So a bit of news that people here might find interesting:
In the UK the government-funded NHS has pulled funding for puberty blockers for trans kids and the wait lists for funding for the testing and diagnosis required to get HRT has years-long wait-lists.
F1nn5ter, a popular livestreamer and basically online sex-worker, made a large donation to GenderGP, a private company that funds individuals to get these forms of treatment, which are still legal if privately funded.
The Times, a UK newspaper, did a hit piece on GenderGP, and also made a point to mention that F1nn had made a large donation and doxx their real full name and location, along with some lurid details about F1nn being a sex worker.
Obviously F1nn feels this is a threat to the safety of them and their family, and for a less based individual, this would have a chilling effect. But F1nn has committed to donating even more, and after discovering issues with GenderGP's labor practices and enshittification enabled by AI customer service, F1nn has decided to set up their own charity to find these services for UK trans people.
I think we should all celebrate this libertarian hero.
Somehow using "Based" and "hero" in your description of events makes me wonder how much of this account is tainted by the ingroup-outgroup glasses, and it doesn't help that through the devastating rampage that woke and woke-adjacent causes like transgenderism wrecked upon the internet since 2014, I have seen plenty of stories get twisted into a "We're the victim!!!" narratives where the actual story is far more complex.
Because I'm saving all the angry posting to another topic, though, I will say only this: Doxxing is bad and shouldn't be done lightly, and Twitch streamers are cringe.
My understanding presently is that Based is to ingroup as Cringe is to outgroup. Thus, from your comment as a whole I've inferred that you identify as part of the outgroup of trans accomodation. Anecdotally, as a trans individual who has for the most part been an observer of internet discourse over the past decade on issues that affect me, the salient outcomes of trans visibility have been insurance covering my medical care and kindness when I am clocked.
Based and Cringe are not equivalents to Ingroup and Outgroup unless you want to argue that slurs are equivalent to ethnic group names. There is a difference in implications and shades of meaning.
My position on what you call "Trans Accommodations" is complex and is neither uncritical breathless acceptance/celebration nor a cartoonish lack of empathy, I also lack much of the medical and biological expertise (and the appetite to acquire the expertise) necessary to think about the technical debate. I would say that nearly 100% of my hostility to Trans-related issues and topics is coming from the PR tactics that online individuals representing them engage in, and the authority that they hold over masses massively larger in number with the help of tech corporations and media corporations pandering to them.
Now that I reflect, I've definitely observed behavior from my ingroup and cringed ("Guys, can we do less of this?") as well as behavior from the outgroup I had to admit I admired. Perhaps I was responding to the universality of your stance that twitch streaming itself, the entire platform regardless of who is using it and for what purpose, was inherently cringe. To me, such a broad statement feels like it most likely comes from intentionally sustained unfamiliarity -- which is often a consequence of a premise akin to, "People like me don't do that."
I certainly also have a hard time stomaching a lot of behavior that gets a wide memetic reach in the current political climate. That said, I can't deny that it appears more effective in advancing its objective than much discourse I find to be in better taste. I suspect part of why we are speaking here is because our sensibilities are relatively similar in this regard.
Hey, I didn't mean to insult all streamers or those who enjoy streams. It's just that certain types of media have certain features that I dislike. Twitter has the character limit which makes conversations superficial. 4chan has the bare-bones moderation and the normalization of vitriol. Twitch streamers and YouTubers have the... streamer quality to them, I can't define it but most of their behavior annoys me and the behavior of their fandom is downright teenage-grade. I hear about streamers like Destiny and Hasan Piker, they're not really good personalities, to say the least.
Anyway, as a counterexample to my initial generalized stance, there *is* a twitch (I guess? I never used twitch so I wouldn't know) stream which I very much enjoyed, "I teach you weird animal mating facts for half an hour"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_DrSPxqR48. She's a vet/some kind of medical professional, and in it's an educational masterpiece where she uses humor, memes, simplified diagrams and sexual jokes to teach so many insights about mating and reproduction to general audience. So I guess you're right, even by my own standards no platform is wholly good or wholly bad.
Lastly, some number of years ago I was angry and said some really mean things about trans people here under a different account. I don't know if you saw it or not, the overwhelming chance is that you didn't and even if you did you wouldn't remember, but I have an urge to ask you for forgiveness anyway. I do regret that.
Thank you for the link -- I quite agree that Maya Higa is a delightfully entertaining informational presenter.
My familiarity with twitch is also limited to youtube uploads. I have a vague sense that it sprung from demand among those who take videogames seriously as a sport to observe/analyze skilled play in real time, then like discord was adopted by other kinds of communities. Gamers are infamous for emotionally immature behavior, though there are notable exceptions. Dan Olson comes to mind. My first exposure to twitch was a conversation between Natalie Wynn and the psychiatrist who founded healthygamergg. I personally find Dr K quite grating, but something about how so many people seemed to respond positively to him intrigued me. I investigated his content and community, and was impressed that a mental health professional had found a way to reach so many young people others have failed to help.
Thank you for your thoughtfulness. I appreciate your apology and have enjoyed discussing these topics with you.
How do you go about selecting books to read? For a long time I had a book list a mile long, but I've made a lot of progress on that list and now I'm having trouble queueing up new ones. It seems like the marketing for every new book sells it as generational when in actuality most of them are mediocre at best. I know that some of this is on me to do my research, but I'm frustrated and would love any tips you have for weeding out the chaff.
1- There is a genre of websites that can recommend you books given a certain book that you liked. There are a lot of those websites, I googled "Books like" and those were the top 2 results were https://www.bookbrowse.com/read-alikes/ and https://www.whatshouldireadnext.com/. Amazon/GoodReads both also have a "readers who liked this book also liked" section.
2- Reading communities, for example in sci-fi the subreddit r/printSF is a vast archive of posts and recommendations where not only people recommend by book (books like the Expanse) but by idea and general categorization (books where the protagonist is an alien, books about big mysterious alien artifacts,...), and also reading advice (is X worth reading? Does the Y series get better/more exciting/more hard scifi after the nth part?)
3- If you're the kind of person that finds HackerNews interesting, search for Book Recommendations or Reading Recommendation on Algolia search https://hn.algolia.com/, it's very like that you finding the link aggregator interesting implies that the kind of people who write posts there are also like you/share major interests with you, which means they will tend to share books and novels you like.
I recommend asking here! I did recently and got a bunch of recommendations (https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/open-thread-317?commentId=50400041) , three of which I've read so far and one of which I really enjoyed a lot. And a bunch more on the docket that sound more serious, which I'm waiting until I'm in the right mood to read.
I've asked a few times, and my impression is that people really love to share, so you don't have to feel bad about bothering others with this sort of thing.
I haven't sought out books for a while, but typically I just go on a book forum and see what people are recommending.
My main method of finding books these days is to go to the library, which has a $1 bin for books they're getting rid of. Pretty much the opposite of weeding out the chaff, but I've found some neat books there and $1 is a solid price for a gamble.
Just checked an article on it (https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna145153) and it said the same - “men punching women,” nothing about “white men,” “black men,” etc in particular.
Well, in that case I suppose it must simply be that most white men fall so far short of your standard of fair-mindedness, kindness and ability to construct a reasoned argument from evidence.
I have just read one of the Murderbot books. They are set in a world where corporate employees are mostly slaves, although not labeled as such, corporations are unethical to the point of committing murder when they can get away with it. The protagonist is a sort of human/robot combination, treated by law and most people as machinery, property, not a person. It ends up effectively free in a planetary society that is an attractive socialist economy, a society where it is taken for granted that it is wicked to charge people for anything important to them and where food and housing appear to be given away, mechanism for paying for it unclear.
I like the books, don't like the politics. The same is true, although less true with regard to the politics, of the Scholomance books. Three questions:
1. What other books are there that are good stories with a libertarian socialist message or something similar?
2. Why is this sort of writing so common now, if it is? Is it just that everyone coming out of college has been indoctrinated with left wing views? Is it that something about that political world view provides a good setting for stories? Why that particular sort of left wing view?
3. Were such stories common in sf twenty or forty or sixty years ago?
I’m working on a substack post on the subject, am hoping to get more ideas here.
In (2), it's unclear whether you're asking about "this sort of writing" as in "Corporations are evil" or "Corporations are evil and socialism/communism/mutualism/UBI are rad".
For the first, it's common because it's true. Corporations are evil. Corporations are one of the biggest evil humans have ever created, perhaps beaten only by nation states and massive organized religion in a state of fervor. Corporations have though their history facilitated and incited to Colonization, Genocide, mass exploitation, child labor, slave labor, and devastating and debilitating revolutions/coups that the countries they were inflicted upon still didn't recover decades later. The more massive and jurisdiction-crossing a corporation is, the eviler it is.
I don't know if **writing about how evil corporations are** was always common, the history of corporations is interesting and very illuminating but I don't know enough about it to summarize it intelligently. But in the last couple of decades, starting from the 1980s with Reagan and Thatcher, Corporations started showing their cartoonishly evil side more and more, especially with the globalization of communication (so Nestle doing shady shit to nursing mothers in <far away place with corrupt government> is known everywhere including in the societies that buy Nestle's shares and make the laws that it must abide by.) Outsourcing, globalization, and the whole shitstorm that happened since the 1980s, the fall of the Soviet Union in 1990s leaving Capitalism with no real competitor or incentive to fear the humans under its grip, the housing bubble and the financialization of capital and economics in the 2000s, culminating with the 2008 crisis and Occupy Wall St. Climate Change. The generations of the 1930s and the 1940s and the 1950s and the 1960s who "ooooh"ed and "aaaaahhh"ed at every little gadget and convenience Capitalism offered without thinking too much about consequences are withering away, in their place are the generations who grew up in the 1980s and saw (or read about) Corporations inciting coups in South America and stealing Iraqi Oil, destroying Nigeria's ecosystem and crying about their """"""InTelleCTual ProPerTy""""" in a life-saving vaccine that can prevent millions of deaths and an economic disaster (the research behind said vaccine being massively state-funded.)
As for the "And X as a replacement for Capitalism is awesome" part, that's just how scifi works. It speaks truth to power by imagining its replacement. Capitalism is both a power in its own right and intertwined with lots of other very powerful powers (the nation state, militaries, the royal scum of the Arabian Gulf), so it makes perfect sense that a genre based and premised on challenging and questioning and heckling and mercilessly re-imagining the status quo won't leave Capitalism alone.
"This sort of writing" means very good stories which preach a political lesson that I, as a libertarian and economist, reject, in particular stories portraying an attractive socialist or gift economy society, where problems of scarcity are mostly ignored — rich communism, using the term not to refer to historical state socialism but to the sort of "everything free" society that some supporters of the latter imagined as their end state.
Isn't this kind of book just a natural progression from the dream of a post-scarcity economy that folks were playing with a few years ago?
Also - and I know it won't be a particularly popular idea here - a lot of people find both political systems and economic principles hideously boring.
So adopting a background position where scarcity has been 'solved' reduces the more boring kinds of friction and means that the author can move their plot along. It's mass-market fiction, after all; I wouldn't necessarily be reading political radicalism into every word.
We don't see what motivates people to do useful work in Preservation Alliance. Other than the religious festival (maybe Holi or something?), we pretty-much only see the super high-flyers in their society--top scientists who are involved in a planetary survey. Compared to the corporates Murderbot has worked with, most of the humans from Preservation are extremely capable and self-directed, probably because they're the cream of the crop. The exceptions I can think of:
a. Senior Indah (approximately the police chief of their space station) is intimidated by the thought that she might lose her job as a result of treating Murderbot badly, but we don't see why.
b. Amena is the teenage daughter of a high-flying family, notably including Mensah (who's something like the prime minister of the planet).
Later, we see some people from the Pansystem University (another political entity), but again, they're carefully selected and trained.
We don't know why Amena cares about getting an advanced education, or why people go to the Pansystem University when they could live in free housing and eat free food and f--k other dolists to their hearts' content.
For 2, murderously unethical companies tick a lot of villain boxes; they're evil to the point that no one will root for them, and powerful enough that you're hard-pressed to even survive fighting them. But then the individual employees have the Achilles Heel of public scandal. It's essentially the Democracy version of the evil king, or the lich sorcerer with the hidden phylactery.
For 3, it's been a very common theme for a long time. Dances With Wolves is very much that utopia idea, the inhuman corporation is Robocop, The Running Man, etc. I don't know exactly how common it was in sci-fi specifically, but I know Isaac Asimov's Nightfall collection contained a nakedly political story that Asimov introduced as being the one he thought was most important (as opposed to the story Nightfall which his audience found most profound).
Heinlein’s “The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress” gets recommended a lot for the libertarian angle. Maybe Le Guin’s “The Dispossessed” for libertarian socialism? Guess you could even say Banks’ Culture novels are libertarian socialism, as there is not a state visible in the day to day for citizens.
I think the general reason is that Sci-Fi tends to be either dystopian or utopian, and most people don’t think of libertarianism as a utopian outcome. But plenty of people who wouldn’t vote socialist now would agree that with some technological advances, (radical abundance) utopia could look more like socialism.
> 3. Were such stories common in sf twenty or forty or sixty years ago?
1964 is before my time, but that's about when "Dune" came out, and the "New Wave" was starting up, right? Maybe... a good comparison would be drug use? How many stories then took (heh) drugs as a natural and normal part of their future? How many readers would refuse to read something without positive depictions of mind-altering drugs? Apparently parts of "Nine Princes in Amber" were published in 1967; was the psychedelia of shadow-walking viewed by the author and publisher as a necessary mark of allegiance?
The comparison that comes to my mind is going back over 100 years, back to when "improving" moral messages were inserted into stories as a matter of course. It makes Saki's "The Storyteller" feel fresh, especially regarding the type of story that the eponymous storyteller is parodying. But the thing that story lacks is an foul and base enemy, to righteously vanquish in order to prove one's virtue, and that's an element that seems to be necessary these days.
> 2. Why is this sort of writing so common now, if it is?
I'd blame the free market, combined with people being more intensely ideological? I suspect more and more people are buying stuff that explicitly treats their views as obviously good and normal, and that publishing houses are leaning into this trend in a self-reinforcing feedback loop. I just ran into a guy today who started up a discussion of fiction he liked with me, and "progressive" was one of the main criteria he listed for what he was reading (along with "independent" and "unpublished"). I was re-reading a paper copy of "Diplomatic Immunity" by Bujold, and was unsure whether to describe it as "progressive", given how he was using that word. I'm not sure his ideology would approve of Miles spending his life trying to nudge Barrayar into the mainstream of galactic society, rather than immediately implementing changes from the top down, or running away from the mess. Or for that matter what he'd make of galactic society, as described in the series.
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Models of Consciousness: A model of consciousness is a theoretical description that relates brain properties of consciousness (e.g., fast, irregular electrical activity, widespread brain activation) to phenomenal properties of consciousness (e.g., qualia, a first-person-perspective, the unity of a conscious scene). How can we evaluate and compare the various proposed models of consciousness, such as Global Workspace Theory, Integrated Information Theory, and others? What are the key challenges in developing a comprehensive theory of consciousness? Which models of consciousness would you like to focus further explore in future discussions?
The Windfall Clause: Sharing the Benefits of Advanced AI: The Windfall Clause proposes that AI firms make an ex-ante commitment to share extreme benefits from advanced AI systems. What are the key challenges in implementing such a policy? How can we ensure the Windfall Clause remains enforceable as AI systems become more powerful? What are the potential risks and benefits of letting AI firms voluntarily commit to benefit sharing versus government-mandated redistribution?
Walk & Talk: We usually have an hour-long walk and talk after the meeting starts. Two mini-malls with hot takeout food are readily accessible nearby. Search for Gelson's or Pavilions in the zip code 92660.
Share a Surprise: Tell the group about something unexpected that changed your perspective on the universe.
Future Direction Ideas: Contribute ideas for the group's future direction, including topics, meeting types, activities, etc.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to develop a ten-part series to be titled "The Last Secrets of WWII." This will be about WWII, of course, but not the famous battles that everyone has heard about, but rather about the obscure bits that don't get much coverage. What do you propose to cover in the series?
The Battle of Castle Itter for just sheer absurdity. The American Army, the Wehrmacht and French prisoners team up to fight against Nazi loyalists of the SS in the final days of the war. Among the French prisoners are generals, a former Prime Minister, a famous tennis player, and Charles De Gaulle's sister.
One of the strangest battles of the war, maybe not obscure enough for the show.
From a UK perspective, I think the an important we don't teach about nearly enough is the Burmese famine.
I think it would be interested to teach more about the distribution* what people living in Germany at the time thought about Nazism and the war at different points before, during and shortly after it - how many believed in which aspects of Nazism? (When) was the war effort popular? (When) were they optimistic? How rapidly did opinions change? What does modern German thought on the war look like? I'm sure all this information is out there, but it doesn't really reach the British (or at least English) popular consciousness, as far as I can tell.
Again from a UK perspective, you could probably get away with classifying quite a lot of stuff about the Pacific front that's common knowledge in the US and the antipodes as "obscure bits that don't get much coverage".
Everyone knows about Bletchley Park and the Enigma; not many people know that the Nazis were also listening in on Churchill's radio conversations with Rooseveldt.
*I would not be so interested in anecdotes that aren't trying quite hard to be a representative sample.
The wiki for Vietnam made their time in WW2 look pretty interesting, just from the number of nationality changes they went through. I'd like an episode on that.
There are whole countries who were belligerents but which we never hear about. What about Mongolia? Greece? Brazil? The whole question of what happened in China is pretty hazy to me. What about Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Finland, Croatia and Thailand?
We don't need more stories about the British and Americans.
I'd kind of like the story of Wilhelm Canaris's career working for MI6. Unfortunately, I suspect a lot of that is still Secret in the sense of "MI5 will toss you in an oubliette if you mention it", rather than the more boring "doesn't get much coverage" sense. Not that 5's heart would be in it, just bureaucratic inertia and an impossibly long queue of documents awaiting declassification.
But if this is done to Hollywood's rules, we can just make up stuff to fill it out as needed for ten episodes.
I'd love to know more about the codebreakers working in the Pacific, who were so responsible for victories like Midway. In my experience they get far less fame than their Bletchley Park counterparts.
Japan's attempted bombing of the Oregon coast (in response to the Doolittle raid) also makes for a nice story, especially when you include the coda of what happened later when they invite the pilot back to town.
Because many Jews are highly educated liberal whites, who tend to voice antipathy towards other whites - especially those they correctly perceive to be particularly low in human capital. There's likely nothing distinctive about Jews in this regard, they just have a higher mean of educational attainment, so are more noticeable in this regard.
>especially those they correctly perceive to be particularly low in human capital
Okay, and black people have the lowest human capital of all, but this is used by the same jewish authors to defame gentile whites, not black people. Blacks having lower "human capital" than whites is a sign that whites are "oppressing" black people. Non-jew whites having lower "human capital" than jews however is simply proof that jews are superior to non-jew whites.
Do "educated" blacks write books about how "low human capital" blacks are evil and stupid? Does any group do anything analogous (other than maybe Indians talking about lower castes)? Can you find a single book published by a mainstream publisher in the US that explicitly defames a non-white race/ethnic group the way the books I posted do?
Black academics are mostly not Republicans, but in any case, the people you're talking about are mostly embarrassed of low class blacks. They don't think they're evil, they don't have the genuine hatred that jewish academics have of gentile whites. When they talk about them, it's mostly of the "our community needs to sort itself out", not "black people are destroying american society".
If I may piggyback on this thread, does anyone have a decent estimate of what portion of Jews who look white don't identify as white? I've only encountered one such person, but it's really not a question that comes up much.
If journalists and activists are anything to go by, these people rarely have a consistent ethnic identity in this respect and will opportunistically identify as white or not given the context. For example, you often see "My fellow white people.." type posts from these people to avoid the sense of an ethnic/cultural outsider lecturing white people, but then you'll have a similar type of jew endorse the idea that 'white privilege' is a thing but that jews do not possess it because they're "jewish, not white". It's apparently less controversial to claim that brown-skinned south asians have "white privilege" than white-skinned, majority-European-ancestry jews do. And of course, even though Askenazis are neither a majority or plurality of Israel's population, they are very keen to avoid identifying as white as it seen as undermining their claims of ancestral ownership of Israel and evokes the idea of white people oppressing brown people that they want to avoid.
Probably not entirely representative of jewish americans at large, but the sheer concentration of anti-white jewish activism suggests that this has to be drawn from a larger population of anti-white racial resentment. The jews most comfortably identified as white are probably prole jews without the racial resentment chip on the shoulder and also without any kind of institutional influence or platform. Many conservative American jews will also not strongly idenitify with their jewishness up until it comes time to defend israel or decry anti-semitism or "anti-semitism" e.g. on college campuses.
I just don't get the fixation on Jews, or blaming them for wokeness? What?
I really don't like the genetic IQ thing, but appealing to it would favour Jews right?But I prefer to focus entirely on culture. Black culture produced gangsta rap. Islamic culture produced honour killings. I think it's pretty clear there's something really, really rotten in both of those cultures. (Which is not to say they haven't produced good things as well, but those really stand out.)
What has Jewish culture done? Because all I can think of is persecuting early Christians nearly 2000 years ago. And I think they've paid for that in spades, in so far so you even accept that collective guilt is a legitimate thing.
How are they advancing wokeness? Some of the most prominant anti-woke liberals are Jewish (e.g. Christopher Hitchens, Nate Silver, and, you know, Scott Alexander). If you ask me to think of supposedly Jewish-dominated institutions, what comes to mind is Wall Street, Hollywood, and Israel. Only Hollywood can be considered left-wing. Maybe I'd be open to that accusation if I saw evidence that Jews in Hollywood are much more likely to push woke propaganda than non-Jews in Hollywood. I haven't seen that.
So what's the basis for this? Why Jews? (For the avoidance of doubt, I'm not Jewish, nor do I think I personally know, or have ever known, *anyone* who's Jewish. They're not as common in Australia. I have met plenty of leftists who vitriolically hate Jews though.)
Nit: Islamic culture is far from the only culture that practices and condones honor killings, the Quran itself says that both adulterers (the closest English translation to the Arabic Zani/Zania زاني/زانية, meaning a man/woman who engage in sex outside of marriage, whether any of them is married or not) should be lashed a 100 lashes each, not just the woman, and that women should additionally be confined to their homes till death or till "Allah finds a way for them". Moreover, Quran sets a ridiculous standard of evidence to accuse a woman of fornication, 4 male witnesses who have seen her while in the act. Those who don't pass the evidential standard are themselves punished.
Which is not to defend Islam or any religion of the same genre, I'm atheist and have been for years, it's just inaccurate to say that Islamic cultures produced the tradition, it's a conservative practice that was there way before Islam and continued long after it. Of course, like any religion, people use it to justify things that they were already doing. Evangelical Christians support Israel, Middle Eastern Christians don't, both can point to the Bible.
> What has Jewish culture done?
Like all cultures, good and bad things. The closest Jewish equivalent to "Honor Killing"-grade morally bad thing is 600K settlers building homes and burning trees/people outside of their internationally recognized nation state territory, and an army of 500K max and 150K min protecting them and standing aside while they do their thing. Granted, that's not very relevant to wokeness or American Jews, but gangsta rap and Honor Killings are not very relevant to most Blacks or Muslims either. The settlers are every bit as motivated by the Torah and the Talmud as Jihadis are motivated by Quran, here's a recent CNN interview with several Israelis in the settler movement https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkXJwErm8DM where they talk about the settler movement's latest hobby horse: re-settling Gaza and expelling the Gazans everywhere.
> How are they advancing wokeness?
Jews were very prominent in the American Civil Rights movement. This was mostly a good thing, but you can draw a direct line between that early and mostly sane mobilization and today's wokeness. Jews are also overrepresented in Academia, which is of course the bastion of wokeness.
(I don't agree with OP and I think he's annoying, I'm merely answering your questions with answers that would explain OP's sentiments and many others like them. I don't think Jews are particularly blamable for Wokism anymore than - say - Blacks or Indians or East Asians, as a matter of fact they were nastily bitten by it post-October 7th.)
>I don't think Jews are particularly blamable for Wokism anymore than - say - Blacks or Indians or East Asians
Sure, if you think "wokism" (I didn't call jews woke, I called them anti-white) is something that exists due to individuals spontaneously expressing woke views. But it's not, all of it has its roots in academia and far-left activism, all of which was disproportionately jewish by far.
>as a matter of fact they were nastily bitten by it post-October 7th
The ADL, one of the most prominent Zionist propaganda organizations in the world, has been ferociously anti-white for its entire history. Which is another example of jews using hatred of whites in the pursuit of their own ethnonationalist goals.
The ""disproportionately"" implies a ratio, did you actually calculate such a ratio? Your top level post is just a photo with several woke books whose authors are Jewish-sounding names, but what's the base rate? How many woke books are published by white women? By asian women? By indian and black and native American women?
> The ADL
> is another example of jews
The ADL is shit, Israel is shit, neither of them are suitable placeholders for "Jews" in general. I have a feeling you wouldn't employ this standard with your own ethnicity, presumably White US/UK citizen. Is Donald Trump or the Republications "White people"? Is the royal family of the UK and their tiresome antiques "The British"? 90% of everything is shit, and 99% of everything in politics or on the internet is even shittier.
Jewish writers are responsible for an unending stream of vitriolically hateful anti-white books (and "scholarship" in humanities and social studies departments).
Can you just IMAGINE if you took any one of the books pictured and replaced 'white' with 'jewish', and had this book published by a major publisher, stocked at university libraries and prescribed for academic courses? This would be absolutely scandalous, and everyone responsible would be called "white supremacists". And yet, the reverse happens and people rush to the defense of these jewish writers and call you a weirdo or anti-semite for noticing that they're nearly all jewish. It's literally no difference than when it's fine to say there's "too many white people" in e.g. the media, but say that about jews (despite them being more overrepresented than gentile whites), and this is scandalous.
And as for Australia, many of the most prominent early advocates for "multiculturalism" were jewish, and they employed anti-white rhetoric to advance this anti-white cause.
Your link wasn't working for me earlier, but in any case your link is just a list of hateful woke books. Some of the names look Jewish; I'll take your word for it that they all are.
Yes, this is anti-white racism plain and simple and it's disgusting in its hypocrisy. But...I don't see how your attitude is any different. You're observing that a certain larger-than-average proportion of Jews are involved in wokeness (which again I'll take your word for that being a fact), and then concluding that there's something wrong with Jews in general. This...is exactly what wokists do. Observe that some Whites have disproportionately done various racist things (ignoring anything beyond the last few centuries of course, because their brains don't cope with complexity) and then blame all whites and say we're all complicit in it or some shit.
I don't see how playing their hypocrisy game is helpful. God knows there's enough "it's not racist when WE do it" crap going around. Can't anyone (anyone?) actually hold to a "actually, racism is whenever you treat people different because of their race. Full. Stop." Not "except when they're whites" or "except when they're Jews" or "except when they're blacks" or "except when they're yellowish penguins who identify as triangles" but, like, you know, *always*.
Also, calling multiculturalism an anti-white cause is bizzarely playing into the left's narrative. Multiculturalism has nothing to do with race. Culture is not race, as much as the left tries to pretend it is. Stop making their dishonest totalitarian project easier.
>Observe that some Whites have disproportionately done various racist things
Okay, but these "racist" whites are the most reviled people in society. They have no power. If a white person is exposed as being "racist" that could spell the end of their career as they know it.
These jews who publish hateful anti-white books are not the dregs of society. They're not self-publishing this stuff anonymously.
These people and books are being published by mainstream publishing houses and universities. Many of them are employed at elite universities. Far from taking any kind of risk by publishing this stuff, this stuff is so celebrated in elite circles that these books are the BASIS of their careers.
These people are not reviled by jews generally the way racist whites are by other whites. It's not in any way comparable.
>Multiculturalism has nothing to do with race.
Multiculturalism is trivially a euphemism for racial diversity. Pre-modern europe had countless different cultures, but it wasn't until the mass importation of brown people that it became "multicultural".
And like I said, *anti-white rhetoric* was used to justify multiculturalism in Australia. That there's something deficient with white people that they need brown people to make up for, that it's racist to prefer to be around people like you (never applied to non-whites), brow beating white australians over the 'white australia policy'.
Jews should consider it extremely fortunate that they are largely indistinguishable from gentile whites, otherwise their overrepresentation in various fields and institutions would become extremely obvious and more normies would likely be uncomfortable with it. If Korean people occupied the position that Ashkenazi jews do in American society instead, I think a lot of people would think something strange is going on.
And of course, jews would also be unable to lecture white people as their "fellow white people", which would make said rhetoric less effective.
Yeah, I think we should limit the societal participation of everybody except the super-Aryan folks. What could be clearer than that the browner you are, the stupider, less talented, hornier, slyer, more violent and, of course, stinkier you are?
Also my toilet has been making weird noises and I'm concerned there's a Jew with a really bad case of anti-white racial resentment hiding in the tank. But not onna them prole Jews, cuz I keep finding really intellectual books on the back of the toilet.
Jews support white privilege theory and are some of its biggest proponents.
THEY want to limit white societal participation. As do much of if not the majority of the left through DEI.
Jews say that its a problem that there's "too many" white men in various fields and institutions. That this needs to be "rectified" through discriminatory hiring and promotion programs, but of course this doesn't apply to jews who are an oppressed minority.
But as you're so clearly displaying here, turning their own logic on them is absolutely unacceptable.
Speaking of resolving conflict...I'd like to know why you ignored my question about abortion at https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-319/comment/51472924. It really disturbs me when people casually say they support abortions without even a single word about the child being killed, and I was particularly shocked because you generally seem to show compassion in your posts, and I tried to ask in a careful way that even acknowledged I respect certain kinds of justifications.
And just being completely ignored felt like a slap in the face. And an endorsement of all my worst impressions about abortion supporters (i.e. being carelessly, even sociopathically, unconcerned about anyone but themselves). But I thought this was probably an irrational reaction and that maybe you just didn't get around to responding (as I often don't when people in a thread ask me questions) and I let it go.
But now, in light of your very pointed endorsement of "fair-mindedness, kindness and investment in resolving conflict", I do find it reasonable to ask.
You're right, I didn't intend my not answering to be a slap in the face. It was an old expiring thread , the thread it came up on was not about abortion, but some other issue entirely, and I just lost track of your question. I just spent 20 mins typing out an answer for you and then Substack sort of swallowed it whole. That happens to me about one reply in 10, have no idea what causes it. The text box just disappears. It's like there's some secret keyboard shortcut for Cancel that I hit accidentally. I'm on my way to work but will try to write out an answer to you later.
Thank you for clarifying. The thread was someone saying it's okay to kill in defence of property, getting mobbed by lots of people including you mocking conservatives for constantly asking "can I kill *this* person?", and your comment also mentioned supporting abortions which I thought was, to put it very mildly, a bit rich. The context was very much relevant is all I'm saying.
I don't think I've seen the text box do what you described but it does lag ridiculously, and often I accidentally hit cancel because of the scrolling lag. I just try to keep selecting and copying the text as I write.
OK, I’ll give you my reasons for being pro-abortion, and if you like you can tell me what you think is wrong with them, but then I hope we can just let it rest there.
-At the point when most abortions are performed, embryos are not sentient beings. They don’t suffer pain or fear. I could write more about this, but all I have to say is the standard stuff, and having read what you wrote in response to Christina it sounds like you don’t disagree with that, so I won’t say more.
-OK, about the more emotional side of it. I had an abortion when I was 22. I was about 8 weeks pregnant. I did not feel distressed about ending the life of an embryo, because it was not yet a baby, or anything close to a baby. In both size and in sentience, it was sort of in the same category as a big mole that I needed to get rid of to protect wellbeing and my future
If somehow there had been no chance of getting an abortion until I was 7 mos. pregnant, I would not have believed it was right to abort what was now a baby, and I also would not have been able to bear to do it — it would indeed have felt like murder.
You write that "the vast majority of pro-choice activists simply *do not care* if the child is conscious or not." What?!? I don’t know what gave you the idea that most pro-choice activists don’t care whether the fetus is conscious or not. It’s simply not true. I mean, there is a gray area in fetal development during the second trimester when they are what you could call sort of conscious. The can feel pain and move to get away from something poking them. On the other hand it seems very unlikely that they are capable of mosts of the kinds of suffering that murdered sentient beings feel: Recognizing they are in danger and being terrified, feeling betrayed by trusted beings one relies on, having a sense of a self and a terrible resistance to having it snuffed out. I can image some pro-abortion people reacting angrily to an argument that a 4 month fetus is conscious by saying it doesn’t matter, and I can see their point. It’s conscious, but in a very limited way — not in a way that matters much when deciding whether it is an act of great cruelty to end the pregnancy.. And I agree with that. It does seem to me much less monstrous and cruel to inflict brief suffering on a semi-sentient being than to do it to a fully sentient one — a 6 month old baby, say. They’re whole different worlds. Virtually every woman I know is unambivalently in favor of abortion rights, and every single one would be as horrified as you are at the idea of killing a *baby*. Yes, of course, it’s monstrous. I’m sure if you look online you can pull up quotes of enraged malignant pro-abortion narcissists saying that you should be able to abort right up to the day before your due date, and they don’t give a shit what the baby feels. But you can find online people espousing all kinds of monstrous, crazy things.
Here’s an example of what seems wrong to me with your thinking about this. Let’s say someone is against gun control. I personally am not against it, but I know there are plenty of people for whom target shooting or hunting is a cherished hobby, and who are stunned and furious at the idea that the government could just take away their pistols or rifles. But what if I believed that everybody who’s against gun control believes that if my dog strays into their yard it’s just fine for them to kill it, if a drunk teenager stops to pee in their bushes in the middle of the night and they think it’s an intruder it’s fine for them to shoot him because "he’s on my land.” But see, that’s just not the right way for me to think about it. Lots of people against gun control are no more likely to shoot a dog or a drunk teenager in their yard than I would be. They’d be horrified at the very idea. Imagining that all people against gun control are in favor of shooting the hell out of innocent beings who stray onto their land IS JUST NOT TRUE, and is guaranteed to make you feel furious and desperate. Exactly the same can be said about thinking that those in favor of abortion rights are fine with killing babies.
And one other thing about ending the lives of non-conscious or only-barely-conscious beings. I have made clear to my family that if I develop dementia, and reach the point where I do not recognize them that I would like to be euthanized. I believe I can arrange this by making sure there are documents signed by me at a time when I am not demented stating that this is my wish. (They would probably have to take me to Switzerland for the actual euthanasia.). They know I would like them to do that even if I seem content. I do not want a lot of money wasted on caring for this barely-conscious version of me, and I don't want my family to have to live with a bunch of memories of me in that state. I hope that helps you see that I do not have a double standard -- one for me, and one for unwanted fetuses. I really believe that living things that are non-conscious or only very weakly conscious do not have the same rights as fully conscious beings, and that decisions about them should mostly be determined by the needs of other, fully conscious beings.
I don't strongly object to any of the responses or arguments given in this thread. I don't fully agree with it, but I see as a reasonable disagreement.
And indeed I had hoped, and probably expected, that people in this community would have reasoned and morally principled justifications , although I was not certain and I felt strongly compelled to clarify. I'm really glad to have that confirmed.
(The reason I expected this was both the high standard of reasoned argument here and the almost total absence of the kind of toxic feminists who are overwhelmingly responsible for the monstrous rhetoric.)
We don't have to discuss this anymore, that's fine. I just really needed to know.
In reply to Christina I'll mention some examples of the rhetoric I was talking about.
Regarding guns, people often point that out to me when I express this idea. All I can say is that I don't feel like I've ever seen the equivalent. I could very well just have overlooked it, maybe similar rhetoric exists on the pro-gun side. But I feel like I've seen lots of insistance that more guns would actually lead to fewer school shootings (by allowing self-defence) and lots of statements that it's unfair and wrong to restrict law-abiding gun-owners for something that has nothing to do with them, that they had no involvement in, and that the proper course of action is to harshly punish the actual perpetrators. But I don't feel I've seen anything like "it doesn't actually *matter* if children die, all that matters is my rights!"
I *feel* like I've seen that exact sentiment more times than I can possibly count from pro-choicers.
That's my perception. Apologies if I came across as accusatory.
This was an excellent comment. +1 all the way, especially the analogy to the average gun owner not actively wanting to shoot harmless pets and bush-peeing teenagers.
To extend the analogy, it's worth noting that the consequences of even a textbook "good shoot" - a well-documented, unambiguous imminent lethal threat - are DIRE. Forget the trauma of the crime, the criminal investigation and civil suits and the impact on one's community are where the Chinese water torture aftermath of a shooting all occurs.
No one, and I mean NO ONE even *slightly* mentally competent wants to go to jail and/or lose his home after inappropriately shooting a bush-peeing teenager. Even psychopaths who might enjoy shooting that damn kid on the lawn don't want the aftermath.
There are probably some parallels to abortion in there!
I am likely past child-bearing years, so I don't have much personal interest in the fight, and I am not only pro-choice, but pro-abortion, because I care deeply about the quality of human life.
I literally can't think of a single instance in which voluntary abortion isn't a positive for both the parent(s) who didn't want a child and the unborn, who avoids being born unwanted (and who experiences nothing, anyway).
It's also worth pointing out that spontaneous abortion, aka miscarriage, is also *abortion.* If your position on abortion is informed by a religious tradition, it's worth asking why a deity would cause "spontaneous" abortion in a vast number of pregnancies, both wanted and unwanted, but would forbid humans the power of abortion to mitigate foreseeable suffering.
Thank you for your response. Although you're not the one who casually mentioned it without explanation.
I not only respect that position, but I held that exact position for a while. Right down to calling myself "not pro-choice but pro-abortion", on the grounds that no consciouness is present during first trimester abortions, and therefore no one exists to be harmed, and therefore if there's even slight doubt as to how wanted the child is they are better off aborted before coming into existence.
I no longer agree with that argument, though the reasons are a bit complex. Moreover, I very much respect it as a morally principled argument. Changing my mind on the moral logic of that consciousness-based argument is not at all the main factor in my shift to becoming pro-life.
No, what completely shifted my position was...a slow, dawning, horrific realisation that the vast majority of pro-choice activists simply *do not care* if the child is conscious or not. And they make that as clear as they possibly can.
Over and over and over we are told that "it doesn't actually matter" if there's consciousness or personhood. Over and over. All that matters, we are told, is "what I want". "What I demand". That "I do whatever the fuck I want and I couldn't give two fucks about this parasite that I don't want."
It...doesn't...actually...matter. I can't imagine how a person with anything resembling a conscience could, in any imaginable circumstances, utter those words. To confront a situation that people are telling you amounts to the murder of a baby, and to say that doesn't matter. At all. Of no significance. To deal with a life-or-death situation involving another human life and to think *only* of yourself. To not spend five seconds thinking of anything or anyone other than your own desires. And to be absolutely, shamelessly *proud* of that, to happily admit it and boast of it, and to be (instead of condemnded and octracised from all decent society) celebrated and valorised as "empowered" and "assertive" for your sociopathic selfishness.
I feel comfortable saying these people are among the most evil people *on the face of the earth*. Nothing compares to this. Nothing. Not immigration, not poverty, not war. Nothing compares to the monstrosity of being told you're killing a child, and responding that that doesn't matter at all whatsoever. And proudly saying you will do so, and you "demand" the right to do so, for *any reason at all*.
Even Putin thinks he needs to invent a claimed reason for killing people.
Now, I don't believe that most women who get abortions think like that at all. I'm happy to believe that almost all of them have either thought carefully and concluded that there is no awareness in the fetus or that the circumstances are compelling to make it the right thing for everyone, or are desperate or scared and not thinking clearly, not sure it's right but feeling they have no choice. And I don't judge either of these groups.
Only the monsters who calmly, coldly think only of themselves and utterly disregard the child. I think these may be only a very small number of those who get abortions, but it seems pretty clear they are the vast, vast majority of the activists.
And I can barely comprehend or cope with the fact that the latter are living, in my society, side by side with decent people. And I want to do everything I can to bring these monsters to justice.
So this is why I am so obsessive about asking for an explanation when someone says they're pro-choice. Because there's a good chance that they, like you, have a perfectly principled moral position that has concern for the interests of people generally, and there's a good chance that they're a complete monster. And I often have no idea which, and it causes me to tense up, causes me so much stress.
Those are my emotions about the issue. What actual reasons someone has for supporting abortion matter magnitudes more to me than whether they do. (Of course there are people who tell me that the above mentioned people don't mean what they say. Given that they say it over and over and, when told they surely don't really mean it, proudly and clearly say they absolutely mean all of it, I don't find that persuasive.)
By the way, my position on abortion has nothing whatsoever to do with religious beliefs (I'm a theist but wouldn't call myself religious). Frankly, I find it bizzare that anyone's would, especially since if babies are sinless and go to heaven when they die this would seem to make abortion good. If you believe that this life is all there is, on the other hand, then you'd better be damn sure not to end any life that might possibly in some sense exist.
I'm really stunned at this depiction of the thought of pro-choice people, because it's not what I've encountered at all.
Forty years ago, there was a lot of pro-choice rhetoric that depicted the fetus as a meaningless lump of tissue that could be thrown away without concern like any tumor or cyst. I found that attitude rather offensive. But they don't talk like that any more. Over and over again, I see abortion treated as a difficult decision that needs considerable thought and care put into whether it's the best decision or not.
But the question of consciousness or personhood doesn't come up because it's irrelevant to 99% of abortions. Most abortions take place before anything that's recognizable as a human child exists, despite anti-abortion rhetoric about a beating heart (which is hardly a "heart" as a born person has one). Late-term abortions are almost exclusively of non-viable pregnancies, so again it's not a person as we'd recognize one.
> , despite anti-abortion rhetoric about a beating heart (which is hardly a "heart" as a born person has one)
Pro-choice advocates should have countered early and often with, "A beating heart doesn't work without breathing lungs, dummy," or some pithier version of the idea.
As it stands, I believe that the fetus is not a person. There is no child killed in an abortion, no matter when it is performed[1]. Therefore, abortion is a completely *neutral* action, no more morally fraught than getting a tattoo or laser eye surgery or any other alteration to your own body. Within this framework, I fully support no limitations on abortion beyond practical health and safety standards (to the same extent that it's a good idea to make sure tattoo parlors are clean).
If through some hypothetical situation I were convinced that an unborn fetus were conscious and a person, I would still support abortion rights. It would make abortion into an immense tragedy, one worth counseling against and trying to avoid, but one that still should remain *legal*. I say that because by the time a fetus is even plausibly conscious, it is clearly wanted. Nobody[2] is waiting 9 months to get a late term abortion just for kicks. Every case of a late term abortion happening is because of a heart-wrenching tragedy, a discovery of some nonviability or health problem that forces someone to make the worst decision of their lives. And I don't think the law weighing in on that moment would make it better for anyone.
Given that, I will state that it does not matter whether the fetus is a person or not. It doesn't change my conclusion, just the weight of the decision. To an extent, this shouldn't be surprising. Few conclusions are reached on the weight of a single consideration. Many values would have to change for me to change that conclusion. If that makes me the most evil person you can imagine, then I am glad your life has been so peaceful to make that so.
[1] I will bite the bullet and admit that birth is an arbitrary line. But it is one positioned such that it has a 0% false negative rate. Infants shortly after birth probably aren't really people yet either, but it is valuable to pretend otherwise and birth is a useful schelling fence
[2] Fine, in a world of 8 billion people, SOMEONE has probably done this. They are not frequent enough to justify imposing restrictions on people.
I don't think your position as described is evil at all. Crucially, your argument as to why "consciousness doesn't matter" depends on your certainty that consciousness can't exist until the point where almost all abortions are performed for compelling reasons. So lack of consciousness at certain stages is still a central part of your position. The people I'm calling evil are the ones saying that *even* if an early-term fetus were conscious or even completely self-aware, abortion for even the most trivial reason would still be absolutely fine! Or saying about late-term abortions for trivial reasons, not that they never happen or that they're a horrible risk worth taking (as you did), but saying that they are utterly justified, or even *require no justification at all*. "My rights are not negotiable!" See the PZ Myers link in my response to Christina.
And I don't think the idea that we can be pretty sure something horrible doesn't happen, therefore we don't need laws against it, is accepted pretty much anywhere else. I've seen advocates of various anti-discrimination laws sonetimes explicitly acknowledge that they haven't heard of the discriminatiom they want to ban actually happening, but that that isn't a reason not to have a law.
Huh, this was not the response I was expecting at all!
I'm typing on my phone so I can't provide a full some response right now, but where are you seeing pro-abortionists who are acknowledgeding a "child" with meaningful experience and capacity for pain exists, but that it doesn't matter?
I don't think I'm seeing those arguments, and I'm wondering if an algorithm is maybe making their population seem larger than it is?
I got a bit emotional in the above post, and I perhaps equivocated on two different things regarding what the "vast majority" of pro-choicers say. The vast majority do not outright say "it literally doesn't matter how conscious the fetus is or whether it's a person". Rather, the vast majority simply do not mention consciousness or personhood at all! They don't acknowledge any gestational limits whatsoever. They don't acknowledge any possibility that they would rethink their position if new evidence about fetal awareness came to light. If confronted with "you're killing a child" they usually don't respond by saying it's not a child, they simply scream back "bodily autonomy!" (And my impression is also that most of these same people support or sympathise with vaccine mandates, which may well be the most blatant hypocrisy I'm ever seen in my life, but that's probably not a constructive way to argue about things). Reading through pro-choice news articles and editorials, press releases from pro-choice groups, and statements from politicians, I'm waiting, and waiting and waiting, for them to just *mention*, just once, the presence of what many claim is a human child. And it's almost never mentioned or acknowledged at all.
They *implicitly* seem to be saying that the fetus, conscious or not, pain-capable or not, is of utterly no significance in their position. I admit I can't call these people evil. It's perfectly possible that they do internally base their reasoning entirely on the absence of consciousness, and would change their position if evidence about that changed, and do support a gestational limit in law or in practice. But for some reason, many of them never ever say this. I don't know why, and I find it incredibly distressing.
The ones I'm calling evil are the ones who outright say it doesn't matter. A few examples:
https://the-orbit.net/greta/2014/03/13/having-a-reasonable-debate-about-abortion/ A feminist absolutely furious, not only at the thought of not being allowed to kill a fetus for any reason, but at the thought of having to actually give *reasons* for being allowed to do so. Complete with her saying that personhood is completely irrelevant.
http://www.shakesville.com/2013/03/the-rhetorical-power-of-pig-pain.html?m=1 A femimist condemning Richard Dawkins for *supporting* abortion...because his argument rests on the existence of fetal pain, and it's so offensive to thereby imply that if there *was* fetal pain a woman wouldn't have an unconditional right to abort anyway.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2015/09/05/wrong-question/ PZ Myers, one of the slimiest "rationalists" if he even counts as one, flippantly saying that whether abortions for Down Syndrome are justified isn't even a question worth asking. And being cheered on for this in the comments
All three of these are prominient people who've written books and are the faces of entire movements. This doesn't include the innumerable comments I've seen saying every possible variation of "personhood doesn't matter" "all that matters is what *I* want", responding to a question of whether they're okay with abortion up until birth for any reason whatsoever or none at all, with a proud flippant "yep!"
Endlessly invoking the Violinist Argument, despite that argument being intended for cases of rape, and coldly saying that even deliberately using abortion as contraception, even for no other reason than not wanting to use any actual contraception, is not only perfectly fine, but that it's "oppressive" to even suggest otherwise.
Persistently calling unborn children "parasites". I put this in a fundamentally different category to "clump of cells". While the latter is dehumanising, it does look like an appeal to a lack of consciousness, albeit in a nasty way. But "parasite" is entirely based on the fact that the child is dependent on another to survive, with no concern for whether or not it's aware, as if this categorically makes disposing of it for the slightest convenience okay. "You're in my way, you can die" is the sort of thing I'd associate with a cliched movie villian rather than a real person in a peaceful compassionate society.
Many of these people are perhaps not saying that the fetus *is* conscious and that they don't care. They're saying that it wouldn't make a difference if it was, or that they don't care enough to even ask the question. Even if I were 100% convinced that fetuses possess absolutely no consciousness whatsoever at any stage, I would put these people in the same category as someone who speeds through a school zone, utterly indifferent to whether he hits a child or not and proudly saying so, but by luck doesn't hit anyone. Not only is this person evil, I would want him locked up even if nobody was hit. Who knows what he might do tomorrow, if that's his attitude to human life and concern for others. And the simple thought of having someone with this mindset living side by side with me is sickening.
So I'm sure I've overstated the number of these sorts of people. But they're definitely around, there are definitely lots of them. And the worst thing is not the people themselves. It's the culture (especially the progressive, feminist culture) that *celebrates* this attitude. If I could see lots of normal pro-choice people loudly condemning the above people, saying they do not represent them at all, that *their* support for abortion is based strictly on weighing up the interests of all people and someone who thinks only of themselves is an evil person, even if they don't think their *position* as at all evil...I would feel immeasurably better. Instead, all I see is many others who, even if they don't talk that way themselves, unequivocally praising the ones who do, praising their "courage" or whatever of "standing up for their rights" which, it seems, has come to mean advertising as clearly as possible your complete selfishness and disregard for others.
To be as clear as possible, nobody in this thread has come remotely close to the attitude I'm describing, and all have very clearly diffetentiated themselves from it. But this comment section is not a representative sample of people.
I once had a long, illuminating but somewhat disturbing discussion with a very pro-choice medical professional who helped run a clinic for late-term abortions. She had plenty of reasonably well-thoughtout defenses of her position, which was basically abortion on demand (in consultation with a doctor) up until birth. The women who need late-term abortions are (according to her) disproportionately poor, non-white, in abusive relationships etc.
I pushed her on the cognitive dissonance I was experiencing in that her position seemed to be that as long as a fetus was in the womb, it was most definitely not a person, and yet an hour later it would be murder to take this newborn baby's life.
What it finally came down to as we spoke, was that in her medical training she was taught that babies are not truly conscious, and therefore not really capable of suffering, until they are about 1 year old. She pointed to the fact that we do not remember our first year of existence at all (there may be exceptions but this seems to be almost universally the case). So for her, the time of birth was arbitrarily used as the definition of personhood, but to take her POV to its logical conclusion, ending the life of a severely disabled 3-month-old, for example, would be ethically defensible.
I tried to dig a bit deeper but it was obvious to me she was not enjoying the conversation, so I let it go. We never spoke on this topic again.
I say something you don't like and you immediately go to work trying to establish rapport, grasp my point of view even if it angers you, and making a real effort to be fair-minded and open yourself to the possibility that I may be right about some thngs. You can't expect other people to be as gifted and diligent as you are at resolving conflict!
You made an extremely snide, insulting comment and now act as if I'm the unreasonable one.
But at the end of the day, you are simply engaging in apologetics for extremely hateful people, and are more offended by my calling them out than you are of their hatred.
When I was a little kid, I was picked on and bullied. There were several of us in that position, and we were friends of a sort. I'm not proud of this, but when some of the others were being bullied, while I wouldn't actively participate, I would join in the laughter. It felt good to not be the lowest any more, to be part of the group, the group that was defining itself against an Other. It never stopped me from being a target, and I don't remember what my friends did at those times.
I can tell myself that I wasn't even 10, or 12, or whatever, but that doesn't make me feel less guilty. I look around today, and in other areas, I see adults doing the same thing. And I wonder: I'm good at seeing multiple sides of issues, but how is that different than my younger self taking an opportunity to distance myself from the target du jour? Is part of it simply a defense mechanism to avoid identifying with the lowest of the low? I don't think so; there are times when I do identify with the lowest. But I could be wrong.
Come see about me and my little slice of Internet bullshit, when we ask the question - why do some people feel compelled to do free PR for those in higher positions than themselves? I don't have the answer, but come read what I think about it anyways 💋
During the Covid era and afterwards, there were two great debates revolving online around Covid: whether Covid was really dangerous (bit hard to quantify, but generally this would include things like a considerable chance of debilitating long covid, heightened chance of cancer after Covid, the "airborne HIV" statements and so on) or not that dangerous (ie. comparable to a bad or a regular case of influenza) maybe, and whether the Covid vaccines were dangerous (ie. would cause considerably heightened risk of stroke or vaccine death compared to other vaccines, expose one to cancer or so on) or not (ie. comparable to regular vaccines).
Now, while usually the "mainstream" view during the most heightened Covid fear era was implicitly or explicitly that Covid was dangerous and vaccines were not dangerous and actually were beneficial, and the stereotypical "dissident" view is that Covid was not dangerous but the vaccines were, these two axis of debate aren't actually necessarily connected. Thus, already during this time you'd have people saying that neither Covid or the vaccines were particularly dangerous, and this basically would be the current "mainstream" view, at least the people (apart from diehard zero-Covidists) have been going out and about for two years now in a way indicating they no longer consider Covid to be a danger.
However, does anyone remember anyone of any importance willing to go to the bat for the view that *both* Covid and the vaccines would actually be comparably very dangerous compared to, say, influenza and the flu vaccine? I remember some zero covid types basically saying that the vaccine wasn't as good as claimed and thus lockdowns and masking should continue indefinitely, but I don't remember any going the whole hog to actually say that while they fear Covid, they thought the vaccines were very dangerous by themselves, too. Logically, you'd expect at least someone to take this stance, as well.
I have a dim memory that, early on, before the talking points had settled into their final form, there were some anti-vaccine people who didn't want the vaccine because it was too much like getting covid. That could be a neural net hallucination, though.
There was certainly a point when, when I was informed about how mRNA vaccines worked, I was quite queasy about having some of my cells persuaded to synthesize the spike protein.
I don't know about anyone of importance, but this view is pretty widely held by the general public. My mother-in-law holds it, for example. I'm pretty sure it's how China simultaneously sustained zero-covid policy and a low vaccination rate for such a long time. People hate needles.
In medical journals I see things like: According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, African Americans are 30% more likely to die from heart disease than non-Hispanic whites.
I want to apply the same statistical thinking.
62% of Lao students are below the standard, and 38% of non Lao students are below the standard.
Our Lao kids are XXX% more likely than non-Lao kids to be below the standard.
Is this a simple percentage increase calculation? As in 62-38=24, 24/38= .63 x100= Lao kids are 63% more likely to be below grade level at our school.
Or would the denominator be the average of the two percents? 24/45 x 100= 53%
30% more likely to die means 1.3 times as likely to die. If 62% of Lao die of X and 38% of non-Lao, then Lao are 62/38 times as likely to die of X, or 1.63 times as likely to die. So the answer is 63% more likely.
So I gave up drinking beer for Lent again this year. I'm not Catholic, but I drink too much beer and I figure it's good to give it up for a month or so every year. And by giving it up for Lent I get to celebrate those two party time catholic holidays, Fat Tuesday and Dingus Day. (Here in Buffalo we have a large polish community so lots of Dingus day stuff.) Now this year I asked a young women I work with, "So does Lent include Easter Sunday?" And she told me that Lent doesn't include any Sundays! WTF, so I can get plastered every Sunday? This seems like much less of a sacrifice. Besides which I'm giving up the beer for me, my health.
Can. 1249 The divine law binds all the Christian faithful to do penance each in his or her own way. In order for all to be united among themselves by some common observance of penance, however, penitential days are prescribed on which the Christian faithful devote themselves in a special way to prayer, perform works of piety and charity, and deny themselves by fulfilling their own obligations more faithfully and especially by observing fast and abstinence, according to the norm of the following canons.
Can. 1250 The penitential days and times in the universal Church are every Friday of the whole year and the season of Lent.
Can. 1251 Abstinence from meat, or from some other food as determined by the Episcopal Conference, is to be observed on all Fridays, unless a solemnity should fall on a Friday. Abstinence and fasting are to be observed on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday.
Can. 1252 The law of abstinence binds those who have completed their fourteenth year. The law of fasting binds those who have attained their majority, until the beginning of their sixtieth year. Pastors of souls and parents are to ensure that even those who by reason of their age are not bound by the law of fasting and abstinence, are taught the true meaning of penance.
Can. 1253 The conference of bishops can determine more precisely the observance of fast and abstinence as well as substitute other forms of penance, especially works of charity and exercises of piety, in whole or in part, for abstinence and fast.
So giving up beer seems to be your penance, which you should follow throughout the season of Lent and on every Friday during the rest of the year. Actual fasting seems to be only required on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday.
Interesting. We always got taught to maintain our sacrifices, but it’s been a long time. The mini Easter thing probably mattered a lot more back when the fast from meat was expected for all of Lent, not just Fridays.
Consider signing up to Vibeclipse if you haven't already, it's a cool rationalist/EA event and you get to see the eclipse in Texas! https://vibe.camp/vibeclipse_home/
The Great British Intelligence Test is still online. There was heated debate about whether it was a *real* IQ test. The problem-solving questions seemed like the standard IQ questions that I've seen in the IQ tests. They also test working memory and things like emotional intelligence (that one really pissed off a lot of commentators). Speed of response is also used in the intelligence measurement and the working memory components.
IIRC, the test moves pretty fast, and I gave up in frustration at the working memory part. I have shitty working memory and I always have. But I have great locative memory, and I've memorized vast amounts of info that I've learned throughout my life using a system similar to memory palaces. It annoyed me that there's no test for that sort of memory.
I believe there are free copies of the LSAT and GRE online -- both are sort of like the SAT, but for people applying to grad and professional schools. I don't know whether they allow you to translate your result into an LSAT or a GRE score. If they do, there is info online for translating those into IQ scores. I don't know how good the translation to IQ is, but see no reason why it shouldn't be as good as transformations for the SAT. The LSAT and GRE tests themselves are very good quality and reliable.
I found one free test many years ago that seemed quite good. I actually got the same score as a professional test I had taken at school a few years prior. No idea if it's still around and doubt it's free anymore.
I used to really enjoy taking these tests and took a bunch of them. The others were all garbage. I stopped trying to take them 15+ years ago when they looked like more and more garbage and/or would try to make you pay for scores after you put all the work into them.
I had an idea for how to do more accurate polling for an election. Not sure if this is a new idea, I've seen something similar before. Let me know if it is an old idea.
In the US when they call people and ask who they will vote for in the next election, supposedly old people are more likely to answer. And old people are more likely to vote Trump. So the polls will wrongly trend towards Trump.
So instead they ask people for who they will vote for AND who they voted for in the last election. And then they look at the numbers for the last election and the percentage of people who changed their mind. So say Biden got a hundred votes last election. And 10 percent of people who voted for Biden last election say they will not be voting for him now, then Biden will get 90 votes this election. (The actual math is more complicated, but I hope you get the gist.)
Think this would work well in the US, since there is only two realistic candidates. Makes the math easier, anyway.
One flaw is that the system does not take into account voters who have died since the last election. But if one has statistics for the ages of who voted Democrats and ho voted Republican in the last election, I think one could do some statistical analysis and account for this. (At least for people who died of old age. Would be harder to do the math for people who died of the Corona Virus, if Republicans were more likely to die of of the Corona Virus.)
Another potential flaw is if old people are switching their votes at a different ratio than younger people. Then you are back to the original problem of old people being more likely to respond. I was hoping the ratio of vote switchers is about the same for all ages, even if the ratio of Biden voters are different.
Pollsters go *way* more in depth on weighting than you imagine. Polling is a constant battle to get any useful signal out of the noise when hardly anyone ever responds in the best of circumstances. The polling numbers aren't just simple counts, they're the results of complex models that slice and reweight the data by various factors to try to *predict* what a representative count *would* have given. And after every election, pollsters adjust their models to try to do better next time, which means that polling biases aren't predictable from year to year either.
Anyone else notice this annoying bug where when you click away from astral codex ten to another tab, then you come back to this tab, the screen freezes for 20 seconds before you can scroll again?
I think Scott should just open a "substack UI megathread" in the comment section of every OT where all the complaints about their horrible interface go.
Yes, and only on ACX no other Substack that I read. Also the Open Threads pause quite often and regularly give me a crash warning. The other posts slow down when I tab away, but don't have the same problems as much as the Open Threads.
Has never happened to me on Safari, either on desktop or on mobile. It's sounding to me like Substack works better with Safari than with other browsers. The only glitch I experience here is very slow loading of the comments when there get to be more than 600 or so. And if the total gets really huge, writing a comment is very slow also.
I usually write comments in a text editor then paste them into Substack, because otherwise it's not rare for my comment to get deleted somehow before I finish writing it. I am definitely not hitting the "cancel" option under the text box, so I have no idea what causes it. It's as though there's some secret keyboard shortcut for cancel that I hit by accident maybe one time in ten if I reply directly on Substack.
My score on the table in the original post (based on my ID key) and my score on the table in this post (with my hashed email address) are different. Was there a change in scoring? Or maybe I actually used a different email address and ran into a hash collision? Any ideas?
Unpopular take*: Dune pt. 2 was very disappointing.
I've read the reviews about all the things the movie did right. I don't dispute most of that. It looked fantastic. The characters were well played. It avoided the tired preachy tropes that plague so many modern movies. Fine. Great. But even so I left the theater feeling ... let down. Like the film had made some very grand promises and then failed to deliver on them. In many ways, this is like what Star Wars did in the sequel trilogy: lots of setup that failed to pay off.
I remember going to see Dune pt 1, and thinking that it did almost everything right except that the end was obviously incomplete. Whatever. I knew from the beginning I was going to see part 1 of a 2 parter. So long as part 2 stuck the landing, the two movies felt like they'd be well worth it. Dune part 2 did NOT have anything like a satisfying ending.
"But you don't understand! It's about the complicated decision Paul had to make. As a good man, he was forced by political necessities ..."
No. That's not the problem. The problems were much more fundamental than that. The final battle was ... absurdly easy. These were the big bad guys across two films? Really? The final standoff was between successive opponents (the emperor, Bene J high command, Feyd R) who hadn't met Paul until they faced off against him and were defeated. The galactic jihad outcome that so horrified Paul was ... abstractly hinted at? Maybe?
I suspect a lot of this isn't the fault of the filmmakers so much as the deficiencies in the source material. The world building is great so far as it goes, but it's poorly established in connection to the plot. Let me explain with a broken catechism.
Why is spice so important? "It enables shipping between planets! Space travel grinds to a halt without it, disrupting the galactic economy and the center of power of literally every major player." Okay, I imagine space travel will be a prominent part of the story then? "Nope." Will disruption of spice production at least have a dramatic effect on the people of Dune? The characters we meet? "There will be huge political pressures to-" Yes, yes. But the shipping? Will we SEE the effects of disruption of spice production in a tangible way? "No." So everything is abstract?
It doesn't have to be this way. A single scene showing the big bad Baron having to go without his favorite bonbons would be a minimal sop to the idea that the actions of Paul are doing something with wide-reaching effects. A single scene showing food scarcity arising from the baron's iron fisted policies would show he has power to hurt Paul's cause. The abstract nature of ALL the core conflicts in the story make it difficult to enjoy. The things that matter most to the plot - the pressures exerted on the emperor to maintain power among the great houses, the power of the shipping guild, etc. - all happen away from the scenes and characters who matter. The things that feature most prominently - the harsh desert environment, the sand worms, the relationship with Chani - don't end up meaning much to the plot. They feel like window dressing that could be interchangeable with other details in a different story.
Perhaps some day they'll make an adaptation of Dune with the kind of influence Lord of the Rings had. That would require a wholesale rewrite of the plot, I suspect.
*Based on the hype I'm hearing and the Rotten Tomatoes scores.
I watched the movie yesterday and found it disappointing. For the most part, it just felt like a mindless action movie. (The following are my own impressions without having read the other comments here.)
The baron is not a villain, he is the caricature of one. Between his flair for Reichparteitag scenes, his grotesque physique, and his propensity to murder his commanders and random civilian servants of his (which rapidly loses its shock value), onscreen rape and subsequent cannibalism are basically the only thing which could drive home the point "baron bad" less subtly.
His nephew feels like an extra villain which an action game might establish in a few cutscenes to set up another boss fight. Like someone deciding that what the movie really needed was more 1-vs-1 knife fights (whose realism I dispute without being a real expert), and putting in that character which has one knife fight to establish that he is capable and evil and then another (totally pointless, btw) knife fight where he is defeated by Paul. Okay, in between his two knife fights that nephew also shows his strategic brilliance by attacking the northern Fremen outpost. You might be excused to think that he is acting on new information, perhaps delivered by a traitor Fremen (which would make for an interesting side character), but apparently, the Harkonnen knew that the Fremen were living in that rock all along. Of course, his strategical brilliance can not overcome Paul's plot armor, so he did not pack enough ammo for a ground assault, leading to the escape of most of the Fremen.
The Fremen break my suspension of disbelief on so many levels. On one level, they are (especially in the south) basically Mujaheddin, except that their culture is carefully devoid of anything the audience might find objectionable. It has been decades since I read the book, but I vaguely recall that reused the water of both enemy and friendly dead, including for drinking. Now it is explicitly mentioned that the water taken from enemy troops is used for some less objectionable purpose, and the water of that dead warrior feeds some sacred swimming pool instead. Did Paul not inherit a wife after killing her husband in a duel in the book? And of course the Fremen are amazingly progressive: unmarried women are part of the strike team against the Harkonnen and are also free to pursue sexual relations with Paul, or yelling at the fundamentalist elder council without any bad consequences.
Per the movie, you can not survive without faith in the south, but apparently faith, sand and spice are enough to sustain huge populations there. They don't have a pastoral lifestyle (which would be typical for people in marginal lands), and just recycling water from dead people does not seem terribly sustainable. Wind traps get mentioned, so they provide enough water to survive in the desert (but not enough so that you could do without harvesting corpses), and for protein they just hunt the odd dessert mouse or something? Speaking of dubious ecosystems, what do the sandworms eat again?
Either it is really easy to craft rocket launchers out of spice and sand without any industry required, or the Fremen have some kind of CIA-like sponsor who ships weapons to them as part of an effort to fight a proxy war against the Harkonnen.
Much has been written about the idea that primitive down to earth cultures will of course defeat dedicated solidiers of much richer societies because the former are hardcore and the latter are degenerate, and how wrong this idea is [0].
Then there is the emperor. First he helps the baron to get rid of house Artreides because he considers Paul's father to be weak and emotional. He must be aware that he set himself up to be blackmailed by the baron, who also has exclusive control of the most important resource in the empire. He then proceeds to show that his military genius is equal to his political savyness by personally landing (from what I can tell from the movie) in the inhospitable south about ten kilometers from Fremen Fundamentalist Central and gets promptly overrun by them.
The only thing saving the Bene Gesserit from being conspiratorial Space Jews following every antisemitic trope is the fact that they are all female. Pulling the strings behind the fall of House Atreides, setting up the religious framework of the Fremen, putting their weight behind the baron's nephew (psychotic, psychopathic, potaitoh, potahto), always being the Wormtongue to whisper sinister ideas into the ear of every lord, powerful enough that nobody can just do without them but pursuing their own bizarre eugenic cultist breeding program agenda.
Frank Herbert already requires a lot of plot devices to make the world work. Spice as the magical crude oil which the world's logistics depend on. Personal energy shields which give an advantage to melee weapons. A Butlerian Jihad which means that electronics are verboten. Powerful psychic abilities for the Bene Gesserit which allow them to stay too useful to those in power to be sent to the stake where they arguably belong. Nukes as limited resource only available to the Great Houses. (An empire where the central power is so weak that the vassals are free to wage war against each other and which is not under external threat does not seem like a very long term stable political configuration to me, but it is probably the Bene Gesserit holding it all together.)
In retrospect, perhaps they should not have used a script written by a LLM </sarcasm>
> The baron is not a villain, he is the caricature of one
That's a good way of putting it; I'd go farther and say that almost everything in the movie was a caricature of itself. It's all images designed to convey a vibe.
> the water taken from enemy troops is used for some less objectionable purpose
As I recall, the movie said that Harkonnen water was too polluted to use? So probably playing to an environmentally-conscious audience.
> Either it is really easy to craft rocket launchers out of spice and sand without any industry required
The book said that all of the Fremen industry had been introduced in the last 2 generations, starting with Liet-Kyne's father, Pardot Kynes. Part of it was cannibalization of the Imperial ecological testing stations. But they also had a lot less industry than shown in the movie. Thumpers, in particular, were a lot lower-tech.
> Spice as the magical crude oil which the world's logistics depend on.
There's some indications that spice is fairly new to the galaxy, at least on a large scale. It's use may only have taken off in the last hundred years. Galactic society has become unstable, but no one fully realized this until Paul came along.
> but it is probably the Bene Gesserit holding it all together.
I believe the books explicitly say that it's the Spacing Guild holding it together. Partly because they charge enormous sums of money for any large-scale troop movement, so most wars are "wars of assassins", involving poison and traitors and small elite strike groups. The Guild doesn't want any large-scale disruption in interstellar commerce, because they effectively survive by taxing interstellar commerce.
The final battle in the book was just as much Paul and the Fremtredes curbstomping the Empire, Guild, et al as was the movie. He's got an army the equal of the Emperor's, *and* he's got an arsenal of nuclear weapons that combined with his knowledge of local terrain and conditions allows him to negate the enemy's shields, *and* he's got long-range artillery that can cripple their spaceships, *and* he's got all the spice in the universe, *and* he's got sandworms. And he's nigh-omniscient, so he knows exactly how he's going to win before the first shot is fired.2
If you want to enjoy a "Dune" movie, you need to be invested in the buildup to the final battle, and interested in exactly what Paul's plans for that battle are going to turn out to be, and then you have to sit back and enjoy the ride to its preordained conclusion. And that's fine. Sometimes it's enough to just love it when a plan comes together.
As for the lack of discussion of spice economics, I do miss that (along with many other things). But it's a necessary and appropriate simplification to fit the rest of the story into a mere two movies. In this version, Spice is a MacGuffin. That also is fine. Movies about strife in the Middle East don't have scenes with wealthy first-worlders driving SUVs so we can see how important oil is, and "Avatar" never did show or even tell us what Pandoran Unobtanium was used for.
I think it's a little unfair to judge Herbert by modern storytelling standards, but at the same time any movies based on his fiction need to be updated to those standards. Newer fiction follows conventions that older fiction often violates. Sometimes these are just arbitrary convention (for example, third person omniscient is rare in modern novels), whereas others feel like real improvements in storytelling mechanics.
One of these is the convention on how to maintain tension. You have two main options (outlined by Sanderson in his discussion on the mechanics of a heist story, but it's universally applicable):
1. The Ocean's 11 approach. Hide the plan from the reader. The reader/viewer is told what the objective is, how that objective will be impossible to achieve, and then you wait to see how the plan evolves to achieve the impossible objective, within the bounds of capabilities established throughout the story. (Classic example of this is the Mission Impossible TV series.)
2. The Italian Job approach. You know the plan, but the plan hits the fan. The characters openly discuss the plan and all the tools they will use to achieve the plan. Then circumstances intervene to make that plan impossible, but the characters repurpose their resources to pull off a win anyway.
Both of these approaches maintain tension, though in different ways. The reason the Dune approach isn't in favor anymore is because it's too straightforward. You first hear what the characters are going to do and then they do it, so the author ends up repeating points but in more detail the second time. (The other outmoded approach is to just not talk about the plan or the objective, which then feels like stumbling about from one random experience to another.)
Avatar ... wasn't a great example of how to establish a McGuffin. Iron Man 1 had the Arc reactor that was essentially a MacGuffin, but you got to see the varying ways it was meaningful to the different characters. Sometimes the MacGuffin is ancillary - like the NOC list in Mission Impossible 1 - but we still see how it matters to the antagonist. You feel how important it is to Ethan that the list not get out (because doing so makes him a black operative who hurts the country he's sworn to protect). Even though you could easily interchange it with other MacGuffin ideas without significantly changing the plot, the MacGuffin can be used to play meaningful role in character development.
Dune could easily do all this! It just needs to be updated with modern storytelling mechanics to make the story compelling. This will almost certainly upset fans during their first watching, but it will all be forgivable.
I actually very much like the storytelling in the book, Dune. The first scene dumps us into Paul's encounter with the Reverend Mother and the gom jabbar, and we're completely disoriented and have no idea what's going on. And then the second scene takes us to the Baron having Piter explain his entire plan to Feyd-Rautha. After that, we know exactly what's going to happen, we know who the traitor is, we can see the Atreides underestimating the danger, but we also see the Atreides finding out that the Fremen are more useful than the Harkonnens think, and we've seen that Paul may have depths that the Harkonnens aren't aware of. So we see the plans clashing, and the suspense comes from hoping that the secrets the good guys know will outweigh the secrets the bad guys know. Up until the point where Paul comes out of the trance with a solid vision of the future, and then we get to watch him kick ass like Neo at the end of the Matrix. :-)
And the book is 60 years old. This is the third video adaptation. Everyone pretty much knows what's going to happen, even more so than knowing that "Batman stops the Joker".
Frankly, I think what you call "modern storytelling mechanics" is like McDonald's hamburgers or those horrible looking 5-over-1 buildings that get put up. It's a cheap least-effort implementation, and while some people may be so used to it that they start becoming connoisseurs of local fast-food joints, I think that says more about impoverished culture than what's actually good.
Perhaps I wasn't clear about what I was saying, when I talked about modern storytelling techniques. It sounds like what you heard was something like, "You didn't check this box, so the story doesn't work for modern audiences," and you reject that idea. I reject it as well.
What I was trying to say was that conventions build up in storytelling over time. They always have. You can see them in Shakespeare's plays, and in Aristophanes' plays. Some of those conventions have endures, while others don't. Usually there's some principle behind the convention, which is why people use them. (I.e. you need a fool to counterbalance the king's authority and provide comic relief.) But the principle and the convention aren't the same thing, and there's no reason you can't reject the convention so long as the principle is fulfilled. In Dune, the reason for the convention is to maintain dramatic tension. If your reader is 200 pages into the book, or 4 hours into a 2-part movie, you risk them losing their investment in the story unless you continue building that dramatic tension toward the climax. The problem with the Dune movies (for me, at least) is that the story lost all dramatic tension as it built toward the climax.
"Lost" is probably wrong. It intentionally jettisoned that tension, piling up so many advantages in Paul's column that there was nothing left for him to accomplish. Now, obviously a bunch of people liked the book and the movie. I'm not here trying to say they're wrong. I'm just confused why so many people and reviewers are saying it's some kind of 'masterpiece' because that wasn't my experience. It was well produced and well acted, but for me it was only an okay movie that disappointed on many levels - foremost in the storytelling department.
What's really interesting is that you're the first person in the comments to give a full-throated defense of the storytelling. That suggests something like a 90-10 split (among readers of this blog) against the film, versus a critical/audience reception that's more like 5-95. I wonder why that is.
OK, yes, I think I misunderstood you. To switch genres for a moment, in mysteries the standard approach has been "whodunnit", but Columbo introduced "howcatchem", by showing the murder first, and then providing a murderer-centric view of the case, where we see the detective slowly closing in. Is that the kind of technique you're talking about?
I do think the director made some choices to try to keep up the dramatic tension. One thing I recall reading somewhere was that he "externalized" Paul's internal conflict over his destiny as messiah, by having Chani act as a foil for that. Instead of internal angst, Paul and Chani could argue about it. I think it worked, in that respect, but at the cost of ruining Chani as a character, and also potentially altering the storyline enough that "Dune Messiah" will be (more) difficult.
Overall that's typical of my criticism of Villeneuve's "Dune" movies. I can tell he liked and understood the books, and I agree abstractly with a lot of the choices he made about what to cut and how to simplify the story (like having Thufir die in the first half). But I think he was like someone tinkering with a delicately-balanced ecosystem, and failed to see the consequences of the changes he made. Perhaps I'm projecting, but I feel like it's the sort of mistake I'd make in his shoes, getting too wrapped up in some aspects of the film, and losing sight of the big picture.
I suppose a more direct response to your point is that I don't think the story of "Dune" is really about suspense about "what happens". (As opposed to, say, "Blade Runner 2049", where we have no idea what's going to happen.) To the extent that there's suspense, it's about "how will Paul survive" and most especially "what type of person will Paul become". And that's harder to pull off, and I think Villeneuve tried and failed. (Heh.)
Here's a question or three: Have you seen the first Harry Potter film? Did you read the books? What did you think of the film, **as a film** ? Personally, I thought it was a wonderful illustration of the book, but an utter failure as a piece of storytelling. But that didn't matter because we all knew the story anyway, so we got to sit back and enjoy the amazingly-well-crafted illustration.
Hmmm, you raise an interesting question about HP1. It's been a long time since I watched the movie. I feel like the book was well written, for the most part. It was a much tighter story than later HP books.
I'll have to go rewatch the movie to see if you're right about the storytelling. Maybe I wasn't paying attention well enough? I feel like HP1 was such a cultural phenomenon at the time that people were just happy enough watching the spectacle they were willing to forgive any amount of storytelling deficiencies just to see the Wizarding World come to life. (If you're right about the movie not being able to stand on its own.)
Maybe something similar is happening with Dune pts 1&2. They had a much smaller fan base than HP, but they augmented that with part 1, building an audience who were going to go watch the second one regardless. Hypothesis: a lot of people went to see Dune pt2 because they saw pt1. A lot of critics were fans of the books, so gave it a good review because they weren't really looking for the storytelling. Since the movie stands up well from an acting/production value perspective, the nigh impossible problems with the storytelling didn't affect the review scores as it would have other movies.
I'm not convinced this is the whole explanation, but maybe it contributed?
Wait a minute. How is Herbert's storytelling technique less evolved than the storytelling techniques of contemporary genre novelists? Herbert constructs a narrative with a lean prose style, and he develops the plot with a sequence of visually evocative chapter scenes. The plot moves along without any digressions, and he creates characters who display dramatic intensity (which none of the actors in the current Dune franchise have been able to convey). Herbert created a universe with a complex political backstory, but we can understand it as the characters reveal its complexity with their conversations and thoughts (without a lot of extraneous didactic prose) — and we can understand the tactical and strategic thinking of the characters without having to consult the appendices. Except for Princess Irulan's epigraphs there's very little fluff in this novel. I would say it's a masterpiece of genre fiction. This is unlike the turgid prose of contemporary speculative fiction and fantasy novels that characterize series like The Reach, The Song of Ice and Fire, and the Harry Potter books (please note: I don't think these are *bad*, but a good editor could cut a third of the prose out of these novels to make them hum.)
I would say that the genre fiction from the pulp era is generally superior to contemporary genre fiction because the authors had to learn dramatic pacing for their serialized novels and for the shorter novel formats of the era.
But if you were referring to the storytelling techniques of the cinema, I'd agree that directors about cinematographers learned a lot about scene composition, pacing, and editing over the course of the Twentieth Century. Cinema techniques peaked in the early nineties, and suddenly directors started forgetting everything they learned with the advent of special-effect-driven blockbusters.
The final battle isn't the equivalent of the heist scene in Ocean's Eleven though, it's the equivalent of the scene where they all just sit around watching the fountains and listening to Debussy after the heist. The story of Dune Part 2 is about how Paul becomes the guy with the giant unstoppable army, not how that giant unstoppable army whups everybody's ass. The seduction scene is interesting, but the sex scene just pounds away towards its inevitable conclusion.
One thing that was missing a bit is a sense of scale -- it's not so clear that the Fremen army he's leading by the end of the movie is all that much bigger than the Fremen army he's already kinda-leading by the second reel. I assume his little speech down in the south turned him from a leader of thousands into a leader of millions, but that scale is never really made clear so it never feels like all that much was achieved.
The new movie just completely omitted the threat to destroy the sandworms, and thus destroy the spice, which is how the Guild is compelled to not intervene in a decapitation strike against a galactic monarchy.
The Chani subplot was non-textual, which doesn’t bother me intrinsically, but it didn’t really matter, especally in the context of the utter lack of chemistry between Chani and Paul.
I agree Dune 2 underperformed. Mainly, for me, Paul just never matured. He was a bland pretty boy from beginning to end.
The new movie does have Paul tell his radioman to tell the ships of the Great Houses in orbit that if the interfere he will glass the spice fields which is close enough to "destroy the sandworms" in narrative meaning that I don't think the threat is omitted.
I agree that this was their stand-in for "destroy the spice", but:
A) It had zero narrative heft behind it, just felt like a throw away
B) We are living in a slightly magical universe, so I don't know why I care, but "a few hundred nukes" would definitely annoy people involved in planetary-scale mining (more so than just blowing up their mining gear? Not clear), but would be extremely unlikely to destroy a planetary ecosystem
C) It's the lynchpin of the story! A bunch of planet-bound bad-ass fighters are just not going to be able to achieve anything in the galaxy without complete Guild control. The only way the entire story makes sense is if you've drilled deep into why Paul uniquely has found a credible way to extinguish the entire Guild. This plot point has to actually make sense to the audience.
Yeah, I was very disappointed at that. In the time it took to discuss the nuke plot and show the cave, they could have come up with an interesting visualization for Paul's big prescient vision, cut to him saying "I've seen it all, here's what we're going to do", and then cut to him winning over and over again. All he has to do is tell a Guild representative "I know how to create a chain reaction to destroy all spice production on Arrakis, which will cripple the Guild and cause all of you to die horrible deaths from spice withdrawal. I've set it up to happen if I don't get what I want. Look into the future and see for yourselves". Then the Guild representatives get a surprised look on their face, and start backing him 100%.
It's really easy! It was done back in the 80s, in "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure"! Point, say "can", and a garbage can falls on the guy's head. The main characters figured out what they could do with time manipulation, and then they just WON. No more suspense, we don't need it any more, it's entertaining enough to watch how they win.
Yeah, I think the failure of the Chani subplot has to be laid directly at the feet of the filmmakers. And that was a huge reason the ending failed! It felt like the writers were heavily relying on her relationship with Paul to provide dramatic tension in the final scenes. But it didn't work. In part, I think that's because the chemistry wasn't there. In part it was because the writing didn't give us a lot of memorable moments for them to connect on. She teaches him how to sand walk ... a little better than before? Meh.
I'm reminded of the scene in LotR RotK, where Sam is reminiscing about the Shire on the slopes of Mt. Doom, and Frodo's response is that he can't imagine any of that because he's so far gone. It's poignant because 1.) we love the Shire, having spent some quality time there laughing and joking with the Hobbits and, 2.) we feel a sense of loss/horror that this has been taken from Frodo, since 3.) saving the Shire was the whole impetus for the journey to begin with. Frodo is about to give up at the end of his journey because he lost his purpose. It works on so many levels, but it ONLY works because we the audience can connect to the Shire so viscerally.
In Dune (especially this adaptation), Paul develops a deep affinity for the Fremen and their dreams for their planet. But that crucial aspect of his character isn't developed in memorable scenes that the film can lean on later to dramatic effect. For example, what if Paul were to tell stories to the children about oceans on his home planet, and then instill in them the dream that their planet could one day have those same oceans? Maybe then he jokes around with the kids and lets them beat him in a 'fight'. Combine that by having Chani smile at him from afar, admiring how he's so good with kids or something. We could feel Paul's affection for the people, and Chani's affection for Paul as having truly become one of them at heart.
Instead, Paul's relationship with the people is all told to us and we have to take it on faith. Okay, but when the parts people resonate with are the visually stunning bits, not the emotional character bits, you missed something in the storytelling. If you're going to have your ending hinge on emotional character moments, you've got to lay the groundwork to earn those moments!
Hm. There's a common distinction people make between "showing" and "telling", and I think I can sum up over half my criticisms of Dune 2 by saying that it's "visual telling".
I never got the impression from the film that Channi was the love of Paul's life... she seemed more like a girl that he got with at summer camp due to a lack of better available options, likely to be ditched the moment someone better comes along. So the whole relationship makes perfect sense internally to the film, I just don't know how they're going to square it with what happens in the sequels (if they are).
I only saw it the once, so maybe I'm wrong, but I got the exact opposite impression. Chani brings Paul back to life with her tears, despite being upset that he has chosen to take on the messianic mantle. She leaves in a huff and gives Paul the cold shoulder in subsequent scenes.
When Paul has to go in and negotiate with the emperor, he makes a point of telling Chani that whatever happens in there he'll always love her. We get multiple pointed scenes of her giving him the evil eye, and once again leaving in a huff. For me, it really felt like the ending was leaning on the idea of separation from Chani and his precommitment to not affirming the religious myths as tragic losses for Paul during his reluctant ascension.
Yeah, that was a perfectly appropriate story for Chani as written, and a perfectly appropriate ending for Chani (and Paul) as written. And while I'll have to reread the book to be sure, I'm pretty sure I like Villeneuve's Chani better than I do Herbert's.
The problem is that it completely inverts the very memorable final scene in the book that Villeneuve is adapting, and it ruins the setup for the book he says he wants to adapt next so we pretty much know he's going to say "nah, just kidding!"
It's not enough to wreck an otherwise-good movie, but I do think it was a misstep.
Denis Villeneuve is such a cold filmmaker and that's my problem. You get this big beautiful world but the film never revels in it. There's no sense of wonder. Only dread. And it's not just a question of source material because other directors can take a sad story and infuse it with life.
I only really thought that Sicario and Blade Runner 2049 are cold films and for both its a deliberate choice. Blade Runner 2049 is about a robot forced to stay cold to keep him under control in a world established in the first one to be ran by people less human than their creations while Sicario is about the inhuman nature of the drug war. Arrival, Enemy and Prisoners aren't what I would call cold films. I'm not sure I agree on Dune p1 or p2 being cold films though, they're lacking in humour but I'm not sure if they're cold.
That's not how I'd describe it, but yeah. It's odd, the first one was better than the second, and I think his approach actually worked decently for the Blade Runner sequel.
Maybe that's because "Blade Runner 2049" was about robots simulating human feeling. That seems like a good description of his film-making style, actually. A robotic simulation of human feeling.
I think the final battle being absurdly easy is deliberate and really an issue with adopting an exposition heavy book as a film with minimal exposition. The Fremen are supposed to completely outclass every other soldier in the galaxy due to the conditions, but its hard to show this prior to the final battle because the plot from the book has them only fight Harkonnens until the finale and the Harkonnen troops are never shown as something to fear as the the Sardauker are written as the group that the Atriedes soldiers are outmatched by. I think Villeneuve tries to work around this by having the Sardaukar be actually nuked and the worms play a massive visual role in the final battle but it still feels underwhelming as he doesn't have characters repeatedly state that the Fremen are super amazing fighters like in the book or what he did for the Sardauker in part 1 where they are introduced purely as amazing fighters.
It should be noted that the film ending is *less* underwhelming than the book too.
The final battle was also a literally foregone conclusion, given that Paul can literally see the future. Between the Fremen, the storm, the sandworms, the surprise nuking of the Shield Wall, and the MAD blackmail of the Guild, Paul set things up so that his victory was assured. Trump may have had a 28% chance of winning, but the Sardaukar had 0%.
The two part structure is a problem. We were briefly shown how the Sardukar are the most fearsome fighting force in the galaxy, but that was in Part 1, which we probably saw years ago. The prowess of the Sardukar is never demonstrated in Part 2, which means that when the Fremen overwhelm them it doesn't make the Fremen seem strong, it just makes the Sardukar seem like pushovers.
Also, while I can buy that the Fremen are the best warriors in the galaxy within the context of their home desert, seeing them jump into spaceships and expect to be space combat experts too seems a bit silly.
If you ask me, the movie quite simply did not deserve its running time. There's a little more to it, but I think the simplest reason I think the movie sucks is that it was just too long, needlessly, especially since they cut out themes and plots from the book with a machete. I don't understand why the popular opinion seems to be that this movie is good. Not nearly as good as Dune 1 was.
All of those are from the book, yeah. All of the books are much more about political maneuverings and transformations of the people around them, than any actual resources. And the first book's ending is absolutely just an anticlimactic boss rush.
Is there anyone on this substack who can discuss the business models of the leading AI companies? How do they expect to recoup the massive investment required to bring the next generation of AI to fruition?
I've heard a lot of talk about AIaaS. But given the propensity of current LLMs to bullshit (err, hallucinate) if I were a CIO, why would I want to outsource my corporate systems to an LLM?
Accounting? How would I be sure the numbers it was giving me were correct?
Logistics? Hell, no!
Manufacturing? What could possibly go wrong?
Marketing? After seeing some of the marketing materials ChatGPT produced, I think it would require lots of human supervision — which would make it less cost effective.
Legal? Could we trust the citations and its understanding of the law?
How about coding? I hear LLM can produce software code. Is it useable? Or is it usuable after a lot of tweaking? Is it bug free?
A more principled point: the discussions show that there are really two ways of thinking about it.
Beowulf888, you are asking yourself in which situations AIs can replace a human? And there I agree, that's not many, the systems are not reliable. For most things you can't just take an answer from an LLM without looking at it. (Though you might underestimate the progress here as well. The GPT Pro version has access to the internet, so it usually doesn't hallucinate links, it rather summarizes what it has found, and returns the relevant text snippets from the websites. Also, I would usually trust the modern LLMs to summarize a text correctly.)
But you don't need a standalone AI for monetizing it. It's enough that the AI is good enough as a tool to make a human work faster. Michael describes this below for programming, I describe it for academic work, and I think there are many other examples. Marketing is a perfect example. I fully believe that an experienced AI-assisted human can produce a leaflet much faster than without AI. Not by entering a prompt and walking away, but by entering a prompt, looking at the result and changing whatever needs to be changed. That is a lot faster than producing the leaflet from scratch. It's the same for programming, or for scanning research papers.
In practice, the question "is the output of LLMs correct" does not make a lot of sense. It can be correct or incorrect, yes. But copy/pasting text from elsewhere can also be correct or incorrect. Just use the correct parts.
> if I were a CIO, why would I want to outsource my corporate systems to an LLM?
Didn't you leave out the main one? Call centers and chat support? Those are huge cost centers to most big businesses (tens to hundreds of millions for most F-50's, and probably most F-100's), and you can probably reduce your FTE by 4/5, with the remaining 1/5 coordinating a suite of tools and overseeing a group of calls / chats to make sure it doesn't hallucinate or promise something they can't deliver.
We've got two separate issues here — costs and garbage output.
OK, I'm perfectly willing to concede that LLMs and generative models can provide useful results. But at what cost? OpenAI's revenue was claimed to be $2 billion in 2023, but it's far from making a profit and it seems to be losing a lot of money (if you've got better info than I have, please share it). Despite claims that it has 100 million users visiting it weekly, and Microsoft anno'suncement that it has sold its services to 18,000 customers via Bing/Copilot — other insiders claim that OpenAI's losses are mounting, and may have been on the order of $500 million in 2023. Of course, OpenAI is not a publicly traded company, so this all whispers and rumors. But if true, that sounds like OpenAI needs at least $2.5 billion/year revenue to break even with the current generation of its LLM.
OTOH, Insider estimates claim that the energy costs of training GPT4 were approximately $100 million. Scott said (in his Sam Altman post) that GPT5 would require ~30x more energy to train. Energy costs money so 30 x $100 million = $3 billion. If we can take the $2.5 billion number seriously, that implies OpenAI is burning through approx $7 million/day. Would GPT5 cost 30x more to run each day? Probably not, but let's say it will require 15x more to keep a GTP5 installation running, that implies $100 million/day — suggesting that it would require $36.5 billion in revenue each year to break even. That's not an impossible number. Walmart's revenue is 10x that, and there are hundreds of companies whose revenue is greater than $36 billion. But it would require about 150 million subscribers paying $20/month to reach that number. Comcast has about 38 million subscribers, so I suppose a 150 million subscribers worldwide is perfectly doable. But I'm not going to pay that sort of money for something that gives me a high percentage of wrong answers!
But then we have Sam Altman saying that AI data centers will require their own autonomous (preferably) nuclear power plants. Have you priced out building a nuke in the US recently? Well, we haven't built one recently, but inflation-adjusted it would cost about $13 million/per megawatt. (It's much less in other countries, though.) Anyway, Altman and his ilk will have to convince some investors with very deep pockets to cough up the money on something that may not turn a profit. So I think my question is legitimate. Do the Sam Altman's of the world have a business model?
This brings me to the garbage output issue. It will take larger datasets of text and images than currently exist to train the next generation of AI. So the big idea is to create vast repositories of generated text and images and train them on that. There's only one catch. AI trained on generative datasets does not perform well...
I'm an old fart, and back in the computer Stone Age we had a saying: "Garbage in. Garbage out." I think AI has all the hallmarks of a speculative bubble.
For the 7 trillion that Sam Altman wants, I also don't easily way a way to earn this money back.
But if AI stalls at the current generation, then I see no problem of getting a few 100 million users, likely a few billions. For this you don't need a new generation of LLMs, you can just remove the garbage answers from GPT4. This has essentially already been done in the Pro version of GPT4 for web searches, and it has sufficiently been done in CoPilot to make it a must-have for everyone who actually writes code. (There was a fair objection that not all software developers spend their time writing code.) If not for competition, it would be no problem whatsoever to earn a few billions per year with GPT4, and probably a lot more. The problem is that every current generation of AIs may become pretty useless when the next generation comes, but that is how competition goes.
Uhm, I really think you haven't grasped what GPT4 already does. First of all, obviously we are discussing under the assumption that AIs will stall at the current level and not progress further. None of the companies is expecting that, but let's work with the current state of the art.
A killer applications already is Copilot. This is a success at the level of Word or Excel. If AI stalls at the current level, Copilot or a competitor product will basically be used by every programmer in the world in a few (very few!) years. Programming without Copilot&Co is just not competitive anymore.
AIs will also replace Google search one way or the other. As a university researcher, when I want to know the state of the art on some obscure research question, I already use specialized GPT-tools like GPT Consensus or some other GPT research tools. To skim through a big pile of scientific papers, I let GPT write a short summary of each of them. My students use it to produce summaries of my lectures, or to create new exercises to train with. Just the fact that it can summarize text is a killer application in its own, and it does that well. Another killer application that will inevitably come is that AIs can produce a presentation from a document. (Perhaps that is already there, I haven't played a lot with this.)
So yeah, we are talking about a success on the level of Word or Google search. Microsoft and Google have made some profits with those.
Software developer here. Copilot is completely worthless to me. Laypeople are unlikely to realize that *actual programming* is like <10% of my job, with the vast majority being waiting for various people to answer basic questions. Although basic, the the answers require proprietary client-specific knowledge, and there is no way in hell that a LLM knows the answer. Making my *programming* more efficient just lets me twiddle my thumbs more and benefits me not at all.
Well making work easier for academics and programmers aren't real big money-makersk you know?. I think beowulf's question still stands. Also, regarding how AI will replace google search: Has it occurred to you that many of the sites google searches are up because their owners get money, clients, or prestige out of having a site up? If instead most people shift to using AI for information searches, I think sites that offer information will start disappearing. Online stores won't, and neither will online entertainment. But it sure seems like a lot of online information will.
I disagree. Programming companies make a lot of money. And those were just two examples. There are a lot of jobs where people need to read texts or graphics.
EDITED to make the point clearer: And for Google search, it doesn't matter where and how the information is stored. It will somehow come to the user, and someone is going to be the gatekeeper. I hardly see a scenario where AI is not used for that, and the gatekeeper will control access to literally billions of users. If they can get 10$ per month out of each of them (which seems realistic to me given what gatekeepers like Google, Apple, Amazon make today from gatekeeping), you are in the 100 billion $ business per year.
About my second point -- online sources of info disappearing -- which you didn't address: Let's say you are a superforecaster, and would like to become better known & monetize your skill. So you set up a site where you blog about forecasting, but you also have on the site a searchable record of past forecasting contests, their topics, and the winners, as well as a list of upcoming contests and links to more information about them. It's a smart move to have that info up, because a lot of people will come to the site for that info, and when they're there they will learn more about you. Google will send them there when they do searches having to do with forecasting contests. But over time people stop using Google, and instead use an AI. The AI gives them the information from your page of information about past and upcasting tournaments, as well as info from other sites, but does not give URLs. Now the contest information you have up does not bring people to your site. And that was the part of the site that brought you the most visits. You might decide it's not worth keeping that info up anymore -- it probably involves some work to keep up to date and accurate on upcoming contests. Why bother? You seek other means of getting your name out there -- maybe podcasts. That's the kind of thing I'm talking about when I say it seems to me that having AI search and then give summarized info rather than sites is going to lead to the loss of a good number of sites that offer specialized information.
I find this perfectly possible, and it is already causing problems for wikipedia that people visit their sites less (due to previews, that was already before LLMs).
But I don't see that this changes a lot. Unless you are assuming that the decreasing amount of information will cause people to communicate less via the open internet. But when I search for information, then it's mostly not something as you describe. It's often put up from people who have a genuine interest on me getting the information. Like "which flights are there to X, and where can I buy the tickets?", or "how do I renew my passport?" or "for this conference, when and how do they want me to submit my paper there?" All this will stay up, and the other side doesn't really care how I get the information. Actually, both sides would be happy if AIs can make the process more smoothly.
There are a few exceptions of the type "how do I fix Z", where the websites are set up to live from my visits and from ads, but that's only a small part of my internet searches. The only such websites that I frequently visit is for news, and there I rather go directly to my favorite websites instead of making a web search. Perhaps other people use the internet in a different way, but I find it very hard to believe that search engines will just go away without any replacement.
How reliable is the code produced by current LLMs? How much do the LLMs charge for this service? Or are they giving it away for now?
As for academic research, be cautious about the answers that GPT 3.5 and 4 give you. In 3.5 I see a high frequency of hallucinated studies. I'd say at least 25% of the studies that 3.5 spits out have some error in the title or the authors — and some turn out to be wholly specious (at least I can't find them in Google Scholar).
As for LLMs being a replacement Google search, Google makes money out of providing links to paid advertisers. Is that OpenAI's plan? Because it's still very coy about offering up actual URL links. But I'm not paying for GTP 4 to be may gatekeeper, because I've seen the bullshit that 3.5 spews out, and others have told me 4 has the same problem.
I use Github Copilot (the Copilot product for code). It's useful. I couldn't give you a number on the reliability because it's kind of like asking, "how reliable is Joe's code?" Joe's code might be very reliable for easy tasks and code within his specialization and less reliable on trickier tasks.
You get a rough idea over time of the likelihood of Copilot producing correct code for a given task. It's reliable for code that's straightforward or has been done many times before. Ask it to write a function to find the nth prime number and it'll give you correct code. It also knows how to use popular programming libraries I may not be familiar with, or write config files for popular tools.
For trickier stuff that relies mainly on knowledge of my own code, it's more hit and miss. I'm often surprised and impressed when it gets something tricky right, but a lot of the time it's clear it's just guessing, often by trying to match some pattern you have elsewhere in your code.
Bad generations aren't a big problem. It's usually only generating a few lines at a time, and not more than one function. If it didn't generate what you want, you just don't use it. It takes a bit of time to read the code and make sure it's doing the right thing, but not nearly as long as writing tricky code. The downside of bad code generation is just that it's failing to be useful, but not that it'll ruin your code without you realizing. It's still at a point where you have to read over what it generates. If it ever gets to the point where it can reliably write code without someone looking it over, programmers will be in trouble.
It's $10/month for individuals, $19 for business and $39 for enterprise. As far as I know, the model and quality of code generated is the same for all versions and they distinguish them by adding enterprisey features to the higher tiers.
I suspect that Google would love to get a lot of people to pay $20 a month. The other tech companies likely see Amazon Prime as a big success story, and diversifying away from ad revenue is something Google has tried to do for decades with limited success. OpenAI has a $20 a month plan and it’s an obvious thing to copy, since people are paying for it.
In case AI isn’t a big enough selling point on its own, they’re throwing in other services, too: “Google One AI Premium.”
How profitable this is depends on how much they can reduce costs while making it attractive to their users.
Amazon Prime is a big bundle of services, leading with free shipping. I expect a similar thing with OpenAI and this new Google subscription. The LLM doesn’t have to be their only feature.
I see that Microsoft Copilot charges $20/month for its premium version. Microsoft says it's based on GPT4. It gave me the correct answer to my COVID question: "When and where was the first COVID-19 death in the US?" Plus it provided some links to support its answer. I really like that! (I'll be using Copilot instead of ChatGPT from here on out for that reason alone.)
And it gave a somewhat different answer than GPT 4 did for Jeffrey Soreff's chemistry question ("Will CeO2 dissolve in 6 N HCl?"). I am not a chemist so I'm not sure if it's the correct answer.
For coding, I'll pick "often useful after tweaking." It's useful for the similar reasons that autocomplete and copying code from somewhere else are useful. Even if I know exactly which code I want to copy, I often prefer Copilot to copying code and modifying it, since it makes the changes as well.
I also tend to use ChatGPT for "how to" questions where I might have previously did a Google search and looked on StackOverflow for someone else's dodgy example. I still read reference documentation.
You still need to review and test your code, but we're used to that :-)
A good source of hints can be useful even if you have to verify the results through other means. I imagine that's also true for other fields.
I don't see $20/month subscriptions as enough to pay for all the investment, but it's a start and well worth it at that price.
This from Sabine Hossenfelder — she just released a video on the cost of powering AI — which would biggest ticket item in the operational costs of the AI compute, and it's estimated that the cost of training GPT4 was 100 million dollars! How will the next generation of LLMs be able to recoup those costs? Curious minds want to know.
Round numbers: 1m users paying $20/mo for 1 year gets you $240m back, so you net $140m (before subtracting operating costs, which are substantial).
Point being, you need to divide the training cost/resources by the number of users to get back to meaningful units. If every month each user is taking ~$10 of training compute and paying $20 they must be getting more than $20 of value for it.
If Scott would post full cryptographic hashes of the email addresses, then it would be trivial for anyone to check if a given email address participated and if so, how they did.
So instead, Scott posts the first five hex digits only. This is enough so that most people get unique hashes, but at least gives plausible deniability to users.
(With 3000 entries, about one in 350 hash values is populated, which still let's you do quite some Bayesian updates regarding the participation of a known email address.)
Is there a way to unsubscribe to Open Threads but not other posts?
So a bit of news that people here might find interesting:
In the UK the government-funded NHS has pulled funding for puberty blockers for trans kids and the wait lists for funding for the testing and diagnosis required to get HRT has years-long wait-lists.
F1nn5ter, a popular livestreamer and basically online sex-worker, made a large donation to GenderGP, a private company that funds individuals to get these forms of treatment, which are still legal if privately funded.
The Times, a UK newspaper, did a hit piece on GenderGP, and also made a point to mention that F1nn had made a large donation and doxx their real full name and location, along with some lurid details about F1nn being a sex worker.
Obviously F1nn feels this is a threat to the safety of them and their family, and for a less based individual, this would have a chilling effect. But F1nn has committed to donating even more, and after discovering issues with GenderGP's labor practices and enshittification enabled by AI customer service, F1nn has decided to set up their own charity to find these services for UK trans people.
I think we should all celebrate this libertarian hero.
Somehow using "Based" and "hero" in your description of events makes me wonder how much of this account is tainted by the ingroup-outgroup glasses, and it doesn't help that through the devastating rampage that woke and woke-adjacent causes like transgenderism wrecked upon the internet since 2014, I have seen plenty of stories get twisted into a "We're the victim!!!" narratives where the actual story is far more complex.
Because I'm saving all the angry posting to another topic, though, I will say only this: Doxxing is bad and shouldn't be done lightly, and Twitch streamers are cringe.
My understanding presently is that Based is to ingroup as Cringe is to outgroup. Thus, from your comment as a whole I've inferred that you identify as part of the outgroup of trans accomodation. Anecdotally, as a trans individual who has for the most part been an observer of internet discourse over the past decade on issues that affect me, the salient outcomes of trans visibility have been insurance covering my medical care and kindness when I am clocked.
Based and Cringe are not equivalents to Ingroup and Outgroup unless you want to argue that slurs are equivalent to ethnic group names. There is a difference in implications and shades of meaning.
My position on what you call "Trans Accommodations" is complex and is neither uncritical breathless acceptance/celebration nor a cartoonish lack of empathy, I also lack much of the medical and biological expertise (and the appetite to acquire the expertise) necessary to think about the technical debate. I would say that nearly 100% of my hostility to Trans-related issues and topics is coming from the PR tactics that online individuals representing them engage in, and the authority that they hold over masses massively larger in number with the help of tech corporations and media corporations pandering to them.
Now that I reflect, I've definitely observed behavior from my ingroup and cringed ("Guys, can we do less of this?") as well as behavior from the outgroup I had to admit I admired. Perhaps I was responding to the universality of your stance that twitch streaming itself, the entire platform regardless of who is using it and for what purpose, was inherently cringe. To me, such a broad statement feels like it most likely comes from intentionally sustained unfamiliarity -- which is often a consequence of a premise akin to, "People like me don't do that."
I certainly also have a hard time stomaching a lot of behavior that gets a wide memetic reach in the current political climate. That said, I can't deny that it appears more effective in advancing its objective than much discourse I find to be in better taste. I suspect part of why we are speaking here is because our sensibilities are relatively similar in this regard.
Hey, I didn't mean to insult all streamers or those who enjoy streams. It's just that certain types of media have certain features that I dislike. Twitter has the character limit which makes conversations superficial. 4chan has the bare-bones moderation and the normalization of vitriol. Twitch streamers and YouTubers have the... streamer quality to them, I can't define it but most of their behavior annoys me and the behavior of their fandom is downright teenage-grade. I hear about streamers like Destiny and Hasan Piker, they're not really good personalities, to say the least.
Anyway, as a counterexample to my initial generalized stance, there *is* a twitch (I guess? I never used twitch so I wouldn't know) stream which I very much enjoyed, "I teach you weird animal mating facts for half an hour"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_DrSPxqR48. She's a vet/some kind of medical professional, and in it's an educational masterpiece where she uses humor, memes, simplified diagrams and sexual jokes to teach so many insights about mating and reproduction to general audience. So I guess you're right, even by my own standards no platform is wholly good or wholly bad.
Lastly, some number of years ago I was angry and said some really mean things about trans people here under a different account. I don't know if you saw it or not, the overwhelming chance is that you didn't and even if you did you wouldn't remember, but I have an urge to ask you for forgiveness anyway. I do regret that.
Thank you for the link -- I quite agree that Maya Higa is a delightfully entertaining informational presenter.
My familiarity with twitch is also limited to youtube uploads. I have a vague sense that it sprung from demand among those who take videogames seriously as a sport to observe/analyze skilled play in real time, then like discord was adopted by other kinds of communities. Gamers are infamous for emotionally immature behavior, though there are notable exceptions. Dan Olson comes to mind. My first exposure to twitch was a conversation between Natalie Wynn and the psychiatrist who founded healthygamergg. I personally find Dr K quite grating, but something about how so many people seemed to respond positively to him intrigued me. I investigated his content and community, and was impressed that a mental health professional had found a way to reach so many young people others have failed to help.
Thank you for your thoughtfulness. I appreciate your apology and have enjoyed discussing these topics with you.
How do you go about selecting books to read? For a long time I had a book list a mile long, but I've made a lot of progress on that list and now I'm having trouble queueing up new ones. It seems like the marketing for every new book sells it as generational when in actuality most of them are mediocre at best. I know that some of this is on me to do my research, but I'm frustrated and would love any tips you have for weeding out the chaff.
1- There is a genre of websites that can recommend you books given a certain book that you liked. There are a lot of those websites, I googled "Books like" and those were the top 2 results were https://www.bookbrowse.com/read-alikes/ and https://www.whatshouldireadnext.com/. Amazon/GoodReads both also have a "readers who liked this book also liked" section.
2- Reading communities, for example in sci-fi the subreddit r/printSF is a vast archive of posts and recommendations where not only people recommend by book (books like the Expanse) but by idea and general categorization (books where the protagonist is an alien, books about big mysterious alien artifacts,...), and also reading advice (is X worth reading? Does the Y series get better/more exciting/more hard scifi after the nth part?)
3- If you're the kind of person that finds HackerNews interesting, search for Book Recommendations or Reading Recommendation on Algolia search https://hn.algolia.com/, it's very like that you finding the link aggregator interesting implies that the kind of people who write posts there are also like you/share major interests with you, which means they will tend to share books and novels you like.
4- Ask here and on the subreddit for SSC.
I recommend asking here! I did recently and got a bunch of recommendations (https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/open-thread-317?commentId=50400041) , three of which I've read so far and one of which I really enjoyed a lot. And a bunch more on the docket that sound more serious, which I'm waiting until I'm in the right mood to read.
I've asked a few times, and my impression is that people really love to share, so you don't have to feel bad about bothering others with this sort of thing.
I haven't sought out books for a while, but typically I just go on a book forum and see what people are recommending.
My main method of finding books these days is to go to the library, which has a $1 bin for books they're getting rid of. Pretty much the opposite of weeding out the chaff, but I've found some neat books there and $1 is a solid price for a gamble.
Why are so many white men in new york punching women at the moment?
What makes you think it’s white men? I saw a cnn video (https://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2024/03/29/nyc-women-serial-puncher-tiktok-cprog-orig-ht-mb.cnn) about it today and that mentioned “men” but no race angle.
Just checked an article on it (https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna145153) and it said the same - “men punching women,” nothing about “white men,” “black men,” etc in particular.
It's racist to claim that black men are punching women
Here's another little joke, about as funny as yours:
Q: Why hasn't Hammond been banned yet?
A: Because everybody thinks he's actually Black and complaining about him might be racist.
Well, in that case I suppose it must simply be that most white men fall so far short of your standard of fair-mindedness, kindness and ability to construct a reasoned argument from evidence.
I have just read one of the Murderbot books. They are set in a world where corporate employees are mostly slaves, although not labeled as such, corporations are unethical to the point of committing murder when they can get away with it. The protagonist is a sort of human/robot combination, treated by law and most people as machinery, property, not a person. It ends up effectively free in a planetary society that is an attractive socialist economy, a society where it is taken for granted that it is wicked to charge people for anything important to them and where food and housing appear to be given away, mechanism for paying for it unclear.
I like the books, don't like the politics. The same is true, although less true with regard to the politics, of the Scholomance books. Three questions:
1. What other books are there that are good stories with a libertarian socialist message or something similar?
2. Why is this sort of writing so common now, if it is? Is it just that everyone coming out of college has been indoctrinated with left wing views? Is it that something about that political world view provides a good setting for stories? Why that particular sort of left wing view?
3. Were such stories common in sf twenty or forty or sixty years ago?
I’m working on a substack post on the subject, am hoping to get more ideas here.
In (2), it's unclear whether you're asking about "this sort of writing" as in "Corporations are evil" or "Corporations are evil and socialism/communism/mutualism/UBI are rad".
For the first, it's common because it's true. Corporations are evil. Corporations are one of the biggest evil humans have ever created, perhaps beaten only by nation states and massive organized religion in a state of fervor. Corporations have though their history facilitated and incited to Colonization, Genocide, mass exploitation, child labor, slave labor, and devastating and debilitating revolutions/coups that the countries they were inflicted upon still didn't recover decades later. The more massive and jurisdiction-crossing a corporation is, the eviler it is.
I don't know if **writing about how evil corporations are** was always common, the history of corporations is interesting and very illuminating but I don't know enough about it to summarize it intelligently. But in the last couple of decades, starting from the 1980s with Reagan and Thatcher, Corporations started showing their cartoonishly evil side more and more, especially with the globalization of communication (so Nestle doing shady shit to nursing mothers in <far away place with corrupt government> is known everywhere including in the societies that buy Nestle's shares and make the laws that it must abide by.) Outsourcing, globalization, and the whole shitstorm that happened since the 1980s, the fall of the Soviet Union in 1990s leaving Capitalism with no real competitor or incentive to fear the humans under its grip, the housing bubble and the financialization of capital and economics in the 2000s, culminating with the 2008 crisis and Occupy Wall St. Climate Change. The generations of the 1930s and the 1940s and the 1950s and the 1960s who "ooooh"ed and "aaaaahhh"ed at every little gadget and convenience Capitalism offered without thinking too much about consequences are withering away, in their place are the generations who grew up in the 1980s and saw (or read about) Corporations inciting coups in South America and stealing Iraqi Oil, destroying Nigeria's ecosystem and crying about their """"""InTelleCTual ProPerTy""""" in a life-saving vaccine that can prevent millions of deaths and an economic disaster (the research behind said vaccine being massively state-funded.)
As for the "And X as a replacement for Capitalism is awesome" part, that's just how scifi works. It speaks truth to power by imagining its replacement. Capitalism is both a power in its own right and intertwined with lots of other very powerful powers (the nation state, militaries, the royal scum of the Arabian Gulf), so it makes perfect sense that a genre based and premised on challenging and questioning and heckling and mercilessly re-imagining the status quo won't leave Capitalism alone.
"This sort of writing" means very good stories which preach a political lesson that I, as a libertarian and economist, reject, in particular stories portraying an attractive socialist or gift economy society, where problems of scarcity are mostly ignored — rich communism, using the term not to refer to historical state socialism but to the sort of "everything free" society that some supporters of the latter imagined as their end state.
Isn't this kind of book just a natural progression from the dream of a post-scarcity economy that folks were playing with a few years ago?
Also - and I know it won't be a particularly popular idea here - a lot of people find both political systems and economic principles hideously boring.
So adopting a background position where scarcity has been 'solved' reduces the more boring kinds of friction and means that the author can move their plot along. It's mass-market fiction, after all; I wouldn't necessarily be reading political radicalism into every word.
We don't see what motivates people to do useful work in Preservation Alliance. Other than the religious festival (maybe Holi or something?), we pretty-much only see the super high-flyers in their society--top scientists who are involved in a planetary survey. Compared to the corporates Murderbot has worked with, most of the humans from Preservation are extremely capable and self-directed, probably because they're the cream of the crop. The exceptions I can think of:
a. Senior Indah (approximately the police chief of their space station) is intimidated by the thought that she might lose her job as a result of treating Murderbot badly, but we don't see why.
b. Amena is the teenage daughter of a high-flying family, notably including Mensah (who's something like the prime minister of the planet).
Later, we see some people from the Pansystem University (another political entity), but again, they're carefully selected and trained.
We don't know why Amena cares about getting an advanced education, or why people go to the Pansystem University when they could live in free housing and eat free food and f--k other dolists to their hearts' content.
For 2, murderously unethical companies tick a lot of villain boxes; they're evil to the point that no one will root for them, and powerful enough that you're hard-pressed to even survive fighting them. But then the individual employees have the Achilles Heel of public scandal. It's essentially the Democracy version of the evil king, or the lich sorcerer with the hidden phylactery.
For 3, it's been a very common theme for a long time. Dances With Wolves is very much that utopia idea, the inhuman corporation is Robocop, The Running Man, etc. I don't know exactly how common it was in sci-fi specifically, but I know Isaac Asimov's Nightfall collection contained a nakedly political story that Asimov introduced as being the one he thought was most important (as opposed to the story Nightfall which his audience found most profound).
Heinlein’s “The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress” gets recommended a lot for the libertarian angle. Maybe Le Guin’s “The Dispossessed” for libertarian socialism? Guess you could even say Banks’ Culture novels are libertarian socialism, as there is not a state visible in the day to day for citizens.
I think the general reason is that Sci-Fi tends to be either dystopian or utopian, and most people don’t think of libertarianism as a utopian outcome. But plenty of people who wouldn’t vote socialist now would agree that with some technological advances, (radical abundance) utopia could look more like socialism.
> 3. Were such stories common in sf twenty or forty or sixty years ago?
1964 is before my time, but that's about when "Dune" came out, and the "New Wave" was starting up, right? Maybe... a good comparison would be drug use? How many stories then took (heh) drugs as a natural and normal part of their future? How many readers would refuse to read something without positive depictions of mind-altering drugs? Apparently parts of "Nine Princes in Amber" were published in 1967; was the psychedelia of shadow-walking viewed by the author and publisher as a necessary mark of allegiance?
The comparison that comes to my mind is going back over 100 years, back to when "improving" moral messages were inserted into stories as a matter of course. It makes Saki's "The Storyteller" feel fresh, especially regarding the type of story that the eponymous storyteller is parodying. But the thing that story lacks is an foul and base enemy, to righteously vanquish in order to prove one's virtue, and that's an element that seems to be necessary these days.
https://www.commonlit.org/en/texts/the-storyteller
> 2. Why is this sort of writing so common now, if it is?
I'd blame the free market, combined with people being more intensely ideological? I suspect more and more people are buying stuff that explicitly treats their views as obviously good and normal, and that publishing houses are leaning into this trend in a self-reinforcing feedback loop. I just ran into a guy today who started up a discussion of fiction he liked with me, and "progressive" was one of the main criteria he listed for what he was reading (along with "independent" and "unpublished"). I was re-reading a paper copy of "Diplomatic Immunity" by Bujold, and was unsure whether to describe it as "progressive", given how he was using that word. I'm not sure his ideology would approve of Miles spending his life trying to nudge Barrayar into the mainstream of galactic society, rather than immediately implementing changes from the top down, or running away from the mess. Or for that matter what he'd make of galactic society, as described in the series.
The Troy Rising series and Snow Crash are two ultra libertarian sci-fi works I enjoyed. Snow Crash is more anarchic though.
Is Snow Crash as a story libertarian/anarchic? The setting is, and it's fun to read about, but it doesn't look like a good place to live.
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What, precisely, are you planning to do?
OC ACXLW Sat March 30 Models of Consciousness and AI Windfall
Hello Folks!
We are excited to announce the 59th Orange County ACX/LW meetup, happening this Saturday and most Saturdays after that.
Host: Michael Michalchik
Email: michaelmichalchik@gmail.com (For questions or requests)
Location: 1970 Port Laurent Place
(949) 375-2045
Date: Saturday, March 30 2024
Time 2 pm
Conversation Starters:
Models of Consciousness: A model of consciousness is a theoretical description that relates brain properties of consciousness (e.g., fast, irregular electrical activity, widespread brain activation) to phenomenal properties of consciousness (e.g., qualia, a first-person-perspective, the unity of a conscious scene). How can we evaluate and compare the various proposed models of consciousness, such as Global Workspace Theory, Integrated Information Theory, and others? What are the key challenges in developing a comprehensive theory of consciousness? Which models of consciousness would you like to focus further explore in future discussions?
http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Models_of_consciousness
The Windfall Clause: Sharing the Benefits of Advanced AI: The Windfall Clause proposes that AI firms make an ex-ante commitment to share extreme benefits from advanced AI systems. What are the key challenges in implementing such a policy? How can we ensure the Windfall Clause remains enforceable as AI systems become more powerful? What are the potential risks and benefits of letting AI firms voluntarily commit to benefit sharing versus government-mandated redistribution?
https://www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/cullen-okeefe-the-windfall-clause-sharing-the-benefits-of-advanced-ai
Walk & Talk: We usually have an hour-long walk and talk after the meeting starts. Two mini-malls with hot takeout food are readily accessible nearby. Search for Gelson's or Pavilions in the zip code 92660.
Share a Surprise: Tell the group about something unexpected that changed your perspective on the universe.
Future Direction Ideas: Contribute ideas for the group's future direction, including topics, meeting types, activities, etc.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to develop a ten-part series to be titled "The Last Secrets of WWII." This will be about WWII, of course, but not the famous battles that everyone has heard about, but rather about the obscure bits that don't get much coverage. What do you propose to cover in the series?
Personally, I'd like to see an episode about the Bevin Boys, British draftees who were assigned to work in coal mines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bevin_Boys
An episode about the work of the Western Approaches Tactical Group, a bunch of Wrens who developed new anti-u-boat tactics by wargaming, would also be welcome. https://www.history.co.uk/articles/the-story-of-the-u-boat-wargamers
The Battle of Castle Itter for just sheer absurdity. The American Army, the Wehrmacht and French prisoners team up to fight against Nazi loyalists of the SS in the final days of the war. Among the French prisoners are generals, a former Prime Minister, a famous tennis player, and Charles De Gaulle's sister.
One of the strangest battles of the war, maybe not obscure enough for the show.
Skorzeny.
From a UK perspective, I think the an important we don't teach about nearly enough is the Burmese famine.
I think it would be interested to teach more about the distribution* what people living in Germany at the time thought about Nazism and the war at different points before, during and shortly after it - how many believed in which aspects of Nazism? (When) was the war effort popular? (When) were they optimistic? How rapidly did opinions change? What does modern German thought on the war look like? I'm sure all this information is out there, but it doesn't really reach the British (or at least English) popular consciousness, as far as I can tell.
Again from a UK perspective, you could probably get away with classifying quite a lot of stuff about the Pacific front that's common knowledge in the US and the antipodes as "obscure bits that don't get much coverage".
Everyone knows about Bletchley Park and the Enigma; not many people know that the Nazis were also listening in on Churchill's radio conversations with Rooseveldt.
*I would not be so interested in anecdotes that aren't trying quite hard to be a representative sample.
The wiki for Vietnam made their time in WW2 look pretty interesting, just from the number of nationality changes they went through. I'd like an episode on that.
There are whole countries who were belligerents but which we never hear about. What about Mongolia? Greece? Brazil? The whole question of what happened in China is pretty hazy to me. What about Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Finland, Croatia and Thailand?
We don't need more stories about the British and Americans.
I'd kind of like the story of Wilhelm Canaris's career working for MI6. Unfortunately, I suspect a lot of that is still Secret in the sense of "MI5 will toss you in an oubliette if you mention it", rather than the more boring "doesn't get much coverage" sense. Not that 5's heart would be in it, just bureaucratic inertia and an impossibly long queue of documents awaiting declassification.
But if this is done to Hollywood's rules, we can just make up stuff to fill it out as needed for ten episodes.
I'd love to know more about the codebreakers working in the Pacific, who were so responsible for victories like Midway. In my experience they get far less fame than their Bletchley Park counterparts.
Japan's attempted bombing of the Oregon coast (in response to the Doolittle raid) also makes for a nice story, especially when you include the coda of what happened later when they invite the pilot back to town.
Why do so many jews hate white people so much?
https://i.imgur.com/7f01tfY.jpeg
Why is every post you make in an open thread phrased like you're trying to start a fight?
The simplest explanation is that he does, indeed, want to start a fight.
Because many Jews are highly educated liberal whites, who tend to voice antipathy towards other whites - especially those they correctly perceive to be particularly low in human capital. There's likely nothing distinctive about Jews in this regard, they just have a higher mean of educational attainment, so are more noticeable in this regard.
>especially those they correctly perceive to be particularly low in human capital
Okay, and black people have the lowest human capital of all, but this is used by the same jewish authors to defame gentile whites, not black people. Blacks having lower "human capital" than whites is a sign that whites are "oppressing" black people. Non-jew whites having lower "human capital" than jews however is simply proof that jews are superior to non-jew whites.
Do "educated" blacks write books about how "low human capital" blacks are evil and stupid? Does any group do anything analogous (other than maybe Indians talking about lower castes)? Can you find a single book published by a mainstream publisher in the US that explicitly defames a non-white race/ethnic group the way the books I posted do?
>Do "educated" blacks write books about how "low human capital" blacks are evil and stupid?
No, they make stand-up routines about it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3PJF0YE-x4
" Do "educated" blacks write books about how "low human capital" blacks are evil and stupid?
Maybe not books, but my impression is that a lot of the rhetoric of black Republican politicians is almost exactly this.
Black academics are mostly not Republicans, but in any case, the people you're talking about are mostly embarrassed of low class blacks. They don't think they're evil, they don't have the genuine hatred that jewish academics have of gentile whites. When they talk about them, it's mostly of the "our community needs to sort itself out", not "black people are destroying american society".
If I may piggyback on this thread, does anyone have a decent estimate of what portion of Jews who look white don't identify as white? I've only encountered one such person, but it's really not a question that comes up much.
If journalists and activists are anything to go by, these people rarely have a consistent ethnic identity in this respect and will opportunistically identify as white or not given the context. For example, you often see "My fellow white people.." type posts from these people to avoid the sense of an ethnic/cultural outsider lecturing white people, but then you'll have a similar type of jew endorse the idea that 'white privilege' is a thing but that jews do not possess it because they're "jewish, not white". It's apparently less controversial to claim that brown-skinned south asians have "white privilege" than white-skinned, majority-European-ancestry jews do. And of course, even though Askenazis are neither a majority or plurality of Israel's population, they are very keen to avoid identifying as white as it seen as undermining their claims of ancestral ownership of Israel and evokes the idea of white people oppressing brown people that they want to avoid.
Probably not entirely representative of jewish americans at large, but the sheer concentration of anti-white jewish activism suggests that this has to be drawn from a larger population of anti-white racial resentment. The jews most comfortably identified as white are probably prole jews without the racial resentment chip on the shoulder and also without any kind of institutional influence or platform. Many conservative American jews will also not strongly idenitify with their jewishness up until it comes time to defend israel or decry anti-semitism or "anti-semitism" e.g. on college campuses.
I just don't get the fixation on Jews, or blaming them for wokeness? What?
I really don't like the genetic IQ thing, but appealing to it would favour Jews right?But I prefer to focus entirely on culture. Black culture produced gangsta rap. Islamic culture produced honour killings. I think it's pretty clear there's something really, really rotten in both of those cultures. (Which is not to say they haven't produced good things as well, but those really stand out.)
What has Jewish culture done? Because all I can think of is persecuting early Christians nearly 2000 years ago. And I think they've paid for that in spades, in so far so you even accept that collective guilt is a legitimate thing.
How are they advancing wokeness? Some of the most prominant anti-woke liberals are Jewish (e.g. Christopher Hitchens, Nate Silver, and, you know, Scott Alexander). If you ask me to think of supposedly Jewish-dominated institutions, what comes to mind is Wall Street, Hollywood, and Israel. Only Hollywood can be considered left-wing. Maybe I'd be open to that accusation if I saw evidence that Jews in Hollywood are much more likely to push woke propaganda than non-Jews in Hollywood. I haven't seen that.
So what's the basis for this? Why Jews? (For the avoidance of doubt, I'm not Jewish, nor do I think I personally know, or have ever known, *anyone* who's Jewish. They're not as common in Australia. I have met plenty of leftists who vitriolically hate Jews though.)
Nit: Islamic culture is far from the only culture that practices and condones honor killings, the Quran itself says that both adulterers (the closest English translation to the Arabic Zani/Zania زاني/زانية, meaning a man/woman who engage in sex outside of marriage, whether any of them is married or not) should be lashed a 100 lashes each, not just the woman, and that women should additionally be confined to their homes till death or till "Allah finds a way for them". Moreover, Quran sets a ridiculous standard of evidence to accuse a woman of fornication, 4 male witnesses who have seen her while in the act. Those who don't pass the evidential standard are themselves punished.
Which is not to defend Islam or any religion of the same genre, I'm atheist and have been for years, it's just inaccurate to say that Islamic cultures produced the tradition, it's a conservative practice that was there way before Islam and continued long after it. Of course, like any religion, people use it to justify things that they were already doing. Evangelical Christians support Israel, Middle Eastern Christians don't, both can point to the Bible.
> What has Jewish culture done?
Like all cultures, good and bad things. The closest Jewish equivalent to "Honor Killing"-grade morally bad thing is 600K settlers building homes and burning trees/people outside of their internationally recognized nation state territory, and an army of 500K max and 150K min protecting them and standing aside while they do their thing. Granted, that's not very relevant to wokeness or American Jews, but gangsta rap and Honor Killings are not very relevant to most Blacks or Muslims either. The settlers are every bit as motivated by the Torah and the Talmud as Jihadis are motivated by Quran, here's a recent CNN interview with several Israelis in the settler movement https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkXJwErm8DM where they talk about the settler movement's latest hobby horse: re-settling Gaza and expelling the Gazans everywhere.
> How are they advancing wokeness?
Jews were very prominent in the American Civil Rights movement. This was mostly a good thing, but you can draw a direct line between that early and mostly sane mobilization and today's wokeness. Jews are also overrepresented in Academia, which is of course the bastion of wokeness.
(I don't agree with OP and I think he's annoying, I'm merely answering your questions with answers that would explain OP's sentiments and many others like them. I don't think Jews are particularly blamable for Wokism anymore than - say - Blacks or Indians or East Asians, as a matter of fact they were nastily bitten by it post-October 7th.)
>I don't think Jews are particularly blamable for Wokism anymore than - say - Blacks or Indians or East Asians
Sure, if you think "wokism" (I didn't call jews woke, I called them anti-white) is something that exists due to individuals spontaneously expressing woke views. But it's not, all of it has its roots in academia and far-left activism, all of which was disproportionately jewish by far.
>as a matter of fact they were nastily bitten by it post-October 7th
The ADL, one of the most prominent Zionist propaganda organizations in the world, has been ferociously anti-white for its entire history. Which is another example of jews using hatred of whites in the pursuit of their own ethnonationalist goals.
The ""disproportionately"" implies a ratio, did you actually calculate such a ratio? Your top level post is just a photo with several woke books whose authors are Jewish-sounding names, but what's the base rate? How many woke books are published by white women? By asian women? By indian and black and native American women?
> The ADL
> is another example of jews
The ADL is shit, Israel is shit, neither of them are suitable placeholders for "Jews" in general. I have a feeling you wouldn't employ this standard with your own ethnicity, presumably White US/UK citizen. Is Donald Trump or the Republications "White people"? Is the royal family of the UK and their tiresome antiques "The British"? 90% of everything is shit, and 99% of everything in politics or on the internet is even shittier.
Did you click the link on my post?
Jewish writers are responsible for an unending stream of vitriolically hateful anti-white books (and "scholarship" in humanities and social studies departments).
Can you just IMAGINE if you took any one of the books pictured and replaced 'white' with 'jewish', and had this book published by a major publisher, stocked at university libraries and prescribed for academic courses? This would be absolutely scandalous, and everyone responsible would be called "white supremacists". And yet, the reverse happens and people rush to the defense of these jewish writers and call you a weirdo or anti-semite for noticing that they're nearly all jewish. It's literally no difference than when it's fine to say there's "too many white people" in e.g. the media, but say that about jews (despite them being more overrepresented than gentile whites), and this is scandalous.
And as for Australia, many of the most prominent early advocates for "multiculturalism" were jewish, and they employed anti-white rhetoric to advance this anti-white cause.
Your link wasn't working for me earlier, but in any case your link is just a list of hateful woke books. Some of the names look Jewish; I'll take your word for it that they all are.
Yes, this is anti-white racism plain and simple and it's disgusting in its hypocrisy. But...I don't see how your attitude is any different. You're observing that a certain larger-than-average proportion of Jews are involved in wokeness (which again I'll take your word for that being a fact), and then concluding that there's something wrong with Jews in general. This...is exactly what wokists do. Observe that some Whites have disproportionately done various racist things (ignoring anything beyond the last few centuries of course, because their brains don't cope with complexity) and then blame all whites and say we're all complicit in it or some shit.
I don't see how playing their hypocrisy game is helpful. God knows there's enough "it's not racist when WE do it" crap going around. Can't anyone (anyone?) actually hold to a "actually, racism is whenever you treat people different because of their race. Full. Stop." Not "except when they're whites" or "except when they're Jews" or "except when they're blacks" or "except when they're yellowish penguins who identify as triangles" but, like, you know, *always*.
Also, calling multiculturalism an anti-white cause is bizzarely playing into the left's narrative. Multiculturalism has nothing to do with race. Culture is not race, as much as the left tries to pretend it is. Stop making their dishonest totalitarian project easier.
>Observe that some Whites have disproportionately done various racist things
Okay, but these "racist" whites are the most reviled people in society. They have no power. If a white person is exposed as being "racist" that could spell the end of their career as they know it.
These jews who publish hateful anti-white books are not the dregs of society. They're not self-publishing this stuff anonymously.
These people and books are being published by mainstream publishing houses and universities. Many of them are employed at elite universities. Far from taking any kind of risk by publishing this stuff, this stuff is so celebrated in elite circles that these books are the BASIS of their careers.
These people are not reviled by jews generally the way racist whites are by other whites. It's not in any way comparable.
>Multiculturalism has nothing to do with race.
Multiculturalism is trivially a euphemism for racial diversity. Pre-modern europe had countless different cultures, but it wasn't until the mass importation of brown people that it became "multicultural".
And like I said, *anti-white rhetoric* was used to justify multiculturalism in Australia. That there's something deficient with white people that they need brown people to make up for, that it's racist to prefer to be around people like you (never applied to non-whites), brow beating white australians over the 'white australia policy'.
You didn't know that Jews have plaid butts? Also paisley feet, in colors of black, periwinkle and hot pink. Sort of like flamingos.
Jews should consider it extremely fortunate that they are largely indistinguishable from gentile whites, otherwise their overrepresentation in various fields and institutions would become extremely obvious and more normies would likely be uncomfortable with it. If Korean people occupied the position that Ashkenazi jews do in American society instead, I think a lot of people would think something strange is going on.
And of course, jews would also be unable to lecture white people as their "fellow white people", which would make said rhetoric less effective.
Yeah, I think we should limit the societal participation of everybody except the super-Aryan folks. What could be clearer than that the browner you are, the stupider, less talented, hornier, slyer, more violent and, of course, stinkier you are?
Also my toilet has been making weird noises and I'm concerned there's a Jew with a really bad case of anti-white racial resentment hiding in the tank. But not onna them prole Jews, cuz I keep finding really intellectual books on the back of the toilet.
Jews support white privilege theory and are some of its biggest proponents.
THEY want to limit white societal participation. As do much of if not the majority of the left through DEI.
Jews say that its a problem that there's "too many" white men in various fields and institutions. That this needs to be "rectified" through discriminatory hiring and promotion programs, but of course this doesn't apply to jews who are an oppressed minority.
But as you're so clearly displaying here, turning their own logic on them is absolutely unacceptable.
<this needs to be "rectified" through discriminatory hiring and promotion programs
I *definitely* did not hire a Jew to moan and mutter in my toilet tank
Because Jews fall so far short of your standard of fair-mindedness, kindness and investment in resolving conflict.?
Speaking of resolving conflict...I'd like to know why you ignored my question about abortion at https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-319/comment/51472924. It really disturbs me when people casually say they support abortions without even a single word about the child being killed, and I was particularly shocked because you generally seem to show compassion in your posts, and I tried to ask in a careful way that even acknowledged I respect certain kinds of justifications.
And just being completely ignored felt like a slap in the face. And an endorsement of all my worst impressions about abortion supporters (i.e. being carelessly, even sociopathically, unconcerned about anyone but themselves). But I thought this was probably an irrational reaction and that maybe you just didn't get around to responding (as I often don't when people in a thread ask me questions) and I let it go.
But now, in light of your very pointed endorsement of "fair-mindedness, kindness and investment in resolving conflict", I do find it reasonable to ask.
You're right, I didn't intend my not answering to be a slap in the face. It was an old expiring thread , the thread it came up on was not about abortion, but some other issue entirely, and I just lost track of your question. I just spent 20 mins typing out an answer for you and then Substack sort of swallowed it whole. That happens to me about one reply in 10, have no idea what causes it. The text box just disappears. It's like there's some secret keyboard shortcut for Cancel that I hit accidentally. I'm on my way to work but will try to write out an answer to you later.
Thank you for clarifying. The thread was someone saying it's okay to kill in defence of property, getting mobbed by lots of people including you mocking conservatives for constantly asking "can I kill *this* person?", and your comment also mentioned supporting abortions which I thought was, to put it very mildly, a bit rich. The context was very much relevant is all I'm saying.
I don't think I've seen the text box do what you described but it does lag ridiculously, and often I accidentally hit cancel because of the scrolling lag. I just try to keep selecting and copying the text as I write.
OK, I’ll give you my reasons for being pro-abortion, and if you like you can tell me what you think is wrong with them, but then I hope we can just let it rest there.
-At the point when most abortions are performed, embryos are not sentient beings. They don’t suffer pain or fear. I could write more about this, but all I have to say is the standard stuff, and having read what you wrote in response to Christina it sounds like you don’t disagree with that, so I won’t say more.
-OK, about the more emotional side of it. I had an abortion when I was 22. I was about 8 weeks pregnant. I did not feel distressed about ending the life of an embryo, because it was not yet a baby, or anything close to a baby. In both size and in sentience, it was sort of in the same category as a big mole that I needed to get rid of to protect wellbeing and my future
If somehow there had been no chance of getting an abortion until I was 7 mos. pregnant, I would not have believed it was right to abort what was now a baby, and I also would not have been able to bear to do it — it would indeed have felt like murder.
You write that "the vast majority of pro-choice activists simply *do not care* if the child is conscious or not." What?!? I don’t know what gave you the idea that most pro-choice activists don’t care whether the fetus is conscious or not. It’s simply not true. I mean, there is a gray area in fetal development during the second trimester when they are what you could call sort of conscious. The can feel pain and move to get away from something poking them. On the other hand it seems very unlikely that they are capable of mosts of the kinds of suffering that murdered sentient beings feel: Recognizing they are in danger and being terrified, feeling betrayed by trusted beings one relies on, having a sense of a self and a terrible resistance to having it snuffed out. I can image some pro-abortion people reacting angrily to an argument that a 4 month fetus is conscious by saying it doesn’t matter, and I can see their point. It’s conscious, but in a very limited way — not in a way that matters much when deciding whether it is an act of great cruelty to end the pregnancy.. And I agree with that. It does seem to me much less monstrous and cruel to inflict brief suffering on a semi-sentient being than to do it to a fully sentient one — a 6 month old baby, say. They’re whole different worlds. Virtually every woman I know is unambivalently in favor of abortion rights, and every single one would be as horrified as you are at the idea of killing a *baby*. Yes, of course, it’s monstrous. I’m sure if you look online you can pull up quotes of enraged malignant pro-abortion narcissists saying that you should be able to abort right up to the day before your due date, and they don’t give a shit what the baby feels. But you can find online people espousing all kinds of monstrous, crazy things.
Here’s an example of what seems wrong to me with your thinking about this. Let’s say someone is against gun control. I personally am not against it, but I know there are plenty of people for whom target shooting or hunting is a cherished hobby, and who are stunned and furious at the idea that the government could just take away their pistols or rifles. But what if I believed that everybody who’s against gun control believes that if my dog strays into their yard it’s just fine for them to kill it, if a drunk teenager stops to pee in their bushes in the middle of the night and they think it’s an intruder it’s fine for them to shoot him because "he’s on my land.” But see, that’s just not the right way for me to think about it. Lots of people against gun control are no more likely to shoot a dog or a drunk teenager in their yard than I would be. They’d be horrified at the very idea. Imagining that all people against gun control are in favor of shooting the hell out of innocent beings who stray onto their land IS JUST NOT TRUE, and is guaranteed to make you feel furious and desperate. Exactly the same can be said about thinking that those in favor of abortion rights are fine with killing babies.
And one other thing about ending the lives of non-conscious or only-barely-conscious beings. I have made clear to my family that if I develop dementia, and reach the point where I do not recognize them that I would like to be euthanized. I believe I can arrange this by making sure there are documents signed by me at a time when I am not demented stating that this is my wish. (They would probably have to take me to Switzerland for the actual euthanasia.). They know I would like them to do that even if I seem content. I do not want a lot of money wasted on caring for this barely-conscious version of me, and I don't want my family to have to live with a bunch of memories of me in that state. I hope that helps you see that I do not have a double standard -- one for me, and one for unwanted fetuses. I really believe that living things that are non-conscious or only very weakly conscious do not have the same rights as fully conscious beings, and that decisions about them should mostly be determined by the needs of other, fully conscious beings.
Thank you for this. I feel like this is almost exactly my position WRT abortion, stated much better than I could hope to do myself.
Thank you.
I don't strongly object to any of the responses or arguments given in this thread. I don't fully agree with it, but I see as a reasonable disagreement.
And indeed I had hoped, and probably expected, that people in this community would have reasoned and morally principled justifications , although I was not certain and I felt strongly compelled to clarify. I'm really glad to have that confirmed.
(The reason I expected this was both the high standard of reasoned argument here and the almost total absence of the kind of toxic feminists who are overwhelmingly responsible for the monstrous rhetoric.)
We don't have to discuss this anymore, that's fine. I just really needed to know.
In reply to Christina I'll mention some examples of the rhetoric I was talking about.
Regarding guns, people often point that out to me when I express this idea. All I can say is that I don't feel like I've ever seen the equivalent. I could very well just have overlooked it, maybe similar rhetoric exists on the pro-gun side. But I feel like I've seen lots of insistance that more guns would actually lead to fewer school shootings (by allowing self-defence) and lots of statements that it's unfair and wrong to restrict law-abiding gun-owners for something that has nothing to do with them, that they had no involvement in, and that the proper course of action is to harshly punish the actual perpetrators. But I don't feel I've seen anything like "it doesn't actually *matter* if children die, all that matters is my rights!"
I *feel* like I've seen that exact sentiment more times than I can possibly count from pro-choicers.
That's my perception. Apologies if I came across as accusatory.
This was an excellent comment. +1 all the way, especially the analogy to the average gun owner not actively wanting to shoot harmless pets and bush-peeing teenagers.
To extend the analogy, it's worth noting that the consequences of even a textbook "good shoot" - a well-documented, unambiguous imminent lethal threat - are DIRE. Forget the trauma of the crime, the criminal investigation and civil suits and the impact on one's community are where the Chinese water torture aftermath of a shooting all occurs.
No one, and I mean NO ONE even *slightly* mentally competent wants to go to jail and/or lose his home after inappropriately shooting a bush-peeing teenager. Even psychopaths who might enjoy shooting that damn kid on the lawn don't want the aftermath.
There are probably some parallels to abortion in there!
I am likely past child-bearing years, so I don't have much personal interest in the fight, and I am not only pro-choice, but pro-abortion, because I care deeply about the quality of human life.
I literally can't think of a single instance in which voluntary abortion isn't a positive for both the parent(s) who didn't want a child and the unborn, who avoids being born unwanted (and who experiences nothing, anyway).
It's also worth pointing out that spontaneous abortion, aka miscarriage, is also *abortion.* If your position on abortion is informed by a religious tradition, it's worth asking why a deity would cause "spontaneous" abortion in a vast number of pregnancies, both wanted and unwanted, but would forbid humans the power of abortion to mitigate foreseeable suffering.
(https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/372193v1)
Thank you for your response. Although you're not the one who casually mentioned it without explanation.
I not only respect that position, but I held that exact position for a while. Right down to calling myself "not pro-choice but pro-abortion", on the grounds that no consciouness is present during first trimester abortions, and therefore no one exists to be harmed, and therefore if there's even slight doubt as to how wanted the child is they are better off aborted before coming into existence.
I no longer agree with that argument, though the reasons are a bit complex. Moreover, I very much respect it as a morally principled argument. Changing my mind on the moral logic of that consciousness-based argument is not at all the main factor in my shift to becoming pro-life.
No, what completely shifted my position was...a slow, dawning, horrific realisation that the vast majority of pro-choice activists simply *do not care* if the child is conscious or not. And they make that as clear as they possibly can.
Over and over and over we are told that "it doesn't actually matter" if there's consciousness or personhood. Over and over. All that matters, we are told, is "what I want". "What I demand". That "I do whatever the fuck I want and I couldn't give two fucks about this parasite that I don't want."
It...doesn't...actually...matter. I can't imagine how a person with anything resembling a conscience could, in any imaginable circumstances, utter those words. To confront a situation that people are telling you amounts to the murder of a baby, and to say that doesn't matter. At all. Of no significance. To deal with a life-or-death situation involving another human life and to think *only* of yourself. To not spend five seconds thinking of anything or anyone other than your own desires. And to be absolutely, shamelessly *proud* of that, to happily admit it and boast of it, and to be (instead of condemnded and octracised from all decent society) celebrated and valorised as "empowered" and "assertive" for your sociopathic selfishness.
I feel comfortable saying these people are among the most evil people *on the face of the earth*. Nothing compares to this. Nothing. Not immigration, not poverty, not war. Nothing compares to the monstrosity of being told you're killing a child, and responding that that doesn't matter at all whatsoever. And proudly saying you will do so, and you "demand" the right to do so, for *any reason at all*.
Even Putin thinks he needs to invent a claimed reason for killing people.
Now, I don't believe that most women who get abortions think like that at all. I'm happy to believe that almost all of them have either thought carefully and concluded that there is no awareness in the fetus or that the circumstances are compelling to make it the right thing for everyone, or are desperate or scared and not thinking clearly, not sure it's right but feeling they have no choice. And I don't judge either of these groups.
Only the monsters who calmly, coldly think only of themselves and utterly disregard the child. I think these may be only a very small number of those who get abortions, but it seems pretty clear they are the vast, vast majority of the activists.
And I can barely comprehend or cope with the fact that the latter are living, in my society, side by side with decent people. And I want to do everything I can to bring these monsters to justice.
So this is why I am so obsessive about asking for an explanation when someone says they're pro-choice. Because there's a good chance that they, like you, have a perfectly principled moral position that has concern for the interests of people generally, and there's a good chance that they're a complete monster. And I often have no idea which, and it causes me to tense up, causes me so much stress.
Those are my emotions about the issue. What actual reasons someone has for supporting abortion matter magnitudes more to me than whether they do. (Of course there are people who tell me that the above mentioned people don't mean what they say. Given that they say it over and over and, when told they surely don't really mean it, proudly and clearly say they absolutely mean all of it, I don't find that persuasive.)
By the way, my position on abortion has nothing whatsoever to do with religious beliefs (I'm a theist but wouldn't call myself religious). Frankly, I find it bizzare that anyone's would, especially since if babies are sinless and go to heaven when they die this would seem to make abortion good. If you believe that this life is all there is, on the other hand, then you'd better be damn sure not to end any life that might possibly in some sense exist.
I'm really stunned at this depiction of the thought of pro-choice people, because it's not what I've encountered at all.
Forty years ago, there was a lot of pro-choice rhetoric that depicted the fetus as a meaningless lump of tissue that could be thrown away without concern like any tumor or cyst. I found that attitude rather offensive. But they don't talk like that any more. Over and over again, I see abortion treated as a difficult decision that needs considerable thought and care put into whether it's the best decision or not.
But the question of consciousness or personhood doesn't come up because it's irrelevant to 99% of abortions. Most abortions take place before anything that's recognizable as a human child exists, despite anti-abortion rhetoric about a beating heart (which is hardly a "heart" as a born person has one). Late-term abortions are almost exclusively of non-viable pregnancies, so again it's not a person as we'd recognize one.
> , despite anti-abortion rhetoric about a beating heart (which is hardly a "heart" as a born person has one)
Pro-choice advocates should have countered early and often with, "A beating heart doesn't work without breathing lungs, dummy," or some pithier version of the idea.
As it stands, I believe that the fetus is not a person. There is no child killed in an abortion, no matter when it is performed[1]. Therefore, abortion is a completely *neutral* action, no more morally fraught than getting a tattoo or laser eye surgery or any other alteration to your own body. Within this framework, I fully support no limitations on abortion beyond practical health and safety standards (to the same extent that it's a good idea to make sure tattoo parlors are clean).
If through some hypothetical situation I were convinced that an unborn fetus were conscious and a person, I would still support abortion rights. It would make abortion into an immense tragedy, one worth counseling against and trying to avoid, but one that still should remain *legal*. I say that because by the time a fetus is even plausibly conscious, it is clearly wanted. Nobody[2] is waiting 9 months to get a late term abortion just for kicks. Every case of a late term abortion happening is because of a heart-wrenching tragedy, a discovery of some nonviability or health problem that forces someone to make the worst decision of their lives. And I don't think the law weighing in on that moment would make it better for anyone.
Given that, I will state that it does not matter whether the fetus is a person or not. It doesn't change my conclusion, just the weight of the decision. To an extent, this shouldn't be surprising. Few conclusions are reached on the weight of a single consideration. Many values would have to change for me to change that conclusion. If that makes me the most evil person you can imagine, then I am glad your life has been so peaceful to make that so.
[1] I will bite the bullet and admit that birth is an arbitrary line. But it is one positioned such that it has a 0% false negative rate. Infants shortly after birth probably aren't really people yet either, but it is valuable to pretend otherwise and birth is a useful schelling fence
[2] Fine, in a world of 8 billion people, SOMEONE has probably done this. They are not frequent enough to justify imposing restrictions on people.
I don't think your position as described is evil at all. Crucially, your argument as to why "consciousness doesn't matter" depends on your certainty that consciousness can't exist until the point where almost all abortions are performed for compelling reasons. So lack of consciousness at certain stages is still a central part of your position. The people I'm calling evil are the ones saying that *even* if an early-term fetus were conscious or even completely self-aware, abortion for even the most trivial reason would still be absolutely fine! Or saying about late-term abortions for trivial reasons, not that they never happen or that they're a horrible risk worth taking (as you did), but saying that they are utterly justified, or even *require no justification at all*. "My rights are not negotiable!" See the PZ Myers link in my response to Christina.
These people (https://web.archive.org/web/20170218220337im_/https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*AHzA_WFBckrbOtUV.jpg) are not treating abortion as a tragedy. I also saw something which I can't find about a female comedian saying she had an abortion and her audience cheering. Any confidence that no one's doing it "for kicks" is not really compatible with this sort of rhetoric.
And I don't think the idea that we can be pretty sure something horrible doesn't happen, therefore we don't need laws against it, is accepted pretty much anywhere else. I've seen advocates of various anti-discrimination laws sonetimes explicitly acknowledge that they haven't heard of the discriminatiom they want to ban actually happening, but that that isn't a reason not to have a law.
My arbitrary cut off line is independence: The ability to live without heroic medical intervention outside the womb.
Which is to say, when an entity can breathe without assistance beyond fleeting first-aid-ish care like wiping nostrils, it's now a baby, not a fetus.
But an entity which can't survive without complex machinery controlling its breath is a fetus, not a baby. NICU or human womb - same function.
Nobody agrees with me, but I think "breathing on your own" is a decent bar for the kind of autonomy which defines personhood.
Huh, this was not the response I was expecting at all!
I'm typing on my phone so I can't provide a full some response right now, but where are you seeing pro-abortionists who are acknowledgeding a "child" with meaningful experience and capacity for pain exists, but that it doesn't matter?
I don't think I'm seeing those arguments, and I'm wondering if an algorithm is maybe making their population seem larger than it is?
Yes, that may be true.
I got a bit emotional in the above post, and I perhaps equivocated on two different things regarding what the "vast majority" of pro-choicers say. The vast majority do not outright say "it literally doesn't matter how conscious the fetus is or whether it's a person". Rather, the vast majority simply do not mention consciousness or personhood at all! They don't acknowledge any gestational limits whatsoever. They don't acknowledge any possibility that they would rethink their position if new evidence about fetal awareness came to light. If confronted with "you're killing a child" they usually don't respond by saying it's not a child, they simply scream back "bodily autonomy!" (And my impression is also that most of these same people support or sympathise with vaccine mandates, which may well be the most blatant hypocrisy I'm ever seen in my life, but that's probably not a constructive way to argue about things). Reading through pro-choice news articles and editorials, press releases from pro-choice groups, and statements from politicians, I'm waiting, and waiting and waiting, for them to just *mention*, just once, the presence of what many claim is a human child. And it's almost never mentioned or acknowledged at all.
They *implicitly* seem to be saying that the fetus, conscious or not, pain-capable or not, is of utterly no significance in their position. I admit I can't call these people evil. It's perfectly possible that they do internally base their reasoning entirely on the absence of consciousness, and would change their position if evidence about that changed, and do support a gestational limit in law or in practice. But for some reason, many of them never ever say this. I don't know why, and I find it incredibly distressing.
The ones I'm calling evil are the ones who outright say it doesn't matter. A few examples:
https://the-orbit.net/greta/2014/03/13/having-a-reasonable-debate-about-abortion/ A feminist absolutely furious, not only at the thought of not being allowed to kill a fetus for any reason, but at the thought of having to actually give *reasons* for being allowed to do so. Complete with her saying that personhood is completely irrelevant.
http://www.shakesville.com/2013/03/the-rhetorical-power-of-pig-pain.html?m=1 A femimist condemning Richard Dawkins for *supporting* abortion...because his argument rests on the existence of fetal pain, and it's so offensive to thereby imply that if there *was* fetal pain a woman wouldn't have an unconditional right to abort anyway.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2015/09/05/wrong-question/ PZ Myers, one of the slimiest "rationalists" if he even counts as one, flippantly saying that whether abortions for Down Syndrome are justified isn't even a question worth asking. And being cheered on for this in the comments
All three of these are prominient people who've written books and are the faces of entire movements. This doesn't include the innumerable comments I've seen saying every possible variation of "personhood doesn't matter" "all that matters is what *I* want", responding to a question of whether they're okay with abortion up until birth for any reason whatsoever or none at all, with a proud flippant "yep!"
Endlessly invoking the Violinist Argument, despite that argument being intended for cases of rape, and coldly saying that even deliberately using abortion as contraception, even for no other reason than not wanting to use any actual contraception, is not only perfectly fine, but that it's "oppressive" to even suggest otherwise.
Persistently calling unborn children "parasites". I put this in a fundamentally different category to "clump of cells". While the latter is dehumanising, it does look like an appeal to a lack of consciousness, albeit in a nasty way. But "parasite" is entirely based on the fact that the child is dependent on another to survive, with no concern for whether or not it's aware, as if this categorically makes disposing of it for the slightest convenience okay. "You're in my way, you can die" is the sort of thing I'd associate with a cliched movie villian rather than a real person in a peaceful compassionate society.
Many of these people are perhaps not saying that the fetus *is* conscious and that they don't care. They're saying that it wouldn't make a difference if it was, or that they don't care enough to even ask the question. Even if I were 100% convinced that fetuses possess absolutely no consciousness whatsoever at any stage, I would put these people in the same category as someone who speeds through a school zone, utterly indifferent to whether he hits a child or not and proudly saying so, but by luck doesn't hit anyone. Not only is this person evil, I would want him locked up even if nobody was hit. Who knows what he might do tomorrow, if that's his attitude to human life and concern for others. And the simple thought of having someone with this mindset living side by side with me is sickening.
So I'm sure I've overstated the number of these sorts of people. But they're definitely around, there are definitely lots of them. And the worst thing is not the people themselves. It's the culture (especially the progressive, feminist culture) that *celebrates* this attitude. If I could see lots of normal pro-choice people loudly condemning the above people, saying they do not represent them at all, that *their* support for abortion is based strictly on weighing up the interests of all people and someone who thinks only of themselves is an evil person, even if they don't think their *position* as at all evil...I would feel immeasurably better. Instead, all I see is many others who, even if they don't talk that way themselves, unequivocally praising the ones who do, praising their "courage" or whatever of "standing up for their rights" which, it seems, has come to mean advertising as clearly as possible your complete selfishness and disregard for others.
To be as clear as possible, nobody in this thread has come remotely close to the attitude I'm describing, and all have very clearly diffetentiated themselves from it. But this comment section is not a representative sample of people.
I once had a long, illuminating but somewhat disturbing discussion with a very pro-choice medical professional who helped run a clinic for late-term abortions. She had plenty of reasonably well-thoughtout defenses of her position, which was basically abortion on demand (in consultation with a doctor) up until birth. The women who need late-term abortions are (according to her) disproportionately poor, non-white, in abusive relationships etc.
I pushed her on the cognitive dissonance I was experiencing in that her position seemed to be that as long as a fetus was in the womb, it was most definitely not a person, and yet an hour later it would be murder to take this newborn baby's life.
What it finally came down to as we spoke, was that in her medical training she was taught that babies are not truly conscious, and therefore not really capable of suffering, until they are about 1 year old. She pointed to the fact that we do not remember our first year of existence at all (there may be exceptions but this seems to be almost universally the case). So for her, the time of birth was arbitrarily used as the definition of personhood, but to take her POV to its logical conclusion, ending the life of a severely disabled 3-month-old, for example, would be ethically defensible.
I tried to dig a bit deeper but it was obvious to me she was not enjoying the conversation, so I let it go. We never spoke on this topic again.
Okay, so you think there's nothing wrong with vitriolic racial hatred, so long as it's white people on the receiving end? Very interesting.
I say something you don't like and you immediately go to work trying to establish rapport, grasp my point of view even if it angers you, and making a real effort to be fair-minded and open yourself to the possibility that I may be right about some thngs. You can't expect other people to be as gifted and diligent as you are at resolving conflict!
You made an extremely snide, insulting comment and now act as if I'm the unreasonable one.
But at the end of the day, you are simply engaging in apologetics for extremely hateful people, and are more offended by my calling them out than you are of their hatred.
When I was a little kid, I was picked on and bullied. There were several of us in that position, and we were friends of a sort. I'm not proud of this, but when some of the others were being bullied, while I wouldn't actively participate, I would join in the laughter. It felt good to not be the lowest any more, to be part of the group, the group that was defining itself against an Other. It never stopped me from being a target, and I don't remember what my friends did at those times.
I can tell myself that I wasn't even 10, or 12, or whatever, but that doesn't make me feel less guilty. I look around today, and in other areas, I see adults doing the same thing. And I wonder: I'm good at seeing multiple sides of issues, but how is that different than my younger self taking an opportunity to distance myself from the target du jour? Is part of it simply a defense mechanism to avoid identifying with the lowest of the low? I don't think so; there are times when I do identify with the lowest. But I could be wrong.
Come see about me and my little slice of Internet bullshit, when we ask the question - why do some people feel compelled to do free PR for those in higher positions than themselves? I don't have the answer, but come read what I think about it anyways 💋
https://kyleimes.substack.com/p/doing-unpaid-damage-control-for-the
During the Covid era and afterwards, there were two great debates revolving online around Covid: whether Covid was really dangerous (bit hard to quantify, but generally this would include things like a considerable chance of debilitating long covid, heightened chance of cancer after Covid, the "airborne HIV" statements and so on) or not that dangerous (ie. comparable to a bad or a regular case of influenza) maybe, and whether the Covid vaccines were dangerous (ie. would cause considerably heightened risk of stroke or vaccine death compared to other vaccines, expose one to cancer or so on) or not (ie. comparable to regular vaccines).
Now, while usually the "mainstream" view during the most heightened Covid fear era was implicitly or explicitly that Covid was dangerous and vaccines were not dangerous and actually were beneficial, and the stereotypical "dissident" view is that Covid was not dangerous but the vaccines were, these two axis of debate aren't actually necessarily connected. Thus, already during this time you'd have people saying that neither Covid or the vaccines were particularly dangerous, and this basically would be the current "mainstream" view, at least the people (apart from diehard zero-Covidists) have been going out and about for two years now in a way indicating they no longer consider Covid to be a danger.
However, does anyone remember anyone of any importance willing to go to the bat for the view that *both* Covid and the vaccines would actually be comparably very dangerous compared to, say, influenza and the flu vaccine? I remember some zero covid types basically saying that the vaccine wasn't as good as claimed and thus lockdowns and masking should continue indefinitely, but I don't remember any going the whole hog to actually say that while they fear Covid, they thought the vaccines were very dangerous by themselves, too. Logically, you'd expect at least someone to take this stance, as well.
I have a dim memory that, early on, before the talking points had settled into their final form, there were some anti-vaccine people who didn't want the vaccine because it was too much like getting covid. That could be a neural net hallucination, though.
There was certainly a point when, when I was informed about how mRNA vaccines worked, I was quite queasy about having some of my cells persuaded to synthesize the spike protein.
Yeah, that made me slightly queasy too, but it was balanced out by my technophilia, because it was such a cool bit of immunological jujitsu. :-)
Very true!
I don't know about anyone of importance, but this view is pretty widely held by the general public. My mother-in-law holds it, for example. I'm pretty sure it's how China simultaneously sustained zero-covid policy and a low vaccination rate for such a long time. People hate needles.
In medical journals I see things like: According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, African Americans are 30% more likely to die from heart disease than non-Hispanic whites.
I want to apply the same statistical thinking.
62% of Lao students are below the standard, and 38% of non Lao students are below the standard.
Our Lao kids are XXX% more likely than non-Lao kids to be below the standard.
Is this a simple percentage increase calculation? As in 62-38=24, 24/38= .63 x100= Lao kids are 63% more likely to be below grade level at our school.
Or would the denominator be the average of the two percents? 24/45 x 100= 53%
Any advice is much appreciated
30% more likely to die means 1.3 times as likely to die. If 62% of Lao die of X and 38% of non-Lao, then Lao are 62/38 times as likely to die of X, or 1.63 times as likely to die. So the answer is 63% more likely.
So I gave up drinking beer for Lent again this year. I'm not Catholic, but I drink too much beer and I figure it's good to give it up for a month or so every year. And by giving it up for Lent I get to celebrate those two party time catholic holidays, Fat Tuesday and Dingus Day. (Here in Buffalo we have a large polish community so lots of Dingus day stuff.) Now this year I asked a young women I work with, "So does Lent include Easter Sunday?" And she told me that Lent doesn't include any Sundays! WTF, so I can get plastered every Sunday? This seems like much less of a sacrifice. Besides which I'm giving up the beer for me, my health.
The Canon Law says:
Days of Penance
Can. 1249 The divine law binds all the Christian faithful to do penance each in his or her own way. In order for all to be united among themselves by some common observance of penance, however, penitential days are prescribed on which the Christian faithful devote themselves in a special way to prayer, perform works of piety and charity, and deny themselves by fulfilling their own obligations more faithfully and especially by observing fast and abstinence, according to the norm of the following canons.
Can. 1250 The penitential days and times in the universal Church are every Friday of the whole year and the season of Lent.
Can. 1251 Abstinence from meat, or from some other food as determined by the Episcopal Conference, is to be observed on all Fridays, unless a solemnity should fall on a Friday. Abstinence and fasting are to be observed on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday.
Can. 1252 The law of abstinence binds those who have completed their fourteenth year. The law of fasting binds those who have attained their majority, until the beginning of their sixtieth year. Pastors of souls and parents are to ensure that even those who by reason of their age are not bound by the law of fasting and abstinence, are taught the true meaning of penance.
Can. 1253 The conference of bishops can determine more precisely the observance of fast and abstinence as well as substitute other forms of penance, especially works of charity and exercises of piety, in whole or in part, for abstinence and fast.
So giving up beer seems to be your penance, which you should follow throughout the season of Lent and on every Friday during the rest of the year. Actual fasting seems to be only required on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday.
The point of Easter is that it’s a feast day marking the end of Lent (and celebrating the resurrection)
But you don’t get the other Sundays “off”.
https://www.catholic.org/lent/story.php?id=76859. But I'm not catholic so I can do whatever I want.
Interesting. We always got taught to maintain our sacrifices, but it’s been a long time. The mini Easter thing probably mattered a lot more back when the fast from meat was expected for all of Lent, not just Fridays.
I was raised Catholic and never heard of Sundays as "not counting" for Lent.
On the other hand we never gave up anything for lent either, apart from (non-fish) meat on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday.
Me neither, which is why I could never get my math to be mathin', but I did hear of that once I no longer was Catholic.
It's not 40 days unless you skip Sundays (Ash Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday + 6 × (Monday to Saturday))
Consider signing up to Vibeclipse if you haven't already, it's a cool rationalist/EA event and you get to see the eclipse in Texas! https://vibe.camp/vibeclipse_home/
Are there really zero good free online IQ-tests?
(I would be fine with not-free, but I'm in Russia, so each payment is problematic.)
The Great British Intelligence Test is still online. There was heated debate about whether it was a *real* IQ test. The problem-solving questions seemed like the standard IQ questions that I've seen in the IQ tests. They also test working memory and things like emotional intelligence (that one really pissed off a lot of commentators). Speed of response is also used in the intelligence measurement and the working memory components.
https://gbit.cognitron.co.uk/account/consent
The results here...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/5NG89VsBmQ9Z490v7WzP01T/great-british-intelligence-test-the-results
IIRC, the test moves pretty fast, and I gave up in frustration at the working memory part. I have shitty working memory and I always have. But I have great locative memory, and I've memorized vast amounts of info that I've learned throughout my life using a system similar to memory palaces. It annoyed me that there's no test for that sort of memory.
I believe there are free copies of the LSAT and GRE online -- both are sort of like the SAT, but for people applying to grad and professional schools. I don't know whether they allow you to translate your result into an LSAT or a GRE score. If they do, there is info online for translating those into IQ scores. I don't know how good the translation to IQ is, but see no reason why it shouldn't be as good as transformations for the SAT. The LSAT and GRE tests themselves are very good quality and reliable.
I found one free test many years ago that seemed quite good. I actually got the same score as a professional test I had taken at school a few years prior. No idea if it's still around and doubt it's free anymore.
I used to really enjoy taking these tests and took a bunch of them. The others were all garbage. I stopped trying to take them 15+ years ago when they looked like more and more garbage and/or would try to make you pay for scores after you put all the work into them.
Have you tried leaving Russia?
That's the real IQ test, but it's neither online nor free.
I had an idea for how to do more accurate polling for an election. Not sure if this is a new idea, I've seen something similar before. Let me know if it is an old idea.
In the US when they call people and ask who they will vote for in the next election, supposedly old people are more likely to answer. And old people are more likely to vote Trump. So the polls will wrongly trend towards Trump.
So instead they ask people for who they will vote for AND who they voted for in the last election. And then they look at the numbers for the last election and the percentage of people who changed their mind. So say Biden got a hundred votes last election. And 10 percent of people who voted for Biden last election say they will not be voting for him now, then Biden will get 90 votes this election. (The actual math is more complicated, but I hope you get the gist.)
Think this would work well in the US, since there is only two realistic candidates. Makes the math easier, anyway.
One flaw is that the system does not take into account voters who have died since the last election. But if one has statistics for the ages of who voted Democrats and ho voted Republican in the last election, I think one could do some statistical analysis and account for this. (At least for people who died of old age. Would be harder to do the math for people who died of the Corona Virus, if Republicans were more likely to die of of the Corona Virus.)
Another potential flaw is if old people are switching their votes at a different ratio than younger people. Then you are back to the original problem of old people being more likely to respond. I was hoping the ratio of vote switchers is about the same for all ages, even if the ratio of Biden voters are different.
Pollsters go *way* more in depth on weighting than you imagine. Polling is a constant battle to get any useful signal out of the noise when hardly anyone ever responds in the best of circumstances. The polling numbers aren't just simple counts, they're the results of complex models that slice and reweight the data by various factors to try to *predict* what a representative count *would* have given. And after every election, pollsters adjust their models to try to do better next time, which means that polling biases aren't predictable from year to year either.
Many Thanks!
idle thought:
If the use of some condiment tends to change answers, but isn't known and modeled, should it be nicknamed pollsterbane? :-)
That's a standard practice in US presidential-election polling.
Anyone else notice this annoying bug where when you click away from astral codex ten to another tab, then you come back to this tab, the screen freezes for 20 seconds before you can scroll again?
It's utterly unusable on Opera mobile but seems to be decent when viewed in desktop mode. Not good, just usable.
I think Scott should just open a "substack UI megathread" in the comment section of every OT where all the complaints about their horrible interface go.
That's just a consequence of Substack being utterly shit to the point where it requires a supercomputer just to display a bit of text.
Yes, and only on ACX no other Substack that I read. Also the Open Threads pause quite often and regularly give me a crash warning. The other posts slow down when I tab away, but don't have the same problems as much as the Open Threads.
Has never happened to me on Safari, either on desktop or on mobile. It's sounding to me like Substack works better with Safari than with other browsers. The only glitch I experience here is very slow loading of the comments when there get to be more than 600 or so. And if the total gets really huge, writing a comment is very slow also.
>And if the total gets really huge, writing a comment is very slow also.
I forget who told me this and should get the credit, but a workaround for this is to
open the comment you want to respond to in a new tab, and write your response to the comment in that new tab.
( I'm doing this in Firefox on Windows 10, FWIW )
I usually write comments in a text editor then paste them into Substack, because otherwise it's not rare for my comment to get deleted somehow before I finish writing it. I am definitely not hitting the "cancel" option under the text box, so I have no idea what causes it. It's as though there's some secret keyboard shortcut for cancel that I hit by accident maybe one time in ten if I reply directly on Substack.
Many Thanks!
>I usually write comments in a text editor then paste them into Substack
I do that for long comments.
>because otherwise it's not rare for my comment to get deleted somehow before I finish writing it.
Ouch! I don't _think_ I've had that happen, but substack does often does do weird, surprising, and damaging things.
Is it only ACX or do other Substacks do it too?
As I was typing, the reply box also locked up a bunch.
Normally a Substack's comments are paged and only load the first couple but on ACX it loads everything, which is why it's so slow.
Most substacks get relatively few comments, but if you find a post with lots of comments, I'd expect it to be just as bad.
Yes.
Yes
Yep, its frustrating
My score on the table in the original post (based on my ID key) and my score on the table in this post (with my hashed email address) are different. Was there a change in scoring? Or maybe I actually used a different email address and ran into a hash collision? Any ideas?
Mine wasn't in the table at all. I think the hash system is messed up.
Remember, conservatives, "censorship" on social media is just free market private property, donchaknow?
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2023/09/08/biden-administration-coerced-facebook-court-rules/70800723007/
Unpopular take*: Dune pt. 2 was very disappointing.
I've read the reviews about all the things the movie did right. I don't dispute most of that. It looked fantastic. The characters were well played. It avoided the tired preachy tropes that plague so many modern movies. Fine. Great. But even so I left the theater feeling ... let down. Like the film had made some very grand promises and then failed to deliver on them. In many ways, this is like what Star Wars did in the sequel trilogy: lots of setup that failed to pay off.
I remember going to see Dune pt 1, and thinking that it did almost everything right except that the end was obviously incomplete. Whatever. I knew from the beginning I was going to see part 1 of a 2 parter. So long as part 2 stuck the landing, the two movies felt like they'd be well worth it. Dune part 2 did NOT have anything like a satisfying ending.
"But you don't understand! It's about the complicated decision Paul had to make. As a good man, he was forced by political necessities ..."
No. That's not the problem. The problems were much more fundamental than that. The final battle was ... absurdly easy. These were the big bad guys across two films? Really? The final standoff was between successive opponents (the emperor, Bene J high command, Feyd R) who hadn't met Paul until they faced off against him and were defeated. The galactic jihad outcome that so horrified Paul was ... abstractly hinted at? Maybe?
I suspect a lot of this isn't the fault of the filmmakers so much as the deficiencies in the source material. The world building is great so far as it goes, but it's poorly established in connection to the plot. Let me explain with a broken catechism.
Why is spice so important? "It enables shipping between planets! Space travel grinds to a halt without it, disrupting the galactic economy and the center of power of literally every major player." Okay, I imagine space travel will be a prominent part of the story then? "Nope." Will disruption of spice production at least have a dramatic effect on the people of Dune? The characters we meet? "There will be huge political pressures to-" Yes, yes. But the shipping? Will we SEE the effects of disruption of spice production in a tangible way? "No." So everything is abstract?
It doesn't have to be this way. A single scene showing the big bad Baron having to go without his favorite bonbons would be a minimal sop to the idea that the actions of Paul are doing something with wide-reaching effects. A single scene showing food scarcity arising from the baron's iron fisted policies would show he has power to hurt Paul's cause. The abstract nature of ALL the core conflicts in the story make it difficult to enjoy. The things that matter most to the plot - the pressures exerted on the emperor to maintain power among the great houses, the power of the shipping guild, etc. - all happen away from the scenes and characters who matter. The things that feature most prominently - the harsh desert environment, the sand worms, the relationship with Chani - don't end up meaning much to the plot. They feel like window dressing that could be interchangeable with other details in a different story.
Perhaps some day they'll make an adaptation of Dune with the kind of influence Lord of the Rings had. That would require a wholesale rewrite of the plot, I suspect.
*Based on the hype I'm hearing and the Rotten Tomatoes scores.
I watched the movie yesterday and found it disappointing. For the most part, it just felt like a mindless action movie. (The following are my own impressions without having read the other comments here.)
The baron is not a villain, he is the caricature of one. Between his flair for Reichparteitag scenes, his grotesque physique, and his propensity to murder his commanders and random civilian servants of his (which rapidly loses its shock value), onscreen rape and subsequent cannibalism are basically the only thing which could drive home the point "baron bad" less subtly.
His nephew feels like an extra villain which an action game might establish in a few cutscenes to set up another boss fight. Like someone deciding that what the movie really needed was more 1-vs-1 knife fights (whose realism I dispute without being a real expert), and putting in that character which has one knife fight to establish that he is capable and evil and then another (totally pointless, btw) knife fight where he is defeated by Paul. Okay, in between his two knife fights that nephew also shows his strategic brilliance by attacking the northern Fremen outpost. You might be excused to think that he is acting on new information, perhaps delivered by a traitor Fremen (which would make for an interesting side character), but apparently, the Harkonnen knew that the Fremen were living in that rock all along. Of course, his strategical brilliance can not overcome Paul's plot armor, so he did not pack enough ammo for a ground assault, leading to the escape of most of the Fremen.
The Fremen break my suspension of disbelief on so many levels. On one level, they are (especially in the south) basically Mujaheddin, except that their culture is carefully devoid of anything the audience might find objectionable. It has been decades since I read the book, but I vaguely recall that reused the water of both enemy and friendly dead, including for drinking. Now it is explicitly mentioned that the water taken from enemy troops is used for some less objectionable purpose, and the water of that dead warrior feeds some sacred swimming pool instead. Did Paul not inherit a wife after killing her husband in a duel in the book? And of course the Fremen are amazingly progressive: unmarried women are part of the strike team against the Harkonnen and are also free to pursue sexual relations with Paul, or yelling at the fundamentalist elder council without any bad consequences.
Per the movie, you can not survive without faith in the south, but apparently faith, sand and spice are enough to sustain huge populations there. They don't have a pastoral lifestyle (which would be typical for people in marginal lands), and just recycling water from dead people does not seem terribly sustainable. Wind traps get mentioned, so they provide enough water to survive in the desert (but not enough so that you could do without harvesting corpses), and for protein they just hunt the odd dessert mouse or something? Speaking of dubious ecosystems, what do the sandworms eat again?
Either it is really easy to craft rocket launchers out of spice and sand without any industry required, or the Fremen have some kind of CIA-like sponsor who ships weapons to them as part of an effort to fight a proxy war against the Harkonnen.
Much has been written about the idea that primitive down to earth cultures will of course defeat dedicated solidiers of much richer societies because the former are hardcore and the latter are degenerate, and how wrong this idea is [0].
Then there is the emperor. First he helps the baron to get rid of house Artreides because he considers Paul's father to be weak and emotional. He must be aware that he set himself up to be blackmailed by the baron, who also has exclusive control of the most important resource in the empire. He then proceeds to show that his military genius is equal to his political savyness by personally landing (from what I can tell from the movie) in the inhospitable south about ten kilometers from Fremen Fundamentalist Central and gets promptly overrun by them.
The only thing saving the Bene Gesserit from being conspiratorial Space Jews following every antisemitic trope is the fact that they are all female. Pulling the strings behind the fall of House Atreides, setting up the religious framework of the Fremen, putting their weight behind the baron's nephew (psychotic, psychopathic, potaitoh, potahto), always being the Wormtongue to whisper sinister ideas into the ear of every lord, powerful enough that nobody can just do without them but pursuing their own bizarre eugenic cultist breeding program agenda.
Frank Herbert already requires a lot of plot devices to make the world work. Spice as the magical crude oil which the world's logistics depend on. Personal energy shields which give an advantage to melee weapons. A Butlerian Jihad which means that electronics are verboten. Powerful psychic abilities for the Bene Gesserit which allow them to stay too useful to those in power to be sent to the stake where they arguably belong. Nukes as limited resource only available to the Great Houses. (An empire where the central power is so weak that the vassals are free to wage war against each other and which is not under external threat does not seem like a very long term stable political configuration to me, but it is probably the Bene Gesserit holding it all together.)
In retrospect, perhaps they should not have used a script written by a LLM </sarcasm>
[0] https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-part-i-war-at-the-dawn-of-civilization/
I was really hoping [0] was a shadow reference along the lines of "use common sense" although the link you gave is absolutely the correct one.
> The baron is not a villain, he is the caricature of one
That's a good way of putting it; I'd go farther and say that almost everything in the movie was a caricature of itself. It's all images designed to convey a vibe.
> the water taken from enemy troops is used for some less objectionable purpose
As I recall, the movie said that Harkonnen water was too polluted to use? So probably playing to an environmentally-conscious audience.
> Either it is really easy to craft rocket launchers out of spice and sand without any industry required
The book said that all of the Fremen industry had been introduced in the last 2 generations, starting with Liet-Kyne's father, Pardot Kynes. Part of it was cannibalization of the Imperial ecological testing stations. But they also had a lot less industry than shown in the movie. Thumpers, in particular, were a lot lower-tech.
> Spice as the magical crude oil which the world's logistics depend on.
There's some indications that spice is fairly new to the galaxy, at least on a large scale. It's use may only have taken off in the last hundred years. Galactic society has become unstable, but no one fully realized this until Paul came along.
> but it is probably the Bene Gesserit holding it all together.
I believe the books explicitly say that it's the Spacing Guild holding it together. Partly because they charge enormous sums of money for any large-scale troop movement, so most wars are "wars of assassins", involving poison and traitors and small elite strike groups. The Guild doesn't want any large-scale disruption in interstellar commerce, because they effectively survive by taxing interstellar commerce.
The final battle in the book was just as much Paul and the Fremtredes curbstomping the Empire, Guild, et al as was the movie. He's got an army the equal of the Emperor's, *and* he's got an arsenal of nuclear weapons that combined with his knowledge of local terrain and conditions allows him to negate the enemy's shields, *and* he's got long-range artillery that can cripple their spaceships, *and* he's got all the spice in the universe, *and* he's got sandworms. And he's nigh-omniscient, so he knows exactly how he's going to win before the first shot is fired.2
If you want to enjoy a "Dune" movie, you need to be invested in the buildup to the final battle, and interested in exactly what Paul's plans for that battle are going to turn out to be, and then you have to sit back and enjoy the ride to its preordained conclusion. And that's fine. Sometimes it's enough to just love it when a plan comes together.
As for the lack of discussion of spice economics, I do miss that (along with many other things). But it's a necessary and appropriate simplification to fit the rest of the story into a mere two movies. In this version, Spice is a MacGuffin. That also is fine. Movies about strife in the Middle East don't have scenes with wealthy first-worlders driving SUVs so we can see how important oil is, and "Avatar" never did show or even tell us what Pandoran Unobtanium was used for.
I think it's a little unfair to judge Herbert by modern storytelling standards, but at the same time any movies based on his fiction need to be updated to those standards. Newer fiction follows conventions that older fiction often violates. Sometimes these are just arbitrary convention (for example, third person omniscient is rare in modern novels), whereas others feel like real improvements in storytelling mechanics.
One of these is the convention on how to maintain tension. You have two main options (outlined by Sanderson in his discussion on the mechanics of a heist story, but it's universally applicable):
1. The Ocean's 11 approach. Hide the plan from the reader. The reader/viewer is told what the objective is, how that objective will be impossible to achieve, and then you wait to see how the plan evolves to achieve the impossible objective, within the bounds of capabilities established throughout the story. (Classic example of this is the Mission Impossible TV series.)
2. The Italian Job approach. You know the plan, but the plan hits the fan. The characters openly discuss the plan and all the tools they will use to achieve the plan. Then circumstances intervene to make that plan impossible, but the characters repurpose their resources to pull off a win anyway.
Both of these approaches maintain tension, though in different ways. The reason the Dune approach isn't in favor anymore is because it's too straightforward. You first hear what the characters are going to do and then they do it, so the author ends up repeating points but in more detail the second time. (The other outmoded approach is to just not talk about the plan or the objective, which then feels like stumbling about from one random experience to another.)
Avatar ... wasn't a great example of how to establish a McGuffin. Iron Man 1 had the Arc reactor that was essentially a MacGuffin, but you got to see the varying ways it was meaningful to the different characters. Sometimes the MacGuffin is ancillary - like the NOC list in Mission Impossible 1 - but we still see how it matters to the antagonist. You feel how important it is to Ethan that the list not get out (because doing so makes him a black operative who hurts the country he's sworn to protect). Even though you could easily interchange it with other MacGuffin ideas without significantly changing the plot, the MacGuffin can be used to play meaningful role in character development.
Dune could easily do all this! It just needs to be updated with modern storytelling mechanics to make the story compelling. This will almost certainly upset fans during their first watching, but it will all be forgivable.
I actually very much like the storytelling in the book, Dune. The first scene dumps us into Paul's encounter with the Reverend Mother and the gom jabbar, and we're completely disoriented and have no idea what's going on. And then the second scene takes us to the Baron having Piter explain his entire plan to Feyd-Rautha. After that, we know exactly what's going to happen, we know who the traitor is, we can see the Atreides underestimating the danger, but we also see the Atreides finding out that the Fremen are more useful than the Harkonnens think, and we've seen that Paul may have depths that the Harkonnens aren't aware of. So we see the plans clashing, and the suspense comes from hoping that the secrets the good guys know will outweigh the secrets the bad guys know. Up until the point where Paul comes out of the trance with a solid vision of the future, and then we get to watch him kick ass like Neo at the end of the Matrix. :-)
And the book is 60 years old. This is the third video adaptation. Everyone pretty much knows what's going to happen, even more so than knowing that "Batman stops the Joker".
Frankly, I think what you call "modern storytelling mechanics" is like McDonald's hamburgers or those horrible looking 5-over-1 buildings that get put up. It's a cheap least-effort implementation, and while some people may be so used to it that they start becoming connoisseurs of local fast-food joints, I think that says more about impoverished culture than what's actually good.
Perhaps I wasn't clear about what I was saying, when I talked about modern storytelling techniques. It sounds like what you heard was something like, "You didn't check this box, so the story doesn't work for modern audiences," and you reject that idea. I reject it as well.
What I was trying to say was that conventions build up in storytelling over time. They always have. You can see them in Shakespeare's plays, and in Aristophanes' plays. Some of those conventions have endures, while others don't. Usually there's some principle behind the convention, which is why people use them. (I.e. you need a fool to counterbalance the king's authority and provide comic relief.) But the principle and the convention aren't the same thing, and there's no reason you can't reject the convention so long as the principle is fulfilled. In Dune, the reason for the convention is to maintain dramatic tension. If your reader is 200 pages into the book, or 4 hours into a 2-part movie, you risk them losing their investment in the story unless you continue building that dramatic tension toward the climax. The problem with the Dune movies (for me, at least) is that the story lost all dramatic tension as it built toward the climax.
"Lost" is probably wrong. It intentionally jettisoned that tension, piling up so many advantages in Paul's column that there was nothing left for him to accomplish. Now, obviously a bunch of people liked the book and the movie. I'm not here trying to say they're wrong. I'm just confused why so many people and reviewers are saying it's some kind of 'masterpiece' because that wasn't my experience. It was well produced and well acted, but for me it was only an okay movie that disappointed on many levels - foremost in the storytelling department.
What's really interesting is that you're the first person in the comments to give a full-throated defense of the storytelling. That suggests something like a 90-10 split (among readers of this blog) against the film, versus a critical/audience reception that's more like 5-95. I wonder why that is.
OK, yes, I think I misunderstood you. To switch genres for a moment, in mysteries the standard approach has been "whodunnit", but Columbo introduced "howcatchem", by showing the murder first, and then providing a murderer-centric view of the case, where we see the detective slowly closing in. Is that the kind of technique you're talking about?
I do think the director made some choices to try to keep up the dramatic tension. One thing I recall reading somewhere was that he "externalized" Paul's internal conflict over his destiny as messiah, by having Chani act as a foil for that. Instead of internal angst, Paul and Chani could argue about it. I think it worked, in that respect, but at the cost of ruining Chani as a character, and also potentially altering the storyline enough that "Dune Messiah" will be (more) difficult.
Overall that's typical of my criticism of Villeneuve's "Dune" movies. I can tell he liked and understood the books, and I agree abstractly with a lot of the choices he made about what to cut and how to simplify the story (like having Thufir die in the first half). But I think he was like someone tinkering with a delicately-balanced ecosystem, and failed to see the consequences of the changes he made. Perhaps I'm projecting, but I feel like it's the sort of mistake I'd make in his shoes, getting too wrapped up in some aspects of the film, and losing sight of the big picture.
I suppose a more direct response to your point is that I don't think the story of "Dune" is really about suspense about "what happens". (As opposed to, say, "Blade Runner 2049", where we have no idea what's going to happen.) To the extent that there's suspense, it's about "how will Paul survive" and most especially "what type of person will Paul become". And that's harder to pull off, and I think Villeneuve tried and failed. (Heh.)
Here's a question or three: Have you seen the first Harry Potter film? Did you read the books? What did you think of the film, **as a film** ? Personally, I thought it was a wonderful illustration of the book, but an utter failure as a piece of storytelling. But that didn't matter because we all knew the story anyway, so we got to sit back and enjoy the amazingly-well-crafted illustration.
Hmmm, you raise an interesting question about HP1. It's been a long time since I watched the movie. I feel like the book was well written, for the most part. It was a much tighter story than later HP books.
I'll have to go rewatch the movie to see if you're right about the storytelling. Maybe I wasn't paying attention well enough? I feel like HP1 was such a cultural phenomenon at the time that people were just happy enough watching the spectacle they were willing to forgive any amount of storytelling deficiencies just to see the Wizarding World come to life. (If you're right about the movie not being able to stand on its own.)
Maybe something similar is happening with Dune pts 1&2. They had a much smaller fan base than HP, but they augmented that with part 1, building an audience who were going to go watch the second one regardless. Hypothesis: a lot of people went to see Dune pt2 because they saw pt1. A lot of critics were fans of the books, so gave it a good review because they weren't really looking for the storytelling. Since the movie stands up well from an acting/production value perspective, the nigh impossible problems with the storytelling didn't affect the review scores as it would have other movies.
I'm not convinced this is the whole explanation, but maybe it contributed?
Wait a minute. How is Herbert's storytelling technique less evolved than the storytelling techniques of contemporary genre novelists? Herbert constructs a narrative with a lean prose style, and he develops the plot with a sequence of visually evocative chapter scenes. The plot moves along without any digressions, and he creates characters who display dramatic intensity (which none of the actors in the current Dune franchise have been able to convey). Herbert created a universe with a complex political backstory, but we can understand it as the characters reveal its complexity with their conversations and thoughts (without a lot of extraneous didactic prose) — and we can understand the tactical and strategic thinking of the characters without having to consult the appendices. Except for Princess Irulan's epigraphs there's very little fluff in this novel. I would say it's a masterpiece of genre fiction. This is unlike the turgid prose of contemporary speculative fiction and fantasy novels that characterize series like The Reach, The Song of Ice and Fire, and the Harry Potter books (please note: I don't think these are *bad*, but a good editor could cut a third of the prose out of these novels to make them hum.)
I would say that the genre fiction from the pulp era is generally superior to contemporary genre fiction because the authors had to learn dramatic pacing for their serialized novels and for the shorter novel formats of the era.
But if you were referring to the storytelling techniques of the cinema, I'd agree that directors about cinematographers learned a lot about scene composition, pacing, and editing over the course of the Twentieth Century. Cinema techniques peaked in the early nineties, and suddenly directors started forgetting everything they learned with the advent of special-effect-driven blockbusters.
The final battle isn't the equivalent of the heist scene in Ocean's Eleven though, it's the equivalent of the scene where they all just sit around watching the fountains and listening to Debussy after the heist. The story of Dune Part 2 is about how Paul becomes the guy with the giant unstoppable army, not how that giant unstoppable army whups everybody's ass. The seduction scene is interesting, but the sex scene just pounds away towards its inevitable conclusion.
One thing that was missing a bit is a sense of scale -- it's not so clear that the Fremen army he's leading by the end of the movie is all that much bigger than the Fremen army he's already kinda-leading by the second reel. I assume his little speech down in the south turned him from a leader of thousands into a leader of millions, but that scale is never really made clear so it never feels like all that much was achieved.
The new movie just completely omitted the threat to destroy the sandworms, and thus destroy the spice, which is how the Guild is compelled to not intervene in a decapitation strike against a galactic monarchy.
The Chani subplot was non-textual, which doesn’t bother me intrinsically, but it didn’t really matter, especally in the context of the utter lack of chemistry between Chani and Paul.
I agree Dune 2 underperformed. Mainly, for me, Paul just never matured. He was a bland pretty boy from beginning to end.
The new movie does have Paul tell his radioman to tell the ships of the Great Houses in orbit that if the interfere he will glass the spice fields which is close enough to "destroy the sandworms" in narrative meaning that I don't think the threat is omitted.
I agree that this was their stand-in for "destroy the spice", but:
A) It had zero narrative heft behind it, just felt like a throw away
B) We are living in a slightly magical universe, so I don't know why I care, but "a few hundred nukes" would definitely annoy people involved in planetary-scale mining (more so than just blowing up their mining gear? Not clear), but would be extremely unlikely to destroy a planetary ecosystem
C) It's the lynchpin of the story! A bunch of planet-bound bad-ass fighters are just not going to be able to achieve anything in the galaxy without complete Guild control. The only way the entire story makes sense is if you've drilled deep into why Paul uniquely has found a credible way to extinguish the entire Guild. This plot point has to actually make sense to the audience.
It just didn't work, at all, from my perspective.
Yeah, I was very disappointed at that. In the time it took to discuss the nuke plot and show the cave, they could have come up with an interesting visualization for Paul's big prescient vision, cut to him saying "I've seen it all, here's what we're going to do", and then cut to him winning over and over again. All he has to do is tell a Guild representative "I know how to create a chain reaction to destroy all spice production on Arrakis, which will cripple the Guild and cause all of you to die horrible deaths from spice withdrawal. I've set it up to happen if I don't get what I want. Look into the future and see for yourselves". Then the Guild representatives get a surprised look on their face, and start backing him 100%.
It's really easy! It was done back in the 80s, in "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure"! Point, say "can", and a garbage can falls on the guy's head. The main characters figured out what they could do with time manipulation, and then they just WON. No more suspense, we don't need it any more, it's entertaining enough to watch how they win.
Yeah, I think the failure of the Chani subplot has to be laid directly at the feet of the filmmakers. And that was a huge reason the ending failed! It felt like the writers were heavily relying on her relationship with Paul to provide dramatic tension in the final scenes. But it didn't work. In part, I think that's because the chemistry wasn't there. In part it was because the writing didn't give us a lot of memorable moments for them to connect on. She teaches him how to sand walk ... a little better than before? Meh.
I'm reminded of the scene in LotR RotK, where Sam is reminiscing about the Shire on the slopes of Mt. Doom, and Frodo's response is that he can't imagine any of that because he's so far gone. It's poignant because 1.) we love the Shire, having spent some quality time there laughing and joking with the Hobbits and, 2.) we feel a sense of loss/horror that this has been taken from Frodo, since 3.) saving the Shire was the whole impetus for the journey to begin with. Frodo is about to give up at the end of his journey because he lost his purpose. It works on so many levels, but it ONLY works because we the audience can connect to the Shire so viscerally.
In Dune (especially this adaptation), Paul develops a deep affinity for the Fremen and their dreams for their planet. But that crucial aspect of his character isn't developed in memorable scenes that the film can lean on later to dramatic effect. For example, what if Paul were to tell stories to the children about oceans on his home planet, and then instill in them the dream that their planet could one day have those same oceans? Maybe then he jokes around with the kids and lets them beat him in a 'fight'. Combine that by having Chani smile at him from afar, admiring how he's so good with kids or something. We could feel Paul's affection for the people, and Chani's affection for Paul as having truly become one of them at heart.
Instead, Paul's relationship with the people is all told to us and we have to take it on faith. Okay, but when the parts people resonate with are the visually stunning bits, not the emotional character bits, you missed something in the storytelling. If you're going to have your ending hinge on emotional character moments, you've got to lay the groundwork to earn those moments!
Hm. There's a common distinction people make between "showing" and "telling", and I think I can sum up over half my criticisms of Dune 2 by saying that it's "visual telling".
I never got the impression from the film that Channi was the love of Paul's life... she seemed more like a girl that he got with at summer camp due to a lack of better available options, likely to be ditched the moment someone better comes along. So the whole relationship makes perfect sense internally to the film, I just don't know how they're going to square it with what happens in the sequels (if they are).
I forget, did we ever see her happy? Or smiling?
I only saw it the once, so maybe I'm wrong, but I got the exact opposite impression. Chani brings Paul back to life with her tears, despite being upset that he has chosen to take on the messianic mantle. She leaves in a huff and gives Paul the cold shoulder in subsequent scenes.
When Paul has to go in and negotiate with the emperor, he makes a point of telling Chani that whatever happens in there he'll always love her. We get multiple pointed scenes of her giving him the evil eye, and once again leaving in a huff. For me, it really felt like the ending was leaning on the idea of separation from Chani and his precommitment to not affirming the religious myths as tragic losses for Paul during his reluctant ascension.
Yeah, that was a perfectly appropriate story for Chani as written, and a perfectly appropriate ending for Chani (and Paul) as written. And while I'll have to reread the book to be sure, I'm pretty sure I like Villeneuve's Chani better than I do Herbert's.
The problem is that it completely inverts the very memorable final scene in the book that Villeneuve is adapting, and it ruins the setup for the book he says he wants to adapt next so we pretty much know he's going to say "nah, just kidding!"
It's not enough to wreck an otherwise-good movie, but I do think it was a misstep.
Denis Villeneuve is such a cold filmmaker and that's my problem. You get this big beautiful world but the film never revels in it. There's no sense of wonder. Only dread. And it's not just a question of source material because other directors can take a sad story and infuse it with life.
I only really thought that Sicario and Blade Runner 2049 are cold films and for both its a deliberate choice. Blade Runner 2049 is about a robot forced to stay cold to keep him under control in a world established in the first one to be ran by people less human than their creations while Sicario is about the inhuman nature of the drug war. Arrival, Enemy and Prisoners aren't what I would call cold films. I'm not sure I agree on Dune p1 or p2 being cold films though, they're lacking in humour but I'm not sure if they're cold.
You think "Arrival" was cold?
Not the script, but the aesthetics.
That's not how I'd describe it, but yeah. It's odd, the first one was better than the second, and I think his approach actually worked decently for the Blade Runner sequel.
Maybe that's because "Blade Runner 2049" was about robots simulating human feeling. That seems like a good description of his film-making style, actually. A robotic simulation of human feeling.
Mostly agreed; I enjoyed it quite a bit until the last 30 minutes.
I genuinely prefer the David Lynch version; it's an incoherent narrative, but it's aesthetic madness much more captures the vibe of the book.
I think the final battle being absurdly easy is deliberate and really an issue with adopting an exposition heavy book as a film with minimal exposition. The Fremen are supposed to completely outclass every other soldier in the galaxy due to the conditions, but its hard to show this prior to the final battle because the plot from the book has them only fight Harkonnens until the finale and the Harkonnen troops are never shown as something to fear as the the Sardauker are written as the group that the Atriedes soldiers are outmatched by. I think Villeneuve tries to work around this by having the Sardaukar be actually nuked and the worms play a massive visual role in the final battle but it still feels underwhelming as he doesn't have characters repeatedly state that the Fremen are super amazing fighters like in the book or what he did for the Sardauker in part 1 where they are introduced purely as amazing fighters.
It should be noted that the film ending is *less* underwhelming than the book too.
The final battle was also a literally foregone conclusion, given that Paul can literally see the future. Between the Fremen, the storm, the sandworms, the surprise nuking of the Shield Wall, and the MAD blackmail of the Guild, Paul set things up so that his victory was assured. Trump may have had a 28% chance of winning, but the Sardaukar had 0%.
The two part structure is a problem. We were briefly shown how the Sardukar are the most fearsome fighting force in the galaxy, but that was in Part 1, which we probably saw years ago. The prowess of the Sardukar is never demonstrated in Part 2, which means that when the Fremen overwhelm them it doesn't make the Fremen seem strong, it just makes the Sardukar seem like pushovers.
Also, while I can buy that the Fremen are the best warriors in the galaxy within the context of their home desert, seeing them jump into spaceships and expect to be space combat experts too seems a bit silly.
The movie was made for book fans. This allowed skipping exposition and focusing on atmosphere.
But the final battle was disappointing.
If you ask me, the movie quite simply did not deserve its running time. There's a little more to it, but I think the simplest reason I think the movie sucks is that it was just too long, needlessly, especially since they cut out themes and plots from the book with a machete. I don't understand why the popular opinion seems to be that this movie is good. Not nearly as good as Dune 1 was.
All of those are from the book, yeah. All of the books are much more about political maneuverings and transformations of the people around them, than any actual resources. And the first book's ending is absolutely just an anticlimactic boss rush.
Is there anyone on this substack who can discuss the business models of the leading AI companies? How do they expect to recoup the massive investment required to bring the next generation of AI to fruition?
I've heard a lot of talk about AIaaS. But given the propensity of current LLMs to bullshit (err, hallucinate) if I were a CIO, why would I want to outsource my corporate systems to an LLM?
Accounting? How would I be sure the numbers it was giving me were correct?
Logistics? Hell, no!
Manufacturing? What could possibly go wrong?
Marketing? After seeing some of the marketing materials ChatGPT produced, I think it would require lots of human supervision — which would make it less cost effective.
Legal? Could we trust the citations and its understanding of the law?
How about coding? I hear LLM can produce software code. Is it useable? Or is it usuable after a lot of tweaking? Is it bug free?
A more principled point: the discussions show that there are really two ways of thinking about it.
Beowulf888, you are asking yourself in which situations AIs can replace a human? And there I agree, that's not many, the systems are not reliable. For most things you can't just take an answer from an LLM without looking at it. (Though you might underestimate the progress here as well. The GPT Pro version has access to the internet, so it usually doesn't hallucinate links, it rather summarizes what it has found, and returns the relevant text snippets from the websites. Also, I would usually trust the modern LLMs to summarize a text correctly.)
But you don't need a standalone AI for monetizing it. It's enough that the AI is good enough as a tool to make a human work faster. Michael describes this below for programming, I describe it for academic work, and I think there are many other examples. Marketing is a perfect example. I fully believe that an experienced AI-assisted human can produce a leaflet much faster than without AI. Not by entering a prompt and walking away, but by entering a prompt, looking at the result and changing whatever needs to be changed. That is a lot faster than producing the leaflet from scratch. It's the same for programming, or for scanning research papers.
In practice, the question "is the output of LLMs correct" does not make a lot of sense. It can be correct or incorrect, yes. But copy/pasting text from elsewhere can also be correct or incorrect. Just use the correct parts.
> if I were a CIO, why would I want to outsource my corporate systems to an LLM?
Didn't you leave out the main one? Call centers and chat support? Those are huge cost centers to most big businesses (tens to hundreds of millions for most F-50's, and probably most F-100's), and you can probably reduce your FTE by 4/5, with the remaining 1/5 coordinating a suite of tools and overseeing a group of calls / chats to make sure it doesn't hallucinate or promise something they can't deliver.
We've got two separate issues here — costs and garbage output.
OK, I'm perfectly willing to concede that LLMs and generative models can provide useful results. But at what cost? OpenAI's revenue was claimed to be $2 billion in 2023, but it's far from making a profit and it seems to be losing a lot of money (if you've got better info than I have, please share it). Despite claims that it has 100 million users visiting it weekly, and Microsoft anno'suncement that it has sold its services to 18,000 customers via Bing/Copilot — other insiders claim that OpenAI's losses are mounting, and may have been on the order of $500 million in 2023. Of course, OpenAI is not a publicly traded company, so this all whispers and rumors. But if true, that sounds like OpenAI needs at least $2.5 billion/year revenue to break even with the current generation of its LLM.
OTOH, Insider estimates claim that the energy costs of training GPT4 were approximately $100 million. Scott said (in his Sam Altman post) that GPT5 would require ~30x more energy to train. Energy costs money so 30 x $100 million = $3 billion. If we can take the $2.5 billion number seriously, that implies OpenAI is burning through approx $7 million/day. Would GPT5 cost 30x more to run each day? Probably not, but let's say it will require 15x more to keep a GTP5 installation running, that implies $100 million/day — suggesting that it would require $36.5 billion in revenue each year to break even. That's not an impossible number. Walmart's revenue is 10x that, and there are hundreds of companies whose revenue is greater than $36 billion. But it would require about 150 million subscribers paying $20/month to reach that number. Comcast has about 38 million subscribers, so I suppose a 150 million subscribers worldwide is perfectly doable. But I'm not going to pay that sort of money for something that gives me a high percentage of wrong answers!
But then we have Sam Altman saying that AI data centers will require their own autonomous (preferably) nuclear power plants. Have you priced out building a nuke in the US recently? Well, we haven't built one recently, but inflation-adjusted it would cost about $13 million/per megawatt. (It's much less in other countries, though.) Anyway, Altman and his ilk will have to convince some investors with very deep pockets to cough up the money on something that may not turn a profit. So I think my question is legitimate. Do the Sam Altman's of the world have a business model?
This brings me to the garbage output issue. It will take larger datasets of text and images than currently exist to train the next generation of AI. So the big idea is to create vast repositories of generated text and images and train them on that. There's only one catch. AI trained on generative datasets does not perform well...
https://openaccess.thecvf.com/content/ICCV2023/html/Hataya_Will_Large-scale_Generative_Models_Corrupt_Future_Datasets_ICCV_2023_paper.html
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2311.09807.pdf
I'm an old fart, and back in the computer Stone Age we had a saying: "Garbage in. Garbage out." I think AI has all the hallmarks of a speculative bubble.
For the 7 trillion that Sam Altman wants, I also don't easily way a way to earn this money back.
But if AI stalls at the current generation, then I see no problem of getting a few 100 million users, likely a few billions. For this you don't need a new generation of LLMs, you can just remove the garbage answers from GPT4. This has essentially already been done in the Pro version of GPT4 for web searches, and it has sufficiently been done in CoPilot to make it a must-have for everyone who actually writes code. (There was a fair objection that not all software developers spend their time writing code.) If not for competition, it would be no problem whatsoever to earn a few billions per year with GPT4, and probably a lot more. The problem is that every current generation of AIs may become pretty useless when the next generation comes, but that is how competition goes.
Uhm, I really think you haven't grasped what GPT4 already does. First of all, obviously we are discussing under the assumption that AIs will stall at the current level and not progress further. None of the companies is expecting that, but let's work with the current state of the art.
A killer applications already is Copilot. This is a success at the level of Word or Excel. If AI stalls at the current level, Copilot or a competitor product will basically be used by every programmer in the world in a few (very few!) years. Programming without Copilot&Co is just not competitive anymore.
AIs will also replace Google search one way or the other. As a university researcher, when I want to know the state of the art on some obscure research question, I already use specialized GPT-tools like GPT Consensus or some other GPT research tools. To skim through a big pile of scientific papers, I let GPT write a short summary of each of them. My students use it to produce summaries of my lectures, or to create new exercises to train with. Just the fact that it can summarize text is a killer application in its own, and it does that well. Another killer application that will inevitably come is that AIs can produce a presentation from a document. (Perhaps that is already there, I haven't played a lot with this.)
So yeah, we are talking about a success on the level of Word or Google search. Microsoft and Google have made some profits with those.
Software developer here. Copilot is completely worthless to me. Laypeople are unlikely to realize that *actual programming* is like <10% of my job, with the vast majority being waiting for various people to answer basic questions. Although basic, the the answers require proprietary client-specific knowledge, and there is no way in hell that a LLM knows the answer. Making my *programming* more efficient just lets me twiddle my thumbs more and benefits me not at all.
Well making work easier for academics and programmers aren't real big money-makersk you know?. I think beowulf's question still stands. Also, regarding how AI will replace google search: Has it occurred to you that many of the sites google searches are up because their owners get money, clients, or prestige out of having a site up? If instead most people shift to using AI for information searches, I think sites that offer information will start disappearing. Online stores won't, and neither will online entertainment. But it sure seems like a lot of online information will.
I disagree. Programming companies make a lot of money. And those were just two examples. There are a lot of jobs where people need to read texts or graphics.
EDITED to make the point clearer: And for Google search, it doesn't matter where and how the information is stored. It will somehow come to the user, and someone is going to be the gatekeeper. I hardly see a scenario where AI is not used for that, and the gatekeeper will control access to literally billions of users. If they can get 10$ per month out of each of them (which seems realistic to me given what gatekeepers like Google, Apple, Amazon make today from gatekeeping), you are in the 100 billion $ business per year.
About my second point -- online sources of info disappearing -- which you didn't address: Let's say you are a superforecaster, and would like to become better known & monetize your skill. So you set up a site where you blog about forecasting, but you also have on the site a searchable record of past forecasting contests, their topics, and the winners, as well as a list of upcoming contests and links to more information about them. It's a smart move to have that info up, because a lot of people will come to the site for that info, and when they're there they will learn more about you. Google will send them there when they do searches having to do with forecasting contests. But over time people stop using Google, and instead use an AI. The AI gives them the information from your page of information about past and upcasting tournaments, as well as info from other sites, but does not give URLs. Now the contest information you have up does not bring people to your site. And that was the part of the site that brought you the most visits. You might decide it's not worth keeping that info up anymore -- it probably involves some work to keep up to date and accurate on upcoming contests. Why bother? You seek other means of getting your name out there -- maybe podcasts. That's the kind of thing I'm talking about when I say it seems to me that having AI search and then give summarized info rather than sites is going to lead to the loss of a good number of sites that offer specialized information.
I find this perfectly possible, and it is already causing problems for wikipedia that people visit their sites less (due to previews, that was already before LLMs).
But I don't see that this changes a lot. Unless you are assuming that the decreasing amount of information will cause people to communicate less via the open internet. But when I search for information, then it's mostly not something as you describe. It's often put up from people who have a genuine interest on me getting the information. Like "which flights are there to X, and where can I buy the tickets?", or "how do I renew my passport?" or "for this conference, when and how do they want me to submit my paper there?" All this will stay up, and the other side doesn't really care how I get the information. Actually, both sides would be happy if AIs can make the process more smoothly.
There are a few exceptions of the type "how do I fix Z", where the websites are set up to live from my visits and from ads, but that's only a small part of my internet searches. The only such websites that I frequently visit is for news, and there I rather go directly to my favorite websites instead of making a web search. Perhaps other people use the internet in a different way, but I find it very hard to believe that search engines will just go away without any replacement.
How reliable is the code produced by current LLMs? How much do the LLMs charge for this service? Or are they giving it away for now?
As for academic research, be cautious about the answers that GPT 3.5 and 4 give you. In 3.5 I see a high frequency of hallucinated studies. I'd say at least 25% of the studies that 3.5 spits out have some error in the title or the authors — and some turn out to be wholly specious (at least I can't find them in Google Scholar).
As for LLMs being a replacement Google search, Google makes money out of providing links to paid advertisers. Is that OpenAI's plan? Because it's still very coy about offering up actual URL links. But I'm not paying for GTP 4 to be may gatekeeper, because I've seen the bullshit that 3.5 spews out, and others have told me 4 has the same problem.
I use Github Copilot (the Copilot product for code). It's useful. I couldn't give you a number on the reliability because it's kind of like asking, "how reliable is Joe's code?" Joe's code might be very reliable for easy tasks and code within his specialization and less reliable on trickier tasks.
You get a rough idea over time of the likelihood of Copilot producing correct code for a given task. It's reliable for code that's straightforward or has been done many times before. Ask it to write a function to find the nth prime number and it'll give you correct code. It also knows how to use popular programming libraries I may not be familiar with, or write config files for popular tools.
For trickier stuff that relies mainly on knowledge of my own code, it's more hit and miss. I'm often surprised and impressed when it gets something tricky right, but a lot of the time it's clear it's just guessing, often by trying to match some pattern you have elsewhere in your code.
Bad generations aren't a big problem. It's usually only generating a few lines at a time, and not more than one function. If it didn't generate what you want, you just don't use it. It takes a bit of time to read the code and make sure it's doing the right thing, but not nearly as long as writing tricky code. The downside of bad code generation is just that it's failing to be useful, but not that it'll ruin your code without you realizing. It's still at a point where you have to read over what it generates. If it ever gets to the point where it can reliably write code without someone looking it over, programmers will be in trouble.
It's $10/month for individuals, $19 for business and $39 for enterprise. As far as I know, the model and quality of code generated is the same for all versions and they distinguish them by adding enterprisey features to the higher tiers.
The big problem is when it generates code that superficially looks correct but is actually wrong.
I suspect that Google would love to get a lot of people to pay $20 a month. The other tech companies likely see Amazon Prime as a big success story, and diversifying away from ad revenue is something Google has tried to do for decades with limited success. OpenAI has a $20 a month plan and it’s an obvious thing to copy, since people are paying for it.
In case AI isn’t a big enough selling point on its own, they’re throwing in other services, too: “Google One AI Premium.”
How profitable this is depends on how much they can reduce costs while making it attractive to their users.
Amazon Prime is a big bundle of services, leading with free shipping. I expect a similar thing with OpenAI and this new Google subscription. The LLM doesn’t have to be their only feature.
I see that Microsoft Copilot charges $20/month for its premium version. Microsoft says it's based on GPT4. It gave me the correct answer to my COVID question: "When and where was the first COVID-19 death in the US?" Plus it provided some links to support its answer. I really like that! (I'll be using Copilot instead of ChatGPT from here on out for that reason alone.)
And it gave a somewhat different answer than GPT 4 did for Jeffrey Soreff's chemistry question ("Will CeO2 dissolve in 6 N HCl?"). I am not a chemist so I'm not sure if it's the correct answer.
Put it up. Jeffrey will be interested.
For coding, I'll pick "often useful after tweaking." It's useful for the similar reasons that autocomplete and copying code from somewhere else are useful. Even if I know exactly which code I want to copy, I often prefer Copilot to copying code and modifying it, since it makes the changes as well.
I also tend to use ChatGPT for "how to" questions where I might have previously did a Google search and looked on StackOverflow for someone else's dodgy example. I still read reference documentation.
You still need to review and test your code, but we're used to that :-)
A good source of hints can be useful even if you have to verify the results through other means. I imagine that's also true for other fields.
I don't see $20/month subscriptions as enough to pay for all the investment, but it's a start and well worth it at that price.
Thanks for the clarification.
This from Sabine Hossenfelder — she just released a video on the cost of powering AI — which would biggest ticket item in the operational costs of the AI compute, and it's estimated that the cost of training GPT4 was 100 million dollars! How will the next generation of LLMs be able to recoup those costs? Curious minds want to know.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZraZPFVr-U
This is not a useful number in isolation.
Round numbers: 1m users paying $20/mo for 1 year gets you $240m back, so you net $140m (before subtracting operating costs, which are substantial).
Point being, you need to divide the training cost/resources by the number of users to get back to meaningful units. If every month each user is taking ~$10 of training compute and paying $20 they must be getting more than $20 of value for it.
That's a drop in the bucket for these companies.
Just curious, what hash function do you use to get collisions? Aren't these supposed to be, like, infinitesimally rare?
If Scott would post full cryptographic hashes of the email addresses, then it would be trivial for anyone to check if a given email address participated and if so, how they did.
So instead, Scott posts the first five hex digits only. This is enough so that most people get unique hashes, but at least gives plausible deniability to users.
(With 3000 entries, about one in 350 hash values is populated, which still let's you do quite some Bayesian updates regarding the participation of a known email address.)
The main reason I made the hash output space small (and thus have a few collisions) was so it would be logically impossible to brute fo