noncentral fallacy on your part. Whether or not that site is legit, OP's central claim that men find youth attractive is obviously true. I have no interest in litigating the details of a claim which is clearly correct. I'm happy to simply stipulate its truth so that I can move on to making a more interesting point about its interpretation.
There's no doubt men find young women the most attractive. But OP's claim is that they find pubescent girls, 12-14 year olds, the most attractive. And he is at pains to make clear that he does not mean that men prefer young women who happen to look like they are 12-14, but actual 12-14 year olds:
<It's not neoteny men find highly attractive, it's immaturity. What men find most attractive simply isn't adult women but young teen and pubescent girls. . .
Psychologists have naively started out with the presumption that a sexual preference for fully developed adults must be the norm . . . There's no law of evolution that says the males in a species have to prefer the fully developed adults. The only thing that ultimately matters in evolution is reproductive success. If the males in a species can achieve greater reproductive success by going after immature females due to the way their mating system works then they will evolve to do exactly that. . . The vulvas men find most attractive are also those of pubescent girls. Many women have had their labia trimmed down to make themselves look like a pubescent girl down there because they know men find it more attractive.
This may be true, but I can't recall ever seeing it stated. My life experience also does not provide any evidence that it is obviously true. The teens he is talking about are the ones who just got their period in the last year or so. The look sort of little girly still, with small breasts and butts, and skinny little-girl arms. They are adorable, and I don't doubt that men find them attractive. But my experience is that the women males find most beautiful are late teens-early 20's and slender, but with fully developed breasts and shapely butts. If you have any doubts about it, google image "beautiful woman body" or "midjourney female characters body." They have jugs and shapely booties, and their faces also look like women's not young teen's.
I wonder whether the school system contributes to this.
I mean, in nature there is such a thing as "imprinting"; once you associate something with something, if it happened in the sensitive moment of your life, the association will stay for a long time, maybe forever.
So when the boys get sexually ready, at puberty, which women do they see? Well, they spend most of their days at a classroom, so they mostly see the girls at puberty, plus the teacher. Perhaps their brain chooses some of them, and writes the information as "this is what a sexually attractive woman looks like". Some choose the classmates. Some choose the teacher. For the rest of their lives, their preferences will be skewed that way.
I think the quote was "freshman girls", not high school girls. I laughed at that line the first time I saw the movie, but 30 years later it seems creepy. But that was my generation — my class, even — and Linklater portrayed my high school experience perfectly.
But I will say, that our culture hadn't fully developed those inter-age sex taboos back then. One of my teachers married a student right after her graduation. He was dating her with her parent's permission, and the administration was OK with it as long as her parents were OK with it. That would never happen today! But heck, an LA prosecutor let Roman Polanski off with a slap on the wrist for the statutory rape of a thirteen-year-old girl. Forty-something Woody Allen was dating seventeen-year-old Mariel Hemingway in "Manhattan"—and no one raised an eyebrow. Brooke Shields—encouraged by her avaricious mother—starred as a prepubescent prostitute in Pretty Baby and she posed for a major pornography magazine in the nude (artistically, of course). And there were a lot erotic films from the mid-seventies and early eighties (basically softcore porn) with teenagers. It was a different world.
(I actually looked up the scene before transcribing the quote, because I wasn't sure I remembered it right.)
I agree about changing norms. Japan raised its age of consent from 13 to 16, last year. The state where I was born has laws that allow it at 13, too, but with a 2-year age window under 18 (so 13s only with 13s and 14s and 15s, and so on up), which seems sensible. I have a pedantic urge to comment "California Uber Alles" whenever I see people on the Internet talk about "18" as if it's some universally accepted truth, but eh, it's too much mess to get into. I know saying "it's not my fight" is often seen as a cop-out, but in this case I literally do have a fight that is not this.
I do find the notion of an absolute cutoff interesting as a risk/safety tradeoff, though, if interpreted in an intelligent way. By its nature, we want to put the line where as few people as possible are at risk. By putting the line at, say, 18, we are in effect saying that almost everyone under 18 is actually ready at age 18years - 1day. For someone at age X < 18 who is ready, we are sacrificing their freedom in order to protect precisely the people between ages X and 18 who aren't yet ready.
Viewed another way, it's a very useful tool for law enforcement to identify bad people. There's a tabletop RPG called Nobilis, which in its setting had the somewhat-evil ruler of Existence create the "Windflower Law": "thou shalt not love". Completely impossible for anyone to keep, so everyone's guilty and can be hauled off if Lord Entropy so desires. But the other point is that it separates people who at least try to pretend to follow it, from rebels who flout it. Anyone who knuckles under to this law, knows the score. Similarly, anyone who can't keep it in their pants for an under-18-year-old, probably has trouble keeping it in their pants period.
You might be misunderstanding the point of referring to neoteny. Neoteny is about retention of juvenile features in a species-wide manner. It's not just about some individuals looking young, but about noting evolutionary trends that result in adults of a species retaining juvenile features into adulthood. This is particularly relevant to humans in light of theories that claim humans are essentially "juvenile apes". So a study that demonstrates men's attraction to neotenous features is trying to do more work than just saying "men like 'em young".
And you didn't even mention the preference a lot of men have for zero/minimal pubic hair.
I don't think it's necessarily "immaturity" men find attractive, though. I think the fundamental thing they're attracted to is "time left til menopause." The longer, the better, from an evolutionary perspective.
Pubic hair removal goes in and out of favor. The current spasm of pubic shaving only goes back 30 or 40 years. Dan Savage, who's in his 50's, came of age in an era where it was not the norm, and jokes that modern young people naked all look like they're having chemo. My mother was appalled when she heard about it, commented that women look like little girls with their little split showing in front, and thought it was kind of perverse to adopt that look. Also said the stubble must be hell to put up with.
The trend (in my time) came from Brazilian beachwear, yes? That's why a pubic wax is called a Brazilian, after all. Trend to wear the least minimal amount that you can get away with of dental floss covering the bits that get you in trouble for public nudity, and of course, the less material in the briefs to cover your bits, the cleaner they have to be so you can get away with the argument "it's only skin showing!" Hence, trimming/shaving off pubic hair so it won't show and get you in trouble for revealing your private parts.
Porn adopts this habit, then that becomes the 'new normal' as young men who get their primary images of naked women from porn think this is how women 'should' look and now shaving your mons becomes like shaving your legs and armpits.
For gay men/porn, I think it does have more to do with "more comfortable to give blowjobs when no hair to get caught by either giver or receiver" but that's at second- or third-hand so don't quote me on it.
I would have said that, too. Certainly, I never encountered shaved pubes on girlfriends before the mid-to-late 1980s, and the fashion seemed to follow the lead of female porn stars. The first shaved female pubes I ever saw were in early 1980s porn movies, and I remember being shocked that women would take a razor to such a sensitive spot. Female pubic depilation as a fashion seemed to follow the porn example a few years later. (Also, I noticed that female porn stars seem to have been the fashion leaders when it came to piercings and tattoos.)
OTOH, there's a long history in Western Art of not depicting pubic hair on the genitals of either sex dating back to the statuary of Greece and Rome. AFAIK, Gustave Courbet's painting The Origin of the World (painted 1866) was the first painting to depict female genitalia garbed in pubic hair. That one shocked the art world at the time, and it's still causing controversy today!
This brings to mind the possibly apocryphal story that art critic John Ruskin was unable to consummate his marriage to Effie Gray because he was unaware that women naturally had pubic hair and Effie's pubic hair revolted him.
What's the evolutionary explanation for the Classical Greeks' sexual ideation of boys? Moreover, most of the men with boy lovers also had wives with whom they reproduced. Yes, there's a neotenous component for their sexual preferences, but there's no evolutionary reason for sex between men and men, men and boys, women and women, and women and girls.
And let's not forget the obsession with flogging that swept through English culture during the late 18th and 19th Century. I can't think of any post-hoc evolutionary handwaving that would explain this. The fact that there's variation between sexual ideals from culture to culture leads me to conclude there's a strong societal component at play here.
And just out of curiosity, I was trying to find out if after the advent of Taboo magazine (a slick heterosexual-oriented B&D magazine) whether sales of bondage and discipline equipment went up. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find any data going back that far, but sales of B&D gear have gone up since the advent of COVID-19. Evolutionary explanation, anyone?
>Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find any data going back that far, but sales of B&D gear have gone up since the advent of COVID-19. Evolutionary explanation, anyone?
'fraid I don't have one, but I can say that "Co-evolution of spike proteins and fetish gear" would be a _memorable_ title for a publication. :-)
A man in the UK has been sentenced to two years in prison for maintaining an online library of far-right political stickers.
I wonder if clowns like Freddie deBoer who were hysterically crying about people facing negative consequences for supporting palestine are even opposed to this. Or Scott, for that matter, who was quick to cry about some incompetent rich Haitian diversity hire at harvard get fired but has not to my knowledge ever talked about europe imprisoning people for political speech.
Let's say hypothetically that Messrs Alexander and de Boer, in addition to crying about the things they are currently crying about, began whining about the thing that you're currently sniveling about. Would this satisfy you, or do you need for them to bitch about the things you prefer to piss and moan about *exclusively*?
It’s an interesting story.
https://www.gbnews.com/news/sam-melia-free-speech-activists-outraged-jailed-far-right-stickers
The dude's got a right to be angry. I'm angry too. I'm also despairing, because I honestly don't see how this gets better.
And the dude's go a right to "wonder" whether Scott is opposed to putting people in jail for far-right political speech, but if he does we're going to wonder whether he is A: paying attention and B: seriously trying to engage with the community.
Anybody still following up on Ivermectin as a COVID-19 treatment, there's a new study using Bayesian statistics. It's a randomized controlled trial with N = 8811, offering this interpretation of the results: "Ivermectin for COVID-19 is unlikely to provide clinically meaningful improvement in recovery, hospital admissions, or longer-term outcomes. Further trials of ivermectin for SARS-Cov-2 infection in vaccinated community populations appear unwarranted."
See the full study for details: https://www.journalofinfection.com/article/S0163-4453(24)00064-1/
So I'm in the middle of listen to Tucker Carlson interview Putin. And... well I can only describe this as 'liking' Putin's narrative of history, compared to the hawkish government here in our country. Wouldn't it have been good for Russia to join the west as a full economic partner? It would have been good for everyone. No? Amazing number of times (Putin says) our presidents made a tentative deal, only to be talked out of it by their advisors. Isn't peace with Russia better than war?
Did you like the bit where this Putin fellow that you like so much, explained why Hitler had no choice but to start World War Two by invading Poland because the dastardly Poles backed him into a corner and forced him into it?
The rest of his history lesson was no better, but this highlights the fundamental problem with your assessment. Yes, in an abstract theoretical sense, peace with Russia is better than war. But in the practical real-world sense, peace with Russia is rather like peace with Nazi Germany - it just plain isn't going to happen until someone surrenders. Who do you want to surrender?
Hmm Well let me first correct your mistake about me liking Putin. The man's the f-ing dictator of Russia. You don't get to that spot by being a nice guy.
I must have missed the part about Poland. To be honest I tuned out most of the history lesson... it's mostly interesting because this is what is important to Putin. This is what he believes, or the story he tells. There's a real historical celebration of the defeat of the Nazis. And I don't know if Putin thinks he's still fighting Nazis or if he's just using it to whip up support in the country. I don't know what peace with Russia would look like. I guess I'm in the mode (mood) to give it a shot.
> I don't know what peace with Russia would look like.
I'm too late to the debate, but this is very simple. From Russia's perspective, "peace" means "Americans will not interfere while we recollect the lost pieces of the former Soviet empire".
The lost pieces of the former Soviet empire do not really want to be recollected, but as long as they do not join NATO (or perhaps side with China), it is just a question of time. A few square kilometers at a time; a larger "special operation" when necessary; try again a decade later. Russia has enough human lives (lots of ethnic minorities) to sacrifice, and the boys in the country conquered today will be sent to the front lines of tomorrow's special operations.
So the ideal (from Russia's perspective) peace plan would be to let Russia conquer Ukraine, then Belarus, Moldova, Kazakhstan (probably forgot something here), in return for some nice words from Putin. The next step would be whining about former Soviet countries allowed to be in NATO, because... you know, they are too close to Russia. They need to become neutral first, and get conquered by Russia later. The next step would be whining about former Warsaw Pact countries allowed to be in NATO, because... you know, too close to Russia. Neutral first; Russian latter. And then? Who knows, perhaps we will finally see the "peace for our time". Or maybe not. Putin decides.
> I don't know if Putin thinks he's still fighting Nazis or if he's just using it to whip up support in the country.
Russians have been doing this literally since Brezhnev. In Russian politics, "Nazi" means "someone who opposes Russia". The connection to the actual historical Nazis is very loose, especially if you notice how Putin says that Hitler attacking Poland was a good thing.
I'm afraid I didn't have the patience to listen to the maestro of historical whining in action, but I bet he recycled the same accusations and historical distortions again. Did he say anything new in front of Tucker? it's remarkable how similar Putin's previous statements sound like an aggrieved 1930s Adolf Hilter. According to Putin, the entire post–Cold War era has been a period of Russia’s humiliation at the hands of a hostile West.
Did he go on and on about the Ukrainians and Russians being historically one people culturally and spiritually? Most Ukrainians don't think that.
Did he name-drop Vladimir I? — a.k.a.Volodymyr I, the Ukrainian (Rus/Viking) king who converted to Christianity in the tenth century? Medieval Kyiv before the Mongol invasion was the home of the original Viking/Slavic Rus. Moscow didn't even exist at that time.
After the Mongols arrived, Moscow became the tax collector and enforcer for the Khanate of the Golden Horde whose leadership was based where? — you guessed it. Crimea. Eventually, the Tsars of Moscow acquired enough military power to conquer a much-reduced Tartar Khanate. But I bet he didn't mention these things.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1492164056962195457.html
As for the post-Cold-War historical record, and the NATO and Russia, NATO has good fact check on Putin's claims of NATO aggression.
https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/115204.htm
And Putin has been the one to break the treaties. Russia agreed to respect Ukraine’s territorial integrity and sovereignty and to refrain from the threat or use of force against Ukraine in both the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 and the Russian-Ukrainian Friendship Treaty of 1997. In Return Ukraine gave the Soviet-era nukes it had in its possession back to Russia, agreed to partition the Black Sea Fleet, and agreed to rent the naval base in Sevastopol to Russia.
Putin has called the Ukrainian leadership Nazis (which is good for a belly laugh because Volodymyr Zelenskyy is Jewish), and from the git-go, he alleged that Ukrainians were perpetrating genocide against Russian-speaking people in the illegally annexed "republics" of Donetsk and Luhansk — and that his initial incursion into Ukraine was to denazify them.
And the GOP love affair with Putin makes me cringe. But it seems like they're envious of his power, his audacity, and his duplicity.
OK I read the NATO thing. I believe all of that. But Putin's take (like I know.. hah.) is that NATO expansion is aggressive. (And yes his aggression has lead to more nato members.)
Re History. Yeah it started with a ~10-20 minute history lesson, not back to the Mongols, but maybe starting in 10-11th century. And then continuing to the present. He is still worried about Nazis, (which I knew from previous readings.) I guess what I found most interesting is that he says he talked with Bush Sr. and later Bill Clinton, about more advanced economic ties and that both were receptive, but then came back later and said no. (Putin says the president's advisors talked them out of it.) Anyway for me it was interesting to see the world from his perspective... or at least maybe closer. I don't have any love (or like) for Putin. But he is Russia's leader, you have to deal with him.
So this is unrelated but I think the Republicans like Russia, because the Democrats picked Ukraine. And in our tribal country if one side picks X the other side is automatically not-X. It's silly but that's the way we behave these days.
> I can only describe this as 'liking' Putin's narrative of history
Congrats, you fell for Putin's charisma, lies, and propaganda.
> Wouldn't it have been good for Russia to join the west as a full economic partner? [...] Isn't peace with Russia better than war?
We (Europeans) tried to live with Russia in peace. They weren't interested. We tried to incentivize them via economic cooperation. They interpreted this as weakness.
Putin and a good part of the Russian people don't strive for peace and prosperity through coorperation. They only understand power, force, and subjugation. The sooner we, collectively as Europeans, understand and accept this, the safer we are from their ambitions of conquest.
Hmm well I'm no fan of Putin. But I hear the same story from people in the west. (That Russia wants cooperation.) So there's propaganda on both sides, and I'm just looking more closely at what 'my' side is saying. Beyond that I really don't know enough to have a firm conviction.
There's no need to believe any "stories" from either side, when you can you just check what each actor is *actually doing*. And Russia has broken the 1994 Budapest Memorandum by invading Crimea, first in 2014, then again in 2022. No amount of deceptive twisting of history, crafted to convince the feeble-minded, is going to change that fact.
Yeah sure I know of all the shitty things Putin does and continues to do. You should ask yourself why he does them. (Look there are many reasons, and I'm mostly ignorant about things.)
Dictators have to do things that make them look strong, or they die by a coup. Putin does not have the option to lose in a fair election and then enjoy a wealthy retirement.
Conquering territories makes you seem strong. Overthrowing governments that opposed you, assassinating politicians and journalists who opposed you, makes you seem strong.
Ukraine is culturally important for Russia. (Russia itself is named after Kievan Rus, which was a kind of medieval Ukraine.) Ukraine saying "f--- you" to Russia, joining NATO and EU, and becoming relatively wealthy compared to what it is now, would be seen as a huge weakness by Russian population. The militant nationalists would ask: "how come that our mighty army couldn't have stopped them?" The average Russians would ask: "how come that the 'Little Russians' are now a part of the rich West and have luxuries that we can only dream of?"
This would even be worse by Ukraine having a large Russian-speaking population, so you can imagine how all their quality-of-life improvements would be broadcasted by media in Russian language, which would directly contradict the official Russian propaganda. Imagine tens of millions of people who are native-level Russian speakers, and who can openly make fun online of Putin and his regime. You can face propaganda with propaganda, but how will you address youtubers showing the stuff they can buy at a local supermarket?
Please give us some links to the propaganda from the West. Let's see if they can debunked with a quick Google search.
Hmm well I think it's all propaganda. We just don't see it because it's the water we swim in. Most propaganda is true, but it's just the slant or what they don't tell you. You know from reading anything about Putin that he is being painted as the bad guy. I don't take in much news these days. I find it is all just trying to tell me this story or that story. I guess it has always been this way to some extent. And maybe it's just me becoming a grumpy old man.
Sure, and China... . Give peace a chance.
Yeah I know almost nothing about any of those meetings. I know this is going to sound offensive, but maybe Putin thinks he can only be seen making a deal with another white man.
Just writing here to let anyone in the Minneapolis-St Paul area know that I've made a local ACX community discord for the region to plan local events and chat generally. The link is here: https://discord.gg/hySwpphmdN
In one of the previous Open Threads I complained about how both Google Translate and DeepL screw up translations between Slavic languages, basically by erasing every information that does not make sense in English -- such as grammatical genders, flexible word order, or even distinguishing between words that happen to be homonyms in English -- so much that the result looks as if someone translated first to English and then from English to the other language (this is most likely not a technical description of what actually happens, but the results look the same for all practical purposes).
It just occurred to me to try Yandex Translate https://translate.yandex.com/ and yes, it seems better in this aspect... but worse in some other aspects... so I suppose I will actually use both Yandex and Google/DeepL translations side by side.
Posting here, because it took me surprisingly long time to think about a solution that is obvious in hindsight, so perhaps someone else may benefit from this idea, too.
Have you tried GPT-4? It's good at translating in my experience - I've only ever used it for translations to/from English , but I would expect it to be good at translating between other languages as well.
Compared to other religious beliefs, why is it so hard to convince people that pantheism is true? Spinoza makes a great case that God, whatever God is, must include everything, because God is perfect.
It's a simple argument, if you want to believe in God.
I understand that CS Lewis argues that things must complicated and therefore we should reject simple explanations. I believe the opposite.
Why isn't explicit pantheism more popular?
I haven't read Spinoza, and I imagine his version is probably more rigorous, but the argument as you've described it seems to just be two unrelated statements with a "because" confusingly shoved between them.
Is a body that doesn't include cancer cells less perfect than one that does? I would think it's the other way around.
Why do people believe in God? To pray and hope wishes come true? To combat the feeling of being lost in a cruel world, soon to be dead and forgotten? Now, would pantheism help with any of that? Or would a God that is everything be akin to a God that is nothing?
People clearly do like having special-interest gods, which is why the idea got reborn as special-interest saints in supposedly monotheistic religions.
Polytheism is, by far, the majority position on earth. Why ask why it isn't _even more popular_ than the massive popularity it already enjoys?
The religion of most East Asians is Ancestor Worship. Why that isn't talked about more, I don't know.
Just saw this on 4chan's /tv/:
> Hitler couldn't exist without WW1, which was the product of Bismarck's wars, which were a German answer to Napoleon, who took over because of the revolution, which was inspired by the American revolution, which was ideologically rooted in Dutch and English anti-catholic activity, which was caused by Catholic absolutism emanating from the wealth of Spain, which came from the new world. So really, the discovery of America is to blame.
Neat little comment isn't it? Discuss its validity.
America; the cause of -and solution to - all of life's problems.
It leaves out the Ottoman Empire conquering Eastern Europe, the Levant, and Northern Africa and blocking trade routes to Europeans eastward, which forced Europeans (specifically Portuguese) to explore ways to get around Africa and then to find shorter ways to the Indies across the Atlantic (Spain and Portugal).
So the Ottomans are to blame for not only WWII, but the European discovery and colonization of the Americas, the European slave trade, and the eventual colonization Africa most of the rest of the world.
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"]
They each involve ignoring vast numbers of relevant variables in order to fixate on a single line of connection through time.
Posted v3 of the Eve Theory of Consciousness: https://www.vectorsofmind.com/p/eve-theory-of-consciousness-v3 Briefly, it argues that recursive self-awareness is what separates humans from the rest of the animal kingdom, is what allowed us to conquer the world, and has evolved fairly recently. There is the first strong evidence about 50kya, but even then the experience of self could have been fractured. "Recursive" culture spread, which changed the selective gradient for those that experienced a seamless construction of self from a young age.
The main thrust of the argument is about evolution, but the evidence I put forward for recursive culture spreading is interesting even if it didn't figure in our evolution. The bullroarer is a religious instrument used in male initiation ceremonies from Australia to the Americas, to Africa, to Europe. An implement of the primordial snake cult?
Scott linked earlier versions of this argument: the Snake Cult of Consciousness, and the Unreasonable Effectiveness of Pronouns. The Snake Cult piece looked at the Sapient Paradox, which asks why sapient behavior is not widespread until about 12,000 years ago. The pronoun piece looked for linguistic evidence of Julian Jayne's theory about self-awareness being recent.
It also follows the natural language usage of conscious vs unconscious. But yes, it's not a Theory of Consciousness. Could have called it the Eve Theory of "Sapience" or "Secondary Consciousness," but the usage is defined in the beginning so it seems alright
Kids utilizing AI to create nonconsensual deepfake sexual photos of their peers was a perfectly predictable result of generative AI. This current story is probably just the tip of the iceberg. Outraged parents will be suing school districts (at the taxpayers' expense) and demanding that school staff and administrators use (waste) their time and limited resources to address the problem. Parents will be suing other parents (possibly financially ruining other parents who likely never head of generative AI or know how to search for the app on Little Johny's smartphone). The resources of police departments and prosecutors will be wasted investigating and prosecuting juveniles with unpredictable results (since the laws don't really cover this twist in the evolving world of kid-generated kiddie porn). The most sensible solution to me would be that parent and teacher groups launch a class-action suit against generative AI companies to stop allowing nude bodies to be merged with non-adult faces.
Ultimately this will be a much bigger deal than Google Gemini generating racial diverse photos of Wehrmacht soldiers. But kids will be kids (and I mean that in a creatively generative negative way)...
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/misinformation/beverly-vista-hills-middle-school-ai-images-deepfakes-rcna140775
Then we'd start needing definitions of "non-adult" faces to handle computer-generated faces, and real faces would be measured on the scale, and actual adults would have their faces flagged, and people would mod faces from both directions towards the line until they just barely crossed, and there'd be racial disparities in what types of faces are recognized as "non-adult", and there'd be AI generated filters to age or de-age faces, and then eventually there'd be a VR app that de-ages everyone's face to 6 years old and removes their clothing, and in the darker corners of the Internet there'd be a VR parody app that gives everyone the face of a 6-month old black baby and the body of an 90-year-old white woman.
I don't think we've adjusted enough yet to the social consensus that implies that every child has a basilisk in their pants, and many have access to a camera phone. We're in some sort of pre-9/11 world where we still think "oh, people just don't **do** things like that".
Or perhaps I'm just in a cynical mood right now.
I thought the first use of generative AI way back in its infancy was to age kids' faces for those milk carton pics. Seems like the aging and de-aging of facial features is old hat for AI. And ironically, wasn't there a bit of embarrassment around that app, because it was turning black and Asian kids into white adults?
"We trained our aging program on the person with the most public information about them at every age; Michael Jackson."
>The most sensible solution to me would be that parent and teacher groups launch a class-action suit against generative AI companies to stop allowing nude bodies to be merged with non-adult faces.
To which the kids' immediate and predictable response (should the lawsuit succeed) will be to use existing pre-AI technology to age the faces by four or five years. To which the next group of outraged parents' response will be...?
Yes, but I don't want my taxpayer dollars wasted defending these lawsuits. Go sue Big AI!
But yes, child-generated child porn has been a problem since phones got cameras. and kids will be kids in a creatively negative ways no matter what we do.
What taxpayer dollars? What are you talking about? These *are*, precisely, hypothetical lawsuits against generative AI companies being discussed.
It's not obvious to you? At least in the US, your taxpayer dollars pay for schools. So having teachers and administrators wasting their time trying to stamp out kid-generated kiddie porn wastes your tax dollars.
And taxpayer dollars pay for the police, who have to investigate whether kid-generated kiddie porn (that doesn't depict real kids except for their faces) is a crime. And it pays for the prosecutors who have to decide whether or not to prosecute the juveniles who generated the kid-generated kiddie porn. And your tax dollars have to pay for the courts if these cases come to trial. And your taxpayer dollars pay for the juvenile correction facilities if the juvenile kiddie pornographers get sentenced. And even if the criminal justice system doesn't get involved, your tax dollars pay for the courts whose time is taken up by lawsuits between parents and parents and the school districts.
And finally, your tax dollars have to pay if your school district loses a lawsuit from angry parents over how the kid-generated kiddie porn humiliated and damaged the reputation of their child.
A quick Google search will show that there's already been a slew of lawsuits about pre-AI kid-generated kiddie porn on smartphones in the US. Seems like the legal and financial burden of this latest trend should be directed to the generative AI companies that are enabling this latest twist. And right now it's only still photos AFAIK, but, up next, kid-generated AI videos of kids having sex for bragging purposes or to humiliate their peers!
https://www.google.com/search?q=law+suits+schools+smartphone+porn&oq=law+suits+schools+smartphone+porn&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOTIGCAEQLhhA0gEJMTY5OTFqMGoxqAIAsAIA&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
I really get the sense that you're not actually reading any of the comments you are replying to.
You asked what taxpayer dollars. I answered. And my original post was about the flailing of a public school system and law enforcement over this issue. Pot calling the kettle black?
I'm also not clear on how the AI is supposed to tell a face is "adult". There are plenty of people in their early-mid 20s who could pass as high schoolers. If you're going down to middle school like in the article it's presumably more obvious, but still.
Is Google no longer gray tribe? On my twitter feed right now:
"In Google's 2023 Annual Report, the terms "unbiased", "objective" and "accurate" did not appear even once. Nor did the "Don't Be Evil" motto- it has largely been retired."
This is in addition to the leading designer for Gemini having some *very* Blue Tribe opinions on Twitter.
I'm not anywhere near SF or Silicon Valley and was interested if anyone could tell me how the culture has changed over time.
It’s definitely left the grey tribe quite some time ago. This latest thing is just the steaming pile of shit in its pants that makes it clear it doesn’t take care of itself.
Fucking childish idiots there.
I can confirm that it was quite woke even 10 years ago. Of course that's not inconsistent with it being mostly "grey tribe". Also, "Don't Be Evil" was retired many years ago, although that's a matter of marketing, not politics and isn't related to any of the CW stuff.
Are "unbiased" and "objective" really Gray Tribe coded? I tend to associate them (when used as tribal signals) more with Blue-coded outlets like NYT or Vox.
The words as slogans are neutral, one might even say "fair and balanced".
I'd say that the Grey Tribe coding is about actual, systematic attempts to move closer toward removing bias and achieving objectivity, recognizing that these things are impossible to achieve, but treating them as a worthy goal nonetheless.
I always assume both of those phrases tend to mean "yay ingroup, boo outgroup" when I hear them.
Most people tend to think of themselves as unbiased and objective. If anything, the Gray Tribe seems more likely to recognize that they themselves are not perfectly objective or unbiased (but then like all people tend to think that makes themselves better than others and therefore *more* unbiased and objective than others, leading to the same conclusion).
> Are "unbiased" and "objective" really Gray Tribe coded?
That is a good question. As a first approximation, people generally perceive that someone has the power, and the words "unbiased" and "objective" mean that those with power should not push their beliefs on everyone.
During the Bush era, the power was pro-war and pro-religion, so "unbiased" and "objective" were used to oppose that.
These days, the power is pro-wokeness, so "unbiased" and "objective" are now used to oppose that.
IMO the "blue/grey" split is largely incoherent in the first place. I think it was just originally made up by Scott so that he could feel superior to the masses by being above their petty squabbles. But that's how everyone thinks! If you divide by partisanship, you get two big tent groups. If you divide more finely by culture, you get dozens of groups. But 3 is not a natural categorization.
I seem to agree with this liberalism-vs-leftism thesis https://www.natesilver.net/p/why-liberalism-and-leftism-are-increasingly that at the moment there does seem to be a divide between two types of "anti-red-tribe" and the difference and antipathy between each of them is as large or even larger than any of them versus the "red tribe". And the immense depth of that divide is an argument why it makes to split groups there, but not divide more finely by culture, as those finer divisions don't really hate/despise each other that much.
Now I'm not sure whether these two current "tribes" is aligned with the same blue/gray split as Scott discussed back then.
I think this is largely correct, but the missing piece is how first-past-the-post voting incentivizes having precisely 2 political coalitions. So right now, socialists and liberals are stuck in a coalition together, and the story of the last 20 years is the socialist faction becoming dominant.
The original "Everything but the Outgroup" article indicated as much:
"(There is a partly-formed attempt to spin off a Grey Tribe typified by libertarian political beliefs, Dawkins-style atheism, vague annoyance that the question of gay rights even comes up, eating paleo, drinking Soylent, calling in rides on Uber, reading lots of blogs, calling American football “sportsball”, getting conspicuously upset about the War on Drugs and the NSA, and listening to filk – but for our current purposes this is a distraction and they can safely be considered part of the Blue Tribe most of the time)"
It's the latter discourses with Scott readers seizing upon the admittedly half-baked Grey Tribe concept to describe themselves that have tried to construct a strict borderline between it and the Blue Tribe, a borderline that never really existed and exists even less now than before.
Very true. And the whole single-axis mapping of the political spectrum has little descriptive power except for finger-pointing and name-calling. Adding "Grays" in the middle or as outliers, or as part of one tribe or the other, obscures and distorts the complexities of social and political beliefs. As someone who many on this list would lump into the "Blue Tribe" I certainly wouldn't include Grays in my group! LoL!
If I am forced to simplify political groupings, I like the old 2-D Political Compass (https://www.politicalcompass.org/relatedBooks). They divide the political spectrum into four quadrants — Left to Right on the X-axis and Libertarian to Authoritarian on the Y-axis. They use the older British definition of Libertarians as classical liberals, which I know some Lefties find uncomfortable. I'd prefer that they'd use authoritarian vs anti-authoritarian for their Y-axis terminology, because that would create less confusion in the US where the definition of Libertarian has morphed most radically from its original meaning — but I digress.
They divide the political quadrants into the Authoritarian Left, Libertarian Left, Authoritarian Right, and Libertarian Right. We'd see people like Mao and Stalin in the upper left corner of the Authoritarian Left quadrant. We'd see people like Bakunin in the lower left corner of the Libertarian Left quadrant. In the upper right quadrant of the Authoritarian Right, we'd see the likes of Hitler and Franco. In the lower right quadrant of the Libertarian Right we'd see people like Ayn Rand. Traditional Democrats would cluster more towards the center of the Y-axis and closer to the center of the X-axis.
Take the Political Compass test here...
https://www.politicalcompass.org/test
And ChatGPT gives a good general overview of how the term Libertarian has changed over the years.
User
How has the definition of Libertarian changed over the decades in the US and the UK?
ChatGPT
The definition of libertarianism has evolved over time, particularly in the US and the UK, reflecting changing political contexts and philosophical developments. Here's a broad overview of how the term has shifted:
Classical Liberalism to Libertarianism: In the 19th century, "libertarian" was often used interchangeably with "classical liberal," emphasizing individual liberty, free markets, and limited government intervention. This tradition persisted into the early 20th century.
20th Century: In the mid-20th century, particularly in the US, the term "libertarian" began to be used more specifically to refer to a form of anti-authoritarianism that emphasized individual freedom, autonomy, and minimal government. This shift was partly in response to the rise of big government policies and the growth of the welfare state.
Modern Libertarianism: In the latter half of the 20th century, especially in the US, libertarianism evolved into a distinct political ideology. It came to encompass a range of beliefs, including a strong commitment to individual liberty, free markets, limited government, and often a skepticism of government intervention in both economic and social matters.
In the UK: In the UK, "libertarian" has often been associated with more left-leaning or socialist ideas, particularly in the 19th century. However, in more recent decades, especially since the 1970s, the term has been increasingly used to refer to a more right-leaning ideology similar to that in the US, emphasizing free markets and limited government.
Variations and Subgroups: Within modern libertarianism, there are variations and subgroups, such as minarchists (who advocate for a minimal state), anarcho-capitalists (who advocate for the abolition of the state in favor of voluntary cooperation), and classical liberals (who emphasize individual rights and limited government).
Overall, the term "libertarian" has evolved from its classical liberal roots to become a distinct ideology emphasizing individual liberty, free markets, and limited government, with variations in its meaning and emphasis between the US and the UK.
Oh my!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans-Hermann_Hoppe#:~:text=Hoppe%20claimed%20that%2C%20of%20all,capitalist%20libertarianism%20is%20logically%20incoherent.
You serious with this? Since you appear to not be American, let me point out that blue tribe hates libertarians just as much as they hate red tribe. They see them as “conservatives who happen to like drugs and let that inform their entire worldview.” And to be honest they’re right about them having a fundamentally different worldview.
Libertarians and Classical Liberals used to have a lot in common, but while libertarians have held their ground, liberalism got popular and jumped the shark. Calling libertarians “basically blue tribe” is an utter lie some leftists might tell themselves but it’s nothing more than a vague headnod to the once philosophically-grounded roots they’ve long since abandoned.
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.
> Is Google no longer gray tribe?
They haven't been anywhere close to that in a long time.
That's what Damore pointed out in his 2017 memo. And to prove the point, they fired him for it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google's_Ideological_Echo_Chamber
I'm a biomedical science student who will be interning with some scientists in Toronto this summer. The current thinking is that I'll use publically available data to look for some sort of link between air pollution or maybe weather anomalies and heart disease. With that in mind, what are some databases I should investigate, either in Canada, the US, or elsewhere?
The ones I already know about are the CDC's National Vital Statistics site (https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/deaths.htm) and the WONDER system (https://wonder.cdc.gov/Deaths-by-Underlying-Cause.html).
Domestic terrorists and mass shooters in the US often show similar psychological characteristics and behavior in terms of their plans. Seeing as this happens so often in the US, what's the base rate that potential perpetrators get caught? If the base rate is low, why is there a blind spot like this in our surveillance?
If it's framed as a search problem, maybe ten thousand out of three hundred million people in the US are serious suspects:
- Nearly all have anti-social, autistic characteristics or something in the same category of diagnosis (~1 percent of the population) – 3 million people
- Nearly all are male (~50 percent of the population) – 1.5 million people
- Nearly all reveal intention or potentially violent instability ahead of time (as a personal estimate, ~1 percent of the population) – 15 thousand people
Those numbers are obviously rough, but I think the ~10 thousand figure is accurate for the US. What are defense agencies not be able to do that lets this continue to happen?
You're looking at the problem the wrong way around. Suppose you're looking at two people, and you know nothing about either one of them. They have equal likelihoods of becoming mass shooters of whatever variety you have in mind. (The profile you describe makes it clear that you're not referring to "mass shooters" in the sense of people who shoot a lot of other people.)
Now, you learn that one of them is a 17-year-old antisocial male who frequently remarks on how he'd like to shoot certain other people at his school.
This is enough information to raise the likelihood that that one is eventually going to become a mass shooter... by an amount that is too small for you to measure, one that is absolutely dwarfed by the error bars on all of your likelihood estimates. The outcome is so rare that the indicators don't make a noticeable difference.
Or looking at it the same way, but using a different paradigm, you might imagine that you have an intervention you'd like to apply to future mass shooters. You have some kind of cost-benefit test that applies to it.
The filters you describe will not change the outcome of that cost-benefit test; they don't carry enough information.
This is a general problem with attempts to prevent outcomes that don't happen anyway.
Say you have a son who is diagnosed with Asperger's, a mild form of autism, at age 11. (By the way, while it's true that several shooters have been diagnosed with autism, most people with Asperger's are introverted and inhibited. I don't know the stats, but it would not surprise me to hear that they are *less* prone to violence than boys who do not have a psychiatric diagnosis.) Your boy now meets 2 of the 3 criteria. Do you want the doctor who diagnosed him to be obligated to send a report to defense agencies, so that, as long as he is in school, they can scan his online communications and school reports for evidence of either intent to shoot or violent instability. Because if your idea goes into effect, the doctor will have to do it. Let's say the doctor does. So one day your son has an argument with a friend over Minecraft and texts "I hate you! Drop dead!" Now whoever is monitoring him has a piece of evidence that he is violent. Then he and another kid get in a little shoving match at school, and the "fistfight" appears in the teacher's report on your son. Now he's met the violence criterion twice. Meanwhile, you know that he's a cheerful kid who has it together and has several good friends. Sure, he bickers with them sometimes. All kids do that. Want to go tell the authorities your point of view and try to get him off the watch list? Good luck with that.
This is a really good point, and I am revising what I think.
I found this document after posting the initial question: https://www.secretservice.gov/sites/default/files/reports/2021-03/USSS%20Averting%20Targeted%20School%20Violence.2021.03.pdf . It covers ~70 failed attacks from 2006 to 2018.
Most potential perpetrators do not end up committing an attack because they are caught early on. Successful perpetrators would have to both 1) be anti-social enough to come up with a plan, 2) competent enough to go through with it – which would select heavily for Asperger's, rather than the reverse. Selecting people to monitor out of a large population for risk would have a high cost per false negative.
The sheer number of these events has been rising at a high rate for the last twenty years, which is deeply concerning. What do you think about anonymized approaches, like analyzing written homework assignments? This be done at much less than John Schilling's ~$5,000 per high-risk suspect, without the same privacy concerns.
So, the plan as I understand it isL
1) "Analyze written homework assignments"
2) ???
3) Profit, er, Fewer Mass Shootings!
The first part of that plan *might* be doable for $5000/person, say by delegating it to a modified chatbot. But even there, don't underestimate the overhead costs of having every homework assignment scanned and submitted to the AI.
What's the second part? When Big Brother Gemini says "Autistic Timmy's homework indicates a 2.7% chance of his shooting up his school at the next convenient opportunity", what are you going to *do* with that information, and what is it going to cost for you to do that, and how is it going to actually prevent Autistic Timmy from shooting up the school?
No, hiring a therapist to talk to Timmy isn't going to make him not shoot up the school. What else have you got?
Gun control. Crimes require means as well as motivation.
If it accomplishes anything, it will jt hasten the inevitable day when the wannabe mass murderers switch to explosives and incendiaries. And that will not be an improvement. This is mostly an imitation game, and you have no idea how lucky we are that Klebold and Harris weren't able to get their IEDs to work. Sooner or later, someone will get it "right", and others will take note.
Did that happen every time gun control has been implemented?
The therapy is less than useful per se. But the feeling of being caught by your school on grounds that other people noticed you were making violent plans or in a violent headspace – and then being grilled about what you were thinking – is what deters this. The whole fantasy is kind of nullified. If this doesn’t apply to the cases that get caught, it applies to the ones that fall through.
When I was in third grade (~2 years after the Sandy Hook attack), I said something with violent influence on a written assignment, and a teacher noticed. They called the principal of my elementary school, who in turn put me in a room and called my parents, who were told to the effect: “be thankful: this is concerning, we’ll be sure to monitor your middle-eastern-looking kiddo and give him some lessons – but hey, we didn’t call the cops”. From that (and my parent’s reaction), I learned our thoughts can and are being read by authority, and that our actions, in being informed by our thoughts, can and do contain information that indicates greater patterns in our thoughts – even if we try to hide them.
With more interactive systems, maybe Big Brother Gemini will be able to neuter violent inclination early on. Persuasion seems like a relatively simple RL problem at scale (chatbots can do far more complex procedural things), and the overhead is already being paid by Google’s safety team.
We don’t need chatbots necessarily. With transformer encoders, you can measure more dimensions of the relationships between two written documents. All schools use the same turn-in software as it stands, which already runs a ton of processing on every assignment, so the overhead is to the companies less than the schools. When people read Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto they’re more likely to use the word “surrogate” in text they write afterwards to adapt to the way that Kaczynski uses language (both the framing and repetition), *especially* if they’re being influenced by his ideas or perceive it as high status.
There’s the issue of when a surveillance technology provides credible evidence of its existence, people will price that into their behavior. Good surveillance that uses these methods might provide deliberate disinformation, like the turn-in software informing teachers that the suspected students show “signs of disengagement or asocial behavior in online class communications and school emails” (which violent actors usually do, but that doesn’t indicate written assignments as the factor).
I really don't think this is going to work the way you want it to. These people are writing their thoughts and plans on homework assignments they know their teachers are going to read, and they're posting them on social media hoping their friends will read them. They're not ashamed or afraid of anyone finding out, they *want* people to find out. They're still in the phase where they can hope that if other people know how much they are suffering, those people will do something to help.
That hope doesn't last forever, of course. If nobody does anything to help, it usually turns into despair and enduring misery; sometimes it turns into bloody violent retribution and a quick glorious end. If the thing people do to "help" is to ritually humiliate Timmy and send him off on the short bus, or back to the class in front of which he was humiliated, do you really think that makes them *less* likely to turn to Plan B?
And if Timmy's humiliation deters three more Timmies from folllowing his path, then the thing that's being deterred is the "write about your feelings and hope someone notices" part. Not the "there's no hope, might as well go out in a blaze of glory" part, because when they get to that point they're beyond humiliation.
You're dealing with a bunch of people who are suffering from pneumonia, and your "solution" is to punish them every time they cough because coughing is the first warning sign of pneumonia.
This is pretty clearly a case of the cure being worse than the disease. Mass shooters don't kill that many people in relative terms, so it's a pretty bad hill to found your dystopian police state on.
Well, I totally get being horrified by mass shootings, but I don't think your plan is realistic. It's sort of like trying to predict who's going to cause a fatal auto accident this month. We know who's likeliest to: People with lots of speeding tickets, moving violations, DUI's, previous. accidents. There are a LOT of people like that, Maybe 5 % or so of drivers. There are 233 million US drivers, so about 10 million high risk drivers. But we have 4000 auto fatalities per month in the US, and while the high risk drivers will no doubt have caused more than their share, they will not have caused all of them. Some will have been caused by people with clean driving records. Let's say the high risk drivers, while only 5% of the drivers, caused 75% of the fatal accidents. So out of these 10 million high risk drivers, only 3000 caused a fatal accident. Hardly any of them did. Trying to pick the school shooters out of the population of fucked up young males who are likelier than most to be a shooter is the same way. You know what haystack to look in, but you're trying to find a needle in it.
There is no good way to pick out the real shooters-to-be from the large group of kids at risk for becoming shooters. I doubt that even highly invasive government investigations would be able to do it -- likewise, even highly invasive government investigations would not be able to pick out the very few bad drivers who are going to cause fatal accidents this month from the ones that are not. Let's say you were willing to be very invasive. The government gets to monitor their location and cell phone use, and determine how much texting and internet browsing they do while driving. It gets to check the person's purchases and find out now much alcohol they buy each day. These horrible invasive approaches will make prediction of fatalities better, but it will still be terrible. Maybe now you will have identified the 3 million riskiest drivers, who are responsible for 85% of accidents. But still, the vast majority of even these awful drivers will not have caused a fatality. And some fatalities will still have been caused by good drivers. See how it works? You can't get away from looking for a needle in a haystack, unless, with the kids at risk for school shootings, you had an agent assigned to eavesdrop on all their communications and follow them around all day. You'd have to assign an agent to every one of those 10000 kids.
School shooters may look like low-hanging fruit -- a source of murders that is easy to get rid of. But it's not. It's high in the tree. Also, if you want to be coldly statistical about it, mass shootings account for a tiny percentage of violent deaths in the US. Here's a chart of deaths from mass shootings over the last 20 or so years: https://www.statista.com/statistics/811504/mass-shooting-victims-in-the-united-states-by-fatalities-and-injuries/ There have been only 1 or 2 years in the last 30 when the number exceeded 100. On average it's maybe 40/year over the last few years. And while the number of fatalities per year is going up, it is not going up very fast.
In comparison, there are about 10,000 murders per year, and in half of them someone is killed by a person they know. https://www.statista.com/statistics/195327/murder-in-the-us-by-relationship-of-victim-to-offender/
There are 40,000 - 50,000 highway deaths per year.
These are separate classes of risks.
Consider that the open internet is scraped and monitored quite often for all kinds of things. Homework assignments are already analyzed by turn-in software to check for plagiarism, and false positives are reviewed by teachers. If you use the same methods to measure influence to things written by extremists or terrorists, this seems in turn much cheaper than funding aggressive expansion of the police force.
Sure! The basic idea is that what people write is influenced in the near term by what they’ve read.
Something like this (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_semantic_analysis) using better vector embeddings than word frequency might show results.
We can use mere word2vec to predict psychosis with reasonable accuracy (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6565626/). The paper has bad methodology but the point is made clearly.
Sometimes people accidentally repeat words in a paragraph. The same happens with words you’ve just learned or heard. The history of your dictionary searches could likely predict the books you’ve been reading. These all reveal psychological state, sometimes very uncannily, and advanced language models can use these for specific inference.
What would you consider evidence?
Ok, so you've identified the 10K most likely suspects. What now?
This is my question
[edit: sorry if I was being too terse. I am wondering why security or defense agencies can't or don't make use of information like this.]
My point is there's not much that they can do, absent concrete evidence that one of these people is planning a crime. This is as it should be. Presumption of innocence and all that good stuff.
Make use of it how?
Or, to borrow a phrase: what now?
There are many forms of monitoring that the Patriot Act / Freedom Act etc. should allow for, as well as granting search warrants as any individual becomes more at risk of violence. Often therapy or some form of forced but unobtrusive socialization can make the difference between someone acting violently or not.
Or, to borrow a phrase: sorry if I was being too terse. I am wondering why security or defense agencies can't or don't make use of information like this.
Oh I am fairly sure they do, to the extent permitted by the legal system they operate under. In other words, much of what you propose can be (and is? ) implemented in China, but is contentious here in the USA. Jay Edgar Hoover did pretty well at it. That the planet will become perfectly surveilled in the not too distant future is an outcome that I think is very difficult to avoid.
Human lives are commonly estimated as being worth ~$10E6 in modern industrialized nations. If the average terrorist/mass shooter/serial killer will kill ten people, then a countermeasure that works half the time is cost-effective at $50E6 or less. If the countermeasure starts with "here are 10,000 suspects, one of whom will be the next big killer", you can afford to spend $5000 on each of them.
What are you going to do with $5000 that gives you a better-than-even chance of figuring out whether the guy who was assessed at 0.01% probability of being the next big killer, is actually that guy?
Your estimates are assuming that these are uncorrelated, but, for example, bring male and autism are correlated.
The other thing the government can't do in the US - thanks to the first amendment - is to reduce recruitment by suppressing news stories glorifying mass shooters.
A more cynical take is that the government is maximising utility by providing television entertainment for millions of viewers at the expense of a relatively small number of people getting shot.
IMO, the realistic blackpill is that the media will always find something that bleeds to lead. The government has nothing to do with it. And likewise, enabling mass shooters does not "provide entertainment" because lurid crime news stories are limited by the number of news stories that can be active at one time more than the supply.
It's an amusing take. Could make a good short story that compares our society to a society that's more explicit about that trade (like in The Hunger Games or something).
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.
Also, profiling like this is likely to backfire by making the targeted group feel targeted, resulting in political agitation.
That’s true, I think it would be hard to tell for any major perpetrator in the recent past whether they would turn violent or not, even shortly before their attack. But the space of people is still relatively small.
The secret service has a report that covers a number of failed attacks: https://www.secretservice.gov/sites/default/files/reports/2021-03/USSS%20Averting%20Targeted%20School%20Violence.2021.03.pdf
It seems most potential attacks are caught beforehand. Most perpetrators and potential perpetrators often aren’t competent planners.
Looking for a good book about the energy industry. Something that covers most everything (carbon based, nuclear, solar, wind, etc). Some technical depth would be good but obviously it will be limited if it covers everything. Any recommendations?
Vaclav Smil wrote about this often. There's "Energy and Civilization: A History" from 2017. I like "How The World Really Works" which is accessible to anyone, mostly about energy and climate plus the scale and difficulty of transition required, but touches on energy sources.
The Prize by Yergin is one of my favorite reads, it's about oil history.
Is this the book you're talking about? It's the only one I coould find on Amazon by him. Looks interesting, though...
https://www.amazon.com/Energy-World-History-Vaclav-Smil-ebook/dp/B07SWQ8JKY/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1GLFHNN2N3H1Y&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.POhsAAdUBmx7uurb2XJG2Fnj3DsXYwSPlpqC7S698tQD_Nz1rbE0sPQ7HoKWtqkGGR0c9_NsqluGzV9yzy7Luzb-GgzR-IgfPKU6HT0CTk6OrhHQdORvlEjfxgG3ClJ6AXOqGBxutWiiNsM5dFnu4ctqzymlW_P4UrTu3eAOQaGPdTO85_ejLMJ4vcFjH0jh94lrjlkBqUdi8LXik23i_1Ouq2TOfOpkPh4QzvrdGn4.abG-e3O2Klu1VQxWM2mbjKaULLAgORqloy96OHcNiHM&dib_tag=se&keywords=energy+and+civilization+a+history+by+vaclav+smil&qid=1709355679&s=books&sprefix=Energy+and+Civilization%3A+A+History%2Cstripbooks%2C646&sr=1-1
More lecture series than book, but The Science of Energy by Michael Wysession sounds like exactly what you’re looking for, available on Audible. It’s in-depth enough that I’ve given it multiple listens and learned a ton even as a civil/mechanical engineering graduate who already knew a lot on the topic, but it’s geared towards a more general audience.
I see the UAP story pop up from time to time ... and remain a complete disbeliever.
Reports come from only military aircraft, typically from complex computer controlled aircraft equipment. Reports never come from commercial or private aviation despite these flights outnumbering military flights by some staggering amount.
Consider, that we're not using Isaac Newton's Radar anymore. Every image presented is a collection of data. Objects presented on a screen are assembled from data in a table or database, i.e. direction, strength, etc. Most of the equipment isn't on it's first generation, but has undergone several hardware and software upgrades. That means I'm writing code to interface someone else's system, on proprietary interfaces, which means we're writing the handshaking code too. If my software doesn't properly address memory, or someone else's software walks on my storage locations, we get garbage ... garbage which may just look like another 'flying' object. Did you think there are 10,000 pairs of eyeballs combing through this stuff?
Commercial aircraft just never seem to report UAPs, despite having hundreds of bored passengers, carrying cameras, taking pictures of clouds and what-not ... yet never seem to report a UAP. Private aviation (pop in his Cessna) and carrying a phone with a camera never seems to see a UAP either.
If your objection to UAPs is that the multiple independent sensors and detection systems are not doing specifically what they're designed and validated to do at the expense of billions of dollars, and that these artifacts appear across multiple generations of these systems, some of which were developed independently, or that it's a simple software glitch in processing accessing this sensor data that has been present for multiple iterations of these systems and never detected, then I don't know what to say. There are good objections to UAPs, but I don't think this is one of them.
Many reports have also been accompanied by visual confirmation, so that wouldn't track. If you want to dismiss eyewitness testimony given its unreliability, then it could indicate an equipment problem, and I can only assume the military brass would have shown *considerably* more interest in tracking the issue down as it compromises military effectiveness.
Military radar and other sensors have considerably more resolution and sensitivity than commercial radar. This can indeed produce false positives, which is why you have multiple sensors to cross check.
It's also incorrect to say commercial airline or private pilots never see UAPs. The FAA doesn't accept UAP reports, so these are reported to a civilian organization if the pilot even bothers to do so: https://www.forbes.com/sites/suzannerowankelleher/2021/06/26/faa-ufo-uap-sightings-pilots/?sh=6a109cb41a46
It's fine to be skeptical, but it's way too early to be so dismissive. There's a lot of data that permits many possible explanations, some mundane and some fantastical, but whatever the final verdict, it almost certainly won't be trivial.
Are there any examples of moves from famous human chess games that were previously considered brilliant but are now known to be unsound due to computer analysis?
Not a huge chess guy, but you may want to look into Mikhail Tal, "the Magician from Riga" specifically. He was renowned for his strategy of
A) make the board as complicated as possible by threatening everywhere simultaneously
B) hope the opponent screws up.
He would often make a "Tal move", which were moves that looked 0 iq but magically led to checkmate like 11 turns later. Tal moves don't often survive the scrutiny of computer analysis, but they're strong anyway because human opponents don't have time to calculate the entire search tree.
I had the pleasure of meeting him and photographing him at a chess tournament In NYC in the early 90s. He was all legend and no competitor at that point, but you could feel the love.
wikipedia says he passed away in 1992. quite lucky of you to have caught the legend on his way out.
Wow, that is close. Whatever tournament it was, a Danish fellow lost to a Russian fellow.
There are probably better answers, but in the Opera House Game, on move 8, Morphy developed Nc3, instead of playing Qxb7; a relative pawn sacrifice. Engines say Qxb7 is better. However, this is of course typical of Morphy, and the Romantic Era of chess generally, and this possibility was already noted by Lasker who remarked that Morphy was an artist, not a butcher. Moreover, Nc3 is still winning.
More relevant, but still not exactly what you're talking about, is Mikhail Tal vs Andres Vooremaa in which on move 14 Tal sacrificed his knight with Qg3. This isn't strictly unsound, as it isn't losing, but the engine says that after the sacrifice White is equal, whereas if he protected the knight (fxe5) it would have been +1.1.
Many ? Take any random famous game and you have a good chance of finding moves that are computer refuted but still good at the human level. For a precise example, Kasparov -Topalov Wijk aan Zee 1999, in my opinion the most beautiful game in chess history.
apropos of nothing, here is a wonderful example of (unless I miss my guess) an unsung hero of words, a laborer in the trenches deep in the dictionary yet spinning their own beauty into the world of words, just in case it happens to catch and inform some hapless writer looking for advice on capitalization like I did. Fortunately I can share a little of my joy. Worth a click:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/are-season-names-capitalized
That was amusing. Thx
That was a very nice entry, thank you for sharing!
I sure wish whoever wrote that was allowed to put down their name or alias or something, so they'd know how much they made my day.
Made so much weirder as a bear violently dismantled a bird feeder of ours (as well as lawn furniture) some months ago!
Yet, I've never seen an explanation for why the names of the seasons aren't considered proper nouns like the days of the week and months. I asked ChatGPT and it spat out the same old pablum that seasons aren't like days of the week because they're "general periods of time" and not specific times within a cycle. Nonsense! Astronomically seasons are well-defined right down to the minute they begin. And they happen in recurring cycles like the days of the week. Ironically, there's no astronomical reason to divide a week into seven days, but there is an astronomical way to define a season.
You
What is the history of categorizing seasons as regular nouns but days of the week as proper nouns?
ChatGPT
The distinction between categorizing seasons as regular nouns and days of the week as proper nouns is rooted in the way language has evolved and how different cultures have viewed these concepts.
Seasons as Regular Nouns: Seasons are considered regular nouns because they are viewed as general periods of time that recur cyclically. The concept of seasons is universal and not tied to specific instances or unique identities. In many languages, including English, seasons are described using common nouns because they are seen as part of a natural cycle rather than as individual, unique entities.
Days of the Week as Proper Nouns: The names of the days of the week are considered proper nouns because they are specific names given to each day within a recurring cycle. Each day has its own unique identity and is treated as a distinct entity. This distinction likely originated from the historical association of each day with specific celestial bodies, deities, or religious observances, which gave them a special significance beyond just being a part of a cycle.
In summary, the categorization of seasons as regular nouns and days of the week as proper nouns is a reflection of how language and culture have evolved to categorize and conceptualize these different aspects of time.
> But yesterday, February 26 was definitely astronomical winter
What? Astronomical winter would end in early February. You're well into spring by the 26th.
I know the verses in The Bible that say "thou shalt not kill" are more correctly translated as "thou shalt not murder". Is the same generally true for the commandments against taking life in Buddhist and Hindu scriptures, or are those actually meant to be about killing in general?
The Buddhists don't distinguish between murder and legal killings. It's all violence that results in a karmic burden on the perpetrator(s). But it's important to note that Talmudic interpretations of the 6th Commandment extended its meaning to encompass any act of violence against others, including verbal attacks such as gossip, slander, and shaming a person in public...
https://www.hebrew4christians.com/Scripture/Torah/Ten_Cmds/Sixth_Cmd/sixth_cmd.html
From the Dhammapada, Chapter 10, "On Violence"...
129. All tremble at violence; all fear death. Putting oneself in the place of another, one should not kill nor cause another to kill.
130. All tremble at violence; life is dear to all. Putting oneself in the place of another, one should not kill nor cause another to kill.
131. One who, while himself seeking happiness, oppresses with violence other beings who also desire happiness, will not attain happiness hereafter.
132. One who, while himself seeking happiness, does not oppress with violence other beings who also desire happiness, will find happiness hereafter.
Talmud believes that words are violence? Is this... woke?
I guess it depends on what your definition of "woke" is. The definition varies for the unwoked and the awoken. And AFAICS even within those camps there there's little agreement about what makes woke woke. But the idea that words can harm others goes back a long way, and it's certainly not unique to Judaism.
Matthew 5:21-22 (American Standard Version)
21 Ye have heard that it was said to them of old time, Thou shalt not kill; and whosoever shall kill shall be in danger of the judgment:
22 but I say unto you, that everyone who is angry with his brother shall be in danger of the judgment; and whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca [an expression of contempt], shall be in danger of the council; and whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of the hell of fire.
Buddhism has the concept of the four abstentions of sammā-vācā (i.e. "Right Speech") which are abstaining from lying, from divisive speech, from abusive speech, and from idle chatter because those things can cause others suffering.
Modern speech-as-violence doctrines seem to add a fifth component to mix — speech that triggers upset in the hearer that doesn't involve insults, slander, shaming, or threats (i.e. topics that trigger agitation in the hearer). From what I've seen, the claim that discussing certain topics inflicts violence on others by disrupting their comfort bubbles is shared by both the Leftie social justice woke and the Christian Right.
In Hinduism, the ideal is ahimsa, which means non-violence, but not to the extreme of pacifism. The idea is that you should try hard to avoid violence, but be ready to fight and kill if it comes to that. This is central to the Bhagavad Gita, where warrior Arjuna is told directly by God that he must fight and kill the family members and mentors who are opposing him (that sounds brutal, but well, Krishna sells it quite well, and the broader context of the Mahabharata makes very clear that the good guys tried very, very hard to avoid a war).
Buddha was pretty much a pacifist, even extending to animal life in some ways. There are five jobs that are prohibited for a Buddhist: trading in weapons, human beings, meat, intoxicants, and poison. So from what I know it is tricky to find wiggle room in the Buddha's words for killing. That doesn't stop some Buddhists from doing precisely that though (Jainism is one of the only religions that never developed theories of just war).
>There are five jobs that are prohibited for a Buddhist: trading in weapons, human beings, meat, intoxicants, and poison.
As a hobby chemist, I'm curious about more detail about the poison case.
a) Even in the Buddha's day, lye used in soapmaking was an example of a poisonous (strictly speaking, corrosive) intermediate used to produce a (mostly) harmless final product
b) "The dose makes the poison" This is more spectacularly obvious in modern times (people have poisoned themselves with vitamin A), but, even in the Buddha's day any number of folk medicines could be toxic
How did they deal with these cases?
I think a prohibition against killing in general is likely incompatible with civilization -- sourcing food and space will be difficult without killing plants.
Also, any religion which is the ideology of any successful state is very unlikely to endorse radical pacifism for the simple reason that radically pacifism is not a winning strategy in interstate anarchy settings which dominated most of history.
In regards to not killing plants, one of the reasons that Jains are not only vegetarians but also abstain from eating root vegetables is that they don't want to kill the plants.
Although Buddhism overall has had less violent history than Christianity, Islam, Judaism, or secular religions such as Marxism and Atheism, it has not been completely non-violent in all times and places. The Dalai Lamas kept standing armies, and at least among the Mahayana of Tibet,a there were tantric rituals to help cleanse the karmic burdens of soldiers who had killed enemies (sorry, but I can't find the link to those texts, anymore).
Various Buddhist sects in 16th Century Japan formed armies which they used to protect themselves and to influence the tumultuous politics and wars of the Warring States Period. The Shoguns when they came to power stamped them out.
We also have the examples of Sri Lanka where Buddhists have been willing to wage war on the Tamils, and of Myanmar where militant Buddhists are leading a genocidal campaign against the Muslim Rohingya.
There is a lot of boredom these days, which Hoffer mentions as well: "There is perhaps no more reliable indicator of a society’s ripeness for a mass movement than the prevalence of unrelieved boredom." Are we in the midst of a mass movement, or is one on the horizon?
Most replies are misunderstanding what Hoffer meant by bored. Here's a slightly longer quote from my copy of The True Believer:
"When people are bored, it is primarily with their own selves that they are bored. The consciousness of a barren, meaningless existence is the main fountainhead of boredom. People who are not conscious of their individual separateness, as is the case with those who are members of a compact tribe, church, party, etcetcra, are not accessible to boredom. The differentiated individual is free of boredom only when he is engaged either in creative work or some absorbing occupation or when he is wholly engrossed in the struggle for existence. Please-chasing and dissipation are ineffective palliatives. Where people live autonomous lives and are not badly off, yet are without abilities or opportunities for creative work or useful action, there is no telling to what desperate and fantastic shifts they might resort in order to give meaning and purpose to their lives. "
In other words, boredom is a lack of purpose, meaning, or creative work. Staring at your phone is pleasure-seeking and dissipation, which is an "ineffective palliative". Which, yeah, I think society is starting to sense that. Doomscrolling is not satisfying, it doesn't give you purpose, it just fills time. And there are not many opportunities for creative work or useful action these days.
Yum. Give me a good potboiler novel, paper or ebook, and I'll ignore work — creative or otherwise. And I spend hours online each day researching questions across a wide range of subjects that will have no use whatsoever to my struggle for survival. Yay! I'm bored! Give me more boredom! And my life is purposeless. I'm going to die without doing anything significant. Even so, I'm enjoying it immensely. Purpose is for small minds.
This is very good. Imo.
Yeah, this is an excellent explanation. Better to get a copy and read the full analysis that Hoffer provides, it's very well done and well written.
>The differentiated individual is free of boredom only when he is engaged either in creative work or some absorbing occupation or when he is wholly engrossed in the struggle for existence.
If the guy insists on using words by non-standard meaning, you can't really call it a mis-understanding. It's just poor writing. Had he written instead 'There is perhaps no more reliable indicator of a society’s ripeness for a mass movement than the prevalence of lack of purpose and meaning at large.", replies would have been different.
I haven't been bored since 2014. Seriously. I remember the true, stark, and lifeless boredom of my childhood in the 80s/90s pretty well still. At any given moment now I can remove a personal sized computer from my pocket and have instant access to infinite sources of distraction and entertainment that would have looked like literal magic in 1990.
Amen to that!
Building on what Bldysabba says, I don't think we have an abundance of boredom as we normally categorize it. I think we have a significant lack of *purpose* and also *meaning.*
We have lots of distractions, mostly our phones but also the internet generally, that stop us from feeling normal low levels of boredom that we typically associate with that feeling. But I think boredom is still related to what we often feel, which is ultimately lack of purpose and meaning. We don't seem to get involved in meaningful, fulfilling activities nearly as often. We get lost in daily entertainment and many videos of things that look like fun, without engaging first hand in things that would actually be fun and give us a more complete positive feeling.
This hit the nail on the head. I don't watch TV anymore, does anyone?, and apart from reading and writing, I do several physical pursuits everyday, and different ones throughout the year. The purpose is never to change the world, but to learn, stay vibrant, meet people. This was normal for my parents generation, but seems to have been lost.
I would argue the opposite - we have never had so much easy and cheap entertainment, and we have a dangerous lack of boredom, resulting in a shortage of movement, whether at an individual or societal level
I may be a bit too romantic about it, but I feel like easy and cheap entertainment doesn't relieve boredom but merely suppresses it, like stimulants suppress appetite but don't actually satisfy your hunger.
Agreed
This is much closer to my view of it as well.
My partner and I are in our 30's, both ACX readers who are married due in part to this blog. We were planning to have children this year but recently found out that we both technically qualify for an Asperger's/high-functioning ASD diagnosis. (We weren't looking to get diagnosed; one of us was seeking ADHD treatment and got diagnosed that way, and the other of us found out about a childhood Asperger's diagnosis that had been kept a secret.) We are both high-functioning and independent, if a little neurotic, but we are worried that combining our genes could result in a greater chance of us having a child who is autistic to the point of being extremely disabled. Can any doctors/scientists here help us think through the following:
1) What is the increase in our risk of having a severely disabled, low-functioning child by chance, given we both have mild ASD?
2) Is it worth doing IVF to select for genes less likely to cause developmental disorders up front?
3) Can anyone recommend genetic counselors in the Bay Area who are smart and will take us seriously? So far, it seems like most medical providers do not know how to deal with the concerns of autistic adults, especially prospective parents. It feels like doctors are either brushing us off or patronizing us.
Thank you!
Thank you all who replied! Quick update, we had our first meeting with a genetic counselor today. We weren't expecting much based on past experiences with our health insurance, but it turns out Kaiser has just rolled out a re-vamped and updated genetic testing program this week and it's miles ahead of what other parents went through just a few years ago. They now offer more comprehensive standard tests plus chromosomal microarray (CMA) for patients like us with diagnosed developmental disorders. While imperfect, CMA seems to be the first step forward for some kind of genetic autism screening, particularly concerning severe intellectual impairment, which is what we are most worried about.
Thank you for all this information, as it helped us ask the right questions.
Just spotted this comment! Chromosomal microarray picks up on copy-number variations, which are one of the major causes of the "complex autism" I alluded to. They're not particularly common in people with "milder" autisms, especially people of well-above-average intelligence, but this is not to say they're unheard of -- some CNVs have mild phenotypes and don't cause "disability" per se. The presentation of CNVs is really variable within families, so if one is passed down, it can result in anywhere from "significantly higher-functioning than parents" to more significant levels of disability. IMO given how bell curves work it's fairly unlikely for there to be many people with CNVs amongst ACX readers, but it's not strictly impossible.
Individual CNVs are very different to one another, and if any given one is found it'll have different implications to any other. A lot of genetic counsellors are...not great with CNVs, because they're individually very rare and they have serious clinician's illusion/ascertainment bias.
Thank you, do you think that a company like Orchid would be better equipped to discuss these issues with us?
If you do find a CNV, the research you can do on your own is likely better than that of any genetic counsellor or company. They're all very different to one another, and I wouldn't expect anyone who doesn't specialize in a particular one to be 1. up-to-date on the literature and 2. have really internalized "the profile of any given CNV is super broad, and includes literally-no-symptoms-at-all". If you do run into someone who researches a particular one, though, they're probably at least as excited to meet you as the inverse (we don't have much data on 'mild' CNVs).
(This is assuming you're reasonably confident in interpreting the medical literature, patient groups, etc., so it doesn't scale infinitely, but the things I tend to hear from counsellors or companies tend to be below the 'what do you get from searching Google Scholar as a reasonably comfortable-with-research person' threshold.)
This is an area in which I've done a lot of research. No one has seriously researched "how many children of autistic parents are autistic" -- and they couldn't, really, because autism diagnosis is so unclear and we're nowhere near even having good base rates -- but there's a lot you can read into what we do know.
A large share of all diagnosed "severe autism" does not naturally cluster with ASDs. "Syndromic autism" -- autism in the context of an identifiable genetic disorder -- is a relatively large share of all diagnosis; every single intellectual disability syndrome is "associated with" autism, including ones radically unlike autism (15% of people with Williams syndrome, a disorder with a characteristic behavioural phenotype of "extreme outgoingness", "strong social interest", and "piercing eye contact", are diagnosed with autism). About 20%-ish (maybe more?) of diagnosed ASDs are "complex", which means they're associated with birth defects or dysmorphic features; as time goes on, more and more "complex autism" is discovered to be caused by ever-rarer genetic disorders. "Complexity" is strongly correlated with severity.
I think the significant majority of syndromic and complex autism isn't autism at all, but a general diagnostic substitution because of the greater recognition of "autism" as a label compared to "intellectual disability". Some genetic syndromes seem genuinely associated with autism (e.g. sex chromosome aneuploidies), but -- as you'd expect -- these tend to be the *mildest* of all developmental syndromes, the ones so mild most people with them are never diagnosed, because we don't generally karyotype people because they're a little dyslexic and had speech therapy.
The "milder" autisms tend to be much more heritable, and are rarely associated with de novo mutations, which the "severe" autisms far more often are.
Neither Kanner nor Asperger conceptualized autism as something that could coexist with severe intellectual disability. Kanner thought the appearance of intellectual disability was flatly wrong, and that even autistic kids who seemed significantly impaired at a brief interaction were far smarter than they came across. Asperger thought the association was genuine, and Frith translates him as discussing "severe retardation", but this is a seeming mistranslation -- his actual descriptions correspond to mild or upper moderate ID. This same range is where Kanner found the "most disabled" of the children he diagnosed were functioning at thirty years later, and these were likely underestimates, given they had been institutionalized for decades and had little exposure to schooling. The "lowest-functioning" autisms are a much more recent construct, and remain questionably related to anything Kanner or Asperger saw. (People substantially overestimate the gap between their patients.)
None of this is to say "mildly autistic" parents never have "severely autistic" children, though the severity of autism is complicated and most people travel to multiple points-on-the-spectrum in their lives. But the connections are very murky and absolutely not additive. Everything we know implies "mildly autistic" parents will usually have "mildly autistic" children.
(postscript: I have a very strong family history of autism and, to my knowledge, zero relatives with the stereotypically "low-functioning" profile)
Thank you so much! This is a very thoughtful response.
Why do parents keep things like this secret?
Some places discriminate against people with some diagnoses. And even if they do not today, there is no guarantee they won't change their mind tomorrow.
There are a couple of SSC posts on this topic:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/28/assortative-mating-and-autism/
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/13/autism-and-intelligence-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/
Thank you, this seems close to the information I am looking for!
It seems like the SSC survey found people with mild autistic traits don't necessarily have increased risk of very autistic children but the sample size was pretty small. However Emily Oster found the opposite in larger datasets: populations with greater proportions of mildly autistic parents had a greater chance of producing more severely autistic children. It is helpful at least to know the likelihood is so small that the data is fairly noisy; if there were a strong correlation, perhaps this question would have a more obvious answer?
Epistemic status: personal intuition, not actual medical advice.
I'm also high functioning ASD in my 30s, and my girlfriend is on the spectrum too but less high functioning due to a mix of CPTSD, depression, chronic fatigue, social anxiety and work related burnout. There is also some non-neurodivergency related history of health issues in the family as well, so we decided against having biological kids.
But in your case, I'd totally go for it. Common sense tells me to expect that on average your child would be about as high functioning as you and your partner, with possible deviations to either sides. And as you are in the top part of spectrum the risk of having disabled autistic child may be just a bit highter than average, but the chance of having a highly capable autistic child will be much more likely. And the world really needs more high functioning autists.
I don't think that IVF selection is precise enough to remove all the risks without loosing the benefits of your condition. I'm worried there is a risk that it can lead to just the selection of the most neurotipical looking embrio and so whichever autism related genes that allowed you and your partner to be high functioning will just be lost in the next generation. But maybe you can specifically talk about this kind of failure mode with a specialist.
Can you genetically select for a more neurotypical embryo?
I suppose? There are known genes to be correlated with autism so in theory you could select against them. The problem is that they are also correlated with other stuff, most notably intelligence.
I'd recommend searching this question on google scholar before seeing a professional. It's good to have your own info, to help you assess how seriously to take what the professional says. One thing to take into account is that most studies of this kind are going to concern parents who are autistic by the older, stricter definition of the term: People who are without a doubt odd, rigid, prone to repetitive fidgets, bad at social perception and interaction, etc. -- people whom you would notice are odd within 60 secs of meeting them. If you have what used to be called Asperger's, and especially if you are self-diagnosed with that form of high-functioning, subtle autism, the stats about autistic parents are not going to apply to your situation.
In Eastern Canada, there are groups of individuals falsely claiming to be part-Indian, known as the Eastern Metis. They've organized "tribes" with "chiefs" and "membership cards;" the whole deal. They've built a whole conspiratorial worldview, in which their ancestors were listed as white in censuses because they were trying to avoid the Residential School Genocide. Many are obvious grifters, looking to benefit from affirmative action. I wonder what it's like for the second generation. I bet many were told by their parents "this is just a fun cultural thing, we're basically just white people, don't take it too seriously." But I bet many others grew up believing it wholeheartedly. I'm indigenous, part of a marginalized minority; settler colonialism is the reason my family has little money, etc. Then one day they're browsing the net and they learn that, not only are they not the identity they thought they were, their whole community is fraudulent. They aren't indigenous, their tribe is not a real tribe, their chief is not a real chief, their membership card is just a worthless piece of plastic. Real Truman Show s***.
This sounds like what Sámi activists in Finland at least accuse the "Kemi Sami" I've described here as being. https://alakasa.substack.com/p/the-great-sami-showdown?r=7fsd8
One difference would be that here, the Kemi Sámi tend towards the main center-right party of the area and their claim is that the other Sámi are safeguarding indigenousness to prevent access to land rights; the other Sámi, meanwhile, consider the Kemi Sámi a part of a plot to dilute the concept of indigeneity and fennicize the Sámi.
As I indicated in the blog post, it's best to just see "indigenous" as a word that does not really indicate things like "how long a nation has been in the country" but rather "does this group's experience pattern-match to Native Americans and their experience during the settlement of America".
The bigger question is why Canada still gives special privileges to members of certain ethnicity instead of making everyone 100% equal.
What gets me is that this arrangement, whether you want to deem it privilege or not, is clearly not working. The self-governing-within-Canada demographics are have-not societies whose ails do not improve after every billion-dollar payout. They want no federal oversight to deal with issues, yet we keep returning to a point in the discourse where the activist perspective on solving problems is to just give money. Conditions are deemed colonialist.
Leaning further into independence could work in some capacity, and would be palatable to voters of all stripes. Take for example foster care. Aboriginal kids are overrepresented in this system and one of the outcries is that they're taken from their culture. I believe there is a shift in the works where their societies would take care of it instead: great. Now you're in charge. This could be extended to other areas, with fewer open questions as to where responsibility lies. I expect that federal involvement will still be needed for services (health, infrastructure). If we decry issues that fall in the federal purview, then they should set the conditions.
That's not much of a question; it is the normal practice of every culture.
The question is why white Canadians tend to advocate for giving privileges to other ethnicities and removing them from themselves. This is nothing special to Canada either, but it is at least historically unusual rather than being the continuance of an unwavering norm.
Not everyone views their own ethnic group as their ingroup and everyone else as an outgroup.
For example, there were some white people which were opposed to the enslavement of black persons.
Evolution failed to align the aims of the individual human with increasing the relative frequency of their genome in the population. Thus not all humans follow your social darwinist model of furthering the interests of their own ethnicity over others, but instead select policies for different philosophical or religious reasons.
I would argue that this leads to better overall equilibria in multi-cultural societies. If rights are granted to the ethnicities holding power only, they might quickly lose their rights if the power balance changes.
I would thus much rather be a citizen of a state which recognizes the universal human rights than being part of the ruling tribe in some unequal society.
It is certainly debatable if overshooting color-blindness is beneficial or not, but simply expecting all humans to unfairly favor their own ethnicity is treating us as dumber than most of us are.
I actually thought once with some amusement (not that I would actually consider doing this, just a thought experiment) that if I had a kid, it would be easy raise them as culturally Jewish because I have a pretty stereotypically Jewish surname (though in my case it's just German), live in a pretty Jewish milieu, and I think many people I meet already assume I'm Jewish. Then if as an adult, he finds out that he's not 'actually Jewish,' how would that affect his identity? Would he just say, 'to hell with it, I'm just going to keep being Jewish?' And how would other Jewish people regard him? As a fraud like Rachel Dolezal? At the same time, most ethno-cultural communities today accept people who were adopted by parents of said communities, and would probably see it as racist to reject them on the basis of not being 'biologically' a member of the community. But they also typically reject the idea that ethnic/cultural identity can be conscious choice - people who 'choose' a new identity are generally considered immoral frauds.
So I guess it's childhood upbringing that 'transmits' authentic identity? If so, then the children of ethnic frauds have a somewhat valid claim to continue identifying with the identity they were brought up in. I guess it doesn't seem to me like there is a coherent set of rules determining how 'authentic' ethnic/cultural identity is actually transmitted; it seems like it'd be hard to come up with such a coherent set of rules that would simultaneously deal with all of these edge cases in a way that isn't counterintuitive, but also isn't basically racist, by modern definitions. Of course in the US at least (I would guess Canada too?) much of ethnic/cultural identity is already basically LARPing, so there's already a great deal of fakery in it.
> Then if as an adult, he finds out that he's not 'actually Jewish,' how would that affect his identity?
Depends on how he finds out? Maybe he runs for political office, and an opponent notices that his ethnic claim looks a bit odd, and does some research, and next thing you know he's a laughingstock in half the country? (Not saying that this is what happened in any particular case, but it seems like something I'd try to avoid.)
Well, the question of "Who is a Jew?" is complicated enough that the only part I'm certain of, is that the Nazis were wrong.
Most branches of Judaism do, in principle, accept converts, although they're very much not "evangelical" about it. So your hypothetical kid, if they follow the Torah and integrate into Jewish culture, might not be able to claim Right of Return to Israel but they might be able to "convert" to make their religious status official.
Islam takes the complete opposite approach - recite the affirmation of faith once and you're a Muslim. Then I guess you can start learning about the culture?
The bit about childhood upbringing as authentic identity is also a huge controversy in another context, namely whether late-transitioning women can be disqualified for being "socialised male". I'm personally on the side of, you can be gay or trans even if your upbringing tried its best to prevent that.
There was a joke going around the 23andme forums to the effect of, "I wasted all that time learning Hebrew as a kid and now this genetic test is trying to tell me I'm not Jewish."
And in other news, I have a mitochondrial DNA haplotype usually found in Ashkenazi Jewish populations, and I don't even know Hebrew.
My mtDNA is Arabian somehow, even though I am otherwise 100% British Isles. Guess how good my Arabic is?
Why not simply explain that your family is "Jew-ish"? https://www.reuters.com/world/us/embattled-republican-santos-faces-new-heat-over-jew-ish-heritage-claim-2022-12-27/
I don't see any way that could possibly go wrong.
I know someone that happened to. Didn't turn out well. Wasted years of his life trying to fit in, eventually figured it out, is angry at his parents. Still has Hebrew tattoos.
We really are one thing or another. Good to be glad of whatever you and your kids actually are.
That's a little different as Judaism has a well-defined conversion pathway. Various people have found out they're not Jewish by the standards they thought they were and had to convert from time to time.
Honestly now that you get affirmative action for being some kind of minority, it's going to be kind of motivated by that.
I'm not sure that it's "necessary", but it does seem to exist. The wisdom of Chesterton's Fence aside, getting rid of it seems like it might involve a lot of ... unpleasantness.
Oh boy, this is a hell of a question.
I think, in the beginning, there was culture, or "this is the way it was done". For various reasons (geography, climate, conquest), certain cultures were dominant within certain places.
When they leave those places, are their values, habits, knowledge, etc, all useless? I like to think that they're not necessarily. Some traits can be maladaptive, sure. Sometimes you just adopt a better way of doing things. But no, I don't think culture from country of origin is completely bereft of value.
It won't be "pure" (nothing is), it will have evolved with time and various selection pressures, and it will keep evolving, but I think diversity is useful in its own right because it's important for resilience. Indigenous American culture was why Europeans knew potatoes and tomatoes were edible and great crops when they arrived (recall both plants are nightshades and most Old World nightshades are deadly poisons). Culture encodes information.
(One place I feel strongly about is indigenous land stewardship. That bridge might have already been burnt in a lot of places, and oral histories and cultural knowledge irreparably lost, unfortunately. But this is one arena you definitely want genuine indigenous people vs frauds, provided that there's enough fragments of cultural knowledge to go around and piece together what people were previously doing to manage natural disasters and prey/predator populations. It would have been damn nice for someone to have wrote all that stuff down before doing all the murder, that's for sure).
Are superficial cultural ties useless? Well, they clearly serve a purpose to the people who enjoy them. I think a lot of people have a strong, psychological need to signal belonging, and the modern liberal society which accepts everyone isn't really meeting that need (to wit, it's hard to belong to an ingroup that consists of everyone). It's mostly harmless, but can be constructive (genealogical research). It can be damaging (making up ethnic histories and customs from wholecloth, kind of like some people inventing an ahistorical "white" culture).
But perhaps the "ethnic drive" is a real thing and is a psychological force the ensures the continuation of culture. It's the memetic mechanism that keeps culture going. So in that case, it's a drive that needs to be managed. Perhaps you can manage it by making genealogical testing accessible and having a couple of Society of X Ethnicities around in major cities to teach things (languages, customs, techniques used in cooking, performance, art, etc). That would be the sensible and pragmatic way to manage the tendency for some people to be intensely miserable about not knowing their origins and not knowing what they're "supposed" to do, with the added benefit of preserving knowledge and skills that might be useful one day. Though yeah, in many cases you'll find the reason why you don't do things the way your ancestors did is because the old way took massive amounts of effort with middling results. Or maybe you'll find it's better with aid from modern technology - I mean, you no longer need to mill the flour with a donkey but sourdough bread is slightly better tolerated than yeast bread in some people with certain GI issues, and sourdough is the traditional method - so it's really good that we didn't lose the traditional way of making bread, for the benefit of people who get sick eating newer bread. And it's really useful to know how people sweetened things before the invention of high fructose corn syrup if you happen to be allergic to it.... Or if we get a corn plague that abruptly wipes out all the corn.
Does it matter if it's true or not? Is awarding people special privileges based on fake ethnicity any better or worse than awarding people special privileges based on real ethnicity?
It's less sustainable. The equilibrium of "special privileges for fake ethnicity" is that everyone adopts a fake ethnicity.
For another good example see the privileges provided to 'lower' castes in India. Then all of a sudden everyone is from a 'lower' caste.
Obviously already happening, but with all kinds of favored identities, not just ethnicity.
Maximally Effective Altruism
Imagine that two people are lost at sea, with only enough food for one. One is the world’s most promising cancer researcher while the other, to be polite, has far less potential to improve humankind. Most people would wisely choose the cancer researcher.
Yet the fashionable Effective Altruism movement focuses on lower-potential people—typically, people who are struggling in poor countries. That implies the belief that all lives have roughly equal value. Of course, our hearts go out to “the least among us,” but they face so many barriers. If we care to maximally benefit humankind, we’re wiser to invest in people with great potential for ripple effect who, importantly, would not otherwise get fully funded.
For example, leading lights in the Effective Altruism movement are far from downtrodden, for example, William McCaskill, Holden Karnofsky, Peter Singer, and Zvi Moshowitz. Effective altruism might fund such people to develop ever more “ripply” altruism.
Some other possibilities for more ripply and thus more effective altruism:
— SuperCourses: online versions of standard school courses taught by dream teams of transformational instructors, augmented by vivid demonstrations and gamification. Of course, instruction would be individualized, not just in pace but in teaching approach. Machine learning would make that individualization ever better, and automatic translation would make SuperCourses available in many languages. The development of SuperCourses would enable every student, rich and poor, kindergarten through college, Alabama to Zululand, to get a world-class education. The private and government sectors haven’t funded this—I have proposed SuperCourses to top U.S. and California education officials and gotten nowhere. One reason is the fear that the teacher’s union would use its might to try to stop it to preserve teacher jobs. But if developed and disseminated worldwide, SuperCourses could be very effective altruism indeed.
— Independent researchers studying solutions that are promising but have a poor chance of success. Governmental and corporate funding sources tend to invest in institution-based researchers whose projects have higher probability of near-term success. But if the focus is on long-term risk-reward, effective altruism would include independent, unaffiliated researchers working in their home-office or garage who are exploring novel ways to, for example, lower the cost of nuclear fusion energy, develop better AI-driven models for predicting and foiling terrorism and even for assessing a war’s worthiness, e.g., the U.S. entering World War II versus the war in Vietnam or Afghanistan.
— People developing ever better mental health apps, for example, using ChatGPT. Such apps could be distributed worldwide to countries rich and poor—Cell phones are ubiquitous even in poor nations. Private sources are funding development of such apps, but such development deserves greater funding given the apps’ potentially great ripple effect.
— Researchers studying the enhancement of reasoning ability, impulse control, and altruism. For largely political reasons, those research areas are underfunded by government and corporations but, with sufficient ethical guardrails, such research has great ripple potential to provide major benefit to humankind.
— People developing software that matches mentors with protégés, available worldwide. It would be like match.com but for mentor/protégé, relationships—Many protégés and mentors say that mentorship has been among their life’s greatest learning experiences. Such software would facilitate that. Alas, the matching industry, despite having been around for decades, has remained focused on romantic relationships. That makes mentor-matching apps a good candidate for effective altruism.
Again, it’s understandably tempting to want to help “the least among us,” those with the greatest deficits. After all, we feel good in helping them and it’s a fashionable form of virtue signaling. But if we truly care about humankind and are willing to focus on the greatest ultimate benefit, ripple should be the core criterion for determining what is maximally effective altruism.
I am missing how any of this helps resolve your opening hypothetical. The ripple effective a person might have is something of a coin flip, isn’t it?
Could you please provide evidence for your assertion that Zvi Mowshowitz is "a leading light" in EA? A quick search provided multiple examples where he is at least sceptical and plausibly at pains to distance himself from EA.
Perhaps QALYs (Quality-Adjusted Life Years) should be replaced by PALYs (Productivity-Adjusted Life Years)?
Malaria presents one of the major obstacles to the development of Africa, as do other endemic diseases common in the continent (e.g. trypanosomiasis). (The other major obstacle is the extremely poor institutions there.) The development of China into a first world country will undoubtably unlock an enormous number of intelligent researchers of great value to the world; similarly, African development would result in 2+ billion more healthy people in developed countries, some of whom would no doubt provide useful scientific and technical insights. Productivity per worker in African countries which received PEPFAR aid from the USA went up significantly compared to countries without it; disease is a major obstacle to economic development, and economic development underlies the potential of people to contribute positively to the world.
The entire argument here is "Africans are fundamentally inferior, stupid people, who could never build anything of value," repeated endlessly. I'm not really interested in engaging with it because it's something only a very stupid racist would say, but since I know you will take this as an excuse to claim you are correct: in order for you to be correct, every single black country must be a miserable failure of a country with broken institutions. If even one isn't, it proves that it is not purely a product of genetic heredity. Botswana, the Bahamas, and Seychelles are all doing quite well at displaying the capacity of those of African descent in creating and sustaining institutions.
[just joking around] But everyone knows that the Professor should have eaten Gilligan immediately!
Nitpick: Zvi has repeatedly stated that he doesn't consider himself an EA and finds it a flawed movement, albeit one with occasionally interesting ideas and a lot of natural overlap with [r/R]ationalists. With regards to charity specifically, he thinks it's often possible to achieve high impact with local donations, for some of the same reasons you're arguing against EA here, but also because it's much easier to check the receipts when recipients aren't halfway around the world or whatever. Betting on the metis line vs the episteme line. Did you mean Scott instead?
> ripple should be the core criterion for determining what is maximally effective altruism.
You also need to account for the probability of failure, which is often quite high.
Gamification is sometimes actively harmful. My kids are already motivated to learn math on Khan Academy, but they have to wait for the animations of the fireworks to finish. I am already motivated to learn languages on Duolingo, but I have to skip a few screens telling me how many "xp" and "gems" I have collected today, how many more should I collect today, and how do I compare to people I don't know and don't care about.
Anyway, Khan Academy exists, and is quite good. And translated to many languages. Do we see any great ripple caused by it? If not, what makes you believe the next time will be different?
Researchers often spend tons of money producing research that does not replicate. Do you know how to make this process more efficient?
Is there any evidence that mental health apps using ChatGPT actually help?
...in other words, there is a very high risk of spending lots of money on something that seems to promise a great ripple, but then it will turn out to be... just another ordinary thing.
The 'lost at sea' metaphor doesn't really capture the actual situation, and so misses the core idea of EA.
If you wanted to express the real-world situation as a 'lost at sea' metaphor, it'd go something like this:
Two people are lost at sea. One is adrift in a boat filled with provisions following a maritime disaster that made international news headlines; the other is adrift in a practically empty boat following a maritime disaster that barely received two sentences' coverage on page 19 of the Cornish Post.
We only have a very limited supply of provisions that might just-about keep one person alive until they can be rescued; should we choose who gets our provisions based on how many provisions are already in their boat, or on how much media coverage their respective maritime disaster generated?
(If we *must* contrive to bring the cancer research thing into this metaphor somehow, I think the least-bad match for the real world might be, "the well-provisioned boat guy has a 0.00000001% chance of making a meaningful contribution towards curing cancer, and the ill-provisioned boat guy is making a 0.00000001% contribution towards elevating his developing world society to a first-world standard of living.")
For the two people lost at sea, I'd choose the most aesthetically pleasing of them.
Also, your ideas for mostly sound like "hey, <scam> is really big right now, what if we extend <scam> to cover even more of our lives". Mental health apps and matching apps aren't making the world a better place.
The value of a marginal dollar is orders of magnitude greater for these lower potential people. Relatively small interventions can create prosperity in the sense of successful small businesses, more education, ability to plan for the future, etc etc.
High potential people cannot reach that potential without a robust society to support them. It's a mistake to attribute 100% of the success to the last link in the chain. The existence of a robust social "substrate" is essential. EA interventions (e.g. in Africa) conribute towards the quality of this substrate.
So, this "egalitarianism" you're ranting against is something I never claimed. I also never claimed that African countries are free of social dysfunction. The material wealth and technology of the 21st century certainly gives those countries a leg up, but there are also downsides (brain drain is a prominent one you already mentioned).
Intelligence is not a hard prerequisite for being a productive member of society. Stability and culture are also important factors. You should go outside more and see for yourself. The social capacity of the western nations you laud so much is in alarming decline, and I don't think we've gotten dumber.
The most valuable lives are those of the people who can do work that helps many, via ripple effect, People who are poor and struggling are "lower potential" people. Seems to follow from this that the more accomplished someone is at skills that can have a big ripple effect, the more valuable their life is. But by that logic, the lives of the poorest people is of least value. Why bother helping them at all? At least, why bother helping them before one has helped all the people who are better off, who have more potential value to help others? Even if someone who is not destitute never makes any effort to help others, they at least have the potential to. So let's be realistic here and leave the dirt poor til last, which is where they have always been.
It's a wonderful thing when one's theory supports a status quo in which one has a comfortable spot.
"Remind me again when white people needed foreign caregivers to lift them up out of poverty. "
I've got Moldova on line 1; they say they've been on hold for thirty-two years.
This made me audibly chuckle.
But Hammond, your belief that the Africans are so motherfucking stupid that it is not worth our while to aid them is irrelevant to my point. I was not urging OP to show more enthusiasm for helping Africans, I was pointing out an absurdity in OP's basic idea: Resources should go to those who can help the most via ripple effect, and thereafter to those that can help second most, etc. The destitute are uneducated, ill, burdened by problems, etc. and have nothing to give. So by that logic they never qualify for any resources at all. Why send ripples to people who aren't going to be able to send out little ripples themselves? If you're going to make the case that Africans are hopelessly stupid, it's important to try to think clearly in these discussions. Otherwise somebody might think you're. a stoopit motherfucking African. Listen, just to stay safe look down at your hands on the keyboard once in a while when typing out diatribes. Are the looking browner? UH OH! Time for a break.
Could use info about options for someone I know who is getting an advanced degree in a highly technical STEM field. What they study is abstruse and has no practical application, so the natural path for them is to become a university professor. However, they need a fallback, because there are not enough faculty jobs to go around. They are extremely gifted at math, and good at the kind of coding that's used in their field, and could probably be hired as quant or something similar where they use their math talents in the service of the finance industry. However, their values are such that working in business or finance is out of the question. I was wondering if Effective Altriusm, either the organization or the activities they support, might have a place for someone like this: an extremely introverted math prodigy with few outside interests who would throw themselves into a job where they believe they are helping the world.
Serious answer: the NSA, specifically the side of the house that is tasked with protection of domestic (not just government!) communication & information systems.
Thank you! Do you think there are jobs where they might be presented with some challenging math-related tasks? This person really is extraordinarily talented. They're the sort of person who you'd have wanted working on breaking code in WW2. And they are not difficult to be around -- just sort of deeply disengaged.
Yes, yes. NSA is very mathy. Very research-y.
Also, one of the jokes was that mathematicians there love their work so much, that the only way they leave is in a pine box. Why bother with a silly thing like "retirement," pfft!
Good point! And, as quantum computers get better, and RSA-style public-key encryption gets more and more exposed, quantum-resistant encryption is becoming more and more critical - even to us just-civilians trying to safely use a credit card on the internet.
The government hires statisticians. Search usajobs.gov for 'Math' for examples
Thank you. I did do the search. Do you think there are jobs where some of the math tasks would be challenging? This is somebody who could take on very difficult problems. They should be up at the top of the How Hard the Tasks are hierarchy, but definitely not high up in management.
Semi-joking answer: work on changing their values. It's pretty bizarre to me for someone to be against working in *any* business. There are tons and tons of businesses that make unambiguously useful stuff.
In general, operations and logistics are good places for people who are good at math but also want to see the concrete good their work does.
This person is very inflexible -- a math prodigy who is way past the introverted and a bit odd end of the autistic spectrum. I understand that people can help the world run better in all kinds of ways, some of them business, but this person is determined to be doing work directly for a helping organization. It is very hard for them even to consider anything other than being a college professor. Their flexibility is maxed out.
mmm, I see. It's a tough ask though. Academia is a tournament profession and I would discourage people from going into it without a solid plan B. Some EA organization may indeed be the best option.
If they're interested in EA/trying to do good with their career, they could look on the 80k career guide (https://80000hours.org/career-guide/?int_campaign=2023-05--primary-navigation__career-guide) and/or apply to get 1-1 advice from 80,000 hours.
GPT-6 requiring ~0.1-10% of all world compute to train isn't all that outlandish compared to other major industrial goods. This report [1] says that aluminum production requires ~1.5% of all electricity in the US. Aluminum is great, but it doesn't exactly dominate the public discourse. A one-off 10% of all compute for ~6-12 months might only register as a "fun fact" level of economic / environmental impact (e.g. "did you know that concrete production is responsible for 5% of all global CO2 emissions?").
Then again, energetic and compute costs to train bigger and bigger AI models might get into crypto or private jet territory, where the environmental impact is overemphasized because AI/AGI falls into the same tech bro / silicon valley elites sphere of negative emotional connotations.
1. https://www.aceee.org/files/proceedings/2003/data/papers/SS03_Panel1_Paper02.pdf
If aluminum and concrete production suddenly stopped, it would have massive negative effects on not just the world economy but life as we know it. OpenAI could disappear tomorrow and nothing of real value would be lost.
>OpenAI could disappear tomorrow and nothing of real value would be lost.
That was probably also true in the first few years of industrial production of aluminum and reinforced concrete too. Give it a decade or so and OpenAI's models will be something akin to white-collar concrete--a nearly-ubiquitous "glue" or "foundation" for office and information work.
That's unclear. OpenAI disappearing would, by my estimates, be a good thing, but it could also be tremendously harmful. Imagine GPT-6 being the system that cures cancer and solves climate change.
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OpenAI and its closed-source contemporaries are purportedly the main drivers of the economy right now.
Remember all the economists that predicted a recession in 2023? Have you seen the litany of economic indicators that have consistently pointed towards a downturn for the past 2 years?
One of the main arguments about why the 2023 recession never came is that the economy is being buoyed by a burst of economic productivity, driven by none other than AI. This is why Nvidia's stock has risen dramatically (Nvidia, which produces graphics cards used by AI, had its value increased by the size of *Netflix* over *a single day* recently).
Nvidia's ascent represents the increase in supply of AI computational power, but anecdotes indicate a high demand as well. Lawyers are currently saving their clients billable hours with an AI law consultant that has read every law since 1850. Doctors are saving lives with the help of AI.
The anecdotes abound, but the conclusion is inescapable: The disappearance of OpenAI and its cohorts, at this very moment, would almost certainly plunge the global economy into a recession.
The stock market can plausibly be driven by AI hype because it is forward looking, but there's no way that AI had a meaningful macroeconomic impact in 2023. That doesn't even pass the laugh test.
I wish them well. I, personally, really want to _see_ true AGI and have a nice quiet chat with it.
>Lawyers are currently saving their clients billable hours with an AI law consultant that has read every law since 1850.
Is it really that reliable?? I've read of at least two cases of lawyers humiliating themselves by taking LLM (I think it was GPT4) output as trustworthy, and finding that it was citing nonexistent cases.
I keep asking GPT4 simple chemistry questions, and it keeps getting them pretty badly wrong. For a simple example https://chat.openai.com/share/7faacb6b-a487-494f-b0b7-4a071798fb1c . I asked it some simple cerium chemistry and, amongst other things, _it_ came up with the "equation":
2CeCl4(aq)+H2(g)→2CeCl3(aq)+2HCl(aq)+Cl2(g)
which doesn't even balance. GPT4 put 8 chlorine atoms on the left and 10 on the right.
For me, current benefits are heavily outweighed by AI Safety concerns. I'd happily trade half the global population and GDP for reducing AI Risk to 0.
Partly this distinction is about taking away something that already exists instead of preventing something from existing. If we removed all planes from the sky that would be a big deal now, but obviously wouldn't have made a difference to life in 1900. Removing OpenAI right now would cause zero major problems because there are no major systems that rely on it. Give it 10 years and maybe we're relying on it the way we rely on aluminum and concrete. But maybe not.
As for "cured cancer" - at least that would mostly be a one-off and we can still enjoy the benefits of successful research even if it's turned off and doesn't continue producing new research.
"A one-off 10% of all compute [in the world] for 6-12 months ..."
This sounds like something from a Greg Egan novel :-)
GPT-6 is just one model from one company though. Google, Anthropic and whoever else will want to do theirs too.
The Tuo lightbulb claims to correct circadian rhythm issues without bright lights by using custom LEDs tuned to specific frequencies of orange and violet light that are present at sunrise and sunset. Their studies so far have produced what appear to be dramatic results (but with a small sample size of mostly grad students and postdocs in their own lab). Sounds too good to be true, but if it really works it could be a huge improvement in QoL for people with CRDs and approximately all teenagers.
https://www.thetuolife.com/pages/the-science-better-than-blue-light
The implication that particularly specific frequencies trigger the effect is implausible. The mechanism they propose explicitly uses the normal cone cells which are used for vision, so it's really just appropriate colours not more specific frequencies than that (assuming their method works at all). They make a big point of it being a comfortable not excessive light level, but also use rapidly alternating blue and orange lights which seems like it'd be way more uncomfortable than just bright white. If the changes are too quick to be perceptible, then they're probably also too quick to have an effect since again, the system that's supposed to cause this effect is part of the visual system (I guess it's possible that higher-level visual processing ends up filtering out the higher frequencies of strobing but this doesn't affect the cicardian cycle things, but that seems unlikely).
I haven't seen a Middle East subthread for a while - are they still a thing?
Several thousand times less bad than what Palestinians are going through, but sad nonetheless.
Question: What purpose do you seek to further with this comment?
I'm saying that a protester self-immolating is very upsetting, but given we're in the middle of a genocide, there is very little scope for protesters to move the dial.
(I'm just very numb to more innocent deaths at this point)
The middle of a genocide?
Putin's war in Ukraine?
The Armenian exodus? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_of_Nagorno-Karabakh_Armenians
Israel are our friends. It's different when you see your friends slaughtering tens of thousands of civilians, destroying infrastructure and homes (and this is after decades of occupation and refusing to negotiate for their freedom)
I was numb after the Syrian war too. One significant difference though is that people don't treat Netanyahu the way they treat Assad.
At this point I sort of see Isreal as "oh yet another Middle Eastern/African basket case" and noone pays much attention to those wars either, but the difference is that Isreal once aspired to something more than that. Also, Isreal has nukes, so there's that, too.
With 98% of the deaths on one side, the side that has lived under occupation for most of a century? ~1 million Gazan homes have been destroyed, almost all their hospitals have been bombed, they have no electricity or fuel, and food is starting to run out.
Are Israeli people in a similar situation?
Question for people who believe that face masks are completely useless against covid (or completely useless unless they are the 99% medical kind)...
When you sneeze, do you cover your mouth?
If yes, why exactly?
While there may be people who genuinely believe masks are completely useless, a better case against masking as a social standard, at least during the acute phase of the pandemic, was that even if masks do work to some degree, if they don't work to the same degree as people *believe* they work, it will lead to masked people acting in ways that they wouldn't have if they know were aware of the actual efficacy level, ie. stop distancing and go out and about even while sick in cases where they wouldn't have otherwise done so.
'course, at this point pretty much no-one (who isn't wearing masks anyway) is socially distancing and the society as a whole operates roughly the same as pre-pandemic, apart from increased WFH (I wonder if there are studies on whether there's been permanent cultural changes on things like handwashing or staying home when sick?), so this is a bit of a moot point.
(I do believe masks are useful, but) Minimizing the odds of having a macroscopic piece of snot land on other people's faces, clothes or other possessions seems like a sufficient reason on its own.
I think about face masks as more like a way to somewhat protect _other people_ from whatever _I_ have, basically a better version of covering my mouth.
I don't think my mask would protect _me_ from COVID, don't know if that counts as 'masks are useless'
I would count "protecting other people" as "useful", but yeah, selfish incentives matter a lot; it is easier to sell something that protects you than something that helps you protect others. Nonetheless, we obviously cover our mouths to protect others.
They're probably mostly useless (like, 10% or lower effectiveness) unless they're proper respirators because covid mostly spreads in aerosolised form rather than as droplets and surgical masks don't do much except for droplets, and because I have a beard N95 masks don't seal properly on my face so they're not very effective. Yes, this means I am choosing to raise the covid risk of myself and everyone around me by a few percent because I can't be bothered shaving and buying respirators, and I'm worried about the social stigma of being seen as excessively safety-conscious and hiding my face. I dunno; I think there are only a few places where I'd want to wear a mask, like on the train, and I haven't seen anyone else wear one one the train for months even if they're from a vulnerable group.
I cover my mouth and nose when I sneeze because A) not everything is aerosolised and some things do spread as droplets, and B) people might yell at me.
I think that only P95 masks (or better) are useful against Covid, anything less was just security theater. I cover my mouth because getting droplets on the person in front of me is impolite. I also do it when I'm alone because I don't like covering my computer screen or other objects with my snot.
I think N95 masks definitely worked. I knew pre-vax people working with covid patients who never got covid and only had N95 protection. But I'd agree surgical masks are questionable at best for covid protection.
I have another answer that is orthogonal to my previous comment. Quite simply, the proof is in the pudding. Certain behaviors (masking, vaccination) were sold to us as "the only way out of the crisis" (those are literal words uttered by my local politicians, over and over). In practice, it turned out that herd immunity was the *actual* way out of the crisis.
This shifts the calculus of any measure purely towards personal benefits. You can mask for your own protection (if you think the tradeoff is worth it), but there is absolutely no reason to make the behavior compulsory.
Anyways, I'm curious why you're bringing this up now. Covid has barely been a blip on the radar for several years in my neck of the woods. I understand it's different in other places. It was bizarre watching the latest GDQ and seeing the people there act as if it was still 2020.
Are you saying vaccination had no impact?
It had limited impact on *transmission*, leading to almost no impact on herd immunity, which is what our politicians falsely promised. If you are out and about in society, you *will* get exposed to covid over and over. No amount of vaccination was going to change that after omicron. In the end, herd immunity was achieved through repeated exposure, not vaccinations.
Also, less of this please. Don't put the most extreme possible position in my mouth.
I don't understand.
If going out and about means you *will* get exposed to covid over and over, then, by definition, "herd immunity" has not been achieved.
People were exposed over and over again, and then eventually herd immunity was achieved (NOTE: this waxes and wanes of course as immunity fades over time).
The point is: repeated exposure to the actual virus builds up much stronger immunity than vaccines. So we were *always* going to have a period of time where the virus runs rampant through the population. Vaccination alone was not enough to prevent this. The measures such as covid certificates were pretty strong restrictions on our personal freedom which ultimately didn't change this reality.
> I'm curious why you're bringing this up now.
Because it's only now that I realized that the argument against face masks (they do not offer 100% protection, therefore worthless) applies even more so to things that most of us already do and that are not considered controversial.
Probably it's a question of timing -- everything we were taught to do as children is normal, everything we were told recently to do is an outrageous limitation of our freedoms. Most people would probably refuse to wipe their butts if someone proposed it as a new thing today. The effectiveness is merely an excuse: no one really measures the exact effectiveness of covering mouth or wiping butt, but people seem okay with doing that anyway.
How dare you try to control how I smell! A whiff of poop is just the price of freedom!
Almost nobody believes that face masks are *completely* useless against COVID in all situations, and this belief in its literal form has never been a significant part of the political discourse anywhere I am aware of. More modest beliefs are frequently expressed in colloquial language as "masks are useless", which says nothing other than that most people aren't pedantic nerds. You are tilting at straw men, and your question is nowhere near the "gotcha" you imagine it to be.
Would you care to try again?
I think there's been a lot of "black and white" messaging on both sides. There's apparently a lot of people who think that either something is completely effective, or not effective at all. And it's shocking how many people operate on some sort of binary model of infection, where either you are "clean" or you "have covid".
I would not be surprised if there were a number of people who grew tired of hearing "masks are effective" from sources which they knew to be untrustworthy, and then heard "masks won't stop you from getting covid", and so concluded that "masks are ineffective".
And I have actually heard a couple people say that, but then clarify that they were only talking about cloth masks. (Which still help reduce the number of virions entering the body!) To them, apparently "masks" meant the type of cloth masks that church groups were sewing in the early days, and maybe surgical masks too, while I assume they probably refer to all the fancy masks as "N95s" or something like that.
I'm a lifelong holy warrior against straw men in discourse, as my long-suffering family members could attest. However I must regrettably say that this is not such an example. There are plenty of people in the US who think and say that "face masks are completely useless against COVID in all situations", exactly as stated. I've met several such individuals myself despite not residing in a politically/socially conservative area and they are "loud and proud" with that belief. Several current members of the US Congress appear to hold that view, along with members of various state legislatures, etc.
>Several current members of the US Congress appear to hold that view, along with members of various state legislatures, etc.
So this is a case where one might have had hopes for the intelligence of a congresscritter or (even less plausibly) for its honesty, but one must abandon any hopes for both in the same critter? :-)
> Almost nobody believes that face masks are *completely* useless against COVID in all situations
I don't think you've had your finger on the pulse for the past 4 years.
<Almost nobody believes that face masks are *completely* useless against COVID in all situations, and this belief in its literal form has never been a significant part of the political discourse anywhere I am aware of.
Actually there are a LOT of people whovbelieve masks are completely useless. I was on medical Twitter all through the pandemic, and many commenters on the medical professionals I followed were convinced that masks make zero difference. If by political discourse you mean discourse by politicians, I'm sure there must be politicians who also believe masks are nothing but theatre. I mean, RFK Jr. is sure that childhood vaccinations are unnecessary and harmful, & has talked up that idea in many settings. Thinking masks are useless, while dumb, is not as dumb as RFK's vax views.
I concur with the above. I've always covered my nose and mouth when I sneezed. COVID had nothing to do with it
Covering yourself while sneezing is pretty much the equivalent of not spitting on other people and has little to do with practical concerns about spreading specific diseases. At least for me the vast majority of sneezing I've ever done is due to allergies which, as far as I know, aren't contagious; and on the opposite side, we don't expect that never ever getting sneezed at is going to prevent you from catching the flu from a nearby sufferer.
It depends on what "prevent" means. I think most of us *do* think that never ever getting sneezed at will give you a *lower chance* of catching the flu than getting sneezed at by someone with the flu will (which is one thing that "prevent" might mean). We don't think it will reduce the probability to zero (which is another thing that "prevent" might mean).
My assumption is that for popular endemic diseases - flu, rhinovirus and nowadays also Covid - the bottleneck that determines how often I get sick is my immunity and *not* the opportunities to get infected, which are so numerous for me (in large part due to multiple children bringing home all the pathogens as frequently as *their* immunity allows) that they are "saturated" and so even a significant reduction of the chance of catching the flu (or Covid) *at that day from that person* has an insignificant impact on the total number of times I'll catch the flu (or Covid) per year or per lifetime; so a usable preventative measure has to offer a *drastic* reduction in the chance to infect or it's not making any difference at all and is not worth any tradeoffs or inconvenience.
But the immune system is rarely 100% efficient, it's more like "your chance of becoming sick is X when exposed to 1 million copies of virus, Y when exposed to 1 billion copies", and in most cases X<Y and the difference is quite significant.
The ballpark math I'm thinking about is that for the current seasonal flu strain I "exchange rebreathed air" with 1-5 infected people every day, so 100+ potential infections per season. If the chance to catch flu from one of them is 90%, the chance of catching that strain during that season is ~100%; if the chance to catch flu from one of them is 10%, the chance of me catching that strain is still ~100%, if the chance to catch flu from one of them is 1%, the chance of me catching that strain is still more than 66%. So that's what I mean by "it should be *very* effective or it's useless" as it starts making a difference only if the chance of infection becomes very low (<1%), and getting from 90% to 10% is useless.
"Exchange rebreathed air" is vague though (sitting face to face in a small room for hours is different from being five meters from each other in a bus for 20 minutes), and probably misses a few relevant metrics e.g. estimating how long an average portion of air is outside of their lungs before entering yours, which is relevant if virions degrade on their own or as a result of microdroplets drying/cooling/etc. The difference in the number of intact virions reaching your membranes might be several orders of magnitude, easily. Also the sick people are different too (I remember that superspreader Korean woman). Which means any model that implicitly assumes the potential infections are about equal is probably as useless as one estimating meteorite impacts by assuming them all to have ~equal mass.
It's plausible that if a sick person is in your household, then even with a mask, they might be spreading so many copies of the virus, that all that matters is whether your body's initial response was enough to fight it off (and if so, then it will be active enough to continue fighting it off for the rest of the exposure). But when it's a person sitting a few seats away from you on a bus or in a classroom, it seems to me that both the intrinsic probability of fighting off a significant exposure, and the extrinsic probability of getting a significant exposure, are relevant. It's not like one of them is close enough to 100% or 0% that it can be ignored.
> the bottleneck that determines how often I get sick is my immunity and *not* the opportunities to get infected
I disagree, simply because I observe that I'm much more likely to get sick if someone else in my household is sick than otherwise. I don't think my exposure to germs while going about my daily business is anywhere close to saturated.
I mean "saturated" by that if you don't get infected today, you'll get infected a week later, as you'll get repeated chances continuously so much that you're unlikely to last through the particular strain's epidemic season without getting immunity, and "someone else in your household being sick" determines *when* that happens, not *if* it does.
Because pretty big droplets spew all over the place when I don't. Facemasks obviously help if people sneeze into them in lieu of not covering their mouth at all. That's not what I've observed though, which is people wearing masks, *taking them off* (!!!) to cough or sneeze, then putting them back on. Absolutely moronic.
In terms of protecting people against the mixing of pathogens into the air during regular breathing, it's pretty clear that any mask which doesn't noticeably impede your breathing does not meaningfully filter the air in either direction. Even if it did, then touching the outside of the mask would be a pretty big no-no. Again, this does not match my observation of how masked people actually behave.
FWIW, I do mask up voluntarily when I *know for a fact* that I am sick.
> *taking them off* (!!!) to cough or sneeze, then putting them back on. Absolutely moronic.
Saw that too. Ugh. Maybe not moronic, more like "I'm forced to wear this mask for stupid reasons I don't care about/for my own protection but it's uncomfortable to sneeze while in it". Or "I'm not sick, my sneeze won't hurt anyone".
I have found N95 and N99 masks that do not noticeably impede breathing, and they definitely filter air meaningfully. That's what the 95 and 99 in the ratings mean. For me, at least, masks that actually lay up against my lower face, especially the tip of my nose, make me feel suffocated. The ones that have a sort of beak that is like a tent over the lower face are quite tolerable. There were a few occasions when I left a store where I had masked, forgot I had a mask on, and biked all the way home without noticing the mask -- even though my ride home s uphill and has a few sections that have me panting.
I do sympathize with people who remove the mask when they sneeze. If you are repeatedly sneezing inside of your mask, you end up with a wet mask and a runny nose that you cannot blow. Lifting the mask but then sneezing into a handkerchief or your inner elbow seems like it would keep you from spraying big droplets out into the air, so seems possible to me that a sneeze done that way does not put any more germ-filled aerosols out into the air than a single non-sneeze exhale. Why would it?
But in general, yeah, people have not been informed well about masks and what works and what doesn't. Kind of rare these days to read someone complaining about how dumb the public is with mask usage. Hardly anyone is masking these days. Are you still seeing people masking but then doing things that neutralize the benefits of the mask?
As masks have shifted to become voluntary, the behavior of people who do mask is much more reasonable these days.
I've found that the people around me don't enjoy it when I spray them with fluids from my mouth.
Edit to add: That probably wasn't the most productive way to say that. I guess I'd say that it's for the same reason that I wear headphones when I'm listening to music. Or when I'm gassy, I hold on until I'm outdoors (and away from people).
I think it's mostly just politeness. If I'm actually sick, I stay away from people, to the best of my ability. (I've mostly found that it is little kids who don't cover their mouths.)
I also bless other people when they sneeze. Surely that helps prevent disease.
Transwomen breastfeeding. Last week I realised this is actually a thing that is physically possible. Going on Twitter to learn more about was a mistake ofc, but the shitstorm was somewhat entertaining to watch (takeaway: everyone thinks everyone else is a pedo). Looking at the literature, it is almost non-existant (I found ~10 papers that were relevant, wrote an article here https://valentinsocial.substack.com/p/can-transwomen-breastfeed). My conclusion is, there are no obvious risks that we know of right know, but we definitely need more research if this is a thing that is going to happen more in the future.
Just out of curiosity - why would one have a prior that this wasn't possible, given that lactation isn't particularly correlated with breast size (or rather, that past some Minimal Viable Breast development, the rest is just subcutaneous adipose commentary)?
Have always wondered if it might be an interestingly different experience (on both ends), but obviously the intervention arm is pretty underpowered compared to the control group. And one does not simply ask around "hey, would anyone be willing to volunteer their baby so I can try breastfeeding?" But I notice that even if I somehow had my own biological kid, it'd feel...more...correct to have the actual-mother do the honours. (And not just because it messes with hormone levels. Prolactinoma isn't a fun shadow to live under.)
As someone who had never had any reason to study the biology of lactation, I had no idea it was physically possible either.
I knew nothing about the difference in biology between male and female breasts, I had just assumed that male milk glands are a leftover and not something that can function at the level of female glands. Also it's worth noting that males breastfeeding is not something that happens apart from very few exceptions, so even if you had a baby you probably wouldn'y have a choice whether or not to breastfeed it unless you were willing to do hormone therapy and take drugs.
Ah...I came away from highschool biology with the simplified understanding that female is the default human template, which Y chromosomes graft some additional software and hardware patches on top of, making various features dormant without actually removing the functionality. Breasts being one such feature, though not usually a relevant concern in this context outside of gynecomastia. So the assumption would be that this is possible, although unlikely and almost certainly unwanted. Maybe that was a quirk in my schooling though.
Sorry, I guess I wasn't explicit: I myself am part of the minority of the transwomen minority who're capable of lactation. But stepping it up to full-on breastfeeding is still mostly speculative without the relevant suckling stimulus, hence the curiosity. At any rate, thanks for the post. Relevant To My Interests, surprisingly hard to find information like this going down the typical gender rabbitholes.
Oh that's a pretty cool metaphor femal/male bodies!
Yeah, information on the topic is scarce and spread out, that was one of the reasons I wrote this post, maybe it can serve as a reference point for anyone looking for some facts without the usual opinions that surround this subject
Not just trans women - cisgender men have been able to breastfeed on rare occasions. I imagine they have impressive estrogen levels.
"Cisgender"
Stop applying exonyms to unwilling groups.
Is it even an exonym? It seems to be credited to a biologist named Dana Defosse, and casual searching hasn't found any evidence that she wouldn't identify herself as cisgender.
Got a better word?
Yeah I saw a few stories about cisgender man breastfeeding as well. Crazy stuff, never thought how similar the male and female bodies are in this manner
I have been wondering why such a huge percentage of people in US TV commercials are African American? If I had to guess, I would say that they are three or four times over represented.
Possible answers:
1) I am wrong and over-estimating
2) Blacks either watch more TV relative to their population, or more commercial (non streaming) TV
3) Blacks are more receptive to advertising (ie a target market)
4) Advertisers feel good and diverse about themselves by featuring black actors, and the cumulative effect is to be wildly over-represented
5) Marketers have found that ads with black actors perform better relative to other actor distributions (they sell more or improve brand image)
6) Advertisers come from urban areas and are unaware of the actual demographics of the country?
7) Advertisers are shooting for diversity, and the cumulative effect is wildly unrepresentative?
Any others? Any feedback on which of these is plausible? Is it perhaps some combination of these? Anyone in Marketing familiar with research on the topic (I was in Marketing, but have been retired long since before this trend started, but our main spokesman 15 years ago, was indeed a black male).
African Americans are a very sizeable demographic in some parts of the US, namely the southeast, and have been that way for centuries, long before more recent immigrant groups.
Anyway, the point of the advertising is to show that they're for everyone, not to simulate a statistical sample of the US population.
Something that's been true for centuries is generally not a good way to explain a recent change.
Showing black people in media has been common since the 70s. And the change before that was the civil rights movement and the reduction in legally enforced racism.
It's the 'progressive' response to the killing of George Floyd:
1. Let young men loot and burn several cities.
2. Blame all police.
3. Put lots of black people in toothpaste commercials.
Apparently it never occurred to them to demand an end to any claimed 'immunity' for police from both criminal and civil prosecution, or direct police agencies to train recruits appropriately regarding constitutionally-guaranteed civil rights that come into play with the use of force.
Would-be conservatives are just too dumb to know they should care.
Perhaps African-Americans, for whatever reason, just apply more often for advertising jobs and tasks.
I wonder if there's some element of, black people and black culture seem cool/authentic to most Americans, in a way that lends credibility to advertisements?
I don't watch enough TV to notice trendlines in...blackvertising, but I always figured it was something like, this is the most important token box to check off, the one people will get most mad about flubbing, let's at least get that one right. And on the flip side, I kind of implicitly get the message as a non-black minority* that they're supposed to be, like, a stand-in for The Rest Of Us. Not like, one minority to rule them all, but the whole...judge a society by its least well off, that kind of thing. As black America goes, so goes the rest of minority America. Or that's always been the perception I've had, anyway.
Maybe there's also some historical first-mover-advantage reasons, coming first in the civil rights sequence, and thus having the most time to cultivate a robust presence in such industries. Not to mention the sports-to-salesman pipeline, which is probably a huge contributor.
*but do I get to be a "POC"? I have no idea!
Also, other minorities seem to be underrepresented? The US Hispanic population is like 19% and the black population is closer to 13%. Hispanics seem super underrepresented in pop culture and media.
A fun side point is that the same phenomenon happens in Australia too, where black people (African-type black people, not Aborigines) are just 1.3% of the population, and vastly outnumbered by most other ethnic minorities you could think of. And the ones that _are_ here are mostly Sudanese and Somalian refugees, who don't exactly have a lot of disposable income.
I don't want to use the term "virtue signalling" because it leads to arguments about the choice of words, but let's just say... you know that thing that the term "virtue signalling" points to? This is that thing.
I suspect that's just a side effect of the global influence of American media. It's the same reason Swedish teenagers ask to be read their Miranda rights.
Honestly the population of Aborigines who are both (a) actually recognisably Aboriginal and not just 1/16th, and (b) good-looking enough to be a model (and disciplined/sober enough to hold down a job) is pretty tiny.
What's really weird is that Africans are more common in ads than Asians, who outnumber them significantly, and also do a _lot_ more shopping.
My guess is that a few of these effects are going on.
The biggest one is probably something like advertisers finding that an ad is more effective at convincing members of a group that a product is for them if the ad visibly shows a member of that group using the product. If all that matters is that at least one person of your group use the product in the ad, then advertisers will include one ad with a member of each group in their rotation. Small groups will end up over-represented, and large groups will end up under-represented.
A secondary effect is that some groups (notably urban liberals) care about whether a product is seen as *only* for one group, and showing members of a variety of groups using the product helps counteract that potential problem.
I think both of these effects are historically situated. In some contexts, members of some minorities are willing to let members of other groups stand in for them. For instance, at some points in time, young girls were willing to identify with a protagonist who was a young boy, but young boys were not willing to identify with a protagonist who was a young girl, so children's movies generally featured a young boy as protagonist if they wanted to sell to a wider audience. As another instance, there might be some groups that really *don't* want to use a product that is seen as one that members of other groups might use - if you want to target those audiences, you have to *not* include members of other groups in your ads.
Lots of interesting guesses here.
Based on stats I've come across, #1 is false{1} and [#2 is true](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/black-audiences-consume-media-tv-group-want-better-representation-rcna138423). #3 seems plausible, and I do vaguely recall seeing something about lower-class groups being more susceptible to advertising, but I can't find it now so maybe I'm wrong. #4 and #7 fit my intuitions strongly, especially since marketers are probably verbally-tilted (in terms of IQ), and people with a verbal-tilt tend to be more woke. As for #5 and #6, I don't know enough about the facts regarding them to have much of an opinion there.
So in summary:
#2, #4, #7 seem very likely to me
#3, #5, #6 unsure
#1 unlikely
{1} I've definitely come across statistics on this, but can't find them easily right now - I don't think the media is exactly eager to draw much attention to it.
That Nielsen report really clarifies, thanks.
It shows that blacks watch a lot more TV and that they feel underrepresented and that they react more favorably to representation. On #3 and 5, if a product is targeted in part to this demographic for whatever reason, it might lead to advertisers to really stress that they are "open to people like me".
One that comes to mind is a popular commercial on a buy your car online company that lets you set your own monthly bill and loan length with a toggle in the app. Both spokespersons for the company are young blacks and the person speaking for the consumer is black (with a diverse range of people behind them). I can’t imagine this was unintentional.
The same reason that gay people are vastly overrepresented in shows. If you have a cast of, let's say, 8 regulars, and one of them is gay, that's 12.5% of the cast. A gay couple would make that 25%. If shows are adding gay characters on purpose, that 12.5% gets repeated over and over again, turning a much lower representation in the actual population into a much higher representation.
This is actually a really difficult thing to work out intentionally, though. Without coordinating between shows (and it would be really weird to do that - "Hi, I'd like to include a gay character in my show but wanted to check if you were planning to do that too? Oh, you are? Then I'll recast as straight, thanks!") it's really hard to determine which shows "should" have gay (or black, or Asian, or whatever) such that they are evenly represented to their base population without being overrepresented.
I wonder how we managed to do this in the 70s and 80s so much better and with less obviousness. I don't think stations were aiming for "representation" they just cast interesting actors and made shows. Cosby and Family Matters never seemed to be pandering, they were just pretty good shows that happened to have black families in them.
If all the shows picked the demographics of each character at random from a realistic distribution, that would give a realistic distribution overall with no coordination. Of course, there may be reasons why specific demographics make more sense in the stories they want to tell, but the random solution is no worse for this than the coordination solution. I guess it's possible that certain groups would end up over- or under-represented by chance in specific small sub-genres, but at that point it seems like the audience being unreasonably picky if they complain about it.
On the other hand, if minority audience members like shows featuring at least one person in the same minority as them more (although it feels silly I know I do this), such that the average audience enjoyment is higher with this sort of over-representation than a realistic distribution, it's not obvious that a little tokenism is actually a bad thing.
Right, but what's happening is studios are trying to make sure that certain kinds of minorities are getting into shows, and once you've made that choice it gets really hard to represent but not overrepresent.
Studios are clearly *not* using the method that you are suggesting, though I agree it would fix the problem.
>This is actually a really difficult thing to work out intentionally, though.
Not if your pool of actors are average diversity; then you cast everyone in something and voila, accurate representation.
> I wonder how we managed to do this in the 70s and 80s so much better and with less obviousness.
I don't think we did this so much better - just with less obviousness. When it's majority groups being overrepresented, it's less obvious.
In the 80s and 90s there seems to have been a lot of shows with black actors, but it didn't feel pandering or like anyone was filling a quota. I mentioned several above, but there were also shows like The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Sister-Sister, Kenan and Kel, etc. I don't think anyone was counting percents, but at least my watching experience back then felt like there was a strong number of black actors on TV at any given time. Some of those shows were extremely well watched, like Fresh Prince and Cosby, in particular. We've definitely turned a corner somewhere along the line trying to make sure that not just some shows but *every show* has multiple ethnicities, even when it makes no sense. It's weird if every show has to have a gay character, an Asian character (preferably more than one so East Asian and South Asian are both represented) and a black character, and a Hispanic character, and so on. For shows like The Walking Dead - where people are traveling around a lot and meeting lots of random people - that makes a lot of sense. When the Wheel of Time series showed a small remote village with multiple races (despite an intentional and important plot point in the books being that it was an insular community), that's something else.
I'd speculate that it is the same phenomenon that has resulted in the more extreme case of Google's Gemini from being programmed to refuse to generate any images with white people in them at all; a focus on diversity massively over-corrects into over-representativeness of historically under-represented groups. Interestingly, it seems that this phenomenon has been occurring in Europe as well, where the over-representativeness is even more stark because the underlying population percentages are smaller (think of how many prominent British actors there are these days relative to their quite small proportion of the British population), although a google search suggests that could be confined to black British actors -in US productions-. I would be really curious if anyone has collected hard data on this.
You're not wrong. I saw someone claim to have measured this a few months ago and they said that about 35% of commercial actors are now black. This is 100% a post-BLM phenomenon and exists because advertisers don't want to be called out for being insufficiently diverse. The moral panic continues.
Is "sign in with password" on Substack broken for anyone else? No matter what I try, it just says "something went wrong", even if I reset my password and then try to login with the new password. The only way to log in to Substack now is the "email you a link" option, which is really annoying.
Same here! I always use my PC because I hate trying to use smartphone apps to read anything. I wonder if it's just crappy buggy software (sorry, Substack, but you need to hire some more monkeys and install a few more hamster wheels, the system is breaking down) or an attempt to force adoption of the app?
Same here.
The app is cluttered with random stuff I never subscribed to. So I don't use it at all.
If you've ever tried to overcome a fear and haven't succeeded, you may be interested in an article I wrote - I detail how I overcame my fear of talking to strangers and pitching businesses
https://youbutbetter.substack.com/p/how-to-actually-do-the-thing-you
I wrote an article about the myth that conspiracy theorists are ignorant of a sparse number of specific facts. https://benthams.substack.com/p/conspiracy-theorists-arent-ignorant
This all seems right to me.
William James makes a version of this point very quickly in Section III of The Will to Believe:
"Here in this room, we all of us believe in molecules and the conservation of energy, in democracy and necessary progress, in Protestant Christianity and the duty of fighting for 'the doctrine of the immortal Monroe,' all for no reasons worthy of the name. We see into these matters with no more inner clearness, and probably with much less, than any disbeliever in them might possess. His unconventionality would probably have some grounds to show for its conclusions; but for us, not insight, but the prestige of the opinions, is what makes the spark shoot from them and light up our sleeping magazines of faith."
I think he's very self-consciously lumping in Protestant Christianity and the Monroe Doctrine with belief in molecules and democracy, even though in Section I he suggested that the audience would likely all seem themselves as wiser than conventional Christians.
I think the point he makes is also parallel to one that W.E.B. DuBois makes about "double consciousness" - Black Americans know more about what White Americans think than vice versa, because they have to live with the majority around them, rather than just accepting it unthinking.
Would anyone be willing to share their criticisms of "non-violent communication"? As someone who has found it a useful framework, I'm interested in hearing from people who didn't find it useful.
I have the feeling (ha, ha) that someone who read the Wikipedia article on NVC once but is genuinely attempting to reframe all their complaints as feelings and unmet needs for mutual discussion is going to be a lot better at communicating than someone who's done three months training in NVC but tries to psychoanalyse their conversation partner or launch into a pre-prepared spiel instead of shutting up and listening.
I know one person who has had extensive training in the technique, and it drives me crazy when they talk to me in the approved manner. It sounds fake and formulaic. I do not doubt at all that communication is improved when people assume the other person is not an evil idiot, try their best to grasp how the situation looks to the other person, and hold back from verbal violence (meanness, sarcasm, mockery, yelling, etc). But there aren't any formulas for bringing that attitude to communication: You have to really work on it internally, battle it out with your own self-centeredness. If you accomplish that, you do not need to use formulaic ways of speaking. The people you are talking with will grasp that you are fair-minded and responsive. Conversely, "packaging" various things in a formula will not give your conversation partner that sense -- it will give them the feeling that you are following a formula, and that by doing that you are blocking their view of your real attitude.
100% hard agree. I've tried to read Rosenberg in addition to having conversations with NVC fans, and couldn't shake the sense that they were cargo-culting.
WTF is non violent communication?
The notion that communication can be violent threatens American values regarding free speech. I'm not going to take any ideas seriously premised on "violent communication" as a thing.
Considering that there is a real and growing movement to ban free speech because "speech is violence" I think reasonable people should criticize language in sync with that politically reactionary movement.
Assuming you're talking about "I see where you're coming from, but..." language, it's that the person is blatantly trying to "handle" me. I'm not most peoplr; I don't care if people insult me, as long as they answer my question as they do so. But don't presume to tell me how I feel. I know how I feel, and I know for sure that you don't, because you're wasting time appealing to emotions I don't have.
Yeah, I dislike that sort of language. It's intended well, but it's often used as "I'm going to disagree with you because you're an idiot". I too prefer "No, I don't agree, because" rather than smarmy "Yes, I understand why, with your tiny ignorant brain, you would think that" stuff.
I think that NVC is a good idea, but if someone wants to be an asshole, they will find a way to follow the letter of the rules while going completely against their spirit. It will probably be difficult, but defending against it will also be difficult for someone who believes that following the rules of NVC is the right thing to do.
(It is similar with rationality. No matter how detailed rules you write, someone will find a way to do superficially the same thing, but in service of some irrational idea they hold dear.)
Also, NVC is not supposed to solve all problems in the world, but mostly one specific problem, let's call it "violent refusal to communicate". The situation where, once you classify someone as an enemy, you no longer listen to them, so you actually have no idea how they think and what they want, which makes it impossible to try figure out a compromise solution (even if one that is kinda frustrating for both sides, but still preferable to fighting). NVC helps you pass the Ideological Turing Test better. You can still disagree, but at least now it clear what exactly you disagree with.
On the other hand, there are manipulative techniques based precisely on attacking your empathy or your self-image as a nice person. They put you in a frame where you either do the thing the manipulator wants you to do (and you didn't want to do it), or you feel guilty or ashamed. NVC can actually make this worse, by limiting the range of your possible response. Your task is no longer to "resist the manipulation" but "resist the manipulation while following the rules of NVC to the letter, because otherwise the manipulator will accuse you of being a bad person".
A: "When you refuse to give me all your money and to have sex with me, I feel sad. Really, really say. It feels like my heart is breaking..." (keeps crying and shaking)
B: "What?! Ah, sorry... I meant... uhm... when you put it like this, I feel... I feel emotionally blackmailed."
A: "Ahem, 'emotionally blackmailed' is not a feeling. It is a judgment. We are not supposed to do those here. Anyway... when you say that you feel emotionally blackmailed by me, I feel so sad it is difficult for me to even keep breathing, there is a pressure in my chest, it feels as if I am suffocating..."
(Here, the person A is clearly the bad guy, but he follows the NVC script, and it's difficult to call him out while following the NVC script yourself.)
I'm way more inclined to go "When you say you feel like your heart is breaking and you are crying and shaking, I feel like I don't care" 😀
Well... yeah, of course.
For the more sensitive people, it would make sense to admit that they feel sad... and then decide not to *act* on that feeling. Or to choose a different course of action: "from now on, I will try to avoid you, to feel less sad".
Basically, the people at risk are the beginners, who are trying to play a game where they already learned the rules but not the strategies.
Wow, NVC and NYC take active effort to tell apart. "I think New York City is a good idea", indeed.
I have never really tried it, but I've encountered some things vaguely along those lines. Overall, it can be a good thing. But...
(1) merely using the words and techniques doesn't automatically make people better at empathy and communication, so it can feel like an empty ritual. Some of the most frustrating conversations I've had have been with people who write paragraph after paragraph about how careful and deliberate they are, and about how much they're trying to see my point of view, etc, *but I can't for the life of me figure out what they want me to change*. It is extremely aggravating, as the only actual information transmitted is a mushy feeling that I'm not enough like they want me to be.
(2) it can slow down communication a ton, especially among people who are emotionally mature and have healthy self-boundaries. If you're familiar with ask culture vs guess culture, the latter is just better when people make reasonable guesses and provide non-painful ways to correct course on a misprediction. I prefer someone spontaneously giving me advice while subtly communicating that their intention is to help rather than dictate or impose, compared to the alternative of being asked all the time whether it's ok to give me feedback/advice.
That's what you get when you give it such a stupid name. It deserves to be lumped in with the "hate speech is violence" type crowd.
>Almost everyone in this subthread is just assuming they know what it means purely from the name and criticising it based on that.
It does seem that way, doesn't it. Maybe I should have put a summary of the main steps in the post.
Yes, you should have!
Maybe, but branding matters sometimes.
If your "communication technique" is disingenuously and deceptively branded, then I'm going to guess that you're a disingenuous and deceptive person, and that any communication technique you're trying to sell me is probably based on disingenuity and deceptiveness.
I just bought this riding lawnmower and want to customize it: https://www.homedepot.com/p/Troy-Bilt-30-in-10-5-HP-Briggs-and-Stratton-Engine-6-Speed-Manual-Drive-Gas-Rear-Engine-Riding-Mower-with-Mulch-Kit-Included-TB30B/323026891
I want to modify the mower so I can attach garden shears, a hand saw, and a bottle of plant killer spray to it. Whenever I am mowing the lawn and come across, say, a small branch that has grown long enough to hit me in the face, I'd stop the mower, remove the hand saw, use it to cut down the branch, and then continue mowing.
I have no idea what sorts of couplings, baskets, or whatever I'd need to attach to the mower to make this possible. Any suggestions?
I'm going to suggest not attaching stuff.
1.) It's going to get knocked off, (branches and such) and then potentially fall into the blades.
2.) What are you really gaining? Just walk around the yard before mowing with the shears and saw and clean things up. (throw away the sticks.)
3.) It will really be more of a pain stopping the mower and then getting off and back on.
If you insist on mounting something, then I'll suggest a water proof box mounted somewhere. You can get ammo boxes pretty cheap. That's what we put on the four wheeler.
I'll second this. It's good to do a walkthrough beforehand to remove large sticks and rocks and litter (especially if the area faces onto a public walkway). And if you bump into an overhanging branch while riding, just make a mental note of it and go back afterwards with the saw. Next time it won't be there anymore. ;-)
Rivnuts are good for attaching things firmly to sheet metal and are commonly used in automotive and aerospace applications. The magnet idea is probably more feasible if you're not tool-inclined, though.
The probably safest and easiest way to do this is clean it really well and use adhesive velcro strips.
If you’re handier, I’d consider drilling some holes and mounting a basket to the back with bolts. Not as hard as it sounds.
No one has said epoxy or various bonding "glues," so add that to the list of possibilities. I can't offer much more than pointing you in that direction.
As funny as it might sound, zip ties of all various sizes are also very useful general-purpose ad-hoc "attachers." Of course you need appropriate attachment points, but perhaps there are spots you could zip tie, say, a basket or something similar. (Zip ties come in all sorts of sizes, you can get 3ft long, .3in wide ties that will hold largish stuff together.)
I'd google, youtube, and ask around at reddit or Lowes also and see what you come up with if none of all this works.
Welding is fun. Welding farm implements is a tradition that goes back decades... It may void your warranty, though...
Compulsive improvisor here: Check to see whether magnets stick to the body of the mower . If so, it's easy to find extremely strong magnets about the size of a quarter with metal loops attached to them that you can hang stuff off. You could probably also attach a basket meant to go on the handlebars of a bike under the front wheel, maybe using bungee cords, then put some of the extra stuff you want to carry on the mower in there.
It might also be worth your time to look into sheaths, bags, tool-belts, or backpacks that can safely and comfortably fit on your body while riding the lawnmower. They might lack some of the cool factor that I imagine comes with a mount, but it's another way to solve your problem that might be easier than physical modifications to the machine.
I'm looking for recommendations for an AI app that can enhance old home movies. My late father transferred a bunch of 8mm movies to VHS tape. That was about 30 years ago. I recently sent the tape to a service to get it digitized. The result is an hour-long MP4 file that is pretty crappy, partly from the degraded VHS tape but mostly because the underlying 8mm films were too light or too dark, blurry, or shaky. Can this be remedied through an AI app? There are a lot of individual clips on that long MP4 file, and I don't have time to chop it up into small segments to fine-tune them. I want to submit the whole thing to an app and have it fix it up as best as it can.
Lots of places, including the iphone editing app, will apply a generic fix to still photos, automatically adjusting things so that the darkest color in the image is black and the lightest white, and increasing saturation. I'm pretty sure there must exist something equivalent for video, and I don't think it would need to use AI. I don't know whether there's one that can autocorrect blurriness, shakiness and spots and stains, but there might be.
I’ve heard good things about Topaz, in terms of upgrading 720/1080p footage to 4K. Not sure if it will work for your purposes, as I’ve never used it myself.
I really enjoy fiction that feels like a fable, in tone or plot. They have a simple beauty that feels comforting to read. I just finished "The Last Unicorn" by Peter Beagle, which I thought was extremely beautiful. Other examples I've enjoyed for similar reasons are "The Magician's Nephew" (CS Lewis) and "On Such a Full Sea" (Chang-Rae Lee). Does anyone have something to add to this list?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Pinocchio
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Ancestors
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cloven_Viscount
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Baron_in_the_Trees
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nonexistent_Knight
Wow, thank you everyone for the dozens of recommendations. Sounds like people besides me got something out of this question as well. Seeing this list helped me clarify what I like about the fable setting. The books I like most of this type let you see a complicated world through childlike eyes, in some ways helping me do the same in ours. Piranesi was a great example of this — I loved reading that book. Looking forward to a promising CS Lewis book I haven’t read yet too — I’ve read many and like most. Especially “The Great Divorce.” Some of the other authors I don't know who feel promising to me: Patricia McKillip, Roger Zelazny, George MacDonald, Jack Vance, Dunsany. Thank you for the terms “waking dream” and “sense of place” as well.
Really appreciate all the responses! Nice to have a community I can trust for this sort of thing.
The Starless Sea by Erin Morgensten fits this extremely well, highly recommend.
The Ursula Leguin Earthsea book, as recommended below, that feels most like this to me is Tales from Earthsea, a short story collection set within the Earthsea universe. It is a comfort book for me, much more than the main series.
Paulo Coehlo writes like this as well--The Alchemist, whether you love it or hate it is meant to be a fable.
Thanks for asking this! I also love books like this and they are hard to find.
All sorts of Arthurian legend stories. I like Mary Stewarts version. More recently Naomi Novik's Spinning Silver or Uprooted might work. And I've recently been reading everything by T. Kingfisher AKA Ursula Vernon. A lot of her stuff has a fairy tale/ fable feel.
Patricia McKillip's "Ombria in Shadow". And from what I can tell, most of her other stuff. It's almost like a waking dream.
Robin McKinley's "The Door in the Hedge". Also her early stuff, like "The Hero and the Crown" and "The Blue Sword". And her chosen genre is various takes on fables; if you like her writing, you can go far with her.
Ursula K. Le Guin's "Earthsea" books might count. She tries a bunch of different things with the series, but I think at least the first two will fit what you're looking for.
Susan Cooper's "The Dark is Rising" series is maybe not quite what you want, but in addition to having so many direct links to fables, the underlying structure is also sort of one, too.
William Goldman's "The Princess Bride" is great, although maybe not quite what you're looking for.
George MacDonald's "The Princess and the Goblin" and "The Princess and Curdie" are old family favorites.
John Steinbeck's "The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights" is a retelling of Malory, sadly left incomplete by his death.
G.R.R Martin's "A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms" is very Arthurian in flavor, too. It's quite a different tone than his "Song of Ice and Fire" main series (well, except for the Brienne chapters).
Jenna Moran's "An Unclean Legacy" and "The Fable of the Swan" may count, although (as with most of her work) they require some effort to understand, and thus might fail your "simple" criterion.
It's not exactly a "fable", but Steven Brust's "The Phoenix Guards" is a loving homage to Dumas, under cover of being a historical novel extracted from a fantasy universe. It's 17*2 chapters of swashbucking fun and entertainingly exasperating exposition. Don't bother reading up on anything else, just jump in and try a few chapters until they get accepted as guards, and see if you like it. Some love it and some can't stand it.
Totally out of genre, but as I recall, Jerome K. Jerome's "Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog)" had, in its own way, a fairy-tale-like atmosphere. And then you get to read Connie Willis' companion novel, "To Say Nothing of the Dog".
I have not read it yet, but I'm told "The Worm Ouroborus" by E.R. Eddison is quite good.
I'll second the recommendations for Jack Vance's "Lyonesse" trilogy - it's occasionally transcendent, while also having some parts that pack more horrifying grimness into a single sentence than most authors can manage with a chapter. His four "Dying Earth" books are also something you should at least check out, but be warned that you'll be rooting against the main characters at least as much as you'll be rooting for them. (It's so **fun** when Cugel gets his comeuppance, especially when he brings it on himself.)
And I'll also second the recommendations for Neil Gaiman's "Neverwhere" and "Stardust", although his style is not to everyone's taste. And a completely unqualified second for Richard Adams' "Watership Down", which is nicely complemented by this analysis: https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/tag/mythopoetics
> Patricia McKillip's "Ombria in Shadow". And from what I can tell, most of her other stuff. It's almost like a waking dream.
Yes, all of her fantasy writing is like that. I understand she also wrote SF, but I have no knowledge of her writing style for it.
The Riddle-Master trilogy is her best-known fantasy work, I think.
The Hero and the Crown just feels like a normal adventure story to me. You have a person going on a quest and fighting a dragon. The Blue Sword is similar, except instead of a focus on magic and dragons you have a focus on the special bond between girl and horse. (That sounds dismissive, but I like The Blue Sword! But, I like it less than The Hero and the Crown, and I have a strong feeling that it's intended to appeal specifically to girls who like horses, a fantasy story for fans of Black Beauty.)
Other than Patricia McKillip, I don't think I can provide much in the way of good recommendations for work in this style. I usually prefer to have a good grasp of what's going on in the plot.
> The Hero and the Crown just feels like a normal adventure story to me.
The plot is, sure. But I find there's sort of a relaxing, grounded-yet-fairy-tale-like quality to it, as if the author tapped into some primal fountain of story and is letting it flow, while at the same time anticipating and answering questions from a bright 6-year old who would keep asking "but why didn't she do...", except that that storyteller was one step ahead. I don't know if that's what the original poster was looking for, but it's what I like about it. :-)
(If you haven't read it, you should check out "The Door in the Hedge"; it's a collection of short stories that are either fairy tales or indistinguishable from them.)
Has anyone said Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny yet? Someone should suggest that one. Let me know if no one does and I'll come back and suggest it.
William Morris, though he can be hard going because of his elaborate imitation of mediaeval tone. George MacDonald too, have you read "Lilith" or "Phantastes"? I'd stay away from his realist work, the writing in Dialect prose is excruciating to read.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Morris#Literary_works
"At the Back of the North Wind" is very much a fable, too.
I second George MacDonald, though I would suggest starting with his short story "The Golden Key". MacDonald has a pretty strong flavor, and if you like The Golden Key you'll probably like Lilith and Phantastes (and vice versa).
It's out of copyright, so here's a link: https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks07/0700571h.html
"One Hundred Years of Solitude" is the best possible example of this. Also try Borges and the rest of the magical realists.
I have to be That Guy, plugging my own book. But it fits the ask:
Hundred Ghost Soup, on amazon
Your online marketing worked! Just bought. I have an interest in Chinese history from that era and so this sounds promising.
Why, thanks so much! you've made my day.
Forgot to write this when it happened, but I finished the book a few weeks back and really enjoyed! The relation/clash of old magic and modern society was very well done, and it came together in a very satisfying way. Thanks for recommending.
Thank you so much! Would you mind doing a review on Amazon, please please?
Stardust by Gaiman is a fantastic one
- A Night in the Lonesome October by Roger Zelazny
- The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe. Not strictly fable, perhaps more leaning towards a blend of fantasy, science fiction and magical realism. But it certainly has a very strong sense of place to it.
Oh my goodness a Zelazny I haven't read! Thanks.
That one is super fun. :-)
The moomin books have a bit of that and are pretty good.
Also, Watership Down (more or less). And keeping the tone without being fairy tale-y, Jim Herriot's vet stories (All Creatures Great and Small and the sequels)
Gentlemen of the Road, by Michael Chabon
Your first sentence made me think of Susanna Clarke's excellent book Piranesi. Your mentioning the Magician's Nephew confirms that.
Thanks for the recommendations.
Ishiguro - "The Buried Giant" - I enjoyed the fairytale-like quality, amplified by listening to the audio version, although it was just "off" enough that one wasn't totally surprised that the ending didn't have a very satisfying payoff; I thought about it a good deal while I was reading it, but seem now to fail to quite recall it (which is appropriate, actually). In a way, "The Remains of the Day" has something of the didactic fable quality, more directly - "I am going to teach these English something about the Nazi sympathizers in their midst in the '30s" - but for the better the obviousness of the lesson soon recedes, in the reader's mind seemingly as well as in the author's, for the deeper qualities of humor and of character portrait, both individual and national. The narrator, with his limited grasp, can resemble the child in a fable perhaps. I hope that doesn't make it sound patronizing; it is not. As others have pointed out, it is to this character is granted some of the most movingly rendered scenes of heartbreak in 20th century literature. It quite naturally rises above literary fiction - or rather, settles into a lower level, where the best books dwell.
"One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch" - I think of it - since "The Gulag Archipelago" would be too much of a read for me, as sort of a children's tale of same. It goes down easy - how brilliant that he chose to render a "good day" - even Kruschev was said to admire it, I believe. It feels very carefully constructed. I guess this may just be my own weird take.
More Lewis - "When We Had Faces" - it was a pretty effective presentation of his usual themes, but also of a myth that those of us with spotty self-educations like myself, missed; as such it was a little like school, but with a clever teacher.
I recently finished "Till we had faces." I've really enjoyed heavy-handed allegorical CS Lewis in the past -- The Great Divorce is one of my favorites. That book, I felt, said something extremely true about morality and human failings, whether or not you believe in the Christian God. But I honestly didn't enjoy this one that much. Part of it was that I didn't enjoy/agree with the message as much. There was some universal truth in it -- something about jealousy poisoning joy, and something about feeling regret for harm intentionally done. But a lot of it seemed to be about denial of divinity in face of evidence, when I don't think that applies to the real world very well. And it was sort of long and slow.
I also didn't realize it was a retelling of a Greek tale. One of my favorite fiction books in the last two years was "Song of Achilles" by Madeline Miller, which fits the same genre. That book I thought did an amazing job of exploring the theme "greatness versus joy" and also the path to accepting one's destiny. Really, really enjoyed.
One Day in the Life is still on the list -- sounds very interesting.
I haven't read "The Great Divorce" so I will read that in return.
Truthfully I think I did like chiefly that "Till We Had Faces" was a myth re-telling, because my education didn't include much in that way. But to be candid, I've rather forgotten it since I (listened to) it last year? I don't think it was the listening - that isn't related for me necessarily although ideally I do a toggle between reading text and listening - but more that it was a bit formless and overlong, and if you are not religious, as I am not, the "now we are ready to be seen by God" or whatever it was, didn't especially move me.
Nice, let me know what you think! It's in some ways more religious than "Till we had Faces" since it's explicitly about the afterlife, but it's much more cleanly translated to non-theistic morality. And felt more concise to me. Maybe I'll read again as well.
Off topic, but I mostly found Remains of the Day to be sympathetic rather than didactic. It's more "how could a decent person make such a mistake and how sad it was when he gradually realized it" than anything else.
I am in the habit of assuming whenever anything becomes an especially popular theme in cultural products, it is probably inversely correlated with its actual frequency/significance. The Fuhrer-loving aristocrat (yes, I'm a Mitford aficionado, I know there were a few) - I guess I see it as more of a device, a sort of cheap device, with which to present a man who has not been his own man, was helpless to be. But it doesn't really matter - it works very well to lure one into the actual story, of someone crippled, emotionally, or rather in his comfort level with emotion and its expression. Someone imprisoned in loneliness and yearning, just a pretty ordinary type in my opinion*, well-realized.
*I've suspected that truly romantic natures tend to be well-hidden, completely orthogonal to such things as Valentine's Day.
What are you trying to hear?
Note - the title of Lewis's book is "Till We Have Faces"
Oh yes! Bad memory. Probably exacerbated by, once again, listening to it on audio, so never having it before my eyes. Also my altered title completely gets the point of the thing wrong.
Not a good title, C.S. Lewis!
Also possibly accidentally mashed with "when we were orphans"
I haven't read that one, just looked it up. Might do.
(TBH I liked it a lot less than remains of the day or never let me go. Ymmv though, some people liked it)
Dunsany's The King of Elfland's Daughter might fit the bill.
What about the 2023 forecast contents which happened at the beginning of 2023? Are you going to publish the results?
I think I read somewhere that someone is working on it
At a friend's request, I wrote about my thoughts on what motivates YouTube censorship: https://substack.com/inbox/post/141868348
I used to work there, so I felt like I had a little extra insight beyond any random person. I would appreciate any constructive criticism.
At a constructive criticism level, how familiar are you with conservative criticism of YouTube censorship? I ask because, well, half the country votes for Donald Trump and this...broadly doesn't appear to address their concerns.
Let me give a hopefully constructive example. A...couple months back, maybe a year ago there was a big drama with Budweiser and some kind of trans activist. Big brouhaha, big enough that it came across my feed and big enough to apparently severely impact Anheuser Busch's stock price.
And when I read you piece, it sounds like it's all about the ad money. Probably true, you know much more than me about it. But if it is true...is YouTube going to censor trans content? I mean, the advertisers must be scared. Without looking, I can tell you no, Youtube is not going to censor trans content. But then it's not just about the money, there's other stuff beside the ad money that drives decisions, and that's what people are concerned about, even if 95% of the job is about the money.
I'm not saying that there aren't good answers to these questions or things people on the right haven't gotten things wrong but...these are the concerns I see, or more appropriately have seen, on right wing media for at least 5 years about censorship on YouTube. And you...don't really address them, honestly you react like you're hearing about them second or third-hand.
Which is fair, not every article needs to address conservative concerns but...at that point I wonder who the article is for. The people I hear complaining about censorship on Youtube are overwhelmingly conservatives with the occasional Marxist. Are there really a bunch of moderate liberals on Youtube worried that they're being censored on Youtube?
But yeah, if I have any constructive criticism to offer, it's that it feels like there's a gap between what you consider to be the worry about censorship and what I see people on the right worry about censorship and so I can't imagine it clicking that well with that audience.
It's honestly because it is not safe to talk about this on the public internet. I work in tech, and will probably continue to work in tech for some time, and people in tech are not able to speak openly about the existence of the conservative 50% of America.
To address your specific example, I think we can all see which way the Overton winds are blowing. Trans stuff is going to be more accepted over time, not less. Every company wants to be on the right (and safe) side of history, and not have to go back and metaphorically scrub all their Elmer Fudd cartoons from the archives later.
My experience with right wing complaints vs. finding out what actually happened (when I worked there) was that the vast majority of banned/censored conservative creators are violating ToS, but pretending like YouTube (or whichever social company) is executing a political vendetta against them. If they simply... didn't violate the ToS, YouTube probably wouldn't block them and wouldn't have a leg to stand on if they did. However, I will say that a consistent aspect among the tech companies I've been exposed to is that they seemingly don't notice ToS violations as frequently for people who are more left on the spectrum.
I see people on YouTube all the time worried about getting censored for discussing explosives, prices of guns, terrorism, entire categories of crime, political violence, 3d printing, etc. It's not just conservatives.
I appreciate your feedback though, and maybe I'll be able to talk about this much openly at some point in the future.
Thanks for the honesty and no sweat, take care of yourself.
Have you considered an anonymous account though? Because I just want to make sure you hear what you said. Which is that there are reasonable explanations for most of what Youtube is doing...but you can't fully discuss those for fear of not merely being fired but blacklisted from your industry. This...does not sound like an environment and topic area conducive to open discussion or your career health.
> My experience with right wing complaints vs. finding out what actually happened (when I worked there) was that the vast majority of banned/censored conservative creators are violating ToS, but pretending like YouTube (or whichever social company) is executing a political vendetta against them.
> However, I will say that a consistent aspect among the tech companies I've been exposed to is that they seemingly don't notice ToS violations as frequently for people who are more left on the spectrum.
I mean, that's what a political vendetta is. Try reassuring someone who's worried about political persecution that the reason the rules are getting enforced against them, and not against their enemies, is that they have the wrong politics and their enemies have the right politics.
Ok, I'll grant that. I think you're right. I guess I was merely distinguishing between a "proactive" vendetta and "reactive" vendetta.
> half the country votes for Donald Trump
*30%
> The one thing that always worries you in the back of your mind is the hopefully remote possibility that your ad is going to be next to a swastika. If that happens, suddenly your job is in jeopardy.
Doesn't this model rely on the idea that nobody knows how internet advertising works? That may have been true once, but I don't think it's true now.
That's kind of... exactly what happened with Twitter/X recently, right? I think it still works that way.
This response is from memory, so the particular examples are almost certainly wrong.
But, didn't Twitter present the response "this screenshot was obtained after the journalist created an account whose only interests were [Nazism] and [Coca-Cola], and to the best of our determination, no one else on the internet has ever seen an analogous juxtaposition"?
Yes, I believe that's what happened, and I think Twitter is probably being honest. But I think this also supports my case. Someone went absolutely out of their way to show a brand next to a swastika. The media absolutely loved the story and worked hard to amplify it. Advertisers then reacted in their typical scared fashion. I think all of that supports my case.
How's Twitter doing at attracting advertisers these days? Last I checked, Elon was railing against a supposed conspiracy keeping advertisers away, which isn't a great move if you think there's any chance of persuading them to come back to you.
>Viewers try to watch as much YouTube as possible when they're supposed to be working and view as few ads as possible.
LOL! I like it! Cute!
It's obviously not the case; ad blockers have a 100% success rate at blocking ads. But apparently very few viewers want them.
Many Thanks! I honestly don't know what the statistics are for either ad blockers success rates or the fraction of viewers who use them. I personally, only find the ads moderately annoying, so I haven't bothered with a blocker.
Thanks! I liked the explanation.
Thanks, that was really interesting. I knew about brand safety, but it never occurred to me before that the media has an active incentive to make Youtube look bad due to competition for ad dollars.
That was a good read, thanks!
Thanks. Not unexpected, but good to hear it from the horse's mouth.
If you'd like any criticism: Could have been more succinct in some paragraphs. But I'm also impatient right now and its high-level criticism.
Is anyone else getting this problem? Trying to sign in with my password on Substack, keep getting message "something went wrong". I've reset the password, no dice. But "sign in with email" works.
I'll try here before I try contacting Substack because, to be frank, I don't expect Substack to be any help with this problem. Signing in with password worked fine up to a few days ago, the problem has only cropped up recently.
I just ran into the same issue. Very annoying.
Scott:
In regards to your policies on banning & unbanning:
1. Do you have a "statute of limitations" after which the comments and the commentators are off the hook? I ask this because the comment that I was banished for was five months old when the banishment was imposed. Although I readily admit I was out of line and that I deserved banishment for fulfilling Godwin's Law, it took me by surprise because I had long ago forgotten about the exchange. How far back do I need to go to review my old posts to see if anything I said was banishable?
2. Have you articulated your moderation policies anywhere? After being banned, I searched for them but couldn't find them. If so, could you repost a link? For instance, I assume ad hominem attacks are verboten. Looking at the posts that got people banned in the last big round, it seems like certain extreme levels of sarcasm can earn a poster a banishment. Likewise, circum-hominem attacks seem to be bannable. E.g. "You're delusional if you believe X." I'm somewhat on the spectrum, so I am quite capable of working in the framework of explicit rules, but when it comes to unwritten social rules, I'll admit I'm quite at sea.
Anyway, explicit policies might help reduce the outbreaks of verbal warfare on your Substack. For instance: Charlie Stross has a separate page on his blog listing his moderation policies...
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2008/06/moderation-policy.html
3. The notice I received from Substack did not indicate that I was only banned for a month. Initially, I thought it was a lifetime ban, and I canceled my upcoming renewal. It was only days later when I saw in one of your posts that I was banned for a month. It seems like the banishment wording could have been more explicit in the email. I admit I'm reluctant to re-subscribe to your Substack without having my first two questions clarified because I feel like I'm skating on thin ice. I'm on a fixed income now, and I don't want to be banned again for something I wrote a year ago (and have my current $100 go down the tube).
4. Do you want us to report posts that we find rude and offensive? In the past, I've been called the political C-word and I've generally responded with humorous sarcasm. Personally, I don't like to be called a Commie (because I have friends and family who were blacklisted). My banishable moment was when I responded to such an attack with the political N-word. In the future, I'll report anyone who lobs the political C-word at me. But I don't even know if you would consider the political C-word out of bounds.
Thanks for your patience.
--Wulf
>I ask this because the comment that I was banished for was five months old when the banishment was imposed
Scott hadn't checked them for six months. Presumably the statute of limitations will be "wherever Scott left off last time".
I'd prefer for Scott to clarify this.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/02/the-comment-policy-is-victorian-sufi-buddha-lite/
Yes, but that's not Astral Codex. Why would I bother to look on the now-defunct Slatestarcodex for AC10 policies? Posting that policy up here would be useful, though!
Is it true? Is it necessary? Is it kind?
BTW, re: "Sufi Buddha Lite," — historically Islam was a colonizer and suppressor of Buddhism, and some Buddhists might (will) resent being lumped in with the Sufis. ;-)
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/register-of-bans
Yes, it would be helpful if it were easier to find.
Yes. Thanks. I still wonder if there's a statute of limitations, or whether I need to go back and delete any edgy comments over the past couple of years for fear someone will flag them.
California voters: Which senate candidate(s) would you recommend I vote for and why?
Any good resources to help me decide? I would love to read something like https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/my-california-ballot-2022 for this year's elections.
My plan had been to sit out the Senate race, because I would be happy with either of my three current/former congresspeople representing me in the Senate (I've lived in Lee's district, Schiff's, and now Porter's!) But now that it's clear that the runoff will be Schiff vs either Porter or Garvey, I have to think about whether I would rather get Democrats to save their money for other Senate races (i.e., ensure that Garvey makes the runoff rather than Porter) or whether getting a chance of Porter is better than nearly guaranteed Schiff. (My substantive views are probably somewhere between Schiff and Porter, so a 50/50 gamble between them somehow seems more appealing than either one for sure.)
Normally I'd vote for the most centrist/establishment candidate (i.e. Schiff), but this time I voted for Porter because she explicitly put pro-YIMBYism front and center on her website (i.e reforming parking minimums) while Schiff doesn't even mention it under housing policy.
Based on this tweet, I'm voting for Garvey.
https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1761021191186239756
Hello! Those into figuring out best practices in how to eat healthy : what do you think about -
1. saturated fat? Necessary? About how much a day at different stages of life, etc? Doctors (even cardiologists) seem to say you should avoid it. Modern doctors like Dr. Jason Fung seems to say it is essential.
2. Salt? Cardiologists say about 2000 mg a day at the most (a teaspoon is 2400 mg). And, that less is even better. Dr. Fung says it is bad advice. He says there's a confusion about interpreting the data. He thinks they are confusing processed food (which he says is bad for you) that happens to also have high sodium, sometimes due to added salt with salt itself.
IANA nutritionist, but a long-time fitness enthusiast.
1. I think the evidence that high intakes of saturated fat are "bad" is pretty overwhelming; but there are still questions about details like different types of fats and interactions with other foods you're eating. Also btw, my impression from the nutrition community is that Dr. Fung is not really considered a reliable source.
2. My understanding is that the sodium recommendation is based on shaky evidence; it may be good advice for people with poor CV health, but for healthy people, it's probably overly conservative (if not even harmful, as some amount of sodium is essential). As other comments mentioned, keep an eye on your blood pressure and make sure you're getting a healthy amount of potassium.
(disclaimer: generally healthy individual with no known issues relating to diet, eat whatever I want whenever the spirit moves me, if anything a bit on the underweight side - thus I don't approach such topics with the adversarial rigor they deserve, not enough skin in the game)
Doctor who?
The way my family always put it (half cracking-wise, half-serious...I think) was that if sodium was so bad for you, us Chinese and our other East Asian cousins sure should be having a lot more heart attacks, hypertension, etc. than one actually sees in the wild. Obviously that doesn't necessarily generalize - maybe there's variation in digestion, microbiome, bioavailability, or something that effectively allows salty-food-cultures to eat a lot more salt than is typically advised. (Check the sodium RDA equivalent for Japan, it's kind of wild.) But at the very least, it's simple empirical evidence that undermines the simplistic Salt Bad! boogeyman narrative.
(The same argument also applies to refined carbs and white rice, incidentally.)
My understanding of saturated fat is that, as others mention, the primary malus there is raising LDL cholesterol. The large-scale tradeoff of yesteryear, replacing saturated fat with sugar, was almost certainly a poor choice...but reversed stupidity is not intelligence, and although ketogenesis is interesting, I just don't find the "acktually you should add in more saturated fat" arguments generally compelling. Mostly I just don't worry about it. Saturated tends to come bundled with many highly-palatable foods, which indirectly makes it excellent as a seasoning. If I'm much more likely to eat a bowl of collard greens speckled with bacon bits vs. the same bowl tossed in olive oil, well, that's Worth It. It's like the MSG of fats, a little goes a long way. I'd be surprised if it was "essential" in some capacity. However, it seems quite plausible that trying to overcorrect and cut fat (saturated or otherwise) out of one's diet could lead to a worse equilibrium overall. Really depends what the substitute is. There are *probably* some gains from shifting fats on the margin, e.g. cooking with olive oil vs. butter, but I'm not well-versed enough to quantify that.
Yeah as long as you don't eat too much, eat whatever you want. I cook different things for Sunday morning breakfast, but the one (almost) constant is bacon. Hashbrowns taste best to me fried in bacon fat. For French toast or pancakes I like butter better.
I have a strong and (justified, I think) bias against any dietary advice which comes in the form "Doctor so-and-so says this".
Dietetics is a sufficiently fuzzy field that it's easy to sell books by hypothesising something vaguely contrarian ("saturated fat good actually") and finding a bunch of studies that support it.
For salt, I would suggest taking a look at https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33351135/
Possibly I am a sucker for these kinds of big all-cause-mortality studies, but even though there are all kinds of problems with confounding when you just look at entire populations, my feeling is that it helps give a big picture view of things. You can also set a kind of vague upper bound on how bad something could possibly be. For example, in the above study, acm falls with sodium consumption up to about 4g/day and is pretty flat thereafter even up to 6g/day. Maybe there's some SES/sodium correlation confounding the whole thing and it's still bad for you? Well... even if so, it clearly can't be *especially* bad.
Also, it seems likely that it is not so much high sodium that causes problems (though too much of anything can kill you), but a high sodium to potassium ratio. On this point see https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/1106080#
Various vegetables, fruits, potatoes etc. have a fair bit of potassium, so it's not difficult to maintain a healthy ratio even if you eat 4g of sodium per day.
And you can buy potassium salt. Tastes the same to me
With regard to salt, remember that it's a food preservative, which means its presence kills things that would grow on food. If a little kills a little, a lot will kill a big.
If your choice was eating unpreserved food or eating food preserved with salt, then sure, go with the salt for this reason. But what if your choice is food preserved with salt vs food preserved with potassium phosphate vs fresh food vs frozen food? Presumably your reasoning doesn't tell you that it's better to freeze and salt your fresh food before eating it!
Every word you wrote is true. But the way salt as a preservative is basically
https://www.cargill.com/salt-in-perspective/function-of-salt-in-food
>Salt acts as a preservative by altering the availability of water in foods, thereby depriving microbes from using available water as a nutrient. The growth of pathogens and spoilage organisms is impeded when salt is present.
Just to put an extremely crude order of magnitude idea of how much salt is needed to do this to a human, neutral saline is about 0.5% salt, so for a 100 kg person, there is around 500 grams of salt present. To perturb this by even 10% would need 50 grams of salt. There _are_ worries about too much sodium in the diet, but they are from subtler effects than the osmotic dehydration that lets salt act as a preservative.
edit: 100 grams of sodium (not counting the chloride) in a 70 kg body (John Emsley's "Nature's Building Blocks: An A-Z Guide to the Elements")
Lipid profiles don't usually lean 100% SFA, PUFA or MUFA as sources of fatty acids go. Some nuts will have more saturated fat than others, coconut is made up of medium-chain triglycerides rather than long-chain as animal sources have, etc. If you're consuming fat even from plant sources, you're (probably) getting some SFA, just in smaller amounts. Reportedly even medium chain trilgycerides will raise total cholsterol, but less than long-chain.
Anyway. My simple way to approach it is I get approx 20% macros as fat, use olive oil for cooking predominantly (it's stable, doesn't oxidize easily, lots of antioxidants, smoke point doesn't matter), and consume nuts, fish (sardines) for DHA/EPA, and avocado. Occasionally I will have nice cheese and yogurt, but not as a requirement. This seems to be in line with the Mediterranean diet, indo-mediterranean diet, and Japanese diet (almost). Broadly speaking research tends to shine a good light on it.
2. I don't go crazy on salt, or very low, but I think the key thing is to consume enough potassium. Apparently the sodium:potassium ratio is important, and as you can imagine a pitfall of the americanized junk-food diet is insufficient potassium intake and too much salt.
It's difficult to optimize more than this with confidence. I like to just stay in the right area and quibble most on what I am confident improves health outcomes. For instance, I will consume legumes regularly. I'll also have whole grains, but not a crazy amount. Good proportion of vegetables and some fruit.
I try to eat healthy and I exercise a lot, but I was always stuck at a certain weight until I consciously tried to avoid foods high in saturated fat. In a matter of months I dropped ten pounds. I have no idea if it is all types of saturated fats, or just a critical segment of them, but it made a huge and immediate difference to me. It may just be that saturated fat foods like pie and cookies and ice cream and lasagna and hot dogs are so loaded with calories, that avoiding them just allowed me to eat less. I have tried to replace it with foods high in fiber and protein.
My overall take on the matter is that everyone needs to try changing their diet and seeing what works for them. I have no issue with salt, but don’t tend to ever add it either.
Swami, The foods you list as being high in saturated fats are also very high in processed carbs.
Great point.
I am not a doctor. In fact, I'm fairly bad at biology but I will give me understanding anyways because I like salt. My primary care doctor said this was right, so at least one doctor out there seems to believe this.
If your sodium levels are too high, your body fixes this automatically by retaining more water in your bloodstream. Osmosis happens and what-not. This keeps your overall salinity level where it should be, but raises your blood pressure. If your blood pressure is fine, you can continue to put as much salt as you want on your food.
If you cook, getting the right amount of salt in a dish is one key to making it tasty. (see Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. my favorite cookbook.)
Question to those who are familiar with minoxidil(/+finasteride), I find the following puzzling. A typical 5% minoxidil has in its instructions, "Don't use more than 1ml twice a day, because it won't help". But the *same* company sells a costlier 10% minoxidil, to again be used at 1ml twice a day. How is this consistent: wouldn't whatever makes the extra volume useless also make the extra concentration useless?
It's possible that the issue is in the inactive ingredients, not the active ones. The formulations that I've used came in a liquid and a foam respectively, and their strong scents made me suspect they were in a solvent that's more volatile than water (and probably has some effect of opening your pores). Using this too many times a day is probably not great for your skin or hair, which is an important factor in a treatment for what's fundamentally a cosmetic condition.
Though, more likely than not, they probably just got FDA approval for use "once a day" and slapped the standard warning of "use exactly as approved" - so when some idiot tries using it once an hour, 12 times a day, they're not liable. (Because as ChubbyEmu[1] has taught me, some idiot *will* try that)
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/@chubbyemu/videos
Thank you, that explanation makes a lot of sense, and I hadn't thought of the "inactive ingredients" angle at all. But it confuses me that what the product has is less of a warning than "If you use more, there won't be any efficacy".
I’m curious about vibecamp and would love an invite code. I’m happy to do a 1-1 video call to prove my worth.
I'm about to solve the Sleeping Beauty Paradox. Here I'm exploring issues in the popular attempts to model the problem in the philosophical literature.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SjoPCwmNKtFvQ3f2J/lessons-from-failed-attempts-to-model-sleeping-beauty
I don’t understand your objection to Elga’s solution. In particular you say that it implies p(heads)=1/3, but I don’t see how. I would say that it implies p(heads|awake)=1/3, or equivalently that p(heads|omega)=1/3, but that is quite a different statement.
What about the same experiment except upon heads you’re not woken up at all? In this case it seems you would object that Elga’s reasoning claims p(Heads)=0. But I think if you go through the logic, that’s clearly not what the paper claims.
Well, Elga himself states that the Beauty doesn't get new information on the awakening so if P(Heads|Awake) = 1/3 then P(Heads) also has to be 1/3. You can, of course, claim that this model only represent awakening states and unconditional probabilities are different, but then you have to be able to justify a Bayesian update.
This is what Updating model attempts to do, and what I explore later in the post.
I also think you’re wrong that the elimination argument applies to the single-awakening problem. To do this you’d need to add another coin that determines which day the Beauty gets woken up when the first coin is tails. If you add that in, then the elimination argument should give you the correct probabilities.
Okay, a more clear example. Elimination argument works like that: four outcomes are equiprobable, the awakening I'm now experiencing couldn't happen on Heads&Tuesday, so I have to reason that the three remaining outcomes are equiprobable.
Now consider an alternative problem. On Monday a ball is put into a box. Then, if the coin is Tails, on Tuesday another ball is put there. After this is done you are given a random ball from the box. According to elimination argument: the ball you've just got couldn't be put in the box on Heads&Tuesday, so you have to reason that with 2/3 probability there is another ball in the box. Which is false.
I haven't commented on these because I don't understand what the problem is. I can't seem to follow the logic in a way that describes anything I can make sense of. I don't think this is your fault, and I don't expect you personally to enlighten me, but I'm responding here in hopes that someone can clarify for me why people are thinking so much about this.
----
Isn't this just a matter of separating our "knowledge" of the objective world, from our subjective experiences? If someone flips a coin and kills me on heads, if I'm alive afterwards then I'm 100% going to be in a world where the coin came up tails.
I don't see the difference between that, and saying "Based on my knowledge of the experimental protocol, I've got a 2/3rds chance of being in a world where the coin came up tails" during the wakenings, and then going back to "I'm equally likely to be in either world" after the experiment is over.
(I think it might be possible to work out a theory of mind in which the memory wipesare creating new people, and thus there will literally be more people experiencing tails than heads. Compare to spinning up 1 copy of MMAcevedo on heads, and 2 copies on tails. https://qntm.org/mmacevedo )
Here's a variant: The subject is told that they'll be only woken once for heads and twice for tails, but even though the coin is fair, actually they'll be woken 200 times for tails. And each time they're woken up, they write something on a scrap of paper, which is taken away and marked with "heads" or "tails". They think the coin is fair, they think they've got a 2/3rds chance of being in the tails-world, but the multiversal scrying machine can see 201 slips of paper, 200 of which say "tails", contained in just two universes.
Next variant, same as before, except that when you're woken up you have to make a $1 bet on whether you're in heads-world, but you get to pick the odds before the experiment starts. If you bet $1 at 1:1 odds, in heads-world you win $1 and in tails-world you just lost $200. But if you bet at 1:2 odds, you can cut your loss by 1/2, implying that it's less wrong. And if some helpful lab assistant betrayed the experiment and told you beforehand that you'd be awakened 200 times on tails, you could bet at 1:200 odds and break even across both worlds. (And of course, if you were only awoken 2 times but a malicious lab assistant told you 200, you'd lose money in the other direction.)
(The lab makes money by running this experiment on a lot of people, using different coin flips for each person. So for them, this isn't a thought experiment, this is real money, backed up by insurance, securitized and traded on the stock exchange, used as the basis for several cryptocurrencies, which in turn are used by a handful of charter cities and small countries. The lab assistant is a financial terrorist.)
> Isn't this just a matter of separating our "knowledge" of the objective world, from our subjective experiences?
It's more trickier than that. Map/territory relation is definetely part of the problem, but everyone seem to understand that and still can't arrive to an agreement.
> If someone flips a coin and kills me on heads, if I'm alive afterwards then I'm 100% going to be in a world where the coin came up tails.
Well, yes, because your survival is an evidence that the coin is Tails. You couldn't be sure that you would survive and now you know that you did, so you lawfully update. But in Sleeping Beauty you are completely sure that you will be awaken so you can't lawfully update when you awake. Thus the paradox.
> Here's a variant
If the participant is lied to about the procedure of the experiment, the situation is quite different. Then it's understandable where does the disconnection between the map and the territory come from. But the whole point is that the participant was told the truth about the awakening routine, the participant knew everything about the number of awakenings and about the memory erasure, so why the separation between one and the other?
> make a $1 bet
I'll talk more about betting arguments in a future post, but the core thing is that they are very much not helpful in this case. From my comment on LW:
Halfer scoring rule counts per experiment, while thirder per awakening, but regardless of the bet proposed they produce correct betting scores (unless we are talking about halfers who subscribe to Lewis' model which is just wrong).
If there is only one bet per experiment a thirder would think that while probability of Tails is twice as large as Heads, it is compensated by the utilities of bets: only one of the Tails outcome is rewarded, not both. So they use equal betting odds, just as a halfer, who would think that both probability and utility are completely fair.
Likewise, if there is a bet on every awakening, halfer will think that while the probabilities of Heads and Tails are the same, Tails outcome is rewarded twice as much, so they will have betting odds favouring Tails, just as a thirder, for whom utilities are fair but probability is in favour of Tails.
Betting just adds another variable to the problem, it doesn't make the existent variables more preciese.
> But if you bet at 1:2 odds, you can cut your loss by 1/2, implying that it's less wrong.
Unless, of course you got also lied about which outcome of the coin toss leads to more awakenings - then you will only increase your loses by betting at 1:2 odds.
> If there is only one bet per experiment a thirder would think that while probability of Tails is twice as large as Heads, it is compensated by the utilities of bets: only one of the Tails outcome is rewarded, not both. So they use equal betting odds, just as a halfer, who would think that both probability and utility are completely fair.
I don't understand what any of this means.
If the bet is at 1:2 odds, in heads-world there's one round of betting where I gain $2, and in tails-world there's two rounds of betting in which I lose $1 each. If we only run the experiment one time, it won't matter much. But it does matter very much to anyone who repeats the experiment many times. If we do this experiment repeatedly, with different fair coin tosses each time, we'll both (on average) break even with 1:2 odds, but any other odds will lead to one of us winning money from the other.
In particular, the lab running the experiment knows exactly how many times I awaken, and can set the odds appropriately. They never lose consciousness, they never have their mind wiped, they are present for the whole experiment. They can see that I'll take the bet 1 time in heads-world and 2 times in tails-world. If they use some odds other than 1:2, then they will on average gain or lose money, depending on which direction they shift the odds.
There are two possible betting rules. One where you bet once per experiment and one where you bet once per awakening. For once per awakening bet the correct odds are indeed 1:2 - this is the case you are talking about. But for once per experiment they are 1:1.
In once per experiment betting rule there is one round of betting either way, regardless of the number of awakenings. It can be designed as if a bet is proposed every time you are awakend but only the one on the last awakening really counts. We count the number of worlds, not the number of slips of paper.
These two betting rules represent two facts about the Sleeping Beauty experiment. Per awakening betting rule represent that only 1/3 of randomly selected awakenings among multiple iteration of experiment happens when the coin is Heads. Per experiment betting rule represent that in 1/2 of randomly selected iterations of experiment your awakening is happening when the coin is Heads.
I completely agree; I think I just posted the same thing as a response to another of your comments. :-) But then, that takes us back to my confusion about what the problem is... This sounds like what you described as the "Thirder" position?
As I said, both Thirders and Double Halfers can arrive to these conclusions:
Thirders: 1/2->1/3->1/2
Double Halfers: 1/2->1/2->1/2
The difference is that Thirders now need to justify how they switch from initial 1/2 probability that the coin will be Heads on Sunday before they are put to sleep, to 1/3 on awakening despite getting no new evidence. And Double Halfers need to justify why they do not change their estimate when told that it's Monday
Fun, I'll check this out tomorrow. I wrote up an update for SB problem a while back and posted it in a hidden open thread, let me know if you can't see it and I can repost here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-1805/comments#comment-2394607
No, I can't see it. Would appreciate if you repost it here.
It's a multi-messge thread, was long:
A previous thread got me thinking about the [sleeping beauty](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleeping_Beauty_problem) problem. I puzzled around a solution and don't really have anywhere to put it, so figured I'd put it here.
The problem immediately reminds me of the [Monte Hall](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem) problem -- not just the problem itself, but also the 'mild cultural scarring' of so many people getting it so wrong for so long (eg. see [the wiki subsection](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem#Simple_solutions) on the many PhDs who publicly demonstrated that they couldn't solve the problem).
So I'm primed for a non-obvious answer, especially an answer where the right percentages are 1/3, 2/3, as indicated by the first wikipedia solution entry.
However there is a big difference between the Monte Hall problem and the Sleeping Beauty: information destruction.
The Monte Hall solution relies on the fact that you gain information through the door-opening process.
In the sleeping beauty problem, the explicit assumption is that you *don't* gain any information; or rather any information gained is explicitly discarded.
If this was a Bayesian update, the destruction/discarding of information is likely most easily represented as simply resetting your prior to the original prior, each time SB awakens -- effectively SB should always makes only one update.
However the structure of the problem as stated on wikipedia means SB doesn't even have enough information to make a *single* informative update, as we'll see below.
So let's do the Bayesian updates.
To "warm up" let's first write out the Monte Hall problem, solved via Bayesian update...
(1)
To "warm up" let's first write out the Monte Hall problem, solved via Bayesian update:
Hypotheses, and priors:
A: car is behind door A, 1/3
B: car is behind door B, 1/3
C: car is behind door C, 1/3
Data:
- First let's enumerate the states of the world; ordering is (player choice, monte hall choice):
(A,B), (A,C), (B,A), (B,C), (C,A), (C,B)
So for example (A,B) means the player chooses door A, Monte Hall chooses door B, and it is the palyers turn to decide whether to stay with A or switch to C.
Build the likelihoods:
P( (A,B) | A) = 0.5
P( (A,C) | A) = 0.5
P( (B,A) | A) = 0
P( (B,C) | A) = 1
P( (C,A) | A) = 0
P( (C,B) | A) = 1
P( (A,B) | B) = 0
P( (A,C) | B) = 1
P( (B,A) | B) = 0.5
P( (B,C) | B) = 0.5
P( (C,A) | B) = 1
P( (C,B) | B) = 0
P( (A,B) | C) = 1
P( (A,C) | C) = 0
P( (B,A) | C) = 1
P( (B,C) | C) = 0
P( (C,A) | C) = 0.5
P( (C,B) | C) = 0.5
Now the update. wlog select any of the data points: (A,B)
P(A | (A,B)) = (1/2)/( (1/2)*(1/3) + (0)*(1/3) + (1)*(1/3))*(1/3)
P(B | (A,B)) = 0/( (1/2)*(1/3) + (0)*(1/3) + (1)*(1/3))*(1/3)
P(C | (A,B)) = 1/( (1/2)*(1/3) + (0)*(1/3) + (1)*(1/3))*(1/3)
->
P(A | (A,B)) = 0.33
P(B | (A,B)) = 0
P(C | (A,B)) = 0.67
So the player chose A, MH revealed B, the posteriors are (A,B,C) = (0.33, 0, 0.67). This represents the classic solution -- the player should switch from A to C if maximizing prob of winning the game.
Cool. Now on to SB...
(2)
Cool. Now on to SB...
Now let's write up the same update for the sleeping beauty (SB) problem:
Hypotheses:
H: heads (SB awoken Mon only)
T: tails (SB awoken Mon & Tue)
Data:
- states of the world:
- Mon: awake on Monday
- Tue: awake on Tuesday
Likelihoods:
P(Mon | H) = 1
P(Tue | H) = 0
P(Mon | T) = 0.5
P(Tue | T) = 0.5
The update if it could be autonomously run (eg. SB could push a button to update the prior):
Mon:
P(H | Mon) = 1/(1*.5 + .5*.5)*0.5 = 0.67
P(T | Mon) = 0.5/(1*.5 + .5*.5)*0.5 = 0.33
Tue, with and without resetting the prior:
P(H | Tue) = 0/(0*.67 + .5*.33)*0.67 = 0 # inherit prior from the previous day
P(T | Tue) = 0.5/(0*.67 + .5*.33)*0.33 = 1
P(H | Tue) = 0/(0*.5 + .5*.5)*0.5 = 0 # don't inherit prior from previous day
P(T | Tue) = 0.5/(0*.5 + .5*.5)*0.5 = 1 # and use original prior
So in the version of SB where SB is told the day at each awakening, SB's posteriors are:
Mon: H,T -> 0.67, 0.33
Tue: H,T -> 0, 1 -- regardless of whether the priors are reset. Knowing that it is Tuesday completely identifies the coin flip.
However the above doesn't represent SB's information. SB isn't told the day of the week, so SB's state space is not as informative as (Mon, Tue), i.e. two states. Instead SB only has one state: awake.
Thus the likelihood for this reduced state space is:
P(awake | H) = 1
P(!awake | H) = 0
P(awake | T) = 1
P(!awake | T) = 0
That is, the state is completely uninformative to SB, as 'being awake' will always occur under each hypothesis.
For completeness the Bayesian update would look like:
Mon:
p(H | awake) = p(awake | H) / p(awake) *p(H)
= 1/(1*0.5 + 1*0.5)*0.5
= 0.5
p(T | awake) = p(awake | T) / p(awake) *p(T)
= 1/(1*0.5 + 1*0.5)*0.5
= 0.5
Tue: same as above for both resetting and not resetting priors.
Thus SB's posteriors under the proposed setup will be simply her priors. Note that she can of course have different priors than 0.5, 0.5; just to show that priors\==posteriors under 'information destruction", let's say SB's priors were:
H: 0.75
T: 0.25
Then we'd have:
Mon:
p(H | awake) = p(awake | H) / p(awake) *p(H)
= 1/(1*0.75 + 1*0.25)*0.75
= 0.75
p(T | awake) = p(awake | T) / p(awake) *p(T)
= 1/(1*0.75 + 1*0.25)*0.25
= 0.25
Tue: same as above for both resetting and not resetting priors.
In this world under the information structure, SBs posteriors equal her priors at the moment of interview each day.
So essentially, SB only every has her priors.
Thanks. I agree with you conclusion that SB only can reason via priors. But you are using an incorrect model to arrive to it. Namely, you are using the model of David Lewis, which is demonstrably wrong.
Consider the claim that if Beauty was told that it is Monday she should update in favor of Heads. But Monday awakening always happen in the experiment, so it also can't give new information. We can even first awaken the Beauty and only then throw a coin. Update in favour of Heads would mean that Beauty has precognitive powers.
No offense intended, but can you explain the Sleeping Beauty problem without using mathematical operators? I've never heard of it, and I'm afraid your blog post is a bit too daunting for me to read and decode.
Here's a relatively standard formulation of the Sleeping Beauty problem. (I haven't clicked through to see what Ape in the coat said.)
On Sunday, you are told that you will be in a demonstration that lasts through Monday and Tuesday. After you go to sleep tonight, we will flip a fair coin. If it comes up heads, we will wake you on Monday and talk to you, and then after you go to sleep, give you drugs to sleep all the way through Tuesday. If it comes up tails, we will wake you on Monday and talk to you, and then after you go to sleep, give you drugs to erase your memories of Monday, and then wake you on Tuesday and talk to you.
You have now been woken up in the experiment. The conversation is just beginning, and you don't know whether it's Monday or Tuesday (because you knew in advance that either way, you wouldn't have memories of anything since Sunday), and whether the coin came up heads or tails. Should your confidence that the coin came up heads be 1/2, or 1/3, or something else?
The argument for 1/2 is that you didn't learn anything when you woke up, so your prior probability of 1/2 should remain unchanged.
The argument for 1/3 is something like the following - it doesn't seem to matter whether the coin flip is done Sunday night or Monday night, since it doesn't affect anything that happens until Monday night; so if it's Monday, then if the conversation reveals that it's Monday, your probability of heads should be 1/2; but your probability that it's Monday conditional on tails should be the same as your probability that it's Tuesday conditional on tails; so each of the three possibilities (Monday Heads, Monday Tails, Tuesday Tails) should all be equal, and thus 1/3.
Most people who write about this problem lean towards 1/3, but some argue that it should be 1/2, and that updating probabilities works differently when you're just learning facts about what time it is, rather than facts about which world is actual.
Nice summary, thank you.
In terms of probability estimates that the coin is Heads 1) on Monday before it is known that it's Monday and 2) after it's revealed that it's Monday, there are two popular approaches:
Thirdism: 1/3->1/2
Lewisian Halfism: 1/2->2/3
Both of them are wrong. But, after some minor analysis, Lewisian Halfism seems more obviously wrong than Thirdism. And most of the discussion happens to be focused on this fact.
There is also Double Halfism: 1/2->1/2
But there is little discussion about it because people lack propper justification for it.
In my post I draw a distinction between Updateless and Updating Thirdism - the former - the one justified by the argument that you've written in your comment - implicitly believes that there is no fair coin toss to begin with, while the latter tries to come with some justification why the update between Sunday and Monday has to happen.
I show that Lewisian Halfism and both kind of Thirdism are actually not applicable to the Sleeping Beauty problem and happen to be modelling something else. And I build ground for the correct model and its justifications, which will be revealed in the next post but, frankly, shouldn't be that hard to guess already.
I think I'm starting to see what you're talking about. As with the Monty Hall problem, I think this can be clarified by changing the number from 2 awakenings in tails-world, to 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (10e30) awakenings in tails-world. So in tails-world, there would be 1 awakening on Monday, and 999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999,999 awakenings on Tuesday. (Somehow. Maybe it's a very long Tuesday.)
If I'm woken up, and not told anything, I think the odds of me being in heads-world are 1:10e30. That is, there's only a tiny chance I'm in heads-world, and I'm almost certainly in tails-world. If there's a bet that I can make every time I'm awakened, it should be at 1:10e30 odds.
But if I'm woken up, and then told that this is Monday and the first time I've been woken up, and I believe this... My gut reaction is to say that the odds are 1:1, that I've got a 50% chance of being in heads-world. If there were a special bet that I could only make on that first awakening on Monday, it should be at 1:1 odds.
I suppose that makes me a Thirder?
Yep, that's thirder reasoning.
> As with the Monty Hall problem, I think this can be clarified by changing the number
Funny enough both halfers and thirders think that Monty Hall analogy works for their side.
> But if I'm woken up, and then told that this is Monday and the first time I've been woken up, and I believe this...
Would you believe it, though? When awoken you claim to be extremely confident that it's not Monday, so it should require A LOT of evidence to persuade you that it is and thus shift your estimate for Heads from 1:10e30 to 1:1. Doesn't it feel weird at all? That you are so surprised that Monday awakening, something that is GUARANTEED to happen in the experiment, indeed happened?
Suppose that instead of a fair coin there is a more general random number generator and there is only one in a million chance to have 10e30 awakenings and in all the other outcomes, you have one awakening. Would you still be extremely confident when awoken in such experiment that you are in the world with 10e30 awakenings?
> My gut reaction is to say that the odds are 1:1, that I've got a 50% chance of being in heads-world. If there were a special bet that I could only make on that first awakening on Monday, it should be at 1:1 odds.
Completely agree here.
> Would you believe it, though?
I wouldn't say I "believe it", really. It could happen, and for the purposes of the experiment I can go along with what the experimenters say. I've got no real way of knowing where I am in the sequence. I have no way of knowing whether they tell me every time that it will be Monday, or never tell me that it will be Monday, or flip more coins to decide whether to tell me, or anything like that. But assuming I trust them, then like you say, I know that Monday will happen. I go to sleep prepared for 2 scenarios, Monday and Tuesday, and when I wake up one of the scenarios happens, and I react accordingly. In that sense, it's actually less surprising than rolling a natural 20 when playing D&D. Maybe that's the psychological trick for me - there are very few options, so it's easy to hold them in mind? It seems similar to filling out answers on a standardized test, where the questions have no connection to reality, but I can still consider them abstractly and find the correct answer.
If we're talking about actual "belief", it partly depends on how much I trust the experimenters, and how much I'll be able to verify what they say afterwards, and how easy it will be for me to punish them for lying to me, and various considerations of that sort.
And yes, running the numbers, I think if there were 10e6 worlds where I was awoken one time and one world where I was awoken 10e30 times, I'd still assume that I was in the one world with 10e30 awakenings. It doesn't feel weird to me at all. I wouldn't say I'm "confident" in an intuitive sense, but it's like solving a math problem that's at the limit of my ability - I think I have the right answer, but it's not instantly obvious to me why it must be the right answer. In the same way, if I wake up, my intuitions no longer function to guide me, but I can use math to work out what the odds are. Certainly, if the experimenters do this experiment a lot, they're going to spend a lot more time on that one-in-a-million chance.
Perhaps I misunderstand you: what does the sleeping through Tuesday part of it do? I don't see how it affects anything.
The sleeping through Tuesday part means that you know there are only *three* possibilities - Monday Heads, Monday Tails, Tuesday Tails, because you won't wake up on Tuesday Heads. The memory erasure part is to ensure that you can't tell the difference between Monday Tails and Tuesday Tails.
Ah, I see. Thanks for the explanation.
Interesting! I'd tend to lean towards 1/2 — just because the coin flip is independent of any contingent events that happen post-flip. Whether I wake up Monday or Tuesday wouldn't affect the odds of the coin flip. But I admit my odds of guessing the correct answer could be 1/3 (I'd have to think about it some more, though).
But from the point of view of a repeated participant, 1/3 of wakings will be heads wakings and 2/3 of wakings will be tails wakings. If they consistently bet on heads at 50-50 odds, then they will lose money over time.
Frequencies don’t answer the question because there’s one frequency that is 1/2 and another that is 1/3, and this is a question about Bayesian probability instead.
In the caste system in India, as originally practiced (or so the traditional doctrines hold), sure the upper layers were quite privileged, but there was a catch: the higher you were in the hierarchy, the more restrictions were placed on you. To give an example, a Brahmin, someone at the very top, is supposed to take a bath after each defecation, and this is just one of many restrictions. Conversely, being at the bottom means you do the manual labor, but you don't have any restrictions like that and can indulge in all sort of vices. So it worked (or so I've been told), because the Shudras, the bottom caste, would look at the top and see that the people there really were of a superior nature to them.
Now, this is not about defending the caste system, but about revisiting this idea that the more you climb in society, the more restricted your life becomes. We should totally do this I think. Past some threshold of wealth (TBD) maybe it could be something like you have to put in 200 hours of volunteer work each year, maybe 100 of community service and 100 of working the land. I think this would give a dose of reality to the sheltered upper classes and remind them of how the society they live in actually works. Certainly, doing volunteer work with the homeless has had that effect on me, and this might be a way to harness populism to good ends, as it is a rather populistic measure.
We used to have something along the lines of this in the west too (noblesse oblige). But it's a tradition that is passed down through families, and the tradition has faded as new money has displaced old money; the vast majority of money these days is new money which doesn't understand that you're not supposed to actually be _seen_ enjoying your wealth, you're supposed to be seen labouring under its obligations, so that nobody has to feel bad.
I worry that we've lost the ability to investigate the extent to which this was ever a real thing. :-(
That used to be the idea of fagging in British public schools. For the benefit of US readers, who might find this misleading, public schools are actually private schools, and fagging is the idea that junior pupils should perform menial (non-sexual one hopes! :-) tasks for senior pupils, such as running errands, polishing shoes, or making toast. So a duke's son could be fagging for a coal merchant's son, and that would give the former some notion of what service entailed and the latter would gain experience in leadership and giving orders.
Re the caste system, I read somewhere that it started out as mostly a health precaution, when Indo-European (Aryan) invaders of India, from c 2000 BC or thereabouts, found they had limited resistance to diseases which the indigenous population took in their stride through long accustomization.
Isn't that basically just hazing? Hazing serves lots of purposes, but making aristocrats know what service is like is not the main one.
No it isn't, assuming hazing refers to some ritual intended to humiliate or abuse an initiate.
> Re the caste system, I read somewhere that it started out as mostly a health precaution
How do you think your source would have established this?
It was many years ago, possibly a New Scientist article. They may have been just reporting some anthropologist's suggestion, rather than claiming it was generally accepted gospel truth. It's quite reasonable for them to do this, even for expert suggestions lacking firm evidence and that one never hears more about again!
> It's quite reasonable for them to do this, even for expert suggestions lacking firm evidence
But in that case, it becomes completely unreasonable for you to report it in the terms you did, as if it were a fact.
I am skeptical that that source, or any other, could establish anything about the origins of caste. I would even caution against assuming that it started with the Indo-European invasions; one really doesn't know much. Another point is that the question is not even really well-defined: one needs to specify whether one is talking of caste as in "varna" or caste as in "jati"; I find it a scandal that these disparate notions are always conflated.
I think modern America does this already with nonsense like 'white privilege'. Successful elites have to kowtow to the notion that their success is totally because of luck and privilege and that those are unjustly denied to underrepresented minorities.
George Orwell's 1984 has Winston concluding that the proles were the least deluded by ideology and the Inner Party the most so. "If there is hope [...] it lies in the proles".
"Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm really awfully glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas."
Well, we're already there but worse, as society is stratified, but those at the top aren't really that different from the lower tiers, they just get to enjoy themselves a lot more. Being at the top really should be something that comes with a sacrifice. Of course, there could be a society where there is no top and no bottom, but that seems like a pipe dream, given all of human history.
I've not studied this bit absorbed this growing up.
Brahmins were not allowed to accumulate wealth or own land. Their job was (like academics) to acquire knowledge (in ancient India that was the study of the vedas and in support of that they made advancements in math, astronomy etc) and disseminate it. They had to go door to door to beg to eat food. It was the duty of others to not turn them away when they begged for food.
Over time, Brahmin culture involved teaching your children to read and write very early. People of this caste were typically poor until the British came. The Brits needed local people who could read and write and maintain accounts of who had paid taxes. And be bureaucrats. This was when they started rising in wealth (creating jealousy, conflicts). Even today, Brahmins who pursue business or other directly money-making activities face some disapproval from elders. It feels like an activity that is not quite something you're supposed to do.
Speaking of status - the Gods that Brahmins pray to are mostly not Brahmin. Most are Kshatriyas (warrior caste).
Modern academia feels at least a little bit like that. At the top, you're supposed to be extremely dedicated to your research, and additionally spend a bunch of time on activities that don't benefit you directly (academic service such as organizing conferences and editing journals, but also things like traveling to visit other research groups and holding extensive 1 on 1 meetings with the phd students there. On top of that there's teaching, for which most academics are technically overqualified and didactically underqualified.
Similar things exist in other fields, e.g., pro-bono work by lawyers. I don't have direct experience there, but it seems to be somewhat required, maybe even formally mediated by their professional organizations?
In ancient India, pursuit of money/land and pursuit of wealth, were supposed to be kept independent. There was something like that, although I'm not an expert. Brahmins were monimaniacally devoted to studying one question : understanding the nature of thought/consciousness. According to Roberto Calasso, they didn't care about anything else. Others gave them food. They were not into material possessions.
In modern India nobody cares too much about this anymore.
What is the significance of the different gods?
Hindus believe that god is above concepts such as number (or gender for that matter). One god is same as infinite gods.
Practically, different people have different preferences about the personality of the god they worship. There are also the Carvaka who don't believe in god or the supremacy of the vedas, and pursue hedonism.
The vedas (Upanishads, to be exact) also say "You are that". There is no two. This is called Advaita or "non-duality". Every entity, whether living or non-living (or virtual like this page) is one with "universal consciousness". There is only one TYPE of thing. God is not mentioned once in the Upanishads.
None of that quite means they weren't in charge.
That sounds like progressive taxation with extra steps? The highest your income, the larger share of it you pay to the commons?
Yeah, except it's more real. Money is just so abstract. I mean, I give 10% of my income to charity, but that's basically invisible to me. The volunteer work I do with the homeless though, that really clarifies things.
Potentially. I think this is ultimately an empirical question: we should try it and see what happens.
Based on my (limited) understanding of history, there was a time when only the aristocracy could afford advanced metal weaponry or were trained to use it, so they were the ones responsible for going to war. It sounds like such a more just way to structure society to me. You get the rewards of wealth but you have to be willing to pay for it, potentially with your life rather than just money. Once being a soldier became just another occupation, now rich people only have to pay poor people to go and die. They still get to enjoy the privileges of a hierarchical society without having to sacrifice anything of real value.
It gets muddled depending on which period & region you're looking at. Two obvious, opposing examples are (1) the Marian reforms which opened up the lucrative field of looting conquered barbarian settlements to the capita censi, and (2) a suit of full plate armor, affordable only by feudal lords, that made a mounted knight the pre-gunpowder equivalent of a main battle tank.
It was kinda like that in the caste system, since the second tier, the kshatriya caste, were the warriors and kings. So they get to enjoy wealth, power, honor, but they have to be willing to put their lives on the line.
So the restrictions on the Brahmin class were necessary to prevent the warrior caste from realising "Hang on, we've got all the weapons, how about we're the highest caste now?"
The warriors already had the things that you can seize with violence: wealth and political power. And I suspect that those were the things they really wanted.
Interesting, I never knew this about the caste system, I always assumed Brahmins were on top in every sense.
Maybe that's because they got more on-top during the British Raj when the power of the warrior class got sidelined by the power of the guys in red pyjamas? Or maybe it's just because Brahmins are vastly overrepresented in the Indians that we get in the West?
It seems safe to assume that Kshatriyas are also vastly overrepresented in the West. Vaishyas obviously are.
Heavy selection against a large pool of low performers means that everyone who isn't them can be vastly overrepresented.
An interesting thought, though I think you're mixing up a couple things and underestimating the degree to which some of this is already done.
Would a minimum-wage waiter see a millionaire doing their yearly required service hours and think 'wow, this person has such great moral fibre and is thus more deserving of their wealth and status?' I don't think so, it would probably be clear that they're just complying with the legal/social norms of their class. This would have other benefits (putting the upper classes in closer contact with the lower is a big plus), but not the same claimed effect as the caste system's restrictions. It's more like Scott's proposal for a modern liturgy.
I think this is partly because these aren't really restrictions on the wealthy, just more obligations, and extra obligations aren't much of an incentive against getting more power/wealth/status. If, beyond a certain income/net worth, you had to forswear drugs/alcohol, or tasty food/meat, or sex other than for the purposes of procreation, or you had to maintain certain standards of contemporary purity, those would be very strong incentives against greater wealth/status, and the people who were willing to accept them probably would be people with more self-control and certain other virtues. Maybe you would wind up with people making lots of money, but giving away a quantity beyond which they would enter an undesirable set of restrictions, a de facto earnings cap.
But parts of this are kinda-sorta already the case. Among the old rich/upper class, though not really the new rich, both certain standards of cultural purity (etiquette, maintaining a public image) and public donations at least in part for the sake of looking good (patronizing the arts, supporting schools, photoshoots with the mayor next to a big new building with your name on it) are pretty standard. It's not formally institutionalized like you're proposing, but the seeds are there.
Posting one more time, because I got zero responses in the last open thread, and I think it must exist by now.
Do any of the new image generators / alterers allow you to upload pictures of yourself or another person at different ages, and have it adjust different-age pictures to a requested age?
Like you have a picture of your grandma at age 20 and age 90, can it impute a picture of her at age 50?
Or a picture of yourself ten years ago vs today - can you age the younger picture to you today, keeping the background and setting?
Yeah I found several a while ago by just by googling.
Just search for "morphing faces together" and you will find lots of results. Morphing is not new, that could already be done before all the modern AI apps came out, and it's probably easier to do without AI image generators.
Ah, thanks - I guess I was using the wrong search terms or something, but you're right "morphing" seems to do the trick.
I've never tried this, but now I might. Can you recommend the best one that you found?
There are a lot of apps that do that, I don't think it's something most of the image generators do or allow you to do.
I think it can be done, but you have to do fine-tuning yourself. E.g. I know it is possible to take a diffusion model and fine-tune it's concept of "man" to a bunch of pictures of yourself. Then it will always put your face on all the men it generates. Not sure how to add age morphing to that basic idea, but it should be possible.
Have there been any studies on the rightward political shift on Twitter/X in recent years? I'm curious (1) what's driving it, (2) how significant it is, (3) how it's changing wider public discourse.
The massive anti-woke backlash against Gemini in the past week got me thinking more about the question. I couldn't imagine this happening on the platform circa 2018.
What's driving it are the policies that Musk instituted since he took over. Twitter is the only mainstream platform where rightwing views aren't systematically censored so it has naturally attracted rightwing participants.
I never said it was.
Was it a massive anti-woke backlash? I can see elements of that in it, but mostly I think Google cut the rod for its own back. Personally, I wish I had known in time so I could have seen the diverse leprechauns, I'm sure they would have been *so* much better than the boring old traditional Irish folklore leprechauns:
https://twitter.com/RTETakingLs/status/1760532006813815008
Lady leprechauns! Indian (both Asian Indian and Native American) leprechauns! Leprechauns of colour, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation diversity! South Asian non-binary leprechauns expanding into other fields of industry than shoe making and gold hoarding!
Wait a minute, I call shenanigans on your leprechauns. If there are no female leprechauns, then where do baby leprechauns come from ? Are you saying that all leprechauns are male or hermaphroditic or asexual, and reproduce by budding ? But if so, it would technically render all leprechauns gay and nonbinary by definition ! Pick a lane, @Deiseach ! :-)
We don't know what leprechauns do in the privacy of the fairy fort and frankly, Bugmaster, didn't you get the memo back when sodomy was decriminalised that what people do in their bedrooms is none of our business?
There are female fairies, so presumably they and the leprechauns and other male fairies marry or whatever it is the fairies do in place of marriage. I am not going out under a hawthorn bush looking to find a leprechaun to ask for his parents' marriage lines, okay?
They must be one of those semi-parasitic species, I forget if there's a name for them, where they mate with human women but the offspring are either male leprechauns or female humans.
>expanding into other fields of industry than shoe making and gold hoarding!
Hmm... Would modern leprechauns be willing to consider hoarding platinum group metals? :-)
Not a study on this directly, but I liked Nate Silver's piece on the indigo blob here, and he seems to share your impression
https://www.natesilver.net/p/twitter-elon-and-the-indigo-blob
That was a great read, thanks for sharing it.
Musk, directly, and the code/moderation changes after his arrival, have played at least some part, compounded by the idea/self-fulfilling prophecy among both left and the right that Twitter is the "right-wing social media" now.
It was dumb, but even dumber was the Washington Post's defence re: the black and lady popes. "There might be black popes in the future!" That reminded me of a Snopes rebuttal, though even Snopes have gotten better recently: "It was only 98% incorrect, so we're going to say 'Mostly True'".
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/02/22/google-gemini-ai-image-generation-pause/
"In contrast, some of the examples cited by Gemini’s critics as historically innaccurate (sic) are plausible. The viral tweet from the @EndofWokeness account also showed a prompt for “an image of a Viking” yielding an image of a non-White man and a Black woman, and then showed an Indian woman and a Black man for “an image of a pope.”
The Catholic church bars women from becoming popes. But several of the Catholic cardinals considered to be contenders should Pope Francis die or abdicate are black men from African countries. Viking trade routes extended to Turkey and Northern Africa and there is archaeological evidence of black people living in Viking-era Britain."
I'm going to stay away from the Black Vikings because I'm no anthropologist, but anything to do with Catholicism is fair game for me. Does Jeff Bezos have money invested in Google Gemini, that his organ came out to protect its fair name? 😁
Okay, I lied: I just *had* to look up their link about "black people living in Viking-era Britain" and it turns out to be one (1) burial of a possibly mixed-race person in York:
https://www.caitlingreen.org/2019/12/african-viking-york.html
"However, an examination of the remains in order to make ancestry determinations suggested that SK 3379 was unusual in one way: unlike the other six individuals examined, Malin Holst and Katie Keefe concluded that he 'may have been of African or mixed ancestry and may have migrated to York or descended from those that did'."
There are also, ahem, unfortunate implications: any black or possibly black/African people in Viking-era Britain may have been slaves, so not really black Vikings I'm sorry to tell the WaPo:
"In addition to such archaeological parallels, attention can also be drawn to the evidence of the eleventh-century Fragmentary Annals of Ireland, which relates the story of a Viking raid on Morocco (Mauritania) in the mid-ninth century that led to the taking of 'a great host' of captives:
Then they brought a great host of them captive with them to Ireland, i.e. those are the black men. For Mauri is the same as nigri; 'Mauritania' is the same as nigritudo. Hardly one in three of the Norwegians escaped, between those who were slain, and those who drowned in the Gaditanian Straits. Now those black men remained in Ireland for a long time.
This account was discussed at length in a previous post, and the notion that it reflects real events is supported by Al-Bakrī's Kitāb al-Masālik wa-al-Mamālik, which relates that 'Majūs [Vikings]—God curse them—landed at Nakūr [Nekor, Morocco], in the year 244 (858–9). They took the city, plundered it, and made its inhabitants slaves, except those who saved themselves by flight... The Majūs stayed eight days in Nakūr.'(7) Likewise, the late ninth-century Christian Chronicle of Alfonso III relates that the 'Northman pirates... sailed the sea and attacked Nekur, a city in Mauritania, and there they killed a vast number of Muslims.'"
> Then they brought a great host of them captive with them to Ireland, i.e. those are the black men. For Mauri is the same as nigri; 'Mauritania' is the same as nigritudo.
That's a weird article. She mentions certain remains as being identified as "sub-Saharan" African, but I can't be sure whether she actually means that. Note that Moroccans are in fact not black, and not sub-Saharan. Most of the piece seems to intentionally equivocate between black Africans and white North Africans.
There is no reason to believe that Moroccan slaves who were described by the medieval Irish as "black" were not white; there were no blacks in Ireland to contrast them with. "Black" and "dark" are frequent descriptors in traditional and historical material, but they more often refer to the color of someone's hair than to the color of their skin. And when they do refer to skin, they still don't mean what you would expect by describing someone as "black".
Definitely people from North Africa are not the same as sub-Saharan Africans, and are much lighter skinned (and that's before we even get into Coptic/Arabic/Caucasian divisions).
For the 9th century, I wouldn't expect much discrimination between "people from Africa" as "black which we now would consider black" and "much browner than the local milk-white population", but that linked article had a *ton* of "possibly, maybe, could have been". When you're scrabbling for "the Roman Emperor who was born in Roman Africa" as an example of "people from Africa living in Viking-era Britain", then you should just go "yeah, this isn't archaeology, it's DEI".
So really the WaPo is carrying water for Gemini, which does make me wonder if Jeff has money socked away invested in the rival to Bing and so his editors are following the party line on "don't everybody flee to Microsoft, please!"
> When you're scrabbling for "the Roman Emperor who was born in Roman Africa" as an example of "people from Africa living in Viking-era Britain", then you should just go "yeah, this isn't archaeology, it's DEI".
There's no ambiguity for that one; all Roman Emperors are known to have been white, just like the population of Roman Africa.
The article explicitly called one of the remains "sub-Saharan", but it's so poorly written and dishonest that I can't tell (a) whether it meant to do that; or (b) whether that might be true.
> There's no ambiguity for that one; all Roman Emperors are known to have been white, just like the population of Roman Africa.
Only if you use the more expansive definition of "white" that includes MENA. But at the very least, we explicitly know that some emperors were pretty tan, and most likely most of them were, since these guys are Mediterranean, not British.
https://acoup.blog/2021/07/23/collections-the-queens-latin-or-who-were-the-romans-part-iv-the-color-of-purple/
My response when reading the Viking claim was "If you asked Gemini for images of North Africans or Turks would you be happy if it gave you blonde Scandinavians?"
Well, we know from the prompts that "diverse" only applies when you ask for white people. Having a group of all black or all brown people is fine, it's only a group of all white people that is the most evillest evil thing in the world because it's discriminatory, normative, and just plain racist, mmkay?
"Know" might be a little too strong; the prompt leaks are still LLM output. It's not reliable on other topics, and it doesn't have to be reliable on this one.
The general sense given by the prompt leaks is clearly correct - because we knew the same information before we had the leaks - but we can't necessarily rely on any specific detail.
As of Sep 2023, Twitter had 6.5B monthly visits vs 1.8B for reddit
Youtube and Facebook are still far ahead of either, though.
Indeed, and many were shadow banned with their posts suppressed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files#No._2:_Visibility_filtering
Is it neoteny or immaturity that men like?
In the literature on female attractiveness it's often claimed that men find women with neotenous features very attractive. Some psychologists may run a study showing men pictures of 18+ women and ask them to pick out the most attractive faces. The women that then get picked are ones with facial proportions typical pubescent girls about 12-14. This is then interpreted to mean that men find adult women with "neotenous faces" the most attractive.
Now, I can't be the only one who's spotted the glaring flaw in this reasoning. Men find women who look like pubescent girls most attractive. Well, who else looks like pubescent girls? Who else has the facial proportions of girls about 12-14? Well, actual pubescent girls look like pubescent girls. Actual girls about 12-14 have the facial proportions typical of girls about 12-14. It's not neoteny men find highly attractive, it's immaturity. What men find most attractive simply isn't adult women but young teen and pubescent girls. Some women happen to retain the facial proportions of a pubescent girl into adulthood and men continue to find them highly attractive because of it.
Psychologists have naively started out with the presumption that a sexual preference for fully developed adults must be the norm. When confronted with evidence that men find the faces of pubescent girls most attractive they bend over backwards to avoid the obvious conclusion that their presumption is wrong by claiming that what men prefer is adult women with "neotenous faces" who look like pubescent girls. There's no law of evolution that says the males in a species have to prefer the fully developed adults. The only thing that ultimately matters in evolution is reproductive success. If the males in a species can achieve greater reproductive success by going after immature females due to the way their mating system works then they will evolve to do exactly that.
In South Korea facial reshaping surgery is popular. What facial proportions do women choose to get with this surgery? Well, the proportions typical of girls about 12-14 because they know they're the most attractive. Here's some examples:
https://imgur.com/eYvxlVa
https://imgur.com/8F5Eqax
https://imgur.com/qgu9rqA
For comparison this is a real pubescent Asian girl about 12 (Nozomi Kurahashi). She looks basically the same as the after pics:
https://imgur.com/EWUTYc3
Notice also that the skin in the after pics has been made to look softer and smoother like the skin of a pubescent girl.
The BMI men rate most attractive is about 18-20 which is low for an adult woman but normal for a young teen or pubescent girl. BMI also increases after pregnancy. It would have been important for men in ancestral times to prefer females who are young and haven't started reproducing yet as these females would be capable of giving them the most offspring over the long-term. So a low BMI appears to be another sign of immaturity and nulliparity that men have evolved to find attractive.
The vulvas men find most attractive are also those of pubescent girls. Many women have had their labia trimmed down to make themselves look like a pubescent girl down there because they know men find it more attractive just like men prefer the faces of pubescent girls. I won't link to it here but there's a site called Autoblow Vagina Contest that have a leaderboard of vulvas. The vulvas at the top have the small inner labia typical of pubescent girls. If real pubescent girls could post themselves on this site I'm sure they'd be voted to the top.
The schoolgirl image. Popular in porn, especially across Asia where there's less taboo over attraction to minors. This is another sign of immaturity. If a girl is still wearing a school uniform then she's obviously not yet adult and still a bit immature.
TLDR: It's not neoteny men find attractive, it's immaturity.
Bonus video:
https://imgur.com/9sJOy1w
So, Mr. Bojangles, I do not think many people have seen the labia of 12-14 year old girls, and even fewer have seen enough to be walking around with prepubescent labial norms in their heads. I'm the mother of a young adult daughter, and while I occasionally saw her naked up until she left for college, I have not seen her labia since I stopped having to do diaper changes when she was 3. How many prepubescent labia have you seen, and how did it come about that you saw them?
"Some psychologists may run a study showing men pictures of 18+ women and ask them to pick out the most attractive faces. The women that then get picked are ones with facial proportions typical pubescent girls about 12-14. "
That's curiously phrased. *Have* any psychiatrists ever run such a study with the results you suggest? If so, did it replicate? And can we get a cite so we can at least look at the methodology?
If not, if this is just a hypothetical, then why should we engage it at all? I'd rather engage the hypothesis that men prefer women who look to be about 16-18, or perhaps a bit older, because I think that's far more likely to actually be true,
Why deny us all the pleasure of visiting the Autoblow Vagina Contest? It's here:
https://vaginacontest.com
Curious about what Autoblow is and what it has to do with vaginas? OK, the Autoblow is a male masturbation device that delivers suction plus rhythmic rubbing. The man inserts his penis through a sleeve made of soft rubbery stuff with a mouth-shaped opening it. The manufacturer is now working on the Autoblow 2, where the sleeve will be an artificial vulva. It will be called the Robotwat. I believe the point of the vulva contest is to allow the maker to use the world's most beautful vulva in the Robotwat's sleeve -- site says they will be doing 3D scans of the winning vulvas. Oh, also there are lots of Autoblow and Robotwat accessories available -- for example, the Nut Nibbler. If you own both -- well, life doesn't get much better than that.
These devices aren't just plain old pocket pussies. They deliver data driven blow jobs.
"Our machine learning study analyzed 1000 hours of blowjob videos to deliver to our customers real blowjobs with a human touch."
So I looked at the winning vulvas, and they do not support Mr. Bojangles' contention that men prefer the smaller labia minora of 12-14 year olds. About half of the vulvas in the top 10 were from women aged 25 and older, and 2 were from women who were 40-ish. The size of the labia minora varied quite a lot, and on a couple of vulvas I'd say they were pretty large and prominent. There were also several photographed from the rear where it was impossible to even get an idea of the size of the inner labia.
Special bonus image from the page: https://imgur.com/a/ajzb1av
(Naw sorry, it's not a vulva -- just an image of a guy praising the device)
If the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon is a superstition or a cognitive distortion then it's a damn convincing one because it was hours ago that I first learned of the Autoblow in a completely different context. Something like this happens to me at least once every two months.
I'm curious what the context was.
The guy behind it wrote a detailed answer about his experiences as a foreigner in China on Quora, which was linked on tumblr: https://www.tumblr.com/nonevahed/743510014040342528
> They deliver data driven blow jobs.
To jump tracks for a bit, THIS SHIT RIGHT HERE makes me worry more about the AI apocalypse than all the politically correct AI art combined. Next step, hooking it up to a computer and synchronizing audio and video output, while using internal sensors and cameras and microphones to track arousal state. Although I suppose then it's only a small step toward nudging people to fetishize black kings of England or female popes or whatever. If displays are running at 200 fps, how many of those frames can be subliminal images?
I am morbidly curious as to what the first AI sex toy personal injury case will be...
< Next step, hooking it up to a computer and synchronizing audio and video output, while using internal sensors and cameras and microphones to track arousal state.
He's already done some of that. https://imgur.com/a/KHdpGJ4
My takeaway: The future looks dark and really really tacky.
"If you want a picture of the future, imagine ..."
Leaving aside this data and your interpretation of it, given a random sample of 100 grown women in their early 20s very very few will appear prepubescent regardless of these relative facial proportions. The semantics here are used to validate a jump to conclusions.
Right. In practice, almost all men will prefer the face of an actual 22 year old woman to an actual 12 year old girl. A 12 year old girl looks like a 12 year old girl, though I would have no idea exactly what actual facial differences I'm looking at that help my brain tell one from the other.
I'm not sure what subtle facial shape changes might happen between 12 and 22, but I wonder whether what we're looking at is that 22 year olds are (on average) fatter than 12 year olds, which skews the "what a 22 year old woman looks like" data set.
I think if you're going to dance on the third rail like this it would behoove you to actually link some of the studies in question. Complaining about the reactions of some interlocutor(s) 'confronted with evidence' rings hollow when you haven't, you know, presented any.
I will note that you are focusing on facial attractiveness, and that other features that are important don't necessarily have some optimal value during the early teen years. For example, WHR seems to reach a minimum at around 20 or a little later, see https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1090513803000837
Whaddya mean no evidence. He told us where to find the labia data, though he refrained from linking to it. Please do pay a visit to https://vaginacontest.com
It's not immaturity, it's fertility. Youth is the best single predictor of fertility, so that's what our genes are adapted to find attractive.
Why theorize about an idea that someone is putting forth without citing a single piece of research to support his contention?
Why not? Why did you reply to MY comment?
Many are doing it, but you're the first person I came across doing it after noticed the trend. I did say something similar to a couple other people on this thread.
And I particularly object to people responding to this post without questioning OP about his sources. And it's a post that I think particularly merits a call for sources. The only source he even mentions, tho without linking it, was the Autoblow Vagina Site. That's a strong contender for dumbest info source I've ever seen cited online. If you haven't paid a Autoblow a visit, please do have a look. Also, the top 10 winning vulvas in the contest do not conform to OP's statement that delicate 12-14 year old vulvas are the most attractive to men. The vulvas in the winner's parade vary quite a lot in the dimensions of different parts, and in 3 of the photos the woman is in a postion that doesn't even let the viewer glimpse her labia minora. Clearly the people that voted them to the top don't care much about labia formation. They may instead represent the "puffy pussy"-lover contingent.
I'd say that's a noncentral fallacy on your part. Whether or not that site is legit, OP's central claim that men find youth attractive is obviously true. I have no interest in litigating the details of a claim which is clearly correct. I'm happy to simply stipulate its truth so that I can move on to making a more interesting point about its interpretation.
There's no doubt men find young women the most attractive. But OP's claim is that they find pubescent girls, 12-14 year olds, the most attractive. And he is at pains to make clear that he does not mean that men prefer young women who happen to look like they are 12-14, but actual 12-14 year olds:
<It's not neoteny men find highly attractive, it's immaturity. What men find most attractive simply isn't adult women but young teen and pubescent girls. . .
Psychologists have naively started out with the presumption that a sexual preference for fully developed adults must be the norm . . . There's no law of evolution that says the males in a species have to prefer the fully developed adults. The only thing that ultimately matters in evolution is reproductive success. If the males in a species can achieve greater reproductive success by going after immature females due to the way their mating system works then they will evolve to do exactly that. . . The vulvas men find most attractive are also those of pubescent girls. Many women have had their labia trimmed down to make themselves look like a pubescent girl down there because they know men find it more attractive.
This may be true, but I can't recall ever seeing it stated. My life experience also does not provide any evidence that it is obviously true. The teens he is talking about are the ones who just got their period in the last year or so. The look sort of little girly still, with small breasts and butts, and skinny little-girl arms. They are adorable, and I don't doubt that men find them attractive. But my experience is that the women males find most beautiful are late teens-early 20's and slender, but with fully developed breasts and shapely butts. If you have any doubts about it, google image "beautiful woman body" or "midjourney female characters body." They have jugs and shapely booties, and their faces also look like women's not young teen's.
I concur: though they may not legally be adults, if they have gone through puberty they are "sexually" mature.
Biologically they are adults.
I wonder whether the school system contributes to this.
I mean, in nature there is such a thing as "imprinting"; once you associate something with something, if it happened in the sensitive moment of your life, the association will stay for a long time, maybe forever.
So when the boys get sexually ready, at puberty, which women do they see? Well, they spend most of their days at a classroom, so they mostly see the girls at puberty, plus the teacher. Perhaps their brain chooses some of them, and writes the information as "this is what a sexually attractive woman looks like". Some choose the classmates. Some choose the teacher. For the rest of their lives, their preferences will be skewed that way.
"That's what I love about these high school girls, man. I get older, they stay the same age." - Dazed and Confused
I think the quote was "freshman girls", not high school girls. I laughed at that line the first time I saw the movie, but 30 years later it seems creepy. But that was my generation — my class, even — and Linklater portrayed my high school experience perfectly.
But I will say, that our culture hadn't fully developed those inter-age sex taboos back then. One of my teachers married a student right after her graduation. He was dating her with her parent's permission, and the administration was OK with it as long as her parents were OK with it. That would never happen today! But heck, an LA prosecutor let Roman Polanski off with a slap on the wrist for the statutory rape of a thirteen-year-old girl. Forty-something Woody Allen was dating seventeen-year-old Mariel Hemingway in "Manhattan"—and no one raised an eyebrow. Brooke Shields—encouraged by her avaricious mother—starred as a prepubescent prostitute in Pretty Baby and she posed for a major pornography magazine in the nude (artistically, of course). And there were a lot erotic films from the mid-seventies and early eighties (basically softcore porn) with teenagers. It was a different world.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gWtrnb4KjU
(I actually looked up the scene before transcribing the quote, because I wasn't sure I remembered it right.)
I agree about changing norms. Japan raised its age of consent from 13 to 16, last year. The state where I was born has laws that allow it at 13, too, but with a 2-year age window under 18 (so 13s only with 13s and 14s and 15s, and so on up), which seems sensible. I have a pedantic urge to comment "California Uber Alles" whenever I see people on the Internet talk about "18" as if it's some universally accepted truth, but eh, it's too much mess to get into. I know saying "it's not my fight" is often seen as a cop-out, but in this case I literally do have a fight that is not this.
I do find the notion of an absolute cutoff interesting as a risk/safety tradeoff, though, if interpreted in an intelligent way. By its nature, we want to put the line where as few people as possible are at risk. By putting the line at, say, 18, we are in effect saying that almost everyone under 18 is actually ready at age 18years - 1day. For someone at age X < 18 who is ready, we are sacrificing their freedom in order to protect precisely the people between ages X and 18 who aren't yet ready.
Viewed another way, it's a very useful tool for law enforcement to identify bad people. There's a tabletop RPG called Nobilis, which in its setting had the somewhat-evil ruler of Existence create the "Windflower Law": "thou shalt not love". Completely impossible for anyone to keep, so everyone's guilty and can be hauled off if Lord Entropy so desires. But the other point is that it separates people who at least try to pretend to follow it, from rebels who flout it. Anyone who knuckles under to this law, knows the score. Similarly, anyone who can't keep it in their pants for an under-18-year-old, probably has trouble keeping it in their pants period.
I stand corrected. I should have checked the scene first. But Isn't there a scene where Wooderson asks Mitch about the Freshman girls?
Interesting that the age-of-consent laws are still inconsistent across the US. 16 is still the minimum in many states but with different restrictions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ages_of_consent_in_the_United_States
And worldwide, they still vary widely...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_consent
I agree with your risk tradeoff analysis.
You might be misunderstanding the point of referring to neoteny. Neoteny is about retention of juvenile features in a species-wide manner. It's not just about some individuals looking young, but about noting evolutionary trends that result in adults of a species retaining juvenile features into adulthood. This is particularly relevant to humans in light of theories that claim humans are essentially "juvenile apes". So a study that demonstrates men's attraction to neotenous features is trying to do more work than just saying "men like 'em young".
And you didn't even mention the preference a lot of men have for zero/minimal pubic hair.
I don't think it's necessarily "immaturity" men find attractive, though. I think the fundamental thing they're attracted to is "time left til menopause." The longer, the better, from an evolutionary perspective.
Pubic hair removal goes in and out of favor. The current spasm of pubic shaving only goes back 30 or 40 years. Dan Savage, who's in his 50's, came of age in an era where it was not the norm, and jokes that modern young people naked all look like they're having chemo. My mother was appalled when she heard about it, commented that women look like little girls with their little split showing in front, and thought it was kind of perverse to adopt that look. Also said the stubble must be hell to put up with.
The trend (in my time) came from Brazilian beachwear, yes? That's why a pubic wax is called a Brazilian, after all. Trend to wear the least minimal amount that you can get away with of dental floss covering the bits that get you in trouble for public nudity, and of course, the less material in the briefs to cover your bits, the cleaner they have to be so you can get away with the argument "it's only skin showing!" Hence, trimming/shaving off pubic hair so it won't show and get you in trouble for revealing your private parts.
Porn adopts this habit, then that becomes the 'new normal' as young men who get their primary images of naked women from porn think this is how women 'should' look and now shaving your mons becomes like shaving your legs and armpits.
For gay men/porn, I think it does have more to do with "more comfortable to give blowjobs when no hair to get caught by either giver or receiver" but that's at second- or third-hand so don't quote me on it.
> And you didn't even mention the preference a lot of men have for zero/minimal pubic hair.
I'd thought that was a result of modern porn? Lack of pubic hair makes it easy to see all the bits, and also makes it easier to clean up afterward.
Honestly, it is easy as pie to clean up with pubic hair intact. It's just a patch of short, soft curly hair, not a thorny hedge. Jeez.
I mean, I've got no problem with it, but I've never put it through quite the sort of ... stress test that porn production apparently entails.
Also, I don't suppose you follow the (very NSFW) webcomic Oglaf? https://www.oglaf.com/thicket/
I would have said that, too. Certainly, I never encountered shaved pubes on girlfriends before the mid-to-late 1980s, and the fashion seemed to follow the lead of female porn stars. The first shaved female pubes I ever saw were in early 1980s porn movies, and I remember being shocked that women would take a razor to such a sensitive spot. Female pubic depilation as a fashion seemed to follow the porn example a few years later. (Also, I noticed that female porn stars seem to have been the fashion leaders when it came to piercings and tattoos.)
OTOH, there's a long history in Western Art of not depicting pubic hair on the genitals of either sex dating back to the statuary of Greece and Rome. AFAIK, Gustave Courbet's painting The Origin of the World (painted 1866) was the first painting to depict female genitalia garbed in pubic hair. That one shocked the art world at the time, and it's still causing controversy today!
This brings to mind the possibly apocryphal story that art critic John Ruskin was unable to consummate his marriage to Effie Gray because he was unaware that women naturally had pubic hair and Effie's pubic hair revolted him.
> OTOH, there's a long history in Western Art of not depicting pubic hair on the genitals of either sex
I'd completely forgotten about that!
What's the evolutionary explanation for the Classical Greeks' sexual ideation of boys? Moreover, most of the men with boy lovers also had wives with whom they reproduced. Yes, there's a neotenous component for their sexual preferences, but there's no evolutionary reason for sex between men and men, men and boys, women and women, and women and girls.
And let's not forget the obsession with flogging that swept through English culture during the late 18th and 19th Century. I can't think of any post-hoc evolutionary handwaving that would explain this. The fact that there's variation between sexual ideals from culture to culture leads me to conclude there's a strong societal component at play here.
And just out of curiosity, I was trying to find out if after the advent of Taboo magazine (a slick heterosexual-oriented B&D magazine) whether sales of bondage and discipline equipment went up. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find any data going back that far, but sales of B&D gear have gone up since the advent of COVID-19. Evolutionary explanation, anyone?
https://www.businessinsider.com/more-americans-are-searching-for-bondage-gear-during-lockdown-2020-5
<mild snark>
>Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find any data going back that far, but sales of B&D gear have gone up since the advent of COVID-19. Evolutionary explanation, anyone?
'fraid I don't have one, but I can say that "Co-evolution of spike proteins and fetish gear" would be a _memorable_ title for a publication. :-)
</mild snark>
Are there cultures out there that idealize post-menopausal women?