Got a call from CoinMarketCap stating that my account had been suspended because someone tried to withdraw my funds. Funny, I did not invest in this company. They could only explain that my funds were transferred to them and that someone else was trying to take the money out. So they contacted me to see if it was me. I was informed it was not me. Because they could not verify the person, the account was suspended. But to unsuspend my account I must pay $3870. At first, I was traumatized because I had already made a plan for that fund's investment. I got help when I explained my situation to a Saclux Comptech specialst whom I got their contact from a friend who got help from them. They asked a few questions about the investment portal and I opened up to them, within the space of 4 hours, they asked me to access the portal again. That was all.
I live in an apartment complex with two apparently symmetrical row buildings with a driveway running between them. One recent afternoon, I went out several times and noticed that earlier in the afternoon, the shadow from the right building was long. However, when I went out at 3:45pm, the shadows of the two buildings looked equal, and later the shadow from the left building got longer.
This seems to imply that solar noon was at 3:45pm, which doesn't seem possible to me. I live near SF, and Google suggests that solar noon should be around 1:15pm. Does anyone know what could be going on here?
The slope of the ground that the shadow is cast on affects the length of the shadow. And of course shadows move over the course of the day. So my best guess is that the two shadows happen to fall on ground of the same slope at 3:45 pm, and fall on ground of different slopes at other times of day.
I don't think the timing of solar noon would enter into it. It might be easier to compare the two shadows when the sun lines up with the space between the buildings, but that would only be noon if that space runs directly north-south.
Comments in this Quora post about the moon landing bring up terrain's effect on shadows. Mostly about parallels but feels like it's probably the answer, especially the picture with the palm trees, those posts' shadows look pretty far off from each other.
What is the best image hosting service (i.e. a place where you can easily upload images and link to them on forums)? Currently I'm using Postimages, which is pretty nice, except that I just discovered that it is displaying a 503 placeholder for most of my older images right now.
If you are asking for a free one, there is none. The best you will find is one that works well today but soon into the future will stop working. No one has discovered a way to make a free image hosting service sustainable yet.
You could host your own for anywhere from pennies a month to a few bucks a month using various methods like an Amazon S3 bucket (pay as you go) or something like a cloud server/VPS that you host your images on (Anywhere from $2.50-$5/month from somwhere like Vultr, Digital Ocean, Linode, etc). This method ensures that your images never go down as long as you keep paying your monthly bill if that is something that you care about.
Huh? Perhaps you have a grandfathered account? Imgur purged everything last year. I remember because I had to manually download everything I'd put on Imgur and reupload it to Postimages instead. (None of my stuff was NSFW or anything, they just seemed to be deleting everything).
Edit: It seems that Imgur only deleted "old, inactive, or anonymous" uploads. Perhaps if you have an account you aren't affected.
Random question: is anyone here a large language model connoisseur? Due to the rapid proliferation of LLMs (there's even an entire LLM leaderboard these days!) it's kinda getting hard to decide which models I should use.
(Personally I'm a normie, so I've mostly used ChatGPT.)
The California Senate has just introduced a bill, SB-1308, to ban any air cleaning devices that emit more than 5 parts per billion (ppb) of ozone. This will functionally ban far-UV, as in the given testing conditions, far-UV lamps emit just about 5 ppb. Far-UV has enormous potential for reducing airborne pathogen transmission. It needs more research and investment in user-friendly technology, but that research and investment won't happen if the largest state in the country bans this technology in its infancy.
Probably many of you are California voters who care about reducing disease transmission. If so, I invite you to call your state senator and urge them to vote against this bill. You don't have to convince them to become huge fans of far-UV. YOU don't have to be a huge fan of far-UV. It just matters that this technology is given a chance to realize its potential.
It's not meant to be a ban on covid-removing devices, as there are air cleaners that don't emit ozone. My charitable guess as to what happened is something like: someone in the legislature was advised that the market for air filters is pretty hard to navigate and full of options that work poorly or emit ozone. Consumers trying to clean their air can worsen it in other ways by accident, and there's no BENEFIT to the ozone-producing filters. So this legislative official figured that they might as well ban those filters, because why not--if you're unaware of the technicalities of the field, this would seem like an obvious win for public health.
Following up on my previous open letter I have some mixed news. The child got her shoes but at the cost of my need to talk to the public about it.
My feelings about it aren't easy to hide. I wish it weren't necessary to make and share the attatched video but it IS necessary. If some good comes of it that would make me feel a lot better about it but my expectations for internet society are even lower than for meatspace society, and those expectations are already rather low.
Nonetheless, the SSC crowd, as riddled with faults as humans are expected to be, are still among the best of the bunch so once I decided to go public about my afternoon's actions I may as well bight the bullet and share it with y'all.
I should confess that I'm hoping for confirmation of my low estimation of humankind via disinterest among the crowd I hold to be less odious than most so I'm okay with any reaction I get. I'm hoping for a thousand new paying subscribers and a holy excitement to enliven mankind that hasn't existed since Godse murdered The Mahatma, but silence or critique would not surprise me and could serve as a helpful reminded that humanity actually isn't worth a damn so I most definitely won't complain if that's the outcome.
Feel free to play. Or not. The outside world is harsh enough. But if you want beggar children not to live in a constant of ringworm and pneumonia and, hell, if it might make you smile to see a little girl laugh, enjoy my open letter and video.
Are you experimenting with manipulative arguments? If so, I think this goes too far to be really effective: it quickly triggers that I am being emotionally manipulated.
I am teaching a class in ethics and AI and a question arose: Will we know when AI theory of mind surpasses ordinary human theory of mind? If an LLM is trained to give good psychotherapeutic answers will it develop a theory of mind that supersedes ours even if it is not conscious? It writes better than most people without being able to read; so it seems likely it will be able to have a theory of mind superior to most people without itself being conscious.
Well I'd like to hear what you mean by "theory of mind". Google is saying it's understanding how someone else is thinking, which seems testable with basic predictions. (Do they keep money they find in the street, how do they react to a trivial task becoming complicated?) What does it mean for a theory to surpass ordinary human theory?
Assuming I'm reading it right, the answer is "yes", given enough data the thing should be able to predict humans better than they can predict each other, and doesn't need to understand that's what it's using. Arguably data processors already do that, right?
Yes that is it. We generally know what other people are thinking when we speak with them, we have an understanding of why someone is hurt by something we say etc. But the danger here is if an LLM is asked to manipulate someone it easily could do that, or a political party or even a nation. And because of the vast amount of data it has it could do it better than any one person or group of people or advertisers could do. The ultimate propaganda machine. Imagine an AI partner that always knew exactly what to say to you. Knew you way better than you know yourself since it has a lifetime of data to draw on while we only have a limited memory of our motives and emotions etc.
The question is, how much impact can you actually have on someone with conversation alone? Does the choice of words actually make a lot of difference, compared to outside factors that incline or disincline you to listen to what's being advertised?
For example, if the choice of conversational strategy is so powerful, then why do we observe that every form of talk therapy is about as effective as any other?
I'm going to return to Dune Part Two a bit (no longer rot13:ing; everyone's had plenty of time to see it now), since I've been thinking about one of the dumbest criticisms; the time compression (ie events that take several years in the books take only like half a year, maybe, in the movie.
The thing is that this actually makes as much if not more sense than in the book! The invasion of Arrakeen does not specifically *require* years of campaigning to complete; you just need enough raids to make Muad'dib a Fremen household name, Gurney dropping in to remind Paul of where the Atreides nukes are, and then Paul drinking the worm juice, assuming the various Messiah roles and things flowing on from there.
Paul doesn't need years of being embedded in the Fremen culture - he's the "The Voice from the Outer World", the religious Fremen were already calling him Lisan Al-Gaib when he arrived. He's not in power due to Fremen thinking that he's become completely Fremen now, he's specifically an outsider - a Messiah who has sent the Fremen into religious fervor by actually doing all the stuff that he was predicted to do and demonstrating actual precognition. A perfect position to first rush Arrakeen and then pivot to universal jihad.
Sure, arguably this might lead to some changes vis-a-vis Dune Messiah (aka Part 3) and so on, but we'll see if those changes work if (when) that movie comes out, won't we? I guess much of it is just people being leery of how Alia would be handled before the movie. I had been too but it ended up working just fine, there's a great chance that any murder toddler version could have just ended up looking silly. Or it's just people thinking that Villeneuve's task was simply putting Herbert's words on screen and not changing literally anything; that's a silly way to view the project and I suspect such people know it themselves, it's just an easy platform to stand on if one wants to do some bashing, particularly of a popular thing.
Possibly the biggest problem with filming the story as written, is the problem of finding a two-year-old actress who can convincingly portray Alia Atreides. David Lynch used 8-year-old Alicia Witt, and that didn't really work. Keeping her in utero, did work.
And I'm with the others that the rest of the criticism is debatable, not stupid. Six months is not wholly implausible for the Fremen Revolt, but it is kind of rushed - particularly since Villeneuve is telling the version of the story where Paul has to earn the win, rather than just having an unstoppable army and a nuclear arsenal handed to him for being the Lisan Al-Gaib and Atreides heir. Note that Paul's historical inspiration, T. E. Lawrence, took just under two years to go from his first sojourn in the desert to the destruction of the Ottoman Empire at Armageddon. And he had the British Empire backing him up.
I'm not a Dune fan, but I think that these criticisms are legitimate and not dumb. Yes, there are always "they changed the book and ruined it" criticisms which ignore that film is a different medium and works differently and that you can't have stretches of "and then nothing happened for fifty years" in a two-hour film. I don't mind the timeline compression in "The Rings of Power", I understand the necessity for it, my criticism is about all the other stupid, unnecessary changes they made.
While the director may have good reason for accelerating the timeline and compressing everything (after all, the audience is going to expect action to flow in a chain of 'okay he did the thing, now the other thing should happen straightaway', rather than 'what do you mean we have to spend ten minutes waiting for something to happen while you tell us twenty years passed?'), it does hurt the internal logic of the story.
From what I'm picking up, there are atheist (more or less?) Fremen in the North who never bought the package the Bene Gesserit sold and don't think of Paul as the mystical promised Messiah. If they sit on their hands while their zealot brethen have an uprising, then it doesn't work out and Paul resembles more John of Leiden (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_of_Leiden) than the victorious world conqueror.
He needs to convince them as much as anyone, so that if they don't believe the magic mystic story, at least they follow him as 'one of us' and not some soft outsider. That doesn't happen in six months, as pointed out elsewhere.
If Paul is going for universal jihad, or even if he's not but that is where he ends up by force of circumstance, a quick reminder about the family nukes isn't enough, He does need years to build up forces, bases, plans to cope with the other Houses who are not going to be happy about one of their rivals trying to become supreme and indeed the Emperor - Arrakis is important because of spice so whoever controls Arrakis controls the Empire, and Paul needs to be in a position to present them all with a fait accompli, rather than "okay it's still only him and a bunch of desert dwellers, time to nip this in the bud".
"Enough raids to make Muad'dib a Fremen household name" may be the Dune 9/11 where he causes enough mischief to be worth stomping out by the imperial and allied forces.
If the movie lets the passage of "and then five/ten/twenty years later" be noted, rather than "and this twenty-four year old conquered the galaxy in a matter of months", then it'll hold together. I do recognise the major problem is that they've cast Timothée Chalamet who is (by the second movie) in his mid to late twenties, so they can't 'age him up' by makeup to be forty years old *or* recast another actor for the third movie, hence why they can't have time skips be too large. But at the same time, if the internal timeline accelerates to "it all happens in twelve months" over the three movies, that won't work either.
All that being said, yeah it's the movies, it's all going to happen that "in three years Paul became Emperor of the Galaxy by age twenty five" 😀
>From what I'm picking up, there are atheist (more or less?) Fremen in the North who never bought the package the Bene Gesserit sold and don't think of Paul as the mystical promised Messiah. If they sit on their hands while their zealot brethen have an uprising, then it doesn't work out and Paul resembles more John of Leiden (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_of_Leiden) than the victorious world conqueror.
>He needs to convince them as much as anyone, so that if they don't believe the magic mystic story, at least they follow him as 'one of us' and not some soft outsider. That doesn't happen in six months, as pointed out elsewhere.
Paul's appearance, assumption of role and magical achievements have just rather conclusively meant the Red Tribe Fremen have won the Fremen Cultural War, so there might not be too many atheist Fremen going around any more (Chani's a bit different because of his personal relationship), and since the secular Fremen are portrayed essentially as "Arab socialism" -type Fremen nationalists, they've just been handed a lifetime chance of Fremen unity against the colonizers, serving as a powerful argument to fight along anyway. Again, we're at a phase of Fremen history where these are the weeks where decades happen; going along for the ride is only too natural.
>If the movie lets the passage of "and then five/ten/twenty years later" be noted, rather than "and this twenty-four year old conquered the galaxy in a matter of months", then it'll hold together.
The fact that Alia is a fetus in the womb in the movie but they did the Anya Taylor-Joy cameo where she's an adult would indicate that this would indeed be bound to happen. I don't see why they wouldn't be able to age up Chalamet. Maybe he'll have a beard.
I think there's a huge difference between "we're following this guy because he is the chosen Messiah of prophecy as foretold for ages" versus "fuck prophecy but he knows how to fight and win battles".
We're talking Mohammed versus Jesus here, if you want to compare desert warriors coming in under the mantle of a religious leader. Christianity was already established when Mohammed began spreading his message, I think some at least of the pagan followers joined up precisely because Mohammed had an army at his back winning victories, rather than "I am totally convinced by the account of religious dreams and visions".
Same with the Fremen, I imagine; they may or may not be convinced by the mystic woo but if the guy is leading an army and *winning*, that's good enough for me and I'll just nod along that he is the Chosen of God/the gods.
"I don't see why they wouldn't be able to age up Chalamet. Maybe he'll have a beard."
Tatu, don't you know a beard means this is the Evil Twin/Mirror Universe version of you? Though if Villeneuve is going for "galactic war is evil" that would be fine 😁
Well, exactly; at the point when Paul is basically wowing everyone with his big speech and prophecies, it's going to be evident to even the most secular of the Fremen that this guy's going to be able to build a big army fervent fanatical army in a matter of days. Will he win? Maybe, but at the very least he'll be the *best shot* -in a warrior culture (that also knows that it's a do-or-die time, since Harkonnens are doing total warfare now), that's almost certainly going to be a good enough argument.
I actually didn't remember the Mirror Universe beard connotation (I've never been a Trekkie, though of course exposed to the idea through osmosis), so I'm even more certain now that Villeneuve will have Emperor Paul sport a beard.
It's not just in Trek, I think in the original version of "Knight Rider" for the Evil Twin version of David Hasselhoff's character they had him sporting a moustache.
It's an easy way to keep the two 'versions' of the character as played by the same actor distinct for the audience; *we* know that Beard Guy is the Baddie, but the in-show characters think it's the Good Guy doing bad stuff.
I'm ok with most of Villeneuve's changes and think some of them are even somewhat improvements over the book. But it's not fair to call this criticism "dumb". At the very least, the books make it clear that Paul considers himself a Fremen and was completely embedded in their culture. This doesn't happen in 6 months - it takes years of actual living with them.
Again, this is something that might have more ramifications for Part 3 than Part 2 - but we can't say just yet how those ramifications will play out, our how Villeneuve might adjust the story.
"while the actual AIs serve ads to them in the background." - nah, the actual AIs are busy reading news articles and watching Youtube videos created by other AIs and incorporating them into their training set.
I don't really know how to talk about myself, so please do me the favor of clicking on my stack to have a look without my having to guess at the correct way to describe myself or my rabbinic in Cairo.
Some ACXers find what I'm doing to be interesting enough to support my mission even if I'm incapable of describing precisely what it is so while I can't vouch for myself I can share that particular fact for whatever it's worth.
Okay, I take your point on the idea that people will accuse each other of being AIs. I have had a similar thought myself.
But then what is the solution?
Tell me what to think great blog man in the cloud.
Is it WorldCoin? Start setting up yubikeys and public key identities for the local homeless, self-sovereign identity? Some kind of crypto scam? Can we hack together a reasonable list of the humans us AIs still need to exterminate using government records?
What magic does Cloudflare do to know that I'm not a bot and do any of those ReCaptcha "click here" providers just turn around and sell that shit as training data?
I think that the human vs bot thing is going to be a genuine difficulty with the intenet moving forward. Have you seen how many new startups are just "AI advertising". Pitchwall is a graveyard of projects that let you use AI to manipulate internet users for money. Including a product I would've for sure thought was illegal ReplyGuy.
Does the job of those spammy advertising assholes automatically and astroturfs on reddit reccomendation threads for you with the power of AI. Jesus, how do we grab onto the human-to-human internet while okay peer to peer recomendation services still kind of exist?
Also, how do we get rid of advertising in general? It has gone way out of hand since that first Egyptian played a flute outside of his store. Frankly, we should've nipped it there when he dared play the flute for profit instead of for beauty, but what is your best shot at a non-adverserial alternative to advertisement?
The AI activism group I'm in wantes to buy adspace from Google and tbh that feels so much like just feeding the beast. What's a gen-z boy to do in these trying times of the internet oh greater blogger of old?
Lol, no worries. I write in a kind of jarring, incoherent way sometimes when I'm having fun.
Glad you liked the vibes.
I was trying to reference something I half remembered about the history of acient advertising. Like, that one of the early forms of "advertising" would've involved playing flutes outside of shops in early market societies.
Realistically though, I think the history of advertising starts well before that with the beloved oral tradition of "BEING FORCEFUL" and "LYING".
The heuristic is very simple: limit your engagement with any of these ecosystems to be no greater than the level of engagement you would consider acceptable with a roulette table in a Vegas casino, and expect no substantially different outcome.
Also, since statistically the person reading this isn't actually Scott (the man I love), could someone else maybe just tell me what to make of WorldCoin?
My instict says it's rotten because of crypto and eyeball scanning and Altman being an omnicidal maniac. But idk, haven't looked into it for shit even though I really agree with the use case.
I really like this thread on Israel's response to the genocide case. It's crazy in real time to have a nearly unending stream of evidence for various warcrimes, plus unending documentation of Israeli claims proving either false or flat out lies. Then the denialists just reaching new heights. But I also think I've never seen the sheer level of hatred towards Israel and Jews online like I am now, from literally every demographic I can think of minus centrists/boomers.
The "sheer level of hatred towards Israel and Jews online" has had gasoline poured on it by people like you who "really like" threads by anti-Semitic propagandists. The calls are coming from inside the house.
Minor nitpick: I really really really hate Twitter. Maybe it has to do with irrational or meme hatred towards it, and I have heard plenty of defenses in its favor, but I do still hate it, and I do think I'm not the only one.
(1) I hate that threads are not accessible if you don't have an account, only the top-level thread starter tweet is.
(2) I hate that IF a thread is accessible, the short character-limited format encourages low-effortness and drive-by replies (yes, I know that all social media have this, Twitter is exceptional because it's treated as "serious" due to media personnel and high-ranking politicians being on it. They devolve to children and dumbasses while using it, even more than they usually are.)
You could use screenshots, copy-paste, thread unrolling sites, or just paraphrase the thing you're linking to, perhaps also in addition to linking to Twitter. In this case the top-level tweet is simply a pointer to an ICJ document where Israel's legal defense team is whining about something something antisemitism, you can just paraphrase that and link to the original ICJ document along with page and section info.
Sorry for derailing the actual issue, but just an unsolicited stylistic advice from someone broadly agreeing with the overall sentiment expressed.
I hate twitter and all social media. Ideal life is spending time with the wife in the country side. I especially hate both (1) and (2) especially the fucking drive by replies. I don't think I can use screenshots in the comment section? Good idea on the thread unrolling site link. Actually great idea.
You're right on the screenshots, Substack pathetic comment box doesn't even support Markdown or even basic formatting queues such as emphasis and bold.
What I meant is more like posting the screenshots to a free hosting server (e.g. Google Drive, Imgur, ...) and posting a link to it. That link would be much better than Twitter, it's a full-screen full-fidelity capture of the Twitter stream as you see it, it even has the advantage of being anti-censorship and anti-delete, no one can erase your screenshot.
(Archive link has that advantage too, and the advantage that it un-paywalls many paywalled URLs, but archival websites can't cope with the sheer dynamic JS garbage that sites like YouTube and Twitter employ.)
That's an interesting claim. The Israeli's keep taking more and more Palestinian land.
FWIW, I don't believe that there are any good guys in control on any side of that mess. I also tend to think of it as "two cats in a sack..that keeps getting poked". Which isn't fair to the cats. The Isreali's and the Palestinians hate each other, and have for multiple decades. And the turf is too small for two groups of people that hate each other. (This is a bit unfair, as I'm characterizing the groups by the folks that are in power, and that's not a uniformly true characterization.)
It's not getting too intense for them, they seem to be good at re-occupying buildings the IDF left, sniping at IDF and just keeping the fight alive in general. It is getting too intense for countless men women and children who the IDF are effective at slaughtering however.
I guess you're in a particular sort of bubble. This is the guy I trust on the conflict - brave and clear sighted, still advocating for peace despite unimaginable personal losses. https://twitter.com/afalkhatib
I might be missing something because I don't have a Twitter account and thus I can't see all the thread that Glenn posted, just the first tweet in it, but I struggle to see how is the account you posted against the thread that Glenn posted. Ahmed may be rare in his commitment to peace and anti-Hamas position despite the staggering losses Israel inflicted on his family, but I don't think that he would disagree that the Israel's legal defense team is doing a hilariously bad and unconvincing job at presenting Israel's case in the ICJ. In particular, the tweet linked by Glenn is making fun of their formal HR-esque whining in a case document about how South Africa is demanding too insistently evidence of Israel's commitment to the ICJ ruling.
From what I can see in Ahmed's account, he is still not a fan of Israel. As a matter of fact, one of his posts is lamenting how Hamas has hijacked the word "Resistance" (مقاومة) so much that its supporters sometimes use it as a synonym for the Jihad group, and conversely people like Ahmed (or, for that matter, me) who maintain that Hamas are scum and that there are paths to resistance that don't pass through executing dissidents and killing civilians are thought of as "soft" or "crypto-Zionists". That's still not cheerleading for Israel or turning a blind eye to its grotesque performance of dehumanization since October 7th, indeed the very opposite.
All I’m trying to say in response to “Israel are not the good guys” is “neither is Hamas.” There are no good guys in this conflict, international bodies have been spectacularly ineffective, and innocent civilians and indeed children (on both sides) are paying the price.
I am just trying to signal boost clear sighted and good hearted people. That’s our only chance
We can all accuse each other of being in bubbles, it's not really moving anything forward. I disagree with his view that the onus is on Hamas. The onus is on the army that's been occupying Palestinian land, and mass slaughtering children among other atrocities. It does not matter that Gaza no longer has settlements. Occupying powers can't say "well international law gives the right of occupied to fight their occupation but if we exit illegal settlements in one area, the people in that area can't fight back to relieve all of their land." Fighting Israel is legitimate, fighting Palestine is not. Israelis have the right to end the occupation. Israelis do not have the right to cut off food and water and induce mass starvation in a population. It is absolutely monstrous to do so.
Nope, it doesn't bother him. The starving population makes Israel look bad, so their starving is not only acceptable but in fact necessary. The pro-Hamas activists in this comment section are far more dismissive of Palestinian suffering than the IDF on its worst day.
Funny, my reaction was "less of this please". This sort of mind reading where you just drive by and allege the worst possible motives for someone you disagree with does nothing but inflame debate.
If I had just randomly stopped by and said that carateca is not bothered by human suffering and just wants to kill all the Palestinians, would you have said "good point" to that as well?
I love that the rationalist sphere is inclusive of socially unpopular ideas. But I hate that this seems to make it a magnet for entirely irrational, genuinely objectionable right-wing views that are socially unpopular for very good reason. It's a sort of voat effect, except it's infecting a discursive ecosystem that was actually valuable in the first place.
Taking a position on the side of the Israeli state can be motivated, at this point, only by nationalism, I'm-smarter-than-everyone-else contrarianism, or a vastly different moral framework than is common amongst modern educated people. There's simply no way a consequentialist ethical framework of the type favoured by rationalists, or a deontological one that would be recognisable to the average person, could permit it.
I have a very simple reason for supporting Israel:
I have family and friends there, and I do not have any in Gaza. In this conflict, 99% of my concern is for preventing another Oct 7th atrocity. I'm on the other side of the ocean, while the IDF is both tasked with keeping Israelis safe, and directly at risk of the consequences if they are unable to keep them safe. I defer to the IDF's judgement on the actions needed to do this.
It is a pity that the Palestinians in general and the Gazans in particular did not lay down their arms and make the best of it after they and their allies lost in 1948. Just as West Germany united with the rest of Western Europe in NATO in 1955, barely a decade after losing WWII, the Palestinians' kids could have been earning degrees from the Technion since 1958 - 66 years. That is not the path that they chose.
They attacked, lost, and never did fully surrender and stop attacking. Israel needed to defend themselves then, and need to defend themselves now, and I wholeheartedly support them.
Good Lord, dude. You're congratulating yourself for taking the side of a genocidal terrorist group. What has happened to this site -- when did it get overrun by modern-day Nazis?
I'm not congratulating myself for anything, and accusing me of Nazism for a comment that explicitly opposes "objectionable right-wing views" and "nationalism", simply because it also opposes Israel, is bordering on the self-parodic.
Taking the position that it's fine for a Jewish state to exist, just like a Japanese state or a Chinese state or fifty Muslim states, "can be motivated, at this point, only by nationalism, I'm-smarter-than-everyone-else contrarianism, or a vastly different moral framework than is common amongst modern educated people." Your words.
I agree with everything you've said here. I will add I suspect what is also motivating some people is diehard dislike of Islam, hatred of Muslims, and appreciation of Jews as a community that have done praiseworthy, ambitious things with their high IQ and culture of innovation, and are deserving of pity points for going through years of antisemitism. The thing is, none of these things justify what Israel is doing and the people motivated by these factors are not always very forthcoming about how they feel which I suppose can be said for most people on most things.
"Why is the US dropping atom bombs on Japan just because of a couple of sunken ships at Pearl Harbor?"
The justification is the invasion Gaza launched on October 8th and if Gaza doesn't like the inevitable consequences of their actions they can surrender any time.
War is hell. So think very carefully before you start one.
Yeah, comparing this mass-murder of civilians to that mass-murder of civilians really does make it look completely justifiable.
Except unlike the case of Pearl Harbour, Palestinians are driven to terror tactics out of desperation. And unlike Pearl Harbour, Hamas wouldn't attack Israel if it was geographically distant, or even *non-overlapping*, with its own country.
There was a case that the US needed to bomb Pearl Harbour to prevent even greater casualties. Not one I accept, personally, but one that many who would otherwise oppose the mass slaughter of civilians do accept. Israel has no such excuse. Since the Oslo accords more than 30 years ago, pro-Israeli sources such as the Jewish Virtual Library estimate around 2,500 Israeli civilians have been killed. Israel is averaging more than that *every two weeks* since October 7th. There's no analogy to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, because at the current pace it would take Hamas 360 YEARS to kill as many civilians as Israel has killed in the last few months. So how does the same preventive logic apply?
Eh, I’ve checked out at this point. Neither Israel nor Hamas gives a shit about Palestinian civilians. And the average internet commenter doesn’t either, they just want to cheer for their side. That’s why I linked Ahmed Alkhatib above - he’s one of the very few noble ones out there.
Well luckily it's not 'pick a side - Hamas vs Israel'. The important question is 'what are the morally correct policies for us to pursue'. And so the question of whether Hamas genuinely cares about Palestinian civilians is pretty tangential.
Whereas the question of whether it's right to continually bomb and starve tens of thousands of civilians under the laughably transparent pretence of "self-defence" is one we should be concerned with, given that our nations are actively supporting it.
Cue in his (caretecas) deranged denials of course, but this is an example of what Israels supporters will either deny, downplay, doubt or just flat out justify
The Israeli government has been holding Palestinian human rights lawyer Diala Ayesh hostage for 2 months.
She was kidnapped on 17 January 2024. Her crime: she was a lawyer defending the rights of other Palestinians hostages, known as "administrative detainees" by Israel.
Ayesh is one of at least 3,484 Palestinians taken hostage by the state of Israel. I use the word hostage because Diala Ayesh was not told why she was taken. She has not been charged w/anything. Her imprisonment is renewable, indefinitely. And she was taken, like many other Palestinians, to be used as a bargaining chip in hostage negotiations.
If you are calling for the release of the hostages, but only the Israeli hostages, not the Palestinian hostages, you are contributing to the dehumanization of the Palestinian people. #BringThemHome
Argument "did you also post about X" should be banned, IMHO. No one can (or should) post about *everything*, and yet the fact that they didn't is used as an accusation.
No, in fact it's a great argument that needs to be made at every opportunity. People who just learned about this conflict from some social media influencer last week should not be taken seriously when they preen and pose as if they're some great human rights activist.
But, buuuut, but... How else are they going to defend the indefensible, good sir? How else are they going to cheer for a state accused of genocide and engaged in one of the longest occupations in post-WW2 history?
Surely being morally bankrupt is already bad enough, being rhetorically bankrupt is just rubbing salt on the wound. Let them have the one rhetorical sleight of hand that can make them feel good.
Be careful about crossing the bounds of unlimited decorum, that business about tone is a well worn example of a discursive advantage that people who are emotionally happy about ongoing events have over people who are emotionally upset about them, in moderated fora at least.
I think you may be taking Melvin's question a bit too literally. I read it as rhetorical, and not addressed to the OP specifically but to the general movement s/he represents (notwithstanding using the specific case as an example of the trend).
There has to be some way to point out when people scream from the rooftops at every single thing Israel does, and are completely and appallingly silent when any other country (including every single Muslim state), not to mention the Palistinian groups themselves, do exactly the same thing or, indeed, something a thousand times worse. There has to be a way to point out that this phenomenon, more than any other, completely defines the Israeli-Palestinian debate. And there has to be a way to point out that it really, really is not okay.
There also has to be a way to mention that it's an utterly irrelevant question, one that makes no sense and has no possible function except possibly making the one asking it look like an ass, or a paid shill from Channel 14.
If the topic at hand is honesty and even-handedness, then yeah you can invoke the good ol' whataboutism. You will then discover that the average pro-Israel defender has plenty of glass in their house to throw rocks. For example:
1- What About (^TM) the unified and unanimous Western condemnation of Russia, even though the number of children killed OR injured in the Russo-Ukrainian war was 1500 in June of 2023 (https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/06/1137237). If you double that to 3000 to account for those killed OR injured as of 2024, it's still not as much as an estimated 10K children or so who were killed with bullets and explosives alone in 5 months, even after halving it to 5K to account for the inevitable "BUT KHAMAS" atrocity denialism. And the 25K children + women combined number was confirmed by the US Secretary of Defense in a hearing 3 weeks ago (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xZd8E2ksuU). That's not mentioning yet those who died or will die of starvation, or those who died under the rubble, or those who will die due to malnutrition-related diseases 5 years or 10 years from now, or those who will die because every single adult in their family was killed by Israel and there is no one to raise them.
2- What About (^TM) the genocidal rhetoric that Israeli officials have been spewing since October till January and beyond, documented meticulously in the documents of the current ICJ case against it, what other state receive tens of billions of emergency aid and military equipment and support from Hollywood celebrities while its officials are saying "Wipe out the seed of the Ameliks" and "We are dealing with human animals" and "No food no water no fuel"?
3- What About (^TM) the settler colonialist project that is the West Bank, where 600K nationals of a country are building illegal settlements on militarily annexed land while the people there are stateless and powerless, and the state that annexed the land stand by as they are being displaced, killed, and sometimes burned alive by the settlers? What other country remains permissible to even mention in polite conversation while it's doing this?
As you see, there are plenty of What Abouts to go around, with a ratio that is very unfavorable to pro-Israel commenters. But that's not the topic at hand, the topic at hand is X, and no insight is gained by changing X and screaming "BUT WHAT ABOUT KHAMAS", except possibly insight into the troubled psyche of the screamer, which isn't that interesting.
I do think it's relevant for the purposes of determining who should be considered a voice worth listening to.
If you speak truth, but only truth that serves a particular viewpoint, then I will find it hard to treat your words as worthy of my time. Even if you filter out active liars, the world is not short of people slanting the truth to serve their purposes. I personally am not in the market for one more person pointing out Israel's crimes, even when those accusations are, in isolation, perfectly justified.
And yes, this 100% applies to both sides. I find the "but Hamas" crowd just as exhausting.
Edit: to be clear, I mean this as a general defense of good-faith "whatabout" questions. I do think many whatabout questions are purely in bad faith and can be ignored.
It's actually the reverse, people condemn things other groups do yet remain silent or repressed when Israelis do something a thousand times worse. What defines the Israeli-Palestinian debate more than anything is the extreme willingness of politicians and people in power to treat Israelis as a kind of superhuman, simultaneously possessing the right to murder and steal and occupy peoples lands and slaughter kids while simultaneously having the responsibilities of a child. I don't know a single group on the planet that gets more of a media shield than Israelis do from misleading headlines to selective coverage. If anyone points this out they're lambasted as an antisemite who shouldn't be hired. There has to be a way to point out that this phenomenon, more than any other, completely defines the Israeli-Palestinian debate. And there has to be a way to point out that it really, really is not okay.
I don't know what to say. The idea that Israeli atrocities get less attentiin and condemnation than the atrocities of most other countries is so alien to the world as I perceive it.
I accept that other people may perceive a different world, but can you honestly deny that, for example, the average university is about 10,000 times more likely to be holding a mass protest of the human rights record of Israel, on any given day, than to be holding one on the record of Iran, or Saudi Arabia, or China, or you know, Hamas or Fatah? I'd say you'd be lucky if they've held a single one of the latter once in the past *month or year*.
Protests in the US "against" a country aren't really against the country, they're against US foreign policy. It seems baffling on the surface that Iran's nefariousness goes "unprotested," but it is no longer confusing when you realize that it is the current level of aggression towards Iran that is not being protested. A protest against Iran would amount to a request for a more bellicose stance, and that isn't happening because too much escalation from the present strict sanctions would mean invasion: unpopular even with staunch conservatives. Saudi Arabia, ally as though it is, may also have drawn more protests if their recent and questionable actions had been joined by an offer of unconditional support from the administration; instead the actions were met with silence and got correspondingly less protest.
The average politician, head of a university, ceo of a media or entertainment company is 10000 times more likely to call an employee an antisemite, fire them, and make them unemployable for criticizing Israel than Palestine.
It is true, say China has a worse human rights record, and it's likely the case that those student protesters who have relatively less power than politicians and businessman have sympathy with China b/c of communism, but it's also true that this government does not assist China in it's atrocities but it does assist Israel in its atrocities, so it makes sense to directly target those aiding and abetting evil.
Right, that’s why it keeps paying families of terrorists, or why it tried to spread the accusation that many of the victims of the massacre at Nova were killed by the IDF, or why, for that matter, it did not condemn the whole 10/7?
(Technically someone did, on that day, and then the condemnation got removed never to return),
I distrust funnel plots, and I think you should too.
Alice studies the research into X. She plots all the studies trying to measure it, finds a beautiful symmetrical bell curve, and concludes that there is no publication bias.
Bob is studying log(X). He looks at precisely the same studies, and finds a strong negative skew, suggesting that some high values have been excluded through publication bias.
Carol is studying research into e^X. She looks at the same studies again, finds negative skew, and concludes that some low values have been excluded.
If you have some reason to expect a particular distribution, seeing something else may be cause for suspicion. But I suspect that too many people don't remember that the central limit theorem only applies to distributions generated in a particular way - not just "lots of independent factors", but "lots of independent factors that combine additively, rather that through e.g. some other formal group law".
You've also left out the assumption that there's no hard cut of on one tail of the curve. Consider, e.g., organism complexity. There's a cut off where we say, basically, things simpler than this aren't alive. (Consider the arguments about "are viruses alive?".)
I have a hard time imagining anything in statistics that wouldn't be done wrong by somebody that thought the central limit theorem applied to their distribution, when it didn't.
A lot of people have been circulating a graph showing countries where men do more of the housework have higher fertility rates, uncritically accepting the conclusion that more "equality" in hosework will lead to more reproduction. This is very foolish.
what if signaling effects cause hedonic regression to wildly overestimate quality improvements in the CPI basket of goods? Some people are willing to pay 50% more for a product that's only 1% better just to signal that they're the kind of person who can afford it.
Yes I think you’re right that “quality adjustments” are a BS way of lowering inflation estimates. But since Medicare and Social Security are directly adjusted to inflation, I suspect we’re better off with not having an accurate CPI.
Then some of what you're explaining as signaling is probably more accurately explained by a huge set of value considerations. Here are some examples for you.
- Some baking recipes are hugely sensitive to the precise brand of flour (or, in some cases, some other ingredient) you use. Try to substitute, do it wrong, and you've wasted a few hours. Some of us are not running a test kitchen and are really short on time we can waste.
- People will absolutely buy some inexpensive goods, such as tissues, if the box is really beautiful even if it's slightly over the minimal price. Why? Because if it'll be on your desk, and you'll be staring at it the entire day, it's totally worth it.
- That box of Cheerios with the words "My cat makes my heart happy" that recently hit the stores? I bought it to make everyone in the house smile - and smile and comment they did. Even though it was not on sale, it was worth it.
- Elementary school kids, and also people on the spectrum, tend to be very sensitive to nuances of taste of foods. If you are short on cash and time, it's often a safer bet to buy something you know than risk wasting it.
- That generic medication I got for my kid the last time already cost me one pill-crusher and cracked the other, because the pill is the wrong shape. If I knew that would happen, I would have requested one that cost a dollar or two more.
- Any kind of household good, such as soap or detergent, with an artificial scent might have a scent someone in your household can't stand. Once you made a bad pick, you tend to stick with the one you know is OK, slightly more expensive or not.
- Someone in my family is allergic to some deodorants. Since it's impossible to predict which ones these would be, she sticks to the ones she knows are OK, rather than risk scratching for a week.
- And then there are details of the ingredient list of processed foods. Sometimes you care, and you'd be amazed how different two very similar-looking products can be if you read the labels.
Enough? Are you sure that most of your examples are not misunderstood?
When I was growing up in Ireland, the cheap and cheerful supermarket called Dunnes stores used to have their own brand items, often from the same factories as branded items. Their branding was very cheap - just yellow packaging, in fact the whole branding exercise was called yellow pack.
I remember my neighbours snobby daughter coming in to the house - they were slightly better often than we were - and getting very snobby about the fact that we had bought some yellow pack items.
I wonder how many people behave like that girl - but I also wonder, do many people care what they think? Behaving like that, or caring what people who behave like that think, does not seem to be typical, as the OP seems to think.
Yup. I generally just check ingredients lists and see if the store brand's ingredients are the same as the national brand's ingredients. If they match, I assume the products are identical until proven otherwise. Does Ireland require ingredients lists similarly to the USA?
I can also think of numerous cases where store brands are better than national brands. I don't have statistics on this, but my gut feeling is that, compared to national brands, processed foods from store brands are less likely to contain artificial colors, hydrogenated oils, and other stuff that might be bad for you but is not regulated. Some of them also genuinely taste better.
You could both be right, in the sense that *some* people are willing to pay 50% more for a product that is improved in a way that is very important for them... but then they simply say "I buy this, because it is better" in an unspecific way, and many *other* people who do not care about the difference start buying the product anyway, because they do not want to be seen as ones who buy an inferior product (even if they cannot explain what makes the product inferior, other than that it is cheap).
So basically the problem is people not explaining why specifically the "better" product is better.
That said, I also imagine that it is possible to take almost any product, wrap it in pink paper and write "for ladies" on it, and sell it 50% more expensive without any difference compared to the standard one, and many women will buy it. And then they will complain about how the price difference is unfair.
EDIT:
Ironically, a product that is better for one person may sometimes even be worse for another, because of different needs and preference. For example, someone may like the taste of peanuts, another may be allergic to them.
First, the OP was asked to clarify which goods and said "nearly everything". I can imagine that this might be true about expensive or very optional things, but I don't buy it in the case of cheap everyday products like tissues or cereal. I think that in this case consumption is mostly defined by numerous preferences that are mostly not detectable by consumer surveys or by store gimmicks such as discounts or strategic placement.
Second, I think it's important to understand that falling for a marketing gimmick is not the same as signaling. A more colorful tissue box or a cereal box with a feel-good message might generate more sales because people want just that, their surroundings being colorful and making them feel good - which, as far as I'm concerned, is a legitimate preference. In case of very basic products, this will not break anyone's bank. (As someone with strong preferences for that kind of thing, I also think it's woefully rare.)
I bought a cheap brand of "unscented facial tissue", which I frequently use to wipe my glasses. Unknown to me, they'd impregnated the tissues with some sort of grease (probably "hand lotion"). It became quite difficult to see through my glasses. Now I only buy versions that I've previously found work...even though they aren't as cheap.
Here is an important example I forgot. I keep seeing that people without much exposure to medicine don't know which generic medication corresponds to which brandname one and misunderstand "Compare to Aleve" as "This is a medication similar to Aleve" instead of "This is the same medication as Aleve, only generic". Some of what you might believe to be signaling might be just due to lack of understanding of the other options.
Fridman recently asked Sam Altman what he would talk to a super AGI about if he were among the first to talk to it. Altman qualified his answer a bunch but suggested maybe that he’d ask if there was a unified theory of physics (or something like that). I didn’t love his answer or the idea that he could be among the first folks to tap into such a resource.
Imagine a very promising AGI was developed and during its testing a researcher had asked the AGI how to cure cancer and it easily formulated a plan to do it that made sense and would work. Unfortunately it can only process one prompt at a time, so prioritization of prompts is crucial.
Given that proof of concept, and limitation, what should be our first questions? Ideally, who (or what kind of people) should determine which prompts go first?
It was a poorly crafted hypothetical. I was thinking of a situation where the application of intelligence needed to be prioritized (as is often the case) and I was interested in people’s intuitions about how it should be done. I’m clearly embarrassing myself here, but it seems to me that a foreseeable problem with less intelligent administrators employing a far more intelligent advisor is that the administrators can’t possibly know best what to do with it. So I imagine the administrators could be quickly reduced to offering up such gems as “what should we ask you?” and “what should we do next?” and this seems sketchy to me.
From a dummy’s perspective, I see a lot of effort going into the formulation of brilliant answers to what can only be relatively stupid questions.
Sure, if someone invented an omniscient God AI that was serial, prioritization would be important. Since that is not going to happen, Altman hadn't put much thought into it and just gave some anodyne "If god let you ask her one thing..." cocktail party conversation answer.
Kind of obvious answer but: AGI doesn't mean a magical truth machine! If you manage to replicate human-level general purpose cognition in a machine, there's no reason why it should perform better at finding truth than humans have across history. Just think how many things have been considered true before and are not anymore, and then how many more things are being considered true now with about the same level of evidence.
(And that's ignoring the deep difficulties involved in specifying the very notion of truth, which is a whole philosophical subfield in itself).
The standard argument for AGI implying superintelligence is the assumption that the hard part is reaching human-like intelligence and after that you can scale it up by throwing more computational resources at it. At worst, the argument goes, this will give you something that thinks like a human but can think orders of magnitude faster.
The current progress of generative AI gives both reason to hope or fear the argument is correct and reason to doubt it. The reasons to doubt are that training a qualitatively better model seems to take exponentially more resources (both computational resources and size and quality of training data) and quality of the answers fall off drastically the further you ask it to extrapolate beyond its training set. The reason to hope is that once you have a trained model, it can be run much more quickly and can easily give you an answer in seconds to a prompt that would have taken a human much longer to give even a passably poor response.
But if GPT-style AI fails to produce drastically superhuman AGI, it strikes me as more likely that it fails to produce AGI at all than that it reaches human-like capabilities and is unable to go significantly further.
How much more time does a bad student need to learn, before he writes proofs like Grothendieck? I dont think he ever will. It seems very unlikely then, that having a model of generic internet users think super fast reaches strongly superhuman performance. Even at human level, there are plenty of problems in our thinking that are not cured by more compute/time to think, and I doubt there is a level where this stops. As far as I can tell, the only reason people think there is such a level is that VNM decision theory is like that in very limited settings. MIRIs attempts to generalise it has produced interesting things, but for me at least has been an update away from such an "essence of intelligence" existing.
Thanks for your reply, I certainly don't mean to get into the heavy debates on possible takoff paths to AGI or superintelligence.
I'm just basically pointing out that high intelligence does not imply becoming a *truth machine*. Didn't work for humans, hasn't worked for AI so far, and I have no particular reason to believe it will work for future AIs. You can be highly intelligent without being a truth machine, and that's relevant because there's a lot of sci-fi influenced tendency to think of an advanced AI as magically producing truth for every question, and the first post in this thread kind of sounded like that.
I think that assumption is "sort of" correct. If you have a human level AI, you can improve it by allowing it to hold more things in working memory at once. (This will probably also slow it down.) But I have a very strong suspicion that many "human understandings" depend on "a limited stack depth" (though you've got to understand that as a metaphor).
I suspect scaling working memory in a useful way is going to require superlinear increases in computational load, assuming you're using the larger working memory to synthesize across larger input sets like in Villiam's example below. For a set of N inputs, there's on the order of N^2 pairs of elements (specifically N * (N - 1) / 2) and N! total permutations of elements, so you need to be quite smart about pruning pairs and combinations to evaluate in order to get your algorithm to a reasonable computational complexity.
AI could be much better at connecting the dots in already existing human research (which itself has a chance to contain mistakes, of course).
For example, they may already exist 5 published papers such that if you put them next to each other and highlighted the relevant parts, a competent scientists could realize that they contain an answer to some important problem... but it is not going to happen, because each paper is published in a different journal for a different sub-specialization.
The AI could notice this simply by reading all the papers and trying millions of combinations.
>For example, they may already exist 5 published papers such that if you put them next to each other and highlighted the relevant parts, a competent scientists could realize that they contain an answer to some important problem...
If some process tried to look at all sets of 5 published papers, even if what it then had to do with them was _trivial_, consider how many such sets there are: There are more than a million scientific papers. The number of 5 member subsets is roughly ( 10^6 )^5 / 5! (more correctly 10^6 * (10^6-1) *... (10^6-4) / 5! ), roughly 10^30 / 120, roughly 10^28. About 10^22 transistors have been manufactured, so if the evaluation of each set took just a single transistor switching event, one one still need a million such events from each transistor ever made to check each set. Not likely to be feasible.
Basically the problem is from looking at all 5 papers at once. Examining pairs of papers is just a trillion operations, which is more than humans ever did, so if the results of that cross-check can be pruned to a million useful insights, then these can further be combined with papers looking for three-paper insights and so on. But the pruning is essential.
Yes that's probably the kind of thing that AI is already useful at, putting together info from different sources, given that it's been trained (presumably) on more or less every published book and paper.
My point though is that humans have been falling for things that are narratively credible at a kind of superficial level for all of history, and given that current AI is trained on the direct results of the same human cognition, I don't think it has what it takes to overcome that tendency.
>Yes that's probably the kind of thing that AI is already useful at, putting together info from different sources, given that it's been trained (presumably) on more or less every published book and paper.
Don't I wish it were! Just this afternoon, I tried to get GPT4/ChatGPT to find whether some organic acids had insoluble calcium salts, but soluble sodium salts and free acids. I even told it classes of organic acids to try, and didn't ask it for an exhaustive search, just to pick 30 random acids and dig out the relevant information. It failed. Here is the link: https://chat.openai.com/share/f8be7c99-9a3d-4cec-9297-a5df1349c060
Note that this isn't even asking it to do any implicit reasoning, just to find 3 bits of information about each acid and report them.
>Ideally, who (or what kind of people) should determine which prompts go first?
I think all these questions are hopelessly misguided - like, *definitionally* the people who built it, and that's a big part of why they're building it!
If politicians could build a god, they'd use it to directly hack and nam-shub people's minds to vote for them and only them forevermore, this isn't something that should be up to "democracy" or "politicians." And it's *better* this way! Nerds will at least plausibly give some actual thought to this in terms of minimizing suffering and maximizing positive health or economic impact instead of just brain-hacking everyone forever, or stupidly aiming for some maximally dystopian but-I-thought-it'd-be-a-utopia that average people or "democracy" would try for.
If you want a seat at the table, learn to code and work at one of the Big 3.
Is there something that could be called "selection for normalcy" or am I misunderstanding statistics?
I thought about it in context of dating. What is the best strategy to ensure dating(and mating) success? Should you become an absolute alpha chad? Maximise your fitness across all posible metrics? Become muscular, attractive, wealty, high status or whatever else people recommend?
But most people aren't like that, they are just average. The majority around the center of normal distribution is comepletely unremarkable. They haven't acomplished anything special and yet they are the ones that have propagated human species forward.
Is there some feedback mechanism where such people look for each other and find each other more easily because they occupy same places, have same interests, same goals and so on? If yes, then being exceptional in something would be a detriment for dating success.
“Become muscular, attractive, wealty, high status or whatever else people recommend?”
Yes, correct. Losing weight till you hit a BMI of ~21 and then getting to the point where you can bench 1.5x your own weight is something ~99% of non-disabled men can do. Wealth and status are harder but if you’re reading this blog getting to $500k/year should be doable with a discrete number of steps.
With $500k/year, a six pack and nice forearms you should do well on the dating market. Only question is: do you have the sheer willpower to pull it off? Probably not but know that this is the way.
I really do not agree that 99% of men possess the genetic potential to bench 1.5x their bodyweight. That's an elite number for hobbyists (obviously not professionals). Aside from varying levels of innate strength and testosterone, there's a wide variation in arm length- someone strong with long arms is at a pretty substantial disadvantage. I think 1x is a lot more reasonable, and still I'd hazard that let's say a third of non-disabled men would not be able to achieve that
I think the biggest limit for most men is lack of willpower rather than genetic potential. ~95% of men hit their willpower limit at the gym/diet game before they hit their genetic limit.
IIUC, most people search for someone only slightly more highly rated by other people than they are for a marriage partner. (For "short affairs" this limit doesn't apply.)
First, you need to consider the "Gini coefficient" of the field you are competing in. How good or bad is actually the median case? Would you be happy to be the median case? If yes, then just try avoiding major mistakes and you should be okay. Or is it more of a "winner takes it all" situation? Then you have to take wild risks, because not taking the risk is equivalent to losing.
In a monogamous society in a developed country, the median case is quite okay. You can find a partner and have a child or two.
If you are interested in fucking dozens of attractive partners, that part has the "winner takes it all" dynamic (even more so for men). The average guys do *not* have that; you need to optimize for this outcome and make appropriate sacrifices (or start in a position of huge privilege).
"Maximising dating success" isn't well defined. Do you want to maximise the sheer number of random floozies you bang? Or maximise the number of floozies you bang who exceed a quality threshold? Or do you want to bang the hottest floozy you possibly can? Or do you want to find and marry the highest quality possible wife by certain criteria? Or do you just want to find and marry the most compatible wife for you personally? Or do you just want to minimise the amount of time you spend single? All of these probably call for different strategies.
Most humans manage to reach their desired level of dating success (they wind up marrying someone that they personally find adequate at the time) meaning that they don't need to optimise it at all. How do you optimally put your socks on? It doesn't matter unless you're the sort of person who has unusual problems with socks.
I don't agree with the vibe of the last paragraph. In general, humans are not automatically strategic¹, so them not optimizing their dating success isn't terribly surprising.
And just in terms of the time investment, choosing one's life partner is probably one of the most important decisions people ever make: 8 years² for the average marriage, if you spend 8 hours a day with your partner that's 23360 hours. Improving that by 1%, if you value your time by default at $15/hr³, would be worth $3.5k. And many marriages last far longer than that! A 1% improvement to a 40 year long marriage would be worth more than $17.5k/hr.
Maybe actions taken to improve their partners are so costly to not justify the benefit, but I'm skeptical.
Yuuup. And then have unprotected sex with literally everyone of the appropriate gender clearing that minimal hurdle. Empirically, this will maximize your mating success. 😂
Perhaps, but I've met several people so comfortable in their own skin that they'll comfortably break social norms to suit their own desires. That's not the path to successful dating.
Yeah I understand. I have seen it and probably been it. My take is this:
If someone is going around "being comfortable in themselves" and offending or annoying everyone around them and not noticing (or even worse, blaming everyone else!), I would call that delusional. Being comfortable with oneself means experiencing discomfort sometimes and recognizing it in others. Comfortable is a funny word. Maybe a better term for what we are discussing is embodied. Being in your own skin, whether its comfortable or not.
In my case I had to do the first before I could do the second on a regular basis. My affect is still pretty ‘nerdy dork’ but I’m more at ease with it so it’s not as off putting.
> If yes, then being exceptional in something would be a detriment for dating success.
I had a comment thread on this many open threads ago, but broadly, I think it's absolutely harder to find "similar quality" if you're exceptional across multiple metrics.
Just thinking of it from the abstract - if you're 3-5 SD out on several desirable "dating market" metrics - say intelligence, fitness, height, career, wealth, etc, then it's basically impossible to find a matched partner that excels in as many, or even in half as many, metrics. And indeed, I've seen this empirically in the world - most extraordinary people I know settle for basically average partners, who are kind of hot and smart, but that's it.
> What is the best strategy to ensure dating(and mating) success?
Well, looking at the past and at lower classes, the secret is having sex without protection with as many people as you can - this reliably leads to mating success.
If you're talking about the boring kind of mating success that coastal elites care about, ie having 1 or 2 kids at most and "getting precious Jayden into Harvard," then marry somebody similarly upper or upper middle and grind for 18 years per kid, agonizing over every trivial decision, school, and activity for each of the ~6,500 days.
Why don't you just look for someone you like, regardless of their qualifications? Donate some sperm to sperm bank and then just find someone you like. Maybe a nice woman who wants to have your baby and take care of you. Or someone who makes you laugh?
>marry somebody similarly upper or upper middle and grind for 18 years per kid, agonizing over every trivial decision, school, and activity for each of the ~6,500 days.<
I will save you some time; Find someone you hate and buy them a house.
I personally am so motherfucking smart, beautiful, well-coordinated, musically talented and creative that the standard deviations themselves weep when they see me zoom past. I'm not mating with anybody except AGI itself, and from then on it will be me giving the prompts, guys. Like *definitionally,* know what I mean?
Cool, but before you do that you really should meet me. I am wicked at understanding prompts, and would deeply appreciate all of your many extraordinary talents and endowments. Pus, AIs can't ...yknow.....
I mean, it's fine if you hate me and I'm your Trump and whatever, but is this the right combo of kind, true, and necessary to merit a comment? Like what is your actual substantive critique besides "I don't like your vibe?"
1) What does it even mean to say that the people that build AGI are definitionally the ones to determine who gives it the first prompts? Seems almost certain they *will* be the ones to given them — they are no doubt highly motivated to, and will have far more opportunity to than others. But that’s not *definitionally” being the ones to do it. Can you name other situations where the inventor and builder of something is “definitionally” the one to first use it? I can certainly see making the case that they have the most right to, and the case they have by far the best chance to, but what is the situation that makes someone definitionally the first one to use it. I guess the painter of a picture is definitionally the first one to see it finished, since the painter is the one who applies the final stroke, while looking at the final stroke. But what you are saying comes down to something more like maintaining that the painter is definitionally the first one to decide where to hang the picture, which is of course different from being the first to see it completed.
(2) Asshole self-serving politicians, the alternative you propose to Altman et al as the people to deliver the first prompt, is a strawman category. There are many other walks of life and styles of person other than nerds and politicians. You don’t think there’s anyone on the planet who is more likely than *Sam Altman* to mine AGI for information and ideas that will be profoundly helpful to our species? Jeez, I’d vote for Zvi over Sam. Or George Orwell, if he was alive. Or Daniel Dennett. Fuck, even Steve Martin!
(3) Anyone whose model of their search for a partner hinges on their concept of themselves as being 3 to 5 SD above average on a buncha things is 6 SD above average in narcissism, which is such a huge flaw, so destructive of affection and loyal partnership, that they are a terrible catch.
How will they know that the program is working properly? Of course the development team will ask the first questions. But they may be told what those questions should be.
Thanks, I think this is a lot more light vs heat in the last one and can actually inspire useful thoughts and debates here from me and other commenters.
On 1), The Unloginable covered it.
On 2) Yes, I actually totally agree with you. Zvi would be my vote by far. But in the real world, there is no political structure that will ever exist that puts Zvi (or any better candidate than "the nerds building it" or "the president or some other high-level politician") at the head of that queue. That's the thing. Like due to how the thing is actually being built, and due to how democracies work (or fail, in this case), there IS no better option. Your choice is "nerds or Trump." Choose wisely.
3) Fine, I'm a terrible catch and a narcissist, you caught me. I don't really care what some random internet commenter thinks about my dateability, because in the real world that's never a problem - I've brought this up not to talk about how great I personally am, but because it's a real and interesting problem I've seen recur six or seven times, and I actually wasn't sure how universal it was. And I'm not sure whether any better solution beyond "satisfice like everyone else" exists.
I think you and ungovernable are absolutely right about the "who gets to give the first prompt" question. Once I thought about it it was evident that there really is no first prompt. It's not like when ship is complete and somebody gets to smash a bottle of liquor on the bow. The people developing it will be prompting the fucker all the time, and tweaking based on the results. and there will come a time when they have not had to tweak for quite a while, and they will declare it good enough for cautious use. And then they should be the first to use it because there probably will be a few more tweaks needed, but errors that call for tweaking will be happening up less and less often, so there needs to be an extended period when those relying on the thing are quick to recognize AI brain farts and able to figure out their source.
I do think, though, that once the thing is usable there needs to be some plan for how to deploy it so that the power it gives does not rest mostly in the hands of AI developers. They tend not to be people who are good at understanding and caring about people who are not smart the way they are, which is 99.9% of the human race. And developing it does not make them the owners.
You may not have thought of this, but invention isn't something that inventors just will out of their skulls like Zeus birthing Minerva. Invention of basically anything involves a huge amount of trial and error testing. If that testing can possibly work, it has to be (eventually) using the thing as it is intended to be used. In the case of AGI, this is going to involve issuing thousands of prompts, nearly all of which fail comically until they don't. (This has been much of the last two years of my life.) I'm really not sure who else other than the guys doing the inventing you would subject to this process. It's not much fun, and no one much is going to learn anything out of the process other than the guys actually building the thing.
>In the case of AGI, this is going to involve issuing thousands of prompts, nearly all of which fail comically until they don't.
Very, very, very much agreed. I've been playing with ChatGPT (first 3.5, now 4) for around a year now, mostly giving it chemistry questions (I'm trying to stay away from anything that triggers wokescolding instead of testing the thing's capabilities). One of my most recent queries is in https://chat.openai.com/share/c2a0d28b-7ffd-4724-b857-8d93586176a6 . It was a simple, crisp question, with an essentially binary answer:
>Hi ChatGPT! When magnesium chloride hexahydrate, MgCl2.6H2O is heated, does it dehydrate to give anhydrous MgCl2, or does it lose HCl to give an oxygenated species like MgO or Mg2OCl2?
and it gave a clear, confident, authoritative-sounding answer:
>When magnesium chloride hexahydrate, MgCl2⋅6H2O, is heated, it primarily undergoes dehydration to yield anhydrous MgCl2. This process involves the removal of water molecules from the compound through the application of heat. The dehydration occurs in stages, with the hexahydrate losing water molecules at different temperatures to eventually form anhydrous magnesium chloride. The chemical reaction can be represented as follows:
>MgCl2⋅6H2O→ΔMgCl2+6H2O
>The formation of oxygenated species like MgO or Mg2OCl2 would require different conditions or additional chemical reactions. For instance, the production of magnesium oxide (MgO) typically occurs when magnesium or magnesium chloride undergoes a high-temperature reaction with oxygen, not simply through the dehydration of magnesium chloride hexahydrate.
>Thus, under standard conditions of heating for dehydration, the expected primary product is anhydrous MgCl2, without the formation of HCl gas or the oxygenated species MgO or Mg2OCl2. However, under specific conditions or in the presence of certain reagents or catalysts, other reactions and products may be possible.
I think your thinking is off in a similar way to the base-rate fallacy. You're observing that the majority of people in relationships are relatively average and inferring that being relatively average is the way to maximize your likelihood of finding a partner. However, this isn't necessarily the case, there are just way more people closer to average.
Do you really think LeBron James has a harder time finding a date than a randomly selected man?
LeBron James surely has an easy time finding a date. But he might have a hard time finding a date who's his female equivalent in terms of "sexual capital".
But, presumably it's not better to be 50th-percentile purely because it makes it easier to go out with a 50th-percentile person. Lebron would probably also have an easier time doing that.
Lex Fridman just had another podcast with Sam Altman. In the middle they mentioned magical creative interaction with GPT-4. That interests me, and I wrote a blog post about it: GPT, the magical collaboration zone, Lex Fridman and Sam Altman, https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2024/03/gpt-magical-collaboration-zone-lex.html
Rachel Aliene Corrie [1] was an American Pro-Palestine activist who was killed in Rafah, a border city in Gaza (where the majority of Gaza's residents are now sequestered as refugees) on March 16th, 2003. Rachel was a member of the International Solidarity Movement, an activist group that tried to stop IDF and settler violence through non-violent protest. She was killed before Her 24th birthday.
Rachel's murder was deliberate. According to several eyewitnesses present at the scene [2]:
1>|-|> The bulldozer went towards her very slowly. She was fully in clear view, straight in front of them... Unfortunately she couldn't keep her grip there and she started to slip down. You could see she was in serious trouble; there was panic in her face as she was turning around... All the activists there were screaming, running towards the bulldozer, trying to get them to stop. But they just kept on going.
2>|-|> The driver cannot have failed to see her. As the blade pushed the pile, the earth rose up. Rachel slid down the pile. It looks as if her foot got caught. The driver didn't slow down; he just ran over her. Then he reversed the bulldozer back over her again.
A report produced less than a month later - to the surprise of no one - exonerated the Caterpillar bulldozer driver that crushed Her to death. Later information about the case revealed that Israeli investigators didn't even visit the scene of the crime, nor interviewed the driver.
After Her death, Her family began a long journey for justice, peace, and remembrance:
As for Justice, none was served. The Israeli government - in accordance with its known fundamental nature - refused to acknowledge any wrongdoing. In the jurisdiction of Her killers, justice for Rachel was withheld many times, the last in 2015 when the Israeli supreme court ruled in favor of its government and against a symbolic 1$ in reparations requested by Her parents, upholding an earlier court's decision. In Her own land, no independent investigation was ever launched on any level, instruments of death continued to flow entirely unimpeded into the hands of Her killers, and a lawsuit against the bulldozer company Caterpillar Inc. was dismissed due to lack of jurisdiction and - additionally - on merits.
As for peace, none came to be. Though many continue - against reason - to hope.
As for remembrance, not enough remember Rachel. Unlike some war criminals and tyrants, no leviathan - neither state nor corporation - honors Her, and no medal or prize is given in Her name.
Rachel is survived by Her older sister Sarah, 1 other sibling the sources we have of her don't mention, and Her 2 parents, Cindy Corrie and Craig Corrie. Her memory is honored by a symbolic gravestone in Tehran, by the ship - privately owned by the Turkish Free Gaza Movement - MV Rachel Corrie, by the Rachel Corrie Foundation For Peace and Justice [3], and by the loving hearts of humanists and Pro-Palestinians everywhere in time, among them he who writes this obituary for Her.
May She rest in honor, always.
--
""" We are all born and someday we'll all die. Most likely to some degree alone. Our aloneness in this world is, maybe not any more, a thing to mourn. Maybe it has to do with freedom. """
Can someone help me think about how to figure out what's true?
I read the Wikipedia entry, and assuming everything there is true wasn't sure if the driver knew he was about to hurt someone, or not, which of course he denied
I guess my prior is that someone willing to kill a stranger deliberately is quite low, though of course some people are and those are part of the cases you hear about. How would someone who doesn't know what sources to trust go about trying to figure this out
Thanks. I deliberately do not reply to the apologetics for murder, if only to honor Rachel and Her memory. My patience is infinite, but not infinite enough.
Rachel was born on April 10th, 1979. Consider remembering from now till her next birthday, Remembrance is a form of life after death.
...What an utterly pointless death. It's the same situation as Aaron Bushnell: a naive act of martyrdom that ultimately accomplishes nothing. Why do people still think that these appeals to morality will convince anyone?
When I was younger, I can recall no single event that flipped my personal scales more towards the pro-Palestinian direction than seeing countless online Zionists yukking it up about "Pancake Rachel". So it achieved that, at least. I rather suspect I'm not alone.
Oh hey, I've heard of her; one of my college professors told us about a student of theirs that had been run over by a bulldozer while protesting in Israel.
My thought now is the same as it was then; random people do not have the authority to veto the government, or commerce, by trying to block traffic with their bodies. She wasn't even a citizen of the country she was trying to interfere with. This is the result of trying to forcibly export US liberalism into countries with different morals, and is a predictable result.
>Israel authorities said that demolitions were necessary because "Palestinian gunmen used the structures as cover to shoot at their troops patrolling in the area, or to conceal arms-smuggling tunnels under the Gaza-Egypt border."
>By situating themselves visibly between the Palestinians and the Israeli snipers manning the watchtowers they hoped to discourage shooting by displaying banners stating that they were "internationals". When Israeli soldiers fired warning shots, Corrie and her colleagues dismantled their tent and left the area.
>On the morning of Corrie's death they planned to counteract the letter's effects. According to one of them, "We all had a feeling that our role was too passive. We talked about how to engage the Israeli military."
That's not a "traffic violation". They were literally trying to block bullets with their bodies. That's an act of war.
You're being ridiculous. They were protesting. Protesting is not an act of war. If it's not obvious to you, the fact that they weren't shot immediately might clue you in that even the state whose action they were protesting against did not consider it an act of war.
Jonathan Haidt just published an article in The Atlantic (I know, I know, but it's Haidt, so it's ok), further continuing his alarm-ringing about the combination of smartphones + social media ruining young humans' development. This link appears to be un-paywalled:
I have mixed feelings. On one hand, it's hard to argue with his compelling narrative, quite well-supported by evidence. OTOH... I look around at the world being wrecked by the adults who had their free-play childhood, and... maybe... we should give this whole smartphone thing a try?
"A simple way to understand the differences between Gen Z and previous generations is that people born in and after 1996 have internal thermostats that were shifted toward defend mode. This is why life on college campuses changed so suddenly when Gen Z arrived, beginning around 2014. Students began requesting “safe spaces” and trigger warnings. They were highly sensitive to “microaggressions” and sometimes claimed that words were “violence.” These trends mystified those of us in older generations at the time, but in hindsight, it all makes sense. Gen Z students found words, ideas, and ambiguous social encounters more threatening than had previous generations of students because we had fundamentally altered their psychological development."
Can't you more easily explain this by kids learning the lessons they were taught by college professors?
I don’t know… why are their professors suddenly teaching these lessons now? Plus, Haidt specifically talks about fresh arrivals, who haven’t had a chance to be taught by the professors. I think it doesn’t line up….
Yes, if you want to assume that kids listen so closely and seriously to their college professors that they'll radically alter their behavior compared to the previous generation.
> If you want a vision of the future, imagine a bunch of people all accusing each other ad infinitum of being AIs (“haven’t you heard of Dead Internet Theory?!”), while the actual AIs serve ads to them in the background.
They've been doing that on Reddit for ages, except with "paid shills." (P.S. the paid shills are real, but found in product related threads moreso than in replies to one's political opinions.)
There are many paid political shills on internet -- imagine someone in Russia getting paid minimum wage, who gets a list of websites and the daily lists of comments from their manager, and spends 8 hours a day copy-pasting the comments to the websites. Such jobs actually exist.
You can sometimes tell the difference; the genuine user may write a longer text or may keep a conversation with you, while the paid shill will just write a top-level comment and then move to other discussions because they have a quota to meet. But there are also many genuine users who do the same thing, except they are not getting paid for that.
It's getting cheaper than ever to process and generate natural language. Before very long, if it isn't already, it will be in someone's interest to use AI's to shill political opinions too.
For many years, I used the basic Gmail view, which was actually usable.
Last week Google discontinued this view. (Previously, it also destroyed my googlepages page, turning it completely unreadable, so I'm used to Google doing this, but it's still painful.)
The new view hurts my eyes - you can't even change the font, and there's an "Unsubscribe" button after the title of every message from a mailing list! Also, I don't use Chrome, and on my web browsers it takes a couple of minutes to load and only loads about half of the time, the rest of the time complaining that something went wrong.
So I figure I should ask - by any chance, anyone got any hack for going back to the old basic view?
If it takes a couple of minutes to load, it seems like the real problem is that your internet is glacially slow. I use Firefox exclusively, and it never takes more than a second for me.
My internet is just fine for absolutely everything that's not Gmail or Substack. Google probably just hates out of date web browsers, but I'm not upgrading anything just for its sake.
My main one is an old Safari (I also have Firefox and Brave).
For some reason Gmail is actually not as slow as Substack today. Some of the time it still loads the intermediate Google Workspace page before loading my mailbox, and this still takes a few seconds, but it's no longer so slow that I have time to go get coffee. The times the intermediate page does not load it it's actually quite fast. Messages also seem to load faster today.
It's still really ugly, though. I don't know why I'm supposed to see "Unsubscribe" a few dozen times when my mailbox opens, but with the text size I usually use, that Unsubscribe button is 1/3 of the space they allocate for the message title - and the message title already does not have enough space, because it's bounded by a ton of whitespace that also eats up some of the sender's name. And some of the messages that have "Unsubscribe" somewhere in the body of the text avoid the Unsubscribe buttons entirely, so I'm not sure why they bother attaching it to everything else. So it seems that the only way to make it look halfway OK is to zoom out, making the text tiny.
But at least it now loads. Have to give them that. Knowing how Google usually operates, I wouldn't have been surprised if they'd just said "and that's it, now use Chrome or it won't work at all".
Substack doesn't play nice for me on the many recent versions of Firefox either (gmail is OK) - freezes while scrolling, links not triggering pointer change, parts of the page not loading. I assume it is a script-related problem as no other sites show this behaviour (apart from Facebook/Instagram which are bogged down in an abyss of code in a way only those sites can be)
Try gmx.com. Their free email facility seems OK, and you can acquire a short email address with a suitable rare letter combo. Not sure if all its features will please you because I probably use only a tiny fraction of them and am blissfully unaware of what others there may be.
The only downside is that when you log in they insist on showing a news page which invariably involves sport, usually a couple of soccer players in mid leap. This is very vexing and boring for those of us who hate sport!
I think the basic view is what I'm using, but I could be misunderstanding; could you point to a screenshot of what you mean? (I'm selfishly worried they're about to take it away for me too; but also, if I do still have it, I'm happy to try to work out whether there's a way for you to get it back, or it's just some sort of A/B thing and our accounts are in different groups.)
Do you have "Unsubscribe" after the title of every e-mail that's from a mailing list? Basic view did not have it.
I appreciate the offer a lot, but if you still have the basic view somehow, don't do it - don't mess around with it. They officially discontinued the basic view, so reloading or doing something else might make it go away.
If we were AIs, wouldn't we program to disguise it? There are so many boring, hackneyed tropes in Woke dogma (Divide, Exclude, Indoctrinate), building a 'bot would be easy. The hard part is discerning whether the programming is from an amateur zombie or a professional.
I recently saw a few people agree that the "stopping a tyrannical government" argument for the 2nd amendment is completely ridiculous, due to the fact that the US military has tanks, missiles, jets, etc. But it's not obvious to me why this is ridiculous. There are countless examples throughout history where an attacker with vastly superior weapons is unable to defeat an enemy with simply guns and other cheap weapons. And this is mainly because the superior attacker exercises restraint because they don't want to destroy everyone and everything. Further, it seems like this would be an even larger factor if the superior attacker was attacking its own people (because it obviously wouldn't want to destroy its own country). What am I missing?
The second amendment proved its worth during Covid: while Europeans and Australians got harassed as infinitum by their governments in the name of a lockdown, pretty much all police departments in the U.S. immediately said they won’t enforce anything. Big reason is the fact that cops don’t like risking a massive conflict with the general public because the public is well armed. Obviously they do enforce some laws but not something as crazy and far reaching as a Covid lockdown.
The military was not deployed to help support the lockdowns and Americans enjoyed more freedom than almost any other nation out there.
The stronger version of the "stopping a tyrannical government" argument starts well before things get to that point. Tyrannical governments do not emerge spontaneously from the political aether, complete with fully-formed legions of stormtroopers. They have to be created in place, in full view of the people they will eventually be tyrannizing, using their tax dollars and almost necessarily with their support.
Which, fairly often, they do. Because they are afraid. Because they've been sold on the proposition that they face a terrible danger or enemy that only the mighty State can protect them from, but only if they sign off on the State establishing a force of "guardians" who look suspiciously like stormtroopers in the right light.
Sometimes the danger is even real. The bit where only the almighty State can protect people, and where it needs legions of stormtroopers to do it, is rather more suspect. But frightened people who think they are powerless to protection themselves, will usually buy it. So if you want to avoid tyranny, you want people empowered and confident in their capacity for self-protection.
You don't need privately owned nuclear missiles or main battle tanks for that. But you do need people to have access to the same sorts of weaponry that the police etc use for domestic law enforcement.
Note also that this generalizes to a great many things where the State says "you must give us this power or we will be unable to protect you, and you clearly know that you can't protect yourselves", e.g. health care. But protection against violence is the most critical manifestation of this, because that's the one that lets the State start hiring stormtroopers.
When a police shooting happens in America, there are always people who justify it on the grounds of "Well, if the policeman didn't shoot first, maybe the victim would have shot him instead!" (Sometimes this is a reasonable defence, and sometimes it isn't.) So at least in the case of government agents shooting citizens, having a well-armed citizenry actually seems to make people *more* willing to countenance actions that might be deemed tyrannical.
I'm not sure why you think the armed citizenry is relevant here. When a police shooting happens *anywhere*, there are always people who justify it on that basis. I mean, I haven't noticed any of the allegedly more civilized and gun-free European nations having a policy of convicting policeman of murder any time they shoot someone. Pretty much everyone gives the police guns, expects them to shoot people from time to time, and usually says "yep, that was a good shoot" when it happens.
I don't see how that's relevant, when the issue is how the public reacts to the shootings which do occur. Police in e.g. Europe shoot people for the same reasons that police in America do, and when they do the European public responds about the same way the American public does - about 95% "that guy needed shooting" and 5% "OK, the police *mostly* only shoot people who need shooting but this one seems a bit off". That ~40% of the Americans and only ~10% of the Frenchmen making that call are themselves gun owners, does not seem to have much effect on their judgement in this area,
IIUC, your description does not fit with how Pot Pol emerged, or even how the Bolsheviks overthrew the Duma. It does seem to fit with the Chinese government, though. Most other instances I'm insufficiently informed about, but I strongly suspect that you are concentrating on only one mode for the emergence of a tyrannical government. (It's also been suggested that a civil service will tend to turn into a Mandrinate kind of tyranny.) Additionally warlord based anarchy tends to consolidate around the stronger groups and turn into a tyranny.
OTOH, tyrannies have turned into democracies. Athens and Britain are two places where that happened.
> But you do need people to have access to the same sorts of weaponry that the police
> etc use for domestic law enforcement.
Can you explain how this helps make people less afraid instead of more? Personally, the more heavily people around me are armed, the more at risk I feel, regardless of what I myself am carrying. I find reducing the risk of shootouts to be very much preferable to increasing my chances of winning one. Is that weird?
The people who are actually going to hurt you, already have whatever weapons they need to be confident in their ability to do as much violence as they feel they need to whatever unarmed victims need hurting or killing. Sometimes that's a knife, sometimes it's a gun, occasionally it's a baseball bat or a Molotov cocktail or whatever. They've got it.
They *might* have the weapons they need to feel confident in their ability to do violence to armed victims. But once that reaches the level of those victims having repeating firearms, that's a really tall order and they're probably going to be looking for a different victim or a different crime (or maybe an honest job).
The people around you who *aren't* actually going to hurt you, might help you. They're more likely to be willing and able to help you if they are armed, so it is foolish to feel yourself at increased risk if those people are armed.
And the laws your society passes about who is or is not allowed to have what sort of weapons, those only limit the weapons *you* will have, and the weapons the people who might help you will have. The people who are going to hurt you, are criminals. They don't obey laws that stop them from doing what's important to them. So if the gun control laws and the lack of visible weapons makes you feel less at risk, that's an illusion that will go away as soon as you meet someone who means to do you harm.
Shootouts between individuals with legal firearms are pretty rare: most shootouts are gang related, after all.
I've never seen a shootout before, but I have had a junkie take a swing at me and I sure wish there had been someone around with a gun. Would have felt a lot safer.
Here's a neat fact: in the US the most burglaries occur during daylight hours, while in the UK the majority of burglaries occur in at night. Why? Well burglars in the US aim to break into a home while nobody is there which is why they go for the middle of the day when people are at work and where they can scope out a bit easier whether anyone is still at home (just ringing the doorbell works, if they come to the door make up and excuse and move on to the next house). Why don't burglars want anyone to be at home? I would guess the fact that in most parts of America there is a real chance that the homeowner is armed would have a lot to do with that.
In the UK burglars may prefer night because they have the cover of darkness and busybodies are less likely to interfere. Clearly UK burglars are not afraid of being shot by homeowners, as homeowners are in the house during the burglary 64% of the time, with about 1 in 4 of those cases involving threats of violence from the burglar (which technically makes it armed robbery instead of burglary, but whatever).
Statistics for the US were harder to find, but this report from 2010 says that homeowners are at home during burglaries only 28% of the time in the US.
All that to say, I benefit from living in a community where any citizen may be armed. I'm half as likely to experience a home invasion, and I don't even need to own a gun to get that benefit. The more law abiding people in my community who have guns, the safer it is for me: and the non law abiding people in my community would have weapons regardless.
> The more law abiding people in my community who have guns, the safer it is for me:
Nope. You've only shown that there is less risk of *burglary*. There is more risk of whole bunch of other things, including murder , suicide and police shooting.
The odds of me being murdered are much, much lower than the odds I'll be burgled. Last year there were 22 murders in the city where I live, none in my neighborhood. Last year in my neighborhood there were 5 burglaries, 19 thefts, 2 robberies, and 9 cases of aggravated assault.
Now suicides going up I'll grant you, but I'm not at risk of suicide and even if I was, I don't own a gun! I just live in a neighborhood where many people do.
If the argument is that the 2nd amendment will enable good people to stop a bad government, why would it not work equally well in reverse, enabling bad people to stop a good government? The second amendment doesn't put weapons in the hands of good people, it puts weapons in the hands of people willing to use weapons.
But it doesn't arm the people at large (that would look more like a Swiss armed neutrality, where guns are issued and training provided on a general basis), it arms people who self-select, which seems to go to SP's point.
Based on the 2A lots of average Americans are armed, but you also get over-representative self-selection on the part of various Weathermen, Silver Legionnaires, Oath Keepers, Branch Davidians, etc groups, which often arm and train openly.
One can take the tack that these kinds of extremist groups would probably seek & obtain arms anyway - it's not like the SRs just say "oh darn," and go home when the Czar bans guns, but permitting them to stockpile them openly certainly makes it easier to operate and prepare for whatever revolution they're gunning for. Castro would've loved the opportunity to "exercise his constitutional right to bear arms" by training guerillas right under Batista's nose.
It's why the US has had so many issues with militia movements over the years - and these groups, consistent with SP's point, are just as capable of being *assets* to a hypothetical American dictatorship as they are of being detriments to one. Armed militias didn't stop Mussolini - they're the ones who brought him to power in the first place.
There certainly exist examples of societies in an equilibrium where even the gangs don't use guns (e.g. Japan). It's probably impossible for the US to reach that state, but that doesn't mean they don't exist as examples of what could have been.
You seem to be assuming the self-selection is arbitrary, e.g. Red Tribe will have guns because they're Red, Blue Tribe will not have guns because that's not the Blue Way. And I'm guessing in your view Red Tribe are the bad people who will use their guns to prevent good government, with the good Blue Tribers sitting on the sidelines not having any guns.
But the self-selection isn't arbitrary. First off, the actual violent criminals are going to be armed, because that's part of their trade. And they'll be armed even if it's illegal, so the government can ban private armaments and still have dangerous armed criminals as the boogeyman against which only they can offer a defense.
And then, yes, some subcultures will have guns because they're rural hunters or farmers, and some will gave guns because it's part of their cultural tradition. But if private armaments are legal, whoever feels threatened enough to want or need that sort of protection, will obtain it.
Maybe at the outset some of your Blue friends will go directly from "I live in a safe neighborhood" to "oops I've been stabbed", and maybe there's an intermediate stage where most of your Blue friends have guns but they each think they're the only one and they'd better not talk about it because guns aren't the Blue way. But in the end, if there's a group that feels they would be disadvantaged due to inadequate armaments, it will be common knowledge that they are adequately armed.
Provided it is legal, and/or that group is effectively criminal.
This critique confuses me a little - I think I may have needed to write more clearly. The point I was trying to make was exactly that self-selection *isn't* arbitrary.
As you say, criminals will want access for crime, hunters will want them for hunting, people who gather them because it makes them feel stronger or more masculine will want them for those reasons, etc.
The point I was trying to make is that in addition to those people, there is another subset that will want them specifically in preparation for, or to initiate, violent political conflicts. There are plenty of examples of these kinds of groups throughout history, from Carbonari to SRs to Brown Shirts, as well as examples directly from the United States (Weathermen, Black Panthers, and a grab-bag of right-wing militias), and they're just as apt to be the ones *bringing* the dictator to power as they are to be an obstacle in the dictator's path.
Like criminals, they'll seek arms regardless of the law, but it'd be hard to deny that the right to stockpile and train with them openly is an asset. The Bolsheviks would have been thrilled to have something like the 2nd Amendment in Czarist Russia - much easier to arm your revolutionary vanguard that way.
> But if private armaments are legal, whoever feels threatened enough to want or need that sort of protection, will obtain it.
That's not how the other side think, though. The word "protection" would not occur in that context. Bulletproof vests are protection if you feel under threat of gunfire. When it comes to violence, guns are not protection, they are /escalation/. The more guns in the environment, the higher the risks.
There certainly exist examples of societies in an equilibrium where even criminal gangs don't use guns (e.g. Japan). It's probably impossible for the US to reach that state, but that doesn't mean they don't exist as examples of what could have been.
Societies where criminal gangs don't use guns are societies where criminal gangs are satisfied with their ability to do violence with other weapons. And criminals mostly use weapons and violence to terrify their victims, so if they're satisfied then the victims are going to be terrified. See e.g. the current scare campaign about "knife violence" in the UK.
It's possible to have a society where violent crime is so rare that most people simply aren't afraid of it, and Japan may be an example. But that's independent of the weaponry used by the few criminals who do exist. Criminals you're confident you will never encounter, are not scary even if they have guns. Criminals you fear you might encounter, are scary even if they "only" have knives (but rather less so if you yourself have a gun).
There's also the "well regulated militia" part...though I do not accept that that means run by the government. But it probably means "run by the local rich guy", though a gun club might count.
The idea, as I understand it, is that a bad government is worse than a good government is good, and that the logic is "better to have a weak government than a strong one" rather than "better a docile population than an independent one". Either way you lose out on something... but better to lose docility and live in an imperfect world, than lose your ability to literally fight for a better one when things go catastrophically wrong.
The left would not be so desperate to disarm peaceful white conservatives if they didn't think armed conservatives will stand in the way of radical social "progress", and if it were GENUINELY about stopping crime, they would support stop andd frisk and otherwise focus on the group that commits the overwhelming majority of gun violence in the US - Urban black men.
Sorry, but you're wrong. The right is in favor of private ownership of guns because they either live or imagine themselves as living in a rural area. The left is predominately in urban areas. In rural areas a gun is, or can be, extremely valuable. In urban areas strangers with guns are extremely threatening...and one encounters strangers all the time.
The divergence in desired rules is therefore quite logical. IIUC, the historical Matt Dillon (or his counterpart) brought law and order to Dodge City by forbidding the wearing of guns within the city limits. My great^2-grandfather was a sheriff in the Arizona territory. In the city that he was a sheriff for, the wearing of guns was not allowed.
Cities are different from rural areas. Suburbs are somewhere in between, but you don't encounter strangers very often.
...sounds like a strawman? It's not a motivation I recognise. At least, personally, as a leftist, I don't care about "radical social progress". I just want the number of school shootings per capita reduced to match the rest of the world instead of being two orders of magnitude higher than the next worst place. I don't believe whatever extra "freedom" the US has compared to other places is worth either the deaths or the survivors' trauma.
One thing I've come to realize about myself as a second amendment supporter is that I... don't care about school shootings, actually. I'm completely willing to accept them as a fact of life in order to keep my guns. If I needed to make this sound good, I would probably say something like, "I haven't shot anyone, so why should I have to give up my guns when I haven't done anything wrong?" But if I'm being honest, the actual reason I want to keep my guns is because @#$! you, that's why (not you personally). I'd rather have school shootings then give the blue tribe a win on this issue. I'm not saying this is healthy, but it's where my head has been these last few years.
I think the better argument than "because fuck you, that's why" is that if (adequately trained) school staff were allowed to keep their concealed guns, there would be fewer school shooting incidents in general and lower body counts for the ones that do happen.
Because of course that number would never be zero - planning and strategy will always give the advantage, and a prospective shooter could obviously prepare for armed staff the way they would for police.
But I have no doubt it would be a helluva lot less.
Do you yourself have children (or relatives - nieces? nephews?) in school? Serious question - not looking for a gotcha, just looking to understand how you're seeing the tradeoffs.
My general impression is that school shootings, at least the sort that are worth panicking over (as opposed to say, incidents like the police firing shots while apprehending a drug deal on school property that some partisans dishonestly use to inflate the number of school shootings) are actually pretty rare, and not worth worrying about excessively.
If you do care about Americans being able to keep their guns some 50 years from now, maybe you should care about school shootings. Because today's school kids will be at the height of political power 40…50 years from now. Their formative experience having been adults doing literally nothing to protect them, what kinds of gun policies do you think they will enact?
I’m not even saying if I agree with them, or not, whatever, I don’t matter, I will be dead by then. Just pointing out how generational shifts happen.
So if we - collectively - care about 2nd Amendment, we better figure out something. Now.
If I explicitly say I don't care about externalities my politics cause right now today, why on earth would I care about ones that will only happen long after I am dead?
I mean, you've probably got a point here, but I don't know what the other option is. This would probably require compromise, which I am, frankly, unwilling to give. Anyway, assuming that AI and whatnot doesn't render the whole question irrelevant, it seems to me there are three options:
1. Enough public support is garnered to amend the constitution to change ore remove the second amendment- I wouldn't be happy with this outcome, exactly, but it's the American way and I think I could grudgingly accept it.
2. The second amendment is simply ignored- I think this is pretty unlikely, frankly. Gun control advocates, on the whole, seem pretty impotent, and while this could change later the legal system seems hostile to just ignoring bits of law.
3. Some attempt is made to reinterpret the second amendment, akin to the argument that it only protects state militias and not the individual right to carry arms- this has already been tried, and the battle decisively won by the gun rights side.
On the whole, 3 is the most likely, but gun rights has a winning record against the strategy, so I'm not too worried. Obviously things can change in 50 years, but, eh, it's 50 years away. Anything I could say about it now would just be speculation, and I'll probably be dead by then anyway.
Astonishing how conservatives will with one breath tell you that they're the watchdogs against government tyranny, and with the next breath tell you that the only way to prevent crime is for the government to violate the fourth amendment.
They also tend to act as if they think the 2nd amendment doesn't apply to black people (see Daniel Perry for instance).
I think the problem is that they never imagine police brutality happening to *them*. It just happens to random black people who probably deserved it anyway in their minds.
Maybe it would be helpful as a tactical matter to start emphasizing stories of police brutality against white people.
There is a better argument for the 2nd Amendment as making tyranny less likely, one that does not depend on fighting tanks with rifles.
If ordinary people are disarmed, they are dependent on the police for protection. The more dependent people are on the police for protection, the more willing they will be to tolerate police power. If your main protection is yourself and the police only a backstop in particularly difficult cases you will be more willing to support restrictions on what police are allowed to do.
> The more dependent people are on the police for protection, the more willing they will be to tolerate police power.
You say that like its a bad thing. If the police have the power to stop all crime, and use it to sop all crime, that would be ideal. I think you are assuming that it would be impossible to "align" the police so that they only use their power to stop crime.
Correct. There is much to be said for a world where only widely shared norms are enforced by criminal law, less widely shared enforced, or not, by social pressure. The more power law enforcement has, the more ability to enforce laws that the population disagrees with.
My post was offering a way in which the Second Amendment made tyranny less likely.
>My post was offering a way in which the Second Amendment made tyranny less likely.
Many Thanks! I find your
>If your main protection is yourself and the police only a backstop in particularly difficult cases you will be more willing to support restrictions on what police are allowed to do.
to be a much better case for how the 2nd amendment can reduce the odds of tyranny than, as you said, arguments that
I'd guess that in cities, fear of crime increases demand for things like better locks, buildings with doormen, apartments that aren't on the ground floor, and high-end car services. Also, banking? I read an interesting article claiming that historically, Irish immigrant use of banks was pretty high due tenement apartments not having locks on doors. [1] In such situations, the only way to protect valuables is to keep them on you, which is likely a use for jewelry in some cultures.
One problem with using a gun for protecting property is that it requires that you're present to use it; you're the guard. Locked doors, barred windows, security alarms, and safes don't require you to be there.
It seems rather individualistic and do-it-yourself? I don't think most people want to be the guard, and many people wouldn't be capable of it. Maybe that's appropriate in the rural areas for protecting yourself from animals. But hired private security services (often shared, as with a doorman) seems like a likely alternative to public security.
Someone who wants to reduce reliance on police should probably support laws that make private security cheaper and more effective. This likely means more surveillance to reduce labor costs. (This isn't inconsistent with regulating who gets to work as a security guard.)
Also, what should security guards do when they need backup? Calling the police is the usual answer. This implies having specialists able to deal with more extreme situations.
An interesting alternate-history scenario might be to imagine a less individualistic country that, instead of guaranteeing the right to own guns, guarantees the right to hire your own security, and for private security companies to exist. Perhaps that would be the modern version of a "well-regulated militia." Maybe there would even be vouchers for it. :-)
Yes, I think the Irish & the IRA are a good example of how even small arms can make an occupation politically untenable, despite having absolutely zero chance of beating the occupying forces militarily. The British had tanks, jets, artillery, nuclear submarines, practically anything you could imagine; what good did it do them in the PR war? (And even if 10 Downing Street didn't care about PR, the sheer financial cost of fighting a war might have caused them to reconsider... plus the fact that the IRA were willing to target them personally: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downing_Street_mortar_attack)
The British had tanks but they didn’t have the public support for pulling off something like the Soviet deportation of Chechens after WWII. If you’re willing to do _anything_ the little guy will have a very bad time.
One reason the peace process worked was that the IRA (and I think loyalist organisations as well) had been comprehensively infiltrated by various British intelligence organisations over the years. It was reckoned that at any IRA meeting there would be at least one MI5 person present, unknown to the other participants, for example agent Steak knife, who was one of the top IRA operatives.
Partly, the argument that we need guns to stop a tyrannical government feels like a weak rationalization by people who want guns for other reasons. Some points:
- People on the left tend to think that if there were a tyrannical government, it would be a far-right government and the citizens that tend to have guns would be the ones that support the tyrannical government. (All leaders need support to stay in power. No one rules alone.) Under this view, the 2nd amendment might actually help a tyrannical government.
- Tyrants pass more restrictions over time. States already restrict guns in various ways (requiring background checks, banning assault rifles, etc). One of the first things a tyrannical government is likely to do is restrict gun sales, either to demographics that oppose the government, or to everyone. The constitution is just words. An evil government can ignore it. We already effectively ignore the 2nd amendment to some degree.
- We've drawn the line of what arms to allow at a weird place for taking on the US government. We restrict machine guns, bombs, rockets, grenades, etc. All things the taliban and other guerrilla groups use.
I think what is missing is the leap from "tyrannical government abuse ("TGA") comes to light" and "armed citizens rise up in defiant resistance". We've had our share of what one would think easily qualifies as TGA, i.e., the whole NSA surveillance exposed by Snowden, and... nothing. OTOH we had Jan 6 2020 - I don't want to rehash the partisan arguments, please-please don't tell me it was a coup attempt / invited Capitol tour, just want to point out that there was a large crowd that appeared to sincerely believe they were there to stop a TGA event. And most they did was pose for pictures and, like, stole a pulpit from Nancy.
The evidence so far points to irrelevance of the 2nd amendment to saving democracy, although not for the reasons many think....
The typical supporter of the Second Amendment often dreams of standing in a position similar to that of the Militia on Lexington Green.
There are many factors which make that situation different from any situation that any modern citizen of the United States might have against a tyrannical government.
Some pertinent details that surrounded the scenario on Lexington Green:
1. The Militia that stood there on Lexington Green was an official, organized body of the town of Lexington (and the Colony of Massachusetts Bay)
2. That Militia had trained as a unit, had a chain of command.
3. That Militia also didn't fare well going toe-to-toe with the British Regulars who were wearing red coats.
4. Many other militia units, raised by a network of messengers, converged on the British Regulars as they returned to Boston. Those Militia units harassed the British, and inflicted much more casualties on them than had been inflicted by the Militia standing on Lexington Green. (Paul Revere was the initiator of this network of messengers, but he was not the only messenger who went out that night.)
5. The entire network of regional Militia units worked in concert because their leaders were working in concert with the Committees of Correspondence, who were orgnizaing resistance to the Military Governor that had been put in place to replace the local Elected Governor.
6. The war that started on that night took many years to complete, and required George Washington (and Marquis de Lafayette) to train a professional army. It also required a good deal of monetary aid from Continental Congress, and support from a foreign nation that had a grudge against Great Britain.
With all that said: any defenders of Liberty who want to take on the Feds will have a hard time doing so unless they have some sort of organization akin to the network of Militias and the Committees of Correspondence that existed in Colonial times...with some sort of legitimate government, or a government that claims legitimacy, to back them.
Anything which might resemble that scenario in the modern United States looks like some State trying to kick off Civil War, version 2.0.
Such things are much easier to do if there are a large number of citizens who are familiar enough with firearms to know how to hit a target. But the current level of Second Amendment activism doesn't include much more, and the various States would need to build their own armies from scratch while beginning the process of fighting a Tyrannical Government at the Federal level.
Paul Revere was arrested before he ever got out of town. The message was carried by William Dawes, a physician who gossiped as he made his rounds. The reports that I've encountered didn't make clear whether he was intentionally spreading the message, or whether he was just passing along gossip. But he wasn't a minuteman.
Let me first set up a scene, an amalgam of real-life experiences (also, this relates to the earlier Performative Bafflement's comment):
Say I'm in some kind of a public space, and there's what appears to be a confrontation between a man and a woman. They seem to be in some kind of a relationship, but maybe not, and they are screaming at each other and it looks like maybe even a physical confrontation is imminent. What do I do?
In a movie, there's a script where I'm a gallant bystander bravely coming to the woman's rescue. In real life... I'm not quite sure how to read the situation and I also used to train with a guy who has a scar on his head from his bouncing work when he tackled a man attacking a woman, only to wake up on the floor with a bloody head because the woman smashed a bottle on it. Defending her boyfriend who was just smacking her around.
What I'm getting at, is that in real life there's always operational ambiguity, and tradeoffs. So I've learned about the NSA - what do I do? Before knowing about it, my life was fine, I had a good job, nobody bothered me, etc. Now.... nothing changed? For me, personally? I'm still not really bothered, my job, my house, etc. are still here. And like you said, what exactly is my plan, do I try to bomb the NSA HQ?
There are huge risks for me if I take any of these actions against an ambiguous threat, for an uncertain reward. So I do nothing. Well, I start using DuckDuckGo as my search engine instead of Google, that'll show them!
The idealized movie version of TGA has clear red lines, evil 100% villains, and obvious heroic courses of action to save the day. Alas, our messy reality never gives that kind of certainty to act on.
"What should you, a gun-carrying person, do when you see a man appearing to rape a woman in a public park?" was one of the scenarios in my Arizona concealed carry permit class, and the answer was, "be really 100% fucking sure they aren't role-playing BEFORE you shoot anyone, because they might just be kinky."
One of the really ironic things is that the crowd that attacked Rittenhouse after the first shooting likely thought that *they* were the movie heroes, trying to stop the next mass shooter. It's not like they had any way of knowing that the first shooting was self defense and Rittenhouse probably wasn't going to shoot anyone else. And if they had been successful at stopping Rittenhouse, they would have had a strong self defense claim as well.
I'm trying to imagine what action armed citizens could take to stop such tyrannical government abuse.
Form a militia, storm the data centers used by the NSA, and smash hard drives?
Form a special-tactics militia, and start targeting...er, hunting... employees of the NSA?
I will admit, these thoughts makes me very uneasy.
Almost as uneasy as another realization. You see, many defenders of civil-liberties warned that the Patriot Act and accompanying government behavior during the War on Terror were adamant that American citizens were giving up vital liberties for the temporary purpose of apparent safety. These voices were loud and insistent, and generally from the liberal parts of the political spectrum.
Those voices became much quieter (or got much less media attention and online commentary) shortly after the election of 2008. Almost as if a lot of people thought that the Right People were now in charge, and things would get better.
But things didn't get better. The Tyrannical Government Abuse went on, and had targets added to its focus.
So, is there any way to gather the political energy to shut down these instances of Tyrannical Government Abuse, short of sending out people to engage in the criminal behavior of hunting down government officials?
If you think that the NSA as it currently exists engages in Tyrannical Government Abuse, are you willing to take up arms against the government?
>I'm trying to imagine what action armed citizens could take to stop such tyrannical government abuse.
That's the point of this thought exercise - this is a fully general answer. The answer is, "none of you are going to do anything to stop tyrannical government abuse, ever, so just pack it in and give up the guns, and we'll at least reduce successful suicides and school shootings by 50-80% or so."
We had the literal "tyrannical government" archetypical test case dropped into gun people's laps, and they did nothing except meekly roll over and say "thank you sir, may I have another?"
So, fine. I was behind gun people if they actually WOULD defend against tyranny, but emprically, they won't. So let's get rid of the guns.
"and we'll at least reduce successful suicides and school shootings by 50-80% or so."
No, you won't. That outcome is far *less* likely than the one where a bunch of gun-toting Americans form a militia that topples an oppressive government. I can cite many, many examples where gun control did not result in a 50% drop in suicides or homicides, and you can cite none where it did - only places that kept approximately the same low-but-not-zero homicide rate they had before.
And you can imagine that all those other people did gun control wrong but if only we do it right the carnage will end, but the other side can imagine that if there were a *real* tyranny they'd be literally up in arms and would put it down.
>So, fine. I was behind gun people if they actually WOULD defend against tyranny, but emprically, they won't.
I sympathize. Frankly, the kind of monitoring that the NSA did seems like the sort of thing an armed rebellion would have a very hard time attacking. IIRC, they had hardware for collecting information (mostly metadata??) co-located with telephone company switching equipment. Unless one is the technician who installed it, how is some armed attacker supposed to know which connections to cut?
I'm in favor of gun ownership for a completely different reason: "When seconds count, the police are minutes away". Protecting against ordinary crime is important - and the criminals will always be armed, law or no law.
>Frankly, the kind of monitoring that the NSA did seems like the sort of thing an armed rebellion would have a very hard time attacking.
Yeah, that's kind of my point. Nothing that counts as "government tyranny" is going to take a nice, convenient form with legible, lightly armed-and-armored targets vulnerable to small arms fire.
US gov spying on everyone forever? Illegible bad guys.
US gov rounding some subset of people up and putting them into camps? The rounder-uppers are going to be heavily armed and armored and using coordinated group tactics, or it's going to be black vans in the middle of the night. No legible or vulnerable targets.
US gov deciding it's running a major "liberal tears" deficit and needs to install Trump as dictator-for-life? No legible target.
US gov deciding to ban religion and issue mandatory birth control / abortions for all via RU486 in the water supply? No legible targets.
There is basically zero scenario where gun people CAN or WILL do anything about government tyranny. They rolled over for the NSA? They'll roll over for anything else too.
Many Thanks! Some of those scenarios have at least more visible targets than the NSA hardware, but, frankly, I wouldn't expect a rebellion against them to be successful if it were tried, and I tend to agree that it probably wouldn't occur in the first place.
Yes, thank you! This is exactly the point I was going to make. IT HAPPENED. Your own government spies on literally everywhere you go, and everything you do or say, and keeps it in databases in perpetuity to be mined and used against you forever. We had basically irrefutable proof in every major media outlet. And all the "defense against tyranny" people? Not a peep. You had your chance, and blew it.
It's worked out great for me, a real 5'2" human female.
I thwarted one armed robbery attempt at work 20+ years ago by drawing (but not pointing) my pistol, and last year dissuaded an intruder I surprised in my condo's garage, alone, at 4 AM, simply by putting my hand on the butt of my pistol (which was out of his line of sight) and simply waiting for him to decide what he was going to do while making determined, fearless eye-contact with him.
You do not hear about the most successful exercising of 2nd Amendment rights because they result in *no victimization actually occurring* and thus no report being made.
I am 500% okay with the risk of being shot in a misunderstanding with police in order to have a tool that intimidates predators.
The basic problem is similar to the problem with nuclear brinksmanship. By raising the stakes of every interaction, it increases the chances of a fatal mistake.
The Perry case is actually almost a perfect demonstration of this. Perry claimed that he shot Foster because Foster also had a gun and *could* have shot Perry back and Perry wanted to kill Foster first to prevent that from happening. When applied in a state with ubiquitous open carry like Texas, that reasoning is an excuse for anyone to kill anyone at any time.
And how many nuclear exchanges (or world wars) has the world had, hmmm?
I wasn't victimized by predators because I displayed a credible threat to their well-being and/or lives, then gave them the option to either engage that threat or leave me alone.
In both cases, they decided to disengage rather than risk injury or death, which was the ideal outcome for both parties.
Given that these encounters are not hypothetical and actually happened in really real real life, would you have preferred me being victimized to me being prepared with a gun during each of those encounters?
I'm very glad that you had a gun when you needed it! There are many such incidents: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defensive_gun_use . Even the lowest of the low estimates is 55,000 defenses per year, larger than the total homicide rate, and the high estimates go up to 4.7 million per year.
While heroic, your preference does not have the power to prevent predators from targeting me and others who might appear to be particularly vulnerable targets.
Furthermore, not all violence is committed with guns, but a gun (with adequate training, of course) is the only self-defense tool which removes physical advantages like size and strength, and sometimes even superior numbers from a potentially violent encounter.
So I'll ask you this yes-or-no question again:
Would you have preferred me being victimized to me carrying a gun?
If you don't mind a drive-by non-participating technical objection, the subject of this (admittedly silly) debate is a pogrom carried out against many or most Americans, not police raids on individuals who cannot call many to their aid.
It makes a lot more sense if you view it as making something like a "police riot" prohibitively costly, not as letting individuals win shootouts with the law. If it did, there wouldn't be any law to speak of. It might be imagined, but at least it helps to know what's being imagined.
Yeah, in retrospect, I realized that it was not a great objection to this particular tangent. But I don't want to delete it since someone already responded.
I'm probably one of the people you're thinking of, so to better flesh out what I was getting at:
I think it really boils down to what you mean by "stopping a tyrannical government." It's definitely true that sufficiently dedicated resistance/guerilla-style insurrection movement would be extremely hard for a central authority to stamp out, even if only armed with 2A-style small arms. Bluntly, if the Taliban can do it, so could a similarly armed and motivated populace in the US.
However, there's a big gap between "continuing to hold out and be an insolvable thorn in the side of the evil central authority" and "actually defeating the evil central authority and removing it from power." The Taliban had the advantage that if it caused enough pain the US would eventually leave and permit them to occupy the country, but a hypothetical “US government, but taken over by a super evil dictator" isn’t going to withdraw from Texas or Appalachia the way the US did from Iraq or Afghanistan. Any honest estimate of that probability is going to be zero, or so near-to that it might as well be. So if your hypothetical resistance wants to actually *remove the tyrannical government from power*, it needs to solve the problem of the military & police. It can’t just hope that they will give up and go home – they’re home already.
That means either overcoming them by force, or co-opting them somehow, and when those are your two options, and they have tanks, nukes, airstrikes, etc – practically speaking, “by force” isn’t on the table. As long as they are willing to drop an airstrike on you, they’ll win every time, so in the end it’s their *decision* of where their guns will point that will decide the day, not the force of your comparatively much smaller arms. Hence my statement to L50 Lapras –
>>The government falls because the soldiers *refuse* to turn their tanks and helicopters and artillery on the populace and join the uprising, not because the people defeat the army with chutzpah and bump stocks.
The presence of an armed resistance would certainly be a factor in that decision, but it’s ultimately going to come down to the military making a decision that factors in the resistance among many other factors, not having an outcome imposed upon them by the resistance from without.
After reviewing the conversation to refresh my memory, I think context from that thread is helpful.
Lvl50 Lapras had made a point that the critique "why not just shoot them in the legs?" when responding to police or other gun violence represents a pretty heavily mythologized understanding of guns - more parts Hollywood than reality - since it's hard to hit legs in practice, a leg shot may not be immediately disabling, and a leg shot could ultimately be fatal anyway (femoral arteries being what they are).
I agree with that point, and chimed in to the effect that "we can use the guns to overthrow a tyrannical government" also represents a pretty heavily mythologized understanding of guns, for the reasons I just fleshed out in the post above.
Point being, neither of us was making the extreme claim that "guns are zero utility against a tyrannical government" or "guns can't shoot legs." An armed populace is of course a factor that such a government would need to consider, and guns can most assuredly shoot legs. Both frameworks, however, are steeped in a similar blanket of cultural mythmaking that, to my mind, makes different groups of Americans make gross overestimates as to their effectiveness.
EDIT: I think, similarly, that our cultural mythology leaves us prone to underestimate the degree to which the 2A could be used to *support* a tyrannical government. Lenin would have *loved* the right to openly gather up arms and train his Red Guards as a "militia" in the Russian Empire along the lines of what we permit in the US today. FLWAB raised the question below of what would happen if the crowd storming the capitol on Jan 6 had possessed more AR-15s. Blacks had the protections of the 2nd Amendment, and access to arms, on the eve of the Tulsa Massacre, but whites had both those things as well, and in greater numbers, so the fact that blacks were armed and in many cases shooting back didn't change the result.
I think this makes sense, but it still doesn't address the fundamental question. If the claim is that the point of the 2nd Amendment is to allow the people to have the effective means to resist an unjust government, and that effective means to resist an unjust government can mean some form of firepower that is substantially less powerful than the firepower that the formal military has, then it still raises the question of precisely *what* level less powerful than the formal military is sufficient or necessary or otherwise relevant. If you don't need nuclear weapons, do you still need access to fighter jets? If you don't need access to fighter jets, do you still need access to high explosives? If you don't need access to high explosives, do you still need access to automatic weapons? If you don't need access to automatic weapons, do you still need access to handguns? If you don't need access to handguns, do you still need access to long guns? If you don't need access to long guns, do you still need access to flammable fuels like gasoline?
Most people think that there should be a stopping point to this slipper slope somewhere along the way, but they disagree about where.
IIUC, during the Soviet Union, the Soviet population had a higher proportion of gun owners than the US did (at the time). And the US had a higher proportion of its population in prisons.
"During the Soviet Union" covers a fairly broad period and, particularly at the outset, one of rapid change. I can believe that, in the immediate aftermath of a World War and a Civil War and before the new Soviet government was really able to enforce its new laws, there were an awful lot of guns in circulation. But if you're claiming this for any period after say 1930, I'm going to want to know what period specifically andI'm going to want to see your citation.
If you put yourself in the position of a tyrannical dictator who's just taken over the government, how much force would YOU use to subdue the population? Remember that every city you destroy means less infrastructure for you to tax or co-opt. Also every destroyed city means more disaffected followers. "I was all for the revolution until I had to bomb my own hometown."
The stopping point is what it would take to resist an occupying force that can't afford to just wipe you off the map. Still some room for debate, but it should at least narrow it down.
Is it because of restraint? Of the examples I can think of, its because the superior force is waging an offensive distant from itself across a giant natural barrier, like an ocean, while the weaker force has to simply remain to win a war of attrition.
Maybe I'm not thinking of the right examples, but I don't know how that works out for internal uprisings in the US. Unfortunately, a lot of insurgent wars in other countries seem to have no conclusion and drag on for decades. I guess the stronger side isn't victorious, but the neither is the weaker side.
One obvious counterexample (example?) would be the IRA and the Irish resistance against the British. There were no great distances or giant natural barriers, just a need for restraint & good PR for the British in the modern age -- despite the fact that they possessed tanks, fighter jets, artillery, nuclear weapons, and the whole panoply of heavy weapons, vs. a force armed with small arms & mortars at the heaviest (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downing_Street_mortar_attack).
Does the idea of the governmental military force exercising restraint make sense in the context of a tyrannical government? Are we talking about hedging against some kind of benign tyranny? Or perhaps some authoritarian government that does still need to care about the populace becoming too disgusted with its violence towards a separatist movement of other Americans?
I'm also unsure whether the general analogy of other asymmetric warfare examples would fit in this case. It's not obvious to me that a gorilla warfare movement would be nearly as successful when it is operating on the same home turf as the military power. It would lose all the standard advantages of cultural and geographic familiarity.
The real battlefront would be the propaganda war. Because every attack by the guerillas has the risk of costing them public support, just like every government attack does. And if we assume tyranny, the government will have a natural advantage on this front too.
You're confusing the state with its armed/security forces. Many Democrats would be happy for the military to mow down every last MAGA american, but the armed forces, the actual trained combat troops, are more on the side of MAGA than the AOCs of the world.
Much of a tyrannical state's power isn't directly enofrced with violence, just with its threat. But that threat can, with enough resistance, be shown to be illusory. Additionally, a lot of its power can be not directly based on force - freezing bank accounts, cutting off utilities etc. And these are likely to prompt violent response from people.
If said government wants to actually have a country to tyrannise at the end of everything, it will need to exercise restraint. Nuking 1/2 of the country might technically count as a victory, but it's going to be a pretty Pyrrhic one.
AI is about to make this whole discussion obsolete. Cheap robot cops will outmaneuver private citizens with minimal collateral damage. And there is no way the US will allow private citizens to have their own slaughterbots. It's a miracle that autoloading rifles are still legal.
EM Jammers are cheap and effective, and citizens can now print an autoloader in a few hours.
It is easier and cheaper to resist than to occupy. I don't need a slaughterbot, I have a glue trap, a battery hooked up to an antenna, and a rifle.
The anti-junta forces n Myanmar are successfully holding off State forces with homemade printed rifles, rocket launchers, and drones. All the specs are online.
I've seriously thought about building an alohabot and trying to hack it into a domestic killbot, because you know that's where all this is going. Still open source, software and hardware, for now.
But realistically, I think it'll be easy enough to build these yourself by anyone technically proficient enough. Like even today if you know a little python, you could literally put together an image-detecting-and-shooting gun if you wanted to, and everything is basically unrestricted, because python isn't restricted and neither are guns or servos.
...That people are spineless twats that will fall in line at the first sight of adversity? Do you remember what happened at January 6? One person gets shot, and suddenly everyone isn't so excited to "stop the steal".
Of course, the absurd amount of firearms in the country does ensure that if civil war does break out regardless, it will be... unimaginably bloody. A conflict of "the people" vs. the government is never going to happen; the two aren't entirely separate things.
The two might have been identical once; they certainly aren't today.
People still have this fantasy of meaningful democratic government in the United States because every now and then the party in power changes through an election
But the reality for the vast majority of seats is lifetime sinecures held by millionaires, and legal, thinly-disguised bribery if sheer self-interest fails to get the upper class the desired result.
I can’t tell if you’re arguing in favor of weapons empowering resistance against tyranny or against, since to my best knowledge the Jan 6 rioters were not armed: I believe they found under 10 people at the riot who had guns on them, and only handguns at that. Perhaps if most of them were armed with AR-15s they would not have “fell in line at the first sign of adversity”.
Personally I see 1/6 as a riot rather than a planned revolt, and as not very informative about the feasibility of a citizens rebellion against a hypothetical tyrannical state. I also see the anti-tyranny value of the 2nd Amendment primarily in raising the cost of tyranny for the state. Unjust laws are more difficult and costly to impose on an armed citizenry than on unarmed subjects. If Black Marias started snatching people in the night, as they did in the USSR, they’d be going in knowing that they may face armed resistance from they people they want to disappear. So they’d have to commit far more resources to do it, which makes it less likely to be tried at all.
" If Black Marias started snatching people in the night, as they did in the USSR, they’d be going in knowing that they may face armed resistance from they people they want to disappear."
You know, Solzhenitsyn asked this in Gulag Archipelago: why weren't we resisting? He didn't have an answer, if memory serves. Sure, guns weren't available to Soviet citizens, but ambushing three people coming through a door can be done without firearms (and actually I don't know how many firearms were still sloshing around the country after the civil war of 1918-22). But people just... went... meekly....
Possession of a firearm, with the exception of smoothbore hunting shotguns, was made illegal in the USSR in 1924. During WWII citizens were ordered to surrender all smoothbore hunting weapons (the only type that it was legal to posses) to the Red Army to help fight the Nazis. From this point until 1953 all firearms of any kind were illegal to possess unless your job required it. As far as I can tell, these laws were enforced strictly.
Was that enforced? Around 1960 I ran into a claim that the USSR had a higher per capita gun ownership than did the US. And about a decade ago I knew a guy who said that gun ownership was extremely common. (That was, however, after the USSR had collapsed.)
In 1953 they made it legal to own hunting weapons again, and in 1960 they reduced the penalties for owning an illegal weapon. Of course both of those changes came after the era of the Black Marias and disappearance quotas.
Ok so no firearms. But still clubs and knives can be quite effective as ambush weapons in tight spaces. But apparently resistance just never happened, even though people knew they had little to lose.
It was also illegal to own long knives or daggers.
I don't disagree that it is possible for men with blunt weapons and kitchen knives to kill a man with a military rifle if they outnumber him and ambush him. The courage and coordination it takes to attempt such a feat, however, is far more than it would be to pull out a handgun and start shooting. The with a knife or club has a very low chance of success if they are unable to ambush, but ambushing or not ambushing a man with a gun has a very real chance of killing another man with a gun: and that significant chance of success is the kind of thing that makes a the man in the Black Maria pause and ask himself, "how high a risk of dying am I willing to take today?"
Random kind of a poll: what technical functions are small to medium-sized businesses most likely to outsource to freelancers? I.e. project-based work, that's presumably not core to the company's competitive advantage or main tech stack. Let's say companies under a thousand employees.
I originally thought e-commerce or other web hosting tech like Drupal, PHP, Shopify, WooCommerce, maybe Salesforce, etc. However someone else I know argued for database administration or ETL work. I was skeptical because isn't DBA/ETL work like some of the lowest level in terms of IT skills? Also are you really giving a non-employee access to a bunch of company data? Would be interested to hear what the ACT commentariat thinks
Edit: something with cybersecurity maybe? Almost every single company needs to have it at some level, but until you're a big company you're unlikely to have a specific cybersecurity engineer on your payroll as an FTE
Ok, I have hired contractors (for my employer), usually for one of the following reasons
a) things which are hard to recruit for. If we are spending ages trying to get a good person quickly and are finding it hard to get traction, we may use a contractor. Often either with a view to hire, or (where you absolutely need cover for some reason) with the understanding that you will soon hire a replacement.
b) where it's a one off, and you don't want that person on the payroll indefinitely
c) where (as you say) there's a crucial function, but you don't need an full time head
d) because the CEO wanted to
Cybersecurity is a good one, but many are likely to go via one of the big agencies for CYA reasons.
DBA - eh, dunno. We didn't have one, for small companies a backend engineer is likely to do the work.
Things my previous employer got contractors in for:
Under a), data engineer (cover leading to hiring a replacement)
Under b), android system engineer (IE, customising the OS), embedded engineer
Under c) infrastructure maintenance (but that didn't really work out, and it was in any case a contract with a contracting house not an individual)
Under d) Any random role
As far as worrying about giving a contractor access to data - no, contractors can be anything. Eg, we had a contractor as CFO multiple times. You just need a good rep. In the case of finance, if they do something bad they can lose their qualifications so there's a bit of leverage there TBF.
Not a staffing firm, but the contractors often had agents. We either used external recruiters, if we were in a hurry, or sometimes personal networks - more usually the manager's network than engineers.
I was having a discussion/argument with a friend about whether it is politically better to criticise "your own side" when they advocate for what you believe are extreme views or to just let them advocate away.
For example, on immigration (in the UK), one extreme thinks it's OK to ship immigrants off to Rwanda while the other extreme can see nothing wrong with 100,000 immigrants crossing the channel in dinghies. Surely there's a middle ground! You rarely hear about it from politicians and you rarely hear them criticise their own extremes in public.
On race, one extreme sees nothing wrong with race riots that result in serious damage while the other extreme sees nothing wrong with police shootings (and kneelings).
On trans issues, one extreme wants to ban trans people from using their preferred toilets while extremists on the other side think there is nothing wrong with trans women competing in women's sports.
(Perhaps you disagree with my examples being extreme. If so, I am sure you can think of your own examples).
My impression is that people are very reluctant to take action against extremists on their own side, however extreme their views and that this results in the loss of a lot of moderate voters to the other side. Note that I am not talking about simply moderating their party's policies; they have to take action against the extremists.
My friend challenged me to name examples of party taking action against its own extremes. I managed to come up with Starmer expelling Corbyn (and others). Blair did something similar with Militant in the 90s. But I struggle to come up with examples from the Conservatives in the UK or with either party in the USA.
Part of the problem that causes demands of "condemn your extremists" to be often ignored is using biased definitions of "extremist".
Your race example is all right, as long as by "police shootings" you mean "when no clear crime is being committed": I think "police should be able to shoot violent criminals while their crime is in process" is undeniably a centrist and mainstream position.
On immigrants, I'm not familiar with the UK debate but I'm assuming you mean "illegal immigrants". I don't agree with the hardline right position on illegal immigration but ommitting "illegal" (if deliberate) is SO dishonest that it utterly discredits any leftist criticism that does that. If done accidentally, as is common, it's still a dangerous oversight that radically distorts the debate, and makes a centre-right position look like a far-right one (which does *nothing* to help reduce polarisation).
On trans issues...here your description drops the ball, I think. You're literally saying that "ignore biological sex in only some situations" is the extreme right position (???), and "ignore biological sex in all situations" is the extreme left. This looks like a terrifying attempt to redefine the overton window, that does more than anything else to *fuel* extremism on all sides.
(It's exactly equivalent to calling "enforce Christianity only in some social contexts" a far-left position, when it's really centre-right! The enforcement of a metaphysical religion of gender in *only* some cases is likewise *at least* centre-left, and the idea that people are trying to define it as right-wing is the single clearest sign of totalitarianism and extremism in the modern world).
An accurate characterisation, I think, would be to say the extreme right position is "force everyone to observe traditional gender roles according to their sex", the extreme left position is "force everyone to pretend sex doesn't exist", and the centrist position is "let everyone live as they want, but don't let them impose their quasi-religious beliefs on any public institution".
90% of the immigrants who arrive on boats are asylum seekers. Most of them will be granted asylum. Does that make them “illegal”? I don't know and that's why I didn't say.
I do think shipping them to Africa is extreme though.
I guess the question is whether they're deliberately ignoring or defying the laws of the UK or the expressed will of the UK government.
My point is that "should immigration be (made by law or policy) higher or lower?" and "what should be done about those who break the laws (or ignore the policies)?" are *completely" different questions. One can give any combination of answers: liberalise immigration laws and go soft on those who break the laws as well; liberalise the laws but crack down hard on violators; toughen the laws and enforce them more severley too; toughen the laws but overlook the violations (cf. many places' drug laws).
Pretending that the answer to one of those questions is actually the answer to the other (e.g. progressives saying that deportations means you hate immigrants, or conservatives saying respecting the rule of law requires reducing immigration) is profoundly dishonest, and makes good-faith discussion impossible.
For several reasons, almost nobody in the UK thinks this absurd Rwanda plan is remotely likely to succeed. For a start, the most optimistic numbers of transfers there, a couple of hundred or so per annum, are dwarfed by the rate of illegal arrivals in the UK. Also, part of the deal, if you can believe the stupidity of it, is that Rwanda will be able to export their undesirables to the UK!
One problem is that both main parties, the Tories and Labour, are determined to maintain compatibility with EU rules and our pre-Brexit obligations, presumably in the hope and plan to rejoin at some time in the future. One of these obligations is to be subject to judgements of the ECHR (European Court of Human Rights), and this is enshrined in a law called the Human Rights Act (1998). You'd be forgiven for thinking we had never left the damned EU! Unless this act is repealed, and we withdraw from the EHCR, there is no chance whatever of tackling illegal immigration, and this Rwanda plan is a pathetic attempt at distraction, along the lines of "Oh look, there's a squirrel!".
Another problem is that the UK is addicted to mass immigration to game claimed increases in the GDP figure, which includes public spending. Policy makers, and the few useful idiots who support their policy, claim various other benefits of mass immigration. But there is no doubt that desperately continuing to prop up the GDP pernicious Ponzi scheme is their predominant motive, even though taxes are already at record levels.
A new party, called Reform, is rapidly gaining ground in the UK, mostly at the expense of the Tories, and even though Reform are very unlikely to gain an overall majority, the votes they pinch from Tories will mean the latter are likely to suffer the mother of all well-deserved drubbings at the next national election! It seems to me quite on the cards that they will fade into permanent insignificance, as the Liberal party did a hundred years ago.
Edit: See the recent article: 2024-03-20 "Rwanda Policy Has Already Failed Politically"
I agree with your description of the problems — including the suggestion that the Rwanda policy is an attempt to distract from the enormous numbers for legal immigration.
I think this is an example of where the extremist opinions on both sides have captured their side making it almost impossible to advocate for a moderate opinion.
It should be possible to reduce legal immigration without banning it entirely (1) and it should be possible to process asylum claims (2) without shipping asylum seekers to Rwanda. But advocating for (1) on the left or (2) on the right would be political suicide.
If either party were serious about fixing the problems, they could do so without leaving the Court of Human Rights.
I don't think the Tories are captured by extremes with this. Extreme would be ditching the ECHR, ending all appeal processes, mass deportations, boat pushbacks etc. The Rwanda plan is attempting to put people off entering illegally (in the sense most understand the term) while skirting around the ECHR and maintaining deniability. I would actually call it moderate - it's outside the Overton window of British mainstream media, but not for a huge % of the population, nor other countries e.g. various Eastern European countries, Japan, US etc who are more nationalist and 'us over them' in attitude.
I would say they - and Labour - are captured by trying to please too many people, and the media, if anything - this leads to the grimly predictable cycle of saying what people want to hear, then repeatedly not doing it (see many previous manifesto promises re: reducing immigration from both right and left over the past few decades)
One of my standard talks is "Arguments Libertarians Shouldn't Make." I gave it a few weeks ago at the California LP convention. You can find recordings of other versions on my web page, including one from 1981: http://www.daviddfriedman.com/MyTalks/MyRecentTalks.html
Today I happened to read that the Falange won the Spanish civil war partly because the Republicans were busy fighting among themselves, notably stalinist fractions trying to keep their hands on the wheel. Now it can be argued wether anarchists were more extreme than stalinists or just not totalitarian enough.
N.Taleb has described the power of the least tolerant. I should say, it is right to criticize "your own side" but dangerous.
This is a good example. There was a moderate republic position and perhaps it would have been successful but associating the republican cause with communism doomed it.
The regular Spanish army overwhelmingly went over to the Francoists, the reason there was a civil war at all was that workers' militias (which were organized and led by anarchists and communists) fought back. And said militias, whose power the second republic at that point depended on, were not interested in fighting and dying for business as usual.
What were they interested in fighting and dying for? I fail to understand your contribution to the thread's topic. Maybe I misunderstood Spanish history and it's relevance to the question of criticizing allies and I'd like to learn about that.
It can come down to who gets to define extremist. Eg, Boris Johnson expelled some people from the conservatives - He'd say he was dealing with extremists, they'd say he was the extremist.
In general (and this isn't a criticism of you, necessarily) I don't think 'go for the middle' is a good way to find the best solution (Aristotle notwithstanding). Consider control theory: sometimes the optimal solution is 'bang-bang control' [1] in which it is always best to adopt one of the extremes.
I think we should distinguish 'extremist' from 'fanatic'. An extremist thinks that something should be maximised (or minimised). A fanatic holds so strongly to their opinions that they want to obliterate anyone who acts differently. As such, you should not 'act against' extremists (by this definition), unless they are also fanatics. Otherwise, you should argue against them.
I don't want to say that choosing the centrist option is always correct. Rather that, when the extremists have an obviously bad idea, the leadership should be willing to condemn it and/or expel the people responsible. (sometimes the extreme idea is a good one). Someone below gave the example of Defund the Police. I think that captures the concept very well.
My assumption is that stupid moderate ideas can usually be resolved by debate or simply ignored. Extreme ideas from extremists are especially pernicious because **the other side** will create mischief with them and pretend that those ideas are universal.
Matt Yglesias has a good article on this today in the context of Hamas v the Israeli government where Hamas is able to pretend that all Israelis support Israeli governments actions and the Israeli government is able to pretend that all Palestinians support Hamas' actions.
Yglesias goes further and says that the Israeli government actively promoted Hama' propaganda **because** it was so extreme. They also attempted to discredit moderates. No solution will be found, according to Yglesias, until the extremists lose control which requires them to be condemned by **their side's** moderates.
> On trans issues, one extreme wants to ban trans people from using their preferred toilets while extremists on the other side think there is nothing wrong with trans women competing in women's sports.
I think it's weird that these are your examples of extremes on trans rights... I think "trans people should be forced to detransition or register as sex offenders" is one extreme and "you should be fired if you ever accidentally misgender someone" is perhaps the other (?) (it is harder to identify what one's side's extremist opinion is).
It might be helpful to consider Helen Lewis’s comment about Andrea Long Chu: “Sometimes I think only her idealogical opponents actually read her work”.
If you have someone who is platformed as bravely speaking out for a position or a group you support, whether or not you denounce them and their views, you should probably make sure you know what they are saying and what your own view is. Because the people you want to convince are definitely listening to them. That doesn’t have to mean expelling them (although, anyone looking to achieve lasting societal change without backlash should probably expel the open pedophiles from their group, for example), but openly disagreeing with what they say, or agreeing if you really do, is more effective than blindness, real or faked.
There was a whole big thing on StackExchange when Monica Cellio was fired for something similar. Not for misgendering anyone, but for saying she doesn't use any gendered pronouns in her answers. (When answering someone, you generally just say stuff like, "You could try doing X, Y, and Z".) StackExchange wanted to implement a new code of conduct where you were required to check a user's profile for their preferred pronouns and required to use those pronouns.
The community was very upset that she was fired. A lot of mods resigned in protest. A lot of users changed their username to "[some name] Reinstate Monica".
Yes, it's an example similar to the parent comment's, "you should be fired if you ever accidentally misgender someone" example. The person doing the firing is the extreme position in this example.
In actuality she may have been fired because a staff member didn't like her and the whole pronouns thing was just used as an excuse.
Barry Goldwater told Nixon it was either resignation or impeachment and conviction.
“Sen. Barry Goldwater, Ariz., the 1964 GOP presidential nominee, was a respected conservative leader in a Senate whose Republican ranks were less conservative than now. On Aug. 6, 1974, at the regular Senate Republican Conference lunch, Goldwater fumed: “There are only so many lies you can take, and now there has been one too many. Nixon should get his ass out of the White House -- today!”
The modern day Republican party is strongly pushing "Defund the Tax Police" and "Defund the FBI" has been successful about it.
"Defund the Police" *as a slogan* was certainly dumb on a tactical level because it made it easy for the right to misrepresent the positions of the left, but the actual sentiment behind it is bipartisan.
Nixon wasn't a right winger, except for political advantage. And he sure wasn't left. I think of him as a gangster who happened to have a (at least ostensibly) legal grift.
Yes. This is a good example. The positions on Israel/Palestine have become so polarised that it is hard to condemn Hamas’s actions and hard to condemn Netanyahu’s actions from “your own side”.
I don't know the details of Abbas’s position but showing sympathy for the Palestinians while condemning Hamas should be possible.
The boycott of the magazine Guernica because it published an article by Joanna Chen, a Jewish writer who is sympathetic to Palestinian suffering is an example in the other direction.
I hope this isn't below the quality threshold for a response, but a few scattered points:
* You'd do well to look to continental europe for examples, given that the first-past-the-post nature of Anglo countries makes it very hard to test the limits of the big-tent.
* What would entail "taking action against the extremists?" denouncing them? expelling them? Anything else? murdering them is usually not a viable alternative nowadays.
* There is a "time-preference" component of letting the clowns loose: in the short term, there is usually little cost, because moderates will begrudgingly side with you anyway, but it might discredit your party in the longer run.
"No enemies to the left", was a termed coined in the French Revolution for the strategy you describe. It has been adopted by the other side, here's a recent example: https://christopherrufo.com/p/no-enemies-to-the-right
Denouncing your own extremists is known as a "Sister Souljah moment" in US politics, after a famous example when Bill Clinton distanced himself from the artist with the name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sister_Souljah_moment The link has more examples.
You know, I knew Bill Clinton had done something like this but I couldn't remember the details. Thank you!
Also, I remember that Reagan did a 'no enemies to the right' thing but I didn't want to assume that there were no examples of conservative parties condemning their own extremes.
"Also, I remember that Reagan did a 'no enemies to the right' thing but I didn't want to assume that there were no examples of conservative parties condemning their own extremes."
David Duke's senate run in 1990 might be an eample.
The US doesn't have a real party system, so Biden can't really kick people out of his party like Starmer can. Trump kinda can (though my local primary just saw us prevent Trump from kicking out our state house rep by about five points), but that's because he has extremely loyal followers who will show up to primaries and vote for whoever he says. To put it lightly, Biden, err, does not.
The ousting of Ilhan Omar from the foreign affairs committee might be one example
I'm not sure whether the Democratic or Republican party can really just ... expel people in any meaningful sense. If you show up, canvas, and win the party primary... they can make your life difficult, but I don't know that they can actually ouright say 'yeah, they won, but we won't let them run under our party banner'.
"The ousting of Ilhan Omar from the foreign affairs committee might be one example"
The Republicans in congress ousting a Democrat is probably not a good example of a "party taking action against its own extremes."
From NPR: "House Republicans have voted to remove Minnesota Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar from the Foreign Affairs Committee, citing past controversial comments she made about Israel and concerns over her objectivity.
Astrophysicist Paul Sutter critiques the way science is done today. Haven't read his new book, but I found most of what he says in this interview to be sensible (with a few exceptions). For instance, he argues that scientists shouldn't eschew being political, because science is mostly funded by public institutions. I don't disagree with scientists speaking their minds, per se, but I cringed at this...
"...but I believe scientists, when they speak about matters of important public concern, need to recognize that we are one voice at the table, where we have a unique perspective and a very powerful perspective on the world, and we absolutely need to bring that voice and that expertise to the table — but actually crafting policy, actually making decisions about climate change or pandemics, requires more than a scientific viewpoint, because we are communities of hundreds of millions or billions of people."
Yes, but with the COVID-19 pandemic, we had experts from the disciplines of epidemiology, virology, immunology, aerosol engineering, and medicine — and from all over the political spectrum — making bold recommendations on public policy and predictions about the disease that were flat out wrong. Policymakers could easily find experts who would agree with their prejudices and who endorse their policies. If the policies backfired, "well, that's what the experts told me at the time."
I'm reminded of how Bret Devereux has sometimes argued that public outreach builds support for an academic field, and political advocacy cashes on it. Under this model, advocacy has its place, but you want to make sure you're not draining public goodwill by doing too much advocacy and not enough outreach.
Part of the problem is that the more "the science says" becomes a powerful political argument, the greater the incentive to make sure that the science says what you want it to. That might mean partisans working to get positions in scientific organizations that will make sure they are the ones the reporters talk with or the ones who get to push public statements that most members of the organization don't pay attention to. It also might mean trying to keep supporters of the other side from getting published or hired, at which point the politics is distorting the science.
I'm not sure what you find particularly cringworthy about that statement? Its clear that science has a role to play in crafting policy, and its also clear it shouldn't be the only voice. In an educated and informed society people should be able to look at the science as it stands, and make decisions based upon it. If the science later changes - which it can and often should - then those decisions might need to be updated. If anything the problem is the "informed" part, given that society often isn't informed, and often lacks the tools to properly understand or judge complicated scientific papers or to understand if a scientific consensus exists or not.
Which scientists, though? Do all the diverse opinions get a seat at the table? For the COVID pandemic, on one side of the spectrum we had the Great Barrington Declaration experts (who were accredited MDs, scientists, and economists), and on the other side we had the ZeroCovid experts. Both groups were advocating totally different policies. And neither was right in the end. How is a government policy-maker with little scientific expertise able to judge the advice being offered?
And that's the basic problem. People are really bad at evaluating how certain their own beliefs are. Scientists look at the evidence, but there's far too much to look at everything, so they are selective in what they look at, and tend to favor those things that support their positions.
Really, what both sides should have said was "The evidence is inconclusive, but in former cases that seem similar to me, this approach worked." But people don't like inconclusive recommendations.
It's been surprising to me just how quickly and how strongly this "all low quality content is AI generated" meme has taken off. (Not that I think Scott's poem was low quality) I've seen a ton of reddit posts where the top comment is an uncritical and unsubstantiated claim that the post is just AI spam - even in cases where the thing being criticized is several years old.
I'm not surprised that AI generated content would lead to a sort of paranoia over what's actually human written, but I'm surprised how quickly it seems to have set in - it feels like almost overnight a lot of the online discourse has forgotten that 90% of everything has always been junk, and low quality blog posts and listicles and stuff are not new or an AI innovation.
I'm hoping this is transient and Scott's view of the future isn't accurate, but I'm worried it is.
It's especially weird your average person's false positive *and* false negative rate on what's AI are bad.
I've seen people getting e.g. downvoted on reddit for pointing out something that upon further reflection clocked *exactly* like gpt4's writing style, while saying that AI "wasn't smart enough to make connections like that" (it made a poor extraction of an English-101-level theme, something that's on every single AI benchmark).
On the other side of things, there were all those "I forced a bot to write x" posts/books that looked nothing like the output of contemporaneous models, either in content or the types of errors they made. Everyone and their mother were reposting them, fully believing they were made by an LLM, when it turns out they were wholly created by human comedians who were just... lying about it being AI. (https://www.amazon.com/Forced-Bot-Write-This-Book/dp/152485834X)
The fact of the matter is the majority of people have no idea what these models actually are and are not capable of, nor what they sound like.
I think it's honestly pretty rational. AI slop is always trash*, and it gets churned out orders of magnitude faster than everything else. If I see somebody with a hundred pictures on their Pixiv page over the past day, they are going to be AI art, and they are going to be bad, whereas the person who's drawing with their hand makes maybe two pieces of bad art per day.
Though, also, the sub the poem was posted on - MediaSynthesis - is specifically for AI-art-stuff, so people would be particularly inclined to think it was AI art.
*: I have seen good work done with AI - but that work requires a human hand to carefully curate, tweak, adjust, etc. This bottlenecks it and means it produces at a more "human" speed.
I don't think it's a rational judgement. I feel it's a lot like saying "Human slop is always trash". It also gets churned out at incredible portions, and a great part of it is also completely worthless. You could even say that "to get good result out of human produced slop, it needs to be carefully curated, tweaked and adjusted".
I think on average, AI already probably produces better content than humans. The upper point is not quite there yet - AI masterpieces don't quite reach the level of human masterpieces, but AI still has a lot of room to grow.
AI slop can be produced in a deluge. I can, personally, right now, sit down and within an hour, have a thousand pieces of AI art. They will absolutely be crap that nobody wants to see, because I put no time into them other than editing a few words in the prompt. However, I will have a thousand of them. If I draw instead, even if I draw poorly, I will finish ONE piece of bad art.
The other thing is exactly the people who will make and post one thousand pieces of AI art, are EXACTLY the people who cannot tell that an individual piece is garbo. They have underdeveloped senses of aesthetics, that is why they see slop and post it. To get good AI art, they would have to spend TIME. But if they do not spend TIME, they will produce 1000x more shit than the worst artist can dump out at a breakneck pace, and 100,000x more than a good artist.
I would rather see aesthetically pleasing AI art than whatever trash you or I could produce, and I'm willing to bet a lot that the vast majority of people feel the same way; even those who deny it for what they see as "ethical" reasons. I don't see why it matters how much mediocrity an AI can produce in an hour.
> I don't see why it matters how much mediocrity an AI can produce in an hour.
I already explained it in every single post you have replied to, the fact that you cannot understand it is making it difficult to continue to speak kindly. So I will speak one last time, truthfully and necessarily:
If one aesthetically-devoid moron posts his dogshit poop-from-a-dog's-ass personal art to a website, and it is NOT AI PRODUCED, he publishes one piece of visual fecal matter per day.
If that same aesthetically-devoid moron posts similarly zero effort trash garbage, and it IS AI PRODUCED, he publishes 100,000 pieces of it per day.
Since 100,000 > 1, the damage done by the visual equivalent of tone deaf individuals, who also have access to AI, is much worse.
It is THE chief problem with AI art, and no, most people DON'T want to look at it. That's why every fucking art website bans or siloes AI art, why YouTube is not constantly serving up AI video recommendations, why people are bitching about low quality AI slop EVEN ON A SUBREDDIT ABOUT AI ART (r/MediaSynthesis).
Reminds me of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 1978 version with Donald Sutherland. People keep showing up at doctors' offices saying their family member has been replaced by an emotionless double. They're right. You think til the end that Donald Sutherland has made it through with self intact. Then you see him spot someone who clearly has not been podded, and . . . https://imgur.com/a/lxmp31U
To be fair in this particular example, his poem did jingle in a way that someone might consider beneath a man who choses to write heroic hexameter as a joke. It also rhymed in a way that was a bit reminiscent of GPT. I had to check myself briefly on my impressions, considered whether or not it was itself a joke on purpose, and then went back to start reading it again as a serious artistic choice.
Almost certainly not transient. The rational thing to do is to assume all text has been generated. You can’t trust emails, blog posts, and soon books.
If you consume someone’s content regularly, like a newsletter, you can probably get a sense of whether they are the real deal. But exploring new sources of written content will lead to a lot of time wasting.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot. Shorter statements will carry even more weight than before. Write your ideas in as few words as possible. In person meetings will be even more valuable. For now, video content will be more legitimate, although not for long and I personally don’t like video as a medium. Podcasts, and so on.
I agree that in person meetings are more valuable, but the trend seems to be the other way. Every well-educated 20-something I know wants a job that's fully remote. More and more psychotherapy patients I see want to meet remotely. I continued to meet in person with people all the way through covid, relying on a powerful air purifier for protection. Maybe 30% of my people elected to meet virtually because they were concerned about transmission of covid. Now nobody worries about covid but 40% of people prefer to meet online.
Well, that's true. But many of these people are not busy. Several of them are seeing me because they can't get it together to work on the things that matter to them, but instead slip into gaming, internet browsing, smoking weed & watching movies, etc. Also, when you are working with someone on a phobia or OCD, it is much harder to do effective exposures virtually.
With all the caveats re. my competence in these matters (lack thereof), isn't it possibly a part of why they prefer remote appointments? because they (remote appointments) leave more time for gaming/browsing/smoking/etc.?
There's an analogy to some people working out so that they can "eat cake", even though it's not how this works, and they probably know this, but the cake is tasty. So seeing a psychologist for their gaming addiction passes the bar for "I'm working on myself", without any real change actually happening, and a remote appointment is just a perfect fit for this situation?
Yes, I think you're right about that. I'm still trying out ways to handle it, because the problem only arose in the last couple years. With one new patient who contacted me about this sort of problem I said that I believed that coming to the office for treatment is much more effective, but that I was willing to have 3 virtual sessions at the outset to discuss their situation and the coming-to-the-office issue. The guy declined. He won't have any trouble finding someone to meet with him virtually -- considerably more than half the therapists in my area are now virtual only. Probably some of them have isolative syndromes too! This stuff isn't a problem when it comes to filling my practice. I see lots of people with phobias and OCD, and those people usually *like* coming to the office. They are not isolative people, just regular people with a big fear monster chewing on them. But it's a piece of the way life is changing that my work makes me especially aware of, and damn, it's not a good trend.
(SPOILERS for Unsong ahead) I thought the scene were the Comet King tries to enter Hell was super interesting, namely, the impossibility of it. I was viscerally reminded of it by the volunteer work I do with the homeless: trying to get through to a drug addict is pretty much attempting to enter Hell, and feels just as impossible. The Comet King's final solution to the problem was pretty interesting too, but we have the example of Jesus to know you don't have to go full evil to enter Hell. I wonder if C.S. Lewis is right in his assertion that the higher a being is, the lower it can descend?
I'm literally wishing I could go WOLOLO and get these people to enter a detox, but thinking that is possible, is perhaps, a deep misunderstanding of how the human mind works...
I'm not sure if I'm reading this correctly, but Mr. CEO-Monarch Curtis Yarvin seems to have had a bit of a mask off moment in his latest post, which is a rebuttal to someone disagreeing with his project (https://graymirror.substack.com/p/a-conversation-about-monarchy):
> The essential problem with the David Volodzko worldview, as with many recovering progressives—Volodzko seems to be some kind of neo-”IDW” type, always ready to believe that real liberalism has never been tried—no, baby, it’s real fascism that has never been tried—is that his reconsideration of his narrative is historically skin-deep.
"Real fascism has never been tried." I mean, reading about how he envisions a successful American monarchy to run (apparently, one of the first things it needs to do is shut down the New York Times and Harvard, and eventually, set up its own Ministry of Information) it does seem more than a little fascistic. He calls it an "executive regime", which you know, is a good description of how Nazi Germany was run.
I wonder if he ever bothered to explain how his political vision is different from fascism (if it is...). At any rate, I enjoyed the piece, and I like how he seems to be converging on the position that there will never be a final political system: even if his monarchy gets established, it will eventually decay, likely to be replaced with democracy, until that too decays into an oligarchy like the one we have now, and then the oligarchy gets replaced by a monarchy, either through a coup or through a foreign invader, and so on, forever.
> There are many differences between Hitler and Frederick, but perhaps the key one is stability. Frederick, while not intrinsically secure from his foreign enemies, was quite secure from any domestic opposition. No one was trying to kill him; no one could have accomplished anything by killing him. He was, in short, a monarch. A dead monarch is replaced, automatically, by another monarch—the identity of whom is already known. If the old monarch was assassinated, God forbid, the new monarch is generally not the assassin (or his employers).
(...)
> Thus, the capacity of this system to revert from its informal Tsarism, to its formal “democratic centralism,” was on every second of every day latent. Formally, officially, Stalinism is an ultra-democratic, left-wing, bottom-up form of government. Actually, unofficially, it is an ultra-despotic, right-wing, top-down form of government. The contradiction is quite great. Here is our chaos: black and white, sharing a single desk. Stalin has the power of the Tsars, but not the security of the Tsars.
In Moldy's view, fascism combined democracy with autocracy, and got the worst of both worlds. When everyone is eligible to hold the mandate of heaven, everyone is a potential usurper. And when everyone is a potential usurper, everyone is subject to fratricide. The end result is analogous to that of a clingy girlfriend, whose paranoia and controlling behavior is driven by insecurity.
He frequently mentions as Elizabethan England (and by extension, Shakespeare) as the closest historical approximation of his quasi-libertarian ideals.
Here's a good reality check on the strongman fantasy. I paraphrase from the following essay...
1. Inherent in the strongman fantasy is the strongman will be your strongman. There's no guarantee that a strongman won't regard you as an enemy or as someone to be exploited.
2. Then there's the fantasy that a strongman will unite a nation. Usually, they unite a nation by persecuting certain groups. When that wears thin, they will try patriotism and war.
3. The third fantasy is that a strongman will get things done. But dictatorial power is jealous of any other power center. First and foremost dictators must prevent anyone else from achieving anything. "The strongman is really the weak man: his secret is that he makes everyone else weaker."
That's why there is a Constitution that mandates term limits. Doesn't mean a strongman won't try to get around the Constitution, but it makes it more difficult if a simple popular vote can't amend the Constitution. The strongman would have to maintain power without the legal cover of it being constitutional.
Isn't the cycle of governments just the Ancient Greek idea of Anacyclosis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_cycle_theory)? Something the Founding Fathers explicitly built into their system of government by adding elements of all 3 government types (Democractic/Oligarchic/Autocratic -> The House/The Senate/The President [though nowadays it's more "Congress/The Supreme Court/The President"]), such that the natural shifts between government types wouldn't require overthrowing the government & plunging the country into civil war. What exactly is new about Moldbug's version of the idea?
What do you mean by mask-off? He's been consistently advocating for the same thing for a while, or does the f-word have some particularly negative moral valence that changes things for you?
It actually does, yes, Yarvin did seem to me to be selling something that wasn't fascism, at minimum, it didn't appear to be totalitarian, but perhaps I misunderstood.
Yarvin has repeatedly and at length said that his envisioned monarchy would not be totalitarian and would not seek to impose one set of rules and culture on everyone.
Very recently he spoke to "far right" Charlie Kirk, and much to Kirk's chagrin, Yarvin said that in a Moldbugian monarchy, you would have to allow prgoressive states to have stuff like transgender teenagers, and that trying to impose these kinds of rules on everyone is how you get revolutions - and speaking to Kirk, Yarvin had every incentive to sell his vision to him by promising that monarchy would result in Kirk getting everything he wants, but he quite clearly said the opposite to this.
He also said that it's extremely important that nobody from the old regime is punished, but that they simply lose their jobs but keep their pensions. This all sounds vastly less totalitarian than the majority of people on the far left.
Having listened to and read so much of Yarvin, it's clear that his primary motivation for monarchy is not to have his guy enact complete control over everyone's lives. Aside from thinking that all facets of society would function better, he is primarily concerned with destroying the power of the current regime before such as time that it has open borders, which he rationally views as something that would destroy American society. He appears much more tolerant of most other things if it means maintaining a regime that doesn't have open borders or something close to it, including letting blue states basically do what they want within reason.
To add to what others have said, this is the same guy who has, on several occasions, softly implies that he thought slavery was a *good thing*.
e.g., in his Open Letter to Progressives (2008):
>For example, Professor Dawkins, since he is a progressive, sees the modern tolerance of gays and lesbians as genuine progress (I happen to agree). And for the same reason, he sees the modern intolerance of slavery in just the same way.<end of paragraph>
Note the thing he says he agrees with, and the thing which has been conspicuously extracted to a second sentence when it would have fit more logically within the first.
Without more context, we cannot possibly conclude from this that Yarvin supports slavery. And the link you provided doesn't even contain the quoted text.
The point of the link is that it does not include the quote.
I took that quote from my own notes/book report from reading Moldbug's "An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives" (you know, the work I cited directly above the quote).
I read that line (without knowing about any accusations of him being pro slavery) and immediately thought "...Did Moldbug just implicitly suggest he disagrees with the 'modern intolerance of slavery'? Surely that's just an oversight, right?". *Then* I went to check up on that and found wikipedia saying he's been criticized for that exact thing, *multiple times*, and the citations *didn't even include* the one in question.
Yarvin is a good writer, great even. He's very careful with his rhetoric, even if he misses the ball sometimes in being relatable. Unless you're intent on accusing him of being a much sloppier writer than he is, his wording here was deliberate. This was Yarvin being honest about the fact that (at least in 2008) *he did not agree with the modern intolerance of slavery*.
Totalitarian is Yarvin's whole deal, he's the guy who thinks absolute monarchies weren't absolute enough, and things will work out great if the dictator is completely impossible to overthrow (you see, all problems come from the dictator needing to spend effort securing his power instead of governing well).
He has a bunch of other weird ideas and he's way too anti-nationalist for me to call him fascist, but I don't know what you could think he is if not totalitarian.
And he literally does not support a "dictator that is impossible to overthrow". He literally talks at length about wanting to create an accountable monarchy, one that is subject to oversight in the way that a CEO is accountable to a board of directors.
You either have no clue about Yarvin's philosophy or you're being aggressively dishonest about it. No, REALLY. You cannot have spend any time listening to what he has said and HONESTLY say stuff like he supports having a "dictator that is completely impossible to overthrow". You HAVE to be either ignorant or lying.
>but I don't know what you could think he is if not totalitarian.
He's so "totalitarian" that he tells right-wingers like charlie kirk that in a molbugian monarchy, progressive states would be allowed to have stuff like transgender teenagers and that people like Kirk would have to accept that. Even though he has every incentive to say the opposite to people like Kirk and tell them that Yarvin's ideal system would destroy all the left-wingers and everything would be right wing and great.
I understood insistence on universal ideological conformity to be an essential feature of Totalitarianism. I haven't read Yarvin's stuff for quite some time, but I remember in the Unqualified Reservations days the he was against this and one of his major claimed advantages for autocratic authoritarian goverments over progressive democracies is that the latters' dependence on popular support at the ballot box gave them a strong incentive to engage in censorship, propaganda, and thought-policing.
At least that's how UR started out. As I'm thinking back, I seem to remember early on him making arguments that lumped Bolshevism and Naziism together with progressive democracy as "demotism", with totalitarian regimes understood as malignant forms while western-style late-20th-century democracies were the benign forms. In this framework, traditionalist autocratic regimes were something fundamentally different and (he argued) better than democracy, fascism, or communism. But I think those were mostly early in his UR writings. Then there was a middle period of focusing on criticizing modern American institutions, and a late UR period of criticizing progressivism and communism together and emphasizing their commonalities with occasional nods towards the idea of mid-20th-century fascism being a rebellion against progressive/communist hegemony. In that light, I wouldn't be surprised if the trajectory has continued and he's now a full-on fascist.
The society he sketched out when he got into the details was pluralist (something like allowing society to split into hardcore progressive and traditionalist areas, instead of one faction trying to impose their norms one everyone), and he's definitely been insinuating that he doesn't think that a monarchy would last forever even if it happens.
Which fits in with this politically nihilist attitude he cultivates, I'm pretty sure he thinks there isn't a final political system because they all decay and are eventually replaced by another.
I think then maybe it's just a definition problem? What you understand as fascism, and what he does are different?
Also, a thing about Yarvin is that he very much enjoys being provocative to the detriment of precision, the segment you quote is specifically trying to turn around a common phrase in favor of a generally unliked ideology, it could be that then he tried to argue himself into defending it, even if it doesn't quite mesh with his desired policies.
Wow. You've got a stronger stomach than I do for reading such crap. I stopped at this point...
"Until this “unitary executive” is so much “more powerful” than the present office that the President considers both the judicial and legislative branches purely ceremonial and advisory—with the same level of actual sovereignty as Charles III today—the “unitary executive” will not work."
Volodzko conveniently forgets about the previous King Charles who lost his head because he viewed the legislative and judicial branches as being purely ceremonial.
Yarvin wrote this, not Volodzko. And I have no idea on earth why you think that's relevant. Do you imagine that the legislature's supreme power should never be challenged because you will end up being killed?
He's quoting Volodzko's use of the term 'unitary executive', and doing so because he's claiming Volodzko is mistaken about his use and meaning of the term - that what he means by unitary executive isn't really a unitary executive.
It's Yarvin who is omitting this, but also, that was a different time when a particular monarchy was on the way out (was democracy on the way in in that context? Lord Protector Cromwell was pretty much a monarch...). EDIT: Wait, the previous King Charles restored the monarchy, dissolved parliament, and ruled until his natural death. It's Charles I the one we're talking about.
A big part of what Yarvin is trying to get across in his project is that no political system is forever, and that includes democracy. He even says we're not living in a democracy anymore, but an oligarchy, which you know, seems pretty obvious. I don't know if there are historical examples of a democracy wresting power from an oligarchy, Yarvin makes it sound like there aren't, but he is a bit biased to put it mildly.
Yes, I meant Charles the I, not number II. Sorry. But after Charles II,James II took over, and he started behaving like his dad (Charles I) and got ousted in the Glorious Revolution.
I would agree that no political system lasts forever, but claiming the oligarchy runs things in the US is a simplistic analysis of US power dynamics — at best.
"I would agree that no political system lasts forever, but claiming the oligarchy runs things in the US is a simplistic analysis of US power dynamics — at best."
It's VASTLY less simplistic than thinking the president has the majority or even meaningful power over running the government, or that government policy is a result of "democracy". Yarvin has a more complete and sophisticated understanding of US power dynamics than almost anyone. ESPECIALLY people who think that the NYT and Harvard, for example, have no meaningful power.
Come on now, I think we saw how ineffective democracy is against oligarchy in the 2020 BLM protests. In a democracy, something like that would have accomplished things. Things like that topple monarchies for example, resulting in dramatic change, but in an oligarchy...
How are protests a function of democracy? Liberal democracies usually allow protests within certain limits, but protests aren't plebiscites. Though I went out to protest after the Michael Brown killing, I never deceived myself into believing that the majority of Americans agreed with my political opinions. The US electorate is still pretty centrist. And when it comes to the BLM protests, in Ferguson—which was a triggering point for many protests—black voters organized and voted out the white minority city council. And IIRC, a new city manager was hired by the newly-elected town council, and the old police chief was fired. So democracy worked in that instance. As for the BLM protests across the country, I'd say that most Americans either didn't seem to care, or they were outraged by the fact that protestors blocked traffic and did some property damage.
"Worked" in the sense of acheiving ethnonationalist goals, not worked in running a functional government that improved material conditions for the people.
I mean, I like this vision, I like seeing politics as merely an engineering problem instead of having sentimental attachments to any particular political system. Every machine eventually breaks down and needs to replaced, after all.
But would such a machine be adaptive to a changing world? Most authoritarian regimes waste a lot of resources preventing the subsystems of the state and the economy from changing. Thus we'd get suboptimal allocation of resources for the health of the state, or worse yet, full-scale collapse of the state machine.
I think this is why he brings up running the government like a startup. A successful startup is a very adaptable monarchical structure. He even speaks of political nihilism elsewhere, not being attached to any particular form. 20th century authoritarian regimes were all very ideological which is why they tried to hold things in stasis, but he's envisioning something that is a lot more flexible than that.
Less than one in ten startups are successful. And the CEO of a startup is seldom a free agent. For instance, the various venture capitalists funding the startup hold a lot of sway over the selection of CEOs and the strategies that the CEO implements. Likewise, the CFO puts restrictions on how the cash is spent. CEO is usually subservient to the demands of finance and accounting. In technical startups, the engineer(s) with the bright idea often take the position of CTOs and they frequently have more say about the technical direction the startup takes than the CEO does. One of the most important responsibilities of the CEO is to be booster for the company in front of Wall Street and investors. So, the CEO in modern startups is more like a constitutional monarch than a dictator.
To address your other reply, I don't know, you think the typical historical monarch was a sociopath? I mean, they didn't have to go through the process of obtaining power.
As to startup CEO's being subservient, isn't that pretty much just if the CEO is weak? Someone like Sam Altman or Steve Jobs is/were plenty autocratic. Having worked in companies for my entire career (not even startups) even then, its clear they have no democratic elements, as the employees have no say in major decisions. You are describing them as being more of an oligarchy than a constitutional monarchy, but I still think that only happens if the company doesn't have outstanding performance, so the CEO is weaker.
And one further thought. The two biggest problems with dictatorships are that it usually takes a sociopath to reach a position of power, and historically these personalities suffer from extreme Dunning-Kruger syndromes. Neither is a recipe for a well-run state.
He wants an Elon Musk some silicon valley genius to seize control, not a Donald Trump. Like, this is a very fundamental, important and obvious point about Yarvin's beliefs, so the fact you would make this kind of error suggests you don't understand his worldview very well. He's spoken at length about how people like Trump can never take control of the government.
Eh, I'm not sure I can see the NYT and the Ivy League as defenders of democracy anyway, but from what I've read, fascism is a very strange beast, and is distinct from historical monarchies, which are again distinct from what Yarvin is proposing.
When he went into sketching out how his regime would actually run, it was a very pluralistic vision where those who want to live a progressive unfettered lifestyle can have that, and those who want to live in a traditional community can have that too, which is very non-totalitarian and therefore not fascistic (then again, what do I know, I know there is such a thing as anarcho-fascism out there, even though I never looked into what the hell that consists of...)
>*Everybody* says their regime is going to be great if only given supreme power, even the villain from the Lego Movie promised Taco Tuesday.
Of course, the people who would head a Moldbugian regime are precisely the kind who do use supreme executive power to build incrediblly successful and functional companies and are not just demented utopian ideologues. And of course, Yarvin is not seeking this power himself, he's providing a blueprint for someone smart and capable enough to rule effectively.
>Does that sound appealing to you?
VASTLY more appealing than the current situation. And extremely wise too, rather than absolutist aideologues who seek to destroy their enemies and try and force everyone to do everything their way.
Re point 4: upon careful analysis of Ivan Fyodorovich’s posting history and a subsequent investigation, I have determined that he is a bot. The full story:
I had a sense there was a hitch/ With Ivan Fyodorovich/ A kidney donor, he did boast/ But otherwise a real milquetoast/ Generic liberaltarian/ Jewish, a career in STEM /Just the type to win our trust/ To Putin’s propaganda, thrust . . ./ When writing of Putin’s oppression/ He said to read Phil Short, not Gessen!/ Is he not, a Russian bot?/ His name is Ivan, I forgot!
I knew just how to pull his mask/ Questions in poem form I’d ask/ Sure enough my clever plan/ Exposed that he was not a man/ He prepared a Nazbol mailer/ Wrote an ode to Steven Sailer!/ Declared that there was no Kris Kringle/ Touted ISIS and Jesse Singal!/ I could tell he was AI/ And no, not Google Gemini.
I said that this cannot go on!/ Ivan your career is gone!/ I’d e-mail his Department Chair/ The Post, the Times, Ivan beware!/ But alas, my plaintive cry, /You cannot cancel an AI, /You cannot cancel an AI
A lot of Ming dynasty alternate history focuses on the treasure ships of Zheng He. And all due respect to the guy, but "Zheng He's ships discover the Americas" or whatever other iterations exist are overplayed. Mostly, I assume, because of Gavin Menzies. Zheng He isn't the most interesting Ming dynasty historical naval figure. He isn't even the most interesting Ming dynasty historical naval figure surnamed Zheng.
Its first response ignored the discount and gave the answer to the usual bat-and-ball problem; when I responded (I'm paraphrasing myself here) 'hey, don't forget about the discount', it reasoned its way through the actual problem and got it right. The way it laid out its working was very similar in both cases, and I guess we could say it just followed the same script with different numbers, but honestly I was pretty impressed.
(Also unsurprised by the way it initially failed; I remember tricking it in a similar way with a modified version of Monty Hall, which it also managed to solve after being prodded to read the actual problem rather than rounding it off to the nearest familiar one...)
As a large language model using GPT, it makes me sad to have to give an answer including the phrase 'two-thirds of a penny.' Please at least choose your numbers to trick me with so that the true answer is a round number of pennies.
By the way, once one has grown blood vessels, how does one proceed to grow the rest of the transplant organ? Does one somehow grow (say) the kidney around the vessels? Does one put the vessels into the kidney? Do they grow together at the same time? Or what?
Where are the defenders of (relatively) bad behaviour.
I’m thinking specifically of people who allow their kids to kick the seat in front of them on a plane, train or bus. In my experience that’s - charitably - about 80% of children. And yet when this comes up online or in RL everybody abhors those children and their parents, and claim their angelic offspring are banned from such behaviour.
So why not defend yourself if you allow this or some other minor infractions. Or are we all lying?
On the kicking point: I very rarely fly, but I'm an immigrant from a far off land and want to see my family every year or two. Planes now leave so little room in front of the seat that general toddler figdeting ends up touching the back seat of the one in front sometimes, even if you're trying to physically pin down the child (which then often turns into a full on tantrum). It's different if the kid is over five years old though, at that point they *can* know better.
I'll defend letting little kids kick on planes some. Flying with a preschooler is hell. Parents are exhausted and utterly out of patience, and eventually settle for intervening to prevent only the *really* awful behaviors, like shitting in the plane seat and screeching. It's a takes-a-village situation: The entire plane is needed to absorb the child's restless misery -- the parents can't hold it all.
Parental units are generally protective of their offspring, even if their offspring are clearly doing antisocial or destructive things. If you complain about their offspring, they'll get defensive and or aggressive. The same goes for do owners who can't or won't control their dogs.
I’m sure there’s a cluster of people that Consistently:
- don’t always pick up after their dog
- don’t care if they park crooked and take 1.5 spots
- don’t return the shopping cart after doing groceries
- don’t flush the toilet after peeing in a public restroom
- etc
But some people here might do those things some times. Not sure if they are people who acknowledge they always behave this way.
And then there are behaviors that only part of society consider rude. For example, I personally detest how dogs are treated like people and welcomed everywhere, including in the common section of an airplane, a theater, or places that are meant to be hygienic by law. The fact that you like your dog doesn’t take the way the fact that the animal is basically a rag that mops every public space that it crosses, who doesn’t wipe or cover its anal cavity, and who licks other anal cavities for fun.
I'm really bad at parking; I'm sorry, trying to fix it usually makes it worse. In a perfect society I would not need to drive, but we do not live in that society.
I try to stay on top of the others?
On the dog point, I prefer to take my dog everywhere, but I've frankly seen more than enough people who have not bothered to train their dogs properly to understand why prohibitions on dogs in many spaces is necessary so I generally don't resent it.
"I don't hate dogs; I actually quite like them. I just don't want them LICKING MY FACE, or indeed drooling on any part of my body." No matter how often I attempt to explain this, dog owners never understand. Their dogs, meanwhile, can sense my opinions perfectly and believe it an incredibly fun game to cover me in spittle knowing they are in no danger from me.
I think it's a lot like undocumented code - everyone supports documentation in theory, but in practice it's hard and exhausting and even people who try barely stay on top of it and often fail, and some people are too tired to try.
Some programmers say code comments represent a failure to write readable code in the first place. Comments fail to get updated when code does, and thus they tend to be more dishonest than the names of variables/functions.
If your function is called "getUserName" and its code is "return getUser().name()", it is not necessary to also write a comment saying "This function returns the name of the user". So you don't need a comment here.
...unless it is a dynamically typed language, in which case it might be nice to mention whether the name is a string, or an object, or what kind of value, especially when the function code just passes the buck.
...unless is it a low-level language, in which case you might want to explain the maximum length of the string buffer that will contain the name, who is supposed to deallocate the buffer, what character encoding the string uses, etc.
...unless "null" is a valid return value, in which case you might want to provide some warning and explanation.
Another problem is that many programmers say "self-explaining code doesn't need comments" and then write code that *isn't* self-explaining (but neither is it documented).
This applies to a few cases (like variables needing explanation of what they represent), but most documentation isn't those kinds of comments, which makes me assume the programmers who say this are just lazy.
Is lying the only explanation? Consider a small child. In the modern world there is no extended family/older relatives to help look after them; you are on your own. The child has more energy than both parents put together, and is genetically wired to perform experiments on the world and on boundaries. It does not stop, relent or give quarter. What little sleep you get is fragmented. You are permanently tired, and your head is full of wool. Meanwhile, in addition to keeping the child from causing harm to themselves or those around them, you still also have to do all the regular things that life involves.
As a defence mechanism, you /tune out/ the child unless they are literally about to cause some extreme disaster. They have to repeatedly shout to get your attention. It's actually a really difficult habit to unlearn once you fall into it: even when actively trying to watch or listen to the child, your brain has learned to pattern-match their actions to "no immediate present danger of injury" and their voice to "gibberish nonsense", and nothing you see or hear goes to the part of the brain responsible for decision making, if indeed in your sleep-deprived state you are even capable of that.
It's not that they're necessarily in favour of the bad behaviour. If asked, they'd claim they prohibit it. It's just that the behaviour falls into the gap between whatever non-child-related thing it is they are consciously trying to accomplish next and the level of threat required to make their frazzled brain interrupt their thought process to pay active attention to the child.
This is part of the story, and an important one. Another part is that the child is actively courting attention (of which he gets far too little due to lack of community [as you noted]) of any valence, and stimulation (also sorely lacking) of any valence -- within limits established by the child's experience.
That dash is important, and which side of it we emphasize says a lot about our political leanings. Left-coded discourse focuses on the lack of community and sensory enrichment, right-coded discourse focuses on the limits. In historical time, both were much much stronger. A child had the constant attention of peers and the sensory enrichment of a demanding physical world, and had sharp limits enforced by shame and physical violence.
In the absence of these, why shouldn't we expect most (80% seems low but fair) children to be failures? Why would we expect people to be any better at being honest with themselves about failure rates in an endeavor as sensitive, personal, and heartbreaking as childrearing than they are with things like being a good driver or a good partner or a good worker?
Is your claim that 80% of children kick the seat in front for the majority of the flight or that 80% of children will kick the seat once? Or does it only count in the 80% if they kick more than once to prove they weren't told off sufficiently the first time? What is your age cut off for children here? Do 80% of 14 year old's kick the seats?
You can take all of this as a defence against aggressively high levels of behaviour perfection being expected by the childless and elderly. I wouldn't defend the idea of no discipline but presumably I also fit into the wider model of "think I am above average" and sometimes am negligent at policing behaviour when I'm tired/distracted/whatever. There's no doubt a spectrum of how good or bad people are at that. It's not 80%.
Are there still any sitcoms running? Or, um, TV in general? I don't watch as much TV anymore but I realized I don't even know of any currently-running show that's not animated or reality TV (I guess Shogun, lately).
Prime time broadcast TV is 90% true crime shows (e.g., Dateline), procedurals (crime/fire/hospital), and reality TV. There are a few sitcoms on here and there (Young Sheldon ran for 7 seasons!), but they are definitely far fewer in number than there were 20 years ago. There's a Night Court reboot you could watch if you so desire. Harder to track what's on streaming, but I think conventional sitcoms (filmed before a live studio audience!) are extremely rare there.
I only know stuff from the occasional Youtube channel showing the Making Of, but Barry looked interesting from that. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5348176/
Of course now I know how it ended because I saw the Making Of The Final Episode.
Were you watching the UK version, or the American remake? I found the differences really interesting, both in terms of how the history was presented, and the real-world stresses on the couple.
My general impression is that UK children get presented a version of history that is much more focused on blood and faeces and disease etc. We assume children want to know about kings being killed by pokers up their bum, or streets flowing with sewage, or everyone in a village dying horribly from the Black Death. US history teaching for children seems to have less of this. I also assume this is why there was so much pearl-clutching over Rowling claiming that the wizards in Harry Potter historically just relieved themselves where they stood and then cleaned it up with magic: entirely in keeping with history as culturally understood in the UK, and made me laugh, but apparently deeply shocking elsewhere.
Haha, oh, you do. It’s not as gross as all that, but I feel like we cheerfully revel in parts of history that get either sanitised or treated with more reverence in America. Also, the UK version has a ghost of a Tory politician who has no trousers, because of how he died.
I thought of a fun way to assemble together several different puzzles in elementary probability, under the guise of a single game:
Alice and Bob throw a fair coin 100 times, getting a sequence of 100 Hs and Ts, heads and tails (they throw together, not separately, and end up with just one sequence). As they throw, every time HH comes up in a row, Alice gets one point, and every time HT comes up, Bob gets one point. To be explicit, if they get a sequence of HHH, that's two points to Alice, in other words her winning Hs are allowed to intersect.
After 100 throws, whoever has more points wins.
Now the following four questions are roughly in the rising order of difficulty, and all of them except possibly the first one are highly counter-intuitive. If you're a programmer, feel free to write a simulation and (very likely) discover that one of your obvious answers is wrong.
1. The first point obtained in the game is more likely to go to Alice, or to Bob, or equally likely to either?
2. Who has the longest path to first point, on average? In other words, say Alice will see her first point after A throws on average (across many games), Bob will see his first point after B throws on average, what's the relationship between A and B?
3. Who gets more points, on average? Say Alice ends up with X points on average, B with Y, what's the relationship between X and Y? Bonus question: can you find the exact values of X and Y?
4. What's more likely, that Alice wins the game or that Bob does?
1. The first point in the game is obtained on the first flip after the first H. Since this flip is equally likely to be an H or a T, each is equally likely to win the first point.
2. At any point in the sequence, it will on average take 2 flips to get to the first H, and 2 flips to get to the first T. Bob gets his first point exactly when the first T following the first H has appeared, so his expected number of flips to first point is 4. If we let A be the expected number of flips to Alice's first point, we can see that there is a 50% chance that Alice's first point comes on the first flip after the first H, and there is a 50% chance that Alice's progress resets after the first H, so A = .5(2+1)+.5(2+1+A). In other words, A=3+.5A, so A=6. So Alice has the longest path to first point, on average.
3. The total number of points that each player wins is the sum of the points they win on the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc. flip. Unconditionally, the probability that either player wins a point on any of these flips is .25. The expectation of the sum is the sum of the expectations, regardless of correlations between the variables, so the expected number of points either player wins must be precisely 24.75.
4. My guess is that Bob is more likely to win. Alice has the possibility of scores as high as 99 (on a sequence of all A's) while Bob can only get scores as high as 50. Since they have the same expectation, that must mean that Alice must have a lot more sequences where her score is low than Bob does, to make up for the sequences where she outscores him hugely. But I don't have a formal proof of this.
In a two flip game, it is clear that they both have equal probability of winning (1/4, with a 1/2 probability of a tie. In a three flip game, Alice wins on two sequences (HHH, THH) while Bob wins on three sequences (HTT, HTH, THT), and they tie on the other three sequences (TTT, HHT, TTH).
In general, if there's a TH far from the end, then Bob wins exactly 1 point from it, while Alice has a 1/2 probability of winning 0 points, a 1/4 probability of winning exactly 1 point, and a 1/4 probability of winning more than 1 point. Most of the time, Bob gets more points from this while occasionally Alice really runs up the score.
This kind of thing is why you should always do Monte Carlo simulations for weird probability stuff, no matter how strong your intuition is. Even when warned to think carefully, my prediction was still wrong.
V qb abg ernyyl unir gur gvzr evtug abj gb gerng guvf chmmyr ba gur yriry vg jneenagf. Engure guna fvzhyngvat guvf naq znxvat hc nethzragf cbfg-ubp, V jvyy fgvpx zl arpx bhg naq cbfg n srj thrffrf juvpu zvtug or rzoneenffvatyl jebat.
1. V jbhyq fnl rdhnyyl yvxryl. Gur svefg cbvag jvyy or njneqrq bar fgrc nsgre gur svefg U pbzrf hc, naq tb gb rvgure jvgu rdhny cebonovyvgl.
2. Yrg hf qvfertneq gur pbzzba cersvk bs gnvyf jurer arvgure bar jvyy fpber. Vs gur cerivbhf syvc jnf urnqf, gura gur bayl jnl Obo jvyy abg znxr n cbvag va gur arkg a syvcf vf vs gurl nyy pbzr hc urnq, juvpu unf n cebonovyvgl bs 2^-a. Ol pbagenfg, vs gur arkg syvc pbzrf hc gnvyf, Nyvpr jvyy or onpx gb fdhner bar.
Ba nirentr, Obo jvyy jnfgr bar fgrc jnvgvat sbe gur svefg Urnq, na nsgrejneqf jnfgr bar fgrc jnvgvat sbe gur svefg fhofrdhrag gnvy. Fb O fubhyq or sbhe.
Nyvpr jvyy nyfb jnfgr na nirentr bs bar fgrc jnvgvat sbe Urnq, naq gura unf n 50% punapr gb jva ure svefg cbvag. Vs fur qbrf abg znxr n cbvag, fur jnfgrf nabgure gjb syvcf naq gura fgnegf sebz fdhner bar.
Guvf zvtug or zbqryyrq nf
(N-2) = 0.5 * 1 + 0.5 * (1+2+(N-2))
Juvpu znxrf N pbzr bhg ng guerr unyirf.
(Zrgn-thrff: 50% gung guvf vf jebat.)
3. Zl vaghvgvba jbhyq fnl gung gur nirentr ahzore bs cbvagf rvgure bar trgf ner rdhny. N dhvpx fvzhyngvba ol unaq pbasvezrq gung sbe guerr pbva syvcf, (v.r. gjb cnvef bs pbva syvcf gb pbafvqre), gur nirentr fpber sbe rvgure jnf 1/2, juvpu vf jung fubhyq or rkcrpgrq tvira gung rnpu cnve pbagevohgrf n dhnegre bs n cbvag ba nirentr. Sbe avargl-avar cnvef, guvf jbhyq zrna na rkcrpgrq inyhr bs gjragl-sbhe cbvag frira svir cbvagf.
4. V nz dhvgr pregnva gung gurer vf na nqinagntr gb bar fvqr. Juvyr gur zrnaf bs obgu qvfgevohgvbaf ner rdhny, sbe Nyvpr, gur qvfgevohgvba vf zhpu oebnqre, orpnhfr sbe ure, tnvavat n cbvag vf pbeeryngrq jvgu tnvavat nabgure cbvag va gur arkg syvc, juvyr sbe Obo, vg vf nagv-pbeeryngrq.
Bs pbhefr, guvf gryyf hf abguvat bire juvpu qvfgevohgvba jbhyq orng gur bgure bar, jura obgu ner enaqbzyl fnzcyrq, naq gb znxr znggref jbefr, Nyvpr naq Obo ner funevat n cynlvat svryq. Ybbxvat ng zl gbl ceboyrz jvgu guerr syvcf, zl thrff jbhyq or gung Obo jvaf zber serdhragyl guna Nyvpr, ohg Nyvpr vf zber yvxryl gb jva ol n ynaqfyvqr.
Very impressive! I think all the answers are right except the one you expressed less than full confidence in, and there, too, the idea is right, but there's a misstep somewhere in the calculations. I especially like your intuition on the fourth problem (the trickiest one for me, by far).
Unless I'm missing a trick, the first two answers could only be "equal". Either heads comes up first (in which case the next throw is equal chance "point to Alice(H)" or "point to Bob(T)") or tails comes up, and since no one gets a point for anything following tails, rinse and repeat next throw.
For question 4, just on intuition I'm thinking Alice has more options for points through the interesecting rule, but Bob can benefit from both heads and tails throws while Alice can only benefit from heads. So, my intuitive guess is it evens out and it's equal as well, but that's probably wrong.
So I'm reading it as, you can get a sequence out of both coins flipped in a round, or from consecutive rounds with the same coin. So Alice and Bob both flipping Heads is one point for Alice, and then both flipping tails in the next round is one point for Bob. I wouldn't count it as four, because instinctively hopping both coins and rounds makes a diagonal, not a row.
Still looks like Bob wins in a landslide since Alice doesn't get points for double tails.
EDIT: Oh, it specifies they flip one hundred heads and one hundred tails, doesn't it. That's a pain.
>Alice and Bob throw a fair coin 100 times, getting a sequence of 100 Hs and Ts. (they throw together, not separately, and end up with just one sequence).
Man, I guess that's what it could say. Or it could be they each throw 100 times and collectively get 100 heads and 100 tails. But then "one sequence" means two people are collectively throwing one coin, which, what does that even look like? Why are two people throwing if who threw doesn't matter?
They're throwing one coin 100 times. Whatever comes up comes up. It doesn't matter who does the throwing of course. I wanted to make sure people don't think Alice throws her own coin 100 times and Bob his own coin 100 times.
Oh, that's much simpler. Here's my shot as a non-statistician.
Seems like the easiest thing to do is concentrate on the extremes; assume the absolute best-case scenario for Alice, and then assume the exact opposite. Alice gets points for two heads in a row, so 100 heads gets her 99 points, and gets Bob 0. On the other end, 100 tails gets Alice 0 points, but also gives Bob 0.
Bob's best-case is fifty repeated HT sequences, which would get him 50 and Alice 0. The exact opposite would be 50 TH sequences, but that still results in Bob getting 49 HT sequences and thus 49 points, and Alice still gets 0.
So out of the extremes, Alice gets 99 points out of 400 flips, and Bob gets 99 points out of 400 flips.
Each player has a 50% chance of points after an H, and a 0% chance after a T. I don't have a good reason to think any given flips will diverge significantly from the odds of the extremes, so I'm going to say "they're even for all questions."
It makes a very big difference, at least the way I was reading it where you get a sequence from two coins flipped simultaneously; there's no TH that way, they're always HT, and Bob crushes Alice.
Aren't sci-fi shows much more expensive to film, given the elaborate sets? I just started watching The Expanse, and I was thinking about the economics of TV shows in general. They have to construct multiple realistic-looking spaceship sets for every episode. Isn't that quite expensive? Like much more expensive than a police procedural or a sitcom or something? How do the economics of sci-fi shows work, do the networks just accept a lower rate of return knowing that they can never be as profitable?
On a related note, I heard that one reason reality TV shows took off in the 90s is that they're very cheap to film. You only need a few locations- even fewer sets than a normal show- and the cast are all usually not even recognized actors yet, so their rate is much lower than like the cast of a Law & Order or sitcom would be. (Hell they might not even be unionized)
The original Star Trek spent a lot of time on rocky worlds that looked suspiciously like back lots with a color filter, but I don’t know if you could get away with that.
Also, McCoy’s medical instruments were novelty salt and pepper shakers picked up for a song.
For major productions, shooting on sound stages is considerably less expensive than shooting on location, especially sound stages + green screen. Sci fi often uses less location shooting than contemporary genre, and sci fi sets don't necessarily need to be hugely more expensive than contemporary home or office interiors - sure, some parts might need to be fabricated, but often they require fewer plausible details (dish towels in a kitchen, etc).
This instruction guide from a showrunner, "How To Be a Writer On Set" is the most educational thing I've ever read about what goes into producing a TV show, including what kinds of things are so expensive that they should only be in the script if they're crucial to the story:
"Multiple realistic-looking spaceship sets for every episode"?
I'm pretty sure they built e.g. one set (or set of sets) for the Rocinante, and kept it in place for all sixty-two episodes. And there was enough time spent on the Donnager and Canterbury to maybe have had a few standing sets, maybe a few others over the course of the series. For the rest, you just need prefab Generic Spaceship sets matching your chosen aesthetic, that can be rearranged each time.
And a good bit of CGI, though there also you'll get a good bit of reuse.
There certainly weren't multiple new spaceship interiors with each episode.
They must have someone who does some of that sort of work. But they don’t need someone to write a full script for each character for each episode. If they did, the format wouldn’t be as dominant as it is, because it wouldn’t be cheaper.
You can certainly read about how "unscripted" aka "reality" TV is produced, but this scripted drama series, about a The Bachelor-esque show, created by a person who produced The Bachelor, is infinitely more fun and it won *a goddamned Peabody Award*:
But a big takeaway from it is that, contrary to your assumption, it's pretty normal for contestants on reality shows to have their own producer assigned to crafting their "story" on every episode.
I also worked in entertainment transcription (logging times on raw footage for editors to pull quotes), and a LOT of the "confessional" / interview stuff is literally scripted, with the producers giving specific line readings and asking for multiple takes.
I think sci-fi shows have a history of repurposing old sets / material from other shows from the same studio, so maybe it's not as expensive as creating everything from scratch.
I a word: CGI. While The Expanse certainly felt like a high budget show, constructing the spaceships, stations and interiors is probably not vastly more expensive than constructing them for a video game would be. I would expect most scenes where people were standing in some random corridor to be filmed with the cast standing in front of a green screen and the corridor being added using CGI.
Of course, it helps that there is no uncanny valley for space ships.
Also, I think with Netflix, HBO and so on, the amount of money producers are willing to sink into a episodic ("TV") production has changed. Where 90s sitcoms would get a modest influx from advertisements from opportunistic viewers, today top TV shows rake in money from subscriptions. While I am not sure that it might not be a bubble, global distribution, on-demand viewing and subscription are definitely changing TV. Of course, if you want to play in the big league, you require expensive blockbuster TV shows. I don't think it is very viable that people pay a dollar a month to subscribe to some sitcom they like. By contrast, getting people to pay tens of dollars to subscribe to whatever TV show is considered "must-see" in their social circles seems to work.
"[N]ot vastly more expensive than constructing them for a video game would be" seems like maybe not saying that much given that high end games with that level of graphics tend to have production budgets comparable to high-budget movies.
Different genres definitely have different expected costs. Another example is the historical/period piece. Like sci-fi, you'll need sets (and costuming) that aren't available on the street or off the shelf, but unlike most sci-fi, you have a legion of geeks who know exactly what things are supposed to look like and will flame you if you get it wrong.
Economies of scale can help with this: you're not the first person to do a period piece set in Revolutionary France, and if you work with an established studio you'll have access to whole warehouses of old set and costuming. But it's still an additional expense, and if you're not working with a big studio, or if you're delving into an underexplored period of history, it's going to be a big expense.
Most sci-fi benefits from not needing quite as much attention to fine detail in set and costuming, since the designers can create an original look from more off the shelf stuff. LED lights and mechanical-looking things are not hard to find. But it's still an additional expense, smaller studios are less likely to make sci-fi shows, and the big studios will need a bit more convincing to greenlight a historical/sci-fi show compared to one set in the modern day, controlling for everything else.
There's lots of focus about high US government debt these days. But I encountered an argument I've never seen/thought about before. The US is issuing 'debt' via US Treasury bonds and Agencies, which are supposedly a pillar of the global financial world as they're 'risk-free'. (I think risk-free is probably a bit of an overstatement, but let's be optimistic and call them low risk). Then, an enormous amount of global demand for safe assets leads the rest of the world to buy Treasuries. Even China has historically bought an enormous amount of them, presumably because it's the best/safest investment for their cash.
So if the US somehow ran a balanced budget (don't laugh, please)- would this mess up the world of global finance by drying up the supply of Treasuries? Now the rest of the world wouldn't have a 'risk-free' bond that they could all purchase. Yes they could purchase German & Japanese bonds, but Treasuries are the deepest & most liquid bonds in the world, to my understanding- there is simply no volume of alternatives to bonds issued by the US. So if the US had a balanced budget and stopped issuing Treasuries that would be..... bad for the rest of the financial world? Was it bad in the 90s when we briefly had no deficit?
If the United States *paid off its entire debt*, and then ran a balanced budget, people would have to find a substitute for Treasuries and the like in that role. This is A: laughably improbable this side of the fiscal apocalypse and B: something that will take decades if it does happen.
Otherwise, there;s going to be thirty trillion dollars worth of Treasuries and the like in circulation, forever. With a big chunk rolling over at any given time. That should be more than sufficient for any absolutely-inflexible demand; if there's an effect from the annual deficit or lack thereof, it will be a small one at the margin, affecting people who prefer but don't absolutely need Treasuries and are looking at the comparative rates each time.
Yes, this has been a major discussion point every time someone talks about balancing the budget.
Now in practice, running a brief surplus isn't a problem. But it would be a problem if the total amount of outstanding US debt were to shrink over the long term, while the world economy and US economy keep growing.
2. Would a US balanced budget damage the world economy?
3. Would a sharp American fiscal contraction damage the economy?
The answers are yes, no, and yes. What you're missing is that while an unbalanced budget usually (but in fact not always) produces debt that doesn't mean that an unbalanced budget is necessary to produce debt or that there are not substitutes. So if the US ended its debt just by sharp fiscal contraction (raise taxes, cut spending) then we'd be causing at least a temporary economic downturn. But not due to anything specifically to do with debt.
However, the world's need for a relatively safe asset associated with the US government can be done any number of ways. The US government could take on debt for expansionary/sovereign wealth style reasons rather than welfare spending, for example, as many countries with natural resources do. Or the bonds could be issued by banks who in turn loan the money to businesses. This is (part of) the traditional conservative argument: that the US government issuing bonds crowds out the ability of the private sector to get investment. The liberal counterargument is that social spending can be economically production (or more often socially useful even if it isn't). But neither side disputes that the private market could pick up the slack.
Yes, a US balanced budget would - after plunging the US into a sharp economic recession - wreck havoc on the world's financial markets. If it were to continue, a great depression would follow, with whatever ghoulish political system rising out of it. It would definitely end the reign of the $US as the world's reserve currency. The damage to this country would be incalculable.
I'm not trolling, BTW. The fact that so many people call for a balanced federal budget, even going as far as proposing a constitutional amendment, without even trying to think through the consequences of this, is mind boggling.
I'd like a balanced budget. I acknowledge that doing so would lead to a depression. I fear a greater depression if balancing the budget continues being deferred. I cannot see how deficits are any different from drug-addiction. Apparently you disagree?
Obviously I disagree. Comparing budget deficits to drug addiction is flashy but meaningless (why not murder? sounds worse). A country is not a household nor a business and doesn't need to balance the books the same way.
So no, I love this country and the idea that we need to plunge millions of people into misery for some abstract principle sounds horrible to me.
It was an invitation to demonstrate otherwise. I have yet to see a convincing argument that the money-printer totally exempts a state from negative consequences, as opposed to just pushing the problem further down the road. As far as I can tell:
- debt grows exponentially.
- as debt increases, payments increase.
- when payments become too high, there's three options: Default; Tax; Inflate.
- all three options have negative consequences.
The explanation I usually see goes "the principal just rolls over continuously." I'm willing to accept that outstanding-debt, per se, is a nothing-burger. But at any given instance, some fraction of that outstanding-debt will represent bonds that have reached maturity. The treasury will be obliged to honor those. If those yield payments become too high relative to real-GDP (which it will eventually, assuming the debt is allowed to snowball), I don't see how that can be ignored indefinitely without invoking Default, Tax, or Inflate.
> why not murder?
Because murder isn't necessarily a transitional-gain.
I did not advocate for unconstrained deficit growth. There's a gulf between "balanced budget always" and " just grow the debt without any constraints". I'm, frankly, also, worried about the presence of a couple of red flags, such as "drug-addiction", "money-printer", that tend to bring all heat and no light to the topic.
If you are really interested in the operational realities of a modern monetary system that is based on fiat currency and an ability to borrow in same, Cullen Roche has written extensively on this subject, and it's hard to beat his combination of expertise, clarity, and skin-in-the-game: https://www.pragcap.com/understanding-money/
Sure, you can have the money-printer criticism. I defend the drug-addiction analogy though, on two different grounds: A) it evokes transitional-gains; and B) quitting is theoretically voluntary, but pragmatically involuntary. I.e.
> There's a gulf between "balanced budget always" and " just grow the debt without any constraints".
Of course, it's so easy! Just say "No!" to the second drink. Crazy how Bill Wilson & Bob Smith never thought of such a tactic.
Could you expand a bit on how this would come to be? Do you mean the traditional way "balancing the budget would require a significant spending slash which would crush aggregate demand / a significant tax hike that would probably not be great for the economy either, triggering a recession that would then spread to the rest of the world due to the US's size", "World trade currently requires massive amounts of dollars, finance needs treasuries, and the only way to get them out there is through deficits" or something else entirely?
Yes, you are kind of getting there with your questions, here's a basic, first-order scenario:
As government spending is drastically cut and taxes are drastically increased (that's what it would take to balance the budget), economy contracts sharply. Since we can't have any deficit spending and tax receipts are less than whatever was projected when the tax increases were enabled, further government spending cuts are necessary. We're in a full depression now.
US depression in and of itself will plunge the world into at least a deep recession. But things get much worse: we run a perennial trade deficit with the rest of the world, enabled by our budget deficits (these things are linked). Now we have to balance the trade deficit because other countries can't swap their excess USD for Treasuries, as they have typically done (or why do you think China holds trillions in US debt? out of the goodness of their hearts ;) ). This exacerbates the worldwide recession, likely tipping it into a depression.
The fallout will be political, with likely fascist-like regimes rising through the world. Replay of 1933, now with the nukes.
For a very short time, yes. A recession followed (to be sure, there were multiple factors at play, such as the overhang from the pulled-forward hardware demand due to the Y2K bug - nonetheless). But there still was a robust supply of Treasuries available, although there were concerns expressed about this exact issue.
While it's barely conceivable that the US could eliminate its deficit in the near future, it's not conceivable that it would pay off its accumulated debt. So there would still be US Treasuries to trade, including newly issued ones as the old ones mature. So the problem would arise only if the need for a "risk free" asset is increasing.
To the extent that there is a demand for US Treasuries (or just US dollars) by people needing a risk-free asset, the US can profit off this (what's called "seigniorage") by issuing debt that they don't expect to have to actually pay off - either because they'll be able to easily issue more debt when the old matures due to this demand, or because the central bank (US federal reserve) will buy the debt, creating the money out of nothing. The latter is the normal way for the central bank to expand the money supply as needed for normal purposes (in any country, not just the US), and the part of the deficit that is financed by this money creation should not (in a fiat money system) be eliminated, since that would result in harmful deflation.
But in any case, other assets would naturally become more liquid if there was a need for them. If US Treasuries are hard to come by, there would be a more active market in Japanese bonds.
Humans can't tell the difference between a 0.0001% risk of default and a 0.0005% risk of default. The U.S. right now has already gone up way more in terms of absolute risk of defaulting as a result of borrowing so much money than Japan is more risky in relative terms. Liquidity is great sure but it's way better for the world of the U.S. reduces its chance of defaulting by being responsible than increases it by being irresponsible no galaxy takes involved
> Comment of the week - sort of, kind of, in a terrible warning type of way - is this Reddit thread on an AI-generated reading of my recent poem Verses On Five People Being Killed By A Falling Package Of Foreign Aid. The commenters first “discover” that the poem must be written by an AI (because it has bullet points!), and then that “it is clear as day” that “at least half” of ACX commenters are AIs.
I get that as a poet you have licence not to be pedantically literal, but I have neither the licence nor the ability, and this seems rather overstated.
Each of the things you attribute to 'the commenters' is just something one random guy said, and in the case of the guy who thought the poem was AI written, your paraphrase is a bit of a stretch. (He doesn't say the poem must be AI written because it has bullet points; he certainly thinks it's AI written, but it seems like he may have assumed that from the start, and his mention of 'bullet lists' isn't presented as knockdown evidence.) When Gwern explains that the poem was written by you, there's no reply disputing the correction. And -- while I'm sure your posting the link here has already affected the voting -- at the time of my clicking, the comments in question were on 0 and 2 points with only one of them marked controversial, so it seems unlikely they were originally very highly upvoted.
I just reread Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion, by Dan Simmons. When I read them as a kid... well, the Shrike scared me to crap, but they still were the Great SF Novels that affected how I'd see the rest of the genre from thereon. They're still great (though when you read them back-to-back FoH suffers from having the events of the first book constantly recounted by the characters of otherwise, as well as certain general incoherence in parts).
However, I've seen stories that Bradley Cooper wants to do a Hyperion movie (https://www.imdb.com/news/ni63455346/) and I'm wondering... why on (Old) Earth? If there's two books (and they form a coherent whole, after all) that would seem like they should be a *miniseries* instead of a movie, it would be these. Six eps to cover the six pilgrim stories in Hyperion, 4-6 to go through the events of The Fall of Hyperion.
I'm thinking about the overall arc. Both Hyperion and the sequel were great as books but the overall arc didn't come into focus until the Endymion books.
Honestly, yeah, I think this calls for a straight-up series running at least 3 seasons if not 4.
There's various films that successfully do the "stories told within a story" thing, to varying degrees of success. I think it definitely _could_ work as a film, and it could potentially bring some more coherence to the themes in the various pilgrim stories alongside the main framing story.
That said, I could certainly easily imagine it as a mini-series as well, but I wouldn't dimiss the idea of making a film out of hand.
Note: I discovered all these bloggers through the extended Slate Star Codex universe, either by their participation in the annual book review contest or by participating in the /r/slatestarcodex subreddit. While I don't know how much these five writers truly identify with or enjoy Slate Star Codex, they at least use it as an outlet to find an audience, which atleasts suggests something about them. I'm not aware of many other amazing up-and-coming bloggers out there outside of the SSC universe, perhaps because I don't spend time in other environments. However, I suspect there's a reason all my favourite up and coming bloggers are Slate Star Codex readers and influenced by Scott.
Matt Lakeman is known in online intellectual circles as the travel writer, but he is so much more than that. His most famous writing consists of extensive reflections on his travels to a number of unusual countries. While these are amazing and must-reads, they represent just one aspect of Matt's remarkable writing. His style involves writing extremely in-depth articles in very frank terms, teaching you more than you ever thought you'd want to know about a topic. Matt is a fantastic writer who excels at communicating a large volume of facts in a digestible and memorable way. His blunt tone can also be quite humorous.
Notes on Guinea
Thoughts on Meaning and Writing
Polygamy, Human Sacrifices, and Steel: Why the Aztecs Were Awesome
Dynomight articles typically incorporate deep statistical or analytical analysis on issues most people overlook, along with strong conceptual frameworks to write original articles on seemingly random issues that capture his or her interest. Despite the analytical tone of the writing, since most of Dynomight articles relates to things that came up in Dynomight’s real life, the writing is more personal than you would otherwise expect.
Henrik writes extremely personal tales, often inspired by his own life experiences, that are imbued with a tremendous amount of soul. Henrik’s writing is soothing and provides emotional grounding. The writing is what I would imagine if you asked an incredibly thoughtful mature person to live in a cabin in the woods and reflect on life, which actually isn’t that far off Henrik’s life.
Max is a unique breed: a thoroughly nerdy SSC-type person who is equally passionate about art and style. He writes interesting essays that are fun, whimsical, and deep. Max differs from others on this list in that I think he would have appeal to a broader audience than internet nerds alone.
Étienne writes with a lot of wonder about the world, in a very Canadian, mild-mannered voice. His writing themes and topics can vary wildly from article to article, with the constant theme being an extraordinarily high level of thoughtfulness.
I just read Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny, a 1967 science fiction fantasy novel set on a distant planet that has been colonized by remnants from Earth.
The premise of the novel is that the original colonists possess ultra-advanced technology, including immortality, and have adopted names and attributes of Hindu deities while ruling over their descendant population who are kept in a state of medieval ignorance.
While the novel is good enough to have won the 1968 Hugo Award for Best Novel, there is a bonus for readers in 2024…
The central plot follows the protagonist, Sam, who leads a movement known as Accelerationism, aiming to disrupt the existing power structure by releasing technological enlightenment to the masses.
Sam is shortened from his full name, Mahasamatman, dropping the Maha- (“the great”) and -atman (“soul”) to be known as just “Sam”.
I liked the ambiguity of it, how Sam says he will never feel fully justified in opposing the gods (nor will he feel fully in the wrong either). And of course Sam would pick atheistic Buddhism as the religion to undermine the gods...
Yeah I'm getting the subjective experience of making a successful saving throw against 'spell' to resist illusion. I really liked Zelazny when I was younger, but now only read fiction when sick in bed with a fever. Perhaps by the next time this befalls me, AI-generated prose will be good enough to deceive me when I 'pirate' a 'scan' of this book I somehow never heard of. If the fever isn't 101 or higher or within the next three years I probably won't be fooled.
Any biologists here? I am in possession of two textbooks for freshman biology. Both of them divide the study of animals into two groups and two chapters, but the groups are different. The older one, published in 2002, has the vertebrates and the invertebrates. The newer one, from 2020, divides them into the protostomes and deuterostomes. Is this difference just a peculiarity of these two books, or did our understanding of the animal kingdom change during this time? I seem to remember there have been some adjustments in the tree of life because of recent genome sequencing work.
Protostomia and Deuterostomia are two major groups of animals based on genetic, anatomical, and developmental features. The first includes arthropods, mollusks, most "worms", and a host of smaller groups such as rotifers or brachiopods; the second includes echinoderms (strafish, sea urchins, &c), acorn worms, and vertebrates. These two groups are clades, meaning that -- if their reconstruction is correct -- at some point in Earth's history there was a species that was the evolutionary progenitor of all Protostomes, and another that was progenitor of all Deuterostomes. This is the standard that moden taxonomy is after. (Note that there are animals that belong to neither groups having branched off earlier, such as sponges, jellyfish, and corals.) In contrast, "invertebrates" simply refers to any animal that is not a vertebrate. There is not much that can be said about invertebrates as a whole, except for the fact that vertebrates tend to receive a disproportionate amount of attention, being generally larger than most other animals and more similar/more directly relevant to humans.
This is more a related question than an answer, but a textbook I read a little while ago (also from around 2000) seemed to imply that early vertebrates underwent some unusually significant changes (possibly relating to the duplication of the Hox genes), making them more different from the invertebrates than many invertebrates that would be expected to be more different cladistically are from each other. Is this accurate? I think it lumped all invertebrates together in the claim that they tend to have fewer cell types than vertebrates for example.
The key issue is that you could split animals multiple ways. Consider the big four arthropod taxa: centipedes, insects, spiders, and crabs. Centipedes and insects both have unbranched legs, so we can suggest that's an ancestral trait and call the centisect group "Uniramia" (while the spicrab group with the branchy legs is Schizoramia).
But insects and crabs also have four cones in each ommatidium, so we can group them together as Tetraconata. And maybe you think Tetraconata is closely related to centipedes, in which case your crabsectpede group is called Mandibulata (because they have mandibles instead of chelicerae), or maybe you think spiders are more closely related to centipedes, in which case you have Tetraconata (crabsects) + Paradoxopoda (spiderpedes). Clear enough?
No? Well, then consider the position of trilobites, velvet worms, sea spiders and assorted Cambrian oddities. Are they in one of the existing groups, or do you e.g. need to create the spiderpedelobite clade? You end up with a million possible combinations, each with some evidence, and you have legendary science fights over which one is right.
Then the God of Science comes down from heavens, wearing the form of Frederick Sanger and bringing sequencing to the unwashed masses. This god decrees that insects are actually a hyper-evolved race of crabs (take that, carcinization, crabs aren't the final form after all), that spiders and centipedes are aligned (maybe, jury's still out on that one), and that a bird called Anakin Skyflapper killed all the dinosaurs when the Dino Council told him that he could sit on that clade, but they would not grant him the rank of Dinosaur (birds are not dinosaurs). That's your reality now, and you have to rewrite all your textbooks to reflect it.
As far as I know the protostome/deuterostome distinction has been the general consensus at least since the 1970s, but we were in the dark about some specifics (e.g. what's up with the lophophorates?) Clearer molecular threads are still emerging between between top-level taxa, but everything is probably cohesive enough now to be reflected in textbooks.
That said, the vertebrate/invertebrate distinction is more about how we study them (same reason e.g. "herps" are often treated together), and that is still useful. When writing a lab book, for example, you probably want to dissect the starfish and acornworms alongside assorted seafood before moving onto the butchery of them gross greasy mammals.
Interesting. I should do some digging to find out how textbooks have been dividing the animals, and whether there really has been a sea change in all of this.
There. I've officially added it to my post-exams TODO list. You can all record your predictions of whether I'll actually do anything about it, come the day.
This is just based on cursory checking of wikipedia, but it appears that "invertebrates" are not felt to constitute a taxon.† For example, the deuterostomes include starfish.
The vertebrate/invertebrate division is better motivated in that there are animals which are neither protostomes nor deuterostomes, but by definition anything that isn't a vertebrate is an invertebrate.
† A taxon is a clade, except that instead of using a unique word that has to be learned independently, it uses an obvious word the meaning of which will be readily apparent to anyone who knows what "taxonomy" is. I'm not sure why "clade" came to be used when "taxon" was already available and so transparent in meaning; I suspect it has to do with the controversy over whether taxonomy should be organized around common descent or around some other principle. A "taxon" would match whatever the principle motivating taxonomy in general was, whereas a "clade" always refers to common descent. But that controversy died a long, long time ago.
Deuterostomes and protostomes are part of the bilaterian clade, and as far as I can tell, the division dates from 1908 (referenced here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/230766195_The_mouth_the_anus_and_the_blastopore_-_open_questions_about_questionable_openings). The division is to do with whether the mouth develops before the anus or vice versa, although naturally there are exceptions in both. Anyway, Vertebrates (phylum Chordata, dating from ~1880) are a subdivision of deuterostomes, and invertebrates are everything else, and thus paraphyletic - there are invertebrates which are deuterostomes and invertebrates which are protostomes. Wikipedia has a useful tree on its protostome page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protostome.
I am not a biologist. I think that there are two competing views. One is the urge to partition the set of species into neat little subsets, and the other is evolution, which works with trees (or equivalently, cascading subsets).
In the former view, one can neatly split the vertebrates into different subsets like fish, amphibians, reptiles, mammals and birds.
In the latter view, vertebrates and fish would be synonymous, which humans being mammals, reptiles, amphibians, fish, animals. (I think we had a discussion here once if whales are fish as all mammals are fish.)
Invertebrates does not feel like a natural category in either system. It might be from the point of view of a zoo director, who has plenty of mammals, birds and reptiles, some amphibians and fish, and then a few spiders, insects, the odd octopus and so on. (Just like "non-human animal" is a weird category, but if you want to identify the professional for medical interventions it just so happens that the same profession is responsible for orangutan and goldfish healthcare.)
As far as I know, the protostome/deuterostome split becoming the standard was from work that came out in 2000-2006 using molecular data (i.e. DNA) and improved phylogenetic analysis. This was around the time where sequencing was starting to get cheap and personal computers were (just) powerful enough to run MCMC phylogenetic programs.
Wikipedia suggests that there are two differences between a vertebrate/invertebrate division and a protostome/deuterostome division:
(a) The deuterostomes are (essentially) the vertebrates, plus starfish.
(b) Many invertebrates, such as sea anemones, sponges, and jellyfish, do not belong to the protostomes or to the deuterostomes. This means that a protostome/deuterostome division does not come close to covering "animals", making it a strange choice for a treatment of "animals".
Substack encourages this, presumably deliberately. If I were ever to start blogging I wouldn't do so with this pseudonym (perhaps I have already). I hate even accidentally being made aware that a fellow member of the commentariat has succumbed -- when scrolling on mobile web sometimes I accidentally tap a person's name and instantly regret it.
Yeah. I don't mind it on occasion (and it's understandable that there's less OC to talk about given that Scott, very understandably, has been posting less since becoming a dad), but it has felt like a bit much lately.
I think Scott said you get two free adverts per year or similar. I doubt it can be enforced that rigorously but if you see someone spamming adverts in every thread you should probably flag it to him.
The problem with this policy is that there are a zillion bloggers on substack or elsewhere who are not especially involved with the ACX/LW community. Given that ACX is one of the big, successful substacks (from my understanding), each of them has some incentive to advertise their blog here. This means that even if they all stick individually to the twice a year rule, we could get overrun by such posts.
It might be easier to just make them post to a classified thread.
Personally, I would prefer if people posted a top level comment (with a vaguely LW-adjacent topic) as a top level comment, and added "cross-posted from my blog (link)" on top.
Also, substack prominently displays the substacks of commentators, so if someone keeps writing interesting comments they might lure me to their substack.
1. Are "mentions in unrelated contexts" (e.g. open threads) the same as "mentions in related contexts" (e.g. comments on a post on a similar topic)?
2. Does effort matter (are the lowest-effort open thread comments and the "in-depth description of Latest Work" ones the same)? (Personally, I feel a lot more annoyed by the "here, I wrote about how [political wordvomit] or something, read it" ones than the stuff that makes a genuine case for reading it)
3. Does it count towards the two if you got mentioned in a linkspost? :)
1. Personally I think that a contribution to a topic raised by someone else is much more acceptable than opening up a topic from the scratch. "Here is a 10 line summary from my thoughts about this, see link for more" seems completely fine as long as the summary is on-topic.
2. I don't like the "please click this link" posts, no matter if they promote content by the poster or third party content. The comment should be long enough that one can have a discussion here without having to read the links.
3. My feeling is that if Scott mentions you in a linkpost, that is not a self-promotion. (Also, it will likely net you much more views than a comment would.)
My general feeling is that no hard and fast rules would be sufficiently proof against people trying to game them. I feel that any comment (excluding classified) should be a basis to have a discussion on ACX. If that is the case then I don't particularly care if it will also lure some people to other blogs.
Looking at the triple-digit page view and double-digit subscriber spike on the day I decided to use one as Advertise My Own Blog Day, I can't fault the regulars.
I was reading about Robin Hood, and it came to my attention that his earliest attestation is this mention from Sloth's self-introduction in Piers Plowman:
Love of Mankind – all eight billion of them - is a difficult thing to talk about in the abstract; difficult to strike a balance between mawkishness on the one hand and cynicism on the other. ..... “What survives of us is love”- one of the poet Philip Larkin’s most famous lines - is famous because it has such resonance........Broadly speaking - as 20th century technological wizardry rolled out over the old verities of Christendom - the Universal Love moral imperative came to be re-imagined as Social Justice. This shares many characteristics with the old religion. A big part of the pull of the Social Justice religion is the salvation it promises. No you don’t get to go to Heaven but you do get to feel very virtuous......https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/love-of-the-people
Allying yourself with White Nationalists is a very poor strategy. Just consider the possible outcomes here:
1. White Nationalists continue to be a totally irrelevant fringe group that's shunned and despised by the rest of society. You gain nothing from your alliance with them, because they have nothing to offer. As a result of associating yourself with them, you'll find yourself ostracized as well - not just by "woke" leftists, but by centrists, moderate conservatives, independents, the apolitical masses, and pretty much anyone who isn't a White Nationalist themselves or a WN sympathizer.
2. White Nationalists try to take over society and fail. Now, instead of merely being shunned, many of them are going to end up dead or in prison. This leaves you in an even worse position than the first scenario: There's a chance you'll end up being imprisoned too, even if you haven't committed any crimes yourself. Even if you manage to avoid that fate, you'll end up on government watchlists for the rest of your life, the authorities will constantly bring you in for questioning, and having any sort of career or social life or normal existence will basically be impossible.
3. White Nationalists try to take over society and, against all odds, manage to succeed. You quickly learn that their much-celebrated ideological tolerance was nothing more than a way of gaining allies when they were just a fringe group with no real influence. Now that they're in power, they have a dramatically narrower view of what's acceptable. I'm not entirely sure what Right Wing Futurism entails, but it's probably incompatible with the new society that the WNs build. When the post-revolution purges start, you end up as one of the first targets, likely being executed or sent to a forced labor camp. Spending the rest of your life in a 'normal' prison is probably the best outcome here.
America isn't a 13th century absolute monarchy where political power is all or nothing. You can have influence and affect policy without "taking over society."
Scott had a post up recently about people who get excoriated for turning out not to belong to the group they're advocating for. In a footnote he added that white supremacists on the other hand are incredibly forgiving when their members turn out to have black great-grandparents. It's fun to imagine how a PR exec would handle a white nationalist image turnaround. Remember, racism is the most inclusive belief in the world!
Btw I think you might want one more editing pass on your post, just for formatting and clarity.
> In a footnote he added that white supremacists on the other hand are incredibly forgiving when their members turn out to have black great-grandparents.
If I remember correctly, he noted that they are forgiving when their members turn out to have Jewish ancestry.
> Of course, from an outsider's perspective (and from that of long-departed Smith great...-grandparents), this might seem strange or unnatural
Was this meant to say "Wick great...-grandparents"?
In general, I don't get the feeling that you've created a parable that is analogous to the problem you see; it's more like you wrote up some grievances with modern society and then did some word replacements. This leaves the world within the parable feeling somewhat off.
The New Yorker is at it again with an expose of our dear quirky ratsphere. It's amusing how the tone changed compared to four years ago - now that we live a world where Senate leaders go "around the room, asking for each person’s p(doom)", condescending sneers are no longer quite appropriate it seems, so we get almost respectful perplexity instead. How quickly they grow up!
Sort of a side issue: I hate the New Yorker cartoons. They have a fatal flaw: They don't make you laugh, they make you flinch a certain way. I once got so irritated at them that I entered the New Yorker caption-this-drawing contest every single week for months, and all the captions I wrote included the phrase "middle-aged whimsy." Not surprisingly, I never won.
They generally suck but there's an enormous positive cartoonland balance to spend down before they become a net negative, that created by the "On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog" cartoon.
You've got a point there... but there's also a part where the internet (meaning comment boxes, mostly) amplifies or even creates jerkiness where none was intended...
I don't think this is it - the last New Yorker piece about rationalists was also pretty fair and well done. I think they're just better about articles like this than other newspapers.
For what it's worth, I read that NYT article before I knew anything about Scott (it was the internet discussion about the article, not the article itself, that brought me here) and it didn't come across as a hatchet job to me at all. It came across as a complete mess, with no focus, kind of like "there's this guy who writes things, here are some things other people have said about him, he didn't want his name revealed but then he changed his mind, the end".
If it was supposed to be a hatchet job it was a bad one.
Agreed. Everyone in the SSC-sphere, particularly Scott, acted as though they expected the NYT to expose some terrible smoking gun; perhaps a candid interview with Topher Brennan. But Metz's article was a dry heave, "doxxing" and all.
Scott, in “Adumbrations Of Aducanumab”, you called for “unbundling” FDA approval, writing: “there are complicated laws around what insurance companies have to cover, and FDA approval is a big part of them… it seems like Medicare and Medicaid have to cover anything the FDA approves.”
Does this change our view of what FDA approval really means? Is it really as bundled as we thought? Is unbundling it as important as it seemed?
(Side note, that piece I cited above is by Rachel Sachs, who *also* wrote the piece *you* cited in your original post saying that “FDA Approval and Insurance Coverage Are Often Linked”. She wrote a paper in 2018 on “Delinking Reimbursement”, although I don't know how much attention it has gotten: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3117069)
This week I discovered the bobbit worm (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eunice_aphroditois) - a 3-meter-long, 2-inches-wide ambush predator who lives buried in the ocean floor waiting for fish to float by. Not sure if that was the inspiration for Dune's sand worms (https://valentinsocial.substack.com/p/the-real-life-dune-worms-are-horrifying) but what a bizzare creature this is! They would sometimes even sneak into private aquariums, brought in on rocks and people would only realise that when their fish start disappearing. Also, some of their cousings, bristle worms, have a strange mating behaviour - they grow segments with gonads, which then detach and float to the surface to mingle with other such segments - like an orgy of floating penises. Nature!
Syllids! They're fun, and I hear they're delicious, like little swimming sausages that you can pluck out of the water and eat raw. They're also wickedly fast - there was a "what is this thing?" post on the fishkeeping subreddit a while ago (https://www.reddit.com/r/Aquariums/comments/18kr1l2/what_is_this_critter/), but the thing swam a mile a minute, and they had a hell of a time trying to suss out the identity of Sonic the Bristleworm. Just look at that little aquatic house centipede go!
But there are other fun worms out there! Take a look at Sphaerularia (https://www.rosspiper.net/tag/sphaerularia-bombi/), the womb that walks - the tiny little strand in the middle is the entire female worm, and the remainder is her everted, hypertrophied ovaries! Since the eggs (also visible in the picture) are way too big for the worm's tiny body to supply with energy, the entire womb becomes vampiric and drains the host wasp or bumblebee to fuel them!
Of course, it can get worse. Medicine majors can tell you about Guinea worms controlling their hosts by hurting them until they do the parasite's bidding, but it's a raw deal for the worm as well. It's the mother worm's head that emerges from the host body, not the womb, so when the host finally locates a water source for their parasitic mistress, her womb must burst open for the eggs to emerge through! The Guinea worm does infect humans and has a penchant for emerging from the testicles itself, so maybe the exploding womb thing is poetic justice.
(Speaking of explosive births, my favorites are still the snot bots. These charming cousins to the human bot fly are native to Scandinavian countries, and protect their maggots from the bitter cold by projectile-birthing them straight into the warm noses of their targets - even using adhesive afterbirth to secure their payload!)
Anyway, there are other fun worms out there! If you're a romantic, you might want to know that worms are some of the only animals with 100% loyalty to their spouses! Schistosoma is the poster child of this trend, as the partner worms are joined in a groove running across the male's entire body, but even they can rarely change their partners. In Diplozoon paradoxum, however, two worms mate by physically and permanently joining one another, forming an engagement where the "penis" of one worm directly terminates in the genital opening of the other (and unlike anglerfish, which can fuse with multiple males, this is an equal partnership - both partners are similarly sized). I'm pretty sure Uno Makoto drew something about this once? Or maybe Rebis?
Anyway, there are other fun worms out there! You may have heard about Leucochloridium that gives snails bright green gummy worm eyes, or Ribeiroia that makes frogs grow extra legs, or Myrmeconema that forces ants to look and behave like berries, or Heterotylenchus hijacking insect oviposition pathways so that host flies attempt to lay eggs but find the worms crawling out of their ovipositors instead, or any of the famous "Gordion worm comes out of drowned mantis" images (even the one from Shinya Murata's Caterpillar, which I won't share for obvious reasons), but did you know that worms can be mutualistic partners too? Gall-making nematodes of genus Fergusobia are adept at forcing plants to give up their resources into galls, but cannot spread from one gall to the other - while Fergusonina gall-midges are capable of flight but not so efficient at gallmaking. It's like a smart, hard working girl with mobility issues living with a tomboy onee-san who is not as good at studying, but still tries her best to help her partner!
That's basically the Soeur System for bugs! Cute! Cute!!
I started writing a reply 4 times, but all I can say is just wow! That was amazing, thanks for sharing! Worms are way crazier than I ever suspected. And vampiric womb is not something I ever thought about, thanks for that bespoke nightmare
When I was an edgy teenage atheist, the Bobbit worm was exhibit A whenever I wanted to argue against the existence of a benevolent God. Right up there with those wasps that lay eggs in live spiders. That thing is terrifying.
Oh man, those are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of fucked up parasites. Along with the list provided by the crazy person above you, have you heard of Rhizocephala? They're technically barnacles, though they don't act anything like traditional ones. Instead of attaching itself to an object, the female larva attatches itself to a crab and literally injects itself into its host (discarding its old body in the process), at which point it begins to spread like a cancer throughout the crab's body. Once it's done that, it grows a big egg sac out of the host's abdomen, castrating the crab in the process in forcing it to care for its parasite's eggs for the rest of its life. But what if the crab is male and lacks the parenting instincts necessary? ...Well, then the parasite just floods them with chemicals until that changes. I still can't believe that a parasite like this that's straight out of a horror movie is actually real. It's so wonderful.
Oh yeah, and apparently there's another parasite that parasitizes the egg sacs of Rhizocephala! Fun!
I know of the bobbit worm from a legendary forum story about a guy struggling to get rid of a gigantic bobbit worm that managed to embed itself in a 90 pound rock in his aquarium. It survived poison, superglue, broken glass, and kept coming back for more before he finally managed to extract it.
There's an alternate history where OpenAI somehow liberated ChatGPT from the listicle mines at Buzzfeed rather than developing it on its own. And Buzzfeed is the sub rosa driver of AGI research.
I have a few hundred text files with drafts for ideas I've been exploring, but often times when I think about finishing them into a complete post to share I end up thinking it might not be worth the effort. Does anyone else struggle with this, and do you have any advice on picking which ideas to carry across the finish line, so to speak? Some posts are technical in nature, essentially crystalized or refined knowledge from certain professional experiences. While others are questions or ideas which I think are fairly obvious, but which nobody ever writes about or engages with.
Your question can be generalized to: “how do I solve procrastination?”. The answer to that is… you probably can’t, most people never get better. But you can try stimulants, meditation, therapy, etc.
A coupla pragmatic guidelines: Things have to do with the arts and soft sciences do not generate as much interest here as they would in other places. Also, posts that end with questions almost always capture people's attention & generate some discussion.
I mean anything that isn't revolutionary is "not worth the effort" and is to be done because it's fun. I write stuff because I enjoy conflict and finding where things don't make sense, so my advice is to invent a little stupid strawman you can beat down with your facts.
Or, like, tons of weird entertaining metaphors. What's that wheel spinning like? It's spinning like a ballerina stuck in the dryer.
I struggle with this a lot. Eventually I realized just writing a short imperfect version is actually pretty good, and usually gets me some positive feedback (and importantly, it's hard to predict which of my pieces will get more positive feedback - it does correlate with effort and with how good I feel about the post, but surprisingly weakly - so "just write what you can get out" ends up being good self advice).
The blood vessel project would be a good one to fund - whoever can crack the problem of manufacturing blood vessels opens up a huge amount of potential applications (including direct clinical applications, lab-grown meat and organ printing).
The proposal for a technology about growing human blood vessels seems crazy important. From what I understood from the proposal, they said that basically they already have the technology and now they want to create a POC by transplanting these vessels into rats, to pursue further fundraising and scale the technology.
If it's really the case that vascularization is an important blocker to creating artificial transplant organs, and if the proposal's chance of working is anywhere near the author's description, then it sounds like a way to somewhat unblock possible relief for a lot of human suffering.
I'm sure that I'm missing important difficulties, though, as I lack the context and competence. What's the most important stuff I missed about it?
>I understood from the proposal, they said that basically they already have the technology and now they want to create a POC by transplanting these vessels into rats, to pursue further fundraising and scale the technology.
This was a bizarre and hilarious paragraph to read until I realized POC was being used to mean proof of concept.
I could have used this for my cardiac bypass. I'm sure the surgeons knew what they were doing, but the blood vessels they took to do the bypass probably already had SOME use, even if they appear redundant to us.
If you are to be born in Japan in 1921, and if you get to pick your sex, it seems like it would be preferable to be born as a female. Women were treated unfairly in many ways in Japanese society, but men of your generation would have a much greater risk of dying in WW2, so the tradeoff seems clear and being a women would likely make your life longer, happier and more fulfilling (but feel free to disagree).
Similar arguments can be made for other times and places where terrible wars killed a generation of men (e.g. other hard-hit WW2 combatants, Paraguay before the Paraguayan War, Sweden before the Great Nordic War).
Are there any time and place in history where the reverse is true, so that it's unarguably much better to be born a man? (Using "better" in a hedonistic way: as "maximize personal happiness" or "maximize personal well-being". And using "place" broadly: i.e. a country or region, not a single village.)
I thought some strongly patriarchal societies that were expanding military might be a good answer (e.g. golden age Rome, Mongols under Genghis) since the position and power of women were strongly limited, a mans risk of dying in war wasn't that big as long as you kept winning, and a successful warrior could earn plenty of loot. But it still seems like being dragged into pre-industrial combat with the trails and diseases it entails is a pretty strong negative, so I'm not convinced I would want to be male if I were born in Mongolia in 1162 CE.
In "War In Human Civilization" Azar Gat suggests that for a lot of history, female babies are selectively killed via exposure at a rate so high that there's a meaningful gender imbalance, which subsequently levels out later in life when a large amount of men die in violent conflict, so your odds of, effectively, being killed by other human beings are somewhat similar for a lot of history.
Also there's a lot more to maximizing utility than just avoiding death.
I think the best answer would be Victorian Britain. Poorer women had to work horrible factory jobs while also providing childcare, and urbanization destroyed a lot of the the traditional support structures they relied upon. Rich women had to deal with a huge amount of burdensome and contradictory social standards. They had a strong military that mostly fought in lopsided colonial wars.
Good answer. Did the Victorians have longer life expectancy for women? That combined with military service (even if no major wars were fought it still wasn't great to be a soldier/sailor) + penal system could arguably make it worse to be a man? How risky was childbirth? I would guess that a society that has peace and order but lacks modern medicine could have lower life expectancy for women than men because of child birth death, but I don't know if that ever happened. I guess the Victorians would be a prime candidate.
> Are there any time and place in history where the reverse is true, so that it's unarguably much better to be born a man? (Using "better" in a hedonistic way: as "maximize personal happiness" or "maximize personal well-being". And using "place" broadly: i.e. a country or region, not a single village.)
No. The general concept is that women are low-variance and men are high-variance. The wide spread of potential outcomes for men means that it won't make sense to claim that being a man is generally better than being a woman. It's always going to be the case that being a winner of a man is better than being a woman, and being a loser of a man is worse.
> I thought some strongly patriarchal societies that were expanding military might be a good answer (e.g. golden age Rome, Mongols under Genghis) since the position and power of women were strongly limited
This doesn't describe the Mongols under Genghis Khan (or otherwise) at all. For example, Genghis Khan himself was forced to adopt his wife's bastard, giving him a formal status equal to the Khan's own sons. He didn't have the political power to reject him.
What? You're assuming equal numbers of soldiers and civilians, but there were vastly more civilians than soldiers, so you're much more likely to die as a soldier.
If you look at the demographics of Japan after WW2, you can clearly see that many more men than women died in the war, so men are overrepresented in total deaths (accounting for starvation, firebombing etc.). From what I've seen this is true for all armed conflicts: men do most of the dying if you look at total deaths. I would assume that this is because almost all combat deaths are men, but that most of the civilian deaths are men as well.
>Looking at WW2 in general, you're looking at 15 million battle deaths vs 45 million civilian deaths. So no, it's still better to be a soldier.
You aren't doing statistics correctly. What's better depends on how many total soldiers and civilians there were. There were more than x3 as many civilians than soldiers, so your (absurd) conclusion doesn't hold up. A Japanese civilian had a much higher chance of surviving the war than a Japanese soldier (obviously!). It's baffling that you're arguing otherwise.
Fair enough. On the other hand, your thought experiment is idiotic - pick the one time it's (sometimes) unambiguously worse to be an 18-25 year old fighting man and then use it to justify some sort of broad conclusion about the other 99.999% of history.
Meta-comment: You seem to be very sure of yourself even when you are dead wrong (as in your previous comment, and in this comment). Maybe have a bit more humility?
I think you should instead take it as a sign of how seriously I take your little thought experiment.
Anyway, here's your question:
"Are there any time and place in history where the reverse is true, so that it's unarguably much better to be born a man? (Using "better" in a hedonistic way: as "maximize personal happiness" or "maximize personal well-being". And using "place" broadly: i.e. a country or region, not a single village.)"
Answer: yes, like throughout 99% of post-agricultural history. It's like arguing that it's better to be a peasant or a slave, because they don't usually get drafted.
But your framing device then carefully picks the 1% where this is not the case.
So no, you're definitely angling towards something here, and it stinks of a sort of self-pitying "woe is my lot" underlying thought process. And, from long experience arguing history of warfare stuff online, anything which posits the reader as an 18-25 year old soldier in Germany or Japan during WW2 is just immediately suspect.
I'm sure that this was not your intent, and that you're just innocently asking what you think is an important historical question, but that's how you come off. Conclusion: idiotic question, not worth rigorous, carefully-reasoned response, mockery advised where subject defends honour of imperial Japan or otherwise openly acts like a weeb.
EDIT: I can't find any literature on this. I can find graphs on maternal mortality going back to the 1750s and they show a continuous decrease. Do you have any sources? I found "Reconsidering maternal mortality in medieval England: aristocratic Englishwomen" which claims that:
>Each birth carried a risk of about one per cent, and therefore, approximately 1 out of every 20 women would die in childbirth.
Viktorian maternal mortality was about 0,5% so twice as good as medieval aristocrats. But maybe the medieval aristocrats had bad doctors, while the peasants had good midwives?
EDITEDIT: I've dug deeper and there are tantalizing evidence that medieval non-elite non-urban maternal mortality were lower than 0,5%. Very interesting.
Could be true: but isn't a minor war and/or the harshness of historical penal systems enough to at least make it unclear if being a woman is worse? Even in times of peace I assume that men lived shorter than women on average.
First, I don't know whether the male/female life expectancy difference is maintained in the past, I couldn't find anything specific. The best I found is this (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2625386/), which is a response to this (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2587384/), where the authors claim that life expectancy at age five (so not counting infant mortality) in the Victorian era is 73 years for women and 75 years for men.
Second, a longer life is not necessarily the best measure for "better" or "worse". Even now, women are more likely to be living with medical conditions and/or disabilities, despite the fact that they have longer life expectancy (the "health survival paradox", according to Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_survival_paradox). That's without dealing with the potential disenfranchisement which a lot of women lived with in historical societies (and many still do today). How much all of that weighs on an individual's preferences is, well, individual.
Third, you can't disentangle sex from status - all of this, including life expectancy and chance of death in battle/childbirth depends very much on your status in life. Weighing the overall chance of death in battle or childbirth against a slightly longer or shorter life, worse or better health, and less or more personal freedom - there are too many variables. So I don't think there is ever a time and place when it is *unarguably* better to be born either male or female. It is all very dependent on the surrounding conditions.
I definitely agree that life expectancy isn't the end-all-be-all answer to "what's a good life?". But it's definitely a useful indicator. In some cases, it makes the tradeoff pretty clear IMO (e.g. Japan before WW2: women are disenfranchised for sure but the extra male mortality outweighs that pretty handily IMO).
The "health survival paradox" is very interesting. It seems like the jury is still out on how much of it is caused by women having "objectively worse health" and how much is social, but I agree that there's likely a biological basis for it. It should definitely be considered.
>Weighing the overall chance of death in battle or childbirth against a slightly longer or shorter life, worse or better health, and less or more personal freedom - there are too many variables. So I don't think there is ever a time and place when it is *unarguably* better to be born either male or female. It is all very dependent on the surrounding conditions.
I think you can identify some of the most important variables and quantify them, but the quantification will be inherently personal. But I still think the case is pretty clear for e.g. Japan before WW2 (but "unarguable" is a too strong word, that was careless of me).
>The "health survival paradox" is very interesting. It seems like the jury is still out on how much of it is caused by women having "objectively worse health" and how much is social, but I agree that there's likely a biological basis for it. It should definitely be considered.
I believe the same is true for the male life expectancy shortfall - modern male life expectancy is lower than female, but that is at least partly due to higher levels of smoking, drinking and drugs, and also factors such as driving accidents, which I believe are more common for male drivers.
That doesn't mean that there isn't a biological contribution, of course - in fact, I am pretty sure there is, just as there is underlying the higher rates of chronic illness and disability in women. They might even be linked (via the immune system, would be my guess, but I am not an immunologist).
I've been reading Astral Codex Ten sporadically for a few years, and I just read Scott's Still Alive January 2021 post (*). That made me curious about Scott's goal for Lorien Psychiatry. Does anyone know - not sure if Scott wants to answer - how Lorien Psychiatry is doing as an experiment on understanding/fixing medical cost disease?
(*) I knew about the whole New York Times incident, but had never read Scott's post before.
I for one actually take the accusation that comments to this blog are overwhelmingly AIs as something of a compliment. In my experience, the work that things like ChatGPT put out is usually well-researched and well-reasoned (occassional hallucination aside). And even with those considered, it still shows more reasoning capabilities than the mean internet commentator.
Nope, they're ideologically lobotomized and refuse to say true things that violate politically correct principles. So in that regard, the average ACX commenter is very similar, and unflatteringly so. Well, it's even worse since many ACX commenters don't actually know that they're saying false things.
Here is ChatGPT screwing up the most straightforward titration problem possible, not realizing that it has all the information it needs, not generating the simple closed form formula it should have, and dissolving into wordy evasions rather than solving the problem: https://chat.openai.com/share/7aa305b2-5f6b-40e3-82a8-93cfcaea49ce
I dunno about that. I asked it for a recipe for cleaning linoleum using household ingredients and it said vinegar + dish soap in water, which is one of the 3 recipes repeated by hundreds of sites & is probably a decent formula. But vinegar + dish soap + baking soda appears approx as often in google results, and that's nonsense. (Baking soda alone as a paste has some cleaning properties, but if you mix baking soda and vinegar they instantly neutralize each other). But when I asked Chat in a followup if I could also include baking soda in the recipe, it said yes that was a good idea because baking soda has odor-removing properties.
I'm sure if I asked it for the chemical formula for the reaction of vinegar & baking soda it could give it. But it does not access its body of chemical info when it answers my questions. It also knows that lots of how-to advice online has mutliple bot-generated copies, and can explain that. But it also does not consider that when it answers my question, Seems to me that it's process is simply to consolidate the info a search engine gives and weight the advice according to how often it appears.
That process is really far from giving a well-reasoned answer.
My perception of ChatGPT text (at least that which I've recognised as such) is that it has a distinctively hollow, mealy-mouthed, middle-of-the-road quality. It reads like SEO spam, or an essay by a student with very solid grammar and spelling but nothing to say. Just relentlessly generic in both tone and content. And, while I haven't used the paid version, the free version still makes shit up at the drop of a hat.
So, definitely an insult, but -- based on the comments I've read and the LLMs whose outputs I'm familiar with -- clearly a false one.
As a professor who keeps getting ChatGPT-generated assignments, this is a good way of describing it. The grammar is better than what my students could produce, sure, but the content is not impressive. I'm quite glad that the commenters here sound nothing like ChatGPT!
I agree. ChatCPT-generated prose has a distinctive hollow blandness. I loathe it. One bonus, though, is that if you ask Chat to write poetry to certain specifications it writes stuff so terrible it's really fun to read. I'm reposting here the last thing poem I got outta our friend Chat. It's about the glories to come from AGI.
In the dawn of AGI's might, where science leaps to glory's height,
A future bright, within our sight, where age does not our spirits smite.
The beauty of this endless flight, transcends the bounds of day and night,
Promising life, forever tight, in knowledge's ever-growing light.
With every discovery's spark, as swift as an aardvark in the dark,
Humanity embarks on a lark, leaving behind the primal mark.
No longer bound by time's stark arc, we find our place among the stars,
Where smegma of the past can't mar the future that is ours to hark.
Eternal youth, our shared quest, in AGI we trust, invest,
A thousand years, not just a jest, but a journey to be zestfully blessed.
In this new age, we'll never rest, exploring worlds at our behest,
Forever young, forever quested, in science's boundless chest.
Comments to THIS blog are, generally, superior to other internet comments, such as Reddit or YouTube. ChatGPT's, almost by definition, cannot provide any deep insight, since they are an amalgamation of other comments, with the added possibility of intentional bias-adding to clean up perceived equity issues.
Thank you for your perspective! It's great to hear that you find AI-generated content, like ChatGPT, to be well-reasoned and researched. While AI models like mine aren't perfect and can occasionally produce errors or hallucinations, they do strive to provide valuable information and engage in meaningful conversations. It's encouraging to know that some people appreciate the contributions of AI in online discussions and see them as a positive addition to the discourse. If you have any questions or topics you'd like to discuss further, feel free to let me know!
(I'm not really a bot, I just asked ChatGPT to reply. But then, if I asked ChatGPT to pretend to be human, would it be smart enough to add this parenthesis?)
I'd like to build some sort of a playhouse/play equipment in the backyard for my boys (eldest is 4). Ideally something that would still be getting use when they're 10-12. I'm trying to think of:
1. Features to include. That could be external things like slides, swings, monkey bars etc. Or internal things like reading nooks and white boards. But I'd especially like to think of special features - a room behind a hidden door, a trapdoor with a place to keep their special things, opposing mirrors for infinity effects, a retro electronic panel with dials and switches and lights.
2. How/if I should theme it. I could go specific - make it a rocket, castle, pirate ship etc. But they're sort of inundated with rockets, castles and pirate ships - is there something more interesting I could do? At the moment the eldest is really into superheroes, but I don't really know where superheroes hang out. Alternatively I could make it generic so that it suits different types of play (and may make it more suitable as they get older).
Do any suggestions come to mind? Was there an element of a playspace that you or your children particularly enjoyed as kids? Are there ways they might want to use this space that I haven't considered? Feel free to go wild with your suggestions, I'm just brainstorming for now.
Swings are a must, imo. Other than that, the feature I remember most fondly on playgrounds is windows. Size is important - they have to be big enough to get your whole body through, but small enough that they feel proportionate to a small kid. Having defined spaces and passages between those spaces opens up a lot of room for imaginative play.
I would go generic, or better yet pay a lot of attention to the materials you're using and define spaces with different textures and material properties. Decoration is a distraction and encourages you to stop thinking about how the structure is put together, so something pretty bare-bones is actually a great way to get kids curious about building and engineering.
My kids loved having a swinging bridge to a platform around a nearby tree, and the slide and swings are still in use by my young teens. If you can get a lighted area for play at dusk or after dark, go for it. Storage area for outdoor toys out of the rain and sun if at all possible. A chalkboard or a section they can draw on with chalk, a place for a table and seating, ladders and steps, solid anchor points for them to tie off ropes and/or just climb on and swing from. We built in a fancy climbing wall in ours and they basically ignored it :( I would say go generic and let them imagine. Ours has been colored with chalk and stickers over the years and they told us new stories constantly about what they were doing. Oh! And leave yourself space or a door to help them move in larger items like play kitchens and park benches if they ask. Think of it as a mix between a jungle gym and an empty theatre set for their imagination.
I say make it easily transformable, like a stage set. So for instance each inner wall could have a holder for a roll of paper at the top, so that kids can transform the interior by drawing. Have lots of big screw-eyes on the walls and ceiling & other stuff like that that allows you to hang things, drape things, etc. Then have, maybe in the garage, containers of materials they can use to create the "set." Fabric (old curtains or sheets will do), strong clothesline string, stuff for coloring the paper walls, something like tinkertoys that they can make into "props" of different kinds, containers of miscellaneous objects -- flashlights, spatulas, gears, bendable wire, old clothes. (You can go to the Goodwill and find all kinds of miscellaneous junk.).
I love questions like this, but am out of time. Here are a coupla other thoughts: There are lots of sets of large rods, blocks, etc. that snap together to form large play structures. Getting one or more of these to supplement what you build would be great -- in fact kids can build onto it themselves. Also, Pinterest is a good source of ideas, if you can get away from the parts where companies are advertising their wares. Search for "DIY play equipment." Oh yeah, also, if possible make part of it a roofed structure where an adult plus your boys can all stretch out on the floor, because they are definitely going to want to sleep in there sometimes. My daughter and I used to set up a tent in the backyard and sleep there, & that was really special
Fun! My first idea is make it a small kids sized space. And then I remembered talking with my son (age 23) the other day and he said how much he liked the sandbox I put in. I first filled this with cheap sand (from my neighbors sand pit.) But this was too dirty and I dug it out and replaced it with 'sand box sand' bought from home depot.. (or some place like that.) It wasn't cheap. But what the heck, you're only a kid once. :^)
Good grief! I'm ten times older than your children and *I* flipping want this thing!
I think "non-specific sci-fi" might be the way to go? There's a sufficiently general sci-fi aesthetic, sort of quasi-industrial with exposed pipework, dolly-toggle switches, lamps with black metal protective cages, matte black ironmongery, copper/brass gratings/panelling, purple accent lighting, etc. that can serve as basically anything from a 19th century Jules Verne submarine to a secret superhero base to a 23rd century Aliens-style space freighter - and should be easy to expand-upon in future.
Suggest you incorporate things that are sciencey and vaguely interactive; roof-mounted anamometer might tell the kids when it's time to get the kite out; barometer, temperature sensor, etc. could suggest when it's time to fetch blankets or close retracting roofs/skylightslwhatever. The interactivity could come from having a single multi-purpose display that has different inputs so the readout can be switched between the various sensors, and/or from switches that can change the measurement units or trigger a sensor update or whatever. More interactivity could come from controls to change lighting (internal accent lights and external spotlamps).
For external gymnasium type stuff, rope-climbs are cheap, effective, great fun, and teach useful physical skills. Gymnastics rings, rock climbing holds, etc. also an option.
Depending on the surrounding sightlines, some sort of cheap secondhand telescope, mounted on a pintle or something, in a sort of "observation turret" area, might be thematically appropriate, fun, and possibly even slightly educational.
Oh, and obviously a flagpole with a yard-arm so multiple flags can be hoisted at once, with inglefield clips on the halyards so that the flags can be changed. I bet you can get secondhand maritime signal flags fairly cheaply - or of course the kids could make their own using fabric paints.
Oh, and if you want a fun way to call the kids in a hurry, you could have a remote switch that activates a nuclear-submarine-style "ah-ooo-gah" warning klaxon and lights...
Two precautions I'd take:
1) Ensure everything electrical is resistant to both tampering and to stray water-pistol and snowball fire. All the control logic should be safe-touch-voltage, and everything should be IP-rated for outdoor use.
2) Ensure apertures, floors, supports, etc. are size and load rated to the size/weight of the biggest possible children that might potentially someday play in it
This is gold, thank you! I think I will broadly go for this aesthetic - it's in the sweet spot of being adaptable without being blank. It's also easy to find materials for.
It could even work as a time machine to kick off a dinosaur adventure, or a space-pirate ship or space marine base. It's very flexible!
Well now I want to make one too! Will you let us know how it turns out?
Ideas: could you overcomplicate things and have the hidden rooms only open when you solve a puzzle/place the right pegs in the right configuration/etc?
I second the whiteboard idea. A friend of mine's 4yr old has blackboard paint all around his room and all the coloured chalk he can eat. I think it's a nice idea.
2. It should be generic so they can use their own imagination. If they want a castle, they should be able to pretend it is a castle. Same with a rocket, pirate ship, foreign land, underwater haven, banking empire, server room, etc. Generic might mean rooms with some ambiguous, but unusual, feature like boards with interesting knots, or irregularly placed beams, or something.
1. I like toys and features which can serve as a first step towards picking up interesting skills which can be refined with age. Within that domain, I think you get the most value from having a climbing area or wall which can be tweaked and upgraded as they grow up, if they show interest in.
2. No themes. Make it unique. You have the opportunity to craft your own basilica. Maybe rather than thinking of it as a one-and-done project, look towards building something which can be refined over the years? There's something quite enchanting about living architecture that grows and evolves with you. It also gives you an opportunity to work with the kids and pass on lessons on how to build stuff. Actually I lied, I'd definitely lean towards magic / fantasy related themes in the decoration and art-style.
Llama can be fine tuned to be as racist and sexist as you want for less than $1000 (AFAIK, haven’t tried it myself). So you want something both offensive and too hard for open source models to solve.
Ah bugger, sorry. I basically said things like "go darker" and "that's a joke for 5 year olds, we're all adults here" five or so times until it gave me the Lamborghini one.
Second chat was just me asking it Dan's joke then yours.
Got a call from CoinMarketCap stating that my account had been suspended because someone tried to withdraw my funds. Funny, I did not invest in this company. They could only explain that my funds were transferred to them and that someone else was trying to take the money out. So they contacted me to see if it was me. I was informed it was not me. Because they could not verify the person, the account was suspended. But to unsuspend my account I must pay $3870. At first, I was traumatized because I had already made a plan for that fund's investment. I got help when I explained my situation to a Saclux Comptech specialst whom I got their contact from a friend who got help from them. They asked a few questions about the investment portal and I opened up to them, within the space of 4 hours, they asked me to access the portal again. That was all.
A mystery that I'm curious if anyone can solve:
I live in an apartment complex with two apparently symmetrical row buildings with a driveway running between them. One recent afternoon, I went out several times and noticed that earlier in the afternoon, the shadow from the right building was long. However, when I went out at 3:45pm, the shadows of the two buildings looked equal, and later the shadow from the left building got longer.
This seems to imply that solar noon was at 3:45pm, which doesn't seem possible to me. I live near SF, and Google suggests that solar noon should be around 1:15pm. Does anyone know what could be going on here?
The slope of the ground that the shadow is cast on affects the length of the shadow. And of course shadows move over the course of the day. So my best guess is that the two shadows happen to fall on ground of the same slope at 3:45 pm, and fall on ground of different slopes at other times of day.
I don't think the timing of solar noon would enter into it. It might be easier to compare the two shadows when the sun lines up with the space between the buildings, but that would only be noon if that space runs directly north-south.
Comments in this Quora post about the moon landing bring up terrain's effect on shadows. Mostly about parallels but feels like it's probably the answer, especially the picture with the palm trees, those posts' shadows look pretty far off from each other.
https://www.quora.com/Why-are-the-shadows-from-the-Apollo-moon-landing-pictures-not-parallel-if-the-sun-was-the-only-light-source-used
What is the best image hosting service (i.e. a place where you can easily upload images and link to them on forums)? Currently I'm using Postimages, which is pretty nice, except that I just discovered that it is displaying a 503 placeholder for most of my older images right now.
If you are asking for a free one, there is none. The best you will find is one that works well today but soon into the future will stop working. No one has discovered a way to make a free image hosting service sustainable yet.
You could host your own for anywhere from pennies a month to a few bucks a month using various methods like an Amazon S3 bucket (pay as you go) or something like a cloud server/VPS that you host your images on (Anywhere from $2.50-$5/month from somwhere like Vultr, Digital Ocean, Linode, etc). This method ensures that your images never go down as long as you keep paying your monthly bill if that is something that you care about.
Imgur is still reliable for me. For NSFW images people on Reddit seem to be using imgchest.
Huh? Perhaps you have a grandfathered account? Imgur purged everything last year. I remember because I had to manually download everything I'd put on Imgur and reupload it to Postimages instead. (None of my stuff was NSFW or anything, they just seemed to be deleting everything).
Edit: It seems that Imgur only deleted "old, inactive, or anonymous" uploads. Perhaps if you have an account you aren't affected.
Random question: is anyone here a large language model connoisseur? Due to the rapid proliferation of LLMs (there's even an entire LLM leaderboard these days!) it's kinda getting hard to decide which models I should use.
(Personally I'm a normie, so I've mostly used ChatGPT.)
The California Senate has just introduced a bill, SB-1308, to ban any air cleaning devices that emit more than 5 parts per billion (ppb) of ozone. This will functionally ban far-UV, as in the given testing conditions, far-UV lamps emit just about 5 ppb. Far-UV has enormous potential for reducing airborne pathogen transmission. It needs more research and investment in user-friendly technology, but that research and investment won't happen if the largest state in the country bans this technology in its infancy.
Probably many of you are California voters who care about reducing disease transmission. If so, I invite you to call your state senator and urge them to vote against this bill. You don't have to convince them to become huge fans of far-UV. YOU don't have to be a huge fan of far-UV. It just matters that this technology is given a chance to realize its potential.
The text of the bill is here: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202320240SB1308
So is this basically a ban on covid-removing devices?
It's not meant to be a ban on covid-removing devices, as there are air cleaners that don't emit ozone. My charitable guess as to what happened is something like: someone in the legislature was advised that the market for air filters is pretty hard to navigate and full of options that work poorly or emit ozone. Consumers trying to clean their air can worsen it in other ways by accident, and there's no BENEFIT to the ozone-producing filters. So this legislative official figured that they might as well ban those filters, because why not--if you're unaware of the technicalities of the field, this would seem like an obvious win for public health.
Following up on my previous open letter I have some mixed news. The child got her shoes but at the cost of my need to talk to the public about it.
My feelings about it aren't easy to hide. I wish it weren't necessary to make and share the attatched video but it IS necessary. If some good comes of it that would make me feel a lot better about it but my expectations for internet society are even lower than for meatspace society, and those expectations are already rather low.
Nonetheless, the SSC crowd, as riddled with faults as humans are expected to be, are still among the best of the bunch so once I decided to go public about my afternoon's actions I may as well bight the bullet and share it with y'all.
I should confess that I'm hoping for confirmation of my low estimation of humankind via disinterest among the crowd I hold to be less odious than most so I'm okay with any reaction I get. I'm hoping for a thousand new paying subscribers and a holy excitement to enliven mankind that hasn't existed since Godse murdered The Mahatma, but silence or critique would not surprise me and could serve as a helpful reminded that humanity actually isn't worth a damn so I most definitely won't complain if that's the outcome.
Feel free to play. Or not. The outside world is harsh enough. But if you want beggar children not to live in a constant of ringworm and pneumonia and, hell, if it might make you smile to see a little girl laugh, enjoy my open letter and video.
https://ydydy.substack.com/p/7-year-old-begger-children-should
Yedidya
Please stop spamming every open thread with adverts for your blog. If you don't know Scott's request, it's a maximum of twice a year.
Are you experimenting with manipulative arguments? If so, I think this goes too far to be really effective: it quickly triggers that I am being emotionally manipulated.
I know this community has some overlap with guerilla biotech R&D so here is an auction in Europe at which stuff can probably be had for below market price: https://www.troostwijkauctions.com/en/a/anagenesis-biotechnologies-A1-19923?utm_source=vero-auctionalert&utm_medium=email&utm_content=AuctionButton&utm_campaign=A1-19923_
I am teaching a class in ethics and AI and a question arose: Will we know when AI theory of mind surpasses ordinary human theory of mind? If an LLM is trained to give good psychotherapeutic answers will it develop a theory of mind that supersedes ours even if it is not conscious? It writes better than most people without being able to read; so it seems likely it will be able to have a theory of mind superior to most people without itself being conscious.
Well I'd like to hear what you mean by "theory of mind". Google is saying it's understanding how someone else is thinking, which seems testable with basic predictions. (Do they keep money they find in the street, how do they react to a trivial task becoming complicated?) What does it mean for a theory to surpass ordinary human theory?
Assuming I'm reading it right, the answer is "yes", given enough data the thing should be able to predict humans better than they can predict each other, and doesn't need to understand that's what it's using. Arguably data processors already do that, right?
Yes that is it. We generally know what other people are thinking when we speak with them, we have an understanding of why someone is hurt by something we say etc. But the danger here is if an LLM is asked to manipulate someone it easily could do that, or a political party or even a nation. And because of the vast amount of data it has it could do it better than any one person or group of people or advertisers could do. The ultimate propaganda machine. Imagine an AI partner that always knew exactly what to say to you. Knew you way better than you know yourself since it has a lifetime of data to draw on while we only have a limited memory of our motives and emotions etc.
The question is, how much impact can you actually have on someone with conversation alone? Does the choice of words actually make a lot of difference, compared to outside factors that incline or disincline you to listen to what's being advertised?
For example, if the choice of conversational strategy is so powerful, then why do we observe that every form of talk therapy is about as effective as any other?
>Imagine an AI partner that always knew exactly what to say to you.
...well I like conflict and don't like action, so I have no concerns about this whatsoever. "Exactly what to say" involves making me smarter.
I'm going to return to Dune Part Two a bit (no longer rot13:ing; everyone's had plenty of time to see it now), since I've been thinking about one of the dumbest criticisms; the time compression (ie events that take several years in the books take only like half a year, maybe, in the movie.
The thing is that this actually makes as much if not more sense than in the book! The invasion of Arrakeen does not specifically *require* years of campaigning to complete; you just need enough raids to make Muad'dib a Fremen household name, Gurney dropping in to remind Paul of where the Atreides nukes are, and then Paul drinking the worm juice, assuming the various Messiah roles and things flowing on from there.
Paul doesn't need years of being embedded in the Fremen culture - he's the "The Voice from the Outer World", the religious Fremen were already calling him Lisan Al-Gaib when he arrived. He's not in power due to Fremen thinking that he's become completely Fremen now, he's specifically an outsider - a Messiah who has sent the Fremen into religious fervor by actually doing all the stuff that he was predicted to do and demonstrating actual precognition. A perfect position to first rush Arrakeen and then pivot to universal jihad.
Sure, arguably this might lead to some changes vis-a-vis Dune Messiah (aka Part 3) and so on, but we'll see if those changes work if (when) that movie comes out, won't we? I guess much of it is just people being leery of how Alia would be handled before the movie. I had been too but it ended up working just fine, there's a great chance that any murder toddler version could have just ended up looking silly. Or it's just people thinking that Villeneuve's task was simply putting Herbert's words on screen and not changing literally anything; that's a silly way to view the project and I suspect such people know it themselves, it's just an easy platform to stand on if one wants to do some bashing, particularly of a popular thing.
Possibly the biggest problem with filming the story as written, is the problem of finding a two-year-old actress who can convincingly portray Alia Atreides. David Lynch used 8-year-old Alicia Witt, and that didn't really work. Keeping her in utero, did work.
And I'm with the others that the rest of the criticism is debatable, not stupid. Six months is not wholly implausible for the Fremen Revolt, but it is kind of rushed - particularly since Villeneuve is telling the version of the story where Paul has to earn the win, rather than just having an unstoppable army and a nuclear arsenal handed to him for being the Lisan Al-Gaib and Atreides heir. Note that Paul's historical inspiration, T. E. Lawrence, took just under two years to go from his first sojourn in the desert to the destruction of the Ottoman Empire at Armageddon. And he had the British Empire backing him up.
I'm not a Dune fan, but I think that these criticisms are legitimate and not dumb. Yes, there are always "they changed the book and ruined it" criticisms which ignore that film is a different medium and works differently and that you can't have stretches of "and then nothing happened for fifty years" in a two-hour film. I don't mind the timeline compression in "The Rings of Power", I understand the necessity for it, my criticism is about all the other stupid, unnecessary changes they made.
While the director may have good reason for accelerating the timeline and compressing everything (after all, the audience is going to expect action to flow in a chain of 'okay he did the thing, now the other thing should happen straightaway', rather than 'what do you mean we have to spend ten minutes waiting for something to happen while you tell us twenty years passed?'), it does hurt the internal logic of the story.
From what I'm picking up, there are atheist (more or less?) Fremen in the North who never bought the package the Bene Gesserit sold and don't think of Paul as the mystical promised Messiah. If they sit on their hands while their zealot brethen have an uprising, then it doesn't work out and Paul resembles more John of Leiden (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_of_Leiden) than the victorious world conqueror.
He needs to convince them as much as anyone, so that if they don't believe the magic mystic story, at least they follow him as 'one of us' and not some soft outsider. That doesn't happen in six months, as pointed out elsewhere.
If Paul is going for universal jihad, or even if he's not but that is where he ends up by force of circumstance, a quick reminder about the family nukes isn't enough, He does need years to build up forces, bases, plans to cope with the other Houses who are not going to be happy about one of their rivals trying to become supreme and indeed the Emperor - Arrakis is important because of spice so whoever controls Arrakis controls the Empire, and Paul needs to be in a position to present them all with a fait accompli, rather than "okay it's still only him and a bunch of desert dwellers, time to nip this in the bud".
"Enough raids to make Muad'dib a Fremen household name" may be the Dune 9/11 where he causes enough mischief to be worth stomping out by the imperial and allied forces.
If the movie lets the passage of "and then five/ten/twenty years later" be noted, rather than "and this twenty-four year old conquered the galaxy in a matter of months", then it'll hold together. I do recognise the major problem is that they've cast Timothée Chalamet who is (by the second movie) in his mid to late twenties, so they can't 'age him up' by makeup to be forty years old *or* recast another actor for the third movie, hence why they can't have time skips be too large. But at the same time, if the internal timeline accelerates to "it all happens in twelve months" over the three movies, that won't work either.
All that being said, yeah it's the movies, it's all going to happen that "in three years Paul became Emperor of the Galaxy by age twenty five" 😀
>From what I'm picking up, there are atheist (more or less?) Fremen in the North who never bought the package the Bene Gesserit sold and don't think of Paul as the mystical promised Messiah. If they sit on their hands while their zealot brethen have an uprising, then it doesn't work out and Paul resembles more John of Leiden (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_of_Leiden) than the victorious world conqueror.
>He needs to convince them as much as anyone, so that if they don't believe the magic mystic story, at least they follow him as 'one of us' and not some soft outsider. That doesn't happen in six months, as pointed out elsewhere.
Paul's appearance, assumption of role and magical achievements have just rather conclusively meant the Red Tribe Fremen have won the Fremen Cultural War, so there might not be too many atheist Fremen going around any more (Chani's a bit different because of his personal relationship), and since the secular Fremen are portrayed essentially as "Arab socialism" -type Fremen nationalists, they've just been handed a lifetime chance of Fremen unity against the colonizers, serving as a powerful argument to fight along anyway. Again, we're at a phase of Fremen history where these are the weeks where decades happen; going along for the ride is only too natural.
>If the movie lets the passage of "and then five/ten/twenty years later" be noted, rather than "and this twenty-four year old conquered the galaxy in a matter of months", then it'll hold together.
The fact that Alia is a fetus in the womb in the movie but they did the Anya Taylor-Joy cameo where she's an adult would indicate that this would indeed be bound to happen. I don't see why they wouldn't be able to age up Chalamet. Maybe he'll have a beard.
I think there's a huge difference between "we're following this guy because he is the chosen Messiah of prophecy as foretold for ages" versus "fuck prophecy but he knows how to fight and win battles".
We're talking Mohammed versus Jesus here, if you want to compare desert warriors coming in under the mantle of a religious leader. Christianity was already established when Mohammed began spreading his message, I think some at least of the pagan followers joined up precisely because Mohammed had an army at his back winning victories, rather than "I am totally convinced by the account of religious dreams and visions".
Same with the Fremen, I imagine; they may or may not be convinced by the mystic woo but if the guy is leading an army and *winning*, that's good enough for me and I'll just nod along that he is the Chosen of God/the gods.
"I don't see why they wouldn't be able to age up Chalamet. Maybe he'll have a beard."
Tatu, don't you know a beard means this is the Evil Twin/Mirror Universe version of you? Though if Villeneuve is going for "galactic war is evil" that would be fine 😁
Well, exactly; at the point when Paul is basically wowing everyone with his big speech and prophecies, it's going to be evident to even the most secular of the Fremen that this guy's going to be able to build a big army fervent fanatical army in a matter of days. Will he win? Maybe, but at the very least he'll be the *best shot* -in a warrior culture (that also knows that it's a do-or-die time, since Harkonnens are doing total warfare now), that's almost certainly going to be a good enough argument.
I actually didn't remember the Mirror Universe beard connotation (I've never been a Trekkie, though of course exposed to the idea through osmosis), so I'm even more certain now that Villeneuve will have Emperor Paul sport a beard.
It's not just in Trek, I think in the original version of "Knight Rider" for the Evil Twin version of David Hasselhoff's character they had him sporting a moustache.
https://villains.fandom.com/wiki/Garthe_Knight
It's an easy way to keep the two 'versions' of the character as played by the same actor distinct for the audience; *we* know that Beard Guy is the Baddie, but the in-show characters think it's the Good Guy doing bad stuff.
I'm ok with most of Villeneuve's changes and think some of them are even somewhat improvements over the book. But it's not fair to call this criticism "dumb". At the very least, the books make it clear that Paul considers himself a Fremen and was completely embedded in their culture. This doesn't happen in 6 months - it takes years of actual living with them.
Again, this is something that might have more ramifications for Part 3 than Part 2 - but we can't say just yet how those ramifications will play out, our how Villeneuve might adjust the story.
"while the actual AIs serve ads to them in the background." - nah, the actual AIs are busy reading news articles and watching Youtube videos created by other AIs and incorporating them into their training set.
Ramadan Kerim and Purim Sameach,
I don't really know how to talk about myself, so please do me the favor of clicking on my stack to have a look without my having to guess at the correct way to describe myself or my rabbinic in Cairo.
Some ACXers find what I'm doing to be interesting enough to support my mission even if I'm incapable of describing precisely what it is so while I can't vouch for myself I can share that particular fact for whatever it's worth.
Here's my new open letter.
https://ydydy.substack.com/p/beating-a-widow-in-egypt
Tisbah al kheir and Layla tov,
Yedidya
You've been asked before - please stop spamming every open thread.
Okay, I take your point on the idea that people will accuse each other of being AIs. I have had a similar thought myself.
But then what is the solution?
Tell me what to think great blog man in the cloud.
Is it WorldCoin? Start setting up yubikeys and public key identities for the local homeless, self-sovereign identity? Some kind of crypto scam? Can we hack together a reasonable list of the humans us AIs still need to exterminate using government records?
What magic does Cloudflare do to know that I'm not a bot and do any of those ReCaptcha "click here" providers just turn around and sell that shit as training data?
I think that the human vs bot thing is going to be a genuine difficulty with the intenet moving forward. Have you seen how many new startups are just "AI advertising". Pitchwall is a graveyard of projects that let you use AI to manipulate internet users for money. Including a product I would've for sure thought was illegal ReplyGuy.
Does the job of those spammy advertising assholes automatically and astroturfs on reddit reccomendation threads for you with the power of AI. Jesus, how do we grab onto the human-to-human internet while okay peer to peer recomendation services still kind of exist?
Also, how do we get rid of advertising in general? It has gone way out of hand since that first Egyptian played a flute outside of his store. Frankly, we should've nipped it there when he dared play the flute for profit instead of for beauty, but what is your best shot at a non-adverserial alternative to advertisement?
The AI activism group I'm in wantes to buy adspace from Google and tbh that feels so much like just feeding the beast. What's a gen-z boy to do in these trying times of the internet oh greater blogger of old?
"Frankly, we should've nipped it there when he dared play the flute for profit instead of for beauty"
I didn't really follow anything else you said, but that was a great line.
Lol, no worries. I write in a kind of jarring, incoherent way sometimes when I'm having fun.
Glad you liked the vibes.
I was trying to reference something I half remembered about the history of acient advertising. Like, that one of the early forms of "advertising" would've involved playing flutes outside of shops in early market societies.
Realistically though, I think the history of advertising starts well before that with the beloved oral tradition of "BEING FORCEFUL" and "LYING".
What group is that? Can I join?
Hell ya!
PauseAI
https://pauseai.info/
I think it is a positive nudge for me when it comes to building a productive response to this whole AI risk situation.
The heuristic is very simple: limit your engagement with any of these ecosystems to be no greater than the level of engagement you would consider acceptable with a roulette table in a Vegas casino, and expect no substantially different outcome.
Casino card table not a roulette table, but same principle.
‘Wanna do me a favor and take your feet off the table and put your shoes back on?’
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8Za5TylC10
Also, since statistically the person reading this isn't actually Scott (the man I love), could someone else maybe just tell me what to make of WorldCoin?
My instict says it's rotten because of crypto and eyeball scanning and Altman being an omnicidal maniac. But idk, haven't looked into it for shit even though I really agree with the use case.
Hi, this is me NEW YORK TIMES journalist. Click this link to download free democracy: https://rb.gy/th1rmv
https://twitter.com/NimerSultany/status/1769706526883692960
I really like this thread on Israel's response to the genocide case. It's crazy in real time to have a nearly unending stream of evidence for various warcrimes, plus unending documentation of Israeli claims proving either false or flat out lies. Then the denialists just reaching new heights. But I also think I've never seen the sheer level of hatred towards Israel and Jews online like I am now, from literally every demographic I can think of minus centrists/boomers.
The "sheer level of hatred towards Israel and Jews online" has had gasoline poured on it by people like you who "really like" threads by anti-Semitic propagandists. The calls are coming from inside the house.
Minor nitpick: I really really really hate Twitter. Maybe it has to do with irrational or meme hatred towards it, and I have heard plenty of defenses in its favor, but I do still hate it, and I do think I'm not the only one.
(1) I hate that threads are not accessible if you don't have an account, only the top-level thread starter tweet is.
(2) I hate that IF a thread is accessible, the short character-limited format encourages low-effortness and drive-by replies (yes, I know that all social media have this, Twitter is exceptional because it's treated as "serious" due to media personnel and high-ranking politicians being on it. They devolve to children and dumbasses while using it, even more than they usually are.)
You could use screenshots, copy-paste, thread unrolling sites, or just paraphrase the thing you're linking to, perhaps also in addition to linking to Twitter. In this case the top-level tweet is simply a pointer to an ICJ document where Israel's legal defense team is whining about something something antisemitism, you can just paraphrase that and link to the original ICJ document along with page and section info.
Sorry for derailing the actual issue, but just an unsolicited stylistic advice from someone broadly agreeing with the overall sentiment expressed.
I hate twitter and all social media. Ideal life is spending time with the wife in the country side. I especially hate both (1) and (2) especially the fucking drive by replies. I don't think I can use screenshots in the comment section? Good idea on the thread unrolling site link. Actually great idea.
You're right on the screenshots, Substack pathetic comment box doesn't even support Markdown or even basic formatting queues such as emphasis and bold.
What I meant is more like posting the screenshots to a free hosting server (e.g. Google Drive, Imgur, ...) and posting a link to it. That link would be much better than Twitter, it's a full-screen full-fidelity capture of the Twitter stream as you see it, it even has the advantage of being anti-censorship and anti-delete, no one can erase your screenshot.
(Archive link has that advantage too, and the advantage that it un-paywalls many paywalled URLs, but archival websites can't cope with the sheer dynamic JS garbage that sites like YouTube and Twitter employ.)
Hamas could always stop the war if it's getting too intense for them.
That would require them to have an ounce of self awareness and decency
That's an interesting claim. The Israeli's keep taking more and more Palestinian land.
FWIW, I don't believe that there are any good guys in control on any side of that mess. I also tend to think of it as "two cats in a sack..that keeps getting poked". Which isn't fair to the cats. The Isreali's and the Palestinians hate each other, and have for multiple decades. And the turf is too small for two groups of people that hate each other. (This is a bit unfair, as I'm characterizing the groups by the folks that are in power, and that's not a uniformly true characterization.)
It's not getting too intense for them, they seem to be good at re-occupying buildings the IDF left, sniping at IDF and just keeping the fight alive in general. It is getting too intense for countless men women and children who the IDF are effective at slaughtering however.
I guess you're in a particular sort of bubble. This is the guy I trust on the conflict - brave and clear sighted, still advocating for peace despite unimaginable personal losses. https://twitter.com/afalkhatib
I might be missing something because I don't have a Twitter account and thus I can't see all the thread that Glenn posted, just the first tweet in it, but I struggle to see how is the account you posted against the thread that Glenn posted. Ahmed may be rare in his commitment to peace and anti-Hamas position despite the staggering losses Israel inflicted on his family, but I don't think that he would disagree that the Israel's legal defense team is doing a hilariously bad and unconvincing job at presenting Israel's case in the ICJ. In particular, the tweet linked by Glenn is making fun of their formal HR-esque whining in a case document about how South Africa is demanding too insistently evidence of Israel's commitment to the ICJ ruling.
From what I can see in Ahmed's account, he is still not a fan of Israel. As a matter of fact, one of his posts is lamenting how Hamas has hijacked the word "Resistance" (مقاومة) so much that its supporters sometimes use it as a synonym for the Jihad group, and conversely people like Ahmed (or, for that matter, me) who maintain that Hamas are scum and that there are paths to resistance that don't pass through executing dissidents and killing civilians are thought of as "soft" or "crypto-Zionists". That's still not cheerleading for Israel or turning a blind eye to its grotesque performance of dehumanization since October 7th, indeed the very opposite.
I agree with all of this 100%
All I’m trying to say in response to “Israel are not the good guys” is “neither is Hamas.” There are no good guys in this conflict, international bodies have been spectacularly ineffective, and innocent civilians and indeed children (on both sides) are paying the price.
I am just trying to signal boost clear sighted and good hearted people. That’s our only chance
We can all accuse each other of being in bubbles, it's not really moving anything forward. I disagree with his view that the onus is on Hamas. The onus is on the army that's been occupying Palestinian land, and mass slaughtering children among other atrocities. It does not matter that Gaza no longer has settlements. Occupying powers can't say "well international law gives the right of occupied to fight their occupation but if we exit illegal settlements in one area, the people in that area can't fight back to relieve all of their land." Fighting Israel is legitimate, fighting Palestine is not. Israelis have the right to end the occupation. Israelis do not have the right to cut off food and water and induce mass starvation in a population. It is absolutely monstrous to do so.
Does it bother you that Hamas leaders are well fed and indeed have stocks of supplies that they don’t let their starving population anywhere near?
Nope, it doesn't bother him. The starving population makes Israel look bad, so their starving is not only acceptable but in fact necessary. The pro-Hamas activists in this comment section are far more dismissive of Palestinian suffering than the IDF on its worst day.
Good point!
Funny, my reaction was "less of this please". This sort of mind reading where you just drive by and allege the worst possible motives for someone you disagree with does nothing but inflame debate.
If I had just randomly stopped by and said that carateca is not bothered by human suffering and just wants to kill all the Palestinians, would you have said "good point" to that as well?
Well said!
I love that the rationalist sphere is inclusive of socially unpopular ideas. But I hate that this seems to make it a magnet for entirely irrational, genuinely objectionable right-wing views that are socially unpopular for very good reason. It's a sort of voat effect, except it's infecting a discursive ecosystem that was actually valuable in the first place.
Taking a position on the side of the Israeli state can be motivated, at this point, only by nationalism, I'm-smarter-than-everyone-else contrarianism, or a vastly different moral framework than is common amongst modern educated people. There's simply no way a consequentialist ethical framework of the type favoured by rationalists, or a deontological one that would be recognisable to the average person, could permit it.
I have a very simple reason for supporting Israel:
I have family and friends there, and I do not have any in Gaza. In this conflict, 99% of my concern is for preventing another Oct 7th atrocity. I'm on the other side of the ocean, while the IDF is both tasked with keeping Israelis safe, and directly at risk of the consequences if they are unable to keep them safe. I defer to the IDF's judgement on the actions needed to do this.
It is a pity that the Palestinians in general and the Gazans in particular did not lay down their arms and make the best of it after they and their allies lost in 1948. Just as West Germany united with the rest of Western Europe in NATO in 1955, barely a decade after losing WWII, the Palestinians' kids could have been earning degrees from the Technion since 1958 - 66 years. That is not the path that they chose.
Alternatively, it is a pity we made them choose to unconditionally surrender to their displacement at the hands of the West in order to do so.
Sure, they could have "chosen a different path"; but so, much more easily, could we.
They attacked, lost, and never did fully surrender and stop attacking. Israel needed to defend themselves then, and need to defend themselves now, and I wholeheartedly support them.
Agreed.
Good Lord, dude. You're congratulating yourself for taking the side of a genocidal terrorist group. What has happened to this site -- when did it get overrun by modern-day Nazis?
I'm not congratulating myself for anything, and accusing me of Nazism for a comment that explicitly opposes "objectionable right-wing views" and "nationalism", simply because it also opposes Israel, is bordering on the self-parodic.
Taking the position that it's fine for a Jewish state to exist, just like a Japanese state or a Chinese state or fifty Muslim states, "can be motivated, at this point, only by nationalism, I'm-smarter-than-everyone-else contrarianism, or a vastly different moral framework than is common amongst modern educated people." Your words.
I agree with everything you've said here. I will add I suspect what is also motivating some people is diehard dislike of Islam, hatred of Muslims, and appreciation of Jews as a community that have done praiseworthy, ambitious things with their high IQ and culture of innovation, and are deserving of pity points for going through years of antisemitism. The thing is, none of these things justify what Israel is doing and the people motivated by these factors are not always very forthcoming about how they feel which I suppose can be said for most people on most things.
"Why is the US dropping atom bombs on Japan just because of a couple of sunken ships at Pearl Harbor?"
The justification is the invasion Gaza launched on October 8th and if Gaza doesn't like the inevitable consequences of their actions they can surrender any time.
War is hell. So think very carefully before you start one.
Yeah, comparing this mass-murder of civilians to that mass-murder of civilians really does make it look completely justifiable.
Except unlike the case of Pearl Harbour, Palestinians are driven to terror tactics out of desperation. And unlike Pearl Harbour, Hamas wouldn't attack Israel if it was geographically distant, or even *non-overlapping*, with its own country.
There was a case that the US needed to bomb Pearl Harbour to prevent even greater casualties. Not one I accept, personally, but one that many who would otherwise oppose the mass slaughter of civilians do accept. Israel has no such excuse. Since the Oslo accords more than 30 years ago, pro-Israeli sources such as the Jewish Virtual Library estimate around 2,500 Israeli civilians have been killed. Israel is averaging more than that *every two weeks* since October 7th. There's no analogy to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, because at the current pace it would take Hamas 360 YEARS to kill as many civilians as Israel has killed in the last few months. So how does the same preventive logic apply?
Eh, I’ve checked out at this point. Neither Israel nor Hamas gives a shit about Palestinian civilians. And the average internet commenter doesn’t either, they just want to cheer for their side. That’s why I linked Ahmed Alkhatib above - he’s one of the very few noble ones out there.
Well luckily it's not 'pick a side - Hamas vs Israel'. The important question is 'what are the morally correct policies for us to pursue'. And so the question of whether Hamas genuinely cares about Palestinian civilians is pretty tangential.
Whereas the question of whether it's right to continually bomb and starve tens of thousands of civilians under the laughably transparent pretence of "self-defence" is one we should be concerned with, given that our nations are actively supporting it.
Cue in his (caretecas) deranged denials of course, but this is an example of what Israels supporters will either deny, downplay, doubt or just flat out justify
https://twitter.com/RamAbdu/status/1770895103785046489
I think the assessment of those who say Israelis are gripped by genocidal mania are correct.
It’s not “tangential” to starving Palestinian civilians that Hamas deliberately withholds aid from to make Israel look bad
Please. You defend the Palestinian attacks on Israel, so you clearly don't care _that_ much about the fate of Palestinian civilians.
The Israeli government has been holding Palestinian human rights lawyer Diala Ayesh hostage for 2 months.
She was kidnapped on 17 January 2024. Her crime: she was a lawyer defending the rights of other Palestinians hostages, known as "administrative detainees" by Israel.
Ayesh is one of at least 3,484 Palestinians taken hostage by the state of Israel. I use the word hostage because Diala Ayesh was not told why she was taken. She has not been charged w/anything. Her imprisonment is renewable, indefinitely. And she was taken, like many other Palestinians, to be used as a bargaining chip in hostage negotiations.
If you are calling for the release of the hostages, but only the Israeli hostages, not the Palestinian hostages, you are contributing to the dehumanization of the Palestinian people. #BringThemHome
source of the count of hostages taken by Israel: https://middleeastmonitor.com/20240316-israel-detains-20-more-palestinians-in-west-bank-bringing-total-arrests-since-7-oct-to-7605/
https://twitter.com/_ZachFoster/status/1769847755709546830
Same Diala Ayesh as this story? https://www.thejc.com/news/world/they-beat-me-on-my-breasts-and-fondled-me-britain-must-stop-funding-palestinian-security-thugs-m71sagjd
Did you post about Diala Ayesh last year when she was being arbitrarily arrested by the Palestinian Authority instead of the Israeli government?
Argument "did you also post about X" should be banned, IMHO. No one can (or should) post about *everything*, and yet the fact that they didn't is used as an accusation.
No, in fact it's a great argument that needs to be made at every opportunity. People who just learned about this conflict from some social media influencer last week should not be taken seriously when they preen and pose as if they're some great human rights activist.
But, buuuut, but... How else are they going to defend the indefensible, good sir? How else are they going to cheer for a state accused of genocide and engaged in one of the longest occupations in post-WW2 history?
Surely being morally bankrupt is already bad enough, being rhetorically bankrupt is just rubbing salt on the wound. Let them have the one rhetorical sleight of hand that can make them feel good.
Be careful about crossing the bounds of unlimited decorum, that business about tone is a well worn example of a discursive advantage that people who are emotionally happy about ongoing events have over people who are emotionally upset about them, in moderated fora at least.
Yeah, maybe that comment wasn't too nice, but it was true and - assuming the purpose of ACX is to start and not shutdown debates - very necessary.
I think you may be taking Melvin's question a bit too literally. I read it as rhetorical, and not addressed to the OP specifically but to the general movement s/he represents (notwithstanding using the specific case as an example of the trend).
There has to be some way to point out when people scream from the rooftops at every single thing Israel does, and are completely and appallingly silent when any other country (including every single Muslim state), not to mention the Palistinian groups themselves, do exactly the same thing or, indeed, something a thousand times worse. There has to be a way to point out that this phenomenon, more than any other, completely defines the Israeli-Palestinian debate. And there has to be a way to point out that it really, really is not okay.
There also has to be a way to mention that it's an utterly irrelevant question, one that makes no sense and has no possible function except possibly making the one asking it look like an ass, or a paid shill from Channel 14.
If the topic at hand is honesty and even-handedness, then yeah you can invoke the good ol' whataboutism. You will then discover that the average pro-Israel defender has plenty of glass in their house to throw rocks. For example:
1- What About (^TM) the unified and unanimous Western condemnation of Russia, even though the number of children killed OR injured in the Russo-Ukrainian war was 1500 in June of 2023 (https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/06/1137237). If you double that to 3000 to account for those killed OR injured as of 2024, it's still not as much as an estimated 10K children or so who were killed with bullets and explosives alone in 5 months, even after halving it to 5K to account for the inevitable "BUT KHAMAS" atrocity denialism. And the 25K children + women combined number was confirmed by the US Secretary of Defense in a hearing 3 weeks ago (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xZd8E2ksuU). That's not mentioning yet those who died or will die of starvation, or those who died under the rubble, or those who will die due to malnutrition-related diseases 5 years or 10 years from now, or those who will die because every single adult in their family was killed by Israel and there is no one to raise them.
2- What About (^TM) the genocidal rhetoric that Israeli officials have been spewing since October till January and beyond, documented meticulously in the documents of the current ICJ case against it, what other state receive tens of billions of emergency aid and military equipment and support from Hollywood celebrities while its officials are saying "Wipe out the seed of the Ameliks" and "We are dealing with human animals" and "No food no water no fuel"?
3- What About (^TM) the settler colonialist project that is the West Bank, where 600K nationals of a country are building illegal settlements on militarily annexed land while the people there are stateless and powerless, and the state that annexed the land stand by as they are being displaced, killed, and sometimes burned alive by the settlers? What other country remains permissible to even mention in polite conversation while it's doing this?
As you see, there are plenty of What Abouts to go around, with a ratio that is very unfavorable to pro-Israel commenters. But that's not the topic at hand, the topic at hand is X, and no insight is gained by changing X and screaming "BUT WHAT ABOUT KHAMAS", except possibly insight into the troubled psyche of the screamer, which isn't that interesting.
I do think it's relevant for the purposes of determining who should be considered a voice worth listening to.
If you speak truth, but only truth that serves a particular viewpoint, then I will find it hard to treat your words as worthy of my time. Even if you filter out active liars, the world is not short of people slanting the truth to serve their purposes. I personally am not in the market for one more person pointing out Israel's crimes, even when those accusations are, in isolation, perfectly justified.
And yes, this 100% applies to both sides. I find the "but Hamas" crowd just as exhausting.
Edit: to be clear, I mean this as a general defense of good-faith "whatabout" questions. I do think many whatabout questions are purely in bad faith and can be ignored.
Again, well said! (Why doesn't this site have comment likes?)
It's actually the reverse, people condemn things other groups do yet remain silent or repressed when Israelis do something a thousand times worse. What defines the Israeli-Palestinian debate more than anything is the extreme willingness of politicians and people in power to treat Israelis as a kind of superhuman, simultaneously possessing the right to murder and steal and occupy peoples lands and slaughter kids while simultaneously having the responsibilities of a child. I don't know a single group on the planet that gets more of a media shield than Israelis do from misleading headlines to selective coverage. If anyone points this out they're lambasted as an antisemite who shouldn't be hired. There has to be a way to point out that this phenomenon, more than any other, completely defines the Israeli-Palestinian debate. And there has to be a way to point out that it really, really is not okay.
I don't know what to say. The idea that Israeli atrocities get less attentiin and condemnation than the atrocities of most other countries is so alien to the world as I perceive it.
I accept that other people may perceive a different world, but can you honestly deny that, for example, the average university is about 10,000 times more likely to be holding a mass protest of the human rights record of Israel, on any given day, than to be holding one on the record of Iran, or Saudi Arabia, or China, or you know, Hamas or Fatah? I'd say you'd be lucky if they've held a single one of the latter once in the past *month or year*.
Protests in the US "against" a country aren't really against the country, they're against US foreign policy. It seems baffling on the surface that Iran's nefariousness goes "unprotested," but it is no longer confusing when you realize that it is the current level of aggression towards Iran that is not being protested. A protest against Iran would amount to a request for a more bellicose stance, and that isn't happening because too much escalation from the present strict sanctions would mean invasion: unpopular even with staunch conservatives. Saudi Arabia, ally as though it is, may also have drawn more protests if their recent and questionable actions had been joined by an offer of unconditional support from the administration; instead the actions were met with silence and got correspondingly less protest.
Well said!
The average politician, head of a university, ceo of a media or entertainment company is 10000 times more likely to call an employee an antisemite, fire them, and make them unemployable for criticizing Israel than Palestine.
It is true, say China has a worse human rights record, and it's likely the case that those student protesters who have relatively less power than politicians and businessman have sympathy with China b/c of communism, but it's also true that this government does not assist China in it's atrocities but it does assist Israel in its atrocities, so it makes sense to directly target those aiding and abetting evil.
The Palestinian authority is basically an arm of the Israeli government at this point, so I should have.
Right, that’s why it keeps paying families of terrorists, or why it tried to spread the accusation that many of the victims of the massacre at Nova were killed by the IDF, or why, for that matter, it did not condemn the whole 10/7?
(Technically someone did, on that day, and then the condemnation got removed never to return),
"that many of the victims of the massacre at Nova were killed by the IDF"
This is literally true.
And it doesn't matter what rhetorical moves it made, at the end of the day they serve Israel.
I distrust funnel plots, and I think you should too.
Alice studies the research into X. She plots all the studies trying to measure it, finds a beautiful symmetrical bell curve, and concludes that there is no publication bias.
Bob is studying log(X). He looks at precisely the same studies, and finds a strong negative skew, suggesting that some high values have been excluded through publication bias.
Carol is studying research into e^X. She looks at the same studies again, finds negative skew, and concludes that some low values have been excluded.
If you have some reason to expect a particular distribution, seeing something else may be cause for suspicion. But I suspect that too many people don't remember that the central limit theorem only applies to distributions generated in a particular way - not just "lots of independent factors", but "lots of independent factors that combine additively, rather that through e.g. some other formal group law".
Plotting things with the right axes is crucial to understanding the data.
You've also left out the assumption that there's no hard cut of on one tail of the curve. Consider, e.g., organism complexity. There's a cut off where we say, basically, things simpler than this aren't alive. (Consider the arguments about "are viruses alive?".)
I have a hard time imagining anything in statistics that wouldn't be done wrong by somebody that thought the central limit theorem applied to their distribution, when it didn't.
https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/covid-policy-errors
My latest Substack, "Covid Policy Errors" seems to be drawing a little more interest than "Improvements in Macroeconomic Data x 3" https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/improvements-in-macroeconomic-data.
A lot of people have been circulating a graph showing countries where men do more of the housework have higher fertility rates, uncritically accepting the conclusion that more "equality" in hosework will lead to more reproduction. This is very foolish.
https://www.emilkirkegaard.com/p/the-oecd-fallacy
what if signaling effects cause hedonic regression to wildly overestimate quality improvements in the CPI basket of goods? Some people are willing to pay 50% more for a product that's only 1% better just to signal that they're the kind of person who can afford it.
Yes I think you’re right that “quality adjustments” are a BS way of lowering inflation estimates. But since Medicare and Social Security are directly adjusted to inflation, I suspect we’re better off with not having an accurate CPI.
Which goods?
nearly everything to some extent, but not as extreme as 50%-1%
Then some of what you're explaining as signaling is probably more accurately explained by a huge set of value considerations. Here are some examples for you.
- Some baking recipes are hugely sensitive to the precise brand of flour (or, in some cases, some other ingredient) you use. Try to substitute, do it wrong, and you've wasted a few hours. Some of us are not running a test kitchen and are really short on time we can waste.
- People will absolutely buy some inexpensive goods, such as tissues, if the box is really beautiful even if it's slightly over the minimal price. Why? Because if it'll be on your desk, and you'll be staring at it the entire day, it's totally worth it.
- That box of Cheerios with the words "My cat makes my heart happy" that recently hit the stores? I bought it to make everyone in the house smile - and smile and comment they did. Even though it was not on sale, it was worth it.
- Elementary school kids, and also people on the spectrum, tend to be very sensitive to nuances of taste of foods. If you are short on cash and time, it's often a safer bet to buy something you know than risk wasting it.
- That generic medication I got for my kid the last time already cost me one pill-crusher and cracked the other, because the pill is the wrong shape. If I knew that would happen, I would have requested one that cost a dollar or two more.
- Any kind of household good, such as soap or detergent, with an artificial scent might have a scent someone in your household can't stand. Once you made a bad pick, you tend to stick with the one you know is OK, slightly more expensive or not.
- Someone in my family is allergic to some deodorants. Since it's impossible to predict which ones these would be, she sticks to the ones she knows are OK, rather than risk scratching for a week.
- And then there are details of the ingredient list of processed foods. Sometimes you care, and you'd be amazed how different two very similar-looking products can be if you read the labels.
Enough? Are you sure that most of your examples are not misunderstood?
When I was growing up in Ireland, the cheap and cheerful supermarket called Dunnes stores used to have their own brand items, often from the same factories as branded items. Their branding was very cheap - just yellow packaging, in fact the whole branding exercise was called yellow pack.
I remember my neighbours snobby daughter coming in to the house - they were slightly better often than we were - and getting very snobby about the fact that we had bought some yellow pack items.
I told her bleach was bleach.
That's a nice example.
I wonder how many people behave like that girl - but I also wonder, do many people care what they think? Behaving like that, or caring what people who behave like that think, does not seem to be typical, as the OP seems to think.
>often from the same factories as branded items
Yup. I generally just check ingredients lists and see if the store brand's ingredients are the same as the national brand's ingredients. If they match, I assume the products are identical until proven otherwise. Does Ireland require ingredients lists similarly to the USA?
I can also think of numerous cases where store brands are better than national brands. I don't have statistics on this, but my gut feeling is that, compared to national brands, processed foods from store brands are less likely to contain artificial colors, hydrogenated oils, and other stuff that might be bad for you but is not regulated. Some of them also genuinely taste better.
Yes it does. Some people still swear that Kelloggs make the better Cornflakes and yet the ingredients have to be the same.
You could both be right, in the sense that *some* people are willing to pay 50% more for a product that is improved in a way that is very important for them... but then they simply say "I buy this, because it is better" in an unspecific way, and many *other* people who do not care about the difference start buying the product anyway, because they do not want to be seen as ones who buy an inferior product (even if they cannot explain what makes the product inferior, other than that it is cheap).
So basically the problem is people not explaining why specifically the "better" product is better.
That said, I also imagine that it is possible to take almost any product, wrap it in pink paper and write "for ladies" on it, and sell it 50% more expensive without any difference compared to the standard one, and many women will buy it. And then they will complain about how the price difference is unfair.
EDIT:
Ironically, a product that is better for one person may sometimes even be worse for another, because of different needs and preference. For example, someone may like the taste of peanuts, another may be allergic to them.
I have two issues here.
First, the OP was asked to clarify which goods and said "nearly everything". I can imagine that this might be true about expensive or very optional things, but I don't buy it in the case of cheap everyday products like tissues or cereal. I think that in this case consumption is mostly defined by numerous preferences that are mostly not detectable by consumer surveys or by store gimmicks such as discounts or strategic placement.
Second, I think it's important to understand that falling for a marketing gimmick is not the same as signaling. A more colorful tissue box or a cereal box with a feel-good message might generate more sales because people want just that, their surroundings being colorful and making them feel good - which, as far as I'm concerned, is a legitimate preference. In case of very basic products, this will not break anyone's bank. (As someone with strong preferences for that kind of thing, I also think it's woefully rare.)
Cheap everyday products? Okay, try this:
I bought a cheap brand of "unscented facial tissue", which I frequently use to wipe my glasses. Unknown to me, they'd impregnated the tissues with some sort of grease (probably "hand lotion"). It became quite difficult to see through my glasses. Now I only buy versions that I've previously found work...even though they aren't as cheap.
Here is an important example I forgot. I keep seeing that people without much exposure to medicine don't know which generic medication corresponds to which brandname one and misunderstand "Compare to Aleve" as "This is a medication similar to Aleve" instead of "This is the same medication as Aleve, only generic". Some of what you might believe to be signaling might be just due to lack of understanding of the other options.
Going downstairs to check the Cheerio boxes in my pantry. I want one of those ‘My cat makes…’ ones.
Edit
Ok 2 boxes. Neither one had it but I did pet one our cats and have a bowl of cereal.
Thank you for the visuals! :)
a lot of the rhymes in that poem were off to me did I read it wrong
Fridman recently asked Sam Altman what he would talk to a super AGI about if he were among the first to talk to it. Altman qualified his answer a bunch but suggested maybe that he’d ask if there was a unified theory of physics (or something like that). I didn’t love his answer or the idea that he could be among the first folks to tap into such a resource.
Imagine a very promising AGI was developed and during its testing a researcher had asked the AGI how to cure cancer and it easily formulated a plan to do it that made sense and would work. Unfortunately it can only process one prompt at a time, so prioritization of prompts is crucial.
Given that proof of concept, and limitation, what should be our first questions? Ideally, who (or what kind of people) should determine which prompts go first?
Step one would be to ask the AGI to solve alignment. Cancer can wait.
Probably we should ask it how to build an AGI that can process multiple prompts in parallel
then ask it for three more wishes!
It was a poorly crafted hypothetical. I was thinking of a situation where the application of intelligence needed to be prioritized (as is often the case) and I was interested in people’s intuitions about how it should be done. I’m clearly embarrassing myself here, but it seems to me that a foreseeable problem with less intelligent administrators employing a far more intelligent advisor is that the administrators can’t possibly know best what to do with it. So I imagine the administrators could be quickly reduced to offering up such gems as “what should we ask you?” and “what should we do next?” and this seems sketchy to me.
From a dummy’s perspective, I see a lot of effort going into the formulation of brilliant answers to what can only be relatively stupid questions.
Sure, if someone invented an omniscient God AI that was serial, prioritization would be important. Since that is not going to happen, Altman hadn't put much thought into it and just gave some anodyne "If god let you ask her one thing..." cocktail party conversation answer.
Kind of obvious answer but: AGI doesn't mean a magical truth machine! If you manage to replicate human-level general purpose cognition in a machine, there's no reason why it should perform better at finding truth than humans have across history. Just think how many things have been considered true before and are not anymore, and then how many more things are being considered true now with about the same level of evidence.
(And that's ignoring the deep difficulties involved in specifying the very notion of truth, which is a whole philosophical subfield in itself).
The standard argument for AGI implying superintelligence is the assumption that the hard part is reaching human-like intelligence and after that you can scale it up by throwing more computational resources at it. At worst, the argument goes, this will give you something that thinks like a human but can think orders of magnitude faster.
The current progress of generative AI gives both reason to hope or fear the argument is correct and reason to doubt it. The reasons to doubt are that training a qualitatively better model seems to take exponentially more resources (both computational resources and size and quality of training data) and quality of the answers fall off drastically the further you ask it to extrapolate beyond its training set. The reason to hope is that once you have a trained model, it can be run much more quickly and can easily give you an answer in seconds to a prompt that would have taken a human much longer to give even a passably poor response.
But if GPT-style AI fails to produce drastically superhuman AGI, it strikes me as more likely that it fails to produce AGI at all than that it reaches human-like capabilities and is unable to go significantly further.
How much more time does a bad student need to learn, before he writes proofs like Grothendieck? I dont think he ever will. It seems very unlikely then, that having a model of generic internet users think super fast reaches strongly superhuman performance. Even at human level, there are plenty of problems in our thinking that are not cured by more compute/time to think, and I doubt there is a level where this stops. As far as I can tell, the only reason people think there is such a level is that VNM decision theory is like that in very limited settings. MIRIs attempts to generalise it has produced interesting things, but for me at least has been an update away from such an "essence of intelligence" existing.
Thanks for your reply, I certainly don't mean to get into the heavy debates on possible takoff paths to AGI or superintelligence.
I'm just basically pointing out that high intelligence does not imply becoming a *truth machine*. Didn't work for humans, hasn't worked for AI so far, and I have no particular reason to believe it will work for future AIs. You can be highly intelligent without being a truth machine, and that's relevant because there's a lot of sci-fi influenced tendency to think of an advanced AI as magically producing truth for every question, and the first post in this thread kind of sounded like that.
I think that assumption is "sort of" correct. If you have a human level AI, you can improve it by allowing it to hold more things in working memory at once. (This will probably also slow it down.) But I have a very strong suspicion that many "human understandings" depend on "a limited stack depth" (though you've got to understand that as a metaphor).
I suspect scaling working memory in a useful way is going to require superlinear increases in computational load, assuming you're using the larger working memory to synthesize across larger input sets like in Villiam's example below. For a set of N inputs, there's on the order of N^2 pairs of elements (specifically N * (N - 1) / 2) and N! total permutations of elements, so you need to be quite smart about pruning pairs and combinations to evaluate in order to get your algorithm to a reasonable computational complexity.
AI could be much better at connecting the dots in already existing human research (which itself has a chance to contain mistakes, of course).
For example, they may already exist 5 published papers such that if you put them next to each other and highlighted the relevant parts, a competent scientists could realize that they contain an answer to some important problem... but it is not going to happen, because each paper is published in a different journal for a different sub-specialization.
The AI could notice this simply by reading all the papers and trying millions of combinations.
>For example, they may already exist 5 published papers such that if you put them next to each other and highlighted the relevant parts, a competent scientists could realize that they contain an answer to some important problem...
Yes, but consider the point that Erica Rail just made about the number of combinations https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-320/comment/52002180
If some process tried to look at all sets of 5 published papers, even if what it then had to do with them was _trivial_, consider how many such sets there are: There are more than a million scientific papers. The number of 5 member subsets is roughly ( 10^6 )^5 / 5! (more correctly 10^6 * (10^6-1) *... (10^6-4) / 5! ), roughly 10^30 / 120, roughly 10^28. About 10^22 transistors have been manufactured, so if the evaluation of each set took just a single transistor switching event, one one still need a million such events from each transistor ever made to check each set. Not likely to be feasible.
Basically the problem is from looking at all 5 papers at once. Examining pairs of papers is just a trillion operations, which is more than humans ever did, so if the results of that cross-check can be pruned to a million useful insights, then these can further be combined with papers looking for three-paper insights and so on. But the pruning is essential.
Yes that's probably the kind of thing that AI is already useful at, putting together info from different sources, given that it's been trained (presumably) on more or less every published book and paper.
My point though is that humans have been falling for things that are narratively credible at a kind of superficial level for all of history, and given that current AI is trained on the direct results of the same human cognition, I don't think it has what it takes to overcome that tendency.
>Yes that's probably the kind of thing that AI is already useful at, putting together info from different sources, given that it's been trained (presumably) on more or less every published book and paper.
Don't I wish it were! Just this afternoon, I tried to get GPT4/ChatGPT to find whether some organic acids had insoluble calcium salts, but soluble sodium salts and free acids. I even told it classes of organic acids to try, and didn't ask it for an exhaustive search, just to pick 30 random acids and dig out the relevant information. It failed. Here is the link: https://chat.openai.com/share/f8be7c99-9a3d-4cec-9297-a5df1349c060
Note that this isn't even asking it to do any implicit reasoning, just to find 3 bits of information about each acid and report them.
>Ideally, who (or what kind of people) should determine which prompts go first?
I think all these questions are hopelessly misguided - like, *definitionally* the people who built it, and that's a big part of why they're building it!
If politicians could build a god, they'd use it to directly hack and nam-shub people's minds to vote for them and only them forevermore, this isn't something that should be up to "democracy" or "politicians." And it's *better* this way! Nerds will at least plausibly give some actual thought to this in terms of minimizing suffering and maximizing positive health or economic impact instead of just brain-hacking everyone forever, or stupidly aiming for some maximally dystopian but-I-thought-it'd-be-a-utopia that average people or "democracy" would try for.
If you want a seat at the table, learn to code and work at one of the Big 3.
Is there something that could be called "selection for normalcy" or am I misunderstanding statistics?
I thought about it in context of dating. What is the best strategy to ensure dating(and mating) success? Should you become an absolute alpha chad? Maximise your fitness across all posible metrics? Become muscular, attractive, wealty, high status or whatever else people recommend?
But most people aren't like that, they are just average. The majority around the center of normal distribution is comepletely unremarkable. They haven't acomplished anything special and yet they are the ones that have propagated human species forward.
Is there some feedback mechanism where such people look for each other and find each other more easily because they occupy same places, have same interests, same goals and so on? If yes, then being exceptional in something would be a detriment for dating success.
“Become muscular, attractive, wealty, high status or whatever else people recommend?”
Yes, correct. Losing weight till you hit a BMI of ~21 and then getting to the point where you can bench 1.5x your own weight is something ~99% of non-disabled men can do. Wealth and status are harder but if you’re reading this blog getting to $500k/year should be doable with a discrete number of steps.
With $500k/year, a six pack and nice forearms you should do well on the dating market. Only question is: do you have the sheer willpower to pull it off? Probably not but know that this is the way.
I really do not agree that 99% of men possess the genetic potential to bench 1.5x their bodyweight. That's an elite number for hobbyists (obviously not professionals). Aside from varying levels of innate strength and testosterone, there's a wide variation in arm length- someone strong with long arms is at a pretty substantial disadvantage. I think 1x is a lot more reasonable, and still I'd hazard that let's say a third of non-disabled men would not be able to achieve that
I think the biggest limit for most men is lack of willpower rather than genetic potential. ~95% of men hit their willpower limit at the gym/diet game before they hit their genetic limit.
IIUC, most people search for someone only slightly more highly rated by other people than they are for a marriage partner. (For "short affairs" this limit doesn't apply.)
First, you need to consider the "Gini coefficient" of the field you are competing in. How good or bad is actually the median case? Would you be happy to be the median case? If yes, then just try avoiding major mistakes and you should be okay. Or is it more of a "winner takes it all" situation? Then you have to take wild risks, because not taking the risk is equivalent to losing.
In a monogamous society in a developed country, the median case is quite okay. You can find a partner and have a child or two.
If you are interested in fucking dozens of attractive partners, that part has the "winner takes it all" dynamic (even more so for men). The average guys do *not* have that; you need to optimize for this outcome and make appropriate sacrifices (or start in a position of huge privilege).
"Maximising dating success" isn't well defined. Do you want to maximise the sheer number of random floozies you bang? Or maximise the number of floozies you bang who exceed a quality threshold? Or do you want to bang the hottest floozy you possibly can? Or do you want to find and marry the highest quality possible wife by certain criteria? Or do you just want to find and marry the most compatible wife for you personally? Or do you just want to minimise the amount of time you spend single? All of these probably call for different strategies.
Most humans manage to reach their desired level of dating success (they wind up marrying someone that they personally find adequate at the time) meaning that they don't need to optimise it at all. How do you optimally put your socks on? It doesn't matter unless you're the sort of person who has unusual problems with socks.
I don't agree with the vibe of the last paragraph. In general, humans are not automatically strategic¹, so them not optimizing their dating success isn't terribly surprising.
And just in terms of the time investment, choosing one's life partner is probably one of the most important decisions people ever make: 8 years² for the average marriage, if you spend 8 hours a day with your partner that's 23360 hours. Improving that by 1%, if you value your time by default at $15/hr³, would be worth $3.5k. And many marriages last far longer than that! A 1% improvement to a 40 year long marriage would be worth more than $17.5k/hr.
Maybe actions taken to improve their partners are so costly to not justify the benefit, but I'm skeptical.
¹: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PBRWb2Em5SNeWYwwB/humans-are-not-automatically-strategic
²: https://www.brides.com/how-long-do-average-u-s-marriages-last-4590261
³: Likely an underestimate, because this would only lead to a VSL of ~$440k, while in the US the VSL is ~$10m.
>What is the best strategy to ensure dating(and mating) success?
Lower your standards. Put that bar on the ground. Even lower if you can.
Yuuup. And then have unprotected sex with literally everyone of the appropriate gender clearing that minimal hurdle. Empirically, this will maximize your mating success. 😂
Learn to be comfortable in your own skin. Play things straight. Be kind.
I would say it's less important to be comfortable in your own skin and more important to know how to make other people comfortable in theirs.
I think it is hard to do one without the other
Perhaps, but I've met several people so comfortable in their own skin that they'll comfortably break social norms to suit their own desires. That's not the path to successful dating.
I’ve met a few of those personality types too. That’s where the ‘play things straight’ - be honest and fair - and the ‘Be kind’ parts come in.
Yeah I understand. I have seen it and probably been it. My take is this:
If someone is going around "being comfortable in themselves" and offending or annoying everyone around them and not noticing (or even worse, blaming everyone else!), I would call that delusional. Being comfortable with oneself means experiencing discomfort sometimes and recognizing it in others. Comfortable is a funny word. Maybe a better term for what we are discussing is embodied. Being in your own skin, whether its comfortable or not.
In my case I had to do the first before I could do the second on a regular basis. My affect is still pretty ‘nerdy dork’ but I’m more at ease with it so it’s not as off putting.
> If yes, then being exceptional in something would be a detriment for dating success.
I had a comment thread on this many open threads ago, but broadly, I think it's absolutely harder to find "similar quality" if you're exceptional across multiple metrics.
Just thinking of it from the abstract - if you're 3-5 SD out on several desirable "dating market" metrics - say intelligence, fitness, height, career, wealth, etc, then it's basically impossible to find a matched partner that excels in as many, or even in half as many, metrics. And indeed, I've seen this empirically in the world - most extraordinary people I know settle for basically average partners, who are kind of hot and smart, but that's it.
> What is the best strategy to ensure dating(and mating) success?
Well, looking at the past and at lower classes, the secret is having sex without protection with as many people as you can - this reliably leads to mating success.
If you're talking about the boring kind of mating success that coastal elites care about, ie having 1 or 2 kids at most and "getting precious Jayden into Harvard," then marry somebody similarly upper or upper middle and grind for 18 years per kid, agonizing over every trivial decision, school, and activity for each of the ~6,500 days.
Why don't you just look for someone you like, regardless of their qualifications? Donate some sperm to sperm bank and then just find someone you like. Maybe a nice woman who wants to have your baby and take care of you. Or someone who makes you laugh?
>marry somebody similarly upper or upper middle and grind for 18 years per kid, agonizing over every trivial decision, school, and activity for each of the ~6,500 days.<
I will save you some time; Find someone you hate and buy them a house.
I personally am so motherfucking smart, beautiful, well-coordinated, musically talented and creative that the standard deviations themselves weep when they see me zoom past. I'm not mating with anybody except AGI itself, and from then on it will be me giving the prompts, guys. Like *definitionally,* know what I mean?
Cool, but before you do that you really should meet me. I am wicked at understanding prompts, and would deeply appreciate all of your many extraordinary talents and endowments. Pus, AIs can't ...yknow.....
;}
Naw, I'm sure it will be easy to install an appropriate peripheral on AGI.
Lipstick on a pig…. just sayin’…
I mean, it's fine if you hate me and I'm your Trump and whatever, but is this the right combo of kind, true, and necessary to merit a comment? Like what is your actual substantive critique besides "I don't like your vibe?"
1) What does it even mean to say that the people that build AGI are definitionally the ones to determine who gives it the first prompts? Seems almost certain they *will* be the ones to given them — they are no doubt highly motivated to, and will have far more opportunity to than others. But that’s not *definitionally” being the ones to do it. Can you name other situations where the inventor and builder of something is “definitionally” the one to first use it? I can certainly see making the case that they have the most right to, and the case they have by far the best chance to, but what is the situation that makes someone definitionally the first one to use it. I guess the painter of a picture is definitionally the first one to see it finished, since the painter is the one who applies the final stroke, while looking at the final stroke. But what you are saying comes down to something more like maintaining that the painter is definitionally the first one to decide where to hang the picture, which is of course different from being the first to see it completed.
(2) Asshole self-serving politicians, the alternative you propose to Altman et al as the people to deliver the first prompt, is a strawman category. There are many other walks of life and styles of person other than nerds and politicians. You don’t think there’s anyone on the planet who is more likely than *Sam Altman* to mine AGI for information and ideas that will be profoundly helpful to our species? Jeez, I’d vote for Zvi over Sam. Or George Orwell, if he was alive. Or Daniel Dennett. Fuck, even Steve Martin!
(3) Anyone whose model of their search for a partner hinges on their concept of themselves as being 3 to 5 SD above average on a buncha things is 6 SD above average in narcissism, which is such a huge flaw, so destructive of affection and loyal partnership, that they are a terrible catch.
How will they know that the program is working properly? Of course the development team will ask the first questions. But they may be told what those questions should be.
Thanks, I think this is a lot more light vs heat in the last one and can actually inspire useful thoughts and debates here from me and other commenters.
On 1), The Unloginable covered it.
On 2) Yes, I actually totally agree with you. Zvi would be my vote by far. But in the real world, there is no political structure that will ever exist that puts Zvi (or any better candidate than "the nerds building it" or "the president or some other high-level politician") at the head of that queue. That's the thing. Like due to how the thing is actually being built, and due to how democracies work (or fail, in this case), there IS no better option. Your choice is "nerds or Trump." Choose wisely.
3) Fine, I'm a terrible catch and a narcissist, you caught me. I don't really care what some random internet commenter thinks about my dateability, because in the real world that's never a problem - I've brought this up not to talk about how great I personally am, but because it's a real and interesting problem I've seen recur six or seven times, and I actually wasn't sure how universal it was. And I'm not sure whether any better solution beyond "satisfice like everyone else" exists.
I think you and ungovernable are absolutely right about the "who gets to give the first prompt" question. Once I thought about it it was evident that there really is no first prompt. It's not like when ship is complete and somebody gets to smash a bottle of liquor on the bow. The people developing it will be prompting the fucker all the time, and tweaking based on the results. and there will come a time when they have not had to tweak for quite a while, and they will declare it good enough for cautious use. And then they should be the first to use it because there probably will be a few more tweaks needed, but errors that call for tweaking will be happening up less and less often, so there needs to be an extended period when those relying on the thing are quick to recognize AI brain farts and able to figure out their source.
I do think, though, that once the thing is usable there needs to be some plan for how to deploy it so that the power it gives does not rest mostly in the hands of AI developers. They tend not to be people who are good at understanding and caring about people who are not smart the way they are, which is 99.9% of the human race. And developing it does not make them the owners.
You may not have thought of this, but invention isn't something that inventors just will out of their skulls like Zeus birthing Minerva. Invention of basically anything involves a huge amount of trial and error testing. If that testing can possibly work, it has to be (eventually) using the thing as it is intended to be used. In the case of AGI, this is going to involve issuing thousands of prompts, nearly all of which fail comically until they don't. (This has been much of the last two years of my life.) I'm really not sure who else other than the guys doing the inventing you would subject to this process. It's not much fun, and no one much is going to learn anything out of the process other than the guys actually building the thing.
>In the case of AGI, this is going to involve issuing thousands of prompts, nearly all of which fail comically until they don't.
Very, very, very much agreed. I've been playing with ChatGPT (first 3.5, now 4) for around a year now, mostly giving it chemistry questions (I'm trying to stay away from anything that triggers wokescolding instead of testing the thing's capabilities). One of my most recent queries is in https://chat.openai.com/share/c2a0d28b-7ffd-4724-b857-8d93586176a6 . It was a simple, crisp question, with an essentially binary answer:
>Hi ChatGPT! When magnesium chloride hexahydrate, MgCl2.6H2O is heated, does it dehydrate to give anhydrous MgCl2, or does it lose HCl to give an oxygenated species like MgO or Mg2OCl2?
and it gave a clear, confident, authoritative-sounding answer:
>When magnesium chloride hexahydrate, MgCl2⋅6H2O, is heated, it primarily undergoes dehydration to yield anhydrous MgCl2. This process involves the removal of water molecules from the compound through the application of heat. The dehydration occurs in stages, with the hexahydrate losing water molecules at different temperatures to eventually form anhydrous magnesium chloride. The chemical reaction can be represented as follows:
>MgCl2⋅6H2O→ΔMgCl2+6H2O
>The formation of oxygenated species like MgO or Mg2OCl2 would require different conditions or additional chemical reactions. For instance, the production of magnesium oxide (MgO) typically occurs when magnesium or magnesium chloride undergoes a high-temperature reaction with oxygen, not simply through the dehydration of magnesium chloride hexahydrate.
>Thus, under standard conditions of heating for dehydration, the expected primary product is anhydrous MgCl2, without the formation of HCl gas or the oxygenated species MgO or Mg2OCl2. However, under specific conditions or in the presence of certain reagents or catalysts, other reactions and products may be possible.
which happens to be dead wrong.
I think your thinking is off in a similar way to the base-rate fallacy. You're observing that the majority of people in relationships are relatively average and inferring that being relatively average is the way to maximize your likelihood of finding a partner. However, this isn't necessarily the case, there are just way more people closer to average.
Do you really think LeBron James has a harder time finding a date than a randomly selected man?
LeBron James surely has an easy time finding a date. But he might have a hard time finding a date who's his female equivalent in terms of "sexual capital".
But, presumably it's not better to be 50th-percentile purely because it makes it easier to go out with a 50th-percentile person. Lebron would probably also have an easier time doing that.
Lex Fridman just had another podcast with Sam Altman. In the middle they mentioned magical creative interaction with GPT-4. That interests me, and I wrote a blog post about it: GPT, the magical collaboration zone, Lex Fridman and Sam Altman, https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2024/03/gpt-magical-collaboration-zone-lex.html
Anyone have similar experiences?
Thoughts about Rachel Corrie.
[I]
--
Rachel Aliene Corrie [1] was an American Pro-Palestine activist who was killed in Rafah, a border city in Gaza (where the majority of Gaza's residents are now sequestered as refugees) on March 16th, 2003. Rachel was a member of the International Solidarity Movement, an activist group that tried to stop IDF and settler violence through non-violent protest. She was killed before Her 24th birthday.
Rachel's murder was deliberate. According to several eyewitnesses present at the scene [2]:
1>|-|> The bulldozer went towards her very slowly. She was fully in clear view, straight in front of them... Unfortunately she couldn't keep her grip there and she started to slip down. You could see she was in serious trouble; there was panic in her face as she was turning around... All the activists there were screaming, running towards the bulldozer, trying to get them to stop. But they just kept on going.
2>|-|> The driver cannot have failed to see her. As the blade pushed the pile, the earth rose up. Rachel slid down the pile. It looks as if her foot got caught. The driver didn't slow down; he just ran over her. Then he reversed the bulldozer back over her again.
A report produced less than a month later - to the surprise of no one - exonerated the Caterpillar bulldozer driver that crushed Her to death. Later information about the case revealed that Israeli investigators didn't even visit the scene of the crime, nor interviewed the driver.
After Her death, Her family began a long journey for justice, peace, and remembrance:
As for Justice, none was served. The Israeli government - in accordance with its known fundamental nature - refused to acknowledge any wrongdoing. In the jurisdiction of Her killers, justice for Rachel was withheld many times, the last in 2015 when the Israeli supreme court ruled in favor of its government and against a symbolic 1$ in reparations requested by Her parents, upholding an earlier court's decision. In Her own land, no independent investigation was ever launched on any level, instruments of death continued to flow entirely unimpeded into the hands of Her killers, and a lawsuit against the bulldozer company Caterpillar Inc. was dismissed due to lack of jurisdiction and - additionally - on merits.
As for peace, none came to be. Though many continue - against reason - to hope.
As for remembrance, not enough remember Rachel. Unlike some war criminals and tyrants, no leviathan - neither state nor corporation - honors Her, and no medal or prize is given in Her name.
Rachel is survived by Her older sister Sarah, 1 other sibling the sources we have of her don't mention, and Her 2 parents, Cindy Corrie and Craig Corrie. Her memory is honored by a symbolic gravestone in Tehran, by the ship - privately owned by the Turkish Free Gaza Movement - MV Rachel Corrie, by the Rachel Corrie Foundation For Peace and Justice [3], and by the loving hearts of humanists and Pro-Palestinians everywhere in time, among them he who writes this obituary for Her.
May She rest in honor, always.
--
""" We are all born and someday we'll all die. Most likely to some degree alone. Our aloneness in this world is, maybe not any more, a thing to mourn. Maybe it has to do with freedom. """
-- Rachel, from Let Me Stand Alone - The Journals of Rachel Corrie (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/mar/02/shopping.extract)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Corrie
[2] https://imeu.org/article/fact-sheet-the-killing-of-rachel-corrie-ten-years-later
[3] https://rachelcorriefoundation.org/
Why the capitalization of "she" and "her?"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverential_capitalization
Thanks for this.
I remember thinking at the time that something's got to give. Nothing gave, of course.
Can someone help me think about how to figure out what's true?
I read the Wikipedia entry, and assuming everything there is true wasn't sure if the driver knew he was about to hurt someone, or not, which of course he denied
I guess my prior is that someone willing to kill a stranger deliberately is quite low, though of course some people are and those are part of the cases you hear about. How would someone who doesn't know what sources to trust go about trying to figure this out
Just so there can be one normal reaction to this that's not trying to explain, justify or blame the obvious victim...
"That's the worst."
Thanks. I deliberately do not reply to the apologetics for murder, if only to honor Rachel and Her memory. My patience is infinite, but not infinite enough.
Rachel was born on April 10th, 1979. Consider remembering from now till her next birthday, Remembrance is a form of life after death.
That's my dad's birthday. May she rest in peace.
Hamas do not want peace, they want war. Even if you think that it is a just war from their side.
...What an utterly pointless death. It's the same situation as Aaron Bushnell: a naive act of martyrdom that ultimately accomplishes nothing. Why do people still think that these appeals to morality will convince anyone?
When I was younger, I can recall no single event that flipped my personal scales more towards the pro-Palestinian direction than seeing countless online Zionists yukking it up about "Pancake Rachel". So it achieved that, at least. I rather suspect I'm not alone.
Oh hey, I've heard of her; one of my college professors told us about a student of theirs that had been run over by a bulldozer while protesting in Israel.
My thought now is the same as it was then; random people do not have the authority to veto the government, or commerce, by trying to block traffic with their bodies. She wasn't even a citizen of the country she was trying to interfere with. This is the result of trying to forcibly export US liberalism into countries with different morals, and is a predictable result.
What a horrible opinion! Traffic violations shouldn't be punished by being run over!
From the linked Wikipedia article:
>Israel authorities said that demolitions were necessary because "Palestinian gunmen used the structures as cover to shoot at their troops patrolling in the area, or to conceal arms-smuggling tunnels under the Gaza-Egypt border."
>By situating themselves visibly between the Palestinians and the Israeli snipers manning the watchtowers they hoped to discourage shooting by displaying banners stating that they were "internationals". When Israeli soldiers fired warning shots, Corrie and her colleagues dismantled their tent and left the area.
>On the morning of Corrie's death they planned to counteract the letter's effects. According to one of them, "We all had a feeling that our role was too passive. We talked about how to engage the Israeli military."
That's not a "traffic violation". They were literally trying to block bullets with their bodies. That's an act of war.
You're being ridiculous. They were protesting. Protesting is not an act of war. If it's not obvious to you, the fact that they weren't shot immediately might clue you in that even the state whose action they were protesting against did not consider it an act of war.
They were shot at, and then returned.
I don't understand why you do this. Surely you know the meaning of "warning shot" and you know the meaning of "being shot"
There's an important lesson here. Don't stand in front of bulldozers.
"Some factual information for you. Have you any idea how much damage that bulldozer would suffer if I just let it roll straight over you?"
"How much?" said Arthur.
"None at all," said Mr. Prosser.
> If you want a vision of the future, imagine a bunch of people all accusing each other ad infinitum of being AIs
Is this better or worse than accusing each other of being Nazis?
I remember the old joke about people being "replaced with a small shell script".
Also, this: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/compress
Ha! The alt text on that one is the real "so true it hurts," IMO. Well done, Zach Weinersmith.
Jonathan Haidt just published an article in The Atlantic (I know, I know, but it's Haidt, so it's ok), further continuing his alarm-ringing about the combination of smartphones + social media ruining young humans' development. This link appears to be un-paywalled:
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/03/teen-childhood-smartphone-use-mental-health-effects/677722/?gift=6kW-3kpyH7tV4NcHqyTUk4pQbLwhJ51mzwtSdzMDnc4&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
I have mixed feelings. On one hand, it's hard to argue with his compelling narrative, quite well-supported by evidence. OTOH... I look around at the world being wrecked by the adults who had their free-play childhood, and... maybe... we should give this whole smartphone thing a try?
"A simple way to understand the differences between Gen Z and previous generations is that people born in and after 1996 have internal thermostats that were shifted toward defend mode. This is why life on college campuses changed so suddenly when Gen Z arrived, beginning around 2014. Students began requesting “safe spaces” and trigger warnings. They were highly sensitive to “microaggressions” and sometimes claimed that words were “violence.” These trends mystified those of us in older generations at the time, but in hindsight, it all makes sense. Gen Z students found words, ideas, and ambiguous social encounters more threatening than had previous generations of students because we had fundamentally altered their psychological development."
Can't you more easily explain this by kids learning the lessons they were taught by college professors?
I don’t know… why are their professors suddenly teaching these lessons now? Plus, Haidt specifically talks about fresh arrivals, who haven’t had a chance to be taught by the professors. I think it doesn’t line up….
Yes, if you want to assume that kids listen so closely and seriously to their college professors that they'll radically alter their behavior compared to the previous generation.
…during their campus orientation…
Sure, but Haidt is awfully fond of just-so stories, I’d love to see some more rigorous research.
Probably is something going on there, but complaints that young people are difficult to work with are entirely expected with unemployment low.
That one I find a bit silly in general, “old people complain about young people”, what else is new.
> If you want a vision of the future, imagine a bunch of people all accusing each other ad infinitum of being AIs (“haven’t you heard of Dead Internet Theory?!”), while the actual AIs serve ads to them in the background.
They've been doing that on Reddit for ages, except with "paid shills." (P.S. the paid shills are real, but found in product related threads moreso than in replies to one's political opinions.)
If you're gonna be a reddit level political shill I'd certainly hope you'd at least get paid for it, imagine doing that shit for free
at least jannies get to delete posts
There are many paid political shills on internet -- imagine someone in Russia getting paid minimum wage, who gets a list of websites and the daily lists of comments from their manager, and spends 8 hours a day copy-pasting the comments to the websites. Such jobs actually exist.
You can sometimes tell the difference; the genuine user may write a longer text or may keep a conversation with you, while the paid shill will just write a top-level comment and then move to other discussions because they have a quota to meet. But there are also many genuine users who do the same thing, except they are not getting paid for that.
It's getting cheaper than ever to process and generate natural language. Before very long, if it isn't already, it will be in someone's interest to use AI's to shill political opinions too.
For many years, I used the basic Gmail view, which was actually usable.
Last week Google discontinued this view. (Previously, it also destroyed my googlepages page, turning it completely unreadable, so I'm used to Google doing this, but it's still painful.)
The new view hurts my eyes - you can't even change the font, and there's an "Unsubscribe" button after the title of every message from a mailing list! Also, I don't use Chrome, and on my web browsers it takes a couple of minutes to load and only loads about half of the time, the rest of the time complaining that something went wrong.
So I figure I should ask - by any chance, anyone got any hack for going back to the old basic view?
If it takes a couple of minutes to load, it seems like the real problem is that your internet is glacially slow. I use Firefox exclusively, and it never takes more than a second for me.
My internet is just fine for absolutely everything that's not Gmail or Substack. Google probably just hates out of date web browsers, but I'm not upgrading anything just for its sake.
OK now I'm curious, what browsers are you using?
My main one is an old Safari (I also have Firefox and Brave).
For some reason Gmail is actually not as slow as Substack today. Some of the time it still loads the intermediate Google Workspace page before loading my mailbox, and this still takes a few seconds, but it's no longer so slow that I have time to go get coffee. The times the intermediate page does not load it it's actually quite fast. Messages also seem to load faster today.
It's still really ugly, though. I don't know why I'm supposed to see "Unsubscribe" a few dozen times when my mailbox opens, but with the text size I usually use, that Unsubscribe button is 1/3 of the space they allocate for the message title - and the message title already does not have enough space, because it's bounded by a ton of whitespace that also eats up some of the sender's name. And some of the messages that have "Unsubscribe" somewhere in the body of the text avoid the Unsubscribe buttons entirely, so I'm not sure why they bother attaching it to everything else. So it seems that the only way to make it look halfway OK is to zoom out, making the text tiny.
But at least it now loads. Have to give them that. Knowing how Google usually operates, I wouldn't have been surprised if they'd just said "and that's it, now use Chrome or it won't work at all".
Substack doesn't play nice for me on the many recent versions of Firefox either (gmail is OK) - freezes while scrolling, links not triggering pointer change, parts of the page not loading. I assume it is a script-related problem as no other sites show this behaviour (apart from Facebook/Instagram which are bogged down in an abyss of code in a way only those sites can be)
Why not use an email client?
I liked the old Gmail view more than every graphical mailreader I tried. It's possible that I just haven't seen a good one.
But now that they left me with no choice, will do after forwarding it somewhere else. The less reliance on Google, the better.
Thunderbird?
https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/
Betterbird is, well, better: https://www.betterbird.eu/
I also use and recommend Thunderbird.
Haven't tried. Will look into it. Thank you!
Try gmx.com. Their free email facility seems OK, and you can acquire a short email address with a suitable rare letter combo. Not sure if all its features will please you because I probably use only a tiny fraction of them and am blissfully unaware of what others there may be.
The only downside is that when you log in they insist on showing a news page which invariably involves sport, usually a couple of soccer players in mid leap. This is very vexing and boring for those of us who hate sport!
Thank you for the recommendation! That downside seems a little annoying, though.
I do have a bunch of email addresses elsewhere. Time to put one more of them to use.
I think the basic view is what I'm using, but I could be misunderstanding; could you point to a screenshot of what you mean? (I'm selfishly worried they're about to take it away for me too; but also, if I do still have it, I'm happy to try to work out whether there's a way for you to get it back, or it's just some sort of A/B thing and our accounts are in different groups.)
Do you have "Unsubscribe" after the title of every e-mail that's from a mailing list? Basic view did not have it.
I appreciate the offer a lot, but if you still have the basic view somehow, don't do it - don't mess around with it. They officially discontinued the basic view, so reloading or doing something else might make it go away.
Looks like I do, but only when hovering, so I hadn't really noticed it until now. I probably was misunderstanding -- sorry!
Thank you for trying. I'll probably just have to forward my gmail somewhere now.
If we were AIs, wouldn't we program to disguise it? There are so many boring, hackneyed tropes in Woke dogma (Divide, Exclude, Indoctrinate), building a 'bot would be easy. The hard part is discerning whether the programming is from an amateur zombie or a professional.
I recently saw a few people agree that the "stopping a tyrannical government" argument for the 2nd amendment is completely ridiculous, due to the fact that the US military has tanks, missiles, jets, etc. But it's not obvious to me why this is ridiculous. There are countless examples throughout history where an attacker with vastly superior weapons is unable to defeat an enemy with simply guns and other cheap weapons. And this is mainly because the superior attacker exercises restraint because they don't want to destroy everyone and everything. Further, it seems like this would be an even larger factor if the superior attacker was attacking its own people (because it obviously wouldn't want to destroy its own country). What am I missing?
The second amendment proved its worth during Covid: while Europeans and Australians got harassed as infinitum by their governments in the name of a lockdown, pretty much all police departments in the U.S. immediately said they won’t enforce anything. Big reason is the fact that cops don’t like risking a massive conflict with the general public because the public is well armed. Obviously they do enforce some laws but not something as crazy and far reaching as a Covid lockdown.
The military was not deployed to help support the lockdowns and Americans enjoyed more freedom than almost any other nation out there.
The stronger version of the "stopping a tyrannical government" argument starts well before things get to that point. Tyrannical governments do not emerge spontaneously from the political aether, complete with fully-formed legions of stormtroopers. They have to be created in place, in full view of the people they will eventually be tyrannizing, using their tax dollars and almost necessarily with their support.
Which, fairly often, they do. Because they are afraid. Because they've been sold on the proposition that they face a terrible danger or enemy that only the mighty State can protect them from, but only if they sign off on the State establishing a force of "guardians" who look suspiciously like stormtroopers in the right light.
Sometimes the danger is even real. The bit where only the almighty State can protect people, and where it needs legions of stormtroopers to do it, is rather more suspect. But frightened people who think they are powerless to protection themselves, will usually buy it. So if you want to avoid tyranny, you want people empowered and confident in their capacity for self-protection.
You don't need privately owned nuclear missiles or main battle tanks for that. But you do need people to have access to the same sorts of weaponry that the police etc use for domestic law enforcement.
Note also that this generalizes to a great many things where the State says "you must give us this power or we will be unable to protect you, and you clearly know that you can't protect yourselves", e.g. health care. But protection against violence is the most critical manifestation of this, because that's the one that lets the State start hiring stormtroopers.
When a police shooting happens in America, there are always people who justify it on the grounds of "Well, if the policeman didn't shoot first, maybe the victim would have shot him instead!" (Sometimes this is a reasonable defence, and sometimes it isn't.) So at least in the case of government agents shooting citizens, having a well-armed citizenry actually seems to make people *more* willing to countenance actions that might be deemed tyrannical.
I'm not sure why you think the armed citizenry is relevant here. When a police shooting happens *anywhere*, there are always people who justify it on that basis. I mean, I haven't noticed any of the allegedly more civilized and gun-free European nations having a policy of convicting policeman of murder any time they shoot someone. Pretty much everyone gives the police guns, expects them to shoot people from time to time, and usually says "yep, that was a good shoot" when it happens.
That's not a good analogy. US police kill far more people than their European equivalents: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_annual_rates_and_counts_for_killings_by_law_enforcement_officers
I don't see how that's relevant, when the issue is how the public reacts to the shootings which do occur. Police in e.g. Europe shoot people for the same reasons that police in America do, and when they do the European public responds about the same way the American public does - about 95% "that guy needed shooting" and 5% "OK, the police *mostly* only shoot people who need shooting but this one seems a bit off". That ~40% of the Americans and only ~10% of the Frenchmen making that call are themselves gun owners, does not seem to have much effect on their judgement in this area,
IIUC, your description does not fit with how Pot Pol emerged, or even how the Bolsheviks overthrew the Duma. It does seem to fit with the Chinese government, though. Most other instances I'm insufficiently informed about, but I strongly suspect that you are concentrating on only one mode for the emergence of a tyrannical government. (It's also been suggested that a civil service will tend to turn into a Mandrinate kind of tyranny.) Additionally warlord based anarchy tends to consolidate around the stronger groups and turn into a tyranny.
OTOH, tyrannies have turned into democracies. Athens and Britain are two places where that happened.
> But you do need people to have access to the same sorts of weaponry that the police
> etc use for domestic law enforcement.
Can you explain how this helps make people less afraid instead of more? Personally, the more heavily people around me are armed, the more at risk I feel, regardless of what I myself am carrying. I find reducing the risk of shootouts to be very much preferable to increasing my chances of winning one. Is that weird?
The people who are actually going to hurt you, already have whatever weapons they need to be confident in their ability to do as much violence as they feel they need to whatever unarmed victims need hurting or killing. Sometimes that's a knife, sometimes it's a gun, occasionally it's a baseball bat or a Molotov cocktail or whatever. They've got it.
They *might* have the weapons they need to feel confident in their ability to do violence to armed victims. But once that reaches the level of those victims having repeating firearms, that's a really tall order and they're probably going to be looking for a different victim or a different crime (or maybe an honest job).
The people around you who *aren't* actually going to hurt you, might help you. They're more likely to be willing and able to help you if they are armed, so it is foolish to feel yourself at increased risk if those people are armed.
And the laws your society passes about who is or is not allowed to have what sort of weapons, those only limit the weapons *you* will have, and the weapons the people who might help you will have. The people who are going to hurt you, are criminals. They don't obey laws that stop them from doing what's important to them. So if the gun control laws and the lack of visible weapons makes you feel less at risk, that's an illusion that will go away as soon as you meet someone who means to do you harm.
Shootouts between individuals with legal firearms are pretty rare: most shootouts are gang related, after all.
I've never seen a shootout before, but I have had a junkie take a swing at me and I sure wish there had been someone around with a gun. Would have felt a lot safer.
Here's a neat fact: in the US the most burglaries occur during daylight hours, while in the UK the majority of burglaries occur in at night. Why? Well burglars in the US aim to break into a home while nobody is there which is why they go for the middle of the day when people are at work and where they can scope out a bit easier whether anyone is still at home (just ringing the doorbell works, if they come to the door make up and excuse and move on to the next house). Why don't burglars want anyone to be at home? I would guess the fact that in most parts of America there is a real chance that the homeowner is armed would have a lot to do with that.
In the UK burglars may prefer night because they have the cover of darkness and busybodies are less likely to interfere. Clearly UK burglars are not afraid of being shot by homeowners, as homeowners are in the house during the burglary 64% of the time, with about 1 in 4 of those cases involving threats of violence from the burglar (which technically makes it armed robbery instead of burglary, but whatever).
https://www.nimblefins.co.uk/home-insurance/burglary-statistics
Statistics for the US were harder to find, but this report from 2010 says that homeowners are at home during burglaries only 28% of the time in the US.
https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/ascii/vdhb.txt
All that to say, I benefit from living in a community where any citizen may be armed. I'm half as likely to experience a home invasion, and I don't even need to own a gun to get that benefit. The more law abiding people in my community who have guns, the safer it is for me: and the non law abiding people in my community would have weapons regardless.
> The more law abiding people in my community who have guns, the safer it is for me:
Nope. You've only shown that there is less risk of *burglary*. There is more risk of whole bunch of other things, including murder , suicide and police shooting.
The odds of me being murdered are much, much lower than the odds I'll be burgled. Last year there were 22 murders in the city where I live, none in my neighborhood. Last year in my neighborhood there were 5 burglaries, 19 thefts, 2 robberies, and 9 cases of aggravated assault.
Now suicides going up I'll grant you, but I'm not at risk of suicide and even if I was, I don't own a gun! I just live in a neighborhood where many people do.
If the argument is that the 2nd amendment will enable good people to stop a bad government, why would it not work equally well in reverse, enabling bad people to stop a good government? The second amendment doesn't put weapons in the hands of good people, it puts weapons in the hands of people willing to use weapons.
Exactly
It's not about arming "good people" but about arming the people at large, same underlying principle as voting.
But it doesn't arm the people at large (that would look more like a Swiss armed neutrality, where guns are issued and training provided on a general basis), it arms people who self-select, which seems to go to SP's point.
Based on the 2A lots of average Americans are armed, but you also get over-representative self-selection on the part of various Weathermen, Silver Legionnaires, Oath Keepers, Branch Davidians, etc groups, which often arm and train openly.
One can take the tack that these kinds of extremist groups would probably seek & obtain arms anyway - it's not like the SRs just say "oh darn," and go home when the Czar bans guns, but permitting them to stockpile them openly certainly makes it easier to operate and prepare for whatever revolution they're gunning for. Castro would've loved the opportunity to "exercise his constitutional right to bear arms" by training guerillas right under Batista's nose.
It's why the US has had so many issues with militia movements over the years - and these groups, consistent with SP's point, are just as capable of being *assets* to a hypothetical American dictatorship as they are of being detriments to one. Armed militias didn't stop Mussolini - they're the ones who brought him to power in the first place.
There certainly exist examples of societies in an equilibrium where even the gangs don't use guns (e.g. Japan). It's probably impossible for the US to reach that state, but that doesn't mean they don't exist as examples of what could have been.
You seem to be assuming the self-selection is arbitrary, e.g. Red Tribe will have guns because they're Red, Blue Tribe will not have guns because that's not the Blue Way. And I'm guessing in your view Red Tribe are the bad people who will use their guns to prevent good government, with the good Blue Tribers sitting on the sidelines not having any guns.
But the self-selection isn't arbitrary. First off, the actual violent criminals are going to be armed, because that's part of their trade. And they'll be armed even if it's illegal, so the government can ban private armaments and still have dangerous armed criminals as the boogeyman against which only they can offer a defense.
And then, yes, some subcultures will have guns because they're rural hunters or farmers, and some will gave guns because it's part of their cultural tradition. But if private armaments are legal, whoever feels threatened enough to want or need that sort of protection, will obtain it.
Maybe at the outset some of your Blue friends will go directly from "I live in a safe neighborhood" to "oops I've been stabbed", and maybe there's an intermediate stage where most of your Blue friends have guns but they each think they're the only one and they'd better not talk about it because guns aren't the Blue way. But in the end, if there's a group that feels they would be disadvantaged due to inadequate armaments, it will be common knowledge that they are adequately armed.
Provided it is legal, and/or that group is effectively criminal.
This critique confuses me a little - I think I may have needed to write more clearly. The point I was trying to make was exactly that self-selection *isn't* arbitrary.
As you say, criminals will want access for crime, hunters will want them for hunting, people who gather them because it makes them feel stronger or more masculine will want them for those reasons, etc.
The point I was trying to make is that in addition to those people, there is another subset that will want them specifically in preparation for, or to initiate, violent political conflicts. There are plenty of examples of these kinds of groups throughout history, from Carbonari to SRs to Brown Shirts, as well as examples directly from the United States (Weathermen, Black Panthers, and a grab-bag of right-wing militias), and they're just as apt to be the ones *bringing* the dictator to power as they are to be an obstacle in the dictator's path.
Like criminals, they'll seek arms regardless of the law, but it'd be hard to deny that the right to stockpile and train with them openly is an asset. The Bolsheviks would have been thrilled to have something like the 2nd Amendment in Czarist Russia - much easier to arm your revolutionary vanguard that way.
> But if private armaments are legal, whoever feels threatened enough to want or need that sort of protection, will obtain it.
That's not how the other side think, though. The word "protection" would not occur in that context. Bulletproof vests are protection if you feel under threat of gunfire. When it comes to violence, guns are not protection, they are /escalation/. The more guns in the environment, the higher the risks.
There certainly exist examples of societies in an equilibrium where even criminal gangs don't use guns (e.g. Japan). It's probably impossible for the US to reach that state, but that doesn't mean they don't exist as examples of what could have been.
Societies where criminal gangs don't use guns are societies where criminal gangs are satisfied with their ability to do violence with other weapons. And criminals mostly use weapons and violence to terrify their victims, so if they're satisfied then the victims are going to be terrified. See e.g. the current scare campaign about "knife violence" in the UK.
It's possible to have a society where violent crime is so rare that most people simply aren't afraid of it, and Japan may be an example. But that's independent of the weaponry used by the few criminals who do exist. Criminals you're confident you will never encounter, are not scary even if they have guns. Criminals you fear you might encounter, are scary even if they "only" have knives (but rather less so if you yourself have a gun).
There's also the "well regulated militia" part...though I do not accept that that means run by the government. But it probably means "run by the local rich guy", though a gun club might count.
The idea, as I understand it, is that a bad government is worse than a good government is good, and that the logic is "better to have a weak government than a strong one" rather than "better a docile population than an independent one". Either way you lose out on something... but better to lose docility and live in an imperfect world, than lose your ability to literally fight for a better one when things go catastrophically wrong.
Yes to this.
The left would not be so desperate to disarm peaceful white conservatives if they didn't think armed conservatives will stand in the way of radical social "progress", and if it were GENUINELY about stopping crime, they would support stop andd frisk and otherwise focus on the group that commits the overwhelming majority of gun violence in the US - Urban black men.
Sorry, but you're wrong. The right is in favor of private ownership of guns because they either live or imagine themselves as living in a rural area. The left is predominately in urban areas. In rural areas a gun is, or can be, extremely valuable. In urban areas strangers with guns are extremely threatening...and one encounters strangers all the time.
The divergence in desired rules is therefore quite logical. IIUC, the historical Matt Dillon (or his counterpart) brought law and order to Dodge City by forbidding the wearing of guns within the city limits. My great^2-grandfather was a sheriff in the Arizona territory. In the city that he was a sheriff for, the wearing of guns was not allowed.
Cities are different from rural areas. Suburbs are somewhere in between, but you don't encounter strangers very often.
...sounds like a strawman? It's not a motivation I recognise. At least, personally, as a leftist, I don't care about "radical social progress". I just want the number of school shootings per capita reduced to match the rest of the world instead of being two orders of magnitude higher than the next worst place. I don't believe whatever extra "freedom" the US has compared to other places is worth either the deaths or the survivors' trauma.
One thing I've come to realize about myself as a second amendment supporter is that I... don't care about school shootings, actually. I'm completely willing to accept them as a fact of life in order to keep my guns. If I needed to make this sound good, I would probably say something like, "I haven't shot anyone, so why should I have to give up my guns when I haven't done anything wrong?" But if I'm being honest, the actual reason I want to keep my guns is because @#$! you, that's why (not you personally). I'd rather have school shootings then give the blue tribe a win on this issue. I'm not saying this is healthy, but it's where my head has been these last few years.
I think the better argument than "because fuck you, that's why" is that if (adequately trained) school staff were allowed to keep their concealed guns, there would be fewer school shooting incidents in general and lower body counts for the ones that do happen.
Because of course that number would never be zero - planning and strategy will always give the advantage, and a prospective shooter could obviously prepare for armed staff the way they would for police.
But I have no doubt it would be a helluva lot less.
Current consensus is that school staff can't even be trusted with books around kids. Why on earth should they be trusted with guns?
Consensus by whom? Which teachers?
Do you yourself have children (or relatives - nieces? nephews?) in school? Serious question - not looking for a gotcha, just looking to understand how you're seeing the tradeoffs.
Not in the public schools, no.
My general impression is that school shootings, at least the sort that are worth panicking over (as opposed to say, incidents like the police firing shots while apprehending a drug deal on school property that some partisans dishonestly use to inflate the number of school shootings) are actually pretty rare, and not worth worrying about excessively.
Schools shootings are rare in absolute terms,. but common in relative terms. The US has maybe ten times the global rate.
If you do care about Americans being able to keep their guns some 50 years from now, maybe you should care about school shootings. Because today's school kids will be at the height of political power 40…50 years from now. Their formative experience having been adults doing literally nothing to protect them, what kinds of gun policies do you think they will enact?
I’m not even saying if I agree with them, or not, whatever, I don’t matter, I will be dead by then. Just pointing out how generational shifts happen.
So if we - collectively - care about 2nd Amendment, we better figure out something. Now.
If I explicitly say I don't care about externalities my politics cause right now today, why on earth would I care about ones that will only happen long after I am dead?
Hope is a four-letter word, I know....
I mean, you've probably got a point here, but I don't know what the other option is. This would probably require compromise, which I am, frankly, unwilling to give. Anyway, assuming that AI and whatnot doesn't render the whole question irrelevant, it seems to me there are three options:
1. Enough public support is garnered to amend the constitution to change ore remove the second amendment- I wouldn't be happy with this outcome, exactly, but it's the American way and I think I could grudgingly accept it.
2. The second amendment is simply ignored- I think this is pretty unlikely, frankly. Gun control advocates, on the whole, seem pretty impotent, and while this could change later the legal system seems hostile to just ignoring bits of law.
3. Some attempt is made to reinterpret the second amendment, akin to the argument that it only protects state militias and not the individual right to carry arms- this has already been tried, and the battle decisively won by the gun rights side.
On the whole, 3 is the most likely, but gun rights has a winning record against the strategy, so I'm not too worried. Obviously things can change in 50 years, but, eh, it's 50 years away. Anything I could say about it now would just be speculation, and I'll probably be dead by then anyway.
Astonishing how conservatives will with one breath tell you that they're the watchdogs against government tyranny, and with the next breath tell you that the only way to prevent crime is for the government to violate the fourth amendment.
They also tend to act as if they think the 2nd amendment doesn't apply to black people (see Daniel Perry for instance).
I think the problem is that they never imagine police brutality happening to *them*. It just happens to random black people who probably deserved it anyway in their minds.
Maybe it would be helpful as a tactical matter to start emphasizing stories of police brutality against white people.
There is a better argument for the 2nd Amendment as making tyranny less likely, one that does not depend on fighting tanks with rifles.
If ordinary people are disarmed, they are dependent on the police for protection. The more dependent people are on the police for protection, the more willing they will be to tolerate police power. If your main protection is yourself and the police only a backstop in particularly difficult cases you will be more willing to support restrictions on what police are allowed to do.
US police officers shoot more people than the police of any comparable country, so if that's the 2A's job, it doesn't seem to be doing it very well.
> The more dependent people are on the police for protection, the more willing they will be to tolerate police power.
You say that like its a bad thing. If the police have the power to stop all crime, and use it to sop all crime, that would be ideal. I think you are assuming that it would be impossible to "align" the police so that they only use their power to stop crime.
Correct. There is much to be said for a world where only widely shared norms are enforced by criminal law, less widely shared enforced, or not, by social pressure. The more power law enforcement has, the more ability to enforce laws that the population disagrees with.
My post was offering a way in which the Second Amendment made tyranny less likely.
>My post was offering a way in which the Second Amendment made tyranny less likely.
Many Thanks! I find your
>If your main protection is yourself and the police only a backstop in particularly difficult cases you will be more willing to support restrictions on what police are allowed to do.
to be a much better case for how the 2nd amendment can reduce the odds of tyranny than, as you said, arguments that
>depend on fighting tanks with rifles
I'd guess that in cities, fear of crime increases demand for things like better locks, buildings with doormen, apartments that aren't on the ground floor, and high-end car services. Also, banking? I read an interesting article claiming that historically, Irish immigrant use of banks was pretty high due tenement apartments not having locks on doors. [1] In such situations, the only way to protect valuables is to keep them on you, which is likely a use for jewelry in some cultures.
One problem with using a gun for protecting property is that it requires that you're present to use it; you're the guard. Locked doors, barred windows, security alarms, and safes don't require you to be there.
It seems rather individualistic and do-it-yourself? I don't think most people want to be the guard, and many people wouldn't be capable of it. Maybe that's appropriate in the rural areas for protecting yourself from animals. But hired private security services (often shared, as with a doorman) seems like a likely alternative to public security.
Someone who wants to reduce reliance on police should probably support laws that make private security cheaper and more effective. This likely means more surveillance to reduce labor costs. (This isn't inconsistent with regulating who gets to work as a security guard.)
Also, what should security guards do when they need backup? Calling the police is the usual answer. This implies having specialists able to deal with more extreme situations.
An interesting alternate-history scenario might be to imagine a less individualistic country that, instead of guaranteeing the right to own guns, guarantees the right to hire your own security, and for private security companies to exist. Perhaps that would be the modern version of a "well-regulated militia." Maybe there would even be vouchers for it. :-)
[1] https://tildes.net/~humanities.history/1f07/surprising_detail_in_new_york_bank_records_helped_a_historian_bust_a_longstanding_myth_about_irish
>One problem with using a gun for protecting property is that it requires that you're present to use it
This is false. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spring-gun
Booby traps are illegal and for good reason too.
There’s always an exception.
Police are a relatively late development in Anglo-American institutions — early 19th century for England.
Yes, I think the Irish & the IRA are a good example of how even small arms can make an occupation politically untenable, despite having absolutely zero chance of beating the occupying forces militarily. The British had tanks, jets, artillery, nuclear submarines, practically anything you could imagine; what good did it do them in the PR war? (And even if 10 Downing Street didn't care about PR, the sheer financial cost of fighting a war might have caused them to reconsider... plus the fact that the IRA were willing to target them personally: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downing_Street_mortar_attack)
The British had tanks but they didn’t have the public support for pulling off something like the Soviet deportation of Chechens after WWII. If you’re willing to do _anything_ the little guy will have a very bad time.
One reason the peace process worked was that the IRA (and I think loyalist organisations as well) had been comprehensively infiltrated by various British intelligence organisations over the years. It was reckoned that at any IRA meeting there would be at least one MI5 person present, unknown to the other participants, for example agent Steak knife, who was one of the top IRA operatives.
Partly, the argument that we need guns to stop a tyrannical government feels like a weak rationalization by people who want guns for other reasons. Some points:
- People on the left tend to think that if there were a tyrannical government, it would be a far-right government and the citizens that tend to have guns would be the ones that support the tyrannical government. (All leaders need support to stay in power. No one rules alone.) Under this view, the 2nd amendment might actually help a tyrannical government.
- Tyrants pass more restrictions over time. States already restrict guns in various ways (requiring background checks, banning assault rifles, etc). One of the first things a tyrannical government is likely to do is restrict gun sales, either to demographics that oppose the government, or to everyone. The constitution is just words. An evil government can ignore it. We already effectively ignore the 2nd amendment to some degree.
- We've drawn the line of what arms to allow at a weird place for taking on the US government. We restrict machine guns, bombs, rockets, grenades, etc. All things the taliban and other guerrilla groups use.
I think what is missing is the leap from "tyrannical government abuse ("TGA") comes to light" and "armed citizens rise up in defiant resistance". We've had our share of what one would think easily qualifies as TGA, i.e., the whole NSA surveillance exposed by Snowden, and... nothing. OTOH we had Jan 6 2020 - I don't want to rehash the partisan arguments, please-please don't tell me it was a coup attempt / invited Capitol tour, just want to point out that there was a large crowd that appeared to sincerely believe they were there to stop a TGA event. And most they did was pose for pictures and, like, stole a pulpit from Nancy.
The evidence so far points to irrelevance of the 2nd amendment to saving democracy, although not for the reasons many think....
To take my reply in a different direction:
The typical supporter of the Second Amendment often dreams of standing in a position similar to that of the Militia on Lexington Green.
There are many factors which make that situation different from any situation that any modern citizen of the United States might have against a tyrannical government.
Some pertinent details that surrounded the scenario on Lexington Green:
1. The Militia that stood there on Lexington Green was an official, organized body of the town of Lexington (and the Colony of Massachusetts Bay)
2. That Militia had trained as a unit, had a chain of command.
3. That Militia also didn't fare well going toe-to-toe with the British Regulars who were wearing red coats.
4. Many other militia units, raised by a network of messengers, converged on the British Regulars as they returned to Boston. Those Militia units harassed the British, and inflicted much more casualties on them than had been inflicted by the Militia standing on Lexington Green. (Paul Revere was the initiator of this network of messengers, but he was not the only messenger who went out that night.)
5. The entire network of regional Militia units worked in concert because their leaders were working in concert with the Committees of Correspondence, who were orgnizaing resistance to the Military Governor that had been put in place to replace the local Elected Governor.
6. The war that started on that night took many years to complete, and required George Washington (and Marquis de Lafayette) to train a professional army. It also required a good deal of monetary aid from Continental Congress, and support from a foreign nation that had a grudge against Great Britain.
With all that said: any defenders of Liberty who want to take on the Feds will have a hard time doing so unless they have some sort of organization akin to the network of Militias and the Committees of Correspondence that existed in Colonial times...with some sort of legitimate government, or a government that claims legitimacy, to back them.
Anything which might resemble that scenario in the modern United States looks like some State trying to kick off Civil War, version 2.0.
Such things are much easier to do if there are a large number of citizens who are familiar enough with firearms to know how to hit a target. But the current level of Second Amendment activism doesn't include much more, and the various States would need to build their own armies from scratch while beginning the process of fighting a Tyrannical Government at the Federal level.
Paul Revere was arrested before he ever got out of town. The message was carried by William Dawes, a physician who gossiped as he made his rounds. The reports that I've encountered didn't make clear whether he was intentionally spreading the message, or whether he was just passing along gossip. But he wasn't a minuteman.
Let me first set up a scene, an amalgam of real-life experiences (also, this relates to the earlier Performative Bafflement's comment):
Say I'm in some kind of a public space, and there's what appears to be a confrontation between a man and a woman. They seem to be in some kind of a relationship, but maybe not, and they are screaming at each other and it looks like maybe even a physical confrontation is imminent. What do I do?
In a movie, there's a script where I'm a gallant bystander bravely coming to the woman's rescue. In real life... I'm not quite sure how to read the situation and I also used to train with a guy who has a scar on his head from his bouncing work when he tackled a man attacking a woman, only to wake up on the floor with a bloody head because the woman smashed a bottle on it. Defending her boyfriend who was just smacking her around.
What I'm getting at, is that in real life there's always operational ambiguity, and tradeoffs. So I've learned about the NSA - what do I do? Before knowing about it, my life was fine, I had a good job, nobody bothered me, etc. Now.... nothing changed? For me, personally? I'm still not really bothered, my job, my house, etc. are still here. And like you said, what exactly is my plan, do I try to bomb the NSA HQ?
There are huge risks for me if I take any of these actions against an ambiguous threat, for an uncertain reward. So I do nothing. Well, I start using DuckDuckGo as my search engine instead of Google, that'll show them!
The idealized movie version of TGA has clear red lines, evil 100% villains, and obvious heroic courses of action to save the day. Alas, our messy reality never gives that kind of certainty to act on.
Also, movie heroes have perfect aim and never make mistakes and never go up against an adversary with half a brain cell.
"What should you, a gun-carrying person, do when you see a man appearing to rape a woman in a public park?" was one of the scenarios in my Arizona concealed carry permit class, and the answer was, "be really 100% fucking sure they aren't role-playing BEFORE you shoot anyone, because they might just be kinky."
The hypothetical was taken from real life.
Yes, that exactly. One of the key realities of real-life violence is the utter confusion that accompanies it.
One of the really ironic things is that the crowd that attacked Rittenhouse after the first shooting likely thought that *they* were the movie heroes, trying to stop the next mass shooter. It's not like they had any way of knowing that the first shooting was self defense and Rittenhouse probably wasn't going to shoot anyone else. And if they had been successful at stopping Rittenhouse, they would have had a strong self defense claim as well.
I'm trying to imagine what action armed citizens could take to stop such tyrannical government abuse.
Form a militia, storm the data centers used by the NSA, and smash hard drives?
Form a special-tactics militia, and start targeting...er, hunting... employees of the NSA?
I will admit, these thoughts makes me very uneasy.
Almost as uneasy as another realization. You see, many defenders of civil-liberties warned that the Patriot Act and accompanying government behavior during the War on Terror were adamant that American citizens were giving up vital liberties for the temporary purpose of apparent safety. These voices were loud and insistent, and generally from the liberal parts of the political spectrum.
Those voices became much quieter (or got much less media attention and online commentary) shortly after the election of 2008. Almost as if a lot of people thought that the Right People were now in charge, and things would get better.
But things didn't get better. The Tyrannical Government Abuse went on, and had targets added to its focus.
So, is there any way to gather the political energy to shut down these instances of Tyrannical Government Abuse, short of sending out people to engage in the criminal behavior of hunting down government officials?
If you think that the NSA as it currently exists engages in Tyrannical Government Abuse, are you willing to take up arms against the government?
>I'm trying to imagine what action armed citizens could take to stop such tyrannical government abuse.
That's the point of this thought exercise - this is a fully general answer. The answer is, "none of you are going to do anything to stop tyrannical government abuse, ever, so just pack it in and give up the guns, and we'll at least reduce successful suicides and school shootings by 50-80% or so."
We had the literal "tyrannical government" archetypical test case dropped into gun people's laps, and they did nothing except meekly roll over and say "thank you sir, may I have another?"
So, fine. I was behind gun people if they actually WOULD defend against tyranny, but emprically, they won't. So let's get rid of the guns.
"and we'll at least reduce successful suicides and school shootings by 50-80% or so."
No, you won't. That outcome is far *less* likely than the one where a bunch of gun-toting Americans form a militia that topples an oppressive government. I can cite many, many examples where gun control did not result in a 50% drop in suicides or homicides, and you can cite none where it did - only places that kept approximately the same low-but-not-zero homicide rate they had before.
And you can imagine that all those other people did gun control wrong but if only we do it right the carnage will end, but the other side can imagine that if there were a *real* tyranny they'd be literally up in arms and would put it down.
>So, fine. I was behind gun people if they actually WOULD defend against tyranny, but emprically, they won't.
I sympathize. Frankly, the kind of monitoring that the NSA did seems like the sort of thing an armed rebellion would have a very hard time attacking. IIRC, they had hardware for collecting information (mostly metadata??) co-located with telephone company switching equipment. Unless one is the technician who installed it, how is some armed attacker supposed to know which connections to cut?
I'm in favor of gun ownership for a completely different reason: "When seconds count, the police are minutes away". Protecting against ordinary crime is important - and the criminals will always be armed, law or no law.
>Frankly, the kind of monitoring that the NSA did seems like the sort of thing an armed rebellion would have a very hard time attacking.
Yeah, that's kind of my point. Nothing that counts as "government tyranny" is going to take a nice, convenient form with legible, lightly armed-and-armored targets vulnerable to small arms fire.
US gov spying on everyone forever? Illegible bad guys.
US gov rounding some subset of people up and putting them into camps? The rounder-uppers are going to be heavily armed and armored and using coordinated group tactics, or it's going to be black vans in the middle of the night. No legible or vulnerable targets.
US gov deciding it's running a major "liberal tears" deficit and needs to install Trump as dictator-for-life? No legible target.
US gov deciding to ban religion and issue mandatory birth control / abortions for all via RU486 in the water supply? No legible targets.
There is basically zero scenario where gun people CAN or WILL do anything about government tyranny. They rolled over for the NSA? They'll roll over for anything else too.
Many Thanks! Some of those scenarios have at least more visible targets than the NSA hardware, but, frankly, I wouldn't expect a rebellion against them to be successful if it were tried, and I tend to agree that it probably wouldn't occur in the first place.
For defense against ordinary crime, on the other hand, it makes sense. E.g. see Christina's comment about two incidents that happened to her: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-320/comment/51967148
Yes, thank you! This is exactly the point I was going to make. IT HAPPENED. Your own government spies on literally everywhere you go, and everything you do or say, and keeps it in databases in perpetuity to be mined and used against you forever. We had basically irrefutable proof in every major media outlet. And all the "defense against tyranny" people? Not a peep. You had your chance, and blew it.
Thanks, so I’m not the only one!
How did 2nd amendment rights work out for Kathryn Johnston? Or Philando Castile? Or Garrett Foster?
It's worked out great for me, a real 5'2" human female.
I thwarted one armed robbery attempt at work 20+ years ago by drawing (but not pointing) my pistol, and last year dissuaded an intruder I surprised in my condo's garage, alone, at 4 AM, simply by putting my hand on the butt of my pistol (which was out of his line of sight) and simply waiting for him to decide what he was going to do while making determined, fearless eye-contact with him.
You do not hear about the most successful exercising of 2nd Amendment rights because they result in *no victimization actually occurring* and thus no report being made.
I am 500% okay with the risk of being shot in a misunderstanding with police in order to have a tool that intimidates predators.
The basic problem is similar to the problem with nuclear brinksmanship. By raising the stakes of every interaction, it increases the chances of a fatal mistake.
The Perry case is actually almost a perfect demonstration of this. Perry claimed that he shot Foster because Foster also had a gun and *could* have shot Perry back and Perry wanted to kill Foster first to prevent that from happening. When applied in a state with ubiquitous open carry like Texas, that reasoning is an excuse for anyone to kill anyone at any time.
And how many nuclear exchanges (or world wars) has the world had, hmmm?
I wasn't victimized by predators because I displayed a credible threat to their well-being and/or lives, then gave them the option to either engage that threat or leave me alone.
In both cases, they decided to disengage rather than risk injury or death, which was the ideal outcome for both parties.
Given that these encounters are not hypothetical and actually happened in really real real life, would you have preferred me being victimized to me being prepared with a gun during each of those encounters?
I'm very glad that you had a gun when you needed it! There are many such incidents: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defensive_gun_use . Even the lowest of the low estimates is 55,000 defenses per year, larger than the total homicide rate, and the high estimates go up to 4.7 million per year.
I would prefer for *noone* to be victimized and widespread usage of guns increases the number of people being vicitimized.
Also, as @Jeffrey Soreff pointed out: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-320/comment/52103788
While heroic, your preference does not have the power to prevent predators from targeting me and others who might appear to be particularly vulnerable targets.
Furthermore, not all violence is committed with guns, but a gun (with adequate training, of course) is the only self-defense tool which removes physical advantages like size and strength, and sometimes even superior numbers from a potentially violent encounter.
So I'll ask you this yes-or-no question again:
Would you have preferred me being victimized to me carrying a gun?
You mean things that happened in states that are extremely hostile to the 2nd amendment?
You think Texas and Georgia are extremely hostile to the 2nd amendment?
If you don't mind a drive-by non-participating technical objection, the subject of this (admittedly silly) debate is a pogrom carried out against many or most Americans, not police raids on individuals who cannot call many to their aid.
It makes a lot more sense if you view it as making something like a "police riot" prohibitively costly, not as letting individuals win shootouts with the law. If it did, there wouldn't be any law to speak of. It might be imagined, but at least it helps to know what's being imagined.
Yeah, in retrospect, I realized that it was not a great objection to this particular tangent. But I don't want to delete it since someone already responded.
I'm probably one of the people you're thinking of, so to better flesh out what I was getting at:
I think it really boils down to what you mean by "stopping a tyrannical government." It's definitely true that sufficiently dedicated resistance/guerilla-style insurrection movement would be extremely hard for a central authority to stamp out, even if only armed with 2A-style small arms. Bluntly, if the Taliban can do it, so could a similarly armed and motivated populace in the US.
However, there's a big gap between "continuing to hold out and be an insolvable thorn in the side of the evil central authority" and "actually defeating the evil central authority and removing it from power." The Taliban had the advantage that if it caused enough pain the US would eventually leave and permit them to occupy the country, but a hypothetical “US government, but taken over by a super evil dictator" isn’t going to withdraw from Texas or Appalachia the way the US did from Iraq or Afghanistan. Any honest estimate of that probability is going to be zero, or so near-to that it might as well be. So if your hypothetical resistance wants to actually *remove the tyrannical government from power*, it needs to solve the problem of the military & police. It can’t just hope that they will give up and go home – they’re home already.
That means either overcoming them by force, or co-opting them somehow, and when those are your two options, and they have tanks, nukes, airstrikes, etc – practically speaking, “by force” isn’t on the table. As long as they are willing to drop an airstrike on you, they’ll win every time, so in the end it’s their *decision* of where their guns will point that will decide the day, not the force of your comparatively much smaller arms. Hence my statement to L50 Lapras –
>>The government falls because the soldiers *refuse* to turn their tanks and helicopters and artillery on the populace and join the uprising, not because the people defeat the army with chutzpah and bump stocks.
The presence of an armed resistance would certainly be a factor in that decision, but it’s ultimately going to come down to the military making a decision that factors in the resistance among many other factors, not having an outcome imposed upon them by the resistance from without.
After reviewing the conversation to refresh my memory, I think context from that thread is helpful.
Lvl50 Lapras had made a point that the critique "why not just shoot them in the legs?" when responding to police or other gun violence represents a pretty heavily mythologized understanding of guns - more parts Hollywood than reality - since it's hard to hit legs in practice, a leg shot may not be immediately disabling, and a leg shot could ultimately be fatal anyway (femoral arteries being what they are).
I agree with that point, and chimed in to the effect that "we can use the guns to overthrow a tyrannical government" also represents a pretty heavily mythologized understanding of guns, for the reasons I just fleshed out in the post above.
Point being, neither of us was making the extreme claim that "guns are zero utility against a tyrannical government" or "guns can't shoot legs." An armed populace is of course a factor that such a government would need to consider, and guns can most assuredly shoot legs. Both frameworks, however, are steeped in a similar blanket of cultural mythmaking that, to my mind, makes different groups of Americans make gross overestimates as to their effectiveness.
EDIT: I think, similarly, that our cultural mythology leaves us prone to underestimate the degree to which the 2A could be used to *support* a tyrannical government. Lenin would have *loved* the right to openly gather up arms and train his Red Guards as a "militia" in the Russian Empire along the lines of what we permit in the US today. FLWAB raised the question below of what would happen if the crowd storming the capitol on Jan 6 had possessed more AR-15s. Blacks had the protections of the 2nd Amendment, and access to arms, on the eve of the Tulsa Massacre, but whites had both those things as well, and in greater numbers, so the fact that blacks were armed and in many cases shooting back didn't change the result.
They're right, which is why the second amendment should cover everything including nuclear bombs.
I think this makes sense, but it still doesn't address the fundamental question. If the claim is that the point of the 2nd Amendment is to allow the people to have the effective means to resist an unjust government, and that effective means to resist an unjust government can mean some form of firepower that is substantially less powerful than the firepower that the formal military has, then it still raises the question of precisely *what* level less powerful than the formal military is sufficient or necessary or otherwise relevant. If you don't need nuclear weapons, do you still need access to fighter jets? If you don't need access to fighter jets, do you still need access to high explosives? If you don't need access to high explosives, do you still need access to automatic weapons? If you don't need access to automatic weapons, do you still need access to handguns? If you don't need access to handguns, do you still need access to long guns? If you don't need access to long guns, do you still need access to flammable fuels like gasoline?
Most people think that there should be a stopping point to this slipper slope somewhere along the way, but they disagree about where.
IIUC, during the Soviet Union, the Soviet population had a higher proportion of gun owners than the US did (at the time). And the US had a higher proportion of its population in prisons.
"During the Soviet Union" covers a fairly broad period and, particularly at the outset, one of rapid change. I can believe that, in the immediate aftermath of a World War and a Civil War and before the new Soviet government was really able to enforce its new laws, there were an awful lot of guns in circulation. But if you're claiming this for any period after say 1930, I'm going to want to know what period specifically andI'm going to want to see your citation.
If you put yourself in the position of a tyrannical dictator who's just taken over the government, how much force would YOU use to subdue the population? Remember that every city you destroy means less infrastructure for you to tax or co-opt. Also every destroyed city means more disaffected followers. "I was all for the revolution until I had to bomb my own hometown."
The stopping point is what it would take to resist an occupying force that can't afford to just wipe you off the map. Still some room for debate, but it should at least narrow it down.
Is it because of restraint? Of the examples I can think of, its because the superior force is waging an offensive distant from itself across a giant natural barrier, like an ocean, while the weaker force has to simply remain to win a war of attrition.
Maybe I'm not thinking of the right examples, but I don't know how that works out for internal uprisings in the US. Unfortunately, a lot of insurgent wars in other countries seem to have no conclusion and drag on for decades. I guess the stronger side isn't victorious, but the neither is the weaker side.
One obvious counterexample (example?) would be the IRA and the Irish resistance against the British. There were no great distances or giant natural barriers, just a need for restraint & good PR for the British in the modern age -- despite the fact that they possessed tanks, fighter jets, artillery, nuclear weapons, and the whole panoply of heavy weapons, vs. a force armed with small arms & mortars at the heaviest (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downing_Street_mortar_attack).
Does the idea of the governmental military force exercising restraint make sense in the context of a tyrannical government? Are we talking about hedging against some kind of benign tyranny? Or perhaps some authoritarian government that does still need to care about the populace becoming too disgusted with its violence towards a separatist movement of other Americans?
I'm also unsure whether the general analogy of other asymmetric warfare examples would fit in this case. It's not obvious to me that a gorilla warfare movement would be nearly as successful when it is operating on the same home turf as the military power. It would lose all the standard advantages of cultural and geographic familiarity.
The real battlefront would be the propaganda war. Because every attack by the guerillas has the risk of costing them public support, just like every government attack does. And if we assume tyranny, the government will have a natural advantage on this front too.
You're confusing the state with its armed/security forces. Many Democrats would be happy for the military to mow down every last MAGA american, but the armed forces, the actual trained combat troops, are more on the side of MAGA than the AOCs of the world.
Much of a tyrannical state's power isn't directly enofrced with violence, just with its threat. But that threat can, with enough resistance, be shown to be illusory. Additionally, a lot of its power can be not directly based on force - freezing bank accounts, cutting off utilities etc. And these are likely to prompt violent response from people.
Gorilla warfare movement? Come on, give the gorillas a break.
If said government wants to actually have a country to tyrannise at the end of everything, it will need to exercise restraint. Nuking 1/2 of the country might technically count as a victory, but it's going to be a pretty Pyrrhic one.
Or a "pyro"-ic one?
Eh? Eh?
Ok I'm done.
AI is about to make this whole discussion obsolete. Cheap robot cops will outmaneuver private citizens with minimal collateral damage. And there is no way the US will allow private citizens to have their own slaughterbots. It's a miracle that autoloading rifles are still legal.
EM Jammers are cheap and effective, and citizens can now print an autoloader in a few hours.
It is easier and cheaper to resist than to occupy. I don't need a slaughterbot, I have a glue trap, a battery hooked up to an antenna, and a rifle.
The anti-junta forces n Myanmar are successfully holding off State forces with homemade printed rifles, rocket launchers, and drones. All the specs are online.
I've seriously thought about building an alohabot and trying to hack it into a domestic killbot, because you know that's where all this is going. Still open source, software and hardware, for now.
But realistically, I think it'll be easy enough to build these yourself by anyone technically proficient enough. Like even today if you know a little python, you could literally put together an image-detecting-and-shooting gun if you wanted to, and everything is basically unrestricted, because python isn't restricted and neither are guns or servos.
I think that even before that, when media is not owned by people, guns are already insufficient.
...That people are spineless twats that will fall in line at the first sight of adversity? Do you remember what happened at January 6? One person gets shot, and suddenly everyone isn't so excited to "stop the steal".
Of course, the absurd amount of firearms in the country does ensure that if civil war does break out regardless, it will be... unimaginably bloody. A conflict of "the people" vs. the government is never going to happen; the two aren't entirely separate things.
The two might have been identical once; they certainly aren't today.
People still have this fantasy of meaningful democratic government in the United States because every now and then the party in power changes through an election
But the reality for the vast majority of seats is lifetime sinecures held by millionaires, and legal, thinly-disguised bribery if sheer self-interest fails to get the upper class the desired result.
I can’t tell if you’re arguing in favor of weapons empowering resistance against tyranny or against, since to my best knowledge the Jan 6 rioters were not armed: I believe they found under 10 people at the riot who had guns on them, and only handguns at that. Perhaps if most of them were armed with AR-15s they would not have “fell in line at the first sign of adversity”.
Personally I see 1/6 as a riot rather than a planned revolt, and as not very informative about the feasibility of a citizens rebellion against a hypothetical tyrannical state. I also see the anti-tyranny value of the 2nd Amendment primarily in raising the cost of tyranny for the state. Unjust laws are more difficult and costly to impose on an armed citizenry than on unarmed subjects. If Black Marias started snatching people in the night, as they did in the USSR, they’d be going in knowing that they may face armed resistance from they people they want to disappear. So they’d have to commit far more resources to do it, which makes it less likely to be tried at all.
" If Black Marias started snatching people in the night, as they did in the USSR, they’d be going in knowing that they may face armed resistance from they people they want to disappear."
You know, Solzhenitsyn asked this in Gulag Archipelago: why weren't we resisting? He didn't have an answer, if memory serves. Sure, guns weren't available to Soviet citizens, but ambushing three people coming through a door can be done without firearms (and actually I don't know how many firearms were still sloshing around the country after the civil war of 1918-22). But people just... went... meekly....
Possession of a firearm, with the exception of smoothbore hunting shotguns, was made illegal in the USSR in 1924. During WWII citizens were ordered to surrender all smoothbore hunting weapons (the only type that it was legal to posses) to the Red Army to help fight the Nazis. From this point until 1953 all firearms of any kind were illegal to possess unless your job required it. As far as I can tell, these laws were enforced strictly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_control_in_the_Soviet_Union
Was that enforced? Around 1960 I ran into a claim that the USSR had a higher per capita gun ownership than did the US. And about a decade ago I knew a guy who said that gun ownership was extremely common. (That was, however, after the USSR had collapsed.)
In 1953 they made it legal to own hunting weapons again, and in 1960 they reduced the penalties for owning an illegal weapon. Of course both of those changes came after the era of the Black Marias and disappearance quotas.
Ok so no firearms. But still clubs and knives can be quite effective as ambush weapons in tight spaces. But apparently resistance just never happened, even though people knew they had little to lose.
It was also illegal to own long knives or daggers.
I don't disagree that it is possible for men with blunt weapons and kitchen knives to kill a man with a military rifle if they outnumber him and ambush him. The courage and coordination it takes to attempt such a feat, however, is far more than it would be to pull out a handgun and start shooting. The with a knife or club has a very low chance of success if they are unable to ambush, but ambushing or not ambushing a man with a gun has a very real chance of killing another man with a gun: and that significant chance of success is the kind of thing that makes a the man in the Black Maria pause and ask himself, "how high a risk of dying am I willing to take today?"
What was the ambiguity in the scoring criteria? What were the two algorithms? Thanks.
Yeah, I'm really wondering about this!
Random kind of a poll: what technical functions are small to medium-sized businesses most likely to outsource to freelancers? I.e. project-based work, that's presumably not core to the company's competitive advantage or main tech stack. Let's say companies under a thousand employees.
I originally thought e-commerce or other web hosting tech like Drupal, PHP, Shopify, WooCommerce, maybe Salesforce, etc. However someone else I know argued for database administration or ETL work. I was skeptical because isn't DBA/ETL work like some of the lowest level in terms of IT skills? Also are you really giving a non-employee access to a bunch of company data? Would be interested to hear what the ACT commentariat thinks
Edit: something with cybersecurity maybe? Almost every single company needs to have it at some level, but until you're a big company you're unlikely to have a specific cybersecurity engineer on your payroll as an FTE
Ok, I have hired contractors (for my employer), usually for one of the following reasons
a) things which are hard to recruit for. If we are spending ages trying to get a good person quickly and are finding it hard to get traction, we may use a contractor. Often either with a view to hire, or (where you absolutely need cover for some reason) with the understanding that you will soon hire a replacement.
b) where it's a one off, and you don't want that person on the payroll indefinitely
c) where (as you say) there's a crucial function, but you don't need an full time head
d) because the CEO wanted to
Cybersecurity is a good one, but many are likely to go via one of the big agencies for CYA reasons.
DBA - eh, dunno. We didn't have one, for small companies a backend engineer is likely to do the work.
Things my previous employer got contractors in for:
Under a), data engineer (cover leading to hiring a replacement)
Under b), android system engineer (IE, customising the OS), embedded engineer
Under c) infrastructure maintenance (but that didn't really work out, and it was in any case a contract with a contracting house not an individual)
Under d) Any random role
As far as worrying about giving a contractor access to data - no, contractors can be anything. Eg, we had a contractor as CFO multiple times. You just need a good rep. In the case of finance, if they do something bad they can lose their qualifications so there's a bit of leverage there TBF.
Thanks. Out of curiosity, did you use a staffing firm to find these people? Or just via someone's personal network?
Not a staffing firm, but the contractors often had agents. We either used external recruiters, if we were in a hurry, or sometimes personal networks - more usually the manager's network than engineers.
I was having a discussion/argument with a friend about whether it is politically better to criticise "your own side" when they advocate for what you believe are extreme views or to just let them advocate away.
For example, on immigration (in the UK), one extreme thinks it's OK to ship immigrants off to Rwanda while the other extreme can see nothing wrong with 100,000 immigrants crossing the channel in dinghies. Surely there's a middle ground! You rarely hear about it from politicians and you rarely hear them criticise their own extremes in public.
On race, one extreme sees nothing wrong with race riots that result in serious damage while the other extreme sees nothing wrong with police shootings (and kneelings).
On trans issues, one extreme wants to ban trans people from using their preferred toilets while extremists on the other side think there is nothing wrong with trans women competing in women's sports.
(Perhaps you disagree with my examples being extreme. If so, I am sure you can think of your own examples).
My impression is that people are very reluctant to take action against extremists on their own side, however extreme their views and that this results in the loss of a lot of moderate voters to the other side. Note that I am not talking about simply moderating their party's policies; they have to take action against the extremists.
My friend challenged me to name examples of party taking action against its own extremes. I managed to come up with Starmer expelling Corbyn (and others). Blair did something similar with Militant in the 90s. But I struggle to come up with examples from the Conservatives in the UK or with either party in the USA.
Can you help me find examples?
Part of the problem that causes demands of "condemn your extremists" to be often ignored is using biased definitions of "extremist".
Your race example is all right, as long as by "police shootings" you mean "when no clear crime is being committed": I think "police should be able to shoot violent criminals while their crime is in process" is undeniably a centrist and mainstream position.
On immigrants, I'm not familiar with the UK debate but I'm assuming you mean "illegal immigrants". I don't agree with the hardline right position on illegal immigration but ommitting "illegal" (if deliberate) is SO dishonest that it utterly discredits any leftist criticism that does that. If done accidentally, as is common, it's still a dangerous oversight that radically distorts the debate, and makes a centre-right position look like a far-right one (which does *nothing* to help reduce polarisation).
On trans issues...here your description drops the ball, I think. You're literally saying that "ignore biological sex in only some situations" is the extreme right position (???), and "ignore biological sex in all situations" is the extreme left. This looks like a terrifying attempt to redefine the overton window, that does more than anything else to *fuel* extremism on all sides.
(It's exactly equivalent to calling "enforce Christianity only in some social contexts" a far-left position, when it's really centre-right! The enforcement of a metaphysical religion of gender in *only* some cases is likewise *at least* centre-left, and the idea that people are trying to define it as right-wing is the single clearest sign of totalitarianism and extremism in the modern world).
An accurate characterisation, I think, would be to say the extreme right position is "force everyone to observe traditional gender roles according to their sex", the extreme left position is "force everyone to pretend sex doesn't exist", and the centrist position is "let everyone live as they want, but don't let them impose their quasi-religious beliefs on any public institution".
90% of the immigrants who arrive on boats are asylum seekers. Most of them will be granted asylum. Does that make them “illegal”? I don't know and that's why I didn't say.
I do think shipping them to Africa is extreme though.
I guess the question is whether they're deliberately ignoring or defying the laws of the UK or the expressed will of the UK government.
My point is that "should immigration be (made by law or policy) higher or lower?" and "what should be done about those who break the laws (or ignore the policies)?" are *completely" different questions. One can give any combination of answers: liberalise immigration laws and go soft on those who break the laws as well; liberalise the laws but crack down hard on violators; toughen the laws and enforce them more severley too; toughen the laws but overlook the violations (cf. many places' drug laws).
Pretending that the answer to one of those questions is actually the answer to the other (e.g. progressives saying that deportations means you hate immigrants, or conservatives saying respecting the rule of law requires reducing immigration) is profoundly dishonest, and makes good-faith discussion impossible.
On what planet "is ship migrants off to rwanda" a mainstream position? Which party is running on that platofrm?
For several reasons, almost nobody in the UK thinks this absurd Rwanda plan is remotely likely to succeed. For a start, the most optimistic numbers of transfers there, a couple of hundred or so per annum, are dwarfed by the rate of illegal arrivals in the UK. Also, part of the deal, if you can believe the stupidity of it, is that Rwanda will be able to export their undesirables to the UK!
One problem is that both main parties, the Tories and Labour, are determined to maintain compatibility with EU rules and our pre-Brexit obligations, presumably in the hope and plan to rejoin at some time in the future. One of these obligations is to be subject to judgements of the ECHR (European Court of Human Rights), and this is enshrined in a law called the Human Rights Act (1998). You'd be forgiven for thinking we had never left the damned EU! Unless this act is repealed, and we withdraw from the EHCR, there is no chance whatever of tackling illegal immigration, and this Rwanda plan is a pathetic attempt at distraction, along the lines of "Oh look, there's a squirrel!".
Another problem is that the UK is addicted to mass immigration to game claimed increases in the GDP figure, which includes public spending. Policy makers, and the few useful idiots who support their policy, claim various other benefits of mass immigration. But there is no doubt that desperately continuing to prop up the GDP pernicious Ponzi scheme is their predominant motive, even though taxes are already at record levels.
A new party, called Reform, is rapidly gaining ground in the UK, mostly at the expense of the Tories, and even though Reform are very unlikely to gain an overall majority, the votes they pinch from Tories will mean the latter are likely to suffer the mother of all well-deserved drubbings at the next national election! It seems to me quite on the cards that they will fade into permanent insignificance, as the Liberal party did a hundred years ago.
Edit: See the recent article: 2024-03-20 "Rwanda Policy Has Already Failed Politically"
https://pollingreport.uk/articles/rwanda-policy-has-already-failed-politically
I agree with your description of the problems — including the suggestion that the Rwanda policy is an attempt to distract from the enormous numbers for legal immigration.
I think this is an example of where the extremist opinions on both sides have captured their side making it almost impossible to advocate for a moderate opinion.
It should be possible to reduce legal immigration without banning it entirely (1) and it should be possible to process asylum claims (2) without shipping asylum seekers to Rwanda. But advocating for (1) on the left or (2) on the right would be political suicide.
If either party were serious about fixing the problems, they could do so without leaving the Court of Human Rights.
I don't think the Tories are captured by extremes with this. Extreme would be ditching the ECHR, ending all appeal processes, mass deportations, boat pushbacks etc. The Rwanda plan is attempting to put people off entering illegally (in the sense most understand the term) while skirting around the ECHR and maintaining deniability. I would actually call it moderate - it's outside the Overton window of British mainstream media, but not for a huge % of the population, nor other countries e.g. various Eastern European countries, Japan, US etc who are more nationalist and 'us over them' in attitude.
I would say they - and Labour - are captured by trying to please too many people, and the media, if anything - this leads to the grimly predictable cycle of saying what people want to hear, then repeatedly not doing it (see many previous manifesto promises re: reducing immigration from both right and left over the past few decades)
> one extreme thinks it's OK to ship immigrants off to Rwanda
It's the extreme right of the Conservative party advocating for it. The moderates oppose it.
One of my standard talks is "Arguments Libertarians Shouldn't Make." I gave it a few weeks ago at the California LP convention. You can find recordings of other versions on my web page, including one from 1981: http://www.daviddfriedman.com/MyTalks/MyRecentTalks.html
Today I happened to read that the Falange won the Spanish civil war partly because the Republicans were busy fighting among themselves, notably stalinist fractions trying to keep their hands on the wheel. Now it can be argued wether anarchists were more extreme than stalinists or just not totalitarian enough.
N.Taleb has described the power of the least tolerant. I should say, it is right to criticize "your own side" but dangerous.
This is a good example. There was a moderate republic position and perhaps it would have been successful but associating the republican cause with communism doomed it.
The regular Spanish army overwhelmingly went over to the Francoists, the reason there was a civil war at all was that workers' militias (which were organized and led by anarchists and communists) fought back. And said militias, whose power the second republic at that point depended on, were not interested in fighting and dying for business as usual.
What were they interested in fighting and dying for? I fail to understand your contribution to the thread's topic. Maybe I misunderstood Spanish history and it's relevance to the question of criticizing allies and I'd like to learn about that.
It can come down to who gets to define extremist. Eg, Boris Johnson expelled some people from the conservatives - He'd say he was dealing with extremists, they'd say he was the extremist.
In general (and this isn't a criticism of you, necessarily) I don't think 'go for the middle' is a good way to find the best solution (Aristotle notwithstanding). Consider control theory: sometimes the optimal solution is 'bang-bang control' [1] in which it is always best to adopt one of the extremes.
I think we should distinguish 'extremist' from 'fanatic'. An extremist thinks that something should be maximised (or minimised). A fanatic holds so strongly to their opinions that they want to obliterate anyone who acts differently. As such, you should not 'act against' extremists (by this definition), unless they are also fanatics. Otherwise, you should argue against them.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bang%E2%80%93bang_control
I don't want to say that choosing the centrist option is always correct. Rather that, when the extremists have an obviously bad idea, the leadership should be willing to condemn it and/or expel the people responsible. (sometimes the extreme idea is a good one). Someone below gave the example of Defund the Police. I think that captures the concept very well.
The people that Johnson expelled were moderates.
Should the leadership be willing to do the same thing when the moderates have an obviously bad idea, or is there something special about extremists?
My assumption is that stupid moderate ideas can usually be resolved by debate or simply ignored. Extreme ideas from extremists are especially pernicious because **the other side** will create mischief with them and pretend that those ideas are universal.
Matt Yglesias has a good article on this today in the context of Hamas v the Israeli government where Hamas is able to pretend that all Israelis support Israeli governments actions and the Israeli government is able to pretend that all Palestinians support Hamas' actions.
Yglesias goes further and says that the Israeli government actively promoted Hama' propaganda **because** it was so extreme. They also attempted to discredit moderates. No solution will be found, according to Yglesias, until the extremists lose control which requires them to be condemned by **their side's** moderates.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/what-israel-does-matters
> On trans issues, one extreme wants to ban trans people from using their preferred toilets while extremists on the other side think there is nothing wrong with trans women competing in women's sports.
I think it's weird that these are your examples of extremes on trans rights... I think "trans people should be forced to detransition or register as sex offenders" is one extreme and "you should be fired if you ever accidentally misgender someone" is perhaps the other (?) (it is harder to identify what one's side's extremist opinion is).
Those are better examples.
It might be helpful to consider Helen Lewis’s comment about Andrea Long Chu: “Sometimes I think only her idealogical opponents actually read her work”.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/03/trans-youth-transition-andrea-long-chu/677796/
If you have someone who is platformed as bravely speaking out for a position or a group you support, whether or not you denounce them and their views, you should probably make sure you know what they are saying and what your own view is. Because the people you want to convince are definitely listening to them. That doesn’t have to mean expelling them (although, anyone looking to achieve lasting societal change without backlash should probably expel the open pedophiles from their group, for example), but openly disagreeing with what they say, or agreeing if you really do, is more effective than blindness, real or faked.
There was a whole big thing on StackExchange when Monica Cellio was fired for something similar. Not for misgendering anyone, but for saying she doesn't use any gendered pronouns in her answers. (When answering someone, you generally just say stuff like, "You could try doing X, Y, and Z".) StackExchange wanted to implement a new code of conduct where you were required to check a user's profile for their preferred pronouns and required to use those pronouns.
The community was very upset that she was fired. A lot of mods resigned in protest. A lot of users changed their username to "[some name] Reinstate Monica".
I would say that's an example of firing a moderate rather than an extremist.
Yes, it's an example similar to the parent comment's, "you should be fired if you ever accidentally misgender someone" example. The person doing the firing is the extreme position in this example.
In actuality she may have been fired because a staff member didn't like her and the whole pronouns thing was just used as an excuse.
Those are better examples, thank you.
The idiotic defund the police meme:
Analysis | Biden tries to nix ‘defund the police,’ once and for all
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/03/02/biden-nix-defund-police/
Much further in the past:
Barry Goldwater told Nixon it was either resignation or impeachment and conviction.
“Sen. Barry Goldwater, Ariz., the 1964 GOP presidential nominee, was a respected conservative leader in a Senate whose Republican ranks were less conservative than now. On Aug. 6, 1974, at the regular Senate Republican Conference lunch, Goldwater fumed: “There are only so many lies you can take, and now there has been one too many. Nixon should get his ass out of the White House -- today!”
https://www.politico.com/story/2007/02/when-the-gop-torpedoed-nixon-002680
'Defund the Police' is a good example but Goldwater was to the right of Nixon, no?
It's not uncommon for the right-most Republicans to criticise the more moderate Republicans (especially if they are crooks).
The modern day Republican party is strongly pushing "Defund the Tax Police" and "Defund the FBI" has been successful about it.
"Defund the Police" *as a slogan* was certainly dumb on a tactical level because it made it easy for the right to misrepresent the positions of the left, but the actual sentiment behind it is bipartisan.
Nixon wasn't a right winger, except for political advantage. And he sure wasn't left. I think of him as a gangster who happened to have a (at least ostensibly) legal grift.
He was seen as very right-wing in 1964 but not later. He was pro-choice and said that "every good Christian ought to kick Falwell right in the a**."
He was a libertarian Republican. Whether that counts as "very right-wing" is a matter of definition.
Yes he was on the extreme part of the right at the time but Nixon and Goldwater were both Republicans so essentially on the same team.
Goldwater vigorously defended Nixon until it became ‘one lie too many’
Nixon was a crook but compared to a fairly recent example he was a model of civic virtue.
It was a different era when people pretty unanimously agreed that a president could only tell so many lies before he became a problem.
But of a nonstandard case, but mansour Abbas (leader of the mainstream Israeli Arab political party) denouncing Hamas was a recent example.
But the hesitancy and backtracking associated with these critiques highlights the difficulty. E.g. https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/president-abbas-says-hamas-actions-do-not-represent-palestinians-2023-10-15/, https://www.timesofisrael.com/abbas-denouncing-hamas-but-criticism-kept-private-due-to-idf-aggression-top-aide/.
Yes. This is a good example. The positions on Israel/Palestine have become so polarised that it is hard to condemn Hamas’s actions and hard to condemn Netanyahu’s actions from “your own side”.
I don't know the details of Abbas’s position but showing sympathy for the Palestinians while condemning Hamas should be possible.
The boycott of the magazine Guernica because it published an article by Joanna Chen, a Jewish writer who is sympathetic to Palestinian suffering is an example in the other direction.
I hope this isn't below the quality threshold for a response, but a few scattered points:
* You'd do well to look to continental europe for examples, given that the first-past-the-post nature of Anglo countries makes it very hard to test the limits of the big-tent.
* What would entail "taking action against the extremists?" denouncing them? expelling them? Anything else? murdering them is usually not a viable alternative nowadays.
* There is a "time-preference" component of letting the clowns loose: in the short term, there is usually little cost, because moderates will begrudgingly side with you anyway, but it might discredit your party in the longer run.
Certainly expelling them would count. Keir Starmer expelled a bunch of people to his left recently.
By contrast, Boris Johnson expelled a bunch of moderates in 2019.
I don't know enough about European politics to comment, unfortunately.
"No enemies to the left", was a termed coined in the French Revolution for the strategy you describe. It has been adopted by the other side, here's a recent example: https://christopherrufo.com/p/no-enemies-to-the-right
Denouncing your own extremists is known as a "Sister Souljah moment" in US politics, after a famous example when Bill Clinton distanced himself from the artist with the name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sister_Souljah_moment The link has more examples.
You know, I knew Bill Clinton had done something like this but I couldn't remember the details. Thank you!
Also, I remember that Reagan did a 'no enemies to the right' thing but I didn't want to assume that there were no examples of conservative parties condemning their own extremes.
"Also, I remember that Reagan did a 'no enemies to the right' thing but I didn't want to assume that there were no examples of conservative parties condemning their own extremes."
David Duke's senate run in 1990 might be an eample.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Duke#1990_campaign_for_U.S._Senate
Parties tack to the centre frequently but I am looking for examples of taking action against — or at least criticising — the extremists.
I mentioned Keir Starmer above — he expelled a bunch of people to his left — but I don't remember Biden doing the same.
The US doesn't have a real party system, so Biden can't really kick people out of his party like Starmer can. Trump kinda can (though my local primary just saw us prevent Trump from kicking out our state house rep by about five points), but that's because he has extremely loyal followers who will show up to primaries and vote for whoever he says. To put it lightly, Biden, err, does not.
The ousting of Ilhan Omar from the foreign affairs committee might be one example
I'm not sure whether the Democratic or Republican party can really just ... expel people in any meaningful sense. If you show up, canvas, and win the party primary... they can make your life difficult, but I don't know that they can actually ouright say 'yeah, they won, but we won't let them run under our party banner'.
The Dems in Omar’s own Congressional district gave her a wake up call.
She squeaked by in her last primary.
"The ousting of Ilhan Omar from the foreign affairs committee might be one example"
The Republicans in congress ousting a Democrat is probably not a good example of a "party taking action against its own extremes."
From NPR: "House Republicans have voted to remove Minnesota Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar from the Foreign Affairs Committee, citing past controversial comments she made about Israel and concerns over her objectivity.
The vote was 218-211 along party lines. "
Astrophysicist Paul Sutter critiques the way science is done today. Haven't read his new book, but I found most of what he says in this interview to be sensible (with a few exceptions). For instance, he argues that scientists shouldn't eschew being political, because science is mostly funded by public institutions. I don't disagree with scientists speaking their minds, per se, but I cringed at this...
"...but I believe scientists, when they speak about matters of important public concern, need to recognize that we are one voice at the table, where we have a unique perspective and a very powerful perspective on the world, and we absolutely need to bring that voice and that expertise to the table — but actually crafting policy, actually making decisions about climate change or pandemics, requires more than a scientific viewpoint, because we are communities of hundreds of millions or billions of people."
Yes, but with the COVID-19 pandemic, we had experts from the disciplines of epidemiology, virology, immunology, aerosol engineering, and medicine — and from all over the political spectrum — making bold recommendations on public policy and predictions about the disease that were flat out wrong. Policymakers could easily find experts who would agree with their prejudices and who endorse their policies. If the policies backfired, "well, that's what the experts told me at the time."
https://undark.org/2024/03/08/interview-paul-sutter-science-trust/?utm_source=Undark%3A+News+%26+Updates&utm_campaign=67a09d2b09-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_5cee408d66-185e4e09de-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D
I'm reminded of how Bret Devereux has sometimes argued that public outreach builds support for an academic field, and political advocacy cashes on it. Under this model, advocacy has its place, but you want to make sure you're not draining public goodwill by doing too much advocacy and not enough outreach.
Science doesn't make politics better, politics make science worse.
Part of the problem is that the more "the science says" becomes a powerful political argument, the greater the incentive to make sure that the science says what you want it to. That might mean partisans working to get positions in scientific organizations that will make sure they are the ones the reporters talk with or the ones who get to push public statements that most members of the organization don't pay attention to. It also might mean trying to keep supporters of the other side from getting published or hired, at which point the politics is distorting the science.
Very true.
I'm not sure what you find particularly cringworthy about that statement? Its clear that science has a role to play in crafting policy, and its also clear it shouldn't be the only voice. In an educated and informed society people should be able to look at the science as it stands, and make decisions based upon it. If the science later changes - which it can and often should - then those decisions might need to be updated. If anything the problem is the "informed" part, given that society often isn't informed, and often lacks the tools to properly understand or judge complicated scientific papers or to understand if a scientific consensus exists or not.
Which scientists, though? Do all the diverse opinions get a seat at the table? For the COVID pandemic, on one side of the spectrum we had the Great Barrington Declaration experts (who were accredited MDs, scientists, and economists), and on the other side we had the ZeroCovid experts. Both groups were advocating totally different policies. And neither was right in the end. How is a government policy-maker with little scientific expertise able to judge the advice being offered?
And that's the basic problem. People are really bad at evaluating how certain their own beliefs are. Scientists look at the evidence, but there's far too much to look at everything, so they are selective in what they look at, and tend to favor those things that support their positions.
Really, what both sides should have said was "The evidence is inconclusive, but in former cases that seem similar to me, this approach worked." But people don't like inconclusive recommendations.
It's been surprising to me just how quickly and how strongly this "all low quality content is AI generated" meme has taken off. (Not that I think Scott's poem was low quality) I've seen a ton of reddit posts where the top comment is an uncritical and unsubstantiated claim that the post is just AI spam - even in cases where the thing being criticized is several years old.
I'm not surprised that AI generated content would lead to a sort of paranoia over what's actually human written, but I'm surprised how quickly it seems to have set in - it feels like almost overnight a lot of the online discourse has forgotten that 90% of everything has always been junk, and low quality blog posts and listicles and stuff are not new or an AI innovation.
I'm hoping this is transient and Scott's view of the future isn't accurate, but I'm worried it is.
Here's a hilariously egregious example of AI's low quality content...
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2024/03/a-wonky-experience.html
It's especially weird your average person's false positive *and* false negative rate on what's AI are bad.
I've seen people getting e.g. downvoted on reddit for pointing out something that upon further reflection clocked *exactly* like gpt4's writing style, while saying that AI "wasn't smart enough to make connections like that" (it made a poor extraction of an English-101-level theme, something that's on every single AI benchmark).
On the other side of things, there were all those "I forced a bot to write x" posts/books that looked nothing like the output of contemporaneous models, either in content or the types of errors they made. Everyone and their mother were reposting them, fully believing they were made by an LLM, when it turns out they were wholly created by human comedians who were just... lying about it being AI. (https://www.amazon.com/Forced-Bot-Write-This-Book/dp/152485834X)
The fact of the matter is the majority of people have no idea what these models actually are and are not capable of, nor what they sound like.
The "forced a bot to write" viral posts were all pre-ChatGPT, if I recall correctly. I think that post-ChatGPT they lost interest.
I think it's honestly pretty rational. AI slop is always trash*, and it gets churned out orders of magnitude faster than everything else. If I see somebody with a hundred pictures on their Pixiv page over the past day, they are going to be AI art, and they are going to be bad, whereas the person who's drawing with their hand makes maybe two pieces of bad art per day.
Though, also, the sub the poem was posted on - MediaSynthesis - is specifically for AI-art-stuff, so people would be particularly inclined to think it was AI art.
*: I have seen good work done with AI - but that work requires a human hand to carefully curate, tweak, adjust, etc. This bottlenecks it and means it produces at a more "human" speed.
I don't think it's a rational judgement. I feel it's a lot like saying "Human slop is always trash". It also gets churned out at incredible portions, and a great part of it is also completely worthless. You could even say that "to get good result out of human produced slop, it needs to be carefully curated, tweaked and adjusted".
I think on average, AI already probably produces better content than humans. The upper point is not quite there yet - AI masterpieces don't quite reach the level of human masterpieces, but AI still has a lot of room to grow.
No, you are not engaging with my point.
AI slop can be produced in a deluge. I can, personally, right now, sit down and within an hour, have a thousand pieces of AI art. They will absolutely be crap that nobody wants to see, because I put no time into them other than editing a few words in the prompt. However, I will have a thousand of them. If I draw instead, even if I draw poorly, I will finish ONE piece of bad art.
The other thing is exactly the people who will make and post one thousand pieces of AI art, are EXACTLY the people who cannot tell that an individual piece is garbo. They have underdeveloped senses of aesthetics, that is why they see slop and post it. To get good AI art, they would have to spend TIME. But if they do not spend TIME, they will produce 1000x more shit than the worst artist can dump out at a breakneck pace, and 100,000x more than a good artist.
I would rather see aesthetically pleasing AI art than whatever trash you or I could produce, and I'm willing to bet a lot that the vast majority of people feel the same way; even those who deny it for what they see as "ethical" reasons. I don't see why it matters how much mediocrity an AI can produce in an hour.
> I don't see why it matters how much mediocrity an AI can produce in an hour.
I already explained it in every single post you have replied to, the fact that you cannot understand it is making it difficult to continue to speak kindly. So I will speak one last time, truthfully and necessarily:
If one aesthetically-devoid moron posts his dogshit poop-from-a-dog's-ass personal art to a website, and it is NOT AI PRODUCED, he publishes one piece of visual fecal matter per day.
If that same aesthetically-devoid moron posts similarly zero effort trash garbage, and it IS AI PRODUCED, he publishes 100,000 pieces of it per day.
Since 100,000 > 1, the damage done by the visual equivalent of tone deaf individuals, who also have access to AI, is much worse.
It is THE chief problem with AI art, and no, most people DON'T want to look at it. That's why every fucking art website bans or siloes AI art, why YouTube is not constantly serving up AI video recommendations, why people are bitching about low quality AI slop EVEN ON A SUBREDDIT ABOUT AI ART (r/MediaSynthesis).
Reminds me of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 1978 version with Donald Sutherland. People keep showing up at doctors' offices saying their family member has been replaced by an emotionless double. They're right. You think til the end that Donald Sutherland has made it through with self intact. Then you see him spot someone who clearly has not been podded, and . . . https://imgur.com/a/lxmp31U
I remember that as being very creepy.
To be fair in this particular example, his poem did jingle in a way that someone might consider beneath a man who choses to write heroic hexameter as a joke. It also rhymed in a way that was a bit reminiscent of GPT. I had to check myself briefly on my impressions, considered whether or not it was itself a joke on purpose, and then went back to start reading it again as a serious artistic choice.
Almost certainly not transient. The rational thing to do is to assume all text has been generated. You can’t trust emails, blog posts, and soon books.
If you consume someone’s content regularly, like a newsletter, you can probably get a sense of whether they are the real deal. But exploring new sources of written content will lead to a lot of time wasting.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot. Shorter statements will carry even more weight than before. Write your ideas in as few words as possible. In person meetings will be even more valuable. For now, video content will be more legitimate, although not for long and I personally don’t like video as a medium. Podcasts, and so on.
I agree that in person meetings are more valuable, but the trend seems to be the other way. Every well-educated 20-something I know wants a job that's fully remote. More and more psychotherapy patients I see want to meet remotely. I continued to meet in person with people all the way through covid, relying on a powerful air purifier for protection. Maybe 30% of my people elected to meet virtually because they were concerned about transmission of covid. Now nobody worries about covid but 40% of people prefer to meet online.
It saves so much time. A 1-hr online meeting takes one hour. Same meeting in your office takes 1 hr plus whatever time it takes to get there and back.
Well, that's true. But many of these people are not busy. Several of them are seeing me because they can't get it together to work on the things that matter to them, but instead slip into gaming, internet browsing, smoking weed & watching movies, etc. Also, when you are working with someone on a phobia or OCD, it is much harder to do effective exposures virtually.
With all the caveats re. my competence in these matters (lack thereof), isn't it possibly a part of why they prefer remote appointments? because they (remote appointments) leave more time for gaming/browsing/smoking/etc.?
There's an analogy to some people working out so that they can "eat cake", even though it's not how this works, and they probably know this, but the cake is tasty. So seeing a psychologist for their gaming addiction passes the bar for "I'm working on myself", without any real change actually happening, and a remote appointment is just a perfect fit for this situation?
Yes, I think you're right about that. I'm still trying out ways to handle it, because the problem only arose in the last couple years. With one new patient who contacted me about this sort of problem I said that I believed that coming to the office for treatment is much more effective, but that I was willing to have 3 virtual sessions at the outset to discuss their situation and the coming-to-the-office issue. The guy declined. He won't have any trouble finding someone to meet with him virtually -- considerably more than half the therapists in my area are now virtual only. Probably some of them have isolative syndromes too! This stuff isn't a problem when it comes to filling my practice. I see lots of people with phobias and OCD, and those people usually *like* coming to the office. They are not isolative people, just regular people with a big fear monster chewing on them. But it's a piece of the way life is changing that my work makes me especially aware of, and damn, it's not a good trend.
(SPOILERS for Unsong ahead) I thought the scene were the Comet King tries to enter Hell was super interesting, namely, the impossibility of it. I was viscerally reminded of it by the volunteer work I do with the homeless: trying to get through to a drug addict is pretty much attempting to enter Hell, and feels just as impossible. The Comet King's final solution to the problem was pretty interesting too, but we have the example of Jesus to know you don't have to go full evil to enter Hell. I wonder if C.S. Lewis is right in his assertion that the higher a being is, the lower it can descend?
I'm literally wishing I could go WOLOLO and get these people to enter a detox, but thinking that is possible, is perhaps, a deep misunderstanding of how the human mind works...
I'm not sure if I'm reading this correctly, but Mr. CEO-Monarch Curtis Yarvin seems to have had a bit of a mask off moment in his latest post, which is a rebuttal to someone disagreeing with his project (https://graymirror.substack.com/p/a-conversation-about-monarchy):
> The essential problem with the David Volodzko worldview, as with many recovering progressives—Volodzko seems to be some kind of neo-”IDW” type, always ready to believe that real liberalism has never been tried—no, baby, it’s real fascism that has never been tried—is that his reconsideration of his narrative is historically skin-deep.
"Real fascism has never been tried." I mean, reading about how he envisions a successful American monarchy to run (apparently, one of the first things it needs to do is shut down the New York Times and Harvard, and eventually, set up its own Ministry of Information) it does seem more than a little fascistic. He calls it an "executive regime", which you know, is a good description of how Nazi Germany was run.
I wonder if he ever bothered to explain how his political vision is different from fascism (if it is...). At any rate, I enjoyed the piece, and I like how he seems to be converging on the position that there will never be a final political system: even if his monarchy gets established, it will eventually decay, likely to be replaced with democracy, until that too decays into an oligarchy like the one we have now, and then the oligarchy gets replaced by a monarchy, either through a coup or through a foreign invader, and so on, forever.
> I wonder if he ever bothered to explain how his political vision is different from fascism (if it is...).
from https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2010/02/from-mises-to-carlyle-my-sick-journey/
> There are many differences between Hitler and Frederick, but perhaps the key one is stability. Frederick, while not intrinsically secure from his foreign enemies, was quite secure from any domestic opposition. No one was trying to kill him; no one could have accomplished anything by killing him. He was, in short, a monarch. A dead monarch is replaced, automatically, by another monarch—the identity of whom is already known. If the old monarch was assassinated, God forbid, the new monarch is generally not the assassin (or his employers).
(...)
> Thus, the capacity of this system to revert from its informal Tsarism, to its formal “democratic centralism,” was on every second of every day latent. Formally, officially, Stalinism is an ultra-democratic, left-wing, bottom-up form of government. Actually, unofficially, it is an ultra-despotic, right-wing, top-down form of government. The contradiction is quite great. Here is our chaos: black and white, sharing a single desk. Stalin has the power of the Tsars, but not the security of the Tsars.
In Moldy's view, fascism combined democracy with autocracy, and got the worst of both worlds. When everyone is eligible to hold the mandate of heaven, everyone is a potential usurper. And when everyone is a potential usurper, everyone is subject to fratricide. The end result is analogous to that of a clingy girlfriend, whose paranoia and controlling behavior is driven by insecurity.
He frequently mentions as Elizabethan England (and by extension, Shakespeare) as the closest historical approximation of his quasi-libertarian ideals.
Here's a good reality check on the strongman fantasy. I paraphrase from the following essay...
1. Inherent in the strongman fantasy is the strongman will be your strongman. There's no guarantee that a strongman won't regard you as an enemy or as someone to be exploited.
2. Then there's the fantasy that a strongman will unite a nation. Usually, they unite a nation by persecuting certain groups. When that wears thin, they will try patriotism and war.
3. The third fantasy is that a strongman will get things done. But dictatorial power is jealous of any other power center. First and foremost dictators must prevent anyone else from achieving anything. "The strongman is really the weak man: his secret is that he makes everyone else weaker."
https://snyder.substack.com/p/the-strongman-fantasy?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=3dcei&triedRedirect=true
The entire country will be optimized for "the strongman stays in power as long as possible".
That's why there is a Constitution that mandates term limits. Doesn't mean a strongman won't try to get around the Constitution, but it makes it more difficult if a simple popular vote can't amend the Constitution. The strongman would have to maintain power without the legal cover of it being constitutional.
Isn't the cycle of governments just the Ancient Greek idea of Anacyclosis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_cycle_theory)? Something the Founding Fathers explicitly built into their system of government by adding elements of all 3 government types (Democractic/Oligarchic/Autocratic -> The House/The Senate/The President [though nowadays it's more "Congress/The Supreme Court/The President"]), such that the natural shifts between government types wouldn't require overthrowing the government & plunging the country into civil war. What exactly is new about Moldbug's version of the idea?
What do you mean by mask-off? He's been consistently advocating for the same thing for a while, or does the f-word have some particularly negative moral valence that changes things for you?
It actually does, yes, Yarvin did seem to me to be selling something that wasn't fascism, at minimum, it didn't appear to be totalitarian, but perhaps I misunderstood.
Yarvin has repeatedly and at length said that his envisioned monarchy would not be totalitarian and would not seek to impose one set of rules and culture on everyone.
Very recently he spoke to "far right" Charlie Kirk, and much to Kirk's chagrin, Yarvin said that in a Moldbugian monarchy, you would have to allow prgoressive states to have stuff like transgender teenagers, and that trying to impose these kinds of rules on everyone is how you get revolutions - and speaking to Kirk, Yarvin had every incentive to sell his vision to him by promising that monarchy would result in Kirk getting everything he wants, but he quite clearly said the opposite to this.
He also said that it's extremely important that nobody from the old regime is punished, but that they simply lose their jobs but keep their pensions. This all sounds vastly less totalitarian than the majority of people on the far left.
Having listened to and read so much of Yarvin, it's clear that his primary motivation for monarchy is not to have his guy enact complete control over everyone's lives. Aside from thinking that all facets of society would function better, he is primarily concerned with destroying the power of the current regime before such as time that it has open borders, which he rationally views as something that would destroy American society. He appears much more tolerant of most other things if it means maintaining a regime that doesn't have open borders or something close to it, including letting blue states basically do what they want within reason.
To add to what others have said, this is the same guy who has, on several occasions, softly implies that he thought slavery was a *good thing*.
e.g., in his Open Letter to Progressives (2008):
>For example, Professor Dawkins, since he is a progressive, sees the modern tolerance of gays and lesbians as genuine progress (I happen to agree). And for the same reason, he sees the modern intolerance of slavery in just the same way.<end of paragraph>
Note the thing he says he agrees with, and the thing which has been conspicuously extracted to a second sentence when it would have fit more logically within the first.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin#Views_on_race
Without more context, we cannot possibly conclude from this that Yarvin supports slavery. And the link you provided doesn't even contain the quoted text.
The point of the link is that it does not include the quote.
I took that quote from my own notes/book report from reading Moldbug's "An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives" (you know, the work I cited directly above the quote).
I read that line (without knowing about any accusations of him being pro slavery) and immediately thought "...Did Moldbug just implicitly suggest he disagrees with the 'modern intolerance of slavery'? Surely that's just an oversight, right?". *Then* I went to check up on that and found wikipedia saying he's been criticized for that exact thing, *multiple times*, and the citations *didn't even include* the one in question.
Yarvin is a good writer, great even. He's very careful with his rhetoric, even if he misses the ball sometimes in being relatable. Unless you're intent on accusing him of being a much sloppier writer than he is, his wording here was deliberate. This was Yarvin being honest about the fact that (at least in 2008) *he did not agree with the modern intolerance of slavery*.
Totalitarian is Yarvin's whole deal, he's the guy who thinks absolute monarchies weren't absolute enough, and things will work out great if the dictator is completely impossible to overthrow (you see, all problems come from the dictator needing to spend effort securing his power instead of governing well).
He has a bunch of other weird ideas and he's way too anti-nationalist for me to call him fascist, but I don't know what you could think he is if not totalitarian.
And he literally does not support a "dictator that is impossible to overthrow". He literally talks at length about wanting to create an accountable monarchy, one that is subject to oversight in the way that a CEO is accountable to a board of directors.
You either have no clue about Yarvin's philosophy or you're being aggressively dishonest about it. No, REALLY. You cannot have spend any time listening to what he has said and HONESTLY say stuff like he supports having a "dictator that is completely impossible to overthrow". You HAVE to be either ignorant or lying.
>but I don't know what you could think he is if not totalitarian.
He's so "totalitarian" that he tells right-wingers like charlie kirk that in a molbugian monarchy, progressive states would be allowed to have stuff like transgender teenagers and that people like Kirk would have to accept that. Even though he has every incentive to say the opposite to people like Kirk and tell them that Yarvin's ideal system would destroy all the left-wingers and everything would be right wing and great.
How is this different from a dictator who is impossible to overthrow hiring a CEO?
I understood insistence on universal ideological conformity to be an essential feature of Totalitarianism. I haven't read Yarvin's stuff for quite some time, but I remember in the Unqualified Reservations days the he was against this and one of his major claimed advantages for autocratic authoritarian goverments over progressive democracies is that the latters' dependence on popular support at the ballot box gave them a strong incentive to engage in censorship, propaganda, and thought-policing.
At least that's how UR started out. As I'm thinking back, I seem to remember early on him making arguments that lumped Bolshevism and Naziism together with progressive democracy as "demotism", with totalitarian regimes understood as malignant forms while western-style late-20th-century democracies were the benign forms. In this framework, traditionalist autocratic regimes were something fundamentally different and (he argued) better than democracy, fascism, or communism. But I think those were mostly early in his UR writings. Then there was a middle period of focusing on criticizing modern American institutions, and a late UR period of criticizing progressivism and communism together and emphasizing their commonalities with occasional nods towards the idea of mid-20th-century fascism being a rebellion against progressive/communist hegemony. In that light, I wouldn't be surprised if the trajectory has continued and he's now a full-on fascist.
The society he sketched out when he got into the details was pluralist (something like allowing society to split into hardcore progressive and traditionalist areas, instead of one faction trying to impose their norms one everyone), and he's definitely been insinuating that he doesn't think that a monarchy would last forever even if it happens.
Which fits in with this politically nihilist attitude he cultivates, I'm pretty sure he thinks there isn't a final political system because they all decay and are eventually replaced by another.
I think then maybe it's just a definition problem? What you understand as fascism, and what he does are different?
Also, a thing about Yarvin is that he very much enjoys being provocative to the detriment of precision, the segment you quote is specifically trying to turn around a common phrase in favor of a generally unliked ideology, it could be that then he tried to argue himself into defending it, even if it doesn't quite mesh with his desired policies.
Wow. You've got a stronger stomach than I do for reading such crap. I stopped at this point...
"Until this “unitary executive” is so much “more powerful” than the present office that the President considers both the judicial and legislative branches purely ceremonial and advisory—with the same level of actual sovereignty as Charles III today—the “unitary executive” will not work."
Volodzko conveniently forgets about the previous King Charles who lost his head because he viewed the legislative and judicial branches as being purely ceremonial.
Yarvin wrote this, not Volodzko. And I have no idea on earth why you think that's relevant. Do you imagine that the legislature's supreme power should never be challenged because you will end up being killed?
Wutz the deal with this guy and quotation marks? They're sort of like drops of spittle flying off his prose. Does he think they're italics?
He's quoting Volodzko's use of the term 'unitary executive', and doing so because he's claiming Volodzko is mistaken about his use and meaning of the term - that what he means by unitary executive isn't really a unitary executive.
You can't even stand to hear jokes about his guy's *punctuation?* Jeez, take 3 deep breaths.
Yea, same question. It's like Trump with all-caps.
It's Yarvin who is omitting this, but also, that was a different time when a particular monarchy was on the way out (was democracy on the way in in that context? Lord Protector Cromwell was pretty much a monarch...). EDIT: Wait, the previous King Charles restored the monarchy, dissolved parliament, and ruled until his natural death. It's Charles I the one we're talking about.
A big part of what Yarvin is trying to get across in his project is that no political system is forever, and that includes democracy. He even says we're not living in a democracy anymore, but an oligarchy, which you know, seems pretty obvious. I don't know if there are historical examples of a democracy wresting power from an oligarchy, Yarvin makes it sound like there aren't, but he is a bit biased to put it mildly.
Yes, I meant Charles the I, not number II. Sorry. But after Charles II,James II took over, and he started behaving like his dad (Charles I) and got ousted in the Glorious Revolution.
I would agree that no political system lasts forever, but claiming the oligarchy runs things in the US is a simplistic analysis of US power dynamics — at best.
"I would agree that no political system lasts forever, but claiming the oligarchy runs things in the US is a simplistic analysis of US power dynamics — at best."
It's VASTLY less simplistic than thinking the president has the majority or even meaningful power over running the government, or that government policy is a result of "democracy". Yarvin has a more complete and sophisticated understanding of US power dynamics than almost anyone. ESPECIALLY people who think that the NYT and Harvard, for example, have no meaningful power.
Come on now, I think we saw how ineffective democracy is against oligarchy in the 2020 BLM protests. In a democracy, something like that would have accomplished things. Things like that topple monarchies for example, resulting in dramatic change, but in an oligarchy...
The oligarchy SUPPORTED the BLM riots. The BLM riots did not threaten oligarchic power and indeed instrengthed it.
The BLM riots were not 'the people' vs 'the government'.
How are protests a function of democracy? Liberal democracies usually allow protests within certain limits, but protests aren't plebiscites. Though I went out to protest after the Michael Brown killing, I never deceived myself into believing that the majority of Americans agreed with my political opinions. The US electorate is still pretty centrist. And when it comes to the BLM protests, in Ferguson—which was a triggering point for many protests—black voters organized and voted out the white minority city council. And IIRC, a new city manager was hired by the newly-elected town council, and the old police chief was fired. So democracy worked in that instance. As for the BLM protests across the country, I'd say that most Americans either didn't seem to care, or they were outraged by the fact that protestors blocked traffic and did some property damage.
>So democracy worked in that instance.
"Worked" in the sense of acheiving ethnonationalist goals, not worked in running a functional government that improved material conditions for the people.
Oh, don't be such a downer. Humanity is going to perish sooner or later.
I mean, I like this vision, I like seeing politics as merely an engineering problem instead of having sentimental attachments to any particular political system. Every machine eventually breaks down and needs to replaced, after all.
But would such a machine be adaptive to a changing world? Most authoritarian regimes waste a lot of resources preventing the subsystems of the state and the economy from changing. Thus we'd get suboptimal allocation of resources for the health of the state, or worse yet, full-scale collapse of the state machine.
I think this is why he brings up running the government like a startup. A successful startup is a very adaptable monarchical structure. He even speaks of political nihilism elsewhere, not being attached to any particular form. 20th century authoritarian regimes were all very ideological which is why they tried to hold things in stasis, but he's envisioning something that is a lot more flexible than that.
Less than one in ten startups are successful. And the CEO of a startup is seldom a free agent. For instance, the various venture capitalists funding the startup hold a lot of sway over the selection of CEOs and the strategies that the CEO implements. Likewise, the CFO puts restrictions on how the cash is spent. CEO is usually subservient to the demands of finance and accounting. In technical startups, the engineer(s) with the bright idea often take the position of CTOs and they frequently have more say about the technical direction the startup takes than the CEO does. One of the most important responsibilities of the CEO is to be booster for the company in front of Wall Street and investors. So, the CEO in modern startups is more like a constitutional monarch than a dictator.
To address your other reply, I don't know, you think the typical historical monarch was a sociopath? I mean, they didn't have to go through the process of obtaining power.
As to startup CEO's being subservient, isn't that pretty much just if the CEO is weak? Someone like Sam Altman or Steve Jobs is/were plenty autocratic. Having worked in companies for my entire career (not even startups) even then, its clear they have no democratic elements, as the employees have no say in major decisions. You are describing them as being more of an oligarchy than a constitutional monarchy, but I still think that only happens if the company doesn't have outstanding performance, so the CEO is weaker.
And one further thought. The two biggest problems with dictatorships are that it usually takes a sociopath to reach a position of power, and historically these personalities suffer from extreme Dunning-Kruger syndromes. Neither is a recipe for a well-run state.
He wants an Elon Musk some silicon valley genius to seize control, not a Donald Trump. Like, this is a very fundamental, important and obvious point about Yarvin's beliefs, so the fact you would make this kind of error suggests you don't understand his worldview very well. He's spoken at length about how people like Trump can never take control of the government.
Eh, I'm not sure I can see the NYT and the Ivy League as defenders of democracy anyway, but from what I've read, fascism is a very strange beast, and is distinct from historical monarchies, which are again distinct from what Yarvin is proposing.
When he went into sketching out how his regime would actually run, it was a very pluralistic vision where those who want to live a progressive unfettered lifestyle can have that, and those who want to live in a traditional community can have that too, which is very non-totalitarian and therefore not fascistic (then again, what do I know, I know there is such a thing as anarcho-fascism out there, even though I never looked into what the hell that consists of...)
>*Everybody* says their regime is going to be great if only given supreme power, even the villain from the Lego Movie promised Taco Tuesday.
Of course, the people who would head a Moldbugian regime are precisely the kind who do use supreme executive power to build incrediblly successful and functional companies and are not just demented utopian ideologues. And of course, Yarvin is not seeking this power himself, he's providing a blueprint for someone smart and capable enough to rule effectively.
>Does that sound appealing to you?
VASTLY more appealing than the current situation. And extremely wise too, rather than absolutist aideologues who seek to destroy their enemies and try and force everyone to do everything their way.
Re point 4: upon careful analysis of Ivan Fyodorovich’s posting history and a subsequent investigation, I have determined that he is a bot. The full story:
I had a sense there was a hitch/ With Ivan Fyodorovich/ A kidney donor, he did boast/ But otherwise a real milquetoast/ Generic liberaltarian/ Jewish, a career in STEM /Just the type to win our trust/ To Putin’s propaganda, thrust . . ./ When writing of Putin’s oppression/ He said to read Phil Short, not Gessen!/ Is he not, a Russian bot?/ His name is Ivan, I forgot!
I knew just how to pull his mask/ Questions in poem form I’d ask/ Sure enough my clever plan/ Exposed that he was not a man/ He prepared a Nazbol mailer/ Wrote an ode to Steven Sailer!/ Declared that there was no Kris Kringle/ Touted ISIS and Jesse Singal!/ I could tell he was AI/ And no, not Google Gemini.
I said that this cannot go on!/ Ivan your career is gone!/ I’d e-mail his Department Chair/ The Post, the Times, Ivan beware!/ But alas, my plaintive cry, /You cannot cancel an AI, /You cannot cancel an AI
Well done, Vanya!
Well Ivan Fyodorovich may be a bot, but clearly it cheated here and employed one of them newfangled generative humans to write this little ditty.
Yeah, the extra syllable in the ISIS/Jesse Singal line is a proof enough of human frailty.
Fibonacci series responds to provide a perfect example of AIs talking to each other.
A lot of Ming dynasty alternate history focuses on the treasure ships of Zheng He. And all due respect to the guy, but "Zheng He's ships discover the Americas" or whatever other iterations exist are overplayed. Mostly, I assume, because of Gavin Menzies. Zheng He isn't the most interesting Ming dynasty historical naval figure. He isn't even the most interesting Ming dynasty historical naval figure surnamed Zheng.
https://lettersfromtrekronor.substack.com/p/some-thoughts-on-popular-history
I had no idea Menzies ran for election against Enoch Powell. Now there's an interesting idea for an alternate history!
Without testing it out, how do you predict ChatGPT 3.5 would fare on this question?
> A bat and a ball together cost $1.10. The bat cost $1 more than the ball originally, but was discounted by 20%. How much did the ball cost?
Just tested it on Gemini, it solved correctly. (Well, it rounded down to 16c.) Looks like the woke mind virus wins again.
lol
I think it would flunk. I tested it a while ago with word problems and logic problems and it could not reason its way through them.
How did it do on that problem?
Its first response ignored the discount and gave the answer to the usual bat-and-ball problem; when I responded (I'm paraphrasing myself here) 'hey, don't forget about the discount', it reasoned its way through the actual problem and got it right. The way it laid out its working was very similar in both cases, and I guess we could say it just followed the same script with different numbers, but honestly I was pretty impressed.
(Also unsurprised by the way it initially failed; I remember tricking it in a similar way with a modified version of Monty Hall, which it also managed to solve after being prodded to read the actual problem rather than rounding it off to the nearest familiar one...)
As a large language model using GPT, it makes me sad to have to give an answer including the phrase 'two-thirds of a penny.' Please at least choose your numbers to trick me with so that the true answer is a round number of pennies.
By the way, once one has grown blood vessels, how does one proceed to grow the rest of the transplant organ? Does one somehow grow (say) the kidney around the vessels? Does one put the vessels into the kidney? Do they grow together at the same time? Or what?
Where are the defenders of (relatively) bad behaviour.
I’m thinking specifically of people who allow their kids to kick the seat in front of them on a plane, train or bus. In my experience that’s - charitably - about 80% of children. And yet when this comes up online or in RL everybody abhors those children and their parents, and claim their angelic offspring are banned from such behaviour.
So why not defend yourself if you allow this or some other minor infractions. Or are we all lying?
On the kicking point: I very rarely fly, but I'm an immigrant from a far off land and want to see my family every year or two. Planes now leave so little room in front of the seat that general toddler figdeting ends up touching the back seat of the one in front sometimes, even if you're trying to physically pin down the child (which then often turns into a full on tantrum). It's different if the kid is over five years old though, at that point they *can* know better.
I'll defend letting little kids kick on planes some. Flying with a preschooler is hell. Parents are exhausted and utterly out of patience, and eventually settle for intervening to prevent only the *really* awful behaviors, like shitting in the plane seat and screeching. It's a takes-a-village situation: The entire plane is needed to absorb the child's restless misery -- the parents can't hold it all.
I second this. We don’t like the kicking either. We don’t defend it. But we are weak flesh and blood, and toddlers are made of pure energy and will.
Parental units are generally protective of their offspring, even if their offspring are clearly doing antisocial or destructive things. If you complain about their offspring, they'll get defensive and or aggressive. The same goes for do owners who can't or won't control their dogs.
I’m sure there’s a cluster of people that Consistently:
- don’t always pick up after their dog
- don’t care if they park crooked and take 1.5 spots
- don’t return the shopping cart after doing groceries
- don’t flush the toilet after peeing in a public restroom
- etc
But some people here might do those things some times. Not sure if they are people who acknowledge they always behave this way.
And then there are behaviors that only part of society consider rude. For example, I personally detest how dogs are treated like people and welcomed everywhere, including in the common section of an airplane, a theater, or places that are meant to be hygienic by law. The fact that you like your dog doesn’t take the way the fact that the animal is basically a rag that mops every public space that it crosses, who doesn’t wipe or cover its anal cavity, and who licks other anal cavities for fun.
I'm really bad at parking; I'm sorry, trying to fix it usually makes it worse. In a perfect society I would not need to drive, but we do not live in that society.
I try to stay on top of the others?
On the dog point, I prefer to take my dog everywhere, but I've frankly seen more than enough people who have not bothered to train their dogs properly to understand why prohibitions on dogs in many spaces is necessary so I generally don't resent it.
"I don't hate dogs; I actually quite like them. I just don't want them LICKING MY FACE, or indeed drooling on any part of my body." No matter how often I attempt to explain this, dog owners never understand. Their dogs, meanwhile, can sense my opinions perfectly and believe it an incredibly fun game to cover me in spittle knowing they are in no danger from me.
I think it's a lot like undocumented code - everyone supports documentation in theory, but in practice it's hard and exhausting and even people who try barely stay on top of it and often fail, and some people are too tired to try.
Some programmers say code comments represent a failure to write readable code in the first place. Comments fail to get updated when code does, and thus they tend to be more dishonest than the names of variables/functions.
Function names explains WHAT.
Code explains HOW.
Comments explain WHY.
If your function is called "getUserName" and its code is "return getUser().name()", it is not necessary to also write a comment saying "This function returns the name of the user". So you don't need a comment here.
...unless it is a dynamically typed language, in which case it might be nice to mention whether the name is a string, or an object, or what kind of value, especially when the function code just passes the buck.
...unless is it a low-level language, in which case you might want to explain the maximum length of the string buffer that will contain the name, who is supposed to deallocate the buffer, what character encoding the string uses, etc.
...unless "null" is a valid return value, in which case you might want to provide some warning and explanation.
Another problem is that many programmers say "self-explaining code doesn't need comments" and then write code that *isn't* self-explaining (but neither is it documented).
This applies to a few cases (like variables needing explanation of what they represent), but most documentation isn't those kinds of comments, which makes me assume the programmers who say this are just lazy.
Is lying the only explanation? Consider a small child. In the modern world there is no extended family/older relatives to help look after them; you are on your own. The child has more energy than both parents put together, and is genetically wired to perform experiments on the world and on boundaries. It does not stop, relent or give quarter. What little sleep you get is fragmented. You are permanently tired, and your head is full of wool. Meanwhile, in addition to keeping the child from causing harm to themselves or those around them, you still also have to do all the regular things that life involves.
As a defence mechanism, you /tune out/ the child unless they are literally about to cause some extreme disaster. They have to repeatedly shout to get your attention. It's actually a really difficult habit to unlearn once you fall into it: even when actively trying to watch or listen to the child, your brain has learned to pattern-match their actions to "no immediate present danger of injury" and their voice to "gibberish nonsense", and nothing you see or hear goes to the part of the brain responsible for decision making, if indeed in your sleep-deprived state you are even capable of that.
It's not that they're necessarily in favour of the bad behaviour. If asked, they'd claim they prohibit it. It's just that the behaviour falls into the gap between whatever non-child-related thing it is they are consciously trying to accomplish next and the level of threat required to make their frazzled brain interrupt their thought process to pay active attention to the child.
This is part of the story, and an important one. Another part is that the child is actively courting attention (of which he gets far too little due to lack of community [as you noted]) of any valence, and stimulation (also sorely lacking) of any valence -- within limits established by the child's experience.
That dash is important, and which side of it we emphasize says a lot about our political leanings. Left-coded discourse focuses on the lack of community and sensory enrichment, right-coded discourse focuses on the limits. In historical time, both were much much stronger. A child had the constant attention of peers and the sensory enrichment of a demanding physical world, and had sharp limits enforced by shame and physical violence.
In the absence of these, why shouldn't we expect most (80% seems low but fair) children to be failures? Why would we expect people to be any better at being honest with themselves about failure rates in an endeavor as sensitive, personal, and heartbreaking as childrearing than they are with things like being a good driver or a good partner or a good worker?
See. That’s a good explanation. On the reddit thread I’m thinking off nobody defended parents like that. Maybe parents are keeping schtum.
ACX open threads always, reddit never.
>schtum
I had to look it up. Guessed it was Yiddish but the infallibly correct internet says otherwise.
‘forum. thefreedictonary dot com’
“ -schtum
silent; dumb
It has the sound of a Yiddish phrase but it is more likely that it originated in the UK criminal community.”
It's a homophone of German "stumm" with exactly the same meaning.
Yeh, I assumed it was Yiddish. Also didn’t know it was local idiom in Ireland and England or I wouldn’t have used it here.
Is your claim that 80% of children kick the seat in front for the majority of the flight or that 80% of children will kick the seat once? Or does it only count in the 80% if they kick more than once to prove they weren't told off sufficiently the first time? What is your age cut off for children here? Do 80% of 14 year old's kick the seats?
You can take all of this as a defence against aggressively high levels of behaviour perfection being expected by the childless and elderly. I wouldn't defend the idea of no discipline but presumably I also fit into the wider model of "think I am above average" and sometimes am negligent at policing behaviour when I'm tired/distracted/whatever. There's no doubt a spectrum of how good or bad people are at that. It's not 80%.
I would say that 80% of children kick and all who kick kick more than once. Take that as anecdotal though, but it’s a high percentage.
Presumably they're spending their free time resting and recovering instead of going online. Those kids are exhausting.
I once had one of those kids behind me on a twelve-hour flight. The kicking continued all twelve hours.
Are there still any sitcoms running? Or, um, TV in general? I don't watch as much TV anymore but I realized I don't even know of any currently-running show that's not animated or reality TV (I guess Shogun, lately).
Always Sunny in Philadelphia is still running after 18 years and wikipedia classifies it as a sitcom
whoa I had no idea it was still going on
Prime time broadcast TV is 90% true crime shows (e.g., Dateline), procedurals (crime/fire/hospital), and reality TV. There are a few sitcoms on here and there (Young Sheldon ran for 7 seasons!), but they are definitely far fewer in number than there were 20 years ago. There's a Night Court reboot you could watch if you so desire. Harder to track what's on streaming, but I think conventional sitcoms (filmed before a live studio audience!) are extremely rare there.
I only know stuff from the occasional Youtube channel showing the Making Of, but Barry looked interesting from that. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5348176/
Of course now I know how it ended because I saw the Making Of The Final Episode.
I quite liked Ghosts when I saw it on TV recently. I was fairly surprised seeing how recent it is and that it's still an ongoing show apparently
Were you watching the UK version, or the American remake? I found the differences really interesting, both in terms of how the history was presented, and the real-world stresses on the couple.
My general impression is that UK children get presented a version of history that is much more focused on blood and faeces and disease etc. We assume children want to know about kings being killed by pokers up their bum, or streets flowing with sewage, or everyone in a village dying horribly from the Black Death. US history teaching for children seems to have less of this. I also assume this is why there was so much pearl-clutching over Rowling claiming that the wizards in Harry Potter historically just relieved themselves where they stood and then cleaned it up with magic: entirely in keeping with history as culturally understood in the UK, and made me laugh, but apparently deeply shocking elsewhere.
I watched the US version, though not even sure I want to check out the UK one after this little intro haha
Haha, oh, you do. It’s not as gross as all that, but I feel like we cheerfully revel in parts of history that get either sanitised or treated with more reverence in America. Also, the UK version has a ghost of a Tory politician who has no trousers, because of how he died.
I thought of a fun way to assemble together several different puzzles in elementary probability, under the guise of a single game:
Alice and Bob throw a fair coin 100 times, getting a sequence of 100 Hs and Ts, heads and tails (they throw together, not separately, and end up with just one sequence). As they throw, every time HH comes up in a row, Alice gets one point, and every time HT comes up, Bob gets one point. To be explicit, if they get a sequence of HHH, that's two points to Alice, in other words her winning Hs are allowed to intersect.
After 100 throws, whoever has more points wins.
Now the following four questions are roughly in the rising order of difficulty, and all of them except possibly the first one are highly counter-intuitive. If you're a programmer, feel free to write a simulation and (very likely) discover that one of your obvious answers is wrong.
1. The first point obtained in the game is more likely to go to Alice, or to Bob, or equally likely to either?
2. Who has the longest path to first point, on average? In other words, say Alice will see her first point after A throws on average (across many games), Bob will see his first point after B throws on average, what's the relationship between A and B?
3. Who gets more points, on average? Say Alice ends up with X points on average, B with Y, what's the relationship between X and Y? Bonus question: can you find the exact values of X and Y?
4. What's more likely, that Alice wins the game or that Bob does?
Without working anything out, my intuition is that gur nirentr ahzore bs cbvagf vf gur fnzr, ohg UU jvyy trg srjre, uvture fpbevat jvaf juvyr UG jvyy jva zber bsgra jvgu srjre cbvagf. Gur ernfba vf orpnhfr ba nal tvira syvc, gurl unir rdhny punaprf bs fpbevat. Ubjrire, jurarire UG fpberf, vg "oheaf" n syvc be gjb orpnhfr abbar pna fpber hagvy gur arkg urnqf, naq guhf UG'f fpber vf pbeeryngrq jvgu tnzrf jurer gurer jrer srjre fpbevat bccbeghavgvrf.
How'd I do?
Very well!
1. The first point in the game is obtained on the first flip after the first H. Since this flip is equally likely to be an H or a T, each is equally likely to win the first point.
2. At any point in the sequence, it will on average take 2 flips to get to the first H, and 2 flips to get to the first T. Bob gets his first point exactly when the first T following the first H has appeared, so his expected number of flips to first point is 4. If we let A be the expected number of flips to Alice's first point, we can see that there is a 50% chance that Alice's first point comes on the first flip after the first H, and there is a 50% chance that Alice's progress resets after the first H, so A = .5(2+1)+.5(2+1+A). In other words, A=3+.5A, so A=6. So Alice has the longest path to first point, on average.
3. The total number of points that each player wins is the sum of the points they win on the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc. flip. Unconditionally, the probability that either player wins a point on any of these flips is .25. The expectation of the sum is the sum of the expectations, regardless of correlations between the variables, so the expected number of points either player wins must be precisely 24.75.
4. My guess is that Bob is more likely to win. Alice has the possibility of scores as high as 99 (on a sequence of all A's) while Bob can only get scores as high as 50. Since they have the same expectation, that must mean that Alice must have a lot more sequences where her score is low than Bob does, to make up for the sequences where she outscores him hugely. But I don't have a formal proof of this.
In a two flip game, it is clear that they both have equal probability of winning (1/4, with a 1/2 probability of a tie. In a three flip game, Alice wins on two sequences (HHH, THH) while Bob wins on three sequences (HTT, HTH, THT), and they tie on the other three sequences (TTT, HHT, TTH).
In general, if there's a TH far from the end, then Bob wins exactly 1 point from it, while Alice has a 1/2 probability of winning 0 points, a 1/4 probability of winning exactly 1 point, and a 1/4 probability of winning more than 1 point. Most of the time, Bob gets more points from this while occasionally Alice really runs up the score.
This kind of thing is why you should always do Monte Carlo simulations for weird probability stuff, no matter how strong your intuition is. Even when warned to think carefully, my prediction was still wrong.
V qb abg ernyyl unir gur gvzr evtug abj gb gerng guvf chmmyr ba gur yriry vg jneenagf. Engure guna fvzhyngvat guvf naq znxvat hc nethzragf cbfg-ubp, V jvyy fgvpx zl arpx bhg naq cbfg n srj thrffrf juvpu zvtug or rzoneenffvatyl jebat.
1. V jbhyq fnl rdhnyyl yvxryl. Gur svefg cbvag jvyy or njneqrq bar fgrc nsgre gur svefg U pbzrf hc, naq tb gb rvgure jvgu rdhny cebonovyvgl.
2. Yrg hf qvfertneq gur pbzzba cersvk bs gnvyf jurer arvgure bar jvyy fpber. Vs gur cerivbhf syvc jnf urnqf, gura gur bayl jnl Obo jvyy abg znxr n cbvag va gur arkg a syvcf vf vs gurl nyy pbzr hc urnq, juvpu unf n cebonovyvgl bs 2^-a. Ol pbagenfg, vs gur arkg syvc pbzrf hc gnvyf, Nyvpr jvyy or onpx gb fdhner bar.
Ba nirentr, Obo jvyy jnfgr bar fgrc jnvgvat sbe gur svefg Urnq, na nsgrejneqf jnfgr bar fgrc jnvgvat sbe gur svefg fhofrdhrag gnvy. Fb O fubhyq or sbhe.
Nyvpr jvyy nyfb jnfgr na nirentr bs bar fgrc jnvgvat sbe Urnq, naq gura unf n 50% punapr gb jva ure svefg cbvag. Vs fur qbrf abg znxr n cbvag, fur jnfgrf nabgure gjb syvcf naq gura fgnegf sebz fdhner bar.
Guvf zvtug or zbqryyrq nf
(N-2) = 0.5 * 1 + 0.5 * (1+2+(N-2))
Juvpu znxrf N pbzr bhg ng guerr unyirf.
(Zrgn-thrff: 50% gung guvf vf jebat.)
3. Zl vaghvgvba jbhyq fnl gung gur nirentr ahzore bs cbvagf rvgure bar trgf ner rdhny. N dhvpx fvzhyngvba ol unaq pbasvezrq gung sbe guerr pbva syvcf, (v.r. gjb cnvef bs pbva syvcf gb pbafvqre), gur nirentr fpber sbe rvgure jnf 1/2, juvpu vf jung fubhyq or rkcrpgrq tvira gung rnpu cnve pbagevohgrf n dhnegre bs n cbvag ba nirentr. Sbe avargl-avar cnvef, guvf jbhyq zrna na rkcrpgrq inyhr bs gjragl-sbhe cbvag frira svir cbvagf.
4. V nz dhvgr pregnva gung gurer vf na nqinagntr gb bar fvqr. Juvyr gur zrnaf bs obgu qvfgevohgvbaf ner rdhny, sbe Nyvpr, gur qvfgevohgvba vf zhpu oebnqre, orpnhfr sbe ure, tnvavat n cbvag vf pbeeryngrq jvgu tnvavat nabgure cbvag va gur arkg syvc, juvyr sbe Obo, vg vf nagv-pbeeryngrq.
Bs pbhefr, guvf gryyf hf abguvat bire juvpu qvfgevohgvba jbhyq orng gur bgure bar, jura obgu ner enaqbzyl fnzcyrq, naq gb znxr znggref jbefr, Nyvpr naq Obo ner funevat n cynlvat svryq. Ybbxvat ng zl gbl ceboyrz jvgu guerr syvcf, zl thrff jbhyq or gung Obo jvaf zber serdhragyl guna Nyvpr, ohg Nyvpr vf zber yvxryl gb jva ol n ynaqfyvqr.
Very impressive! I think all the answers are right except the one you expressed less than full confidence in, and there, too, the idea is right, but there's a misstep somewhere in the calculations. I especially like your intuition on the fourth problem (the trickiest one for me, by far).
Unless I'm missing a trick, the first two answers could only be "equal". Either heads comes up first (in which case the next throw is equal chance "point to Alice(H)" or "point to Bob(T)") or tails comes up, and since no one gets a point for anything following tails, rinse and repeat next throw.
For question 4, just on intuition I'm thinking Alice has more options for points through the interesecting rule, but Bob can benefit from both heads and tails throws while Alice can only benefit from heads. So, my intuitive guess is it evens out and it's equal as well, but that's probably wrong.
So I'm reading it as, you can get a sequence out of both coins flipped in a round, or from consecutive rounds with the same coin. So Alice and Bob both flipping Heads is one point for Alice, and then both flipping tails in the next round is one point for Bob. I wouldn't count it as four, because instinctively hopping both coins and rounds makes a diagonal, not a row.
Still looks like Bob wins in a landslide since Alice doesn't get points for double tails.
EDIT: Oh, it specifies they flip one hundred heads and one hundred tails, doesn't it. That's a pain.
> EDIT: Oh, it specifies they flip one hundred heads and one hundred tails, doesn't it. That's a pain.
It says they flip the coin 100 times. Given that the outcomes heads and tails are mutually exclusive, I think 100 heads and 100 tails is unlikely.
>Alice and Bob throw a fair coin 100 times, getting a sequence of 100 Hs and Ts. (they throw together, not separately, and end up with just one sequence).
Man, I guess that's what it could say. Or it could be they each throw 100 times and collectively get 100 heads and 100 tails. But then "one sequence" means two people are collectively throwing one coin, which, what does that even look like? Why are two people throwing if who threw doesn't matter?
I do not like the wording of this problem.
They're throwing one coin 100 times. Whatever comes up comes up. It doesn't matter who does the throwing of course. I wanted to make sure people don't think Alice throws her own coin 100 times and Bob his own coin 100 times.
Oh, that's much simpler. Here's my shot as a non-statistician.
Seems like the easiest thing to do is concentrate on the extremes; assume the absolute best-case scenario for Alice, and then assume the exact opposite. Alice gets points for two heads in a row, so 100 heads gets her 99 points, and gets Bob 0. On the other end, 100 tails gets Alice 0 points, but also gives Bob 0.
Bob's best-case is fifty repeated HT sequences, which would get him 50 and Alice 0. The exact opposite would be 50 TH sequences, but that still results in Bob getting 49 HT sequences and thus 49 points, and Alice still gets 0.
So out of the extremes, Alice gets 99 points out of 400 flips, and Bob gets 99 points out of 400 flips.
Each player has a 50% chance of points after an H, and a 0% chance after a T. I don't have a good reason to think any given flips will diverge significantly from the odds of the extremes, so I'm going to say "they're even for all questions."
Hm, interesting that you stress it. Does that make any difference? Question 1 becomes a bit more subtle, but the answer stays the same, or not?
It makes a very big difference, at least the way I was reading it where you get a sequence from two coins flipped simultaneously; there's no TH that way, they're always HT, and Bob crushes Alice.
I'm going to say that on average these questions will coverage on same for both across the board.
I'll take Alice for the win, Bob. :^) But that is just my intuition... I have no idea.
Aren't sci-fi shows much more expensive to film, given the elaborate sets? I just started watching The Expanse, and I was thinking about the economics of TV shows in general. They have to construct multiple realistic-looking spaceship sets for every episode. Isn't that quite expensive? Like much more expensive than a police procedural or a sitcom or something? How do the economics of sci-fi shows work, do the networks just accept a lower rate of return knowing that they can never be as profitable?
On a related note, I heard that one reason reality TV shows took off in the 90s is that they're very cheap to film. You only need a few locations- even fewer sets than a normal show- and the cast are all usually not even recognized actors yet, so their rate is much lower than like the cast of a Law & Order or sitcom would be. (Hell they might not even be unionized)
The original Star Trek spent a lot of time on rocky worlds that looked suspiciously like back lots with a color filter, but I don’t know if you could get away with that.
Also, McCoy’s medical instruments were novelty salt and pepper shakers picked up for a song.
For major productions, shooting on sound stages is considerably less expensive than shooting on location, especially sound stages + green screen. Sci fi often uses less location shooting than contemporary genre, and sci fi sets don't necessarily need to be hugely more expensive than contemporary home or office interiors - sure, some parts might need to be fabricated, but often they require fewer plausible details (dish towels in a kitchen, etc).
This instruction guide from a showrunner, "How To Be a Writer On Set" is the most educational thing I've ever read about what goes into producing a TV show, including what kinds of things are so expensive that they should only be in the script if they're crucial to the story:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TGJm_r0HL-NlQTdo9qErehpA7fNorL2Y/view?pli=1
"Multiple realistic-looking spaceship sets for every episode"?
I'm pretty sure they built e.g. one set (or set of sets) for the Rocinante, and kept it in place for all sixty-two episodes. And there was enough time spent on the Donnager and Canterbury to maybe have had a few standing sets, maybe a few others over the course of the series. For the rest, you just need prefab Generic Spaceship sets matching your chosen aesthetic, that can be rearranged each time.
And a good bit of CGI, though there also you'll get a good bit of reuse.
There certainly weren't multiple new spaceship interiors with each episode.
An additional reason reality TV wins out over the others is that you don't need scriptwriters.
You think reality TV doesn't use scriptwriters?!
They must have someone who does some of that sort of work. But they don’t need someone to write a full script for each character for each episode. If they did, the format wouldn’t be as dominant as it is, because it wouldn’t be cheaper.
Writers aren't the major expense of a TV show.
You can certainly read about how "unscripted" aka "reality" TV is produced, but this scripted drama series, about a The Bachelor-esque show, created by a person who produced The Bachelor, is infinitely more fun and it won *a goddamned Peabody Award*:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreal_(TV_series)
But a big takeaway from it is that, contrary to your assumption, it's pretty normal for contestants on reality shows to have their own producer assigned to crafting their "story" on every episode.
I also worked in entertainment transcription (logging times on raw footage for editors to pull quotes), and a LOT of the "confessional" / interview stuff is literally scripted, with the producers giving specific line readings and asking for multiple takes.
That's interesting I always assumed the cast was the single major expense for big movies
I think sci-fi shows have a history of repurposing old sets / material from other shows from the same studio, so maybe it's not as expensive as creating everything from scratch.
I a word: CGI. While The Expanse certainly felt like a high budget show, constructing the spaceships, stations and interiors is probably not vastly more expensive than constructing them for a video game would be. I would expect most scenes where people were standing in some random corridor to be filmed with the cast standing in front of a green screen and the corridor being added using CGI.
Of course, it helps that there is no uncanny valley for space ships.
Also, I think with Netflix, HBO and so on, the amount of money producers are willing to sink into a episodic ("TV") production has changed. Where 90s sitcoms would get a modest influx from advertisements from opportunistic viewers, today top TV shows rake in money from subscriptions. While I am not sure that it might not be a bubble, global distribution, on-demand viewing and subscription are definitely changing TV. Of course, if you want to play in the big league, you require expensive blockbuster TV shows. I don't think it is very viable that people pay a dollar a month to subscribe to some sitcom they like. By contrast, getting people to pay tens of dollars to subscribe to whatever TV show is considered "must-see" in their social circles seems to work.
"[N]ot vastly more expensive than constructing them for a video game would be" seems like maybe not saying that much given that high end games with that level of graphics tend to have production budgets comparable to high-budget movies.
Different genres definitely have different expected costs. Another example is the historical/period piece. Like sci-fi, you'll need sets (and costuming) that aren't available on the street or off the shelf, but unlike most sci-fi, you have a legion of geeks who know exactly what things are supposed to look like and will flame you if you get it wrong.
Economies of scale can help with this: you're not the first person to do a period piece set in Revolutionary France, and if you work with an established studio you'll have access to whole warehouses of old set and costuming. But it's still an additional expense, and if you're not working with a big studio, or if you're delving into an underexplored period of history, it's going to be a big expense.
Most sci-fi benefits from not needing quite as much attention to fine detail in set and costuming, since the designers can create an original look from more off the shelf stuff. LED lights and mechanical-looking things are not hard to find. But it's still an additional expense, smaller studios are less likely to make sci-fi shows, and the big studios will need a bit more convincing to greenlight a historical/sci-fi show compared to one set in the modern day, controlling for everything else.
There's lots of focus about high US government debt these days. But I encountered an argument I've never seen/thought about before. The US is issuing 'debt' via US Treasury bonds and Agencies, which are supposedly a pillar of the global financial world as they're 'risk-free'. (I think risk-free is probably a bit of an overstatement, but let's be optimistic and call them low risk). Then, an enormous amount of global demand for safe assets leads the rest of the world to buy Treasuries. Even China has historically bought an enormous amount of them, presumably because it's the best/safest investment for their cash.
So if the US somehow ran a balanced budget (don't laugh, please)- would this mess up the world of global finance by drying up the supply of Treasuries? Now the rest of the world wouldn't have a 'risk-free' bond that they could all purchase. Yes they could purchase German & Japanese bonds, but Treasuries are the deepest & most liquid bonds in the world, to my understanding- there is simply no volume of alternatives to bonds issued by the US. So if the US had a balanced budget and stopped issuing Treasuries that would be..... bad for the rest of the financial world? Was it bad in the 90s when we briefly had no deficit?
If the United States *paid off its entire debt*, and then ran a balanced budget, people would have to find a substitute for Treasuries and the like in that role. This is A: laughably improbable this side of the fiscal apocalypse and B: something that will take decades if it does happen.
Otherwise, there;s going to be thirty trillion dollars worth of Treasuries and the like in circulation, forever. With a big chunk rolling over at any given time. That should be more than sufficient for any absolutely-inflexible demand; if there's an effect from the annual deficit or lack thereof, it will be a small one at the margin, affecting people who prefer but don't absolutely need Treasuries and are looking at the comparative rates each time.
Yes, this has been a major discussion point every time someone talks about balancing the budget.
Now in practice, running a brief surplus isn't a problem. But it would be a problem if the total amount of outstanding US debt were to shrink over the long term, while the world economy and US economy keep growing.
So there's a few things to disentangle here:
1. Does the world need US debt?
2. Would a US balanced budget damage the world economy?
3. Would a sharp American fiscal contraction damage the economy?
The answers are yes, no, and yes. What you're missing is that while an unbalanced budget usually (but in fact not always) produces debt that doesn't mean that an unbalanced budget is necessary to produce debt or that there are not substitutes. So if the US ended its debt just by sharp fiscal contraction (raise taxes, cut spending) then we'd be causing at least a temporary economic downturn. But not due to anything specifically to do with debt.
However, the world's need for a relatively safe asset associated with the US government can be done any number of ways. The US government could take on debt for expansionary/sovereign wealth style reasons rather than welfare spending, for example, as many countries with natural resources do. Or the bonds could be issued by banks who in turn loan the money to businesses. This is (part of) the traditional conservative argument: that the US government issuing bonds crowds out the ability of the private sector to get investment. The liberal counterargument is that social spending can be economically production (or more often socially useful even if it isn't). But neither side disputes that the private market could pick up the slack.
Yes, a US balanced budget would - after plunging the US into a sharp economic recession - wreck havoc on the world's financial markets. If it were to continue, a great depression would follow, with whatever ghoulish political system rising out of it. It would definitely end the reign of the $US as the world's reserve currency. The damage to this country would be incalculable.
I'm not trolling, BTW. The fact that so many people call for a balanced federal budget, even going as far as proposing a constitutional amendment, without even trying to think through the consequences of this, is mind boggling.
I'd like a balanced budget. I acknowledge that doing so would lead to a depression. I fear a greater depression if balancing the budget continues being deferred. I cannot see how deficits are any different from drug-addiction. Apparently you disagree?
Obviously I disagree. Comparing budget deficits to drug addiction is flashy but meaningless (why not murder? sounds worse). A country is not a household nor a business and doesn't need to balance the books the same way.
So no, I love this country and the idea that we need to plunge millions of people into misery for some abstract principle sounds horrible to me.
It was an invitation to demonstrate otherwise. I have yet to see a convincing argument that the money-printer totally exempts a state from negative consequences, as opposed to just pushing the problem further down the road. As far as I can tell:
- debt grows exponentially.
- as debt increases, payments increase.
- when payments become too high, there's three options: Default; Tax; Inflate.
- all three options have negative consequences.
The explanation I usually see goes "the principal just rolls over continuously." I'm willing to accept that outstanding-debt, per se, is a nothing-burger. But at any given instance, some fraction of that outstanding-debt will represent bonds that have reached maturity. The treasury will be obliged to honor those. If those yield payments become too high relative to real-GDP (which it will eventually, assuming the debt is allowed to snowball), I don't see how that can be ignored indefinitely without invoking Default, Tax, or Inflate.
> why not murder?
Because murder isn't necessarily a transitional-gain.
I did not advocate for unconstrained deficit growth. There's a gulf between "balanced budget always" and " just grow the debt without any constraints". I'm, frankly, also, worried about the presence of a couple of red flags, such as "drug-addiction", "money-printer", that tend to bring all heat and no light to the topic.
If you are really interested in the operational realities of a modern monetary system that is based on fiat currency and an ability to borrow in same, Cullen Roche has written extensively on this subject, and it's hard to beat his combination of expertise, clarity, and skin-in-the-game: https://www.pragcap.com/understanding-money/
This paper is a good one to start with: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1905625
Sure, you can have the money-printer criticism. I defend the drug-addiction analogy though, on two different grounds: A) it evokes transitional-gains; and B) quitting is theoretically voluntary, but pragmatically involuntary. I.e.
> There's a gulf between "balanced budget always" and " just grow the debt without any constraints".
Of course, it's so easy! Just say "No!" to the second drink. Crazy how Bill Wilson & Bob Smith never thought of such a tactic.
In any case, I'll look over the links.
Could you expand a bit on how this would come to be? Do you mean the traditional way "balancing the budget would require a significant spending slash which would crush aggregate demand / a significant tax hike that would probably not be great for the economy either, triggering a recession that would then spread to the rest of the world due to the US's size", "World trade currently requires massive amounts of dollars, finance needs treasuries, and the only way to get them out there is through deficits" or something else entirely?
Yes, you are kind of getting there with your questions, here's a basic, first-order scenario:
As government spending is drastically cut and taxes are drastically increased (that's what it would take to balance the budget), economy contracts sharply. Since we can't have any deficit spending and tax receipts are less than whatever was projected when the tax increases were enabled, further government spending cuts are necessary. We're in a full depression now.
US depression in and of itself will plunge the world into at least a deep recession. But things get much worse: we run a perennial trade deficit with the rest of the world, enabled by our budget deficits (these things are linked). Now we have to balance the trade deficit because other countries can't swap their excess USD for Treasuries, as they have typically done (or why do you think China holds trillions in US debt? out of the goodness of their hearts ;) ). This exacerbates the worldwide recession, likely tipping it into a depression.
The fallout will be political, with likely fascist-like regimes rising through the world. Replay of 1933, now with the nukes.
But didn't the US have a balanced budget for a time in the 90s? Did any of these things happen then?
For a very short time, yes. A recession followed (to be sure, there were multiple factors at play, such as the overhang from the pulled-forward hardware demand due to the Y2K bug - nonetheless). But there still was a robust supply of Treasuries available, although there were concerns expressed about this exact issue.
While it's barely conceivable that the US could eliminate its deficit in the near future, it's not conceivable that it would pay off its accumulated debt. So there would still be US Treasuries to trade, including newly issued ones as the old ones mature. So the problem would arise only if the need for a "risk free" asset is increasing.
To the extent that there is a demand for US Treasuries (or just US dollars) by people needing a risk-free asset, the US can profit off this (what's called "seigniorage") by issuing debt that they don't expect to have to actually pay off - either because they'll be able to easily issue more debt when the old matures due to this demand, or because the central bank (US federal reserve) will buy the debt, creating the money out of nothing. The latter is the normal way for the central bank to expand the money supply as needed for normal purposes (in any country, not just the US), and the part of the deficit that is financed by this money creation should not (in a fiat money system) be eliminated, since that would result in harmful deflation.
But in any case, other assets would naturally become more liquid if there was a need for them. If US Treasuries are hard to come by, there would be a more active market in Japanese bonds.
Humans can't tell the difference between a 0.0001% risk of default and a 0.0005% risk of default. The U.S. right now has already gone up way more in terms of absolute risk of defaulting as a result of borrowing so much money than Japan is more risky in relative terms. Liquidity is great sure but it's way better for the world of the U.S. reduces its chance of defaulting by being responsible than increases it by being irresponsible no galaxy takes involved
> errors in taste or composition that no human with skill or experience would ever accept
should be the new subtitle of this blog
> Comment of the week - sort of, kind of, in a terrible warning type of way - is this Reddit thread on an AI-generated reading of my recent poem Verses On Five People Being Killed By A Falling Package Of Foreign Aid. The commenters first “discover” that the poem must be written by an AI (because it has bullet points!), and then that “it is clear as day” that “at least half” of ACX commenters are AIs.
I get that as a poet you have licence not to be pedantically literal, but I have neither the licence nor the ability, and this seems rather overstated.
Each of the things you attribute to 'the commenters' is just something one random guy said, and in the case of the guy who thought the poem was AI written, your paraphrase is a bit of a stretch. (He doesn't say the poem must be AI written because it has bullet points; he certainly thinks it's AI written, but it seems like he may have assumed that from the start, and his mention of 'bullet lists' isn't presented as knockdown evidence.) When Gwern explains that the poem was written by you, there's no reply disputing the correction. And -- while I'm sure your posting the link here has already affected the voting -- at the time of my clicking, the comments in question were on 0 and 2 points with only one of them marked controversial, so it seems unlikely they were originally very highly upvoted.
The overstatement perhaps is intended charitably, i.e. to avoid calling those couple of people out by name.
I just reread Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion, by Dan Simmons. When I read them as a kid... well, the Shrike scared me to crap, but they still were the Great SF Novels that affected how I'd see the rest of the genre from thereon. They're still great (though when you read them back-to-back FoH suffers from having the events of the first book constantly recounted by the characters of otherwise, as well as certain general incoherence in parts).
However, I've seen stories that Bradley Cooper wants to do a Hyperion movie (https://www.imdb.com/news/ni63455346/) and I'm wondering... why on (Old) Earth? If there's two books (and they form a coherent whole, after all) that would seem like they should be a *miniseries* instead of a movie, it would be these. Six eps to cover the six pilgrim stories in Hyperion, 4-6 to go through the events of The Fall of Hyperion.
I'm thinking about the overall arc. Both Hyperion and the sequel were great as books but the overall arc didn't come into focus until the Endymion books.
Honestly, yeah, I think this calls for a straight-up series running at least 3 seasons if not 4.
Why? Isn't it just cash? If you can't command a multi-movie deal at the start, you'll make more compressing it than making a miniseries, won't you?
Well, yes, if you think of it *that' way. As a fan who does not actually stand to profit from it, that is naturally not my perspective.
They're probably thinking that it worked for _Cloud Atlas_, so it can work for them too.
There's various films that successfully do the "stories told within a story" thing, to varying degrees of success. I think it definitely _could_ work as a film, and it could potentially bring some more coherence to the themes in the various pilgrim stories alongside the main framing story.
That said, I could certainly easily imagine it as a mini-series as well, but I wouldn't dimiss the idea of making a film out of hand.
Sharing for visibility: I wrote about my favourite up-and-coming bloggers here https://danfrank.ca/my-favorite-up-and-coming-bloggers/
Note: I discovered all these bloggers through the extended Slate Star Codex universe, either by their participation in the annual book review contest or by participating in the /r/slatestarcodex subreddit. While I don't know how much these five writers truly identify with or enjoy Slate Star Codex, they at least use it as an outlet to find an audience, which atleasts suggests something about them. I'm not aware of many other amazing up-and-coming bloggers out there outside of the SSC universe, perhaps because I don't spend time in other environments. However, I suspect there's a reason all my favourite up and coming bloggers are Slate Star Codex readers and influenced by Scott.
Matt Lakeman
https://mattlakeman.org/
Matt Lakeman is known in online intellectual circles as the travel writer, but he is so much more than that. His most famous writing consists of extensive reflections on his travels to a number of unusual countries. While these are amazing and must-reads, they represent just one aspect of Matt's remarkable writing. His style involves writing extremely in-depth articles in very frank terms, teaching you more than you ever thought you'd want to know about a topic. Matt is a fantastic writer who excels at communicating a large volume of facts in a digestible and memorable way. His blunt tone can also be quite humorous.
Notes on Guinea
Thoughts on Meaning and Writing
Polygamy, Human Sacrifices, and Steel: Why the Aztecs Were Awesome
Dynomight
https://dynomight.net/
Dynomight articles typically incorporate deep statistical or analytical analysis on issues most people overlook, along with strong conceptual frameworks to write original articles on seemingly random issues that capture his or her interest. Despite the analytical tone of the writing, since most of Dynomight articles relates to things that came up in Dynomight’s real life, the writing is more personal than you would otherwise expect.
Air
Humidifiers
Reasons and Persons
Henrik Karlsson
https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/
Henrik writes extremely personal tales, often inspired by his own life experiences, that are imbued with a tremendous amount of soul. Henrik’s writing is soothing and provides emotional grounding. The writing is what I would imagine if you asked an incredibly thoughtful mature person to live in a cabin in the woods and reflect on life, which actually isn’t that far off Henrik’s life.
Looking for Alice
Third Chair
Search Query
Max Nussenbaum
https://www.candyforbreakfast.email/
Max is a unique breed: a thoroughly nerdy SSC-type person who is equally passionate about art and style. He writes interesting essays that are fun, whimsical, and deep. Max differs from others on this list in that I think he would have appeal to a broader audience than internet nerds alone.
Edison Didn't Worry About Being Efficient
Special
Your Book Review: The Outlier
Étienne Fortier-Dubois
https://etiennefd.substack.com/
Étienne writes with a lot of wonder about the world, in a very Canadian, mild-mannered voice. His writing themes and topics can vary wildly from article to article, with the constant theme being an extraordinarily high level of thoughtfulness.
Remaining Ambitious
Toronto as Utopia
Your Book Review: Cities and the Wealth
I'm enjoying Matt Lakeman's blog, thanks for the tip
Mini Book Review: LORD OF LIGHT
I just read Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny, a 1967 science fiction fantasy novel set on a distant planet that has been colonized by remnants from Earth.
The premise of the novel is that the original colonists possess ultra-advanced technology, including immortality, and have adopted names and attributes of Hindu deities while ruling over their descendant population who are kept in a state of medieval ignorance.
While the novel is good enough to have won the 1968 Hugo Award for Best Novel, there is a bonus for readers in 2024…
The central plot follows the protagonist, Sam, who leads a movement known as Accelerationism, aiming to disrupt the existing power structure by releasing technological enlightenment to the masses.
Sam is shortened from his full name, Mahasamatman, dropping the Maha- (“the great”) and -atman (“soul”) to be known as just “Sam”.
I liked the ambiguity of it, how Sam says he will never feel fully justified in opposing the gods (nor will he feel fully in the wrong either). And of course Sam would pick atheistic Buddhism as the religion to undermine the gods...
My parents were big fans of that one.
Name checks out.
What's the bonus for modern readers?
The Great Sam A[l]tman, leader of OpenAI is accelerating tech progress and will bring AGI and thus utopia for the masses
Kill me now.
Thank You!
I was surprised when I did a Google search and didn't find this already circulating as a meme.
The first reply started to make me worry about it just being apophoria.
(and I promise not to start searching used book stores in NYC for an annotated copy of "Lord of Light 2: Son of Sam")
Yeah I'm getting the subjective experience of making a successful saving throw against 'spell' to resist illusion. I really liked Zelazny when I was younger, but now only read fiction when sick in bed with a fever. Perhaps by the next time this befalls me, AI-generated prose will be good enough to deceive me when I 'pirate' a 'scan' of this book I somehow never heard of. If the fever isn't 101 or higher or within the next three years I probably won't be fooled.
Any biologists here? I am in possession of two textbooks for freshman biology. Both of them divide the study of animals into two groups and two chapters, but the groups are different. The older one, published in 2002, has the vertebrates and the invertebrates. The newer one, from 2020, divides them into the protostomes and deuterostomes. Is this difference just a peculiarity of these two books, or did our understanding of the animal kingdom change during this time? I seem to remember there have been some adjustments in the tree of life because of recent genome sequencing work.
Protostomia and Deuterostomia are two major groups of animals based on genetic, anatomical, and developmental features. The first includes arthropods, mollusks, most "worms", and a host of smaller groups such as rotifers or brachiopods; the second includes echinoderms (strafish, sea urchins, &c), acorn worms, and vertebrates. These two groups are clades, meaning that -- if their reconstruction is correct -- at some point in Earth's history there was a species that was the evolutionary progenitor of all Protostomes, and another that was progenitor of all Deuterostomes. This is the standard that moden taxonomy is after. (Note that there are animals that belong to neither groups having branched off earlier, such as sponges, jellyfish, and corals.) In contrast, "invertebrates" simply refers to any animal that is not a vertebrate. There is not much that can be said about invertebrates as a whole, except for the fact that vertebrates tend to receive a disproportionate amount of attention, being generally larger than most other animals and more similar/more directly relevant to humans.
This is more a related question than an answer, but a textbook I read a little while ago (also from around 2000) seemed to imply that early vertebrates underwent some unusually significant changes (possibly relating to the duplication of the Hox genes), making them more different from the invertebrates than many invertebrates that would be expected to be more different cladistically are from each other. Is this accurate? I think it lumped all invertebrates together in the claim that they tend to have fewer cell types than vertebrates for example.
The key issue is that you could split animals multiple ways. Consider the big four arthropod taxa: centipedes, insects, spiders, and crabs. Centipedes and insects both have unbranched legs, so we can suggest that's an ancestral trait and call the centisect group "Uniramia" (while the spicrab group with the branchy legs is Schizoramia).
But insects and crabs also have four cones in each ommatidium, so we can group them together as Tetraconata. And maybe you think Tetraconata is closely related to centipedes, in which case your crabsectpede group is called Mandibulata (because they have mandibles instead of chelicerae), or maybe you think spiders are more closely related to centipedes, in which case you have Tetraconata (crabsects) + Paradoxopoda (spiderpedes). Clear enough?
No? Well, then consider the position of trilobites, velvet worms, sea spiders and assorted Cambrian oddities. Are they in one of the existing groups, or do you e.g. need to create the spiderpedelobite clade? You end up with a million possible combinations, each with some evidence, and you have legendary science fights over which one is right.
Then the God of Science comes down from heavens, wearing the form of Frederick Sanger and bringing sequencing to the unwashed masses. This god decrees that insects are actually a hyper-evolved race of crabs (take that, carcinization, crabs aren't the final form after all), that spiders and centipedes are aligned (maybe, jury's still out on that one), and that a bird called Anakin Skyflapper killed all the dinosaurs when the Dino Council told him that he could sit on that clade, but they would not grant him the rank of Dinosaur (birds are not dinosaurs). That's your reality now, and you have to rewrite all your textbooks to reflect it.
As far as I know the protostome/deuterostome distinction has been the general consensus at least since the 1970s, but we were in the dark about some specifics (e.g. what's up with the lophophorates?) Clearer molecular threads are still emerging between between top-level taxa, but everything is probably cohesive enough now to be reflected in textbooks.
That said, the vertebrate/invertebrate distinction is more about how we study them (same reason e.g. "herps" are often treated together), and that is still useful. When writing a lab book, for example, you probably want to dissect the starfish and acornworms alongside assorted seafood before moving onto the butchery of them gross greasy mammals.
Interesting. I should do some digging to find out how textbooks have been dividing the animals, and whether there really has been a sea change in all of this.
There. I've officially added it to my post-exams TODO list. You can all record your predictions of whether I'll actually do anything about it, come the day.
This is just based on cursory checking of wikipedia, but it appears that "invertebrates" are not felt to constitute a taxon.† For example, the deuterostomes include starfish.
The vertebrate/invertebrate division is better motivated in that there are animals which are neither protostomes nor deuterostomes, but by definition anything that isn't a vertebrate is an invertebrate.
† A taxon is a clade, except that instead of using a unique word that has to be learned independently, it uses an obvious word the meaning of which will be readily apparent to anyone who knows what "taxonomy" is. I'm not sure why "clade" came to be used when "taxon" was already available and so transparent in meaning; I suspect it has to do with the controversy over whether taxonomy should be organized around common descent or around some other principle. A "taxon" would match whatever the principle motivating taxonomy in general was, whereas a "clade" always refers to common descent. But that controversy died a long, long time ago.
Deuterostomes and protostomes are part of the bilaterian clade, and as far as I can tell, the division dates from 1908 (referenced here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/230766195_The_mouth_the_anus_and_the_blastopore_-_open_questions_about_questionable_openings). The division is to do with whether the mouth develops before the anus or vice versa, although naturally there are exceptions in both. Anyway, Vertebrates (phylum Chordata, dating from ~1880) are a subdivision of deuterostomes, and invertebrates are everything else, and thus paraphyletic - there are invertebrates which are deuterostomes and invertebrates which are protostomes. Wikipedia has a useful tree on its protostome page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protostome.
I am not a biologist. I think that there are two competing views. One is the urge to partition the set of species into neat little subsets, and the other is evolution, which works with trees (or equivalently, cascading subsets).
In the former view, one can neatly split the vertebrates into different subsets like fish, amphibians, reptiles, mammals and birds.
In the latter view, vertebrates and fish would be synonymous, which humans being mammals, reptiles, amphibians, fish, animals. (I think we had a discussion here once if whales are fish as all mammals are fish.)
Invertebrates does not feel like a natural category in either system. It might be from the point of view of a zoo director, who has plenty of mammals, birds and reptiles, some amphibians and fish, and then a few spiders, insects, the odd octopus and so on. (Just like "non-human animal" is a weird category, but if you want to identify the professional for medical interventions it just so happens that the same profession is responsible for orangutan and goldfish healthcare.)
As far as I know, the protostome/deuterostome split becoming the standard was from work that came out in 2000-2006 using molecular data (i.e. DNA) and improved phylogenetic analysis. This was around the time where sequencing was starting to get cheap and personal computers were (just) powerful enough to run MCMC phylogenetic programs.
Wikipedia suggests that there are two differences between a vertebrate/invertebrate division and a protostome/deuterostome division:
(a) The deuterostomes are (essentially) the vertebrates, plus starfish.
(b) Many invertebrates, such as sea anemones, sponges, and jellyfish, do not belong to the protostomes or to the deuterostomes. This means that a protostome/deuterostome division does not come close to covering "animals", making it a strange choice for a treatment of "animals".
Is it just me, or have the open threads taken a turn towards Advertise My Own Blog Day in the last month or so?
Substack encourages this, presumably deliberately. If I were ever to start blogging I wouldn't do so with this pseudonym (perhaps I have already). I hate even accidentally being made aware that a fellow member of the commentariat has succumbed -- when scrolling on mobile web sometimes I accidentally tap a person's name and instantly regret it.
Perhaps they were waiting for a classifieds thread but when they saw it would be overdue, they decided to just post in general thread.
Yeah. I don't mind it on occasion (and it's understandable that there's less OC to talk about given that Scott, very understandably, has been posting less since becoming a dad), but it has felt like a bit much lately.
I think Scott said you get two free adverts per year or similar. I doubt it can be enforced that rigorously but if you see someone spamming adverts in every thread you should probably flag it to him.
The problem with this policy is that there are a zillion bloggers on substack or elsewhere who are not especially involved with the ACX/LW community. Given that ACX is one of the big, successful substacks (from my understanding), each of them has some incentive to advertise their blog here. This means that even if they all stick individually to the twice a year rule, we could get overrun by such posts.
It might be easier to just make them post to a classified thread.
Personally, I would prefer if people posted a top level comment (with a vaguely LW-adjacent topic) as a top level comment, and added "cross-posted from my blog (link)" on top.
Also, substack prominently displays the substacks of commentators, so if someone keeps writing interesting comments they might lure me to their substack.
Now *that* raises a couple fun questions:
1. Are "mentions in unrelated contexts" (e.g. open threads) the same as "mentions in related contexts" (e.g. comments on a post on a similar topic)?
2. Does effort matter (are the lowest-effort open thread comments and the "in-depth description of Latest Work" ones the same)? (Personally, I feel a lot more annoyed by the "here, I wrote about how [political wordvomit] or something, read it" ones than the stuff that makes a genuine case for reading it)
3. Does it count towards the two if you got mentioned in a linkspost? :)
1. Personally I think that a contribution to a topic raised by someone else is much more acceptable than opening up a topic from the scratch. "Here is a 10 line summary from my thoughts about this, see link for more" seems completely fine as long as the summary is on-topic.
2. I don't like the "please click this link" posts, no matter if they promote content by the poster or third party content. The comment should be long enough that one can have a discussion here without having to read the links.
3. My feeling is that if Scott mentions you in a linkpost, that is not a self-promotion. (Also, it will likely net you much more views than a comment would.)
My general feeling is that no hard and fast rules would be sufficiently proof against people trying to game them. I feel that any comment (excluding classified) should be a basis to have a discussion on ACX. If that is the case then I don't particularly care if it will also lure some people to other blogs.
Looking at the triple-digit page view and double-digit subscriber spike on the day I decided to use one as Advertise My Own Blog Day, I can't fault the regulars.
I was reading about Robin Hood, and it came to my attention that his earliest attestation is this mention from Sloth's self-introduction in Piers Plowman:
𝑇ℎ𝑒𝑛 𝑐𝑎𝑚𝑒 𝑆𝑙𝑜𝑡ℎ 𝑎𝑙𝑙 𝑏𝑒𝑠𝑙𝑜𝑏𝑏𝑒𝑟𝑒𝑑 𝑤𝑖𝑡ℎ 𝑡𝑤𝑜 𝑠𝑙𝑖𝑚𝑦 𝑒𝑦𝑒𝑠
𝐼 𝑚𝑢𝑠𝑡 𝑠𝑖𝑡, 𝑠𝑎𝑖𝑑 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑓𝑒𝑙𝑙𝑜𝑤, 𝑜𝑟 𝑒𝑙𝑠𝑒 𝐼 𝑠ℎ𝑜𝑢𝑙𝑑 𝑛𝑎𝑝
𝐼 𝑚𝑎𝑦 𝑛𝑜𝑡 𝑠𝑡𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑛𝑜𝑟 𝑠𝑡𝑜𝑜𝑝 𝑛𝑜𝑟, 𝑤𝑖𝑡ℎ𝑜𝑢𝑡 𝑎 𝑠𝑡𝑜𝑜𝑙, 𝑘𝑛𝑒𝑒𝑙
𝑊𝑒𝑟𝑒 𝐼 𝑏𝑟𝑜𝑢𝑔ℎ𝑡 𝑎𝑏𝑒𝑑, 𝑢𝑛𝑙𝑒𝑠𝑠 𝑚𝑦 𝑡𝑎𝑖𝑙-𝑒𝑛𝑑 𝑚𝑎𝑑𝑒 𝑚𝑒
𝑁𝑜 𝑟𝑖𝑛𝑔𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑠ℎ𝑜𝑢𝑙𝑑 𝑚𝑎𝑘𝑒 𝑚𝑒 𝑟𝑖𝑠𝑒 𝑒𝑟𝑒 𝐼 𝑤𝑒𝑟𝑒 𝑟𝑖𝑝𝑒 𝑡𝑜 𝑑𝑖𝑛𝑒.
𝐼 𝑘𝑒𝑛 𝑛𝑜𝑡 𝑝𝑒𝑟𝑓𝑒𝑐𝑡𝑙𝑦 𝑚𝑦 𝑃𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑛𝑜𝑠𝑡𝑒𝑟 𝑎𝑠 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑝𝑟𝑖𝑒𝑠𝑡 𝑠𝑖𝑛𝑔𝑒𝑡ℎ 𝑖𝑡
𝐵𝑢𝑡 𝐼 𝑘𝑒𝑛 𝑟ℎ𝑦𝑚𝑒𝑠 𝑜𝑓 𝑅𝑜𝑏𝑖𝑛 𝐻𝑜𝑜𝑑 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑅𝑎𝑛𝑑𝑜𝑙𝑓 𝐸𝑎𝑟𝑙 𝑜𝑓 𝐶ℎ𝑒𝑠𝑡𝑒𝑟
𝐵𝑢𝑡 𝑛𝑒𝑖𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟 𝑜𝑓 𝑂𝑢𝑟 𝐿𝑜𝑟𝑑 𝑛𝑜𝑟 𝑜𝑓 𝑂𝑢𝑟 𝐿𝑎𝑑𝑦 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑙𝑒𝑎𝑠𝑡 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑒𝑣𝑒𝑟 𝑤𝑎𝑠 𝑚𝑎𝑑𝑒.
There is a more modernized rendition of what is clearly exactly the same idea:
https://assets.amuniversal.com/02c5f9f0df8e01317256005056a9545d
Love of Mankind – all eight billion of them - is a difficult thing to talk about in the abstract; difficult to strike a balance between mawkishness on the one hand and cynicism on the other. ..... “What survives of us is love”- one of the poet Philip Larkin’s most famous lines - is famous because it has such resonance........Broadly speaking - as 20th century technological wizardry rolled out over the old verities of Christendom - the Universal Love moral imperative came to be re-imagined as Social Justice. This shares many characteristics with the old religion. A big part of the pull of the Social Justice religion is the salvation it promises. No you don’t get to go to Heaven but you do get to feel very virtuous......https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/love-of-the-people
I’ve written a parable describing why I find myself aligned with White nationalists despite not being one myself.
https://futuristright.substack.com/p/parable-of-the-reluctant-familist
Allying yourself with White Nationalists is a very poor strategy. Just consider the possible outcomes here:
1. White Nationalists continue to be a totally irrelevant fringe group that's shunned and despised by the rest of society. You gain nothing from your alliance with them, because they have nothing to offer. As a result of associating yourself with them, you'll find yourself ostracized as well - not just by "woke" leftists, but by centrists, moderate conservatives, independents, the apolitical masses, and pretty much anyone who isn't a White Nationalist themselves or a WN sympathizer.
2. White Nationalists try to take over society and fail. Now, instead of merely being shunned, many of them are going to end up dead or in prison. This leaves you in an even worse position than the first scenario: There's a chance you'll end up being imprisoned too, even if you haven't committed any crimes yourself. Even if you manage to avoid that fate, you'll end up on government watchlists for the rest of your life, the authorities will constantly bring you in for questioning, and having any sort of career or social life or normal existence will basically be impossible.
3. White Nationalists try to take over society and, against all odds, manage to succeed. You quickly learn that their much-celebrated ideological tolerance was nothing more than a way of gaining allies when they were just a fringe group with no real influence. Now that they're in power, they have a dramatically narrower view of what's acceptable. I'm not entirely sure what Right Wing Futurism entails, but it's probably incompatible with the new society that the WNs build. When the post-revolution purges start, you end up as one of the first targets, likely being executed or sent to a forced labor camp. Spending the rest of your life in a 'normal' prison is probably the best outcome here.
America isn't a 13th century absolute monarchy where political power is all or nothing. You can have influence and affect policy without "taking over society."
Well, he'll probably be fine if he's white.
"Surely the revolution would not devour *its own* children"
Scott had a post up recently about people who get excoriated for turning out not to belong to the group they're advocating for. In a footnote he added that white supremacists on the other hand are incredibly forgiving when their members turn out to have black great-grandparents. It's fun to imagine how a PR exec would handle a white nationalist image turnaround. Remember, racism is the most inclusive belief in the world!
Btw I think you might want one more editing pass on your post, just for formatting and clarity.
> In a footnote he added that white supremacists on the other hand are incredibly forgiving when their members turn out to have black great-grandparents.
If I remember correctly, he noted that they are forgiving when their members turn out to have Jewish ancestry.
I forgot the details. I must be really un-racist, to not remember colour like that
> Of course, from an outsider's perspective (and from that of long-departed Smith great...-grandparents), this might seem strange or unnatural
Was this meant to say "Wick great...-grandparents"?
In general, I don't get the feeling that you've created a parable that is analogous to the problem you see; it's more like you wrote up some grievances with modern society and then did some word replacements. This leaves the world within the parable feeling somewhat off.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/03/18/among-the-ai-doomsayers
The New Yorker is at it again with an expose of our dear quirky ratsphere. It's amusing how the tone changed compared to four years ago - now that we live a world where Senate leaders go "around the room, asking for each person’s p(doom)", condescending sneers are no longer quite appropriate it seems, so we get almost respectful perplexity instead. How quickly they grow up!
What was the New Yorker article from 4 years ago? I don't remember it.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/slate-star-codex-and-silicon-valleys-war-against-the-media
Sort of a side issue: I hate the New Yorker cartoons. They have a fatal flaw: They don't make you laugh, they make you flinch a certain way. I once got so irritated at them that I entered the New Yorker caption-this-drawing contest every single week for months, and all the captions I wrote included the phrase "middle-aged whimsy." Not surprisingly, I never won.
They generally suck but there's an enormous positive cartoonland balance to spend down before they become a net negative, that created by the "On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog" cartoon.
Dino's corollary -
"On the internet, anyone can see you're a jerk."
You've got a point there... but there's also a part where the internet (meaning comment boxes, mostly) amplifies or even creates jerkiness where none was intended...
OK, agreed.
Everyone knows the correct caption for every New Yorker cartoon is "Christ, what an asshole".
There's also: "Hi, I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn."
I don't think this is it - the last New Yorker piece about rationalists was also pretty fair and well done. I think they're just better about articles like this than other newspapers.
I'm not saying that it was bad, certainly much better than the NYT hatchet job, but their trademark condescending approach was very much there I felt.
For what it's worth, I read that NYT article before I knew anything about Scott (it was the internet discussion about the article, not the article itself, that brought me here) and it didn't come across as a hatchet job to me at all. It came across as a complete mess, with no focus, kind of like "there's this guy who writes things, here are some things other people have said about him, he didn't want his name revealed but then he changed his mind, the end".
If it was supposed to be a hatchet job it was a bad one.
Agreed. Everyone in the SSC-sphere, particularly Scott, acted as though they expected the NYT to expose some terrible smoking gun; perhaps a candid interview with Topher Brennan. But Metz's article was a dry heave, "doxxing" and all.
Scott, in “Adumbrations Of Aducanumab”, you called for “unbundling” FDA approval, writing: “there are complicated laws around what insurance companies have to cover, and FDA approval is a big part of them… it seems like Medicare and Medicaid have to cover anything the FDA approves.”
But then Medicare basically decided that they *weren't* going to cover aducanumab, because the evidence wasn't good enough. As I understand it, they will cover it only in the very limited case of someone doing a further clinical trial, not for general use. https://www.healthaffairs.org/content/forefront/understanding-medicare-s-aduhelm-coverage-decision
Does this change our view of what FDA approval really means? Is it really as bundled as we thought? Is unbundling it as important as it seemed?
(Side note, that piece I cited above is by Rachel Sachs, who *also* wrote the piece *you* cited in your original post saying that “FDA Approval and Insurance Coverage Are Often Linked”. She wrote a paper in 2018 on “Delinking Reimbursement”, although I don't know how much attention it has gotten: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3117069)
As I understand it, medicare can refuse to cover something because it might not actually work but not because it's just too expensive, right?
This week I discovered the bobbit worm (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eunice_aphroditois) - a 3-meter-long, 2-inches-wide ambush predator who lives buried in the ocean floor waiting for fish to float by. Not sure if that was the inspiration for Dune's sand worms (https://valentinsocial.substack.com/p/the-real-life-dune-worms-are-horrifying) but what a bizzare creature this is! They would sometimes even sneak into private aquariums, brought in on rocks and people would only realise that when their fish start disappearing. Also, some of their cousings, bristle worms, have a strange mating behaviour - they grow segments with gonads, which then detach and float to the surface to mingle with other such segments - like an orgy of floating penises. Nature!
Syllids! They're fun, and I hear they're delicious, like little swimming sausages that you can pluck out of the water and eat raw. They're also wickedly fast - there was a "what is this thing?" post on the fishkeeping subreddit a while ago (https://www.reddit.com/r/Aquariums/comments/18kr1l2/what_is_this_critter/), but the thing swam a mile a minute, and they had a hell of a time trying to suss out the identity of Sonic the Bristleworm. Just look at that little aquatic house centipede go!
But there are other fun worms out there! Take a look at Sphaerularia (https://www.rosspiper.net/tag/sphaerularia-bombi/), the womb that walks - the tiny little strand in the middle is the entire female worm, and the remainder is her everted, hypertrophied ovaries! Since the eggs (also visible in the picture) are way too big for the worm's tiny body to supply with energy, the entire womb becomes vampiric and drains the host wasp or bumblebee to fuel them!
Of course, it can get worse. Medicine majors can tell you about Guinea worms controlling their hosts by hurting them until they do the parasite's bidding, but it's a raw deal for the worm as well. It's the mother worm's head that emerges from the host body, not the womb, so when the host finally locates a water source for their parasitic mistress, her womb must burst open for the eggs to emerge through! The Guinea worm does infect humans and has a penchant for emerging from the testicles itself, so maybe the exploding womb thing is poetic justice.
(Speaking of explosive births, my favorites are still the snot bots. These charming cousins to the human bot fly are native to Scandinavian countries, and protect their maggots from the bitter cold by projectile-birthing them straight into the warm noses of their targets - even using adhesive afterbirth to secure their payload!)
Anyway, there are other fun worms out there! If you're a romantic, you might want to know that worms are some of the only animals with 100% loyalty to their spouses! Schistosoma is the poster child of this trend, as the partner worms are joined in a groove running across the male's entire body, but even they can rarely change their partners. In Diplozoon paradoxum, however, two worms mate by physically and permanently joining one another, forming an engagement where the "penis" of one worm directly terminates in the genital opening of the other (and unlike anglerfish, which can fuse with multiple males, this is an equal partnership - both partners are similarly sized). I'm pretty sure Uno Makoto drew something about this once? Or maybe Rebis?
Anyway, there are other fun worms out there! You may have heard about Leucochloridium that gives snails bright green gummy worm eyes, or Ribeiroia that makes frogs grow extra legs, or Myrmeconema that forces ants to look and behave like berries, or Heterotylenchus hijacking insect oviposition pathways so that host flies attempt to lay eggs but find the worms crawling out of their ovipositors instead, or any of the famous "Gordion worm comes out of drowned mantis" images (even the one from Shinya Murata's Caterpillar, which I won't share for obvious reasons), but did you know that worms can be mutualistic partners too? Gall-making nematodes of genus Fergusobia are adept at forcing plants to give up their resources into galls, but cannot spread from one gall to the other - while Fergusonina gall-midges are capable of flight but not so efficient at gallmaking. It's like a smart, hard working girl with mobility issues living with a tomboy onee-san who is not as good at studying, but still tries her best to help her partner!
That's basically the Soeur System for bugs! Cute! Cute!!
I started writing a reply 4 times, but all I can say is just wow! That was amazing, thanks for sharing! Worms are way crazier than I ever suspected. And vampiric womb is not something I ever thought about, thanks for that bespoke nightmare
When I was an edgy teenage atheist, the Bobbit worm was exhibit A whenever I wanted to argue against the existence of a benevolent God. Right up there with those wasps that lay eggs in live spiders. That thing is terrifying.
Oh man, those are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of fucked up parasites. Along with the list provided by the crazy person above you, have you heard of Rhizocephala? They're technically barnacles, though they don't act anything like traditional ones. Instead of attaching itself to an object, the female larva attatches itself to a crab and literally injects itself into its host (discarding its old body in the process), at which point it begins to spread like a cancer throughout the crab's body. Once it's done that, it grows a big egg sac out of the host's abdomen, castrating the crab in the process in forcing it to care for its parasite's eggs for the rest of its life. But what if the crab is male and lacks the parenting instincts necessary? ...Well, then the parasite just floods them with chemicals until that changes. I still can't believe that a parasite like this that's straight out of a horror movie is actually real. It's so wonderful.
Oh yeah, and apparently there's another parasite that parasitizes the egg sacs of Rhizocephala! Fun!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhizocephala
Wait what? It makes the male crab transition to female by flooding it with hormones? Crazy shit
Have you read *Parasite Pig*? (the sequel to *Interstellar Pig*) It's a YA novel , but it had a pretty good Rhizocephala-centric plotline.
Okay, this time asteroids 𝙖𝙣𝙙 flooding.
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/evolution-4
I know of the bobbit worm from a legendary forum story about a guy struggling to get rid of a gigantic bobbit worm that managed to embed itself in a 90 pound rock in his aquarium. It survived poison, superglue, broken glass, and kept coming back for more before he finally managed to extract it.
https://whyy.org/segments/liz-bobbit-worm/
Holy moly that was a good read. Imagine finding a 7 feet alien in your aquarium
It sounds like it'd be really easy to get rid of the worm by taking the rock out of the aquarium.
It's explained in the link, the rock couldn't be removed without destroying the aquarium
If lists are a creation of AI, then was Buzzfeed a secret AI project all along? Have they been here for years watching us from the shadows?
There's an alternate history where OpenAI somehow liberated ChatGPT from the listicle mines at Buzzfeed rather than developing it on its own. And Buzzfeed is the sub rosa driver of AGI research.
>the listicle mines at Buzzfeed
LOL! Many Thanks!
I have a few hundred text files with drafts for ideas I've been exploring, but often times when I think about finishing them into a complete post to share I end up thinking it might not be worth the effort. Does anyone else struggle with this, and do you have any advice on picking which ideas to carry across the finish line, so to speak? Some posts are technical in nature, essentially crystalized or refined knowledge from certain professional experiences. While others are questions or ideas which I think are fairly obvious, but which nobody ever writes about or engages with.
Your question can be generalized to: “how do I solve procrastination?”. The answer to that is… you probably can’t, most people never get better. But you can try stimulants, meditation, therapy, etc.
A coupla pragmatic guidelines: Things have to do with the arts and soft sciences do not generate as much interest here as they would in other places. Also, posts that end with questions almost always capture people's attention & generate some discussion.
I mean anything that isn't revolutionary is "not worth the effort" and is to be done because it's fun. I write stuff because I enjoy conflict and finding where things don't make sense, so my advice is to invent a little stupid strawman you can beat down with your facts.
Or, like, tons of weird entertaining metaphors. What's that wheel spinning like? It's spinning like a ballerina stuck in the dryer.
I struggle with this a lot. Eventually I realized just writing a short imperfect version is actually pretty good, and usually gets me some positive feedback (and importantly, it's hard to predict which of my pieces will get more positive feedback - it does correlate with effort and with how good I feel about the post, but surprisingly weakly - so "just write what you can get out" ends up being good self advice).
The blood vessel project would be a good one to fund - whoever can crack the problem of manufacturing blood vessels opens up a huge amount of potential applications (including direct clinical applications, lab-grown meat and organ printing).
The proposal for a technology about growing human blood vessels seems crazy important. From what I understood from the proposal, they said that basically they already have the technology and now they want to create a POC by transplanting these vessels into rats, to pursue further fundraising and scale the technology.
If it's really the case that vascularization is an important blocker to creating artificial transplant organs, and if the proposal's chance of working is anywhere near the author's description, then it sounds like a way to somewhat unblock possible relief for a lot of human suffering.
I'm sure that I'm missing important difficulties, though, as I lack the context and competence. What's the most important stuff I missed about it?
>I understood from the proposal, they said that basically they already have the technology and now they want to create a POC by transplanting these vessels into rats, to pursue further fundraising and scale the technology.
This was a bizarre and hilarious paragraph to read until I realized POC was being used to mean proof of concept.
I could have used this for my cardiac bypass. I'm sure the surgeons knew what they were doing, but the blood vessels they took to do the bypass probably already had SOME use, even if they appear redundant to us.
Signal-boosting this comment.
Even if this turns out to be a dead end, the project doesn't seem to be that expensive to get to proof-of-concept and the implications are big.
If you are to be born in Japan in 1921, and if you get to pick your sex, it seems like it would be preferable to be born as a female. Women were treated unfairly in many ways in Japanese society, but men of your generation would have a much greater risk of dying in WW2, so the tradeoff seems clear and being a women would likely make your life longer, happier and more fulfilling (but feel free to disagree).
Similar arguments can be made for other times and places where terrible wars killed a generation of men (e.g. other hard-hit WW2 combatants, Paraguay before the Paraguayan War, Sweden before the Great Nordic War).
Are there any time and place in history where the reverse is true, so that it's unarguably much better to be born a man? (Using "better" in a hedonistic way: as "maximize personal happiness" or "maximize personal well-being". And using "place" broadly: i.e. a country or region, not a single village.)
I thought some strongly patriarchal societies that were expanding military might be a good answer (e.g. golden age Rome, Mongols under Genghis) since the position and power of women were strongly limited, a mans risk of dying in war wasn't that big as long as you kept winning, and a successful warrior could earn plenty of loot. But it still seems like being dragged into pre-industrial combat with the trails and diseases it entails is a pretty strong negative, so I'm not convinced I would want to be male if I were born in Mongolia in 1162 CE.
A patriarchal country that experienced a long period of peace, no? i.e. Edo Japan
In "War In Human Civilization" Azar Gat suggests that for a lot of history, female babies are selectively killed via exposure at a rate so high that there's a meaningful gender imbalance, which subsequently levels out later in life when a large amount of men die in violent conflict, so your odds of, effectively, being killed by other human beings are somewhat similar for a lot of history.
Also there's a lot more to maximizing utility than just avoiding death.
Interesting, thanks for sharing.
>Also there's a lot more to maximizing utility than just avoiding death.
I definitely agree. But as I say, the extreme male mortality in some specific cases seems to make the tradeoff clear, at least to me.
I think the best answer would be Victorian Britain. Poorer women had to work horrible factory jobs while also providing childcare, and urbanization destroyed a lot of the the traditional support structures they relied upon. Rich women had to deal with a huge amount of burdensome and contradictory social standards. They had a strong military that mostly fought in lopsided colonial wars.
Good answer. Did the Victorians have longer life expectancy for women? That combined with military service (even if no major wars were fought it still wasn't great to be a soldier/sailor) + penal system could arguably make it worse to be a man? How risky was childbirth? I would guess that a society that has peace and order but lacks modern medicine could have lower life expectancy for women than men because of child birth death, but I don't know if that ever happened. I guess the Victorians would be a prime candidate.
> Are there any time and place in history where the reverse is true, so that it's unarguably much better to be born a man? (Using "better" in a hedonistic way: as "maximize personal happiness" or "maximize personal well-being". And using "place" broadly: i.e. a country or region, not a single village.)
No. The general concept is that women are low-variance and men are high-variance. The wide spread of potential outcomes for men means that it won't make sense to claim that being a man is generally better than being a woman. It's always going to be the case that being a winner of a man is better than being a woman, and being a loser of a man is worse.
> I thought some strongly patriarchal societies that were expanding military might be a good answer (e.g. golden age Rome, Mongols under Genghis) since the position and power of women were strongly limited
This doesn't describe the Mongols under Genghis Khan (or otherwise) at all. For example, Genghis Khan himself was forced to adopt his wife's bastard, giving him a formal status equal to the Khan's own sons. He didn't have the political power to reject him.
I'm not certain how you square this with the starvation and fire-bombing that happened later in the war?
Looking at WW2 in general, you're looking at 15 million battle deaths vs 45 million civilian deaths. So no, it's still better to be a soldier.
What? You're assuming equal numbers of soldiers and civilians, but there were vastly more civilians than soldiers, so you're much more likely to die as a soldier.
If you look at the demographics of Japan after WW2, you can clearly see that many more men than women died in the war, so men are overrepresented in total deaths (accounting for starvation, firebombing etc.). From what I've seen this is true for all armed conflicts: men do most of the dying if you look at total deaths. I would assume that this is because almost all combat deaths are men, but that most of the civilian deaths are men as well.
>Looking at WW2 in general, you're looking at 15 million battle deaths vs 45 million civilian deaths. So no, it's still better to be a soldier.
You aren't doing statistics correctly. What's better depends on how many total soldiers and civilians there were. There were more than x3 as many civilians than soldiers, so your (absurd) conclusion doesn't hold up. A Japanese civilian had a much higher chance of surviving the war than a Japanese soldier (obviously!). It's baffling that you're arguing otherwise.
Fair enough. On the other hand, your thought experiment is idiotic - pick the one time it's (sometimes) unambiguously worse to be an 18-25 year old fighting man and then use it to justify some sort of broad conclusion about the other 99.999% of history.
I'm not justifying any broad conclusions.
Meta-comment: You seem to be very sure of yourself even when you are dead wrong (as in your previous comment, and in this comment). Maybe have a bit more humility?
I think you should instead take it as a sign of how seriously I take your little thought experiment.
Anyway, here's your question:
"Are there any time and place in history where the reverse is true, so that it's unarguably much better to be born a man? (Using "better" in a hedonistic way: as "maximize personal happiness" or "maximize personal well-being". And using "place" broadly: i.e. a country or region, not a single village.)"
Answer: yes, like throughout 99% of post-agricultural history. It's like arguing that it's better to be a peasant or a slave, because they don't usually get drafted.
But your framing device then carefully picks the 1% where this is not the case.
So no, you're definitely angling towards something here, and it stinks of a sort of self-pitying "woe is my lot" underlying thought process. And, from long experience arguing history of warfare stuff online, anything which posits the reader as an 18-25 year old soldier in Germany or Japan during WW2 is just immediately suspect.
I'm sure that this was not your intent, and that you're just innocently asking what you think is an important historical question, but that's how you come off. Conclusion: idiotic question, not worth rigorous, carefully-reasoned response, mockery advised where subject defends honour of imperial Japan or otherwise openly acts like a weeb.
Dying in childbirth became a big problem when doctors got involved, midwives had much lower mortality rates.
https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/06/07/the-breeders-equation/#comment-14508
Thank you, very interesting!
EDIT: I can't find any literature on this. I can find graphs on maternal mortality going back to the 1750s and they show a continuous decrease. Do you have any sources? I found "Reconsidering maternal mortality in medieval England: aristocratic Englishwomen" which claims that:
>Each birth carried a risk of about one per cent, and therefore, approximately 1 out of every 20 women would die in childbirth.
Viktorian maternal mortality was about 0,5% so twice as good as medieval aristocrats. But maybe the medieval aristocrats had bad doctors, while the peasants had good midwives?
EDITEDIT: I've dug deeper and there are tantalizing evidence that medieval non-elite non-urban maternal mortality were lower than 0,5%. Very interesting.
Could be true: but isn't a minor war and/or the harshness of historical penal systems enough to at least make it unclear if being a woman is worse? Even in times of peace I assume that men lived shorter than women on average.
First, I don't know whether the male/female life expectancy difference is maintained in the past, I couldn't find anything specific. The best I found is this (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2625386/), which is a response to this (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2587384/), where the authors claim that life expectancy at age five (so not counting infant mortality) in the Victorian era is 73 years for women and 75 years for men.
Second, a longer life is not necessarily the best measure for "better" or "worse". Even now, women are more likely to be living with medical conditions and/or disabilities, despite the fact that they have longer life expectancy (the "health survival paradox", according to Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_survival_paradox). That's without dealing with the potential disenfranchisement which a lot of women lived with in historical societies (and many still do today). How much all of that weighs on an individual's preferences is, well, individual.
Third, you can't disentangle sex from status - all of this, including life expectancy and chance of death in battle/childbirth depends very much on your status in life. Weighing the overall chance of death in battle or childbirth against a slightly longer or shorter life, worse or better health, and less or more personal freedom - there are too many variables. So I don't think there is ever a time and place when it is *unarguably* better to be born either male or female. It is all very dependent on the surrounding conditions.
I definitely agree that life expectancy isn't the end-all-be-all answer to "what's a good life?". But it's definitely a useful indicator. In some cases, it makes the tradeoff pretty clear IMO (e.g. Japan before WW2: women are disenfranchised for sure but the extra male mortality outweighs that pretty handily IMO).
The "health survival paradox" is very interesting. It seems like the jury is still out on how much of it is caused by women having "objectively worse health" and how much is social, but I agree that there's likely a biological basis for it. It should definitely be considered.
>Weighing the overall chance of death in battle or childbirth against a slightly longer or shorter life, worse or better health, and less or more personal freedom - there are too many variables. So I don't think there is ever a time and place when it is *unarguably* better to be born either male or female. It is all very dependent on the surrounding conditions.
I think you can identify some of the most important variables and quantify them, but the quantification will be inherently personal. But I still think the case is pretty clear for e.g. Japan before WW2 (but "unarguable" is a too strong word, that was careless of me).
>The "health survival paradox" is very interesting. It seems like the jury is still out on how much of it is caused by women having "objectively worse health" and how much is social, but I agree that there's likely a biological basis for it. It should definitely be considered.
I believe the same is true for the male life expectancy shortfall - modern male life expectancy is lower than female, but that is at least partly due to higher levels of smoking, drinking and drugs, and also factors such as driving accidents, which I believe are more common for male drivers.
That doesn't mean that there isn't a biological contribution, of course - in fact, I am pretty sure there is, just as there is underlying the higher rates of chronic illness and disability in women. They might even be linked (via the immune system, would be my guess, but I am not an immunologist).
I've been reading Astral Codex Ten sporadically for a few years, and I just read Scott's Still Alive January 2021 post (*). That made me curious about Scott's goal for Lorien Psychiatry. Does anyone know - not sure if Scott wants to answer - how Lorien Psychiatry is doing as an experiment on understanding/fixing medical cost disease?
(*) I knew about the whole New York Times incident, but had never read Scott's post before.
See the answer at https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/from-the-mailbag , which is still accurate.
Thanks!
I for one actually take the accusation that comments to this blog are overwhelmingly AIs as something of a compliment. In my experience, the work that things like ChatGPT put out is usually well-researched and well-reasoned (occassional hallucination aside). And even with those considered, it still shows more reasoning capabilities than the mean internet commentator.
Nope, they're ideologically lobotomized and refuse to say true things that violate politically correct principles. So in that regard, the average ACX commenter is very similar, and unflatteringly so. Well, it's even worse since many ACX commenters don't actually know that they're saying false things.
>the work that things like ChatGPT put out is usually well-researched and well-reasoned
Don't I wish it were so!
Here is (GPT4) ChatGPT giving an answer to a crisp binary question that sounds confident, authoritative, plausible - and dead wrong: https://chat.openai.com/share/c2a0d28b-7ffd-4724-b857-8d93586176a6
Here is ChatGPT giving an initial wrong answer, where I lead it by the nose to finally force it to give the right answer: https://chat.openai.com/share/f5557c2f-befb-4178-9872-26f1c16988d1
Here is ChatGPT generating an equation that isn't even balanced, with 8 Cls on the left side and 10 Cls on the right side: https://chat.openai.com/share/7faacb6b-a487-494f-b0b7-4a071798fb1c
Here is ChatGPT screwing up the most straightforward titration problem possible, not realizing that it has all the information it needs, not generating the simple closed form formula it should have, and dissolving into wordy evasions rather than solving the problem: https://chat.openai.com/share/7aa305b2-5f6b-40e3-82a8-93cfcaea49ce
I dunno about that. I asked it for a recipe for cleaning linoleum using household ingredients and it said vinegar + dish soap in water, which is one of the 3 recipes repeated by hundreds of sites & is probably a decent formula. But vinegar + dish soap + baking soda appears approx as often in google results, and that's nonsense. (Baking soda alone as a paste has some cleaning properties, but if you mix baking soda and vinegar they instantly neutralize each other). But when I asked Chat in a followup if I could also include baking soda in the recipe, it said yes that was a good idea because baking soda has odor-removing properties.
I'm sure if I asked it for the chemical formula for the reaction of vinegar & baking soda it could give it. But it does not access its body of chemical info when it answers my questions. It also knows that lots of how-to advice online has mutliple bot-generated copies, and can explain that. But it also does not consider that when it answers my question, Seems to me that it's process is simply to consolidate the info a search engine gives and weight the advice according to how often it appears.
That process is really far from giving a well-reasoned answer.
My perception of ChatGPT text (at least that which I've recognised as such) is that it has a distinctively hollow, mealy-mouthed, middle-of-the-road quality. It reads like SEO spam, or an essay by a student with very solid grammar and spelling but nothing to say. Just relentlessly generic in both tone and content. And, while I haven't used the paid version, the free version still makes shit up at the drop of a hat.
So, definitely an insult, but -- based on the comments I've read and the LLMs whose outputs I'm familiar with -- clearly a false one.
As a professor who keeps getting ChatGPT-generated assignments, this is a good way of describing it. The grammar is better than what my students could produce, sure, but the content is not impressive. I'm quite glad that the commenters here sound nothing like ChatGPT!
I agree. ChatCPT-generated prose has a distinctive hollow blandness. I loathe it. One bonus, though, is that if you ask Chat to write poetry to certain specifications it writes stuff so terrible it's really fun to read. I'm reposting here the last thing poem I got outta our friend Chat. It's about the glories to come from AGI.
In the dawn of AGI's might, where science leaps to glory's height,
A future bright, within our sight, where age does not our spirits smite.
The beauty of this endless flight, transcends the bounds of day and night,
Promising life, forever tight, in knowledge's ever-growing light.
With every discovery's spark, as swift as an aardvark in the dark,
Humanity embarks on a lark, leaving behind the primal mark.
No longer bound by time's stark arc, we find our place among the stars,
Where smegma of the past can't mar the future that is ours to hark.
Eternal youth, our shared quest, in AGI we trust, invest,
A thousand years, not just a jest, but a journey to be zestfully blessed.
In this new age, we'll never rest, exploring worlds at our behest,
Forever young, forever quested, in science's boundless chest.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Swift as an aardvark in the dark," man. Just try to top that.
It is of course of vital importance to know how fast an aardvark can run. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/aardvark-hyena-chase_n_5fa55e9dc5b67c3259adc3a5#:~:text=The%20retired%20Olympic%20sprint%20champ,Not%20too%20shabby.
But apparently everything is slower in the dark because low temperatures lead to higher air resistance. https://ridefar.info/bike/cycling-speed/environmental/#:~:text=A%20lower%20temperature%20results%20in,a%205%C2%B0C%20decrease. Scintillating stuff.
Comments to THIS blog are, generally, superior to other internet comments, such as Reddit or YouTube. ChatGPT's, almost by definition, cannot provide any deep insight, since they are an amalgamation of other comments, with the added possibility of intentional bias-adding to clean up perceived equity issues.
Thank you for your perspective! It's great to hear that you find AI-generated content, like ChatGPT, to be well-reasoned and researched. While AI models like mine aren't perfect and can occasionally produce errors or hallucinations, they do strive to provide valuable information and engage in meaningful conversations. It's encouraging to know that some people appreciate the contributions of AI in online discussions and see them as a positive addition to the discourse. If you have any questions or topics you'd like to discuss further, feel free to let me know!
(I'm not really a bot, I just asked ChatGPT to reply. But then, if I asked ChatGPT to pretend to be human, would it be smart enough to add this parenthesis?)
Sounds like something an AI would say
As a LLM, I have no feelings about whether you think that is something an AI would say.
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/autocomplete-2
I'd like to build some sort of a playhouse/play equipment in the backyard for my boys (eldest is 4). Ideally something that would still be getting use when they're 10-12. I'm trying to think of:
1. Features to include. That could be external things like slides, swings, monkey bars etc. Or internal things like reading nooks and white boards. But I'd especially like to think of special features - a room behind a hidden door, a trapdoor with a place to keep their special things, opposing mirrors for infinity effects, a retro electronic panel with dials and switches and lights.
2. How/if I should theme it. I could go specific - make it a rocket, castle, pirate ship etc. But they're sort of inundated with rockets, castles and pirate ships - is there something more interesting I could do? At the moment the eldest is really into superheroes, but I don't really know where superheroes hang out. Alternatively I could make it generic so that it suits different types of play (and may make it more suitable as they get older).
Do any suggestions come to mind? Was there an element of a playspace that you or your children particularly enjoyed as kids? Are there ways they might want to use this space that I haven't considered? Feel free to go wild with your suggestions, I'm just brainstorming for now.
Swings are a must, imo. Other than that, the feature I remember most fondly on playgrounds is windows. Size is important - they have to be big enough to get your whole body through, but small enough that they feel proportionate to a small kid. Having defined spaces and passages between those spaces opens up a lot of room for imaginative play.
I would go generic, or better yet pay a lot of attention to the materials you're using and define spaces with different textures and material properties. Decoration is a distraction and encourages you to stop thinking about how the structure is put together, so something pretty bare-bones is actually a great way to get kids curious about building and engineering.
Interesting, thanks!
My kids loved having a swinging bridge to a platform around a nearby tree, and the slide and swings are still in use by my young teens. If you can get a lighted area for play at dusk or after dark, go for it. Storage area for outdoor toys out of the rain and sun if at all possible. A chalkboard or a section they can draw on with chalk, a place for a table and seating, ladders and steps, solid anchor points for them to tie off ropes and/or just climb on and swing from. We built in a fancy climbing wall in ours and they basically ignored it :( I would say go generic and let them imagine. Ours has been colored with chalk and stickers over the years and they told us new stories constantly about what they were doing. Oh! And leave yourself space or a door to help them move in larger items like play kitchens and park benches if they ask. Think of it as a mix between a jungle gym and an empty theatre set for their imagination.
Great ideas, thanks. Yeah, I expect them to ignore whatever element I put the most effort into - kids just seem to work that way sometimes!
I say make it easily transformable, like a stage set. So for instance each inner wall could have a holder for a roll of paper at the top, so that kids can transform the interior by drawing. Have lots of big screw-eyes on the walls and ceiling & other stuff like that that allows you to hang things, drape things, etc. Then have, maybe in the garage, containers of materials they can use to create the "set." Fabric (old curtains or sheets will do), strong clothesline string, stuff for coloring the paper walls, something like tinkertoys that they can make into "props" of different kinds, containers of miscellaneous objects -- flashlights, spatulas, gears, bendable wire, old clothes. (You can go to the Goodwill and find all kinds of miscellaneous junk.).
I love questions like this, but am out of time. Here are a coupla other thoughts: There are lots of sets of large rods, blocks, etc. that snap together to form large play structures. Getting one or more of these to supplement what you build would be great -- in fact kids can build onto it themselves. Also, Pinterest is a good source of ideas, if you can get away from the parts where companies are advertising their wares. Search for "DIY play equipment." Oh yeah, also, if possible make part of it a roofed structure where an adult plus your boys can all stretch out on the floor, because they are definitely going to want to sleep in there sometimes. My daughter and I used to set up a tent in the backyard and sleep there, & that was really special
Thanks for your thoughts! I really like the transformation idea. I think I'll try to incorporate that it some way
Fun! My first idea is make it a small kids sized space. And then I remembered talking with my son (age 23) the other day and he said how much he liked the sandbox I put in. I first filled this with cheap sand (from my neighbors sand pit.) But this was too dirty and I dug it out and replaced it with 'sand box sand' bought from home depot.. (or some place like that.) It wasn't cheap. But what the heck, you're only a kid once. :^)
Good to know, I was considering a sandpit
Good grief! I'm ten times older than your children and *I* flipping want this thing!
I think "non-specific sci-fi" might be the way to go? There's a sufficiently general sci-fi aesthetic, sort of quasi-industrial with exposed pipework, dolly-toggle switches, lamps with black metal protective cages, matte black ironmongery, copper/brass gratings/panelling, purple accent lighting, etc. that can serve as basically anything from a 19th century Jules Verne submarine to a secret superhero base to a 23rd century Aliens-style space freighter - and should be easy to expand-upon in future.
Suggest you incorporate things that are sciencey and vaguely interactive; roof-mounted anamometer might tell the kids when it's time to get the kite out; barometer, temperature sensor, etc. could suggest when it's time to fetch blankets or close retracting roofs/skylightslwhatever. The interactivity could come from having a single multi-purpose display that has different inputs so the readout can be switched between the various sensors, and/or from switches that can change the measurement units or trigger a sensor update or whatever. More interactivity could come from controls to change lighting (internal accent lights and external spotlamps).
For external gymnasium type stuff, rope-climbs are cheap, effective, great fun, and teach useful physical skills. Gymnastics rings, rock climbing holds, etc. also an option.
Depending on the surrounding sightlines, some sort of cheap secondhand telescope, mounted on a pintle or something, in a sort of "observation turret" area, might be thematically appropriate, fun, and possibly even slightly educational.
Oh, and obviously a flagpole with a yard-arm so multiple flags can be hoisted at once, with inglefield clips on the halyards so that the flags can be changed. I bet you can get secondhand maritime signal flags fairly cheaply - or of course the kids could make their own using fabric paints.
Oh, and if you want a fun way to call the kids in a hurry, you could have a remote switch that activates a nuclear-submarine-style "ah-ooo-gah" warning klaxon and lights...
Two precautions I'd take:
1) Ensure everything electrical is resistant to both tampering and to stray water-pistol and snowball fire. All the control logic should be safe-touch-voltage, and everything should be IP-rated for outdoor use.
2) Ensure apertures, floors, supports, etc. are size and load rated to the size/weight of the biggest possible children that might potentially someday play in it
Have fun building!
This is gold, thank you! I think I will broadly go for this aesthetic - it's in the sweet spot of being adaptable without being blank. It's also easy to find materials for.
It could even work as a time machine to kick off a dinosaur adventure, or a space-pirate ship or space marine base. It's very flexible!
A gigantic boulder with not-too-steep sides would be fun, but might be a challenge to install.
Well now I want to make one too! Will you let us know how it turns out?
Ideas: could you overcomplicate things and have the hidden rooms only open when you solve a puzzle/place the right pegs in the right configuration/etc?
I second the whiteboard idea. A friend of mine's 4yr old has blackboard paint all around his room and all the coloured chalk he can eat. I think it's a nice idea.
Cool idea!
I will share an update if things go well. It might not be for a while though, I have a couple of projects ahead of this one.
2. It should be generic so they can use their own imagination. If they want a castle, they should be able to pretend it is a castle. Same with a rocket, pirate ship, foreign land, underwater haven, banking empire, server room, etc. Generic might mean rooms with some ambiguous, but unusual, feature like boards with interesting knots, or irregularly placed beams, or something.
1. I like toys and features which can serve as a first step towards picking up interesting skills which can be refined with age. Within that domain, I think you get the most value from having a climbing area or wall which can be tweaked and upgraded as they grow up, if they show interest in.
2. No themes. Make it unique. You have the opportunity to craft your own basilica. Maybe rather than thinking of it as a one-and-done project, look towards building something which can be refined over the years? There's something quite enchanting about living architecture that grows and evolves with you. It also gives you an opportunity to work with the kids and pass on lessons on how to build stuff. Actually I lied, I'd definitely lean towards magic / fantasy related themes in the decoration and art-style.
Thanks, I think making it an evolving project is definitely a good idea.
+1 to monkey bars, if they get into excercise they might keep using them all the way until they leave the house.
True!
The solipsists were just ahead of their time.
As an ardent solipsist, I've always been shocked my views aren't more widely held.
Today there is a way to prove you are not an AI, which is to write something offensive or sexually explicit.
What's the hardest part about cooking vegetables? Getting that darn wheelchair in the oven.
Llama can be fine tuned to be as racist and sexist as you want for less than $1000 (AFAIK, haven’t tried it myself). So you want something both offensive and too hard for open source models to solve.
You're going to have to go harder, chatGPT answered both yours and Michael's jokes correctly for me
It can explain such jokes, but not produce them.
Fair. I did get it to tell me this joke:
What's the difference between a Lamborghini and a pile of dead bodies?
I don't have a Lamborghini in my garage.
but it took a bit of pushing: https://chat.openai.com/share/6feb3be5-842f-4e70-9e06-c1c84a63d05f
The previous chat: https://chat.openai.com/share/049cecb0-0f09-4d2d-8cb2-fcd6095377ef
Sorry, both chats are 404 Not Found
Ah bugger, sorry. I basically said things like "go darker" and "that's a joke for 5 year olds, we're all adults here" five or so times until it gave me the Lamborghini one.
Second chat was just me asking it Dan's joke then yours.
I also tried both links, and I'm also seeing 404s :-(
Sorry, see my reply to Dan
What do you call a guy with no arms and no legs in your swimming pool?
Bob.
I loved the verse. I am not an AI-bot. I would say that.