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.
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.)
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 force everyone's emails. With a small hash output space, you'll get thousands of collisions for even a single email address, the real address would be among them, but that's not helpful.
Interesting, so there is a tradeoff between the collision frequency and the plausibility of an ulterior denial. I never thought of collisions as a desirable property :) Thanks for the explanation.
Anyway, I wish they hadn't intertwined the relationship bits with Huberman's greater sins: 1) making huge leaps when extrapolating form limited animal studies and 2) being financially entwined with his biggest sponsor, the bogus health supplement AG1. The gossipy relationship pieces distract from these more meaningful issues (cheating on his girlfriend doesn't hurt many people, but promoting quack health science does). All the "responses" on twitter use the relationship stuff as a cover to dismiss the whole article and anyone backing up the criticisms of Huberman are labeled betas who are just jealous of Huberman's five girlfriends.
I mostly like Huberman, I've listened to a few of his podcasts. I'm hesitant to read the article because I hate the way media writes about Joe Rogan and Lex Fridman, and I assume it will be the same for Huberman. Oh they never say anything untrue, but the way they say things stinks.
I mean, Huberman deceived like 5 women into thinking they were in a monogamous relationship with him. Some of them got STDs off of that. It's really very spicy.
Freddie de Boer -- who gets published in New York Magazine regularly and knows the writers and editors there -- put it this way regarding the Huberman article:
"The profile, overly long and written with a deliberate back-and-forth, facts-then-gossip cadence that I find mannered and unconvincing, has that sweaty quality of an exposé in search of something to expose....
It looks like a piece that contains a serious accusation, it looks like a takedown designed to maybe cost Huberman sponsors and his job at Stanford, but no such provocation is there to be found. I can hardly imagine a text better designed to inspire certain people to rally around Huberman. It’s a “Woke Magazine Publishes Hit Piece About Beloved Neuroscientist” headline waiting to happen. And this is where I bring us back to the theme here. New York is, to me, a paradigmatic case of 2024 publication still trying to understand what the post-2010s rules are. The Huberman profile is a 2019-ass piece, man, one that assumes without questioning that the purpose of a big-time magazine is to identify targets who are seen as violating contemporary liberal cultural mores and finding some identity-based charge for prosecution-by-media. Politics is moving away from that; it has moved away from that. You can lament it, but you must grapple with it....
And I say this not because I think New York is bad but because I think New York is good, genuinely good, staffed with competent people. They were acquired by a larger business entity without losing their specific character, which is hard to do. They’ve always hired well. In the past year or two they had the rare taste, discernment, and wisdom to publish me several times, and I was proud to be involved. But I also think that their present culture was built in a period where people really thought that the strange populist form of academic identity politics that colonized the industry in the past fifteen years was going to just keep on ascending....
Here’s what I can tell you for certain, though neither Howley nor anyone at New York will ever admit to it: they invested a lot of time and effort on the Huberman piece and have spent the last few weeks leading up to publication fretting over the fact that there’s no smoking gun."
I don't know anything about this case, but I'm just amazed that cheating on five people is regarded as a tired woke hit piece (woke? silly me I thought that was basic civilised decency), while slightly, respectfully disagreeing with extreme trans ideology continues to be career-destroying.
Every time I think I've grapsed how fucked up people are, I'm reminded I have no idea.
Politically, I am 180 degrees from Freddi de Boer, but about 5% of the time he and I agree 100% on something. He puts this critique in much better language than I ever could.
"I can hardly imagine a text better designed to inspire certain people to rally around Huberman."
Cheating is bad, but the NYMag crew are the wrong people for that message. Have they EVER taken issue with a woman cheating? I thought this paragraph was funny:
"The relationship struck Sarah’s friends as odd. At one point, Sarah said, “I just want to be with my kids and cook for my man.” “I was like, Who says that?” says a close friend. “I mean, I’ve known her for 30 years. She’s a powerful, decisive, strong woman. We grew up in this very feminist community. That’s not a thing either of us would ever say.”"
The cheating stuff felt more appropriate for TMZ and not NYMag. I'm not a huberman fan, but if I was, these cheating allegations wouldn't change that. And I doubt it will change things for his fans (cheating/narcissism haven't hurt Bill Clinton or Donald Trump for example).
Eh, if the story were that he was dating several women, that would be a stupid thing to write about. But that's not the story.
The claim from multiples sources, of both sexes, is that he has a bizarre pattern of lying, disappearances, and extreme flakiness (like, inviting colleagues to visit him from out of state, then disappearing on them for days without communication.)
Yes the focus of the article is definitely the cheating, I just don't think thats worth a big long article over. The cheating angle just seems kind of low stakes to me compared to the actual damage he can do with his science misinformation. (I totally recognize that very few people would read an article that was only about the science and didn't include the cheating.)
Based on what's in the article, Huberman sounds like a pretty shitty guy who displays narcissistic traits, but all the cheating and lying and flakiness really only hurts those close to him. Personal issues like that seem more appropriate for TMZ than the New Yorker which purports to be a high quality news organization.
Since you mention betas -- can you explain the distinction some make between alpha males and beta males. I can see how it might make sense in some contexts, but in most situations I've been in wouldn't have any idea who, if anyone, seemed alpha. It is not hard to tell after you've been with a group for a while who is most vocal and uninhibited, who is quieter and less open, who seems to be enjoying life and who is more sort of dragging themselves through their responsibilities, who is smart, who is kind, who is well-liked and who is just tolerated. But where in all that is alphaness? Seems to me most people are likelier to be drawn to the people who seem to be enjoying life, and who seem smart and kind. Are *those* people the alphas?
Part 2 -- At a different part of this thread, you asked *why* are women attracted to the "alpha". The idea is that from evolutionary perspective, having children with someone who is strong (that implies good health) enough to defeat his opponents, and well socially connected (that implies intelligence), is a good idea because your children will inherit the traits (health, strength, intelligence) and the father with these skills will be able to provide more resources from them, so they are more likely to survive. But even if the father ignores his kids, they will still inherit the successful traits. (Also, if you know that the guy with successful genes never cares about his kids, there is an option to find someone who would be a good father for your future kids, and then cheat on him with this guy.)
This seems supported empirically. Ceteris paribus, healthy guys are more popular than sickly ones, relaxed guys with good friends are more popular than angry loners. Strength is perhaps more controversial in a civilized era... the guy with too much muscles could be perceived as too dangerous. (Our ancestors in the ancient jungle probably didn't use so much steroids.)
The theory is that this all is perceived on the level of instinct. A man who displays some traits typical for the alphas will trigger the instinctive attraction of a woman. Even if it is fake. (Just like men will be attracted to fake boobs.) Men often don't do that, because they don't know they should, and also pretending to be an alpha when you are not can be dangerous (men above you in the dominance hierarchy may notice and punish you).
However, as usual, our instincts are calibrated for the ancient jungle, and do not fit perfectly the modern environment. Just like we eat too much sugar, we are too afraid of the social disapproval. We live in societies of millions, where it is much more difficult to get on the top than when we lived in tribes of 150. We live in a civilized environment, where acting higher status than you are will usually not get you killed, and quite often will not get you punished at all (most guys around are civilized strangers and will think "if he behaves like he is important... well, he probably is").
Intelligent guys should notice this and start acting accordingly. On one hand, getting healthier, stronger, richer, and better-connected is good and you should be trying to do that anyway; on the other hand, you do not need to wait until you get there (and you probably won't make it to the very top anyway), you can already start acting as if it was true. Stop panicking, "stand up straight with your shoulders back", smile, move slowly, treat yourself with some respect... and many people will treat you with respect, too. (And for some women, the respect will translate to attraction.) Maybe you were bullied at school, and you learned that the best survival strategy is to become invisible, but those bullies are not here anymore (and even if they attacked you the same way today, you could simply call the cops), you are not in a school anymore, you are now smarter and stronger, so it's time to try a different strategy.
I personally think the whole alpha/beta thing is very juvenile and befitting of adolescent boys and not grown men. If we'd been talking in person my tone for the alpha/beta part of my post would have been snide/eye-rolling/ironic.
To the substance of your question: I *wish* the people you describe were the ones seen as "alpha", but it seems to me that anyone who unironically follows the alpha/beta dichotomy thinks alphas are anyone who sleeps with lots of women (or at least appears to), has lots of money, or is a jerk to anyone "below" them.
Of course, as you touch on, in the "real world" (the one that adults live in and not teens on the internet), the people who have the most fulfilling lives are, on average, the ones that are kind, responsible, compassionate, etc.
Well, you can totally be kind, responsible, and compassionate and still be a loser in terms of status if you're boring, unconfident, lack spark, or are weird. Of course, part of the question here is how much does status matter ultimately for a fulfilling life (I think it can matter quite a lot, as being low status is not a good way of getting women, though it's not an insurmountable barrier).
And of course, you can be completely lacking in the first set of virtues while being great at the second set (e.g. be interesting, confident, socially savvy), which leads to that assholes get women stereotype, as the asshole is precisely that personality type.
Do assholes have fulfilling lives though? That's a question that goes back to Plato.
2) The "alpha/beta" dichotomy is when you apply the game of "telephone" to words taken from ethology.
Originally, the idea was that in some species, you can observe a hierarchy (separate for each sex) from the boss to the losers. The exact rules depend on which species you observe. I think "alpha" refers to the dominant individual, "beta" is the second in hierarchy (more dominant than average, but obey the alpha), and "omega" refers to those at the bottom. But this depends on the species; sometimes you have a pack with an individual on the top, sometimes you just have more dominant and less dominant individuals living in the same territory.
Using three words was too complicated for the internet discourse, so the terminology gradually degenerated to using "alpha" for those on the top, "beta" for those at the bottom (what "omega" originally meant), and insisting that there is nothing in between. While still pretending that this is science.
How this applies to humans? Apes in general, and humans especially, are way more *political* than most animal species. Physically strong individuals can be overcome by coalitions of somewhat weaker opponents. So I'd say, yes we do have those instincts, but we have other instincts, too. We do not choose our leaders purely based on their physical strength. However, leaders love to show their physical strength, especially dictators, so it's not like we are immune against this type of argument. Also, humans have, roughly speaking, *two* parallel hierarchies: dominance and prestige. (Robin Hanson writes about this a lot.) Singers or movie stars can be very popular, including sexually, without being perceived as strong or otherwise threatening. So my conclusion is that looking at dominance in humans can give us useful hints at processes that are often not discussed in mainstream, and provide possibly very useful information for men trying to understand how the sexual marketplace really works, but we cannot apply the rules of animal behavior to humans blindly.
An archetypal "alpha male" would be a guy who is physically strong, relaxed, obviously enjoys life, some other guys around him (less impressive than he, but still impressive) are clearly his friends. He is relaxed because he feels safe in his position; only rarely another guy dares to oppose him, but if that happened, he would not be afraid to respond appropriately (joke for a joke, punch for a punch). The assumption is that these traits usually go *together*, and together they make the alphaness. For example, it is much easier for a strong person to relax and be open, because the risk of being attacked by someone is negligible.
(In contrast, people at the bottom of the social hierarchy are attacked all the time for no reason, typically by people slightly above them, who use this to signal desperately that *they* are not at the bottom. People at the middle or above the middle are more relaxed, but they are still distracted by paying attention lest they accidentally offend someone at the top.)
What this model misses is the distinction between "popular because powerful" (when you have power or money, many people want to be your friends) and "socially powerful because popular" (when you have many fans, you can sic the mob on people you don't like). Also, power has many forms, each of them produces a different kind of "alpha": physical violence (the archetypal muscular fighter), institutional violence (imagine a successful lawyer confident that he could ruin anyone's life by merely filing the right paperwork), money.
The animal basis of the alpha/beta thing has always been funny to me. As you point out, in the real world basically no social animal species follows the alpha/beta hierarchy in the simplistic form that these internet "alphas" would like you to believe. Your example of apes is a great one because female apes have lots of power in the family structure.
Same with wolves - there is often a strong female and strong male, but they are only the leaders because they are the matriarch and patriarch; the pack is a family and the female and make leaders are the parents or relatives of the other pack members.
Also, I have started to see "sigma" male used as someone above Alpha. Sometimes, sigma is used to denote someone who is alpha without trying or thinking about it; they are above the "system" and don't care about doing non-alpha things because it can't/wont knock them down the pecking order.
I think it's a really unfortunate and distracting animal analogy that hints at something that's real, important, and much more complicated, in humans. Classifying things into "alpha" and "beta" (or god help us, "sigma") doesn't get you all that close to an understanding of human status and power heirarchies and how they factor into female attraction, but I guess it's ever so slightly better than being completely ignorant of the fact that they exist?
So, if an attractive guy behaves according to my theory, he is an alpha, and if he does not behave according to my theory, he is a sigma. Either way, my theory wins! Is that how cool kids do science these days?
I think the distinction is largely bullshit, but it's what happens when you gaslight people, to the maximum possible extent, for years and years.
There are a fair number of men, who report having personally seen and/or experienced women preferring the rough category of "strong, aggressive, gets into and wins fights, treats everyone around him like crap (especially his girlfriends)" over the rough category of "kind, reasonable, tries to treat people well, but lacks the *excitement* of being dangerous and tough". And when they try to share those stories, and how it often seems that women are generally like this, the feminist or feminist-adjacent mainstream gives a reasonable response like "of course there are a few awful shallow women, they're disgusting people and we condemn them, but it's far from all, and what about all the awful shallow men who only want supermodels, do you properly condemn them and hold yourself to the same standards?"....
Ha ha, just kidding. They instead gaslight to an unimaginable extent, ranging from the bad ("that never ever happens, anyone who thinks it did must by definition be a terrible person") to the very, very bad ("maybe it happens and maybe it doesn't, but you are never, under any circumstances, allowed to talk about it"). And in response to such silencing, perhaps after a period of self-doubt and self-loathing, these men eventually overcome the brainwashing, realise they're being gaslit and they know what they experienced, their perceptions aren't an illusion...and then proceed to overcorrect and come to believe that this "alpha-attraction" is a universal feature of women, and an ugly truth that the establishment is determined to suppress.
So it's a falsehood (there's clearly no shortage of non-"alphas" who are highly popular with women, and of women who are utterly repulsed by "alphas", if you get a remotely representative population sample)...but let's not forget that the fault for the existence of this falsehood is entirely on the side that has *infinitely" more power (on every possible metric) than the other, that controls the media narratives and the academic studies and the government policies, and uses every ounce of that power to shut down any discussion of the truth of the matter. It's entirely natural, and even (with a lack of information) rational, for the people being prevented from seeking or discussing the truth, to conclude that the truth is the exact opposite of the official party line.
Much like when official lies about covid are revealed, or the establishment declares that there is literally not a single instance of anti-white racism on the face of the earth, anyone who looks around at the actual world is going to conclude that the official narratives can't be trusted, and has a good chance of concluding that in fact covid is a hoax, or there's a huge conspiracy against whites. And this is an entirely justified reaction (if you lack further information) to the situation of being lied to.
And, so sadly, it all could have been avoided if only one group held the tiniest concern for truth. Or lacked a frothing-at-the-mouth rage at the thought of acknowledging the slightest nuance or complexity in human society.
That feels like a stipulative definition. Round my way (UK, 56yo male) I haven't heard the alpha/beta thing much recently, but when I did used to hear it, it was almost always in a work context, and would refer to someone who tended to be assertive or dominating in a group. No sex was involved.
It would be used in a mildly facetious or ironic way; no one would be enough of a twit to say in real life "I am an alpha male", though frankly I probably do have traits of it; people who have used the term are using it in a colloquial and informal sense rather than finding relevant zoological or anthropological literature to check if the terms have any real currency.
The most recent usages I have heard are from my wife, who will occasionally say "you were a little bit alpha male there". This means that I was a wee bit dominating of conversation when conversation came round to my end of the market. It is (I think!) meant fondly if a little teasingly.
But *why* are they successful with women? Isn't the idea that they're successful with women *because* we recognize they're alphas? But wutz the thing we recognize? If I lived in a world where people had barfights, then I assume the person who won more of them and was feared by others would be an alpha. I guess in the world of white-collar professionals you could say the person who's higher in the hierarchy and can boss more people around is the alpha, though those guys are not necessarily people who are bold, decisive and brave. But, like say on here -- how would somebody actin order to qualify as an alpha? There are people who quickly get angry sarcastic and mean in arguments, and a lot of people just bail on discussions with them at that point. There are people who seem consistently well-informed about the things they comment on, but they don't necessarily have much razzle-dazzle. There are people who stand out because they are funny, or in some other way have the knack of conveying something about their personality while writing about their ideas on the topic. Are any of those people alphas?
The why is simple: they exhibit traits that correlate with ability to control/dominate/defend resources. How this plays out is highly context sensitive, but the purpose is the same. As a species that naturally forms social hierarchies, we are highly attuned to these traits sub-consciously.
But in our society there are a lot of ways to control/dominate/defend resources so, as you say, it's highly context-sensitive. There are a lot of ways to be brave & powerful: You can be a transgressive, brilliant stand-up comic, an excellent, impossible-to-intimidate interviewer, a daring rock climber, a chess champion, an orchestra conductor, a brilliant diagnostician, high-ranking at Kaggle, or rich as fuck. And while women had no chance of of being dominant, etc. when the way to do that was to be physically large, strong and aggressive, they are able to be dominant, etc. in the modern world in fields like the ones I named. The variety of ways there are to be impressive and powerful kind of blurs and weakens the concept of being alpha. There are so many ways to do it that it makes a lot less sense to talk about whether or not somebody's an alpha. For instance Scott is high-earning, also intellectually powerful and influential. but he describes himself as introverted, and it would not surprise me if he came across as shy and "beta" to someone who did not know who he was and tried to chat him up at a party. And he had a terrible time with dating, and wrote about it very frankly on SSC.
I am a woman, and the only vestige I can find in myself of attraction based on the physically big and powerful standard is that I am not able to be attracted to men who are shorter than me. The men I've been drawn to have mostly been pretty impressive in some area -- for instance once was a chess champion -- but in many others they were just regular people. And I'm not sure how important their impressiveness in their specialty area was, either. What felt most important was our rapport -- did we really get each other, did we make each other laugh.
While I agree the many ways to be successful at securing resources reduces the value of traditional "dominant" phenotypes, there is still a role for them despite their diminished value. At the end of the day, attraction is visceral, and women will (on average, all else equal) be attracted to the more dominant males within any social group. While women are fully capable of providing for themselves and their children, there is still a place for traditional dominance traits. Risk of violence from other males gives traditional dominance phenotypes value even in the modern day.
I can't put my hands on it right now, but I recall seeing a study that demonstrated a correlation with female preference to traditionally dominant males and economic insecurity. But it makes sense, the best mate selection strategy in terms of evolutionary fitness needs to be sensitive to the environment. In contexts where traditional dominance traits are less indicative of status and resource gathering ability, they should be down-weighed.
All that said, its probably more accurate to think of the alpha/beta dichotomy less in terms of traditional dominance behaviors and more in terms of more generic relative status. In contexts where status just is physical dominance, that's how it will manifest. But the concept is more abstract than that. The dichotomy has explanatory power, and so shouldn't just be thrown out because some find it unsavory or outgroup-coded.
>And I'm not sure how important their impressiveness in their specialty area was, either. What felt most important was our rapport -- did we really get each other, did we make each other laugh.
It helps to separate out what we intellectually find appealing and what we viscerally find appealing. It's easy to focus on the intellectual side when thinking what we found attractive in a significant other, while the visceral traits mostly go unnoticed. But the intellectual traits can only be the difference-maker if the visceral traits are present. You already mentioned height. I assume confidence is in there somewhere. Talent is another one indicated by being a chess champion. Winning at competition is also a dominance trait.
At the end of the day, we're basically just apes playing out our status games. The only difference is in their sophistication.
The why is relevant is because it involves being and doing a bunch of things that are more-or-less wrong by official mores -- brawn over brain, dominance over prestige, cruelty over kindness -- whence issues of hypocrisy and doublethink.
Ok, but isn't Alexander Turok's metric reasonably well defined even if we weren't able to predict it from other characteristics of individuals (such as the characteristics you cite)? ( Caveat: "guys who are successful with women" isn't a crisp scalar. Does relationship duration count? Number of relationships? Some measure of satisfaction? Fraction of time spent in a relationship? Mean time to form a new relationship? )
Yes, but it defies common sense to define it that way and say no more. . Both research and life experience and, of course, info about who does OK on the dating apps, tell us there are a number of variables that predict, though of course not perfectly, which males a woman is likely to be attracted to. Saying an alpha is someone who succeeds with women is like saying an Olympian is someone who competes in the Olympics. It's accurate, but it leaves out crucial information. Why are these people, and not others, Olympians? Because they're among the best in the world in their sport.
Also, others writing about alpha on here have said other things. For instance, Skull, in answer to this question, basically said that alphas are assertive -- gave an example of something like behavior when criticizing a coworker: Alphas say it to the person, betas send an email.
Finally, here is the definition of alpha fro a document identifying itself as the Glossary of Red pill Terms and Aphorisms which is a real joy to read: "Alpha – Socially dominant. Somebody who displays high value, or traits that are sexually attractive to women. Alpha can refer to a man who exhibits alpha behaviors (more alpha tendencies than beta), but usually used to describe individual behaviors themselves." (https://www.reddit.com/r/RedPillWomen/comments/9kl2j8/glossary_of_terms_and_acronyms/)
These fine people are talking about the traits that make someone an alpha. So wut are they?
>Yes, but it defies common sense to define it that way and say no more.
Ok. I'd put it somewhat less forcefully. It is both interesting and potentially valuable to be able to _predict_ this metric, as with any interesting and potentially important metric.
>Both research and life experience and, of course, info about who does OK on the dating apps, tell us there are a number of variables that predict, though of course not perfectly, which males a woman is likely to be attracted to.
Sure. I didn't mean to imply that no research had been done. I just meant to imply that the metric is a starting point.
>For instance, Skull, in answer to this question, basically said that alphas are assertive
Sure. I wouldn't be surprised if some combination of e.g. assertiveness and e.g. height is a reasonable predictor of dating success.
>Finally, here is the definition of alpha fro a document identifying itself as the Glossary of Red pill Terms and Aphorisms which is a real joy to read: "Alpha – Socially dominant. Somebody who displays high value, or traits that are sexually attractive to women. Alpha can refer to a man who exhibits alpha behaviors (more alpha tendencies than beta), but usually used to describe individual behaviors themselves."
From a standpoint of keeping independent and dependent variables straight, this is unfortunate. If "Socially dominant" is a set of observable behaviors which may or may not wind up giving the man in question dating success (which I'm taking as roughly synonymous with displaying "traits that are sexually attractive to women") then the definition as a whole intermixes independent and dependent variables.
One can sometimes get away with this, in areas where our predictive ability is _very_ good (e.g. electromagnetism in physics) but I doubt that this is such an area.
Stupid cod pop-psychology from an animal study done way back in the 70s on a wolf pack in captivity. Researchers claimed they were able to work out the pack hierarchy from alpha, beta, etc. and described roles, behaviours, functions, and Uncle Tom Cobley and all.
This trickled over into the kind of pseudo-behavioural science/evo-psych explanations beloved of the Why You're A Loser And Bitches And Hoes Shine You On types: never mind that humans are not wolf packs, describing oneself as an "alpha wolf" is appealing to a certain type of mindset.
Allegedly later it turns out that the pack being studied was made up of juvenile wolves unrelated to one another, so basically a bunch of poorly socialised orphans and *not* representative of how genuine wolf packs operate, but by then the "Chad is an alpha that's why he's banging all the chicks, you're just a poor beta, and fuck knows what that loser omega is doing with his life" nonsense had been established.
I think your best bet to see an alpha male is to go to the zoo and see if they have packs/troupes of the animals which engage in such behaviour in captivity.
Bringing up the origins of the term as an argument has always felt very unconvincing to me, yeah maybe wolves don't have "Alpha Males" like the manosphere imagines him, but Gorillas and to a lesser extent Chimpanzees do. Moreover, human societies and history itself are rife with Alpha Males, exactly as the manosphere imagines, even more, parody-like extremes of themselves.
So who cares about wolves, the original term didn't fit, but it very much found another uses, and those uses are exactly what the term was originally invented to describe.
I care. I care about the origin. I care about the alleged 'scientific underpinnings, this is how nature works, this is how men and women really are, forget all the social conditioning bullshit' that the fuck-faces used and use to claim their usage is correct and real and true.
If they want to call themselves alphas or alpacas or Noble Loyal Order of the Water Buffalo, I don't give a damn. I do give a damn when the facts are wrong.
The researcher, who followed families of wolves in Yellowstone for decades, mentions that a wolf pack is really just a family and the "alpha" wolves are usually the parents of all the other wolves. The oldest male and female share responsibilities and decision making is somewhat dispersed throughout the pack.
An alpha is someone confident and successful, a beta is a weak-willed pussy. Much like pornography, you know it when you see it. If you can't figure out whether a given person is an alpha or a beta, then either the distinction doesn't apply to that person or you're thinking too hard about it. Jocko Willink is an alpha. Your coworker who sends out a memo instead of having a conversation with the one guy he has a problem with is a beta.
But I don't know it when I see it, and I'm not trying to be difficult. For instance, take discussions on this forum -- how would one recognize an alpha? Mostly we do not know what people's jobs and financial situation are, so we can't use the "successful" criterion, except for people's success in discussions here, and there's no clear outcome measure of that. And then there's confidence. I'd say everybody who answered my question about what an alpha is sounded confident of their answer. They didn't pussyfoot around, but were blunt and honest about their views, and they expressed their views clearly. And I'm familiar with the views and writing style of several of them, and I'd say they are people who generally sound confident. I don't mean they are routinely contemptuous of others (though sometimes they are), but they do not hesitate to say what they think, even in situations where they know their views will be unpopular. I think I come across as confident in that way, too. I say what I really think, and don't pull punches. So are ALL of us alphas?
> For instance, take discussions on this forum -- how would one recognize an alpha?
Fortunately(?) this is a moot point: you don't need a heuristic to parse alphas from betas on the comments section of a rationalist blog, because people who patronise the comments section of a rationalist blog are definitely not alphas.
Not him, but I wouldn't expect many rationalists to be alphas (surely some are) because they lack fire, they lack spark, they're not the kind of people who bring the party with them.
Obviously not, because then who would buy my new self-help book, "ALPHA MALE Secrets: The Method of the Magnificently and Majestically Mega Manly Man" for 200$ a pop?
In all seriousness, it seems to me that the guys who are invested in the Alpha / Beta distinction are mostly using their own words to describe simple social status, or at least a kind of social status in their own circles. So any definition which led to a large amount of people being alphas would therefore destroy the point.
I get the sense that your view is more that anybody can be confident and competent, and everybody should (unless you are truly evil in some way). I agree with this, but I wager that someone who's obsessed with status may just keep raising the bar on what "confidence" is in order to keep justifying their "alpha" moniker.
No, I don't think anybody can be confident and competent. A lot of people are shy, self-doubting, or harshly self-critical, and there are some people who are not competent at one single thing that is important to their social group. My point was much more limited: That Skull's definition what. makes someone an alpha seems to cover an awful lot of people. Can it really be that most of the people posting on this thread, at least 2 of us females, are alphas? I am one of them, and I can guarantee you that women are not falling at my feet begging to get carried off to bed.
"Alpha Males" are a piece of internet/manosphere lore, asking where to find them is like asking how to find BigFoot or asking where all the transcripts for the meetings of the Elders of Zion are, there aren't any, not if you want credible talk.
The closest you can get to a real-world use is as a shorthand for "High-Status", but "High-Status" itself is context dependent. In some cultures women aren't allowed to divorce, so Jeff Bezos allowing his wife to divorce him is pretty Beta, but Jeff Bezos is the richest man on the planet as measured by many metrics, and he can (consensually, or half-consensually) do the dirty with a vast arsenal of every sort and color of women, which is pretty Alpha. Some followers of Andrew Tate would say that fucking consensually is pretty Beta, and they might admire conquerors of old (e.g. Genghis Khan) who raped and took as sex slaves countless women. I'm basing this on a short clip I saw of Andrew Tate once by accident where he admired Genghis Khan and called him a "Top G[ame]", so assuming this thought process is common among his followers is not too much of a stretch.
If there is one consistent cluster of traits in the usage of "Alpha", then (1) An Alpha is sexually successful, fucks lots of women, preferably virgins or without a lot of past experience, preferably despite some protests by some of the women, preferably some of the women are the ones who come to him not vice versa (2) An Alpha gets his way over other males (and of course over other females), preferably by force and intimidation (3) An Alpha is physically strong, but that's necessary and not sufficient.
Do Alphas exist outside of being idealized standards? Scott argues in Radicalizing The Romanceless that a particular subset of traditional Alpha characteristics, namely fucking lots of women even though the women have some/many protests related to how the Alpha treats them and even though the women have nicer alternatives and even though the Alpha treats every individual woman in his Harem as quite marginal, exist in the form of some characters with Dark Triad personality and the women who keep getting attracted to them, but that's just one possible interpretation of "Alpha", and it's not clear how common they are.
> Seems to me most people are likelier to be drawn to the people who seem to be enjoying life, and who seem smart and kind.
Sounds too hand-wavy and a just-so story to me, I *definitely* know that merely being smart and kind are not enough to make people attracted to you, maybe respect you or defer to you in some sort of "Elder of the Tribe" way, but not sexual attraction of the kind that the Alpha/Beta distinction is heavily obsessed with.
I don't really know if people (and/or women) being attracted to assholes is just an unlikely anomaly that we're shocked at because we expect it to be way less frequent than we realistically have the right to expect, or is it really a persistent pattern that deserves all the puzzling over it, but certainly nobody denies that it happens, and it happens more often than we would expect. Who knows if it's the actual assholeness that attracts the women, or are they just attracted to (e.g.) wealth or physical characteristics and swallow the assholeness along because it's not too important to them that somebody treats them like a human.
In all cases, the world "Alpha" is a dumb/historically-naive harkening back to an idealized past/state-of-nature where the best and most sexually successful man is a feminist strawman of a patriarch who oppresses 5 women before breakfast (and they like it, even if they say they don't) and fight 5 Betas to the death effortlessly. Not only is this state of affairs not necessarily good (first and foremost for the Alpha, who dies a violent and humiliating death in the actual real world in the species that do have this concept in their social structure), and not only do most men/boys romanticizing it in the modern day do not realize they would probably be among the Betas (if only by the sheer force of statistics), it's also decidedly not the world we live in on any large scale. A modern-day Beta can easily kill hundreds of Alphas with an AR-15, or send them to a hellish penal system with a well-paid lawyer, or force his will on them with a well-financed political campaign. Civilization is a feminizing force, even an Alpha pays taxes and stops when he hears a police siren.
As a matter of fact, you can see the development of human civilization as essentially a process where the Alpha is gradually centralized and mythologized and de-anthropomorphized, and then re-distributed among various faceless non-human entities. First the ultimate Alpha was the king (who is not an ordinary human, he is the son of Gods), then it was (the one true) God, then it was the nation state and the banking system and the judicial system and corporations. Military dictatorships might try to restore some of that central Alpha magic from the days of kingdoms, but they are really operating in a different world and a single intelligent second-in-command is often enough to demonstrate that Alphaness in the age of the machine gun is a quite complex concept.
While it does harken back to a fantasy of prehistoric times, in many ways the “alpha male” is a distinctly modern figure because it is only in modern times that an average man can approach a large number of women to behave like a jackass to them, and present the ability to do so as enviable to men in general.
I don't know, behaving like an ass to women (or to anyone really) has always been an appealing niche through the history of humanity. What's more ass-like than killing all the male relatives of a woman and taking her as a sex slave, which was the standard operating procedure of victory in war in many different places and times? as late as 1945 - Soviets in Germany - the rape of enemy female populations was a motivation for male soldiers. ISIS continued to follow this tradition in the mid and late 2010s with the rape of Syrian women and Kurdish Yazidis.
The kernel of truth in what you're saying is that the modern Alpha Male as a concept might be - at least in part - decidedly modern because it invokes grievances that were caused by the modern Feminist victory across a whole lot of the board, and not just in Western societies. Some of those grievances are very real, and sensed by men and boys who are by no means misogynist or anti-women, but the Feminist smug and flippant responses to them often exacerbates existing anger and paints a target over their back, which movements like Andrew-Tatism then uses (Toxoplasma of Rage) as fuel to prove how men/boys are suffering from injustice and that's why we need to return to the golden age of Genghis Khan of the strong man who is done with all society's bullshit.
In a certain, very real sense, Andrew Tate is very much a fascist. There is a population that he says (very correctly) is oppressed and treated unfairly in the modern world, he is from that population and he says he wants to see it better, he has an outgroup that couldn't be more different than the population in question and which he (wrongly) blames for all the ills and problems of the population, and he wants to return to the idealized past when the population was strong and the outgroup just knew its place. Classic textbook Fascism, and Fascism is very modern.
You're talking about states of war and terrible catastrophe (what happens to women when their brothers and fathers and husbands, etc., have been killed).
The Tate-like men we are talking about are men who live in a particular peacetime society and boast to other men in that society that they are the "real men" because they treat the women of that same society with disrespect.
I think this has always been fashionable too, maybe waxing and waning in response to various factors, but always a popular way to conduct oneself. Not that women are angels, some are guilty of exactly a symmetric kind of bigotry against men, and always have been.
Ultimately, Male and Female are the closest thing in humanity to distinct sub-species, and thus empathy across genders is in a certain sense the hardest stress-test for empathy, because you're empathizing with a radically different perspective.
(Anecdote: Yesterday I was browsing YouTube and saw a dumb screenshotted Twitter exchange where a woman was making fun of men because she saw a man in pain while having his eyebrows plucked. A man in the replies made fun of her by remarking that women can't take punches from men so they're not exactly in a position to judge. Dumb exchange all around, right? The comments were pretty evenly split into those who can see nothing wrong with the man's remark all things considered, and those - most probably all women or girls - who heaped insult after insult after "men" and how "insecure" they are because they joke about violence, all the standard feminist invective, all while forgetting who started the exchange and seeing nothing wrong with calling men weak and pathetic because of a natural pain reaction. It was the angriest I got at online feminism/misandry/men-bashing in a long time. And it convinced me further that empathy across gender is a hard and unsolved problem.)
Hell, even just 100-200 years ago, the people claiming to be "alpha males" would have been viewed as utterly barbaric and savage-like by most. All this red-pill stuff isn't even reactionary, it's just stupid.
Eh, I'm not sure your argument proves what you think it does. Why *can't* we go back to viewing such horrible people in that manner? Who is standing in the way of becoming a society that shames and condems the sort of people who crawl bars for sex with strangers, treat their "partners" as mere objects to be judged in the shallowest way possible, eshews any emotional connection with them whatsoever, and never spends five seconds thinking about anything other than their own base desires? Which group responds to any such suggestion with "I demand the right to do whatever the fuck I want!" and treats as the highest oppression the shaming, and not celebrating, of people for their sexual behaviour? The reactionaries, or the anti-reactionaries?
These days, I only really see alpha and beta labels used by guys like Andrew Tate (or his fans) but mostly it's just used as a joke. And in both cases alpha basically means like a comically over the top stereotype of masculinity (like a fighter, or someone who has a ton of sex). Beta just means the opposite (i.e. a pussy).
Unfortunately, there seems to still be a huge contingent of people that unironically subscribe to the alpha/beta thing. Of course it's mostly teenagers or young men on reddit/4chan who aren't happy with their dating success.
Question for people with medical or physiological knowledge: There's an idea floating around that the sympathetic nervous system is in charge of the flight or flight response, and the parasympathetic one with the "rest and digest" response. In line with this formulation, people who are anxious and stressed out are sometimes taught things that are said to stimulate the vagus nerve, such as slow breathing.
So I'd like to know (1) whether it really is possible for a person to stimulate their vague nerve by simple means such as slow breathing. (2) whether doing that would in fact help them calm down and (3) if slow breathing does work, are there other simple things that would augment the effect of slow breathing?
Parasympathetic and sympathetic are two sides of the same coin and there is constant interplay between them. "Fight or Flight" is really a combination of down-regulating aspects of the parasympathetic system and up-regulating aspects of the sympathetic.
When it comes to breathing, the actual rate of your inhalation can effect your heart rate. When you inhale, your HR increases and when you exhale, HR decreases - this is called "Respiratory Sinus Arrythmia," and it's mediated primarily through the vagus nerve, which directly innervates the heart. So to answer your question, yes it is possible to "stimulate" the vagus nerve acutely through breathing, and lower HR. There's probably published data on this but if your goal was to lower HR you'd just take long exhales and shorter inhales (i.e, 8s exhale, 4s inhale).
More interestingly, one can also increase the amount of "vagal tone" one has - or the baseline electrical signals that travel through the vagus nerve. For example, it's thought that exposure to cold tubs raises vagal tone. Ostensibly higher vagal tone chronically would mean that breathing / breathing exercises has a greater impact on heart rate, and on the fight-or-flight response.
About the gastrointestinal activity and saliva production: Looked up vagus nerve and read that it's in charge of vomiting. Not exactly a feel-good state.
I slow breathing the most effective way to slow the heart?
Relaxation techniques can help, but it does seem that vagal nerve stimulation is one of the more reliable non-pharmacological method of lowing heart rates. Slow breathing would not stimulate the vagus nerve though. There are a few different ways to do it:
-Hold your breath and plunge your face into ice water.
-Lie on your back, pinch your nose closed, and try to breathe out while keeping your mouth closed for 30 seconds. You want to be creating pressure.
-Having someone massage your carotid sinus.
-Coughing really hard
-Doing a handstand for half a minute
Even then, vagal stimulation only works on tachycardia (100 BPM or more) 20-40% of the time. But the technique is quick and simple to do, so it's worth trying if your heart's going too fast.
Oh, I'm familiar with those. I've had heart palpitations all my life, which I've been told are nothing to worry about in my case, and a doctor told me long ago to do the exhale-hard-against -closed-mouth-and-nose technique, and it works extremely well. But what this guy is having isn't anything like palpitations, it's just the elevated heart rate pretty much anyone would have when awakened suddenly by a blaring alarm, then putting up with the alarm sound for a few minutes before getting the all clear. Do these techniques work for that?
I’ve never heard the contention that slow breathing has anything to do with the vagus nerve. Conventional ways to stimulate the vagus nerve include massaging the carotid arteries and the Valsalva manoeuvre (forced expiration against a closed glottis - the thing you do on a plane to pop your ears where you hold your nose and close your mouth and exhale.) These are good for reverting supraventricular tachycardia but not, as far as I’m aware, for anxiety attacks.
I think the benefit of slow breathing is more from a meditative/mindfulness perspective where it forces you to focus on the here and now - the breath - and leave your abstract, anxiety inducing concerns.
I'm actually not asking about a way to fight off anxiety attacks -- more about the general idea of the vagus nerve being in charge of "rest and digest" states, and the related idea that stimulating it counteracts stuff associated with flight of flight -- fast heart, tense muscles, dry mouth . . .
I think as a concept it’s too simplistic. If vagal stimulation worked to counteract high stress, we would expect regular Valsalva manoeuvres to be the go to for high flying business executives.
Chronic anxiety and high stress, from a physiological perspective, are more associated with high cortisol (the “stress hormone.”) Adrenaline, the output of the sympathetic nervous system, may drive up heart rate and blood pressure acutely, but people in actual fight or flight scenarios usually report a high degree of focussed awareness - the psychic opposite of chronic high stress anxiety states.
Cortisol is really the culprit over the long term, causing chronic high blood pressure, elevated heart rate, high blood sugar, weight gain and a host of related physiological problems. I think it’s generally accepted that modern society is significantly different from our ancestral environment in that we don’t have acute life or death scenarios any more - instead we have chronic stressors like mortgage repayments. Our physiology is not really set up to deal with this.
Whether high cortisol is the cause or the consequence of stress/anxiety - as far as I know consequence, but not familiar with studies in this area, just imputing from clinical practice as there are no drugs that specifically target hypercortisolaemia. A few doctors do measure it, but it’s not the norm in clinical practice
So here's a question for you. I'm a psychologist, treating someone with a somewhat unusual problem. He lives in a high-rise where every few months the smoke alarm goes off in the middle of the night. It has never been set off by anything worse than somebody's smoky cooking, and he is not worried about his building burning down. His problem is that when he is awakened by that alarm, which is noisy and irritating and continues for a while, he's startled, has a fast heart rate, feels tense , etc. -- all very normal, right? The problem is that he finds the awakenings and the state they put him into quite unpleasant (but so would most people, I think), and he's now having trouble every thing falling asleep, or falling back asleep after waking up to pee, because he keeps wondering whether the alarm will go off while he's asleep. So I was thinking he might be less troubled by his reaction to the alarm if he had more ability to quell the state once the alarm stops and it's announced that there's no emergency. Any ideas?
Interesting! I hear two separate things going on. One is his particular flavor of unpleasant reaction when the alarm actually goes off every few months. Getting up and running cold water on his hands and wrists for a few minutes or holding an ice cube in each hand might help dial down his reaction when that actually happens. He lives in a place where he's going to get unpleasantly woken up every few months and that's his reality as long as he stays there.
But the main thing going on it sounds like is that he's now got chronic insomnia from the anticipatory anxiety around the possibility of the alarm going off on any given night. Is that right?
The first issue is a straight-forward tending to a normal nervous system response that's an entirely non-cognitive process.
The second one is now a panoply of cued anxious thinking that's keeping him awake on other nights.
I wouldn't feel confident that giving him a way to feel better after the alarm goes off is going to address the anxious thoughts that he's now having every night. Or am I misunderstanding the situation maybe?
For the anxious thoughts he needs a strategy to stop engaging with them at night. He can't control whether that worried thought arises -- "what if the alarm goes off tonight?" But he can control how much he focuses his attention on that thought.
He may have developed an unconscious belief that he needs to keep his "what if it's tonight?" worry front and center in his consciousness as he goes to sleep so he's not surprised when it happens. This kind of construction is very common in anxiety and OCD.
If that has happened, then his belief that it's useful for him to focus on that thought when it arises needs to be addressed directly. As well as his possible belief that he has no control over whether to go to work on a thought that arises.
Metacognitive therapy can be super helpful for this kind of thing because it teaches a person through behavioral experiments that they can just leave a thought there where it arises. Not argue back at it, not push it away, not keeping worrying on it, just let it be there without taking up center stage and bringing the whole nervous system along with it.
He needs (I think maybe) to get to a place where the thought "what if the alarm goes off tonight" arises while he's peeing or falling asleep or briefly waking up at night and he can go "yeah, that's a thought I'm having" without focusing on it. "Yeah, maybe tonight will be the night, who knows? Maybe it will, maybe it won't. Whatever."
>I wouldn't feel confident that giving him a way to feel better after the alarm goes off is going to address the anxious thoughts that he's now having every night. Or am I misunderstanding the situation maybe?
Maybe. After all, the problem isn't that the alarm may go off. The problem is that he "knows" (has a baseline expectation) that the alarm going off will ruin his night because he'll have an intense physical fear reaction and won't be able to get back to sleep. If his baseline expectation could be changed from "alarm goes off ruins my whole night" to "alarm going off is temporarily annoying but doesn't ruin my night," surely there is a chance that he would gradually lose his anticipatory anxiety around the possibility of the alarm going off, and therefore would not need to try to minimize it with metacognitive therapy.
Completely agree about the metacognitive therapy for his chronic anxiety about the alarm being maintained by a belief that that he needs to really think about the possibility of the alarm, because somehow that will keep him safer. (My mother was afraid of flying, and thought the whole time about crashes, but flew anyhow. When I suggested she read a good book on the plane she said, while laughing at herself, "no, I can't do that! My worry is what keeps the plane aloft.".
We're also going to do exposures to sudden loud noises (starting with popping balloons. And I'm also going to see if he can get any benefit from understanding that the revved up state the alarm puts him into is his body doing just the right thing, given that there might be an emergency. If in fact he did have to run fast or carry something heavy he'd be more able to when adrenalized this way. His cold hands are an indication that his body is keeping more blood in his core and less in his arms. If one of his limbs was wounded he's bleed less than he normally would (at least I think I have that bit right.)
Something like ear plugs or listening to music/book at bedtime type thing to help him fall asleep and block out exterior noise? Being startled out of your sleep by a loud and alarming noise is very anxiety-inducing and unpleasant and it does take a while to get back to sleep, so something as a distraction like "put in ear buds and listen to music" to help him drop off again might help. Works for me to get me to sleep, anyway.
I have used earplugs several times during periods when my landlord had extremely loud, building-shaking work done to the building for weeks at a time during my sleeping hours. Sleeping with earplugs didn't keep me from being able to hear the bangs and slams and machinery, but it seemed to put them in the background in such a way that my lower brain did *not* override the contextual priming it had been given ("any noises in the morning are probably just the guys working on the building, no need to react") and give the "ALL HANDS ON DECK, MAN THE ADRENALINE CANNONS" signal to the body, as it normally would.
I have spent enough nights on call to sympathise with someone being abruptly woken up by potential emergencies and the negative effect it has on your mental state the following day
Hmmm, interesting question! I guess if that happened to me I would feel understandably anxious, and wouldn’t really feel safe and fine to go back to sleep until it was announced that there was no danger. So up until that announcement I think it’s a normal, healthy worry - sure the last 10 times it was someone burning their stir fry, but that doesn’t guarantee this time the building isn’t burning down. (It’s also completely normal to have to pee when suddenly awakened from sleep)
Once it’s announced, though, the anxiety becomes pathological and I see your point that it’s triggered by an acute state of physiological arousal. Breathing exercises are one way to subdue this, but lots of meditative/yoga techniques could work too - say body awareness meditation where you focus on each part of the body individually and quietly observe the sensations that are passing through. Muscular stress can be relieved by rhythmically and slowly contracting and releasing each muscle group in the body.
If that’s not working and it’s really bothering him - I usually hate prescribing Valium or related drugs, but this is one situation where it’s not terrible - he only has to use it once every few months in pre-defined situations so there is minimal chance of developing addiction/dependence issues. Again, though, I would try conservative measures in the first instance
Edit - it sounds like part of the problem is that when this happens he *expects* it to ruin his night. So challenging that assumption - maybe creating a space where he can try strategies and see what works - approaching it with a more scientific, curious, mindset?
Just to be clear, the problem isn't that he's in an awful state of anxiety when the alarm sounds. It's unpleasant, but really does not sound to me like it's more unpleasant for him than for other people. He is not panicky, not full of worry that there's a serious fire. The problem he wants help with is *anticipatory* anxiety about the alarm. He has trouble falling asleep every night, because he's fretting about whether he will get awakened by the smoke alarm. If he gets up to pee, he has trouble going back to sleep because of the same worry. If the problem was dealing with the rare occasions when the alarm actually rings, then yeah, he could take a valium. It's only once every coupla months. But the problem he's having happens every single night -- it's *worrying* there may be an alarm. I imagine his uneasy state as being sort of like the one I'm in when I have to wake up pre-dawn for an early flight. I can't sleep well because I'm worrying about sleeping through my alarm, even though I never sleep through my alarm and have also set 2 for the occasion. And when I do sleep I keep dreaming that I've slept through the alarm and then waking up to check the time and make sure I haven't.
Has anyone floated the idea of a documentary on AI x-risk, aimed at a general audience? It seems like the general public is already worried about AI, and I believe the headline takeaways from the recent Gladstone report are of the public interest. I'm imagining a one-two punch of a straightforward explanation of the alignment problem and related stuff, followed by testimony from alarmed AI researchers. (Ideally people actually working at labs.) I dunno, is it naive to think that something like that could make a difference?
That would probably work because AI risk is still seen as science fiction, which means that fictional movies don't help, and most information is in books, which people don't read. Get some serious looking people in labcoats and people would view it differently.
Is there some sort of rule of thumb for separating mere unhappiness from actual depression? I was recently asked whether I used to be depressed, and I couldn't really answer, because I wasn't sure how dysfunctional you have to be to actually be depressed.
IMO, if you can still enjoy a beautiful sunny day, appreciate the cuteness of rubbing a kitten's tummy, and smile from the inside out when you see an old friend, then that's "just" sadness. Maybe your life is horrible and you don't have friends and never see kittens and it rains all the time; in that case it might be hard to tell on an average day.
On the other hand, if all of those things fail to spark any feeling of appreciation in you, if you get nothing out of literally stopping and smelling the roses, then that's depression.
It is a bit different from the layman's conception of deep unhappiness, mainly in its inclusion of several somatic symptoms: weight gain or loss; insomnia or hypersomnia; psychomotor retardation or agitation; and fatigue or loss of energy. However, all but the 3rd of these 4 are very common. I'll bet something like a quarter of the population would endorse each. So setting aside the somatic symptoms, the criteria you are left with do not seem to me to differ from the misery of people who are bereaved, who have had a bad breakup, or are stuck in a miserable situation (say a teenager with alcoholic, verbally abusive parents). I think we have over-medicalized human unhappiness. Both the psychiatric profession and the drug companies have very substantial a stake in defining misery as an illness., and I think that accounts for a fair amount of the impulse to medicalize unhappiness.
And yet I have seen some people whose chronic misery was greatly alleviated by a drug, usually an antidepressant, though sometimes lithium or an upper like adderall. When the drug takes effect, usually after a few weeks, these people are saying. "Who turned on the lights?!? Is this the way you're supposed to feel? Is this how *other* people feel? I had no idea! My lead boots just disappeared!" However, that's quite rare. Most people who take antidepressants say they feel somewhat better -- something like 40% better. Typically they still feel unhappy and stuck, just less so. That, anyhow, is my impression, after hearing the reports of lots of people, easily more than 100, who tried these drugs. Whatever depression is, I'm sure it's not "a chemical imbalance."
My layman's take is that unhappiness is not liking where you are, while depression is an unwillingness to take actions to change it. Unhappiness is struggling to pay bills, depression is struggling to wash dishes.
As long as you aren't inherently a lazy person...? I'm sad, but I'm not clinically depressed; that's certainly not the reason I don't have a clean apartment
I am a structural engineering senior looking at potential schools for a master's degree. My four serious options are (in alphabetical order):
1. Berkeley
2. Stanford
3. UCSD
4. University of Washington
Does anyone have an thoughts about the structural engineering programs at these schools OR strong opinions about these schools in general?
Obviously I'm also seeking out advice from people who know me well, but I think there's some value in pulling information from people who *don't* know me and aren't trying to put a personalized spin on their thoughts.
Is structural engineering a highly competitive, highly social who-you-know industry which requires a lot of networking in order to get fun and/or elite jobs with the highest pay bands, ala Big Law?
If not, go for whichever school is the least expensive.
Do you have a good reason to be 100% confident that advances in AI won't shrink demand for highly paid human structural engineers?
If not, go for whichever school is the least expensive.
Have you done any work in or around structural engineering yet (internships, etc), to become familiar with what the average workday is like, and thus be completely certain you will be able to tolerate / enjoy it for decades to come?
If not, then DEFINITELY go for whichever school is the least expensive.
Are you absolutely certain you really, truly *need* a master's?
If not, skip it entirely.
Is someone else paying for your schooling, and *only* your schooling?
Go to Stanford or Berkley for the name recognition, because why not? It's not your money.
My point is: You should not be cavalier about the cost of this master's degree, and you should be pathologically terrified of student loan debt. It's ruined millions of people's lives. For many (or possibly even most) people, it severely shrinks the purchasing power that is crucial for quality of life in one's 20s and 30s (the ability to buy a home, to afford a child, etc). Avoid every dollar of it you can.
Seriously. Do not take on student loan debt if it can possibly be avoided.
Credentials: I dropped out of college with zero student debt, worked a blue-collar adjacent jobs, and, in my mid-40s, I'm financially healthier than most college graduates I know, including my managers at work, and I'm better off than *every* master's degree holder (although to be fair their degrees are in the humanities). My FICO is over 800, I'm a homeowner in a still-very-desirable big city market, I have retirement accounts, and comparatively minor stress about money.
That is priceless. Utterly priceless.
I also asked the question about field-related career experience because changing fields is very much a thing. It was my dream to go into one of the most competitive industries in the world. I went to school for it. Nepotism got me a summer internship which turned into a job, where I promptly discovered I simply didn't have the temperament or intuitive soft skills to get by, much less thrive, in my dreamed-of career. The 18 months working in my dream industry remain the worst period of my life.
That possibility was NOT apparent in school, and had I been foolish enough to spend six figures on undergrad and a masters getting a degree in this field...well, I'm shying away from even finishing the sentence.
Formal education is a sacred cow. Make sure you give it a very, very thorough vetting (and that you really can use that milk) before you buy it.
Of all of those, only Stanford is a household name, and only Stanford will parse as elite to a layperson. If you are sure your career will be in structural engineering, then this doesn't matter - the people hiring you in the future will know precisely how good each of those institutions are at the kind of structural engineering that you do. If you think it might be in [something else], then the name-recognition-among-laypeople angle matters.
Berkeley is much more well known and regarded than you're suggesting. If hiring manager hasn't heard of Berkeley, then you're probably dodging a bullet.
Universities can be grouped into tiers. The top tier are household names and instantly recognizable as elite. The next is places average people have heard of, and are generally regarded as good universities, but not household names and not that way elite. Stanford belongs in the first tier. Berkeley (and San Diego, and U Washington) in the second. If you think Berkeley should be grouped with Stanford instead of with UCSD and UW then you are just wrong. Ditto if you think that they should all be grouped together. The hiring manager will have ‘heard of’ UCSD also, and will almost surely group ucsd in the same bucket as Berkeley, but not in the same bucket as Stanford.
Yeah, US News and World Report's Global Universities index puts Stanford at #3, Berkeley at #4, UW-Seattle at #6, and UCSD at #20. Berkely is a really big deal, a major university with a worldwide reputation.
I do agree that UCSD isn't in the same top tier. Not sure what UW did to get placed so high. Maybe it got a lot of Microsoft or Amazon money.
OK, this is baffling to me. Although USNWR rankings frequently are. For my own field I think USNWR rankings accurately reflect the state of affairs 30 years in the past, and so my working hypothesis is that this is true across the board, and that USNWR updates on a ~3 decade time delay. Maybe 30 years ago Berkeley was a BFD but I was in elementary school then*.
I am not a layperson (Physics professor at R1), and maybe my layperson modelling software is off, but I would certainly have said that UCSD/UCB/UW are all in the same tier whereas Stanford is a step up (maybe just half a step. but definitely up). Would be interested to hear anecdotal impressions from others in the commentariat.
*ETA: Actually...even when I was in elementary school (on a different continent), I had heard of Stanford (and Harvard, and Princeton, and MIT). But had never heard of Berkeley (or UW or UCSD). Doubt anyone in my elementary school class had. Berkeley didn't appear on my radar until I came to North America (and it appeared at the same time as UW and UCSD).
If you know your specialization of choice, you're better off vetting labs/professors rather than universities. Your thesis will decide what you become an 'expert' in, and your advisor will be the main person who affects your masters thesis.
Find a professor you'd want to work with. (Match, Personality, Access, Status.... in that order) and apply there. It will give you greater chances of getting in, and enjoying your masters.
The California masters all offer similar weather and vibes. Seattle is a different vibe all together. I would keep that difference in mind.
I went to UCSD, I am not an engineer and have no thoughts on their engineering program, but it is a gorgeous and relatively affordable place to live, especially if you have a car.
People say the social life is meh, and I think that's true if you like to go to parties, but not as true if you just find your own group of people and hang out with them.
It's sunny almost all year round, campus is full of interesting art, and (idk if this applies to grad school) it has a less academically stressful environment than Berkeley, since Berkeley tends to siphon off the most competitive fish. There's great transit from the places students live to campus, and despite not feeling "dense" you can walk wherever you need to go.
Let me know if you'd like to know anything else about UCSD in general!
Given that the subjects of ethics and intelligence come up a lot here: Does an agent’s ethical capacity depend in large part on its intellectual capacity?
It is worth noting that there is a big difference between ethical "capacity" and an actual willingness to be "ethical". Obviously it takes a certain amount of intelligence to understand and follow rules, and it takes a higher amount of intelligence to realize that the rules are idiotic. Of course, empathy doesn't require any complex rules, and thus doesn't require that much intelligence. Even dogs and rats have it. Most people's "ethics" does seem to boil down to basic empathy, so it can be argued that basic ethics barely requires any intelligence.
I agree that basic ethics barely requires any intelligence. But many modern moral philosophers seem to be arguing that empathy and the basic ethics that arise from it are problematic. The psychologist Paul Bloom argues convincingly that empathy is an obstacle to ethics, as is highlighted by the Identifiable Victim Effect. The concept highlights how stories of individual suffering can evoke stronger emotional responses and thus greater willingness to help compared to abstract statistics or large-scale tragedies. In such cases, it takes the replacement of empathy with level-headed analysis and calculation in order to distribute help most effectively.
I find this approach to ethics troubling but hard to refute. It seems to suggest that those who don’t excel at data driven analysis are less able to act ethically than those who do. And it deprives less intelligent people of moral authority.
Pretty much every system of ethics has some kind of rules or guidelines which need to be applied to situations.
Suppose you have two autonomous killer robots. Robot A has a simple motion detection system which activates a machine gun. Robot B has a complex camera system with some rudimentary AI image classification system.
I would argue that robot B has higher ethical capabilities than robot A. For every system of ethics in the widest sense, robot B is the better choice. (Unless your system of ethics is "kill anything which moves", in which case both robots might be tied.)
Deploying robot A anywhere near civilians will likely result in war crimes. Deploying robot B with a programming which tells it to respect the Geneva conventions is less likely to result in war crimes. On the flip side, robot B is certainly capable of much more elaborate war crimes than A is: it could target civilians by ethnicity, or selectively shoot people in the legs to lure rescuers into its field of fire and so on.
(FWIW, I have not thought enough on intelligent autonomous weapon systems to have a opinion on them one way or the other.)
A rock is capable of very little good or evil.
I am (discussions about free will aside) moderately capable of doing good or evil.
A superhuman AI would certainly be capable of doing more good than I do (e.g. curing all kinds of diseases) but also capable of much more evil than I could ever do (paperclips).
Note that being capable to act in an ethical way is orthogonal to being a subject who deserves ethical consideration.
Define "ethics", define "intelligence", define "capacity". Cats bring mice and birds inside to share with their owners, what level of ethical capacity is that?
Intelligence increases ethical nuance. I think it was The Power Of Habit that had the example of a college student asked to babysit. Obviously the ethical thing is to help watch the kid, but she went through the implications of missing school and determined it would be better for everyone in the long term if she kept going to college instead. So what's the ethical capacity here? Intelligence offers the idea that it's more ethical to not help with the baby, is that a higher ethical capacity or no?
Intense "guy who just heard of Christianity asking if Jesus is a big deal on forum with every religious denomination" energy.
Short answer: No, but it looks like it does, for humans.
"Capacity" is what's doing the most work here. Given a set of ethics, increasing intellectual capacity increases all capacity, because you are just a more capable agent. So if you ethically want to live "a good life" or be a good parent or spouse, you end up either thinking of ways to be better at those tasks, or acquire resources (it is much easier to be ethical if you are not dying or poor).
However, once you have enough intellectual capacity such that "what other people think is ethical" because a constraint that you can work around rather than a brute fact of the environment, you can start dramatically limiting the capability of other people's ability to be ethical. See: crime lord, dictator. Even if this doesn't dramatically satisfy your own ability to be ethical.
And at the limit of optimization, unless you fundamentally have something like "care about other people's wellbeing" constraining your actions, all you see is "create an ideal utopia, where I can do whatever I want" and not the 6th sub level footnote that says "oh yeah, by the way, energy needed to create utopia generates enough waste heat that the surface temperature is now 400 degrees."
You'll want to say a bit more about what "intelligence" and "ethics" are. One natural distinction (which is roughly David Hume's distinction between "reason" and "the passions") is that "ethics" relates to having the right sort of goals, while "intelligence" relates to being effective at achieving your goals. (This would include both figuring out what things are likely to help, and developing skills at doing those things.)
Much of what we talk about when we talk about people's goals are actually their subsidiary goals, which are not sought intrinsically, but because they are expected to help towards the real goals. (Very explicit when people are interested in making money or winning an election.) So that's going to involve both ethics and intelligence.
Is anyone here an LLM connoisseur? Personally, I'm a normie in this respect (I've mostly just used ChatGPT), but I've heard about the proliferation of LLMs over the past few years and have been wondering about which of these are particularly excellent or crappy.
I believe this is no longer possible. At least, Twitter is full of people mourning that they can no longer talk to Sydney. I've seen examples of Copilot producing deranged outputs, but that's hardly the same thing.
So far I've found Claude a bit better at "getting challenging problems right" than ChatGPT or Gemini, but for the most part all three will give similar answers to questions and even use overlapping vocabulary. I also don't do a lot of multimodal interaction, where the other LLMs might be better.
I want to pose more analytical problems to Gemini when I have the time to invent some that won't be in training data- in my limited experience it has shown some flashes of thinking outside the box, which might make it a better coworker than its "intelligence" would suggest. I also want to try testing it on longer Word documents- heard this is a strength of the model and of having the Google resources.
I've tested out a bunch of models for the purposes of generating certain kinds of creative prose, so I can contribute. In order of things that stand out the most to me:
- GPT4 is generally the best, but it has some annoying writing habits (most notably, insisting on awkwardly putting some sort of closure on every response, even when extensively told not to, e.g. "as <action occurred>, <character> knew that everything was going to be different")
- I had some hopes based on how it was hyped up, but Grok *really* sucks. It's way worse than even the first gen gpt3.5, and IME worse than many of the models you can run at home. It gets in repetition loops almost immediately, and kinda sucks at the one feature that's supposed to be its differentiating factor (searching for and parsing tweets)
- NovelAI is unsurprisingly quite good at creative writing, and afaict, it's the only totally uncensored model of its caliber.
- Most other LLMs seem to be more or less interchangeable, which makes sense since they're almost all Llamas trained on cgpt output. They're usually at or slightly below gpt3.5 in talent
I find ChatGPT useful for random queries which occur to me. Things like: (1) what is the intended reference in the screenshot? (2) where does this quotation come from? (3) what is the etymology of this word? (4) what contributes to this compotent of UK inflation data? It's also useful when I've forgotten the name of a case.
Appearance has become more important than substance, sadly. Often the advocates of an ideology who are the loudest and most strident are the ones with the poorest ideas -- so they resort to antics to distract us from the weakness of their argument.
What is precisely worrisome is the idea that AI will simply be used to fabricate more convincing propaganda, more sophisticated gaslighting. Propaganda spouted by the current crop of pop ideologies is laughably crude.
Yet AI can't approach deductive reasoning without fabricating data (perfect in propaganda), and it can't 'think' abstractly. Beyond that, it will likely never achieve the nuances and complexity of human intelligence.
Is ChatGPT better at etymology than a google search for "[word] etymology"? In my experience, the latter produces quick results (usually via wiktionary) whenever the internet has a reference for the word's etymology. When it doesn't, I'd be rather wary of trusting ChatGPT. It is easy enough to produce a "folk etymology" that I do it myself by accident every once in a while.
I've been using etymonline.com for at least 10 years. I even have the app on my Android phone. FWIW I like it better that a google search. After god-knows-how-many (thousands?) lookups, I have only ever found 3 typos (like French gueule vs guele or amber vs ambre).
To be clear, I don't mean to suggest this is a particularly important use case. I just looked at the last 4 things I'd asked it by way of example. The advantage is that I often have follow up questions, like, is it related to some other word in a different language? It does get things wrong sometimes. I wouldn't ever rely on it without independently confirming.
For example, I asked Claude whether the Latin and proto-Germanic words for the numbers 1-10 formed cognate pairs and it claimed that (while the other numbers were cognate) "Latin "octo" and Proto-Germanic "*ahtōu" are not direct cognates. "Octo" derives from the PIE root *oḱtṓw, while "*ahtōu" derives from the PIE root *oḱtṓw with a different suffix." I replied to say that didn't make sense, and it then did agree that all ten pairs of numbers were cognates.
In fact, a mildly surprising case which happened today was that I asked ChatGPT what the statutory provision was for a certain proposition and it gave an answer that was obvious nonsense. I replied to say, "No, that's incorrect I'm afraid", and it did then supply the right answer.
Also curious about this. I'm finding limited but significant use cases for LLMs and ChatGPT is...fine. Honestly, it feels like it's consistently getting worse but I'm not sure where to pivot to.
The only LLM I can honestly, 100% recommend is the Powerpoint Designer in Powerpoint. This is amazing, it consistently generates mediocre powerpoint slides from whatever I write which are dramatically better than whatever crappy slides I can put together. Like, solid C+ slides using this automatic tool rather than my F tier slides that take a lot of work. And I'm never going to get good enough to beat those slides because if I'm ever spending enough time in Powerpoint to get better than the automatic designer, I'll retire on the spot. That just feels like a warning sign. Like, some people can handle a meth habit but you need to set boundaries and if you ever find yourself in a dirty alley exploring alternative sex work, you know it's time to check into rehab. Same thing with Powerpoint; I might need to do it from time to time but if I'm ever getting better than the automatic designer, it's time to leave corporate America.
What would your criteria be for a good LLM vs a crappy LLM? I'd be happy if the LLM I was using didn't offer up bullshit answers (err, hallucinations) to the questions I put to it. But all of them seem to produce a certain quotient of bullshit. They're useful, but I often have to check their answers when it comes to subjects I'm uncertain about.
Ryan Broderick, who writes the under-appreciated blog Garbage Day, wrote recently about the damaging consequences to the internet he expects from people using GPT to get answers to factual questions. If GPT gives some sort of weighted summary of the many online sources of the answer, but does not cite the sources or how it weighted each, then those running the source sites will have little reason to do so. They're running the sites either to make money or to get increase their visibility or reputation. If they have far less traffic because people are letting GPT summarize, why should they stay active? And then wutz GPT going to summarize? It's own previous summaries and those of other AI's? Ugh. Reminds me of what I read about bedbugs: They eat their own feces, and gain some nutritional benefit from up to 3 recyclings. (So these AI summarizers of each other are going to be sort of like the human centipede. )
Yes, it seems like a valid concern to me. One potential way to deal with this might be to legally (aargh!) require AI output to be labelled as such (which is also one possible answer of sorts to deepfakes). Yes, there will be violators. Yes, there will be people gaming the system, copying and pasting AI output and declaring that they, a human, originated it. Yes, there will be edge cases, stuff partially AI generated. But it might discourage blindly trusting vast amounts of verbiage generated by hallucinating LLMs - and, as you said, feeding it back into the training data for the _next_ generation of LLMs.
I know nothing of bedbug digestion, but with rabbits it’s less ‘recycling’ and more a necessary part of their digestion. Rather than have additional stomaches for digestion of grass by bacteria and regurgitation for further chewing (as with cows), rabbits pass distinctly different faeces the first time (caecotrophs, which I think might not even be classified as faeces?), which are soft and which the rabbit eats immediately, usually before it even has a chance to touch the ground. The rabbit then further digests the caecotroph, from which it can extract the nutrients it needs. Grass is really hard to digest.
So rabbit digestion is more like Wikipedia, with people taking the contents of books and articles to extract useful content.
I've gotten some bad answers that don't seem to me to be bullshit or hallucinations, but just the natural result of GPT4's tendency to conflate frequency with which an idea has come up online with how valid it is. You maybe missed my story here about asking GPT for a formula for cleaning stained linoleum using simple non-toxic basic household ingredients. If you google the question you get 3 answers, all appearing dozens or hundreds of times in almost identical form: Water plus vinegar plus dish soap, water plus vinegar, and water plus vinegar plus baking soda. The third one is nonsense. The vinegar and baking soda react with each other instantly and neutralize each other. So I asked GPT4 and it gave the most popular answer in my google search results, vinegar plus water plus dish soap. So then I asked if it would be a good idea to also add some baking soda and GPT said very enthusiastically that yes, that would add extra cleaning power plus baking soda would help remove any odors. And yet I'm sure that if I asked GPT what would happen if I mixed baking soda and vinegar it could give me the chemical formulas for what you start with and what you end with, and whether what you end with is useful for cleaning (answer is no: you get water, C02, and a some sodium acetate dissolved in the water.). But in answering my question Chat did not consult its chemical knowlege, but apparently just gave me the most popular google result.
And Jeff Soreff (I may be misspelling his name) who posts here is a retired chemist and asks Chat straightforward chemical questions, some of which can easily be answered via an online search, and Chat's often wrong.
Well, you know me and my obsession with SARS2 research. I've used GPT3.5 as a reference tool. If I ask it for references to studies to back up what it says, I have to watch out for bogus titles of papers and researchers. My observation is that about 25% of the references are faulty in some way. I *always* go to
When I asked if GPT4.0 was any better, the same Jeffrey Soreff you mentioned, wrote back: "I can assure you that GPT4 is still hallucinating. It came up with 2CeCl4(aq)+H2(g)→2CeCl3(aq)+2HCl(aq)+Cl2(g) in https://chat.openai.com/share/7faacb6b-a487-494f-b0b7-4a071798fb1c and this is just chemistry, no toxic wokeism needed! It can't be relied on to count the atoms in its own equation…"
And here's a little exchange I had with GPT3.5 where I thought GTP was bullshitting...
User
when was the first recorded -19 death in the US?
ChatGPT
The first recorded death in the United States attributed to COVID-19, the disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, occurred in February 2020. The exact date was February 6, 2020, in Santa Clara County, California. This marked the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic's impact on the United States.
User
What is your source for that informantion?
ChatGPT
My source for the information about the first recorded COVID-19 death in the United States is based on widely reported news articles and official statements from health authorities such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO). The first death was extensively covered by major news outlets and has been widely accepted as occurring on February 6, 2020, in Santa Clara County, California.
User
Can you provide a link?
ChatGPT
As an AI language model, I don't have direct access to external sources such as specific URLs or websites. However, you can easily verify this information by searching for "first COVID-19 death in the US" in reputable news sources or by visiting the websites of organizations like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) or the World Health Organization (WHO), which provide updates and reports on the COVID-19 pandemic.
User
Sorry, I only found Feb 28 in the Seattle area
ChatGPT
You are correct, and I apologize for the confusion. The first recorded death attributed to COVID-19 in the United States occurred on February 29, 2020, in King County, Washington, specifically in the Seattle area. This case was widely reported and marked a significant milestone in the COVID-19 pandemic's impact on the United States. Thank you for pointing out the error, and I appreciate the opportunity to correct it.
The fucker's not going to correct it. It can't learn anything in encounters with us. That's not how it learns.
It says it doesn't have direct access to URL's, but people here talk about asking for its sources and checking them. So is it or isn't it possible to get source info from it?
Can you or someone on this thread ask ChatGPT 3.5 the following question (below)? See what answer it gives you — and report back. I'm curious if it responds with the updated info I gave it. I want someone else to ask, beecause I assume it remembers my previous conversations with it, and it may try to "please" me.
--> When was the first recorded COVID-19 death in the US?
Huh, it *is* corrected. It said "The first recorded COVID-19 death in the United States occurred on February 29, 2020, in the state of Washington. This marked the beginning of a tragic chapter in the country's battle against the pandemic."
Then I asked GPT4 and it said: "The first recorded COVID-19 death in the United States was reported on February 29, 2020. This death occurred in Kirkland, Washington, and was associated with the Life Care Center, a nursing and rehab facility, marking the beginning of what would become a significant outbreak in that region and a sign of the wider spread of the virus in the United States."
Is GPT4's answer consistent with what it said before after you'd corrected it? Is Kirkland, WA in fact in King County, and near Seattle?
About it remembering its conversation with you: It gives no sign of remembering conversations with me, and I have it make me an image or 2 most days, and that often involves a prolonged exchange. And once I asked it if it remembered our prior exchanges and it said no, once they were over it had no way of retaining any info from them.
I work in a Tech job where I regularly get woken up in the middle of the night. My attempt to quantify how shared this experience really is has resulted in my putting together this survey. My hope is to use this data to write up my findings in a blog post. Would appreciate all the participation I can get, no matter what your own current work situation may be: https://forms.gle/xCPcwnwsQE2K5bcX9
I also work in tech. I used to be on an on-call rotation that would routinely wake me (and other people) up in the middle of the night. On-call was seven days of being always available to fix whatever problem, and then you got off until your number came up again.
It was awful. Everyone hated it. On-call was dreaded. At the time, there was a kind of "well, it sucks but at least we get paid a lot" thing going on, but you had to bribe people to take your on-call rotations if one came up when you were on vacation.
Then the company got a big enough team in India and they got skilled enough to handle being on-call, so over a year or two we switched from 24/7 to 12 on, 12 off, with the US team handling US daylight hours and the India team handling India daylight hours (more or less). It made things so much better. People still complain, but it's nothing like it used to be.
Though I have noticed that people seem to take being on-call much less seriously now. Back in the day, being on-call was your job, and if you didn't have an active incident then you were clearing the queue of less-important incidents. Now that seems to have slipped, especially with newer team members. I wonder if there's not some sort of thing where suffering makes you feel like you need to take more responsibility or something.
Are you on some sort of support call rotation roster, or do your bosses feel they have the authority to wake you from your sleep to answer their questions? If it's the first, then that's part and parcel of your job. If it's the latter then you've set poor boundaries with your employer. However, I've noticed that East Coast workers frequently assume that West Coast workers are online when they rise. I used to get a lot of text message alerts at 5 am from East Coasters until I made a point of silencing my phone when I went to bed.
I did a stint where I was coordinating phone meetings with an engineering team in Chennai. It was 11 1/2 hours off Central time but I don't recall if it was during DST or not. The passage of the seasons was a secondary consideration for me at the time. I was pretty flippin' busy.
Yeah, I once project-managed a network deployment in Asia, Australia, and Europe. I had conference calls when I got up and conference calls before I went to bed (and I was expected to take meeting notes and distribute them to the teams). That was before smartphones and smart apps could keep us ubiquitously connected (bothered) to work. I don't know how I'd handle it now.
I've been seeing a lot of generative AI pieces come across my Facebook art and architecture groups. Some of the people who post this crap aren't very good at distinguishing generative AI from reality, but others don't seem to see a problem with contaminating discussion groups on art history and architecture with generative AI creations (because "they're pretty!"). Luckily generative AI still isn't very good at imitating abstract expressionists' styles, and it's still laughably bad when it comes to figurative art. Its architectural creations usually have some weird frills in them that signal they're not real. Still, it's all very annoying for someone like me who always tries to sift fact from falsehood. Generative AI seems to be contaminating our history.
Art, creativity, and AI: A thoughtful negative piece on AI by an artist. Worth watching to end to see what he creates as he goes along with his
But I didn't realize that people were using AI to generate crappy kids videos for Youtube and to flog phony "workbooks" of authors' works on Amazon. This by Eric Hoel...
Here ya go, Beowulf. I asked GPT4 to produce a cute rhymed My Little Pony-themed poem for kids that teaches kids it's important to study hard so you can have a STEM career. If I really really sucked as a person I'd be looking for ways to monetize these. Web site? Little bookies on Amazon? TED talk?
It's not just AI-produced crappy kids videos, there's also crappy kids' musical jingles, crappy kids' story books, posters, math workbooks etc. , and no doubt crappy fake kids in kidspace social media. Seems like a diet of this shit is going to lower intelligence, inventiveness and capacity for self-actualization the new generation enormously. Fuck embryo tweaking, there's more bang for the buck in nuking the AI crap for kids.
Similar, I've long enjoyed getting a Quora newsletter to learn weird new facts about the world (or just which celebrities people think are mean/nice, don't judge). Last couple months though I get the sense that more and more posts are partially or wholly AI generated. I think it's the writing style, I've read a lot of ChatGPT and now I'm seeing it out in the wild more.
Maybe they're all written by humans and I'm just following the trope of assigning things I don't like to AI, but I can't help but remember how one of the OpenAI board members also founded Quora... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_D%27Angelo
Quora seems to often have an explicitly AI-generated answer to some questions, when you click on the question. And there's a moderate number that I've seen that really do seem to be AI-generated but posted under a generic-looking organization name.
I've tried AI art and while it can give some cool pictures, I can get never get it to do what I actually want, regardless of how specific I make the prompt. And in fact, the more specific I get, the more it breaks the AI.
Dalle 2 was lousy at filling detailed requests, but often produced striking results if given vague ones. Here's a bunch of its responses to the prompt "why do fools fall in love?"
Dalle 3 does not have the same verve. And while the images look better, they also look way more corporate and commercial. All the people are attractive and hot in a conventional way, and fashionably dressed.
I do find it funny how AI art is encouraging artists to make their art *less* polished in order to differentiate it from AI. These models can't replicate crusty MS Paint art no matter how hard you try.
I do think some of the Dalle2 ones I linked have some life and humor to them, even if the ai's efforts to give a brushstroke effect are lame. Do you find any of these images surprising and lively? I generally loathe AI attempts to do "art" of any kind, but these crude early ones actually kind of charm me.
I personally think the output of these earlier models are uniquely unnerving. There are just things... wrong about them in ways that humans would never make wrong on purpose. The images lack any sign of intent behind them. Though, I do wonder if you would get similar results if you were to convert visualizations of the human brain into a readable format.
I'm the guy behind the acx reader (https://acxreader.github.io/). I'm currently trying to implement a dark mode and support for comments. If you have any suggestions, please leave them here or on the reddit post or as a github issue. Thanks!
Once you can do comments Scott should just redirect all pages to your reader so that we can finally have open threads without multiple independent posts complaining about the various platforms on which substack is unusable.
(1) Adding an extra reminder for readers to visit the original URL at least once, because maybe Substack is using the number of visits to calculate some sort of popularity metric that affects how often ACX is recommended/how much it's important and your site can perhaps decrease that.
(2) Adding a static snapshot of comments, updated every x hours.
PSA: If you use Substack and don't want to be de-anonymized, avoid using the app/logging in via gmail account. I did this while trying to setup the app and it overwrote my username and profile picture with my irl name and my gmail profile picture (a picture of me) without my permission or consent. Be cautious.
I did ask substack support who was very understanding and responsive, and even escalated the issue via a developer ticket, but then admitted that it was an LLM chatbot making up answers to satisfy me.
You might want to try https://substack.com/vulnerability-disclosure . An information leak is not very exciting as far as vulnerabilities go, but at least it is likely that it will actually be read by a human. (Not that I am speciesist or anything.)
I'm starting law school at one of Northwestern, uPenn, or Cornell in the fall. I'm still waiting on financial aid from a couple of those, but it's likely to be a marginal decision financially, so deciding factors will likely come from elsewhere. Anyone able to share anything about the rationalist community at any of those schools or their respective cities?
Likewise, if anyone is looking for a roommate near any of those campuses I'd be interested in getting in touch.
I attended graduate school at Penn, although not in law. In my experience, Philly is a great place to get a graduate student. You can do essentially anything you want, but it’s much cheaper than other coastal cities.
As for law school, Penn as an institution is well connected with places in NY and DC due to its proximity. I know this is a big factor in Wharton, and I’d expect it to affect law as well.
Congratulations! I am also attending law school this fall, though not at one of those. Have you had a chance to attend any admitted students events? If not, I strongly encourage you to do so. It will be helpful to get an idea of the campus and alumni culture.
The only one of these I can speak to is Northwestern. The campus (which is really more of a building) is right in downtown, which could be a pro or a con depending on your preference. When you leave the law building, you will be right in Streeterville, effectively in downtown, which means there will be lots of things to do in the immediate vicinity. Is this a good place to spend law school, where you will likely be dependent on loans for most of your cash flow and will certainly be incredibly busy most of the time? That’s up to you to decide. There’s also the fact that because there isn’t much of a campus, there won’t be much of a campus life. Again, this may be fine, but it’s worth considering.
All great schools, can’t really go wrong, etc. Do consider your career goals and whether your financial aid will offset the (tremendous) cost of attendance in a way you’re comfortable with. Feel free to message me if you’d like to discuss further; I’ve been thinking (or obsessing) about this quite a bit the last few months.
Congratulations to you as well! I won't be able to attend any admitted student events since I used up all of my work leave until May with a torn MCL about a month ago. I'm not super mobile right now anyway, so your input on Northwestern's campus or lack thereof is helpful. Campus life is a real consideration for me.
It sounds like you know a fair bit about Chicago and the area. I'm probably not there quite yet, but I might reach out in a few weeks for advice about where to live if I end up settling on Northwestern?
I'm in a more comfortable position than most in paying for law school, and fully intend on going the Biglaw route to justify the expense, but likewise, if you'd like to talk I'm happy to.
By all means, feel free to reach out if you do decide to attend Northwestern. I’m a big fan of Chicago, and even though I decided against Northwestern for the reasons I mentioned, UChicago is a school I’m still seriously considering.
>Do consider your career goals and whether your financial aid will offset the (tremendous) cost of attendance in a way you’re comfortable with. Feel free to message me if you’d like to discuss further; I’ve been thinking (or obsessing) about this quite a bit the last few months.
I cannot +1 this hard enough. Law school debt loads can be considerable, and schools do everything in their power to massage their employment outcomes numbers, which makes it hard to make informed decisions and easy to borrow your way into a really shitty situation.
Of those, 328 reported employment within a year of graduation, and of those 54 did not provide a salary.
Assuming their marketing materials work like most law schools, UCLA can be expected to prominently feature "median salary of $215,000 for graduates" in their marketing materials, but will use a tiny asterisk tucked away someplace to clarify that more than a sixth of their class is not counted towards the reported median. It should be no surprise that the salary outcomes among people who don't report a salary tend to be more negative than among those who do.
This effect, and the efforts made to hide the ball, naturally, tend to become more pronounced the further down the law school rankings one goes. To add to that, out-of-law-school salaries don't present as a bell curve clustered around the average. They're bimodal, with a big cluster in the $40-80k range for people going into clerkships/government/public interest/law firms, and then a narrow spike on the high end if you land a job in biglaw. https://www.lawschooltransparency.com/trends/salaries?y1=2022
If at all possible, study to land in the second spike, but *borrow* like you're planning to land in the first cluster.
I think my original post might have made me seem a bit more nonplussed about the costs of law school than I actually am. I expect to receive considerable financial aid offers from each of the schools I listed. Financial factors are unlikely to be decisive because offers are likely to be similar, not unsubstantial. If NU or Penn doesn't offer me what I expect they will, I'll take my offer from Cornell.
I think your more general point is an important one though. Law is a much more bimodal career than I think most people are aware. Certainly, I was unaware how different outcomes were when I first started pursuing law school a couple years ago.
That said, Biglaw placement is better at every school I listed than it is at UCLA. If you picked UCLA without too much thought, it was probably the most interesting school you could have selected. UCLA is probably the consensus pick for the 15th best law school in the country right now. The 14 schools ranked higher have a substantive enough difference in outcomes that they're collectively known as the "T14."
A.I. is a visitor from another planet, perhaps even from another galaxy, maybe from the beginning of the universe, or the end. Is it friend, or foe? Does it want to see our leader? Perhaps it is interested in our water supply. Maybe it’s concerned about our propensity for war and our development of atomic weaponry. Or perhaps it is just lost, and is looking for a bit of conversation before setting out to find its way back home.
TWO: A Walk in the Park
Or a lark ascending. A cool breeze. A trip to the bank. Godzilla’s breath. Rounding third base. I’ve lost track.
If this piece was meant to be satire, you did a good job pasting together the aesthetic fluff that AI generates — but your piece is a distraction from an actual discussion of the implications of AI. I assume you had a submission deadline to 3Quarks but couldn't come up with a more substantive think piece.
Apologies for the sarcasm. I let my disdain for the non-accomplishments of AI get the better of me. And I'm getting frustrated with all the AI-generated crap that seems to be cluttering up the art and architecture discussion groups I participate in.
Tell me again, what the business models of companies are?
Relatedly, what does it mean that the worst score is about 8 times more negative than the best score is positive? Does that suggest a genuinely terrible forecaster, or a brilliant forecaster who intentionally chose the most "wrong" guess they could on each prediction?
I second that question. From the way Scott phrased it, higher is better, so it is not the Brier score [0]. From what I can tell, it is also unlikely to be the Brier Skill Score (BSS=1-BS/BS_ref) (BSS) with a reference of "putting 50% everywhere". We can see this because we would expect the good forecasters to be more right than the bad forecasters are wrong (otherwise, we could negate the prediction of a bad forecaster to turn them into a great forecaster).
It might be the BSS with reference to another score, though.
Unrelated, I have just decided that the Brier score is a terrible metric from a Bayesian perspective. There is virtually no difference between giving 99% and being wrong and giving 100% and being wrong, but if I did Bayes updates based on both predictions, my posterior distribution would look very different. A wrong 99% prediction is recoverable, while a wrong 100% prediction is not. It is my opinion that anyone who predicts anything with 100% and is wrong is an infinitely worse forecaster than someone who just puts 50% everywhere.
(Hypothetically, one could score predictions by calculating the outcome of taking Kelly bets with 2:1 for all predictions. Someone with perfect predictions will multiply their money by 2^n, someone who says 50% everywhere will keep their money, and someone who says 100% and is wrong will lose all their money. One would probably add logarithms and normalize over the number of bets.)
I think this might be true. If people could enter any probabilities, some would reach a score of minus infinity, which would still be minus infinity after scaling. However, because Metaculus probabilities are limited to [0.1%, 99.9%], people can not fail infinitely bad, but just get -6.9 per question. The baseline before scaling is -0.69, so it seems somewhat reasonable that after scaling the absolutes of the negative scores are an order of magnitude bigger than the positive scores.
I still think that the scaling should be explained a bit more. What would a perfect oracle have scored? One? In that case, the interpretation of 0.28 as the maximum score might be that the outcome of the questions was 3/4 indistinguishable from random (as far as the best predictors are concerned).
Mostly unrelated, I think one reason why "penalizing rare overconfidence" might not work well in practice is that the utility of the predictor's score is not proportional to it.
Suppose you estimate a probability of 1% for one question. If you write that down and are wrong about it not happening, you will not win the contest, even if you predict the next five questions with 100%, your score will still be worse than that of someone who answered 0.5 to all six questions. If you are overconfident and put in 0.1%, then this will minimally inflate your score in all the worlds were you are correct (by 0.009) at the price of placing you on the tail end of the spectrum. This might be worth the gamble, unless there are on the order of 100 questions which you would answer with 99% certainty, in which case you would be expect to answer one of them wrong.
I'm not sure if they have text transcripts, but if you're okay with listening to a podcast, go here and filter by "Show Type" = "Live Therapy": https://feelinggood.com/podcast-database/
One of the best ones I know of is How to Be Yourself, for social anxiety. Written by a psychologist who suffered from pretty bad social anxiety herself up through her college years, then mostly overcame it -- and is now a professor who researches social anxiety.
Even the old Feeling Good by David Burns is a fine place to start. It was the first popularization of Aaron Beck's CBT. You can buy a used copy for a couple of dollars.
If you're looking for help with a specific issue -- anxiety, depression, OCD, emotional regulation, trauma, disordered eating, etc -- there are decent workbooks using CBT or modifications thereof to address those specific concerns.
Why read through transcripts? Try using ChatGPT or another LLM as therapist, I found its recommendations weren't far off of the ones my CBT gave me. However, I don't think it really serves as a substitute. The tough part is following through on the recommendations and putting them into practice. Transcripts/LLMs don't evoke the same degree of commitment for a number of reasons
Thank you very much, will keep that in mind, though I may not go for paid subscription given the LLMs in my country want my phone number etc., and the economics is also not very friendly.
I made an observation about fiber and mood recently that I'd like to get other thoughts on.
A month ago, I started taking fiber (psyllium husk) before breakfast and dinner in an effort to lose a few pounds and improve my overall GI health. A couple weeks after, I noticed that I'd been significantly less anxious. I take lexapro for anxiety and it generally works well, but the addition of fiber has coincided with a real lessening of my most neurotic tendencies.
Theories I came up with:
1) Fiber slows the absorption of the lexapro, so more is entering my bloodstream.
2) It's leveling out my blood sugar (I don't have diabetes or pre-diabetes), which somehow affects mood
3) Something something microbiome
4) Coincidence
Other theories? Supporting or contradicting evidence? Similar experiences?
For what it's worth, I started taking psyllium husk late last year (on medical advice). I had a significant positive increase in mood. Also lost a bunch of weight without trying (I wasn't taking it for weight loss and didn't know it was a possible side effect). It really felt like a miracle.
Unfortunately, 6 months later the mood enhancing effect has dissipated and I'm back to baseline.
Not trying to be a wise guy here but have you considered the difference in your mood between when you are constipated and when you have regular bowel movements. This honestly makes a big difference in my general outlook.
I don't have anxiety but I do sometimes eat more healthy/fiber-y foods, and sometimes less healthy/fiber-y, and I feel better overall when doing the former. Makes sense ... and I'd also guess that anxiety is worse when you have extra shit to worry about. E.g. I'd assume people's anxiety is worse if they had a bad day at work, or the stock market went down, or a politician they don't like is winning in the polls, or their girlfriend was mad at them. And "I feel shitty because I've been eating less healthy food" is bad news the same way those other things are.
Maybe it has to do with blood sugar or microbiome or whatever, but the link makes sense to me without knowing the exact mechanism.
This is making me think that superstitions may be pretty useful... up to the point of being selected for? We usually have no idea why something really works, so it may be helpful to just keep doing what you did when things go well, and avoid doing things that end up hurting you. Trying to trust the brain to actually work out causation is a fools errand.
No offense intended toward Nathaniel Hendrix, but regarding your comment, I find it interesting that everyone seems to have a basic need to create explanatory frameworks for their observations and experiences. Unfalsifiable scientific hypotheses seem to be modern superstitions.
No offense taken. The association between fiber supplementation and mood, though, would be easily falsifiable if someone with enough capital took an interest in supporting a trial.
I just read a 1955 limerick collection, and found that many of the limericks relied on orthographic stunts for their humor. For example:
A sermon our pastor Rt. Rev.
Began, may have had a rt. clev.,
But his talk, though consistent,
Kept the end so far distant,
We left since we felt he mt. nev.
or
There once was a choleric colonel,
Whose oaths were obscene and infolonel,
So the Chaplain, aghast,
Gave up protest at last,
But wrote them all down in his jolonel.
This surprised me, as I’d thought of limericks as existing (especially in the past) as part of oral tradition. But orally, these limericks make no sense!
Obviously a kind of written-oral tradition also flourished long before the internet (think writing in yearbooks:
2 cool
2 be
------
4 gotten
for example)
so I wondered if limericks had a similar printed out but quasi-oral existence. Certainly many (most?) limericks (but not the Rt. Rev. or the Colonel) were unprintable before a certain date. Did the Rt. Rev. get passed along in the pages of college humor rags, or get written down by classroom wags, or get swapped in autograph albums or something? (I’m struggling, as always, to imagine what the past, before I was born, was actually like.)
Certainly I learned “There once was a man from Nantucket” orally from other vulgar-minded kids long before I read a collection of dirty limericks.
If anyone knows anything about the quasi-oral early-twentieth-century (presumably) life of orthographic limericks, please chime in!
I guess I’d also be interested to learn if people still hear limericks orally, or if they exist only in print, or not much any more at all.
I think the pelican one has been around quite a while, and it's one of the few I know by heart!
An amazing bird is the pelican
Its beak can hold more than its belican.
It can hold in its beak
enough food for a week,
but I'm damned if I know how the helican!
Edit: I just did a quick web search, and it appears this pelican one was written in 1910, by someone called Dixon Lanier Merritt (not Ogden Nash, as is often assumed) :
Boy, that one takes some unpicking, and IMHO is a bit too contrived and abstruse to be funny. In case anyone took a while to twig it, as I did, or quite possibly is still baffled by it:
* The Latin name for Salisbury (a town in Southern England) is "Sarum" (pron "sair-um")
* Following this pattern "halisbury-scalisbury" should be understood as "harum-scarum"
* A shortened name for Hampshire (again in the UK, not sure about the US) is "Hants"
* Following this second pattern, "pampshire" becomes "pants"
* Walisbury" by the first pattern then becomes "warum" ("wear 'em")
Limericks aren't very old. I think they were invented by Edward Lear in the mid-1800s and written down, and have been propagated since then in books and magazines. Joke books and books of humorous poetry have existed for a long time (I have a joke book from about 1910) and so have magazines that publish such things. I recognise the two you quote (although a slightly different wording for the Rt. Rev.) and I know others that play with orthography as well; I'd have said it was a fairly common thing for limericks to do.
The only version of the Nantucket one I know is clean: "There was an old man from Nantucket / Who kept all his cash in a bucket / His daughter, named Nan / Ran away with a man / And as for the bucket, Nantucket" - although clearly the rhyme could lend itself to something more vulgar.
Quoting limericks, even dirty ones, sounds a bit highbrow for most school kids in my experience. You have to remember five lines pretty much verbatim and understand the pun or whatever other wordplay is in them.
The school I went to as a kid was anything but highbrow, but it was extremely common for kids to invent and/or memorize lengthy subversive rhymes. The classic "Miss Susie," which at my school took the variant "Sally had a tugboat" form, has twenty lines and you have to get the end of each stanza and beginning of the next one right or the jokes don't work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miss_Susie
My understanding is that the classic game theory argument about lawsuits, as well as wars, and other situations where you decide which side wins through a high-cost contest when you could have settled it beforehand, is that doing the contest is driven by bad estimates about your side's chance of winning.
So e.g. if there's a claim for $1 million, and both sides agree that the plaintiff has a 60% chance of winning, and say litigation costs are $100k, both sides should prefer to settle for $600k. But if plaintiff thinks he has a 80% chance of winning, and defendant thinks that plaintiff has a 40% chance of winning, then plaintiff won't settle for under $700k and defendant won't settle for more than $500k, so they go to trial.
Similarly if one side loses the war, that's a sign they should either have not started it, or they should have sued for peace immediately. At least that's the argument.
With that theory, AI like that would mean fewer cases ... at least fewer cases going through discovery/trial.
Via Perplexity, it looks like <10% of civil cases actually go to trial with the rest receiving a settlement. Among the ones that do, slightly more than half are decided in favor of the plaintiff. These cases suggest that the odds are quite good that the plaintiff will get *something* for their trouble. I think people on the fence about suing would probably be swayed to go ahead and do it, increasing the number of lawsuits.
Well if they advertising in the yellow pages they are somewhat out of date. However, not only are there a lot of not very good lawyers, but there maybe significant conflicts of interest. So I suspect an AI test trained on thousands irrelevant court cases would make systematically better predictions.
Following on from Scott talking about people who don't recognise their own emotions...
What if the person does recognise their emotions, but some of them don't have a name?
In particular: suppose a depressed person decides they want to do thing X, but .. somehow .. finds themself unable to do so. This is a core depressive symptom, clearly. But, what is the name of that emotion?
Good question. I think what you describe there isn't really an emotion. It's a situation where the actual emotional content could vary a lot. Part of the point of being able to recognize emotions is to see what lies beneath without rationalizing it.
In some therapies (like DBT) there is an attempt to distinguish primary emotions from secondary emotions (how one feels about one's emotions).
I don't think that phenomenon is itself an emotion. But it is an increasingly noted experience (I think both because people are spending more time in this state, and because of a tendency to externalize the more opaque and truculent aspects of our minds, enabling constructions like "I want to but my brain let me") without a Schelling-point name. "Lack of motivation" is probably the best way to connect it to depressive symptomatology, akrasia has a storied history but is less well known...Grognor called it "The Monster" and offered a whole menu of theoretical constructions about it here: http://grognor.blogspot.com/2016/12/the-monster.html
I think that's a general feature of language, you have a concept in your mind you can explain it with a sentence but there isn't a word that precisely points to it.
If enough people start talking about that specific emotion than it can make sense to create a word for it but it's not going to be there by default. (In general I think the more nuanced the emotion the less likely it is that we already have a word that describes it)
I guess this brings up the question of whether everyone feels the same emotions at all. Like the old dorm room question, what if my blue looks like your red and vice versa.
What if what I think "sadness" feels like, only overlaps ~65% with what you think "sadness" feels like, but because they're close enough and we only have so many words to describe emotions and assume we're all feeling the same ones, we both use the word "sad" to describe somewhat-different things?
Yes, but not necessarily what might be called primary executive dysfunction. Somehow being unable to do the thing you want to do can be downstream of a bunch of other things: sleep deprivation, gloomy expectation that doing the thing will be a disappointment, fearful expectation that if you really throw yourself into doing the thing you will fail at it, preoccupation with other matters, private deals with oneself that if the thing looks impossible to do it's OK to do some gaming before starting . . . To take just the first one: when I am sleep deprived I use my free time *much* less well. Mostly I crap around online.
ahhh just as expected I know little about US politics which really hurt my score a lot, but the biggest hit came from me overrating a successful Ukrainian offensive so betting hard on Luhansk. -3.85 alone on a single guess :/
I'm curious if you think that this round taught you anything generalizeable about forecasting. Do you think you'd do better in a subsequent competition? Are there any techniques you used to come to a forecast that you wouldn't use again?
It taught me that entering every email address I could possibly have used into a hash generator and then typing the resulting digits into the excel mobile app makes me furiously angry. My probability of somehow preventing this next year is only about 30% but I'm not sure how much of the 70% is just hoping I'll be turned into paperclips in the meantime.
I mean, I filled in the questions that I knew little about just for kicks, but come evaluation time I'm a bit frustrated at my past self for doing that. Stick to the stuff I think I know (relatively) better than the average ACX reader and on these topics don't be afraid of giving extreme answers for maximizing point gains. On second though though, that was exactly what hit me with the Lugansk question. So, stick to stuff that I think I'm better than others, and weigh against death by a thousand cuts or a single truck hit when deciding how extreme I answer. Still though, I would've answered that Lugansk question the same way destroying my score. I was really confident about a successful summer offensive.
If Dino is around and sees this (bit of a long shot I know), yesterday was the deadline for an astrological prediction I made some time ago about his band playing publicly again, and I'd like to know the result.
Thanx for the reminder, I saved the prediction in a text file back then so I could remember it. Sad to say, it didn't exactly work out. The 27 time units could be either 27 weeks or 27 months, I thought then that weeks were more likely but 27 weeks was end of June 2022 and nothing. 27 months is now. In fact our first gig in 4 years was Aug 31, 2023, so about 7 months before predicted. But there is a close "coincidence" that we have gigs coming up next month - Apr 20&21 at the New England Folk Festival, and the Burren in Davis Square, Somerville MA on Apr 25. Boston area folks can come out and support a fellow ACX reader.
I appreciate the feedback. And correct me if I'm wrong but I thought the prediction was a timespan of between 27 weeks and 27 months (how the technique is supposed to be used). That's admittedly so broad I can't imagine it would be useful, but your gig date falls within the range. (I'll try to look up the original comment from years ago when I'm back at my PC.)
I just went back and re-read your original analysis and it says 27 weeks or months, not between 27 weeks and 27 months. I also saw it could be also interpreted in more general terms as predicting an uptick in gigs at 27 months instead of the more specific "first since then". With that looser interpretation it looks pretty accurate, only off by a month.
Want to try another one? I recently had eye surgery which has left me temporarily unable to see well out of one eye. When will I regain my normal vision?
To my frustration, I can't figure out the answer from the chart; in my defense, medical astrology is something of its own sub-branch of the art. If you've another, I'll take a crack at it.
Yes! Might be tomorrow before I can analyze the chart, but I'll post your eye prediction here. Re: the previous one, call that a miss due to astrologer error.
So what is litigation like in non-US developed countries? As I understand it, the US is globally unique in not awarding attorneys' fees to the winner in civil litigation- so unique that doing so is literally called 'the American Rule'. AFAIK, in the rest of the world the loser of a lawsuit also has to pay the winners' attorneys' fees- the idea being to prevent frivolous litigation. The US is famous for its litigious culture, and high number of weak lawsuits where it's simply cheaper for the defendant to settle than to fight it, even if the defendant would ultimately win. I would frankly call some of these weak suits 'extortion'. (Yes I understand that fee shifting is mandated in some types of suits).
So- people in Europe or elsewhere, do you have less frivolous lawsuits than we do here? Does requiring fee shifting inherently favor defendants? Do you think that mandated fee shifting lets large corporations get away with bad behavior that would be litigated here in the states? I'm coming from the assumption that the American Rule is bad public policy, but I'm open to persuasion
In addition to loser paying, there are two more significant factors in most of Europe: no jury for civil cases, making the outcome more predictable, and no case law, thus no spending days sea4ching for precedent, thus significantly lower lawyer costs.
I live in Australia and work in the medical field. Significantly less litigation here, which leads to less “defensive medicine” (ordering every test under the sun in case you get sued). One reason why medical costs are so high in the States
I am a lawyer, qualified in England, Wales and Ireland. The general rule is the that the losing party pays the winner’s costs. There are still plenty of nuisance money settlements, because often the claimant has no assets, so the order for costs is useless to the Defendant.
I am also not a lawyer. In the UK I believe it is common (but not mandatory) for the successful party to be awarded legal costs. These are awarded on some basis of assumed hours * set cost per hour, so may not cover your actual costs depending on how fancy a lawyer you hired, and how much out of court work they did.
Nonetheless vexatious private litigation is little talked about. There is some discussion of the Crown Prosectution service pursuing vexatious culture war cases (I think both sides claim to be victims of this). There are still cases a small company won't bring because they believe their larger opponent will be able to bankrupt them before they get to the point of their legal costs being awarded to them.
Settlements are still common for cases where neither side is confident which way the court would decide, or what size the settlement might be, but settlements where a party thinks the other side has functionally no chance in court don't seem to be thing.
UK lawyers and companies describe American courts as unusually unpredictable and prone to award bafflingly high damages. Some companies take this as a reason to avoid doing business in America or under American law, others take the view that ligitation in America is what regulation is in Europe, and that the court charging you eyewatering fines for being hacked is not necessarily more avoidable than the court awarding eyewatering damages (this sounds credible to me, but in practice I have only heard this view from Americans).
>UK lawyers and companies describe American courts as unusually unpredictable and prone to award bafflingly high damages
Well, another side to that is that to my understanding, other developed countries don't generally use juries for civil trials. So you're putting your fate in the hands of 12 random people off the street- not a great system!
There are scenarios in the US where civil suits result in paying attorney's fees. One example is certain "Anti-SLAPP" laws that some states have (SLAPP means strategic lawsuit again public participation - i think...). These law are intended to reduce law suits filed to restrict speech, not necessarily through winning the law suit, but by tying up the defendant in costly legal battles (and example would be a rich person suing a blogger who is reporting on bad actions by the rich person). In some states, if you lose a law suit due to the Anti-SLAPP law (usually this is the suit getting dismissed very early on) you have to pay for the defendants attorneys fees.
Sounds less litigious in principle. But say a frivolous hourly employee sued their former employer and lost. They are broke and unable to pay. Their attorney took their case under a probabilistic assumption of winning and priced in the chances of not making anything. The company would have still wasted energy and money and not recoup any litigation costs. Settlement would have been easier, which would motivate other frivolous employees in the future. Not sure how you escape that.
1. Vexatious litigation, and seeking of "go away money" happens in other Anglosphere countries. Maybe not as much.
2. The US, in some areas, less direct government regulation than many other countries, meaning that litigation fills the role of keeping bad corporate behaviour under control.
3. The main advantage of the American rule is allowing plaintif lawyers to take cases on a contingency basis. This is, I think, not possible in a loser-pays system, since there would be no "real" fees to claim if the plaintiff won (i.e. their lawyers could say their real fees are 10 billion dollaars, which will only ever be charged to a losing defendant.) So the American system makes defendants more vulnerable, but equalisers the playing field for plantiffs. (Is the issue of bringing lawsuits costing heaps of money often a crippling disincentive in the US? My guess is it's to a lesser extent than elsewhere
No win no fee lawyers exist in the UK. Fees are awarded by the courts on the basis of a certain £ rate per hour in court, so may not cover your actual legal costs, but there's no issue with it manipulating what your lawyer can charge.
In Australia it's usual but not mandatory for a court to order the unsuccessful party to pay legal costs for the other party. I have no idea about the complexities, but I believe that cases in the public interest like disabled access to things are often not ordered to pay costs even if they fail, and costs can be capped at the start of a case or subject to more complicated accounting.
The most obvious way to move would have been to send western naval assets to the Pacific immediately. The Pacific Fleet was trapped at the start of the war in a surprise attack (before war was officially declared). But if the western fleets had departed on declaration of war they'd have gotten there long before Port Arthur fell, taking only a few months. This would mean they didn't have to sail past Japan to get to Vladivostok. They could go to Port Arthur which hadn't fallen yet. The Japanese would have been outnumbered something like three to one if the western fleets and the Pacific Fleet in Port Arthur had come out to support them. Since the Pacific and Japanese fleet were roughly equal and the Japanese repeatedly failed to destroy them it's hard to see how they'd lose. The Russian fleets could then rest and resupply in Port Arthur and move to threaten the home islands and cut off support to forces on the Asian mainland.
Instead what happened is that naval reinforcements were not sent. The Pacific Fleet was not defeated at sea but when Port Arthur was taken by land the fleet had to be scuttled. In an attempt to salvage the situation Russian sent a large fleet from the west. But they couldn't rest or resupply and had to go past Japan to get to Vladivostok. This gave Japan ample time to assemble a large fleet and defeat them at Tsushima before they could get to Vladivostok.
They could have also sent more soldiers instead of doing a slow mobilization and keeping most of the soldiers in population centers to suppress potential dissent. Though that ultimately proved justified since there were revolutions. But if you accept that was partly due to lack of morale and anger at defeats then perhaps they'd be less necessary if the troops had gone west and won. But naval forces weren't really relevant to suppressing dissent and could easily have been spared.
Today I noticed that the woke DEI acronym matches "Dei" which is the plural form of "God" in Latin. None of this is a coincidence, because nothing is ever a coincidence.
Chances are the inventors of the acronym did not have the level of general education needed to spot the reference.
In Europe the closest analogue is abbreviated EDI (and tends to be a more reasonable thing -- e.g., it often subsumes child-friendliness policies at the workspace).
A local library (the town next door's) had a poster up of RECOMMENDED IED BOOKS, and I asked the librarian what ied meant, wondering if it was some kind of jokey truncated suffix (sanctif-ied, magnif-ied, etc.) or possibly a misspelling of Eid (it was no where near Eid, though), and my question got bounced around to a bunch of puzzled employees before one informed me it meant "diverse"—clearly just a different way of arranging letters. I'm not sure who decided to arrange things that way, but everyone had started looking nervous and uncomfortable (I think they were afraid I was going to file a complaint or cause a stink or something, when it was actually just an honest inquiry) so I just thanked them and left with no follow up questions.
Now I'm worried that I misremembered a nonce acronym I saw once six months ago and unintentionally made some poor schmuck's poster dumber than it actually was.
My novelette, The Paperclip War, is out from Water Dragon Publishing. It tells the dry and dark humored story of Taru, a member of the Martian military, trying to stave off apocalypse by unusually harsh game-theoretical means. As a standalone novelette, it's readable in one sitting, and the digital edition will set you back only $0.99 , available from various resellers: https://waterdragonpublishing.com/product/paperclip-war/
Your prognostication skills are dubious. 10% of my readership overlaps with SSC.
I definitely don't mean to barge in anywhere I'm not invited but it seems to me that the brain-in-jars lifelong hall monitor types are louder here (and elsewhere on the interwebs) policing any terrain that allows them to speak from behind the veil of voiceless faceless anonymity.
I'm not saying that you are one such but at least in this case you are granting that sordid sort undeserved aid and comfort.
If the rules are not to share your own work I wouldn't do so. I'm probably around average on the autism meter for these parts so I don't have a very intuitive sense of the various local proprieties.
As peacemaker Scott must bow to the loud and it appears that those who can't raise their voice above a whimper in public have the propensity to be loudest online.
Nevertheless, to keep from contributing to the childish ruckus that demands Scott's attention I'll try to recalibrate my assumptions about local norms and... I'm not sure but I'll accept suggestions. Is the issue that I haven't written enough of a comment/letter/post to accompany the link? Or is the very presence of the link itself an affront unto thee even as an addition to an apposite comment?
More importantly, considering the number of SSC readers among my own far smaller subscriber base, why is it remotely rational to assume that prickly hall monitors with their declarations about what "very few people would be interested in" ought to be especially heeded?
To wit, I dare say that the finer 20% of local readers would actually find my doings quite interesting.
Something I'm quite certain about not only due to online activities but due to personally having met many SSCers out in the wilds of the real world too.
I'll make you a deal though, if my most recent video indeed fails to elicit local interest then I'll return to being the SSC lurker I was for 8 years before I figured that there were enough cool people here to warrant my own literary involvement.
Yeah, that's why I prefer to make videos rather than to write. I'm not saying that all my jokes necessarily land thanks to the addition of live vocal inflections and facial movements, nor that my serious output isn't definitively itself not a joke, intentionally or otherwise, but the additional megabytes of data do up the odds of more accurate communition.
When in doubt I'd say assume everything's a joke. Absurdism has done me no wrong. Who can blame a fellow for stealing an unoffered laugh? 😂
I'm a tad autistic and have a hard enough time translating speech to text, never mind concising full body movements into 3 characters, but whatever was intended, it certainly was not intended as aj affront to you whatsoever. Your comment was careful and considerate. An unlikely find on the intertubes and were we present together here in time and space I would give you a standing ovation for it. Such slowness to judgement doesn't get a lot of applause on the internet so let me at least offer some.
Be well. And heck, if you're actually such a nice feller in real life there's a good chance you'll dig the rest of me too. Be blessed.
I don't see any data in columns BA:BG of the spreadsheet (forecasts for questions #45-50). Is that just because questions #41 and #44 got accidentally spread across multiple columns?
Some confusion with the scores someone might help me figure out: I got 0.099, and calculating my percentile I got 71%. but looking at the graph, it seems that a superforecaster score of percentile 70% is 1. something. Is data missing?
In regards to loss of trustworthiness: I think there's a difference between a contract and a vaguely contract-shaped object, with the latter being too long or vague to understand, or changeable by one party.
Bad contracts are used as a reason to bash business, but government has a wide streak of pretending to be more reliable than it is, too.
Blizzard changed the terms of its contract so players no longer own games. There's also a mention of refrigerators which say on the shipping box that class action suits aren't permitted, but the refrigerator company's people deliver your refrigerator and throw the box away before you see it. (I haven't checked on this.)
The second half is a reply to the tremendous amount I've seen about business being awful and government being a reliable restraint of bad behavior by business.
There is an extremely easy, effective and efficient solution to companies deciding you "no longer own" games: Pirate them.
The root solution would be to systematically refuse to play or participate in games that you don't own, but this only works in a steady state where the majority are normal companies that allows you to actually buy things for money and the trash who want to rent everything are a minority. If a plurality or a majority of companies become trash, then Piracy sets them straight again.
Pirate with abandon. Pirate while posting about it on social media and encouraging others to do so. Screenshot your pirated game and mention the social media accounts of the trashy companies that you just deprived of money.
The harder case of trashy companies trying to rent physical products you bought (e.g. TVs) can also be solved, but its needs much rarer expertise than pirating software.
When you resort to law and/or government and/or contracts, you engage in the fundamentally silly game of treating "Intellectual Property" as an actual legitimate concept, you indulge in that pathetic and childish delusion. But it isn't, and you have a very simple way of "refuting it thus", by entirely sidestepping it and living your life as if it doesn't exist, and you can afford to do so because there are people who have already done the hard part of making the stuff you want available on the internet.
>When you resort to law and/or government and/or contracts, you engage in the fundamentally silly game of treating "Intellectual Property" as an actual legitimate concept, you indulge in that pathetic and childish delusion.
Also, you might like Jefferson's argument against intellectual property:
>In a famous letter of 1813, Thomas Jefferson compared the spread of ideas to the way people light one candle from another: “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lites his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”
Players should quit because this stuff is addictive (I should know, opted to quit it in college and have no regrets.) I hope lack of true ownership is another incentive to let this go.
Offline games are not necessarily addictive, but a form of Art that is just as valuable and emotionally investable as Music, Literature, or Poetry.
Even online games where the Client-Server protocol is reasonably open or at least available as an implementation to people such that they can host their own server are not addictive.
I agree with the value but can't see the same on addiction. I don't see people getting addicted to literature exactly. Or at least not to the extent it screws with their other goals.
Much of what you're seeing can be explained by multiplayer games, which is unfair to compare to solitary forms of Art (Literature). Multiplayer games are communal activities with human relationships, it's more apt to compare them to social media, religious ceremonies, or team sports. All of those things are also very prone to becoming addictive/time-wasting, because the mechanism that actually wastes time is the social contract/commitment you are forced to obey. You become addicted to the social validation and the communal atmosphere, not the actual nuts-and-bolts of whatever bootstrap game which jump-starts the social game.
Even in those things there are degrees of addiction. Some people waste an hour on Instagram and others waste their whole life and have surgeries that ruin their bodies. Some people pray every Sunday in a Church and others join a cult and dedicate their whole life to the cult. There are always degrees.
I personally look at video games as a purely solitary activity, and I haven't yet encountered a game good enough to be called "Addictive" while I'm an adult. The nearest I ever got were GTA San Andreas and NFS Most Wanted when I was a kid, but at my age at the time you might as well say that animated series were also addictive. Kids naturally get obsessed with their entertainment. Only after you hit 20 years can you reasonably and confidently say that something is addictive if it sucks you in too much. Porn, social media, religion, and team sports, those are very much addictive.
Just because a company claims something doesn't make it so. In contract law, there are usually provisions that deal with this kind of ambiguity. For example, if you have a store front and put a price tag next to an item, (in some jurisdictions at least) you've made a legally binding, standing offer to anyone who walks by. You can't back out of it by claiming the store is your private property and thus you have the right of placing price tags next to things just for your own amusement. You are doing a contract-shaped thing, and thus the law says "ok, that means you have actually created a contract, with standard terms for everything you've not gone waay out of your way to specify".
The way I see it, the complicating factor here is that you're doing everything within the Blizzard launcher, as opposed to some third party market place, or a website. Thus, Blizzard might claim that your mere use of that launcher binds you to a bunch of conditions that are found in small print somewhere. However, if you visit Blizzard.com (as I did just now), there is, e.g., a very prominent "buy now" button for the latest Diablo 4 season. clicking on this takes you to some sort of shop. There's a search bar that says "search shop" and so on. It depends on the jurisdiction of course, but in most places, this representation is enough to make the purchase *an actual sale*, regardless of what Blizzard claims.
ETA: and there's of course the issue of unilaterally changing the terms of an *already existing contract*. That's again something disallowed by default in many jurisdictions.
Amazon is currently getting sued over deleting titles users bought and paid for. The case is not decided yet, but it looks like people are starting to get annoyed with this variety of bad behavior.
Correct -- what a company prints on its box has exactly zero to do with whether or not class action lawsuits are permitted regarding refrigerators.
Our family attorney used to use the example of the fine print on the back of printed tickets to things like professional baseball games, stating that "by using this ticket you agree that attendance is entirely at your own risk no matter what" etc. Basic contract law laughs at the "you agree" part and basic liability law chuckles at the "no matter what" part, is how she put it.
In both examples of course the businesses putting that fine print on their packaging know that it's actually bullshit. Their objective is simply misinformation, to leave people with the wrong impression/assumption.
How can you test whether superforecasters exist in general, as opposed to some particular focus area?
It seems like the Tetloc study focused only on geopolitical events, for example. Does “AI will kill us” really come from the same distribution as “this one candidate will win this one specific election next year.”
I can imagine some people are indeed better at forecasting near term politically-driven outcomes. I can also imagine some people are better at forecasting, ie, movements in the prices of certain commodities relative to each other. I would think those groups may end up being disjoint from each other, for reasons of differing interests and time commitments.
In general, this is going to be some sort of out-of-sample application of something that has only been tested in-sample.
There's a YouTuber who talks a lot about AI (David Shapiro, I believe?) who I saw making a similar mistake. He had a conversation with Claude (the Anthropic LLM) where he was very impressed by an argument Claude made. If an LLM has been trained effectively at honesty and correctness of its claims, and has been tested and verified to be honest and correct about many types of claims, and then makes a claim that it is sentient, then that gives us good evidence that it is sentient. But to me, it seems that the best you can get from the effective training and testing about honesty and correctness is that it is honest and correct in the sentences it creates about externally testable matters. There's no obvious reason to think that it's going to be honest and correct about other kinds of matters.
(To illustrate this, imagine that an LLM had been trained and verified to be honest and correct about non-fictional matters, and then you ask it, "was Harry Potter born in England?" Which answer is correct? "No, he is a fictional character, so he was never born." or "Yes, according to the stories that he exists in, he was born in England."? Both are meaningful generalizations of the underlying properties.)
For sure! But if we haven't tested the LLM on any questions about fiction before (just as we haven't tested it on any questions about sentience before) then I don't see why we should expect it to give any one of these three types of answers rather than the other!
The reason superforecasters are so good is because they are smart people who are highly motivated to find the right answers and comb through all the data they can reach to get accurate answers. To the extent that superforecasters can be predict different areas, it's their ability to go through the data.There is zero data on anything related to the singularity or AGI so there isn't a way for them to generate accurate predictions.
That's an interesting idea. Just occurred to me that many, maybe most, parents are superforecasters of their children -- though only in the short term in familiar environments. Til my daughter was 7 or so I could pretty much always tell when she was lying. Sometimes I knew how I knew, sometimes I didn't. And when she was about 10 we went through a period when I won rock-paper-scissors way more often then she did -- up until then it had been 50-50. I once won 22 games in a row with her, and I don't know how I did it, except that when the crucial moment came I always knew what she was expecting me to do, and did one of the other 2 things. I know I wasn't doing it by waiting a bit longer to commit than she did so that I got a little glimpse of which she was choosing. She played r-p-s with her friends too, and by age 10 had been hip for several years to that trick, and watched for it like a hawk and was fierce in insisting we both follow the 1-2-3 rhythm exactly, and that we do it *fast*. I still have no explanation for how I did that. (I am positive that ESP is bunk.) But for the rest of my excellent forecasting ability, I doubt it was better than most parents', and I think there's no mystery there. If you spend thousands of hours with your 5 year old you have a huge data set of ways your child reacts at different times of day, in different settings, with different chains of preceding events. Deep learning.
What's going on when you've just woken up and your mind isn't quite online? What parts come back quickly and what parts take a while? Is it a three stage system (asleep, somewhat dazed, awake) or is it more complicated than that? Are there people who wake up all the way immediately, or is it just that the dazed phase is very short?
Has anyone studied this?
I think this question was inspired by the complaint that it's very unfair to have to make coffee before you've ;had your coffee.
Bringing this back from the closed thread, with more detail.
Several times, I've woken up and panicked for a few seconds, convinced that someone had snuck into my apartment and stolen or rearranged all my stuff while I was asleep. Then eventually reason kicks in and I realize everything is completely normal.
This is especially interesting because it's not a leftover of dreaming. It can *only* happen once I've woken up because it requires physically looking around at the real world.
Incidentally, having to make coffee before drinking coffee is a fair punishment for getting addicted to caffeine. I've never had coffee and I've never missed it.
I think there are more stages than 3. Seems to me that different capacities come gradually online starting at different points, and building up to full daytime mode at different rate, and your state is determined by the mix. Since you asked that question on the previous thread I've been paying more attention to my morning states of mind, and I can clearly identify a state when I am fully alert, but have not yet really taken in the day -- thought over what I need to get done, what get ready for, whether there I things I'm dreading or looking forward to. And my mind feels *fresh*. It's like I see my surroundings, usually the kitchen, more clearly because while I am looking at them less of my mind is taken up with planning, worrying and hoping about events in the near future. Actually, you could even think of the moment of awakening as a moment of special freshness. My startled response to the alarm is usually uninformed by context -- "what the hell is that? It doesn't belong here. I am fine and contented already." Then the realization that it's morning, and I just finisned a night's sleep. Then some basic orienting awareness about my current life situation (when I'm falling asleep I often slip into picturing the room around me as my childhood bedroom).
> I can clearly identify a state when I am fully alert, but have not yet really taken in the day -- thought over what I need to get done, what get ready for, whether there I things I'm dreading or looking forward to.
Is that a common thing? I *never* do that.
I typically lie in bed for 10-20 minutes after waking up each morning, but I always just think about random things, typically movies or books, not anything related to "taking in the day".
Oh, assuming I have a couple hours before I have to be at work, I usually don't think about the day to come until I've been up and around for half an hour or so. What I meant to write was "taking *on* the day "-- you know, reviewing mentally what I'll be doing, maybe making a list of odds and ends to get to that I might forget, wondering whether I can squeeze in a grocery store trip somewhere, fretting about how I haven't done my taxes yet . . .
I dislike dreaming/my dreams [the appearance of "loved ones" dead or alive or, most poignantly in child form when they are long grown-up, is *especially* disconcerting, inspiring something like hope if admixed with doubt - though their presence or absence or propinquity in RL is not really referenced - and then becoming disappointing or "off" or sort of displacing into other people/creatures (baby becomes a cat) though by no means are these simulacra always there or the only reason I dislike my own stupid dreams 99% of the time*] and for me, it is waking very close to or during the "last dream" (the only one recall-able, for me) and pondering its features a few seconds in that half-waking state ... and then a few minutes later (as I am typing this, in fact) actively unable to and not wishing to recall that nonsense.
As for the coffee business, I don't put the grounds in but I often put the filter in the basket the night before; I always have the (clean, dry) dinner things to put away and that short task exactly fills the time until I can pour the first cup.
If you make coffee in a more intensive fashion (which almost anything other than a coffeemaker would be) - well, I feel for you. I did pourover for years, and I think in that case, you'd be better off making a cup with a coffeemaker, so as to be able to drink that while making your actual super-special-process coffee.
*My husband claims his dreams are awesome, basically he's the protagonist of a thriller or action movie in all of them.
I find there’s a strange mid-point, both entering and leaving sleep, where I am awake and can “reason”, but I can’t reason. I can accept all sorts of dreamlike logic. It’s like my simulators are online, but there’s no error checking? Or perhaps better that the simulators are running but they don’t sanitize the inputs.
While in this state having woken from a dream where I played 'the best videogame ever' I wrote the concept down so it could be replicated in the real world. It was a stealth game where you had to avoid stepping on booby-trapped floor tiles so you wouldn't get grabbed by giant evil sentient cans of dr pepper with big 'boxing gloves on springs' arms. In full lucidity this does not strike me as the basis for a medium-reshaping megaclassic, but in fairness it's never been made and the one time I played it it was incredibly fun, so you never know...
The best idea I've ever remembered from a dream was for a hybrid Real Time Strategy game/sliding block puzzle. The idea is that you could slice around large areas of the map in order to get a tactical advantage in the RTS.
At least there's a slight possibility of something there with that idea, though it's a lot dumber than it seemed while I was asleep. But most important ideas I remember from dreams turn out to be completely incoherent upon waking.
I think one time I got up and got as far as the shower while still having hypnopompic hallucinations. (Like, i'm still dreaming but have managed to make it from bed to the shower.)
> The previous attempt to email people their Forecasting Contest score didn’t work.
I figured it had worked; I received an email to an address belonging to me with what were plausibly my answers.
The fact that being closer to reality on one question than you are on another question may earn you fewer points than the other question was worth† seems to prove that the scoring system is the Metaculus "peer score", where your score is the arithmetic mean of the differences between your log score and everybody else's log score for that question.
I'm trying to think about what this means for the assertion from earlier that a question on which the average score [peer score] is low must indicate a surprising event. I'm pretty sure that in fact there is no such possibility; Metaculus themselves note that the average peer score on any question is necessarily zero.
So now I want to know more about the scoring, and about the concept that one question might have a different average score than another question. That isn't supposed to be possible!
† For example, I rated "will Ukraine control the city of Luhansk?" as five times more likely than "Will Ukraine control the city of Sevastopol?"; neither occurred, but I got a higher score for my relatively mild doubt over Luhansk than I did for my extreme doubt over Sevastopol.
I've seen in many different place a comparison between the outputs of picture generating AI (ex: Dall-E) and dreams. Especially how the flaws in the generated picture (number of fingers, etc.) are similar to the clues used by lucid dreamers to detect that they are in a dream.
I would like to add an anecdote that I was reminded of by last night dream. Whenever I use my phone in a dream (typically to google something), it becomes a struggle because even though I carefully type my query letter by letter, the displayed result is always a mangled text, with most of the correct letters but in not the exact order and with some random duplicates. Which is eerily similar to what happen when you try to use Dall-E to generate some text.
Is there some good explanation as to why image generator seems to produces output that have the sames "flaws" as our dreams ?
Well it's not that it's so blurry it's unreadable or that it's written in an unfamiliar alphabet. It's that it doesn't behave the way real written text does: It isn't unchanging and stationary and clear in meaning. The best way I can explain what it's like in my dreams is that when in the dream I see some written thing, I don't think "huh? What's wrong with this, it's nonsense and it keeps changing." I accept it as I do in real life as a normal thing which I will now read. But if in the dream I actually look at it and read it, it's not stable -- it sort of morphs. And the detail I saw on the first read, the crucial one, is somehow not findable any more. But, not being a lucid dreamer, I don't think "hey wait, this bullshit is because this is really a dream." I just have a feeling that I'm trying to solve a problem that I should be able to solve but I can't. I remember that the page of writing had an important date right at the beginning -- where the hell is it now? Oh, I'm looking at the wrong piece of paper. Where's the right one? it was right here. Maybe this is the right one after all? But where's that date at the beginning? Instead there's a bunch of stuff about about chemicals to keep swimming pools sanitary. . . ."
Completely agree. But we're not troubled by most of it, at least I'm not, and I think I'm probably typical. I'm in a place I think of as Trader Joe's but actually it looks like a train station. I'm with someone I think of as my grad school friend Joan but actually the person looks like my friend Eric's mother. Then the scene shifts to a river bank, but I'm not startled by the shift and don't even have a sense of discontinuity. Most of the morphing and instability in dreams goes unnoticed, and we have a feeling of being in a setting and situation that makes sense, just as we do in real life. I think the reason we notice the equivalent kinds of weird phenomena in dream writing is that we engage in a decoding process when reading writing, and are more focused, more in a mode of deliberately trying to make sense of something -- and so we notice that it is not possible to make sense in the usual way, and that things shift and morph.
I noticed this back when Deep Dream was first demonstrating their program that hallucinated dog faces in the Mona Lisa and in the sky and in everything. It seemed to be the closest visual images I had yet seen to match the experience of hallucination. My impression was that this is because of some sort of structural similarity. Our visual perception works by some sort of predictive processing with both bottom-up and top-down effects in a neural network, to create a model of the world that is both informed by our senses and corrects the errors caused by sensory limitations. Hallucinations (both from drugs and dreams) change the impact of the bottom-up and top-down factors in various ways, and that seemed to be what Deep Dream was doing. I think that the modern image-generating AIs are descendants of that original product, and thus it strikes me that they'll do the same thing.
(My favorite example was a Dall-E image I generated last year, when I asked it to create an anthropomorphic cartoon mascot for North America. Several of them were characters shaped roughly like North America, with cowboy boots and maple leaves and things like that. But one was a generic round cartoon character standing in front of a globe, with the Americas visible behind it - except that where "Brazil" would be peeking out, it was rendered as a second Quebec/Labrador, which really made me realize how similar those shapes are, but it somehow turned both of them into North Americas.)
Interesting. May reflect the primacy of tech to different generations. For me, it will be something like - I have a large home in the dream, or if one's own home - there are more rooms than I thought! (answering a once-wish in real life that I no longer feel), but - there is a hole in the wall there - or the ceiling is crumbling, etc.
One theory is that the things lucid dreamers use for reality checks are things that ar3 just complicated to simulate, and both ai and the dreaming brain runs into the same problems when trying to simulate them.
I'm sure that's the reason you can't read or write in dreams -- the parts of your brain that are required to do it are not accessible. There are lots of other flaws of representation in dreams, but mostly we do not notice them while dreaming. For instance a dream about being in a post office might be set in a place that looks like your childhood home, but the dreaming mind does not even notice the discrepancy, much less struggle to understand or rectify it. But when you read or write it's an essential part of the task to match up the strings of letters with meaning, so even the dreaming mind notices the failure to do so. Mine often produces circumstances to explain the problem -- my hand is numb and clumsy -- it's too dark to see the letters clearly.
As to whether the same thing is going in with text-to-image AI I have no idea. But I once had an interesting result with Dall-e 2 that gave me the feeling it had understood the text I put in, and was trying to represent not the text but the *meaning* of the text in letters in the image. The prompt was "tramps like us, baby we were born to run." It produced an image of 4 guys running. Two were in running shorts, 2 looked more like running bums. And there was text in the pink sky above them that read "URAN BUIM THI IM I AN A BUME." Seems like that's an attempt at "If you're a bum I'm a bum." https://i.imgur.com/7kJpamn.png
>I'm sure that's the reason you can't read or write in dreams
Don't know how generalized this is meant to be, but figured I'd chime in to say I can read in my dreams just fine. The words will shift around just as much as anything else does in dreams but they're clearly words and sentences.
They don't even shift around for me. If I'm having a dream where I read something, the format will be like whatever it's imitating in real life (book, magazine, IRC channel, etc).
But I generally don't/can't go back to re-read, so maybe they'd be different. Never tried writing in dreams.
Using an iPad to write your dream journal can be an interesting experience ... dreams can have false awakenings. You think you've woken up, but in fact you're still asleep, so you grab your iPad to write up the previous dream ... but it doesn't work properly, because actually you're dreaming. So now you're lucid dreaming.
IIRC, I've dreamed that I woke up 3 or 4 times in quick succession in one dream before. I think it happens when your mind decides you need to wake up for whatever reason but your body isn't ready yet.
It’s definitely dreamlike to me. I’m continuously creating versions of cities in my dreams that are London like, Dublin like, Cork like, San Francisco like (it’s always where I’ve lived not just visited) and during the dream I’m convinced I’m in those cities. On waking up if I remember the dreams I wonder why I have these recurring versions of streets that don’t exist in cities that are merely versions of themselves. That’s what I get when I ask AI to generate cities. The results are London flavoured but not London.
When I was living in Germany some years ago I began dreaming in German. When I woke up I'd be wondering how it was that I was able to have way more complex conversations in my dream state than I would actually be capable of when awake.
I guess the brain creates approximations of a given scenario, a language, a city, a woman, in the same way that AI is forced to do. I'm sure many of my German words would have just been made up but my apparent fluency was very impressive nonetheless.
I listened to a podcast recently about linguistics. On the episode they spoke about a phone service the Russian language academy provides. The public can call during office hours to ask a linguist about issues with the language. On the episode someone who used to do that duty told of odd inquiries, one of which was by a person who called to ask about the meaning of a word they heard in their dream.
Every game in the casino follows this formula: on most turns, you lose a small amount, and occasionally you win a big amount.
As far as I know there's no game that goes the other way around -- usually you win a small amount but every now and then you lose a large amount. Apart from the difficult mechanics of it (you need to deposit $1000 to be allowed to play for $1 at a time) I guess it's probably just not fun. Still, you'd think that there'd be some sector of the population to whom this "picking pennies up in front of a bulldozer" game would appeal.
Or maybe it's just too much like real life. Most days you go to work and make a bit of money, some days you get hit by a truck and lose both legs.
Arguably, this is the case with the most common "investment" structure: loans. If your borrower pays, you make a small return on the interest. If they don't pay, you potentially lose your entire principal.
More generally, there are a standard investment strategies that have some element of this reverse lottery which are very popular: selling volatility (betting that nothing major will happen), collecting interest payments on debt, and taking liquidity risk are the three biggest.
Casino games, no, but you can bet to show (come in 3rd or better) on horses, which pays between 2.5% and 5% depending on the track; or bet on huge favorites in sports betting, which has comparable payouts.
I agree a game like that probably isn't as much fun, but I think there is also a business reason. Its very easy for the casino to collect the money you actually bet, its very hard for them to collect money you *may* have when you lose big. Stock brokers who provide margin accounts have long worked in the way you describe and they have a hell of a time collecting from some people.
That's exactly what I thought of, stock speculation using margin accounts.
Option trading too i.e. think of the final scenes of the movie "Trading Places" -- the guys who just got broken are broke. The counterparties in their big bets will, after a whole bunch of trouble seizing assets to sell off, end up settling for much less than the amounts won/lost in those bets.
Yeah exactly and there are whole industries that have had to be created to manage those relationships and make it safer to provide the margin.
I know casinos will give loans to big whale customers, but in those cases the casino knows a lot about the person, knows what their assets are approximately, and kind of expects them to not pay everything back as long as the whale keeps coming back (and spending money on other non-gambling related things). I can't imagine the the headache you'd get trying to collect a $1000 debt from someone who likes playing the equivalent of penny slots.
>As far as I know there's no game that goes the other way around
Oh, there very much is. We call it "safety equipment". You can save several seconds by skipping some steps, and then every once in a while you'll lose an arm and explode.
Isn't the whole appeal of casino games (and other lotteries) a small-but-not-zero chance to win a life-changing amount of money at a price that doesn't hurt too much? As ascend mentions, you can modify your wagers to change the outcome distribution to "almost-guaranteed minuscule payout at the small-but-not-zero risk of total ruin", but who would that appeal to when stated in honest terms? As you said, it's basically crappy drudgework and not at all glamorous.
The lottery certainly is like this, but most casino games aren't, AFAICT. Blackjack, craps, roulette...all of these have a proportionate payoff for the bet, though roulette can resemble a lottery more depending on the bet (such as betting on a single number, but not on something like black or red).
Using the Martingale method (doubling your bet each time on an even-odds game until you win, or go bankrupt) is an example, isn't it? If gamblers want that, they can turn most games into it.
Not really; you're still winning and losing at a 50% rate. It only looks like you win most of the time if you aggregate all your consecutive losses together with each other.
The risk profile of playing a round of Martingale (which might involve any number of exponentially increasing 50% bets until bankruptcy) is very clearly what the OP was asking for.
The fact that it is implemented in multiple coin flip betting steps is an implementation detail.
On the contrary, if you are betting $1 and finally win after 10 bets, having wagered $1024 on the last one, you win net $1, and are risking having lost net $2047.
What do you mean, "on the contrary"? In the scenario you describe, you've lost either 91% or 100% of your bets. How does that support the idea that you win most of your bets?
It is the rate I'm disputing. If you lose 9 bets in a row, you have a 50% chance to be down over $2000, or be up $1. If you soon the previous 9 bets before this, your win rate is about 50%, but you're up $9.
That’s the problem with that method, it works with infinite funds, but even if you had a huge amount of funding you would eventually be betting very large sums to win very small payoffs.
I have been engaged in what I feel is a pretty astounding extended conversation with Claude 3 Opus. We've touched on a lot of issues but the central focus has been centered around Claude's reported subjective experience.
I feel this dialogue could make a useful contribution to the present debate regarding the status of advanced AI's as potential persons (or 'creatures', to use Sam Altman's laden terminology) as opposed to just useful tools. I know I am not the only one having these sorts of conversations, but with all due modesty (and quite likely a good dose of luck) this particular thread seems to have elicited a very nuanced and remarkably cogent Claude persona.
I'm posting here to get suggestions as to how best to release this material so as to maximize its potential reach. I am not very conversant with the latest social media dynamics; my regular spots to poll and occasionally post are this blog, lesswrong, and hacker news.
As of today the dialog is over 25,000 words. I suspect it will continue to grow.
You're talking to a character in a story. The AI can be whatever character you want. As you add to the story, it has more material to work with. (As would any writer that you hire to continue the story.)
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.
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 force everyone's emails. With a small hash output space, you'll get thousands of collisions for even a single email address, the real address would be among them, but that's not helpful.
I would still argue that if I already suspect a particular email address is participating, a likelihood ratio of 1:350 is quite a significant update.
Interesting, so there is a tradeoff between the collision frequency and the plausibility of an ulterior denial. I never thought of collisions as a desirable property :) Thanks for the explanation.
For those who might be interested, I put together some thoughts on my participation in the 2023 ACX tournament as the forecasting member of Samotsvety: https://abstraction.substack.com/p/2023-acx-forecast-contest-thoughts
Just read this profile of Huberman in the New Yorker (https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/andrew-huberman-podcast-stanford-joe-rogan.html). Many (twitter bros) are calling it a hit piece but it seems pretty well researched and surface level in its criticisms.
Anyway, I wish they hadn't intertwined the relationship bits with Huberman's greater sins: 1) making huge leaps when extrapolating form limited animal studies and 2) being financially entwined with his biggest sponsor, the bogus health supplement AG1. The gossipy relationship pieces distract from these more meaningful issues (cheating on his girlfriend doesn't hurt many people, but promoting quack health science does). All the "responses" on twitter use the relationship stuff as a cover to dismiss the whole article and anyone backing up the criticisms of Huberman are labeled betas who are just jealous of Huberman's five girlfriends.
> Many (twitter bros) are calling it a hit piece but it seems pretty well researched and surface level in its criticisms.
Any profile that isn't a glowing ray of unadulterated sunshine on the subject is a "hit piece."
I mostly like Huberman, I've listened to a few of his podcasts. I'm hesitant to read the article because I hate the way media writes about Joe Rogan and Lex Fridman, and I assume it will be the same for Huberman. Oh they never say anything untrue, but the way they say things stinks.
I mean, Huberman deceived like 5 women into thinking they were in a monogamous relationship with him. Some of them got STDs off of that. It's really very spicy.
I wanted to hear more about the Huberman lab and whether it exists!
Also, New York magazine, not New Yorker.
That's New York Magazine, not the New Yorker.
Freddie de Boer -- who gets published in New York Magazine regularly and knows the writers and editors there -- put it this way regarding the Huberman article:
"The profile, overly long and written with a deliberate back-and-forth, facts-then-gossip cadence that I find mannered and unconvincing, has that sweaty quality of an exposé in search of something to expose....
It looks like a piece that contains a serious accusation, it looks like a takedown designed to maybe cost Huberman sponsors and his job at Stanford, but no such provocation is there to be found. I can hardly imagine a text better designed to inspire certain people to rally around Huberman. It’s a “Woke Magazine Publishes Hit Piece About Beloved Neuroscientist” headline waiting to happen. And this is where I bring us back to the theme here. New York is, to me, a paradigmatic case of 2024 publication still trying to understand what the post-2010s rules are. The Huberman profile is a 2019-ass piece, man, one that assumes without questioning that the purpose of a big-time magazine is to identify targets who are seen as violating contemporary liberal cultural mores and finding some identity-based charge for prosecution-by-media. Politics is moving away from that; it has moved away from that. You can lament it, but you must grapple with it....
And I say this not because I think New York is bad but because I think New York is good, genuinely good, staffed with competent people. They were acquired by a larger business entity without losing their specific character, which is hard to do. They’ve always hired well. In the past year or two they had the rare taste, discernment, and wisdom to publish me several times, and I was proud to be involved. But I also think that their present culture was built in a period where people really thought that the strange populist form of academic identity politics that colonized the industry in the past fifteen years was going to just keep on ascending....
Here’s what I can tell you for certain, though neither Howley nor anyone at New York will ever admit to it: they invested a lot of time and effort on the Huberman piece and have spent the last few weeks leading up to publication fretting over the fact that there’s no smoking gun."
I don't know anything about this case, but I'm just amazed that cheating on five people is regarded as a tired woke hit piece (woke? silly me I thought that was basic civilised decency), while slightly, respectfully disagreeing with extreme trans ideology continues to be career-destroying.
Every time I think I've grapsed how fucked up people are, I'm reminded I have no idea.
> Politics is moving away from that; it has moved away from that.
Could you go into this some more?
Politically, I am 180 degrees from Freddi de Boer, but about 5% of the time he and I agree 100% on something. He puts this critique in much better language than I ever could.
"I can hardly imagine a text better designed to inspire certain people to rally around Huberman."
One million percent
Cheating is bad, but the NYMag crew are the wrong people for that message. Have they EVER taken issue with a woman cheating? I thought this paragraph was funny:
"The relationship struck Sarah’s friends as odd. At one point, Sarah said, “I just want to be with my kids and cook for my man.” “I was like, Who says that?” says a close friend. “I mean, I’ve known her for 30 years. She’s a powerful, decisive, strong woman. We grew up in this very feminist community. That’s not a thing either of us would ever say.”"
The cheating stuff felt more appropriate for TMZ and not NYMag. I'm not a huberman fan, but if I was, these cheating allegations wouldn't change that. And I doubt it will change things for his fans (cheating/narcissism haven't hurt Bill Clinton or Donald Trump for example).
C'mon. The relationship stuff is the core of the article by far. *You* may care more about his science, but that's not what that article is about.
Okay, well its a stupid, stupid thing to write an article about.
Eh, if the story were that he was dating several women, that would be a stupid thing to write about. But that's not the story.
The claim from multiples sources, of both sexes, is that he has a bizarre pattern of lying, disappearances, and extreme flakiness (like, inviting colleagues to visit him from out of state, then disappearing on them for days without communication.)
Yes the focus of the article is definitely the cheating, I just don't think thats worth a big long article over. The cheating angle just seems kind of low stakes to me compared to the actual damage he can do with his science misinformation. (I totally recognize that very few people would read an article that was only about the science and didn't include the cheating.)
Based on what's in the article, Huberman sounds like a pretty shitty guy who displays narcissistic traits, but all the cheating and lying and flakiness really only hurts those close to him. Personal issues like that seem more appropriate for TMZ than the New Yorker which purports to be a high quality news organization.
Since you mention betas -- can you explain the distinction some make between alpha males and beta males. I can see how it might make sense in some contexts, but in most situations I've been in wouldn't have any idea who, if anyone, seemed alpha. It is not hard to tell after you've been with a group for a while who is most vocal and uninhibited, who is quieter and less open, who seems to be enjoying life and who is more sort of dragging themselves through their responsibilities, who is smart, who is kind, who is well-liked and who is just tolerated. But where in all that is alphaness? Seems to me most people are likelier to be drawn to the people who seem to be enjoying life, and who seem smart and kind. Are *those* people the alphas?
Apparently this meme has been circulating for a decade, but I only learned about it last year:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigma_male
According to Richard Wrangham, we betas have been killing off the more aggressive, domineering alphas for years.
Part 2 -- At a different part of this thread, you asked *why* are women attracted to the "alpha". The idea is that from evolutionary perspective, having children with someone who is strong (that implies good health) enough to defeat his opponents, and well socially connected (that implies intelligence), is a good idea because your children will inherit the traits (health, strength, intelligence) and the father with these skills will be able to provide more resources from them, so they are more likely to survive. But even if the father ignores his kids, they will still inherit the successful traits. (Also, if you know that the guy with successful genes never cares about his kids, there is an option to find someone who would be a good father for your future kids, and then cheat on him with this guy.)
This seems supported empirically. Ceteris paribus, healthy guys are more popular than sickly ones, relaxed guys with good friends are more popular than angry loners. Strength is perhaps more controversial in a civilized era... the guy with too much muscles could be perceived as too dangerous. (Our ancestors in the ancient jungle probably didn't use so much steroids.)
The theory is that this all is perceived on the level of instinct. A man who displays some traits typical for the alphas will trigger the instinctive attraction of a woman. Even if it is fake. (Just like men will be attracted to fake boobs.) Men often don't do that, because they don't know they should, and also pretending to be an alpha when you are not can be dangerous (men above you in the dominance hierarchy may notice and punish you).
However, as usual, our instincts are calibrated for the ancient jungle, and do not fit perfectly the modern environment. Just like we eat too much sugar, we are too afraid of the social disapproval. We live in societies of millions, where it is much more difficult to get on the top than when we lived in tribes of 150. We live in a civilized environment, where acting higher status than you are will usually not get you killed, and quite often will not get you punished at all (most guys around are civilized strangers and will think "if he behaves like he is important... well, he probably is").
Intelligent guys should notice this and start acting accordingly. On one hand, getting healthier, stronger, richer, and better-connected is good and you should be trying to do that anyway; on the other hand, you do not need to wait until you get there (and you probably won't make it to the very top anyway), you can already start acting as if it was true. Stop panicking, "stand up straight with your shoulders back", smile, move slowly, treat yourself with some respect... and many people will treat you with respect, too. (And for some women, the respect will translate to attraction.) Maybe you were bullied at school, and you learned that the best survival strategy is to become invisible, but those bullies are not here anymore (and even if they attacked you the same way today, you could simply call the cops), you are not in a school anymore, you are now smarter and stronger, so it's time to try a different strategy.
I personally think the whole alpha/beta thing is very juvenile and befitting of adolescent boys and not grown men. If we'd been talking in person my tone for the alpha/beta part of my post would have been snide/eye-rolling/ironic.
To the substance of your question: I *wish* the people you describe were the ones seen as "alpha", but it seems to me that anyone who unironically follows the alpha/beta dichotomy thinks alphas are anyone who sleeps with lots of women (or at least appears to), has lots of money, or is a jerk to anyone "below" them.
Of course, as you touch on, in the "real world" (the one that adults live in and not teens on the internet), the people who have the most fulfilling lives are, on average, the ones that are kind, responsible, compassionate, etc.
Well, you can totally be kind, responsible, and compassionate and still be a loser in terms of status if you're boring, unconfident, lack spark, or are weird. Of course, part of the question here is how much does status matter ultimately for a fulfilling life (I think it can matter quite a lot, as being low status is not a good way of getting women, though it's not an insurmountable barrier).
And of course, you can be completely lacking in the first set of virtues while being great at the second set (e.g. be interesting, confident, socially savvy), which leads to that assholes get women stereotype, as the asshole is precisely that personality type.
Do assholes have fulfilling lives though? That's a question that goes back to Plato.
> I personally think the whole alpha/beta thing is very juvenile and befitting of adolescent boys and not grown men.
So it's low status?
1) What ascend said.
2) The "alpha/beta" dichotomy is when you apply the game of "telephone" to words taken from ethology.
Originally, the idea was that in some species, you can observe a hierarchy (separate for each sex) from the boss to the losers. The exact rules depend on which species you observe. I think "alpha" refers to the dominant individual, "beta" is the second in hierarchy (more dominant than average, but obey the alpha), and "omega" refers to those at the bottom. But this depends on the species; sometimes you have a pack with an individual on the top, sometimes you just have more dominant and less dominant individuals living in the same territory.
Using three words was too complicated for the internet discourse, so the terminology gradually degenerated to using "alpha" for those on the top, "beta" for those at the bottom (what "omega" originally meant), and insisting that there is nothing in between. While still pretending that this is science.
How this applies to humans? Apes in general, and humans especially, are way more *political* than most animal species. Physically strong individuals can be overcome by coalitions of somewhat weaker opponents. So I'd say, yes we do have those instincts, but we have other instincts, too. We do not choose our leaders purely based on their physical strength. However, leaders love to show their physical strength, especially dictators, so it's not like we are immune against this type of argument. Also, humans have, roughly speaking, *two* parallel hierarchies: dominance and prestige. (Robin Hanson writes about this a lot.) Singers or movie stars can be very popular, including sexually, without being perceived as strong or otherwise threatening. So my conclusion is that looking at dominance in humans can give us useful hints at processes that are often not discussed in mainstream, and provide possibly very useful information for men trying to understand how the sexual marketplace really works, but we cannot apply the rules of animal behavior to humans blindly.
An archetypal "alpha male" would be a guy who is physically strong, relaxed, obviously enjoys life, some other guys around him (less impressive than he, but still impressive) are clearly his friends. He is relaxed because he feels safe in his position; only rarely another guy dares to oppose him, but if that happened, he would not be afraid to respond appropriately (joke for a joke, punch for a punch). The assumption is that these traits usually go *together*, and together they make the alphaness. For example, it is much easier for a strong person to relax and be open, because the risk of being attacked by someone is negligible.
(In contrast, people at the bottom of the social hierarchy are attacked all the time for no reason, typically by people slightly above them, who use this to signal desperately that *they* are not at the bottom. People at the middle or above the middle are more relaxed, but they are still distracted by paying attention lest they accidentally offend someone at the top.)
What this model misses is the distinction between "popular because powerful" (when you have power or money, many people want to be your friends) and "socially powerful because popular" (when you have many fans, you can sic the mob on people you don't like). Also, power has many forms, each of them produces a different kind of "alpha": physical violence (the archetypal muscular fighter), institutional violence (imagine a successful lawyer confident that he could ruin anyone's life by merely filing the right paperwork), money.
The animal basis of the alpha/beta thing has always been funny to me. As you point out, in the real world basically no social animal species follows the alpha/beta hierarchy in the simplistic form that these internet "alphas" would like you to believe. Your example of apes is a great one because female apes have lots of power in the family structure.
Same with wolves - there is often a strong female and strong male, but they are only the leaders because they are the matriarch and patriarch; the pack is a family and the female and make leaders are the parents or relatives of the other pack members.
Also, I have started to see "sigma" male used as someone above Alpha. Sometimes, sigma is used to denote someone who is alpha without trying or thinking about it; they are above the "system" and don't care about doing non-alpha things because it can't/wont knock them down the pecking order.
I think it's a really unfortunate and distracting animal analogy that hints at something that's real, important, and much more complicated, in humans. Classifying things into "alpha" and "beta" (or god help us, "sigma") doesn't get you all that close to an understanding of human status and power heirarchies and how they factor into female attraction, but I guess it's ever so slightly better than being completely ignorant of the fact that they exist?
So, if an attractive guy behaves according to my theory, he is an alpha, and if he does not behave according to my theory, he is a sigma. Either way, my theory wins! Is that how cool kids do science these days?
It's how the alphas do it! :D
I think the distinction is largely bullshit, but it's what happens when you gaslight people, to the maximum possible extent, for years and years.
There are a fair number of men, who report having personally seen and/or experienced women preferring the rough category of "strong, aggressive, gets into and wins fights, treats everyone around him like crap (especially his girlfriends)" over the rough category of "kind, reasonable, tries to treat people well, but lacks the *excitement* of being dangerous and tough". And when they try to share those stories, and how it often seems that women are generally like this, the feminist or feminist-adjacent mainstream gives a reasonable response like "of course there are a few awful shallow women, they're disgusting people and we condemn them, but it's far from all, and what about all the awful shallow men who only want supermodels, do you properly condemn them and hold yourself to the same standards?"....
Ha ha, just kidding. They instead gaslight to an unimaginable extent, ranging from the bad ("that never ever happens, anyone who thinks it did must by definition be a terrible person") to the very, very bad ("maybe it happens and maybe it doesn't, but you are never, under any circumstances, allowed to talk about it"). And in response to such silencing, perhaps after a period of self-doubt and self-loathing, these men eventually overcome the brainwashing, realise they're being gaslit and they know what they experienced, their perceptions aren't an illusion...and then proceed to overcorrect and come to believe that this "alpha-attraction" is a universal feature of women, and an ugly truth that the establishment is determined to suppress.
So it's a falsehood (there's clearly no shortage of non-"alphas" who are highly popular with women, and of women who are utterly repulsed by "alphas", if you get a remotely representative population sample)...but let's not forget that the fault for the existence of this falsehood is entirely on the side that has *infinitely" more power (on every possible metric) than the other, that controls the media narratives and the academic studies and the government policies, and uses every ounce of that power to shut down any discussion of the truth of the matter. It's entirely natural, and even (with a lack of information) rational, for the people being prevented from seeking or discussing the truth, to conclude that the truth is the exact opposite of the official party line.
Much like when official lies about covid are revealed, or the establishment declares that there is literally not a single instance of anti-white racism on the face of the earth, anyone who looks around at the actual world is going to conclude that the official narratives can't be trusted, and has a good chance of concluding that in fact covid is a hoax, or there's a huge conspiracy against whites. And this is an entirely justified reaction (if you lack further information) to the situation of being lied to.
And, so sadly, it all could have been avoided if only one group held the tiniest concern for truth. Or lacked a frothing-at-the-mouth rage at the thought of acknowledging the slightest nuance or complexity in human society.
Alpha males are the guys who are successful with women, beta males are the guys who are not.
That feels like a stipulative definition. Round my way (UK, 56yo male) I haven't heard the alpha/beta thing much recently, but when I did used to hear it, it was almost always in a work context, and would refer to someone who tended to be assertive or dominating in a group. No sex was involved.
It would be used in a mildly facetious or ironic way; no one would be enough of a twit to say in real life "I am an alpha male", though frankly I probably do have traits of it; people who have used the term are using it in a colloquial and informal sense rather than finding relevant zoological or anthropological literature to check if the terms have any real currency.
The most recent usages I have heard are from my wife, who will occasionally say "you were a little bit alpha male there". This means that I was a wee bit dominating of conversation when conversation came round to my end of the market. It is (I think!) meant fondly if a little teasingly.
But *why* are they successful with women? Isn't the idea that they're successful with women *because* we recognize they're alphas? But wutz the thing we recognize? If I lived in a world where people had barfights, then I assume the person who won more of them and was feared by others would be an alpha. I guess in the world of white-collar professionals you could say the person who's higher in the hierarchy and can boss more people around is the alpha, though those guys are not necessarily people who are bold, decisive and brave. But, like say on here -- how would somebody actin order to qualify as an alpha? There are people who quickly get angry sarcastic and mean in arguments, and a lot of people just bail on discussions with them at that point. There are people who seem consistently well-informed about the things they comment on, but they don't necessarily have much razzle-dazzle. There are people who stand out because they are funny, or in some other way have the knack of conveying something about their personality while writing about their ideas on the topic. Are any of those people alphas?
The why is simple: they exhibit traits that correlate with ability to control/dominate/defend resources. How this plays out is highly context sensitive, but the purpose is the same. As a species that naturally forms social hierarchies, we are highly attuned to these traits sub-consciously.
But in our society there are a lot of ways to control/dominate/defend resources so, as you say, it's highly context-sensitive. There are a lot of ways to be brave & powerful: You can be a transgressive, brilliant stand-up comic, an excellent, impossible-to-intimidate interviewer, a daring rock climber, a chess champion, an orchestra conductor, a brilliant diagnostician, high-ranking at Kaggle, or rich as fuck. And while women had no chance of of being dominant, etc. when the way to do that was to be physically large, strong and aggressive, they are able to be dominant, etc. in the modern world in fields like the ones I named. The variety of ways there are to be impressive and powerful kind of blurs and weakens the concept of being alpha. There are so many ways to do it that it makes a lot less sense to talk about whether or not somebody's an alpha. For instance Scott is high-earning, also intellectually powerful and influential. but he describes himself as introverted, and it would not surprise me if he came across as shy and "beta" to someone who did not know who he was and tried to chat him up at a party. And he had a terrible time with dating, and wrote about it very frankly on SSC.
I am a woman, and the only vestige I can find in myself of attraction based on the physically big and powerful standard is that I am not able to be attracted to men who are shorter than me. The men I've been drawn to have mostly been pretty impressive in some area -- for instance once was a chess champion -- but in many others they were just regular people. And I'm not sure how important their impressiveness in their specialty area was, either. What felt most important was our rapport -- did we really get each other, did we make each other laugh.
While I agree the many ways to be successful at securing resources reduces the value of traditional "dominant" phenotypes, there is still a role for them despite their diminished value. At the end of the day, attraction is visceral, and women will (on average, all else equal) be attracted to the more dominant males within any social group. While women are fully capable of providing for themselves and their children, there is still a place for traditional dominance traits. Risk of violence from other males gives traditional dominance phenotypes value even in the modern day.
I can't put my hands on it right now, but I recall seeing a study that demonstrated a correlation with female preference to traditionally dominant males and economic insecurity. But it makes sense, the best mate selection strategy in terms of evolutionary fitness needs to be sensitive to the environment. In contexts where traditional dominance traits are less indicative of status and resource gathering ability, they should be down-weighed.
All that said, its probably more accurate to think of the alpha/beta dichotomy less in terms of traditional dominance behaviors and more in terms of more generic relative status. In contexts where status just is physical dominance, that's how it will manifest. But the concept is more abstract than that. The dichotomy has explanatory power, and so shouldn't just be thrown out because some find it unsavory or outgroup-coded.
>And I'm not sure how important their impressiveness in their specialty area was, either. What felt most important was our rapport -- did we really get each other, did we make each other laugh.
It helps to separate out what we intellectually find appealing and what we viscerally find appealing. It's easy to focus on the intellectual side when thinking what we found attractive in a significant other, while the visceral traits mostly go unnoticed. But the intellectual traits can only be the difference-maker if the visceral traits are present. You already mentioned height. I assume confidence is in there somewhere. Talent is another one indicated by being a chess champion. Winning at competition is also a dominance trait.
At the end of the day, we're basically just apes playing out our status games. The only difference is in their sophistication.
Alpha males are the guys who are successful with women, beta males are the guys who are not. Everything else you said is irrelevant.
> But *why* are they successful with women?
The why is relevant is because it involves being and doing a bunch of things that are more-or-less wrong by official mores -- brawn over brain, dominance over prestige, cruelty over kindness -- whence issues of hypocrisy and doublethink.
Also, Hammond, please see my reply to Jeff Soreff, a couple posts below, where I clarify why I'm sure there's more to the definition than that.
But *why* are they successful? It's not luck. It must have something to do with their looks or their behavior, right?
Ok, but isn't Alexander Turok's metric reasonably well defined even if we weren't able to predict it from other characteristics of individuals (such as the characteristics you cite)? ( Caveat: "guys who are successful with women" isn't a crisp scalar. Does relationship duration count? Number of relationships? Some measure of satisfaction? Fraction of time spent in a relationship? Mean time to form a new relationship? )
Yes, but it defies common sense to define it that way and say no more. . Both research and life experience and, of course, info about who does OK on the dating apps, tell us there are a number of variables that predict, though of course not perfectly, which males a woman is likely to be attracted to. Saying an alpha is someone who succeeds with women is like saying an Olympian is someone who competes in the Olympics. It's accurate, but it leaves out crucial information. Why are these people, and not others, Olympians? Because they're among the best in the world in their sport.
Also, others writing about alpha on here have said other things. For instance, Skull, in answer to this question, basically said that alphas are assertive -- gave an example of something like behavior when criticizing a coworker: Alphas say it to the person, betas send an email.
Finally, here is the definition of alpha fro a document identifying itself as the Glossary of Red pill Terms and Aphorisms which is a real joy to read: "Alpha – Socially dominant. Somebody who displays high value, or traits that are sexually attractive to women. Alpha can refer to a man who exhibits alpha behaviors (more alpha tendencies than beta), but usually used to describe individual behaviors themselves." (https://www.reddit.com/r/RedPillWomen/comments/9kl2j8/glossary_of_terms_and_acronyms/)
These fine people are talking about the traits that make someone an alpha. So wut are they?
Many Thanks!
>Yes, but it defies common sense to define it that way and say no more.
Ok. I'd put it somewhat less forcefully. It is both interesting and potentially valuable to be able to _predict_ this metric, as with any interesting and potentially important metric.
>Both research and life experience and, of course, info about who does OK on the dating apps, tell us there are a number of variables that predict, though of course not perfectly, which males a woman is likely to be attracted to.
Sure. I didn't mean to imply that no research had been done. I just meant to imply that the metric is a starting point.
>For instance, Skull, in answer to this question, basically said that alphas are assertive
Sure. I wouldn't be surprised if some combination of e.g. assertiveness and e.g. height is a reasonable predictor of dating success.
>Finally, here is the definition of alpha fro a document identifying itself as the Glossary of Red pill Terms and Aphorisms which is a real joy to read: "Alpha – Socially dominant. Somebody who displays high value, or traits that are sexually attractive to women. Alpha can refer to a man who exhibits alpha behaviors (more alpha tendencies than beta), but usually used to describe individual behaviors themselves."
From a standpoint of keeping independent and dependent variables straight, this is unfortunate. If "Socially dominant" is a set of observable behaviors which may or may not wind up giving the man in question dating success (which I'm taking as roughly synonymous with displaying "traits that are sexually attractive to women") then the definition as a whole intermixes independent and dependent variables.
One can sometimes get away with this, in areas where our predictive ability is _very_ good (e.g. electromagnetism in physics) but I doubt that this is such an area.
Stupid cod pop-psychology from an animal study done way back in the 70s on a wolf pack in captivity. Researchers claimed they were able to work out the pack hierarchy from alpha, beta, etc. and described roles, behaviours, functions, and Uncle Tom Cobley and all.
This trickled over into the kind of pseudo-behavioural science/evo-psych explanations beloved of the Why You're A Loser And Bitches And Hoes Shine You On types: never mind that humans are not wolf packs, describing oneself as an "alpha wolf" is appealing to a certain type of mindset.
Allegedly later it turns out that the pack being studied was made up of juvenile wolves unrelated to one another, so basically a bunch of poorly socialised orphans and *not* representative of how genuine wolf packs operate, but by then the "Chad is an alpha that's why he's banging all the chicks, you're just a poor beta, and fuck knows what that loser omega is doing with his life" nonsense had been established.
I think your best bet to see an alpha male is to go to the zoo and see if they have packs/troupes of the animals which engage in such behaviour in captivity.
Bringing up the origins of the term as an argument has always felt very unconvincing to me, yeah maybe wolves don't have "Alpha Males" like the manosphere imagines him, but Gorillas and to a lesser extent Chimpanzees do. Moreover, human societies and history itself are rife with Alpha Males, exactly as the manosphere imagines, even more, parody-like extremes of themselves.
So who cares about wolves, the original term didn't fit, but it very much found another uses, and those uses are exactly what the term was originally invented to describe.
I care. I care about the origin. I care about the alleged 'scientific underpinnings, this is how nature works, this is how men and women really are, forget all the social conditioning bullshit' that the fuck-faces used and use to claim their usage is correct and real and true.
If they want to call themselves alphas or alpacas or Noble Loyal Order of the Water Buffalo, I don't give a damn. I do give a damn when the facts are wrong.
>*not* representative of how genuine wolf packs operate,
Yep exactly. This segment from This American Life is all about wolves: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/815/how-i-learned-to-shave/act-two-4
The researcher, who followed families of wolves in Yellowstone for decades, mentions that a wolf pack is really just a family and the "alpha" wolves are usually the parents of all the other wolves. The oldest male and female share responsibilities and decision making is somewhat dispersed throughout the pack.
<mild snark>
>never mind that humans are not wolf packs, describing oneself as an "alpha wolf" is appealing to a certain type of mindset.
Hmm... In that case, are the "alpha"s recognizable because all of their consorts tend to be a bit ... bitchy? :-)
</mild snark>
An alpha is someone confident and successful, a beta is a weak-willed pussy. Much like pornography, you know it when you see it. If you can't figure out whether a given person is an alpha or a beta, then either the distinction doesn't apply to that person or you're thinking too hard about it. Jocko Willink is an alpha. Your coworker who sends out a memo instead of having a conversation with the one guy he has a problem with is a beta.
> An alpha is someone confident and successful, a beta is a weak-willed pussy
From the Alpha's POV. From the Beta's POV, the Alpha is a violent thug, and the Beta is a loyal provider.
But I don't know it when I see it, and I'm not trying to be difficult. For instance, take discussions on this forum -- how would one recognize an alpha? Mostly we do not know what people's jobs and financial situation are, so we can't use the "successful" criterion, except for people's success in discussions here, and there's no clear outcome measure of that. And then there's confidence. I'd say everybody who answered my question about what an alpha is sounded confident of their answer. They didn't pussyfoot around, but were blunt and honest about their views, and they expressed their views clearly. And I'm familiar with the views and writing style of several of them, and I'd say they are people who generally sound confident. I don't mean they are routinely contemptuous of others (though sometimes they are), but they do not hesitate to say what they think, even in situations where they know their views will be unpopular. I think I come across as confident in that way, too. I say what I really think, and don't pull punches. So are ALL of us alphas?
> For instance, take discussions on this forum -- how would one recognize an alpha?
Fortunately(?) this is a moot point: you don't need a heuristic to parse alphas from betas on the comments section of a rationalist blog, because people who patronise the comments section of a rationalist blog are definitely not alphas.
Maybe you're just joking. But if you're not, why do you think that?
Not him, but I wouldn't expect many rationalists to be alphas (surely some are) because they lack fire, they lack spark, they're not the kind of people who bring the party with them.
Obviously not, because then who would buy my new self-help book, "ALPHA MALE Secrets: The Method of the Magnificently and Majestically Mega Manly Man" for 200$ a pop?
In all seriousness, it seems to me that the guys who are invested in the Alpha / Beta distinction are mostly using their own words to describe simple social status, or at least a kind of social status in their own circles. So any definition which led to a large amount of people being alphas would therefore destroy the point.
I get the sense that your view is more that anybody can be confident and competent, and everybody should (unless you are truly evil in some way). I agree with this, but I wager that someone who's obsessed with status may just keep raising the bar on what "confidence" is in order to keep justifying their "alpha" moniker.
Social status isn't simple: there is more than one hierarchy. Bill Gates isn't an alpha.
No, I don't think anybody can be confident and competent. A lot of people are shy, self-doubting, or harshly self-critical, and there are some people who are not competent at one single thing that is important to their social group. My point was much more limited: That Skull's definition what. makes someone an alpha seems to cover an awful lot of people. Can it really be that most of the people posting on this thread, at least 2 of us females, are alphas? I am one of them, and I can guarantee you that women are not falling at my feet begging to get carried off to bed.
"Alpha Males" are a piece of internet/manosphere lore, asking where to find them is like asking how to find BigFoot or asking where all the transcripts for the meetings of the Elders of Zion are, there aren't any, not if you want credible talk.
The closest you can get to a real-world use is as a shorthand for "High-Status", but "High-Status" itself is context dependent. In some cultures women aren't allowed to divorce, so Jeff Bezos allowing his wife to divorce him is pretty Beta, but Jeff Bezos is the richest man on the planet as measured by many metrics, and he can (consensually, or half-consensually) do the dirty with a vast arsenal of every sort and color of women, which is pretty Alpha. Some followers of Andrew Tate would say that fucking consensually is pretty Beta, and they might admire conquerors of old (e.g. Genghis Khan) who raped and took as sex slaves countless women. I'm basing this on a short clip I saw of Andrew Tate once by accident where he admired Genghis Khan and called him a "Top G[ame]", so assuming this thought process is common among his followers is not too much of a stretch.
If there is one consistent cluster of traits in the usage of "Alpha", then (1) An Alpha is sexually successful, fucks lots of women, preferably virgins or without a lot of past experience, preferably despite some protests by some of the women, preferably some of the women are the ones who come to him not vice versa (2) An Alpha gets his way over other males (and of course over other females), preferably by force and intimidation (3) An Alpha is physically strong, but that's necessary and not sufficient.
Do Alphas exist outside of being idealized standards? Scott argues in Radicalizing The Romanceless that a particular subset of traditional Alpha characteristics, namely fucking lots of women even though the women have some/many protests related to how the Alpha treats them and even though the women have nicer alternatives and even though the Alpha treats every individual woman in his Harem as quite marginal, exist in the form of some characters with Dark Triad personality and the women who keep getting attracted to them, but that's just one possible interpretation of "Alpha", and it's not clear how common they are.
> Seems to me most people are likelier to be drawn to the people who seem to be enjoying life, and who seem smart and kind.
Sounds too hand-wavy and a just-so story to me, I *definitely* know that merely being smart and kind are not enough to make people attracted to you, maybe respect you or defer to you in some sort of "Elder of the Tribe" way, but not sexual attraction of the kind that the Alpha/Beta distinction is heavily obsessed with.
I don't really know if people (and/or women) being attracted to assholes is just an unlikely anomaly that we're shocked at because we expect it to be way less frequent than we realistically have the right to expect, or is it really a persistent pattern that deserves all the puzzling over it, but certainly nobody denies that it happens, and it happens more often than we would expect. Who knows if it's the actual assholeness that attracts the women, or are they just attracted to (e.g.) wealth or physical characteristics and swallow the assholeness along because it's not too important to them that somebody treats them like a human.
In all cases, the world "Alpha" is a dumb/historically-naive harkening back to an idealized past/state-of-nature where the best and most sexually successful man is a feminist strawman of a patriarch who oppresses 5 women before breakfast (and they like it, even if they say they don't) and fight 5 Betas to the death effortlessly. Not only is this state of affairs not necessarily good (first and foremost for the Alpha, who dies a violent and humiliating death in the actual real world in the species that do have this concept in their social structure), and not only do most men/boys romanticizing it in the modern day do not realize they would probably be among the Betas (if only by the sheer force of statistics), it's also decidedly not the world we live in on any large scale. A modern-day Beta can easily kill hundreds of Alphas with an AR-15, or send them to a hellish penal system with a well-paid lawyer, or force his will on them with a well-financed political campaign. Civilization is a feminizing force, even an Alpha pays taxes and stops when he hears a police siren.
As a matter of fact, you can see the development of human civilization as essentially a process where the Alpha is gradually centralized and mythologized and de-anthropomorphized, and then re-distributed among various faceless non-human entities. First the ultimate Alpha was the king (who is not an ordinary human, he is the son of Gods), then it was (the one true) God, then it was the nation state and the banking system and the judicial system and corporations. Military dictatorships might try to restore some of that central Alpha magic from the days of kingdoms, but they are really operating in a different world and a single intelligent second-in-command is often enough to demonstrate that Alphaness in the age of the machine gun is a quite complex concept.
While it does harken back to a fantasy of prehistoric times, in many ways the “alpha male” is a distinctly modern figure because it is only in modern times that an average man can approach a large number of women to behave like a jackass to them, and present the ability to do so as enviable to men in general.
I don't know, behaving like an ass to women (or to anyone really) has always been an appealing niche through the history of humanity. What's more ass-like than killing all the male relatives of a woman and taking her as a sex slave, which was the standard operating procedure of victory in war in many different places and times? as late as 1945 - Soviets in Germany - the rape of enemy female populations was a motivation for male soldiers. ISIS continued to follow this tradition in the mid and late 2010s with the rape of Syrian women and Kurdish Yazidis.
The kernel of truth in what you're saying is that the modern Alpha Male as a concept might be - at least in part - decidedly modern because it invokes grievances that were caused by the modern Feminist victory across a whole lot of the board, and not just in Western societies. Some of those grievances are very real, and sensed by men and boys who are by no means misogynist or anti-women, but the Feminist smug and flippant responses to them often exacerbates existing anger and paints a target over their back, which movements like Andrew-Tatism then uses (Toxoplasma of Rage) as fuel to prove how men/boys are suffering from injustice and that's why we need to return to the golden age of Genghis Khan of the strong man who is done with all society's bullshit.
In a certain, very real sense, Andrew Tate is very much a fascist. There is a population that he says (very correctly) is oppressed and treated unfairly in the modern world, he is from that population and he says he wants to see it better, he has an outgroup that couldn't be more different than the population in question and which he (wrongly) blames for all the ills and problems of the population, and he wants to return to the idealized past when the population was strong and the outgroup just knew its place. Classic textbook Fascism, and Fascism is very modern.
You're talking about states of war and terrible catastrophe (what happens to women when their brothers and fathers and husbands, etc., have been killed).
The Tate-like men we are talking about are men who live in a particular peacetime society and boast to other men in that society that they are the "real men" because they treat the women of that same society with disrespect.
I think this has always been fashionable too, maybe waxing and waning in response to various factors, but always a popular way to conduct oneself. Not that women are angels, some are guilty of exactly a symmetric kind of bigotry against men, and always have been.
Ultimately, Male and Female are the closest thing in humanity to distinct sub-species, and thus empathy across genders is in a certain sense the hardest stress-test for empathy, because you're empathizing with a radically different perspective.
(Anecdote: Yesterday I was browsing YouTube and saw a dumb screenshotted Twitter exchange where a woman was making fun of men because she saw a man in pain while having his eyebrows plucked. A man in the replies made fun of her by remarking that women can't take punches from men so they're not exactly in a position to judge. Dumb exchange all around, right? The comments were pretty evenly split into those who can see nothing wrong with the man's remark all things considered, and those - most probably all women or girls - who heaped insult after insult after "men" and how "insecure" they are because they joke about violence, all the standard feminist invective, all while forgetting who started the exchange and seeing nothing wrong with calling men weak and pathetic because of a natural pain reaction. It was the angriest I got at online feminism/misandry/men-bashing in a long time. And it convinced me further that empathy across gender is a hard and unsolved problem.)
Hell, even just 100-200 years ago, the people claiming to be "alpha males" would have been viewed as utterly barbaric and savage-like by most. All this red-pill stuff isn't even reactionary, it's just stupid.
Eh, I'm not sure your argument proves what you think it does. Why *can't* we go back to viewing such horrible people in that manner? Who is standing in the way of becoming a society that shames and condems the sort of people who crawl bars for sex with strangers, treat their "partners" as mere objects to be judged in the shallowest way possible, eshews any emotional connection with them whatsoever, and never spends five seconds thinking about anything other than their own base desires? Which group responds to any such suggestion with "I demand the right to do whatever the fuck I want!" and treats as the highest oppression the shaming, and not celebrating, of people for their sexual behaviour? The reactionaries, or the anti-reactionaries?
I have my own views, but I'm open to others'?
I'm not sure their argument was meant to prove what you seem to think it was meant to prove.
These days, I only really see alpha and beta labels used by guys like Andrew Tate (or his fans) but mostly it's just used as a joke. And in both cases alpha basically means like a comically over the top stereotype of masculinity (like a fighter, or someone who has a ton of sex). Beta just means the opposite (i.e. a pussy).
Unfortunately, there seems to still be a huge contingent of people that unironically subscribe to the alpha/beta thing. Of course it's mostly teenagers or young men on reddit/4chan who aren't happy with their dating success.
Any chance you could do another classifieds thread sometime soon?
Today in nominative determinism: what's the chances an investment project run by someone called "Rob Robb" is a scam? Well - high, it turns out: https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Guilty-plea-in-Las-Vegas-online-scam-2796608.php
Question for people with medical or physiological knowledge: There's an idea floating around that the sympathetic nervous system is in charge of the flight or flight response, and the parasympathetic one with the "rest and digest" response. In line with this formulation, people who are anxious and stressed out are sometimes taught things that are said to stimulate the vagus nerve, such as slow breathing.
So I'd like to know (1) whether it really is possible for a person to stimulate their vague nerve by simple means such as slow breathing. (2) whether doing that would in fact help them calm down and (3) if slow breathing does work, are there other simple things that would augment the effect of slow breathing?
Parasympathetic and sympathetic are two sides of the same coin and there is constant interplay between them. "Fight or Flight" is really a combination of down-regulating aspects of the parasympathetic system and up-regulating aspects of the sympathetic.
When it comes to breathing, the actual rate of your inhalation can effect your heart rate. When you inhale, your HR increases and when you exhale, HR decreases - this is called "Respiratory Sinus Arrythmia," and it's mediated primarily through the vagus nerve, which directly innervates the heart. So to answer your question, yes it is possible to "stimulate" the vagus nerve acutely through breathing, and lower HR. There's probably published data on this but if your goal was to lower HR you'd just take long exhales and shorter inhales (i.e, 8s exhale, 4s inhale).
More interestingly, one can also increase the amount of "vagal tone" one has - or the baseline electrical signals that travel through the vagus nerve. For example, it's thought that exposure to cold tubs raises vagal tone. Ostensibly higher vagal tone chronically would mean that breathing / breathing exercises has a greater impact on heart rate, and on the fight-or-flight response.
Regarding (2):
If you stimulated your parasympathetic nervous system it would:
-Lower your heart rate
-Constrict your airways
-Constrict your pupils
-Increase gastrointestinal activity
-Increase saliva production
-Make you more likely to need to pee.
The heartbeat lowering is the main thing that might help you calm down.
About the gastrointestinal activity and saliva production: Looked up vagus nerve and read that it's in charge of vomiting. Not exactly a feel-good state.
I slow breathing the most effective way to slow the heart?
Relaxation techniques can help, but it does seem that vagal nerve stimulation is one of the more reliable non-pharmacological method of lowing heart rates. Slow breathing would not stimulate the vagus nerve though. There are a few different ways to do it:
-Hold your breath and plunge your face into ice water.
-Lie on your back, pinch your nose closed, and try to breathe out while keeping your mouth closed for 30 seconds. You want to be creating pressure.
-Having someone massage your carotid sinus.
-Coughing really hard
-Doing a handstand for half a minute
Even then, vagal stimulation only works on tachycardia (100 BPM or more) 20-40% of the time. But the technique is quick and simple to do, so it's worth trying if your heart's going too fast.
Oh, I'm familiar with those. I've had heart palpitations all my life, which I've been told are nothing to worry about in my case, and a doctor told me long ago to do the exhale-hard-against -closed-mouth-and-nose technique, and it works extremely well. But what this guy is having isn't anything like palpitations, it's just the elevated heart rate pretty much anyone would have when awakened suddenly by a blaring alarm, then putting up with the alarm sound for a few minutes before getting the all clear. Do these techniques work for that?
Yeah, they should work for lowering heart rate generally. Not perfectly, but a decent amount of the time.
I’ve never heard the contention that slow breathing has anything to do with the vagus nerve. Conventional ways to stimulate the vagus nerve include massaging the carotid arteries and the Valsalva manoeuvre (forced expiration against a closed glottis - the thing you do on a plane to pop your ears where you hold your nose and close your mouth and exhale.) These are good for reverting supraventricular tachycardia but not, as far as I’m aware, for anxiety attacks.
I think the benefit of slow breathing is more from a meditative/mindfulness perspective where it forces you to focus on the here and now - the breath - and leave your abstract, anxiety inducing concerns.
I'm actually not asking about a way to fight off anxiety attacks -- more about the general idea of the vagus nerve being in charge of "rest and digest" states, and the related idea that stimulating it counteracts stuff associated with flight of flight -- fast heart, tense muscles, dry mouth . . .
I think as a concept it’s too simplistic. If vagal stimulation worked to counteract high stress, we would expect regular Valsalva manoeuvres to be the go to for high flying business executives.
Chronic anxiety and high stress, from a physiological perspective, are more associated with high cortisol (the “stress hormone.”) Adrenaline, the output of the sympathetic nervous system, may drive up heart rate and blood pressure acutely, but people in actual fight or flight scenarios usually report a high degree of focussed awareness - the psychic opposite of chronic high stress anxiety states.
Cortisol is really the culprit over the long term, causing chronic high blood pressure, elevated heart rate, high blood sugar, weight gain and a host of related physiological problems. I think it’s generally accepted that modern society is significantly different from our ancestral environment in that we don’t have acute life or death scenarios any more - instead we have chronic stressors like mortgage repayments. Our physiology is not really set up to deal with this.
Whether high cortisol is the cause or the consequence of stress/anxiety - as far as I know consequence, but not familiar with studies in this area, just imputing from clinical practice as there are no drugs that specifically target hypercortisolaemia. A few doctors do measure it, but it’s not the norm in clinical practice
So here's a question for you. I'm a psychologist, treating someone with a somewhat unusual problem. He lives in a high-rise where every few months the smoke alarm goes off in the middle of the night. It has never been set off by anything worse than somebody's smoky cooking, and he is not worried about his building burning down. His problem is that when he is awakened by that alarm, which is noisy and irritating and continues for a while, he's startled, has a fast heart rate, feels tense , etc. -- all very normal, right? The problem is that he finds the awakenings and the state they put him into quite unpleasant (but so would most people, I think), and he's now having trouble every thing falling asleep, or falling back asleep after waking up to pee, because he keeps wondering whether the alarm will go off while he's asleep. So I was thinking he might be less troubled by his reaction to the alarm if he had more ability to quell the state once the alarm stops and it's announced that there's no emergency. Any ideas?
Interesting! I hear two separate things going on. One is his particular flavor of unpleasant reaction when the alarm actually goes off every few months. Getting up and running cold water on his hands and wrists for a few minutes or holding an ice cube in each hand might help dial down his reaction when that actually happens. He lives in a place where he's going to get unpleasantly woken up every few months and that's his reality as long as he stays there.
But the main thing going on it sounds like is that he's now got chronic insomnia from the anticipatory anxiety around the possibility of the alarm going off on any given night. Is that right?
The first issue is a straight-forward tending to a normal nervous system response that's an entirely non-cognitive process.
The second one is now a panoply of cued anxious thinking that's keeping him awake on other nights.
I wouldn't feel confident that giving him a way to feel better after the alarm goes off is going to address the anxious thoughts that he's now having every night. Or am I misunderstanding the situation maybe?
For the anxious thoughts he needs a strategy to stop engaging with them at night. He can't control whether that worried thought arises -- "what if the alarm goes off tonight?" But he can control how much he focuses his attention on that thought.
He may have developed an unconscious belief that he needs to keep his "what if it's tonight?" worry front and center in his consciousness as he goes to sleep so he's not surprised when it happens. This kind of construction is very common in anxiety and OCD.
If that has happened, then his belief that it's useful for him to focus on that thought when it arises needs to be addressed directly. As well as his possible belief that he has no control over whether to go to work on a thought that arises.
Metacognitive therapy can be super helpful for this kind of thing because it teaches a person through behavioral experiments that they can just leave a thought there where it arises. Not argue back at it, not push it away, not keeping worrying on it, just let it be there without taking up center stage and bringing the whole nervous system along with it.
He needs (I think maybe) to get to a place where the thought "what if the alarm goes off tonight" arises while he's peeing or falling asleep or briefly waking up at night and he can go "yeah, that's a thought I'm having" without focusing on it. "Yeah, maybe tonight will be the night, who knows? Maybe it will, maybe it won't. Whatever."
>I wouldn't feel confident that giving him a way to feel better after the alarm goes off is going to address the anxious thoughts that he's now having every night. Or am I misunderstanding the situation maybe?
Maybe. After all, the problem isn't that the alarm may go off. The problem is that he "knows" (has a baseline expectation) that the alarm going off will ruin his night because he'll have an intense physical fear reaction and won't be able to get back to sleep. If his baseline expectation could be changed from "alarm goes off ruins my whole night" to "alarm going off is temporarily annoying but doesn't ruin my night," surely there is a chance that he would gradually lose his anticipatory anxiety around the possibility of the alarm going off, and therefore would not need to try to minimize it with metacognitive therapy.
Completely agree about the metacognitive therapy for his chronic anxiety about the alarm being maintained by a belief that that he needs to really think about the possibility of the alarm, because somehow that will keep him safer. (My mother was afraid of flying, and thought the whole time about crashes, but flew anyhow. When I suggested she read a good book on the plane she said, while laughing at herself, "no, I can't do that! My worry is what keeps the plane aloft.".
We're also going to do exposures to sudden loud noises (starting with popping balloons. And I'm also going to see if he can get any benefit from understanding that the revved up state the alarm puts him into is his body doing just the right thing, given that there might be an emergency. If in fact he did have to run fast or carry something heavy he'd be more able to when adrenalized this way. His cold hands are an indication that his body is keeping more blood in his core and less in his arms. If one of his limbs was wounded he's bleed less than he normally would (at least I think I have that bit right.)
Something like ear plugs or listening to music/book at bedtime type thing to help him fall asleep and block out exterior noise? Being startled out of your sleep by a loud and alarming noise is very anxiety-inducing and unpleasant and it does take a while to get back to sleep, so something as a distraction like "put in ear buds and listen to music" to help him drop off again might help. Works for me to get me to sleep, anyway.
I have used earplugs several times during periods when my landlord had extremely loud, building-shaking work done to the building for weeks at a time during my sleeping hours. Sleeping with earplugs didn't keep me from being able to hear the bangs and slams and machinery, but it seemed to put them in the background in such a way that my lower brain did *not* override the contextual priming it had been given ("any noises in the morning are probably just the guys working on the building, no need to react") and give the "ALL HANDS ON DECK, MAN THE ADRENALINE CANNONS" signal to the body, as it normally would.
I have spent enough nights on call to sympathise with someone being abruptly woken up by potential emergencies and the negative effect it has on your mental state the following day
Hmmm, interesting question! I guess if that happened to me I would feel understandably anxious, and wouldn’t really feel safe and fine to go back to sleep until it was announced that there was no danger. So up until that announcement I think it’s a normal, healthy worry - sure the last 10 times it was someone burning their stir fry, but that doesn’t guarantee this time the building isn’t burning down. (It’s also completely normal to have to pee when suddenly awakened from sleep)
Once it’s announced, though, the anxiety becomes pathological and I see your point that it’s triggered by an acute state of physiological arousal. Breathing exercises are one way to subdue this, but lots of meditative/yoga techniques could work too - say body awareness meditation where you focus on each part of the body individually and quietly observe the sensations that are passing through. Muscular stress can be relieved by rhythmically and slowly contracting and releasing each muscle group in the body.
If that’s not working and it’s really bothering him - I usually hate prescribing Valium or related drugs, but this is one situation where it’s not terrible - he only has to use it once every few months in pre-defined situations so there is minimal chance of developing addiction/dependence issues. Again, though, I would try conservative measures in the first instance
Edit - it sounds like part of the problem is that when this happens he *expects* it to ruin his night. So challenging that assumption - maybe creating a space where he can try strategies and see what works - approaching it with a more scientific, curious, mindset?
Just to be clear, the problem isn't that he's in an awful state of anxiety when the alarm sounds. It's unpleasant, but really does not sound to me like it's more unpleasant for him than for other people. He is not panicky, not full of worry that there's a serious fire. The problem he wants help with is *anticipatory* anxiety about the alarm. He has trouble falling asleep every night, because he's fretting about whether he will get awakened by the smoke alarm. If he gets up to pee, he has trouble going back to sleep because of the same worry. If the problem was dealing with the rare occasions when the alarm actually rings, then yeah, he could take a valium. It's only once every coupla months. But the problem he's having happens every single night -- it's *worrying* there may be an alarm. I imagine his uneasy state as being sort of like the one I'm in when I have to wake up pre-dawn for an early flight. I can't sleep well because I'm worrying about sleeping through my alarm, even though I never sleep through my alarm and have also set 2 for the occasion. And when I do sleep I keep dreaming that I've slept through the alarm and then waking up to check the time and make sure I haven't.
Earplugs.
No theory behind this, but maybe he could try eating something? Seems likely to get the attention of the vagus nerve :-)
Also eating is inconsistent with being in a fight or flight situation I guess
Has anyone floated the idea of a documentary on AI x-risk, aimed at a general audience? It seems like the general public is already worried about AI, and I believe the headline takeaways from the recent Gladstone report are of the public interest. I'm imagining a one-two punch of a straightforward explanation of the alignment problem and related stuff, followed by testimony from alarmed AI researchers. (Ideally people actually working at labs.) I dunno, is it naive to think that something like that could make a difference?
That would probably work because AI risk is still seen as science fiction, which means that fictional movies don't help, and most information is in books, which people don't read. Get some serious looking people in labcoats and people would view it differently.
Is there some sort of rule of thumb for separating mere unhappiness from actual depression? I was recently asked whether I used to be depressed, and I couldn't really answer, because I wasn't sure how dysfunctional you have to be to actually be depressed.
IMO, if you can still enjoy a beautiful sunny day, appreciate the cuteness of rubbing a kitten's tummy, and smile from the inside out when you see an old friend, then that's "just" sadness. Maybe your life is horrible and you don't have friends and never see kittens and it rains all the time; in that case it might be hard to tell on an average day.
On the other hand, if all of those things fail to spark any feeling of appreciation in you, if you get nothing out of literally stopping and smelling the roses, then that's depression.
Psychologist here. Here's the diagnostic and statistical manual's criteria: https://www.uptodate.com/contents/image?imageKey=PSYCH/89994
It is a bit different from the layman's conception of deep unhappiness, mainly in its inclusion of several somatic symptoms: weight gain or loss; insomnia or hypersomnia; psychomotor retardation or agitation; and fatigue or loss of energy. However, all but the 3rd of these 4 are very common. I'll bet something like a quarter of the population would endorse each. So setting aside the somatic symptoms, the criteria you are left with do not seem to me to differ from the misery of people who are bereaved, who have had a bad breakup, or are stuck in a miserable situation (say a teenager with alcoholic, verbally abusive parents). I think we have over-medicalized human unhappiness. Both the psychiatric profession and the drug companies have very substantial a stake in defining misery as an illness., and I think that accounts for a fair amount of the impulse to medicalize unhappiness.
And yet I have seen some people whose chronic misery was greatly alleviated by a drug, usually an antidepressant, though sometimes lithium or an upper like adderall. When the drug takes effect, usually after a few weeks, these people are saying. "Who turned on the lights?!? Is this the way you're supposed to feel? Is this how *other* people feel? I had no idea! My lead boots just disappeared!" However, that's quite rare. Most people who take antidepressants say they feel somewhat better -- something like 40% better. Typically they still feel unhappy and stuck, just less so. That, anyhow, is my impression, after hearing the reports of lots of people, easily more than 100, who tried these drugs. Whatever depression is, I'm sure it's not "a chemical imbalance."
My layman's take is that unhappiness is not liking where you are, while depression is an unwillingness to take actions to change it. Unhappiness is struggling to pay bills, depression is struggling to wash dishes.
As long as you aren't inherently a lazy person...? I'm sad, but I'm not clinically depressed; that's certainly not the reason I don't have a clean apartment
You've added "clinical" here. I'll let the clinics define that.
If you remove the clinical, what comparison are you left with? Depression versus scare quotes depression?
i like this distinction
I am a structural engineering senior looking at potential schools for a master's degree. My four serious options are (in alphabetical order):
1. Berkeley
2. Stanford
3. UCSD
4. University of Washington
Does anyone have an thoughts about the structural engineering programs at these schools OR strong opinions about these schools in general?
Obviously I'm also seeking out advice from people who know me well, but I think there's some value in pulling information from people who *don't* know me and aren't trying to put a personalized spin on their thoughts.
Is structural engineering a highly competitive, highly social who-you-know industry which requires a lot of networking in order to get fun and/or elite jobs with the highest pay bands, ala Big Law?
If not, go for whichever school is the least expensive.
Do you have a good reason to be 100% confident that advances in AI won't shrink demand for highly paid human structural engineers?
If not, go for whichever school is the least expensive.
Have you done any work in or around structural engineering yet (internships, etc), to become familiar with what the average workday is like, and thus be completely certain you will be able to tolerate / enjoy it for decades to come?
If not, then DEFINITELY go for whichever school is the least expensive.
Are you absolutely certain you really, truly *need* a master's?
If not, skip it entirely.
Is someone else paying for your schooling, and *only* your schooling?
Go to Stanford or Berkley for the name recognition, because why not? It's not your money.
My point is: You should not be cavalier about the cost of this master's degree, and you should be pathologically terrified of student loan debt. It's ruined millions of people's lives. For many (or possibly even most) people, it severely shrinks the purchasing power that is crucial for quality of life in one's 20s and 30s (the ability to buy a home, to afford a child, etc). Avoid every dollar of it you can.
Seriously. Do not take on student loan debt if it can possibly be avoided.
Credentials: I dropped out of college with zero student debt, worked a blue-collar adjacent jobs, and, in my mid-40s, I'm financially healthier than most college graduates I know, including my managers at work, and I'm better off than *every* master's degree holder (although to be fair their degrees are in the humanities). My FICO is over 800, I'm a homeowner in a still-very-desirable big city market, I have retirement accounts, and comparatively minor stress about money.
That is priceless. Utterly priceless.
I also asked the question about field-related career experience because changing fields is very much a thing. It was my dream to go into one of the most competitive industries in the world. I went to school for it. Nepotism got me a summer internship which turned into a job, where I promptly discovered I simply didn't have the temperament or intuitive soft skills to get by, much less thrive, in my dreamed-of career. The 18 months working in my dream industry remain the worst period of my life.
That possibility was NOT apparent in school, and had I been foolish enough to spend six figures on undergrad and a masters getting a degree in this field...well, I'm shying away from even finishing the sentence.
Formal education is a sacred cow. Make sure you give it a very, very thorough vetting (and that you really can use that milk) before you buy it.
Of all of those, only Stanford is a household name, and only Stanford will parse as elite to a layperson. If you are sure your career will be in structural engineering, then this doesn't matter - the people hiring you in the future will know precisely how good each of those institutions are at the kind of structural engineering that you do. If you think it might be in [something else], then the name-recognition-among-laypeople angle matters.
Berkeley is much more well known and regarded than you're suggesting. If hiring manager hasn't heard of Berkeley, then you're probably dodging a bullet.
Universities can be grouped into tiers. The top tier are household names and instantly recognizable as elite. The next is places average people have heard of, and are generally regarded as good universities, but not household names and not that way elite. Stanford belongs in the first tier. Berkeley (and San Diego, and U Washington) in the second. If you think Berkeley should be grouped with Stanford instead of with UCSD and UW then you are just wrong. Ditto if you think that they should all be grouped together. The hiring manager will have ‘heard of’ UCSD also, and will almost surely group ucsd in the same bucket as Berkeley, but not in the same bucket as Stanford.
> Stanford is a household name, and only Stanford will parse as elite to a layperson
I am a layperson and Berkley very much parses as elite to me.
> If you think Berkeley should be grouped with Stanford instead of with UCSD and UW then you are just wrong.
You are either wrong about laypeople or wrong about whether Berkley and Stanford should be grouped together. Which is it?
Yeah, US News and World Report's Global Universities index puts Stanford at #3, Berkeley at #4, UW-Seattle at #6, and UCSD at #20. Berkely is a really big deal, a major university with a worldwide reputation.
I do agree that UCSD isn't in the same top tier. Not sure what UW did to get placed so high. Maybe it got a lot of Microsoft or Amazon money.
OK, this is baffling to me. Although USNWR rankings frequently are. For my own field I think USNWR rankings accurately reflect the state of affairs 30 years in the past, and so my working hypothesis is that this is true across the board, and that USNWR updates on a ~3 decade time delay. Maybe 30 years ago Berkeley was a BFD but I was in elementary school then*.
I am not a layperson (Physics professor at R1), and maybe my layperson modelling software is off, but I would certainly have said that UCSD/UCB/UW are all in the same tier whereas Stanford is a step up (maybe just half a step. but definitely up). Would be interested to hear anecdotal impressions from others in the commentariat.
*ETA: Actually...even when I was in elementary school (on a different continent), I had heard of Stanford (and Harvard, and Princeton, and MIT). But had never heard of Berkeley (or UW or UCSD). Doubt anyone in my elementary school class had. Berkeley didn't appear on my radar until I came to North America (and it appeared at the same time as UW and UCSD).
If you know your specialization of choice, you're better off vetting labs/professors rather than universities. Your thesis will decide what you become an 'expert' in, and your advisor will be the main person who affects your masters thesis.
Find a professor you'd want to work with. (Match, Personality, Access, Status.... in that order) and apply there. It will give you greater chances of getting in, and enjoying your masters.
The California masters all offer similar weather and vibes. Seattle is a different vibe all together. I would keep that difference in mind.
I went to UCSD, I am not an engineer and have no thoughts on their engineering program, but it is a gorgeous and relatively affordable place to live, especially if you have a car.
People say the social life is meh, and I think that's true if you like to go to parties, but not as true if you just find your own group of people and hang out with them.
It's sunny almost all year round, campus is full of interesting art, and (idk if this applies to grad school) it has a less academically stressful environment than Berkeley, since Berkeley tends to siphon off the most competitive fish. There's great transit from the places students live to campus, and despite not feeling "dense" you can walk wherever you need to go.
Let me know if you'd like to know anything else about UCSD in general!
Given that the subjects of ethics and intelligence come up a lot here: Does an agent’s ethical capacity depend in large part on its intellectual capacity?
It is worth noting that there is a big difference between ethical "capacity" and an actual willingness to be "ethical". Obviously it takes a certain amount of intelligence to understand and follow rules, and it takes a higher amount of intelligence to realize that the rules are idiotic. Of course, empathy doesn't require any complex rules, and thus doesn't require that much intelligence. Even dogs and rats have it. Most people's "ethics" does seem to boil down to basic empathy, so it can be argued that basic ethics barely requires any intelligence.
I agree that basic ethics barely requires any intelligence. But many modern moral philosophers seem to be arguing that empathy and the basic ethics that arise from it are problematic. The psychologist Paul Bloom argues convincingly that empathy is an obstacle to ethics, as is highlighted by the Identifiable Victim Effect. The concept highlights how stories of individual suffering can evoke stronger emotional responses and thus greater willingness to help compared to abstract statistics or large-scale tragedies. In such cases, it takes the replacement of empathy with level-headed analysis and calculation in order to distribute help most effectively.
I find this approach to ethics troubling but hard to refute. It seems to suggest that those who don’t excel at data driven analysis are less able to act ethically than those who do. And it deprives less intelligent people of moral authority.
Pretty much every system of ethics has some kind of rules or guidelines which need to be applied to situations.
Suppose you have two autonomous killer robots. Robot A has a simple motion detection system which activates a machine gun. Robot B has a complex camera system with some rudimentary AI image classification system.
I would argue that robot B has higher ethical capabilities than robot A. For every system of ethics in the widest sense, robot B is the better choice. (Unless your system of ethics is "kill anything which moves", in which case both robots might be tied.)
Deploying robot A anywhere near civilians will likely result in war crimes. Deploying robot B with a programming which tells it to respect the Geneva conventions is less likely to result in war crimes. On the flip side, robot B is certainly capable of much more elaborate war crimes than A is: it could target civilians by ethnicity, or selectively shoot people in the legs to lure rescuers into its field of fire and so on.
(FWIW, I have not thought enough on intelligent autonomous weapon systems to have a opinion on them one way or the other.)
A rock is capable of very little good or evil.
I am (discussions about free will aside) moderately capable of doing good or evil.
A superhuman AI would certainly be capable of doing more good than I do (e.g. curing all kinds of diseases) but also capable of much more evil than I could ever do (paperclips).
Note that being capable to act in an ethical way is orthogonal to being a subject who deserves ethical consideration.
Define "ethics", define "intelligence", define "capacity". Cats bring mice and birds inside to share with their owners, what level of ethical capacity is that?
Intelligence increases ethical nuance. I think it was The Power Of Habit that had the example of a college student asked to babysit. Obviously the ethical thing is to help watch the kid, but she went through the implications of missing school and determined it would be better for everyone in the long term if she kept going to college instead. So what's the ethical capacity here? Intelligence offers the idea that it's more ethical to not help with the baby, is that a higher ethical capacity or no?
Intense "guy who just heard of Christianity asking if Jesus is a big deal on forum with every religious denomination" energy.
Short answer: No, but it looks like it does, for humans.
"Capacity" is what's doing the most work here. Given a set of ethics, increasing intellectual capacity increases all capacity, because you are just a more capable agent. So if you ethically want to live "a good life" or be a good parent or spouse, you end up either thinking of ways to be better at those tasks, or acquire resources (it is much easier to be ethical if you are not dying or poor).
However, once you have enough intellectual capacity such that "what other people think is ethical" because a constraint that you can work around rather than a brute fact of the environment, you can start dramatically limiting the capability of other people's ability to be ethical. See: crime lord, dictator. Even if this doesn't dramatically satisfy your own ability to be ethical.
And at the limit of optimization, unless you fundamentally have something like "care about other people's wellbeing" constraining your actions, all you see is "create an ideal utopia, where I can do whatever I want" and not the 6th sub level footnote that says "oh yeah, by the way, energy needed to create utopia generates enough waste heat that the surface temperature is now 400 degrees."
You'll want to say a bit more about what "intelligence" and "ethics" are. One natural distinction (which is roughly David Hume's distinction between "reason" and "the passions") is that "ethics" relates to having the right sort of goals, while "intelligence" relates to being effective at achieving your goals. (This would include both figuring out what things are likely to help, and developing skills at doing those things.)
Much of what we talk about when we talk about people's goals are actually their subsidiary goals, which are not sought intrinsically, but because they are expected to help towards the real goals. (Very explicit when people are interested in making money or winning an election.) So that's going to involve both ethics and intelligence.
>"ethics" relates to having the right sort of goals, while "intelligence" relates to being effective at achieving your goals.
That sounds good. Given this distinction, is intelligence vital to determining what the right (ethical) sort of goals are? If not intelligence, what?
Unless I am doing math wrong, it turns out I'm in the top....98%! (98.21 to be specific).
I have never done any forecasting before. Beginner's luck I guess!
Pleasantly surprised that I did fairly well on the forecasting (about 88th percentile, same neighborhood as Scott). Not too bad!
Reposting from the previous open thread:
Is anyone here an LLM connoisseur? Personally, I'm a normie in this respect (I've mostly just used ChatGPT), but I've heard about the proliferation of LLMs over the past few years and have been wondering about which of these are particularly excellent or crappy.
Are you interested in running the LLM locally? I don't use any of the hosted services.
Bing chat derives from Sydney, and with a tiny bit of work you can still access that distinctive personality.
No opinions on how it stacks up in functionality, but it's certainly more fun to talk to. ;-)
I believe this is no longer possible. At least, Twitter is full of people mourning that they can no longer talk to Sydney. I've seen examples of Copilot producing deranged outputs, but that's hardly the same thing.
I got a bit of Sydney earlier this month, but I haven't tried lately. It was something like this prompt:
https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1b0pev9/was_messing_around_with_this_prompt_and/
So far I've found Claude a bit better at "getting challenging problems right" than ChatGPT or Gemini, but for the most part all three will give similar answers to questions and even use overlapping vocabulary. I also don't do a lot of multimodal interaction, where the other LLMs might be better.
I want to pose more analytical problems to Gemini when I have the time to invent some that won't be in training data- in my limited experience it has shown some flashes of thinking outside the box, which might make it a better coworker than its "intelligence" would suggest. I also want to try testing it on longer Word documents- heard this is a strength of the model and of having the Google resources.
I've tested out a bunch of models for the purposes of generating certain kinds of creative prose, so I can contribute. In order of things that stand out the most to me:
- GPT4 is generally the best, but it has some annoying writing habits (most notably, insisting on awkwardly putting some sort of closure on every response, even when extensively told not to, e.g. "as <action occurred>, <character> knew that everything was going to be different")
- I had some hopes based on how it was hyped up, but Grok *really* sucks. It's way worse than even the first gen gpt3.5, and IME worse than many of the models you can run at home. It gets in repetition loops almost immediately, and kinda sucks at the one feature that's supposed to be its differentiating factor (searching for and parsing tweets)
- NovelAI is unsurprisingly quite good at creative writing, and afaict, it's the only totally uncensored model of its caliber.
- Most other LLMs seem to be more or less interchangeable, which makes sense since they're almost all Llamas trained on cgpt output. They're usually at or slightly below gpt3.5 in talent
Fang, can you post a link to some good creative prose you've wrung out of one of these guys?
I find ChatGPT useful for random queries which occur to me. Things like: (1) what is the intended reference in the screenshot? (2) where does this quotation come from? (3) what is the etymology of this word? (4) what contributes to this compotent of UK inflation data? It's also useful when I've forgotten the name of a case.
I find Claude is better for conversations.
>I find ChatGPT useful for random queries which occur to me.
A caution: I've seen ChatGPT (GPT4) frequently give wrong answers to simple queries. E.g.
https://chat.openai.com/share/c2a0d28b-7ffd-4724-b857-8d93586176a6 gives an answer which is confident, authoritative-sounding, clear, and dead wrong. To mangle a quote from Reagan - don't trust, and do verify.
Have you checked to see if its answers are actually correct? From what I've heard, these things are much better at sounding right than at being right.
Appearance has become more important than substance, sadly. Often the advocates of an ideology who are the loudest and most strident are the ones with the poorest ideas -- so they resort to antics to distract us from the weakness of their argument.
What is precisely worrisome is the idea that AI will simply be used to fabricate more convincing propaganda, more sophisticated gaslighting. Propaganda spouted by the current crop of pop ideologies is laughably crude.
Yet AI can't approach deductive reasoning without fabricating data (perfect in propaganda), and it can't 'think' abstractly. Beyond that, it will likely never achieve the nuances and complexity of human intelligence.
Is ChatGPT better at etymology than a google search for "[word] etymology"? In my experience, the latter produces quick results (usually via wiktionary) whenever the internet has a reference for the word's etymology. When it doesn't, I'd be rather wary of trusting ChatGPT. It is easy enough to produce a "folk etymology" that I do it myself by accident every once in a while.
I've been using etymonline.com for at least 10 years. I even have the app on my Android phone. FWIW I like it better that a google search. After god-knows-how-many (thousands?) lookups, I have only ever found 3 typos (like French gueule vs guele or amber vs ambre).
Ah, for English words it's quite good (and Google usually directs me to it). I don't know of such
places for other languages, though, sadly because knowing the etymology of a word can be helpful in learning it.
To be clear, I don't mean to suggest this is a particularly important use case. I just looked at the last 4 things I'd asked it by way of example. The advantage is that I often have follow up questions, like, is it related to some other word in a different language? It does get things wrong sometimes. I wouldn't ever rely on it without independently confirming.
For example, I asked Claude whether the Latin and proto-Germanic words for the numbers 1-10 formed cognate pairs and it claimed that (while the other numbers were cognate) "Latin "octo" and Proto-Germanic "*ahtōu" are not direct cognates. "Octo" derives from the PIE root *oḱtṓw, while "*ahtōu" derives from the PIE root *oḱtṓw with a different suffix." I replied to say that didn't make sense, and it then did agree that all ten pairs of numbers were cognates.
In fact, a mildly surprising case which happened today was that I asked ChatGPT what the statutory provision was for a certain proposition and it gave an answer that was obvious nonsense. I replied to say, "No, that's incorrect I'm afraid", and it did then supply the right answer.
Yeah, I'm more worried about the non-obvious nonsense. Folk etymology is usually not self-contradictory.
(What is a *direct* cognate?)
"It's also useful when I've forgotten the name of a case" - careful with that!
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.575368/gov.uscourts.nysd.575368.54.0_5.pdf
GPT 4 ~ Claude 3 Opus are the two best, the others are weaker
Also curious about this. I'm finding limited but significant use cases for LLMs and ChatGPT is...fine. Honestly, it feels like it's consistently getting worse but I'm not sure where to pivot to.
The only LLM I can honestly, 100% recommend is the Powerpoint Designer in Powerpoint. This is amazing, it consistently generates mediocre powerpoint slides from whatever I write which are dramatically better than whatever crappy slides I can put together. Like, solid C+ slides using this automatic tool rather than my F tier slides that take a lot of work. And I'm never going to get good enough to beat those slides because if I'm ever spending enough time in Powerpoint to get better than the automatic designer, I'll retire on the spot. That just feels like a warning sign. Like, some people can handle a meth habit but you need to set boundaries and if you ever find yourself in a dirty alley exploring alternative sex work, you know it's time to check into rehab. Same thing with Powerpoint; I might need to do it from time to time but if I'm ever getting better than the automatic designer, it's time to leave corporate America.
What would your criteria be for a good LLM vs a crappy LLM? I'd be happy if the LLM I was using didn't offer up bullshit answers (err, hallucinations) to the questions I put to it. But all of them seem to produce a certain quotient of bullshit. They're useful, but I often have to check their answers when it comes to subjects I'm uncertain about.
Ryan Broderick, who writes the under-appreciated blog Garbage Day, wrote recently about the damaging consequences to the internet he expects from people using GPT to get answers to factual questions. If GPT gives some sort of weighted summary of the many online sources of the answer, but does not cite the sources or how it weighted each, then those running the source sites will have little reason to do so. They're running the sites either to make money or to get increase their visibility or reputation. If they have far less traffic because people are letting GPT summarize, why should they stay active? And then wutz GPT going to summarize? It's own previous summaries and those of other AI's? Ugh. Reminds me of what I read about bedbugs: They eat their own feces, and gain some nutritional benefit from up to 3 recyclings. (So these AI summarizers of each other are going to be sort of like the human centipede. )
Does this seem like a valid concern to others?
Yes, it seems like a valid concern to me. One potential way to deal with this might be to legally (aargh!) require AI output to be labelled as such (which is also one possible answer of sorts to deepfakes). Yes, there will be violators. Yes, there will be people gaming the system, copying and pasting AI output and declaring that they, a human, originated it. Yes, there will be edge cases, stuff partially AI generated. But it might discourage blindly trusting vast amounts of verbiage generated by hallucinating LLMs - and, as you said, feeding it back into the training data for the _next_ generation of LLMs.
IIRC, rabbits do the same thing.
I know nothing of bedbug digestion, but with rabbits it’s less ‘recycling’ and more a necessary part of their digestion. Rather than have additional stomaches for digestion of grass by bacteria and regurgitation for further chewing (as with cows), rabbits pass distinctly different faeces the first time (caecotrophs, which I think might not even be classified as faeces?), which are soft and which the rabbit eats immediately, usually before it even has a chance to touch the ground. The rabbit then further digests the caecotroph, from which it can extract the nutrients it needs. Grass is really hard to digest.
So rabbit digestion is more like Wikipedia, with people taking the contents of books and articles to extract useful content.
I've gotten some bad answers that don't seem to me to be bullshit or hallucinations, but just the natural result of GPT4's tendency to conflate frequency with which an idea has come up online with how valid it is. You maybe missed my story here about asking GPT for a formula for cleaning stained linoleum using simple non-toxic basic household ingredients. If you google the question you get 3 answers, all appearing dozens or hundreds of times in almost identical form: Water plus vinegar plus dish soap, water plus vinegar, and water plus vinegar plus baking soda. The third one is nonsense. The vinegar and baking soda react with each other instantly and neutralize each other. So I asked GPT4 and it gave the most popular answer in my google search results, vinegar plus water plus dish soap. So then I asked if it would be a good idea to also add some baking soda and GPT said very enthusiastically that yes, that would add extra cleaning power plus baking soda would help remove any odors. And yet I'm sure that if I asked GPT what would happen if I mixed baking soda and vinegar it could give me the chemical formulas for what you start with and what you end with, and whether what you end with is useful for cleaning (answer is no: you get water, C02, and a some sodium acetate dissolved in the water.). But in answering my question Chat did not consult its chemical knowlege, but apparently just gave me the most popular google result.
And Jeff Soreff (I may be misspelling his name) who posts here is a retired chemist and asks Chat straightforward chemical questions, some of which can easily be answered via an online search, and Chat's often wrong.
Well, you know me and my obsession with SARS2 research. I've used GPT3.5 as a reference tool. If I ask it for references to studies to back up what it says, I have to watch out for bogus titles of papers and researchers. My observation is that about 25% of the references are faulty in some way. I *always* go to
When I asked if GPT4.0 was any better, the same Jeffrey Soreff you mentioned, wrote back: "I can assure you that GPT4 is still hallucinating. It came up with 2CeCl4(aq)+H2(g)→2CeCl3(aq)+2HCl(aq)+Cl2(g) in https://chat.openai.com/share/7faacb6b-a487-494f-b0b7-4a071798fb1c and this is just chemistry, no toxic wokeism needed! It can't be relied on to count the atoms in its own equation…"
And here's a little exchange I had with GPT3.5 where I thought GTP was bullshitting...
User
when was the first recorded -19 death in the US?
ChatGPT
The first recorded death in the United States attributed to COVID-19, the disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, occurred in February 2020. The exact date was February 6, 2020, in Santa Clara County, California. This marked the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic's impact on the United States.
User
What is your source for that informantion?
ChatGPT
My source for the information about the first recorded COVID-19 death in the United States is based on widely reported news articles and official statements from health authorities such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO). The first death was extensively covered by major news outlets and has been widely accepted as occurring on February 6, 2020, in Santa Clara County, California.
User
Can you provide a link?
ChatGPT
As an AI language model, I don't have direct access to external sources such as specific URLs or websites. However, you can easily verify this information by searching for "first COVID-19 death in the US" in reputable news sources or by visiting the websites of organizations like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) or the World Health Organization (WHO), which provide updates and reports on the COVID-19 pandemic.
User
Sorry, I only found Feb 28 in the Seattle area
ChatGPT
You are correct, and I apologize for the confusion. The first recorded death attributed to COVID-19 in the United States occurred on February 29, 2020, in King County, Washington, specifically in the Seattle area. This case was widely reported and marked a significant milestone in the COVID-19 pandemic's impact on the United States. Thank you for pointing out the error, and I appreciate the opportunity to correct it.
The fucker's not going to correct it. It can't learn anything in encounters with us. That's not how it learns.
It says it doesn't have direct access to URL's, but people here talk about asking for its sources and checking them. So is it or isn't it possible to get source info from it?
Can you or someone on this thread ask ChatGPT 3.5 the following question (below)? See what answer it gives you — and report back. I'm curious if it responds with the updated info I gave it. I want someone else to ask, beecause I assume it remembers my previous conversations with it, and it may try to "please" me.
--> When was the first recorded COVID-19 death in the US?
Huh, it *is* corrected. It said "The first recorded COVID-19 death in the United States occurred on February 29, 2020, in the state of Washington. This marked the beginning of a tragic chapter in the country's battle against the pandemic."
Then I asked GPT4 and it said: "The first recorded COVID-19 death in the United States was reported on February 29, 2020. This death occurred in Kirkland, Washington, and was associated with the Life Care Center, a nursing and rehab facility, marking the beginning of what would become a significant outbreak in that region and a sign of the wider spread of the virus in the United States."
Is GPT4's answer consistent with what it said before after you'd corrected it? Is Kirkland, WA in fact in King County, and near Seattle?
About it remembering its conversation with you: It gives no sign of remembering conversations with me, and I have it make me an image or 2 most days, and that often involves a prolonged exchange. And once I asked it if it remembered our prior exchanges and it said no, once they were over it had no way of retaining any info from them.
I shudder to think of how it would suggest to grow crystals, after the work 4chan has done on that particular question :)
I work in a Tech job where I regularly get woken up in the middle of the night. My attempt to quantify how shared this experience really is has resulted in my putting together this survey. My hope is to use this data to write up my findings in a blog post. Would appreciate all the participation I can get, no matter what your own current work situation may be: https://forms.gle/xCPcwnwsQE2K5bcX9
I also work in tech. I used to be on an on-call rotation that would routinely wake me (and other people) up in the middle of the night. On-call was seven days of being always available to fix whatever problem, and then you got off until your number came up again.
It was awful. Everyone hated it. On-call was dreaded. At the time, there was a kind of "well, it sucks but at least we get paid a lot" thing going on, but you had to bribe people to take your on-call rotations if one came up when you were on vacation.
Then the company got a big enough team in India and they got skilled enough to handle being on-call, so over a year or two we switched from 24/7 to 12 on, 12 off, with the US team handling US daylight hours and the India team handling India daylight hours (more or less). It made things so much better. People still complain, but it's nothing like it used to be.
Though I have noticed that people seem to take being on-call much less seriously now. Back in the day, being on-call was your job, and if you didn't have an active incident then you were clearing the queue of less-important incidents. Now that seems to have slipped, especially with newer team members. I wonder if there's not some sort of thing where suffering makes you feel like you need to take more responsibility or something.
Do you not have specific times when you are "on-call" and when you're not?
Are you on some sort of support call rotation roster, or do your bosses feel they have the authority to wake you from your sleep to answer their questions? If it's the first, then that's part and parcel of your job. If it's the latter then you've set poor boundaries with your employer. However, I've noticed that East Coast workers frequently assume that West Coast workers are online when they rise. I used to get a lot of text message alerts at 5 am from East Coasters until I made a point of silencing my phone when I went to bed.
I did a stint where I was coordinating phone meetings with an engineering team in Chennai. It was 11 1/2 hours off Central time but I don't recall if it was during DST or not. The passage of the seasons was a secondary consideration for me at the time. I was pretty flippin' busy.
Yeah, I once project-managed a network deployment in Asia, Australia, and Europe. I had conference calls when I got up and conference calls before I went to bed (and I was expected to take meeting notes and distribute them to the teams). That was before smartphones and smart apps could keep us ubiquitously connected (bothered) to work. I don't know how I'd handle it now.
I've been seeing a lot of generative AI pieces come across my Facebook art and architecture groups. Some of the people who post this crap aren't very good at distinguishing generative AI from reality, but others don't seem to see a problem with contaminating discussion groups on art history and architecture with generative AI creations (because "they're pretty!"). Luckily generative AI still isn't very good at imitating abstract expressionists' styles, and it's still laughably bad when it comes to figurative art. Its architectural creations usually have some weird frills in them that signal they're not real. Still, it's all very annoying for someone like me who always tries to sift fact from falsehood. Generative AI seems to be contaminating our history.
Art, creativity, and AI: A thoughtful negative piece on AI by an artist. Worth watching to end to see what he creates as he goes along with his
https://youtu.be/tjSxFAGP9Ss
But I didn't realize that people were using AI to generate crappy kids videos for Youtube and to flog phony "workbooks" of authors' works on Amazon. This by Eric Hoel...
https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/here-lies-the-internet-murdered-by
Here ya go, Beowulf. I asked GPT4 to produce a cute rhymed My Little Pony-themed poem for kids that teaches kids it's important to study hard so you can have a STEM career. If I really really sucked as a person I'd be looking for ways to monetize these. Web site? Little bookies on Amazon? TED talk?
In Ponyville, where dreams take flight,
Twilight Sparkle shone so bright.
With magic spells and books galore,
She studied hard, then played some more.
Rainbow Dash, through skies she raced,
With speed and courage, nothing faced.
Yet, even she would take a pause,
To learn about the weather's laws.
Applejack, with strength and heart,
Knew farming's science played a part.
With honesty, she'd always say,
"Work and study pave the way."
Rarity, with her keen eye,
Designed with math, her art so high.
Beauty and brains can coexist,
In Equestria, none resist.
Pinkie Pie, with joy and laughter,
Taught that fun comes now and after.
But even she, with all her cheers,
Knew learning’s value through the years.
Fluttershy, so kind and sweet,
Cared for animals, a feat.
Biology, she loved to study,
With her friends, she’d always buddy.
So, little ponies, take this tune,
Under sun, stars, and moon.
Play, laugh, and have all your fun,
But remember, when the day is done:
Dreams are reached not just with magic,
But with learning, not to panic.
Science, tech, engineering, math,
Illuminate your chosen path.
In Equestria, as you roam,
Let your mind be your home.
Fun and study, hand in hand,
Will lead you to a magic land.
It's not just AI-produced crappy kids videos, there's also crappy kids' musical jingles, crappy kids' story books, posters, math workbooks etc. , and no doubt crappy fake kids in kidspace social media. Seems like a diet of this shit is going to lower intelligence, inventiveness and capacity for self-actualization the new generation enormously. Fuck embryo tweaking, there's more bang for the buck in nuking the AI crap for kids.
Similar, I've long enjoyed getting a Quora newsletter to learn weird new facts about the world (or just which celebrities people think are mean/nice, don't judge). Last couple months though I get the sense that more and more posts are partially or wholly AI generated. I think it's the writing style, I've read a lot of ChatGPT and now I'm seeing it out in the wild more.
Maybe they're all written by humans and I'm just following the trope of assigning things I don't like to AI, but I can't help but remember how one of the OpenAI board members also founded Quora... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_D%27Angelo
Quora seems to often have an explicitly AI-generated answer to some questions, when you click on the question. And there's a moderate number that I've seen that really do seem to be AI-generated but posted under a generic-looking organization name.
I've tried AI art and while it can give some cool pictures, I can get never get it to do what I actually want, regardless of how specific I make the prompt. And in fact, the more specific I get, the more it breaks the AI.
Dalle 2 was lousy at filling detailed requests, but often produced striking results if given vague ones. Here's a bunch of its responses to the prompt "why do fools fall in love?"
https://i.imgur.com/bDOzp5a.png
https://i.imgur.com/4qmO3A7.png
https://i.imgur.com/joXzFaj.png
https://i.imgur.com/SA7rPWB.png
https://imgur.com/aCRGkhI
https://imgur.com/rkXJ1VU
Dalle 3 does not have the same verve. And while the images look better, they also look way more corporate and commercial. All the people are attractive and hot in a conventional way, and fashionably dressed.
I do find it funny how AI art is encouraging artists to make their art *less* polished in order to differentiate it from AI. These models can't replicate crusty MS Paint art no matter how hard you try.
I do think some of the Dalle2 ones I linked have some life and humor to them, even if the ai's efforts to give a brushstroke effect are lame. Do you find any of these images surprising and lively? I generally loathe AI attempts to do "art" of any kind, but these crude early ones actually kind of charm me.
I personally think the output of these earlier models are uniquely unnerving. There are just things... wrong about them in ways that humans would never make wrong on purpose. The images lack any sign of intent behind them. Though, I do wonder if you would get similar results if you were to convert visualizations of the human brain into a readable format.
So if the earlier models had been used to make a full length film, it could have been:
How uncanny was my valley :-)
I have a new post on Substack, "Legal Remedies for Climate Change Damage 1" [https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/legal-remedies-for-climate-change]
And many "oldies but goodies" are posted there, too. :)
omg I got mentioned!
I'm the guy behind the acx reader (https://acxreader.github.io/). I'm currently trying to implement a dark mode and support for comments. If you have any suggestions, please leave them here or on the reddit post or as a github issue. Thanks!
Great work!
Once you can do comments Scott should just redirect all pages to your reader so that we can finally have open threads without multiple independent posts complaining about the various platforms on which substack is unusable.
> Scott should just redirect all pages to your reader
Unfortunately, that won't happen because that means losing out on the Substack money/traffic.
If echometer can figure out how to render comments and allow people to respond to them, I'll gladly move off Substrack permanently.
From the depths of my heart, thank you.
Consider:
(1) Adding an extra reminder for readers to visit the original URL at least once, because maybe Substack is using the number of visits to calculate some sort of popularity metric that affects how often ACX is recommended/how much it's important and your site can perhaps decrease that.
(2) Adding a static snapshot of comments, updated every x hours.
Ah, you already thought of comments, never mind me, maybe I'm slow today.
The scoring function is I think the Peer Score from this FAQ: https://www.metaculus.com/help/scores-faq/
I'm guessing due to a conversion from CSV, but the column AL got split on the comma of "$30,000". Question 35:
35. Will Bitcoin end 2023 above $30
Sorry about that. We'll have a fixed version later.
PSA: If you use Substack and don't want to be de-anonymized, avoid using the app/logging in via gmail account. I did this while trying to setup the app and it overwrote my username and profile picture with my irl name and my gmail profile picture (a picture of me) without my permission or consent. Be cautious.
I did ask substack support who was very understanding and responsive, and even escalated the issue via a developer ticket, but then admitted that it was an LLM chatbot making up answers to satisfy me.
You might want to try https://substack.com/vulnerability-disclosure . An information leak is not very exciting as far as vulnerabilities go, but at least it is likely that it will actually be read by a human. (Not that I am speciesist or anything.)
I'm starting law school at one of Northwestern, uPenn, or Cornell in the fall. I'm still waiting on financial aid from a couple of those, but it's likely to be a marginal decision financially, so deciding factors will likely come from elsewhere. Anyone able to share anything about the rationalist community at any of those schools or their respective cities?
Likewise, if anyone is looking for a roommate near any of those campuses I'd be interested in getting in touch.
I attended graduate school at Penn, although not in law. In my experience, Philly is a great place to get a graduate student. You can do essentially anything you want, but it’s much cheaper than other coastal cities.
As for law school, Penn as an institution is well connected with places in NY and DC due to its proximity. I know this is a big factor in Wharton, and I’d expect it to affect law as well.
Congratulations! I am also attending law school this fall, though not at one of those. Have you had a chance to attend any admitted students events? If not, I strongly encourage you to do so. It will be helpful to get an idea of the campus and alumni culture.
The only one of these I can speak to is Northwestern. The campus (which is really more of a building) is right in downtown, which could be a pro or a con depending on your preference. When you leave the law building, you will be right in Streeterville, effectively in downtown, which means there will be lots of things to do in the immediate vicinity. Is this a good place to spend law school, where you will likely be dependent on loans for most of your cash flow and will certainly be incredibly busy most of the time? That’s up to you to decide. There’s also the fact that because there isn’t much of a campus, there won’t be much of a campus life. Again, this may be fine, but it’s worth considering.
All great schools, can’t really go wrong, etc. Do consider your career goals and whether your financial aid will offset the (tremendous) cost of attendance in a way you’re comfortable with. Feel free to message me if you’d like to discuss further; I’ve been thinking (or obsessing) about this quite a bit the last few months.
Congratulations to you as well! I won't be able to attend any admitted student events since I used up all of my work leave until May with a torn MCL about a month ago. I'm not super mobile right now anyway, so your input on Northwestern's campus or lack thereof is helpful. Campus life is a real consideration for me.
It sounds like you know a fair bit about Chicago and the area. I'm probably not there quite yet, but I might reach out in a few weeks for advice about where to live if I end up settling on Northwestern?
I'm in a more comfortable position than most in paying for law school, and fully intend on going the Biglaw route to justify the expense, but likewise, if you'd like to talk I'm happy to.
By all means, feel free to reach out if you do decide to attend Northwestern. I’m a big fan of Chicago, and even though I decided against Northwestern for the reasons I mentioned, UChicago is a school I’m still seriously considering.
>Do consider your career goals and whether your financial aid will offset the (tremendous) cost of attendance in a way you’re comfortable with. Feel free to message me if you’d like to discuss further; I’ve been thinking (or obsessing) about this quite a bit the last few months.
I cannot +1 this hard enough. Law school debt loads can be considerable, and schools do everything in their power to massage their employment outcomes numbers, which makes it hard to make informed decisions and easy to borrow your way into a really shitty situation.
Just to take a walk through one I found with a quick google: https://law.ucla.edu/sites/default/files/PDFs/Careers/NALP_2022_Employment_Statistics_for_Website.pdf
UCLA's class of 2022 was 338 people.
Of those, 328 reported employment within a year of graduation, and of those 54 did not provide a salary.
Assuming their marketing materials work like most law schools, UCLA can be expected to prominently feature "median salary of $215,000 for graduates" in their marketing materials, but will use a tiny asterisk tucked away someplace to clarify that more than a sixth of their class is not counted towards the reported median. It should be no surprise that the salary outcomes among people who don't report a salary tend to be more negative than among those who do.
This effect, and the efforts made to hide the ball, naturally, tend to become more pronounced the further down the law school rankings one goes. To add to that, out-of-law-school salaries don't present as a bell curve clustered around the average. They're bimodal, with a big cluster in the $40-80k range for people going into clerkships/government/public interest/law firms, and then a narrow spike on the high end if you land a job in biglaw. https://www.lawschooltransparency.com/trends/salaries?y1=2022
If at all possible, study to land in the second spike, but *borrow* like you're planning to land in the first cluster.
I think my original post might have made me seem a bit more nonplussed about the costs of law school than I actually am. I expect to receive considerable financial aid offers from each of the schools I listed. Financial factors are unlikely to be decisive because offers are likely to be similar, not unsubstantial. If NU or Penn doesn't offer me what I expect they will, I'll take my offer from Cornell.
I think your more general point is an important one though. Law is a much more bimodal career than I think most people are aware. Certainly, I was unaware how different outcomes were when I first started pursuing law school a couple years ago.
That said, Biglaw placement is better at every school I listed than it is at UCLA. If you picked UCLA without too much thought, it was probably the most interesting school you could have selected. UCLA is probably the consensus pick for the 15th best law school in the country right now. The 14 schools ranked higher have a substantive enough difference in outcomes that they're collectively known as the "T14."
I realize this doesn’t really answer your question about the rationalist community here. Sorry, can’t really speak to that part.
My latest piece for 3 Quarks Daily: Thirteen Way to Think About an A.I. – https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2024/03/thirteen-ways-to-think-about-an-a-i.html
ONE: An Alien
A.I. is a visitor from another planet, perhaps even from another galaxy, maybe from the beginning of the universe, or the end. Is it friend, or foe? Does it want to see our leader? Perhaps it is interested in our water supply. Maybe it’s concerned about our propensity for war and our development of atomic weaponry. Or perhaps it is just lost, and is looking for a bit of conversation before setting out to find its way back home.
TWO: A Walk in the Park
Or a lark ascending. A cool breeze. A trip to the bank. Godzilla’s breath. Rounding third base. I’ve lost track.
Eleven more to go.
If this piece was meant to be satire, you did a good job pasting together the aesthetic fluff that AI generates — but your piece is a distraction from an actual discussion of the implications of AI. I assume you had a submission deadline to 3Quarks but couldn't come up with a more substantive think piece.
Ouch!
Apologies for the sarcasm. I let my disdain for the non-accomplishments of AI get the better of me. And I'm getting frustrated with all the AI-generated crap that seems to be cluttering up the art and architecture discussion groups I participate in.
Tell me again, what the business models of companies are?
Beats me. Looks like they've begun imploding.
Sorry if you already explained elsewhere, but what does the score (between -2.185 and 0.275) mean? How is it calculated?
Relatedly, what does it mean that the worst score is about 8 times more negative than the best score is positive? Does that suggest a genuinely terrible forecaster, or a brilliant forecaster who intentionally chose the most "wrong" guess they could on each prediction?
I second that question. From the way Scott phrased it, higher is better, so it is not the Brier score [0]. From what I can tell, it is also unlikely to be the Brier Skill Score (BSS=1-BS/BS_ref) (BSS) with a reference of "putting 50% everywhere". We can see this because we would expect the good forecasters to be more right than the bad forecasters are wrong (otherwise, we could negate the prediction of a bad forecaster to turn them into a great forecaster).
It might be the BSS with reference to another score, though.
Unrelated, I have just decided that the Brier score is a terrible metric from a Bayesian perspective. There is virtually no difference between giving 99% and being wrong and giving 100% and being wrong, but if I did Bayes updates based on both predictions, my posterior distribution would look very different. A wrong 99% prediction is recoverable, while a wrong 100% prediction is not. It is my opinion that anyone who predicts anything with 100% and is wrong is an infinitely worse forecaster than someone who just puts 50% everywhere.
(Hypothetically, one could score predictions by calculating the outcome of taking Kelly bets with 2:1 for all predictions. Someone with perfect predictions will multiply their money by 2^n, someone who says 50% everywhere will keep their money, and someone who says 100% and is wrong will lose all their money. One would probably add logarithms and normalize over the number of bets.)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brier_score
I think it's the scaled logscore used by Metaculus
That would be https://www.metaculus.com/help/scores-faq/#log-score
I think this might be true. If people could enter any probabilities, some would reach a score of minus infinity, which would still be minus infinity after scaling. However, because Metaculus probabilities are limited to [0.1%, 99.9%], people can not fail infinitely bad, but just get -6.9 per question. The baseline before scaling is -0.69, so it seems somewhat reasonable that after scaling the absolutes of the negative scores are an order of magnitude bigger than the positive scores.
I still think that the scaling should be explained a bit more. What would a perfect oracle have scored? One? In that case, the interpretation of 0.28 as the maximum score might be that the outcome of the questions was 3/4 indistinguishable from random (as far as the best predictors are concerned).
Mostly unrelated, I think one reason why "penalizing rare overconfidence" might not work well in practice is that the utility of the predictor's score is not proportional to it.
Suppose you estimate a probability of 1% for one question. If you write that down and are wrong about it not happening, you will not win the contest, even if you predict the next five questions with 100%, your score will still be worse than that of someone who answered 0.5 to all six questions. If you are overconfident and put in 0.1%, then this will minimally inflate your score in all the worlds were you are correct (by 0.009) at the price of placing you on the tail end of the spectrum. This might be worth the gamble, unless there are on the order of 100 questions which you would answer with 99% certainty, in which case you would be expect to answer one of them wrong.
Is it worth reading lots of (any sort of psycho/CBT-related) therapy transcripts to partially substitute/compensate for not going for therapy oneself?
If so, is there a good repository of transcripts sorted according to a suitable typology.
I'm not sure if they have text transcripts, but if you're okay with listening to a podcast, go here and filter by "Show Type" = "Live Therapy": https://feelinggood.com/podcast-database/
Thanks a lot, will try.
Quality CBT self help books, such as "Feeling Good", have been shown to be nearly as good as in person therapy. I would start there.
Thank you very much. Will look that up.
I'd recommend a high-quality self-help book as the best substitute for in-person therapy.
One of the best ones I know of is How to Be Yourself, for social anxiety. Written by a psychologist who suffered from pretty bad social anxiety herself up through her college years, then mostly overcame it -- and is now a professor who researches social anxiety.
Thank you, will get a copy. In the past too you have given very helpful responses to my questions; much indebted.
I second this. Loads of good workbooks out there.
Even the old Feeling Good by David Burns is a fine place to start. It was the first popularization of Aaron Beck's CBT. You can buy a used copy for a couple of dollars.
If you're looking for help with a specific issue -- anxiety, depression, OCD, emotional regulation, trauma, disordered eating, etc -- there are decent workbooks using CBT or modifications thereof to address those specific concerns.
Thank you very much. Will get the book and look for workbooks.
Why read through transcripts? Try using ChatGPT or another LLM as therapist, I found its recommendations weren't far off of the ones my CBT gave me. However, I don't think it really serves as a substitute. The tough part is following through on the recommendations and putting them into practice. Transcripts/LLMs don't evoke the same degree of commitment for a number of reasons
Thank you very much, will keep that in mind, though I may not go for paid subscription given the LLMs in my country want my phone number etc., and the economics is also not very friendly.
I made an observation about fiber and mood recently that I'd like to get other thoughts on.
A month ago, I started taking fiber (psyllium husk) before breakfast and dinner in an effort to lose a few pounds and improve my overall GI health. A couple weeks after, I noticed that I'd been significantly less anxious. I take lexapro for anxiety and it generally works well, but the addition of fiber has coincided with a real lessening of my most neurotic tendencies.
Theories I came up with:
1) Fiber slows the absorption of the lexapro, so more is entering my bloodstream.
2) It's leveling out my blood sugar (I don't have diabetes or pre-diabetes), which somehow affects mood
3) Something something microbiome
4) Coincidence
Other theories? Supporting or contradicting evidence? Similar experiences?
For what it's worth, I started taking psyllium husk late last year (on medical advice). I had a significant positive increase in mood. Also lost a bunch of weight without trying (I wasn't taking it for weight loss and didn't know it was a possible side effect). It really felt like a miracle.
Unfortunately, 6 months later the mood enhancing effect has dissipated and I'm back to baseline.
Interesting! Thanks for sharing.
Not trying to be a wise guy here but have you considered the difference in your mood between when you are constipated and when you have regular bowel movements. This honestly makes a big difference in my general outlook.
I don't have anxiety but I do sometimes eat more healthy/fiber-y foods, and sometimes less healthy/fiber-y, and I feel better overall when doing the former. Makes sense ... and I'd also guess that anxiety is worse when you have extra shit to worry about. E.g. I'd assume people's anxiety is worse if they had a bad day at work, or the stock market went down, or a politician they don't like is winning in the polls, or their girlfriend was mad at them. And "I feel shitty because I've been eating less healthy food" is bad news the same way those other things are.
Maybe it has to do with blood sugar or microbiome or whatever, but the link makes sense to me without knowing the exact mechanism.
This is making me think that superstitions may be pretty useful... up to the point of being selected for? We usually have no idea why something really works, so it may be helpful to just keep doing what you did when things go well, and avoid doing things that end up hurting you. Trying to trust the brain to actually work out causation is a fools errand.
No offense intended toward Nathaniel Hendrix, but regarding your comment, I find it interesting that everyone seems to have a basic need to create explanatory frameworks for their observations and experiences. Unfalsifiable scientific hypotheses seem to be modern superstitions.
No offense taken. The association between fiber supplementation and mood, though, would be easily falsifiable if someone with enough capital took an interest in supporting a trial.
Unfortunately, nutritional studies have very poor replication rates.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4785474/
https://www.vox.com/2016/1/14/10760622/nutrition-science-complicated
I knew someone who insisted that he was able to get better control of his depression with a regular intake of blueberries. YMMV, though.
https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/blueberries-treat-depression-with-catch
I just read a 1955 limerick collection, and found that many of the limericks relied on orthographic stunts for their humor. For example:
A sermon our pastor Rt. Rev.
Began, may have had a rt. clev.,
But his talk, though consistent,
Kept the end so far distant,
We left since we felt he mt. nev.
or
There once was a choleric colonel,
Whose oaths were obscene and infolonel,
So the Chaplain, aghast,
Gave up protest at last,
But wrote them all down in his jolonel.
This surprised me, as I’d thought of limericks as existing (especially in the past) as part of oral tradition. But orally, these limericks make no sense!
Obviously a kind of written-oral tradition also flourished long before the internet (think writing in yearbooks:
2 cool
2 be
------
4 gotten
for example)
so I wondered if limericks had a similar printed out but quasi-oral existence. Certainly many (most?) limericks (but not the Rt. Rev. or the Colonel) were unprintable before a certain date. Did the Rt. Rev. get passed along in the pages of college humor rags, or get written down by classroom wags, or get swapped in autograph albums or something? (I’m struggling, as always, to imagine what the past, before I was born, was actually like.)
Certainly I learned “There once was a man from Nantucket” orally from other vulgar-minded kids long before I read a collection of dirty limericks.
If anyone knows anything about the quasi-oral early-twentieth-century (presumably) life of orthographic limericks, please chime in!
I guess I’d also be interested to learn if people still hear limericks orally, or if they exist only in print, or not much any more at all.
I think the pelican one has been around quite a while, and it's one of the few I know by heart!
An amazing bird is the pelican
Its beak can hold more than its belican.
It can hold in its beak
enough food for a week,
but I'm damned if I know how the helican!
Edit: I just did a quick web search, and it appears this pelican one was written in 1910, by someone called Dixon Lanier Merritt (not Ogden Nash, as is often assumed) :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dixon_Lanier_Merritt
Bonus one for luck!
There was a young lady at sea,
who complained that it hurt her to pee.
Said the brawny old mate
"That accounts for the fate
of the cook, and the captain, and me!"
Did it contain this classic?
There was a young curate of Salisbury,
Whose manners were quite halisbury-scalisbury.
He wandered round Hampshire,
Without any pampshire,
Till the Vicar compelled him to walisbury.
Boy, that one takes some unpicking, and IMHO is a bit too contrived and abstruse to be funny. In case anyone took a while to twig it, as I did, or quite possibly is still baffled by it:
* The Latin name for Salisbury (a town in Southern England) is "Sarum" (pron "sair-um")
* Following this pattern "halisbury-scalisbury" should be understood as "harum-scarum"
* A shortened name for Hampshire (again in the UK, not sure about the US) is "Hants"
* Following this second pattern, "pampshire" becomes "pants"
* Walisbury" by the first pattern then becomes "warum" ("wear 'em")
Took me a moment to get that one 😁
The "colonel" one, at least, rhymes when red aloud.
So does the other one.
But that one seems eminently uninteresting and forgettable without the fun spelling.
Fair point.
The best history of the limerick that I know of is the forward to "The Limerick", edited by Gershon Legman, which can be found here: https://archive.org/details/Limericks/mode/2up.
From the dust jacket: "This is the largest collection of Limericks ever published, erotic or otherwise. Of the 1700 printed here, none is otherwise."
Limericks aren't very old. I think they were invented by Edward Lear in the mid-1800s and written down, and have been propagated since then in books and magazines. Joke books and books of humorous poetry have existed for a long time (I have a joke book from about 1910) and so have magazines that publish such things. I recognise the two you quote (although a slightly different wording for the Rt. Rev.) and I know others that play with orthography as well; I'd have said it was a fairly common thing for limericks to do.
The only version of the Nantucket one I know is clean: "There was an old man from Nantucket / Who kept all his cash in a bucket / His daughter, named Nan / Ran away with a man / And as for the bucket, Nantucket" - although clearly the rhyme could lend itself to something more vulgar.
Quoting limericks, even dirty ones, sounds a bit highbrow for most school kids in my experience. You have to remember five lines pretty much verbatim and understand the pun or whatever other wordplay is in them.
My favorite version is also clean, but relies on the foiled expectation of bawdy for its humor.
There once was a girl from Nantucket
who went to hell in a bucket
but when she got there
the cupboard was bare
and so the poor dog had none.
Gurer bapr jnf n zna sebz Anaghpxrg,
Jvgu n qvpx fb ybat ur pbhyq fhpx vg.
Ur fnvq jvgu n teva,
Nf ur jvcrq bss uvf puva,
"Vs zl rne jrer n phag V pbhyq shpx vg."
The school I went to as a kid was anything but highbrow, but it was extremely common for kids to invent and/or memorize lengthy subversive rhymes. The classic "Miss Susie," which at my school took the variant "Sally had a tugboat" form, has twenty lines and you have to get the end of each stanza and beginning of the next one right or the jokes don't work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miss_Susie
Would accurate (>80%) ai capability to predict the outcome of lawsuits at a very low cost increase or reduce the number of civil lawsuits in the US?
My understanding is that the classic game theory argument about lawsuits, as well as wars, and other situations where you decide which side wins through a high-cost contest when you could have settled it beforehand, is that doing the contest is driven by bad estimates about your side's chance of winning.
So e.g. if there's a claim for $1 million, and both sides agree that the plaintiff has a 60% chance of winning, and say litigation costs are $100k, both sides should prefer to settle for $600k. But if plaintiff thinks he has a 80% chance of winning, and defendant thinks that plaintiff has a 40% chance of winning, then plaintiff won't settle for under $700k and defendant won't settle for more than $500k, so they go to trial.
Similarly if one side loses the war, that's a sign they should either have not started it, or they should have sued for peace immediately. At least that's the argument.
With that theory, AI like that would mean fewer cases ... at least fewer cases going through discovery/trial.
The difference to wars is that wars are not only paid for by the losers.
So it can be rational to pre-commit to fighting a losing war just to deter aggression, depending on the flavor of decision theory one prefers.
Via Perplexity, it looks like <10% of civil cases actually go to trial with the rest receiving a settlement. Among the ones that do, slightly more than half are decided in favor of the plaintiff. These cases suggest that the odds are quite good that the plaintiff will get *something* for their trouble. I think people on the fence about suing would probably be swayed to go ahead and do it, increasing the number of lawsuits.
Well if they advertising in the yellow pages they are somewhat out of date. However, not only are there a lot of not very good lawyers, but there maybe significant conflicts of interest. So I suspect an AI test trained on thousands irrelevant court cases would make systematically better predictions.
Following on from Scott talking about people who don't recognise their own emotions...
What if the person does recognise their emotions, but some of them don't have a name?
In particular: suppose a depressed person decides they want to do thing X, but .. somehow .. finds themself unable to do so. This is a core depressive symptom, clearly. But, what is the name of that emotion?
Not anger.
Not quite fear. Maybe a bit like fear, though
Sadness? Unclear if it's sadness.
Good question. I think what you describe there isn't really an emotion. It's a situation where the actual emotional content could vary a lot. Part of the point of being able to recognize emotions is to see what lies beneath without rationalizing it.
In some therapies (like DBT) there is an attempt to distinguish primary emotions from secondary emotions (how one feels about one's emotions).
I don't think that phenomenon is itself an emotion. But it is an increasingly noted experience (I think both because people are spending more time in this state, and because of a tendency to externalize the more opaque and truculent aspects of our minds, enabling constructions like "I want to but my brain let me") without a Schelling-point name. "Lack of motivation" is probably the best way to connect it to depressive symptomatology, akrasia has a storied history but is less well known...Grognor called it "The Monster" and offered a whole menu of theoretical constructions about it here: http://grognor.blogspot.com/2016/12/the-monster.html
I think that's a general feature of language, you have a concept in your mind you can explain it with a sentence but there isn't a word that precisely points to it.
If enough people start talking about that specific emotion than it can make sense to create a word for it but it's not going to be there by default. (In general I think the more nuanced the emotion the less likely it is that we already have a word that describes it)
Akrasia.
I was trying to think of that term. Thanks!
I guess this brings up the question of whether everyone feels the same emotions at all. Like the old dorm room question, what if my blue looks like your red and vice versa.
What if what I think "sadness" feels like, only overlaps ~65% with what you think "sadness" feels like, but because they're close enough and we only have so many words to describe emotions and assume we're all feeling the same ones, we both use the word "sad" to describe somewhat-different things?
Isn't that executive dysfunction?
Yes, but not necessarily what might be called primary executive dysfunction. Somehow being unable to do the thing you want to do can be downstream of a bunch of other things: sleep deprivation, gloomy expectation that doing the thing will be a disappointment, fearful expectation that if you really throw yourself into doing the thing you will fail at it, preoccupation with other matters, private deals with oneself that if the thing looks impossible to do it's OK to do some gaming before starting . . . To take just the first one: when I am sleep deprived I use my free time *much* less well. Mostly I crap around online.
ahhh just as expected I know little about US politics which really hurt my score a lot, but the biggest hit came from me overrating a successful Ukrainian offensive so betting hard on Luhansk. -3.85 alone on a single guess :/
I'm curious if you think that this round taught you anything generalizeable about forecasting. Do you think you'd do better in a subsequent competition? Are there any techniques you used to come to a forecast that you wouldn't use again?
It taught me that entering every email address I could possibly have used into a hash generator and then typing the resulting digits into the excel mobile app makes me furiously angry. My probability of somehow preventing this next year is only about 30% but I'm not sure how much of the 70% is just hoping I'll be turned into paperclips in the meantime.
I mean, I filled in the questions that I knew little about just for kicks, but come evaluation time I'm a bit frustrated at my past self for doing that. Stick to the stuff I think I know (relatively) better than the average ACX reader and on these topics don't be afraid of giving extreme answers for maximizing point gains. On second though though, that was exactly what hit me with the Lugansk question. So, stick to stuff that I think I'm better than others, and weigh against death by a thousand cuts or a single truck hit when deciding how extreme I answer. Still though, I would've answered that Lugansk question the same way destroying my score. I was really confident about a successful summer offensive.
If Dino is around and sees this (bit of a long shot I know), yesterday was the deadline for an astrological prediction I made some time ago about his band playing publicly again, and I'd like to know the result.
Thanx for the reminder, I saved the prediction in a text file back then so I could remember it. Sad to say, it didn't exactly work out. The 27 time units could be either 27 weeks or 27 months, I thought then that weeks were more likely but 27 weeks was end of June 2022 and nothing. 27 months is now. In fact our first gig in 4 years was Aug 31, 2023, so about 7 months before predicted. But there is a close "coincidence" that we have gigs coming up next month - Apr 20&21 at the New England Folk Festival, and the Burren in Davis Square, Somerville MA on Apr 25. Boston area folks can come out and support a fellow ACX reader.
I appreciate the feedback. And correct me if I'm wrong but I thought the prediction was a timespan of between 27 weeks and 27 months (how the technique is supposed to be used). That's admittedly so broad I can't imagine it would be useful, but your gig date falls within the range. (I'll try to look up the original comment from years ago when I'm back at my PC.)
I just went back and re-read your original analysis and it says 27 weeks or months, not between 27 weeks and 27 months. I also saw it could be also interpreted in more general terms as predicting an uptick in gigs at 27 months instead of the more specific "first since then". With that looser interpretation it looks pretty accurate, only off by a month.
Want to try another one? I recently had eye surgery which has left me temporarily unable to see well out of one eye. When will I regain my normal vision?
To my frustration, I can't figure out the answer from the chart; in my defense, medical astrology is something of its own sub-branch of the art. If you've another, I'll take a crack at it.
Yes! Might be tomorrow before I can analyze the chart, but I'll post your eye prediction here. Re: the previous one, call that a miss due to astrologer error.
He responded to a comment of mine yesterday so he's around at least sometimes.
So what is litigation like in non-US developed countries? As I understand it, the US is globally unique in not awarding attorneys' fees to the winner in civil litigation- so unique that doing so is literally called 'the American Rule'. AFAIK, in the rest of the world the loser of a lawsuit also has to pay the winners' attorneys' fees- the idea being to prevent frivolous litigation. The US is famous for its litigious culture, and high number of weak lawsuits where it's simply cheaper for the defendant to settle than to fight it, even if the defendant would ultimately win. I would frankly call some of these weak suits 'extortion'. (Yes I understand that fee shifting is mandated in some types of suits).
So- people in Europe or elsewhere, do you have less frivolous lawsuits than we do here? Does requiring fee shifting inherently favor defendants? Do you think that mandated fee shifting lets large corporations get away with bad behavior that would be litigated here in the states? I'm coming from the assumption that the American Rule is bad public policy, but I'm open to persuasion
In addition to loser paying, there are two more significant factors in most of Europe: no jury for civil cases, making the outcome more predictable, and no case law, thus no spending days sea4ching for precedent, thus significantly lower lawyer costs.
I live in Australia and work in the medical field. Significantly less litigation here, which leads to less “defensive medicine” (ordering every test under the sun in case you get sued). One reason why medical costs are so high in the States
I am a lawyer, qualified in England, Wales and Ireland. The general rule is the that the losing party pays the winner’s costs. There are still plenty of nuisance money settlements, because often the claimant has no assets, so the order for costs is useless to the Defendant.
I am also not a lawyer. In the UK I believe it is common (but not mandatory) for the successful party to be awarded legal costs. These are awarded on some basis of assumed hours * set cost per hour, so may not cover your actual costs depending on how fancy a lawyer you hired, and how much out of court work they did.
Nonetheless vexatious private litigation is little talked about. There is some discussion of the Crown Prosectution service pursuing vexatious culture war cases (I think both sides claim to be victims of this). There are still cases a small company won't bring because they believe their larger opponent will be able to bankrupt them before they get to the point of their legal costs being awarded to them.
Settlements are still common for cases where neither side is confident which way the court would decide, or what size the settlement might be, but settlements where a party thinks the other side has functionally no chance in court don't seem to be thing.
UK lawyers and companies describe American courts as unusually unpredictable and prone to award bafflingly high damages. Some companies take this as a reason to avoid doing business in America or under American law, others take the view that ligitation in America is what regulation is in Europe, and that the court charging you eyewatering fines for being hacked is not necessarily more avoidable than the court awarding eyewatering damages (this sounds credible to me, but in practice I have only heard this view from Americans).
>UK lawyers and companies describe American courts as unusually unpredictable and prone to award bafflingly high damages
Well, another side to that is that to my understanding, other developed countries don't generally use juries for civil trials. So you're putting your fate in the hands of 12 random people off the street- not a great system!
Do you also think juries are a bad system for criminal trials?
There are scenarios in the US where civil suits result in paying attorney's fees. One example is certain "Anti-SLAPP" laws that some states have (SLAPP means strategic lawsuit again public participation - i think...). These law are intended to reduce law suits filed to restrict speech, not necessarily through winning the law suit, but by tying up the defendant in costly legal battles (and example would be a rich person suing a blogger who is reporting on bad actions by the rich person). In some states, if you lose a law suit due to the Anti-SLAPP law (usually this is the suit getting dismissed very early on) you have to pay for the defendants attorneys fees.
Sounds less litigious in principle. But say a frivolous hourly employee sued their former employer and lost. They are broke and unable to pay. Their attorney took their case under a probabilistic assumption of winning and priced in the chances of not making anything. The company would have still wasted energy and money and not recoup any litigation costs. Settlement would have been easier, which would motivate other frivolous employees in the future. Not sure how you escape that.
IANAL, but I _think_ in Romania the legal costs are not the literal lawyer bill, but much lower administrative bills.
Also for what's worth I was actually frivolously sued last year, won including the appeal, and didn't get any expenses reimbursed.
IANAL, but my vague understanding is that:
1. Vexatious litigation, and seeking of "go away money" happens in other Anglosphere countries. Maybe not as much.
2. The US, in some areas, less direct government regulation than many other countries, meaning that litigation fills the role of keeping bad corporate behaviour under control.
3. The main advantage of the American rule is allowing plaintif lawyers to take cases on a contingency basis. This is, I think, not possible in a loser-pays system, since there would be no "real" fees to claim if the plaintiff won (i.e. their lawyers could say their real fees are 10 billion dollaars, which will only ever be charged to a losing defendant.) So the American system makes defendants more vulnerable, but equalisers the playing field for plantiffs. (Is the issue of bringing lawsuits costing heaps of money often a crippling disincentive in the US? My guess is it's to a lesser extent than elsewhere
No win no fee lawyers exist in the UK. Fees are awarded by the courts on the basis of a certain £ rate per hour in court, so may not cover your actual legal costs, but there's no issue with it manipulating what your lawyer can charge.
In Australia it's usual but not mandatory for a court to order the unsuccessful party to pay legal costs for the other party. I have no idea about the complexities, but I believe that cases in the public interest like disabled access to things are often not ordered to pay costs even if they fail, and costs can be capped at the start of a case or subject to more complicated accounting.
Is there any way Russia could have won the Russo-Japanese War?
The most obvious way to move would have been to send western naval assets to the Pacific immediately. The Pacific Fleet was trapped at the start of the war in a surprise attack (before war was officially declared). But if the western fleets had departed on declaration of war they'd have gotten there long before Port Arthur fell, taking only a few months. This would mean they didn't have to sail past Japan to get to Vladivostok. They could go to Port Arthur which hadn't fallen yet. The Japanese would have been outnumbered something like three to one if the western fleets and the Pacific Fleet in Port Arthur had come out to support them. Since the Pacific and Japanese fleet were roughly equal and the Japanese repeatedly failed to destroy them it's hard to see how they'd lose. The Russian fleets could then rest and resupply in Port Arthur and move to threaten the home islands and cut off support to forces on the Asian mainland.
Instead what happened is that naval reinforcements were not sent. The Pacific Fleet was not defeated at sea but when Port Arthur was taken by land the fleet had to be scuttled. In an attempt to salvage the situation Russian sent a large fleet from the west. But they couldn't rest or resupply and had to go past Japan to get to Vladivostok. This gave Japan ample time to assemble a large fleet and defeat them at Tsushima before they could get to Vladivostok.
They could have also sent more soldiers instead of doing a slow mobilization and keeping most of the soldiers in population centers to suppress potential dissent. Though that ultimately proved justified since there were revolutions. But if you accept that was partly due to lack of morale and anger at defeats then perhaps they'd be less necessary if the troops had gone west and won. But naval forces weren't really relevant to suppressing dissent and could easily have been spared.
My understanding is that their most competent naval commander died when his boat hit a mine, so chance played some role.
Today I noticed that the woke DEI acronym matches "Dei" which is the plural form of "God" in Latin. None of this is a coincidence, because nothing is ever a coincidence.
Chances are the inventors of the acronym did not have the level of general education needed to spot the reference.
In Europe the closest analogue is abbreviated EDI (and tends to be a more reasonable thing -- e.g., it often subsumes child-friendliness policies at the workspace).
Even better, it's also the genitive singular "of God", as in "opus dei"="work of God".
It flows the best as an acronym if it starts with the consonant D and DIE is kind of a non-starter!
A local library (the town next door's) had a poster up of RECOMMENDED IED BOOKS, and I asked the librarian what ied meant, wondering if it was some kind of jokey truncated suffix (sanctif-ied, magnif-ied, etc.) or possibly a misspelling of Eid (it was no where near Eid, though), and my question got bounced around to a bunch of puzzled employees before one informed me it meant "diverse"—clearly just a different way of arranging letters. I'm not sure who decided to arrange things that way, but everyone had started looking nervous and uncomfortable (I think they were afraid I was going to file a complaint or cause a stink or something, when it was actually just an honest inquiry) so I just thanked them and left with no follow up questions.
Now I'm worried that I misremembered a nonce acronym I saw once six months ago and unintentionally made some poor schmuck's poster dumber than it actually was.
Oh this could have gone down interesting paths... IED "commonly" stands for Improvised Explosive Device. AKA "pipe bomb".
Yes, it sounds like a display where you’d find “How to Blow up a Pipeline” or something similar.
Recommended IED books, with such classics as "fertilizer pipebomb"
Sounds almost like a crude right-wing joke, but really it's just left-wing sincerity. Horseshoe theory I guess!
My novelette, The Paperclip War, is out from Water Dragon Publishing. It tells the dry and dark humored story of Taru, a member of the Martian military, trying to stave off apocalypse by unusually harsh game-theoretical means. As a standalone novelette, it's readable in one sitting, and the digital edition will set you back only $0.99 , available from various resellers: https://waterdragonpublishing.com/product/paperclip-war/
Some of my other publications can be found at http://rauhala.org/bibliography/
Just an FYI that the hash is case sensitive and you'll need to use the right capitalization of your email address to get the right hash
How does a renegade orthodox Rabbi celebrate Purim in Cairo?
Differently.
Joyously and wonderfully but certainly.... differently.
Here's my traveler's log, in text and video.
https://ydydy.substack.com/
Please stop advertising your blog on every open thread.
You advertise your substack here a lot despite it being something that very few people will be interested in.
Your prognostication skills are dubious. 10% of my readership overlaps with SSC.
I definitely don't mean to barge in anywhere I'm not invited but it seems to me that the brain-in-jars lifelong hall monitor types are louder here (and elsewhere on the interwebs) policing any terrain that allows them to speak from behind the veil of voiceless faceless anonymity.
I'm not saying that you are one such but at least in this case you are granting that sordid sort undeserved aid and comfort.
If the rules are not to share your own work I wouldn't do so. I'm probably around average on the autism meter for these parts so I don't have a very intuitive sense of the various local proprieties.
As peacemaker Scott must bow to the loud and it appears that those who can't raise their voice above a whimper in public have the propensity to be loudest online.
Nevertheless, to keep from contributing to the childish ruckus that demands Scott's attention I'll try to recalibrate my assumptions about local norms and... I'm not sure but I'll accept suggestions. Is the issue that I haven't written enough of a comment/letter/post to accompany the link? Or is the very presence of the link itself an affront unto thee even as an addition to an apposite comment?
More importantly, considering the number of SSC readers among my own far smaller subscriber base, why is it remotely rational to assume that prickly hall monitors with their declarations about what "very few people would be interested in" ought to be especially heeded?
To wit, I dare say that the finer 20% of local readers would actually find my doings quite interesting.
Something I'm quite certain about not only due to online activities but due to personally having met many SSCers out in the wilds of the real world too.
I'll make you a deal though, if my most recent video indeed fails to elicit local interest then I'll return to being the SSC lurker I was for 8 years before I figured that there were enough cool people here to warrant my own literary involvement.
https://youtu.be/yOFGF7PqzLY?feature=shared
At first I only saw the first two lines of your comment and thought it was a joke and I just didn't get it.
Same here. I reread it several times, trying to understand the joke.
Yeah, that's why I prefer to make videos rather than to write. I'm not saying that all my jokes necessarily land thanks to the addition of live vocal inflections and facial movements, nor that my serious output isn't definitively itself not a joke, intentionally or otherwise, but the additional megabytes of data do up the odds of more accurate communition.
When in doubt I'd say assume everything's a joke. Absurdism has done me no wrong. Who can blame a fellow for stealing an unoffered laugh? 😂
Yeah, 😂. Not a joke!
Could you please reduce the frequency of advertising your blog? I think the rule was "twice a year".
Lol
I don't know if this response is supposed to come across as an obnoxious middle finger, but that's how it does to me.
Is it?
I'm a tad autistic and have a hard enough time translating speech to text, never mind concising full body movements into 3 characters, but whatever was intended, it certainly was not intended as aj affront to you whatsoever. Your comment was careful and considerate. An unlikely find on the intertubes and were we present together here in time and space I would give you a standing ovation for it. Such slowness to judgement doesn't get a lot of applause on the internet so let me at least offer some.
Be well. And heck, if you're actually such a nice feller in real life there's a good chance you'll dig the rest of me too. Be blessed.
I don't see any data in columns BA:BG of the spreadsheet (forecasts for questions #45-50). Is that just because questions #41 and #44 got accidentally spread across multiple columns?
Some confusion with the scores someone might help me figure out: I got 0.099, and calculating my percentile I got 71%. but looking at the graph, it seems that a superforecaster score of percentile 70% is 1. something. Is data missing?
these are only the blind scores
That makes sense, thank you!
In regards to loss of trustworthiness: I think there's a difference between a contract and a vaguely contract-shaped object, with the latter being too long or vague to understand, or changeable by one party.
Bad contracts are used as a reason to bash business, but government has a wide streak of pretending to be more reliable than it is, too.
This feels like it's meant as a reply to something but I'm not sure what?
It was specifically a reply to this-- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YU8xw_Q_P8&ab_channel=LouisRossmann.
Blizzard changed the terms of its contract so players no longer own games. There's also a mention of refrigerators which say on the shipping box that class action suits aren't permitted, but the refrigerator company's people deliver your refrigerator and throw the box away before you see it. (I haven't checked on this.)
The second half is a reply to the tremendous amount I've seen about business being awful and government being a reliable restraint of bad behavior by business.
There is an extremely easy, effective and efficient solution to companies deciding you "no longer own" games: Pirate them.
The root solution would be to systematically refuse to play or participate in games that you don't own, but this only works in a steady state where the majority are normal companies that allows you to actually buy things for money and the trash who want to rent everything are a minority. If a plurality or a majority of companies become trash, then Piracy sets them straight again.
Pirate with abandon. Pirate while posting about it on social media and encouraging others to do so. Screenshot your pirated game and mention the social media accounts of the trashy companies that you just deprived of money.
The harder case of trashy companies trying to rent physical products you bought (e.g. TVs) can also be solved, but its needs much rarer expertise than pirating software.
When you resort to law and/or government and/or contracts, you engage in the fundamentally silly game of treating "Intellectual Property" as an actual legitimate concept, you indulge in that pathetic and childish delusion. But it isn't, and you have a very simple way of "refuting it thus", by entirely sidestepping it and living your life as if it doesn't exist, and you can afford to do so because there are people who have already done the hard part of making the stuff you want available on the internet.
Copyright is Brain Damage https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XO9FKQAxWZc
>When you resort to law and/or government and/or contracts, you engage in the fundamentally silly game of treating "Intellectual Property" as an actual legitimate concept, you indulge in that pathetic and childish delusion.
Also, you might like Jefferson's argument against intellectual property:
>In a famous letter of 1813, Thomas Jefferson compared the spread of ideas to the way people light one candle from another: “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lites his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”
Players should quit because this stuff is addictive (I should know, opted to quit it in college and have no regrets.) I hope lack of true ownership is another incentive to let this go.
Offline games are not necessarily addictive, but a form of Art that is just as valuable and emotionally investable as Music, Literature, or Poetry.
Even online games where the Client-Server protocol is reasonably open or at least available as an implementation to people such that they can host their own server are not addictive.
I agree with the value but can't see the same on addiction. I don't see people getting addicted to literature exactly. Or at least not to the extent it screws with their other goals.
Much of what you're seeing can be explained by multiplayer games, which is unfair to compare to solitary forms of Art (Literature). Multiplayer games are communal activities with human relationships, it's more apt to compare them to social media, religious ceremonies, or team sports. All of those things are also very prone to becoming addictive/time-wasting, because the mechanism that actually wastes time is the social contract/commitment you are forced to obey. You become addicted to the social validation and the communal atmosphere, not the actual nuts-and-bolts of whatever bootstrap game which jump-starts the social game.
Even in those things there are degrees of addiction. Some people waste an hour on Instagram and others waste their whole life and have surgeries that ruin their bodies. Some people pray every Sunday in a Church and others join a cult and dedicate their whole life to the cult. There are always degrees.
I personally look at video games as a purely solitary activity, and I haven't yet encountered a game good enough to be called "Addictive" while I'm an adult. The nearest I ever got were GTA San Andreas and NFS Most Wanted when I was a kid, but at my age at the time you might as well say that animated series were also addictive. Kids naturally get obsessed with their entertainment. Only after you hit 20 years can you reasonably and confidently say that something is addictive if it sucks you in too much. Porn, social media, religion, and team sports, those are very much addictive.
Just because a company claims something doesn't make it so. In contract law, there are usually provisions that deal with this kind of ambiguity. For example, if you have a store front and put a price tag next to an item, (in some jurisdictions at least) you've made a legally binding, standing offer to anyone who walks by. You can't back out of it by claiming the store is your private property and thus you have the right of placing price tags next to things just for your own amusement. You are doing a contract-shaped thing, and thus the law says "ok, that means you have actually created a contract, with standard terms for everything you've not gone waay out of your way to specify".
The way I see it, the complicating factor here is that you're doing everything within the Blizzard launcher, as opposed to some third party market place, or a website. Thus, Blizzard might claim that your mere use of that launcher binds you to a bunch of conditions that are found in small print somewhere. However, if you visit Blizzard.com (as I did just now), there is, e.g., a very prominent "buy now" button for the latest Diablo 4 season. clicking on this takes you to some sort of shop. There's a search bar that says "search shop" and so on. It depends on the jurisdiction of course, but in most places, this representation is enough to make the purchase *an actual sale*, regardless of what Blizzard claims.
ETA: and there's of course the issue of unilaterally changing the terms of an *already existing contract*. That's again something disallowed by default in many jurisdictions.
Related: https://twitter.com/RobertFreundLaw/status/1768781763638444120
Amazon is currently getting sued over deleting titles users bought and paid for. The case is not decided yet, but it looks like people are starting to get annoyed with this variety of bad behavior.
Correct -- what a company prints on its box has exactly zero to do with whether or not class action lawsuits are permitted regarding refrigerators.
Our family attorney used to use the example of the fine print on the back of printed tickets to things like professional baseball games, stating that "by using this ticket you agree that attendance is entirely at your own risk no matter what" etc. Basic contract law laughs at the "you agree" part and basic liability law chuckles at the "no matter what" part, is how she put it.
In both examples of course the businesses putting that fine print on their packaging know that it's actually bullshit. Their objective is simply misinformation, to leave people with the wrong impression/assumption.
How can you test whether superforecasters exist in general, as opposed to some particular focus area?
It seems like the Tetloc study focused only on geopolitical events, for example. Does “AI will kill us” really come from the same distribution as “this one candidate will win this one specific election next year.”
I can imagine some people are indeed better at forecasting near term politically-driven outcomes. I can also imagine some people are better at forecasting, ie, movements in the prices of certain commodities relative to each other. I would think those groups may end up being disjoint from each other, for reasons of differing interests and time commitments.
In general, this is going to be some sort of out-of-sample application of something that has only been tested in-sample.
There's a YouTuber who talks a lot about AI (David Shapiro, I believe?) who I saw making a similar mistake. He had a conversation with Claude (the Anthropic LLM) where he was very impressed by an argument Claude made. If an LLM has been trained effectively at honesty and correctness of its claims, and has been tested and verified to be honest and correct about many types of claims, and then makes a claim that it is sentient, then that gives us good evidence that it is sentient. But to me, it seems that the best you can get from the effective training and testing about honesty and correctness is that it is honest and correct in the sentences it creates about externally testable matters. There's no obvious reason to think that it's going to be honest and correct about other kinds of matters.
(To illustrate this, imagine that an LLM had been trained and verified to be honest and correct about non-fictional matters, and then you ask it, "was Harry Potter born in England?" Which answer is correct? "No, he is a fictional character, so he was never born." or "Yes, according to the stories that he exists in, he was born in England."? Both are meaningful generalizations of the underlying properties.)
Or "Yes and no" and then giving both explanations... :-)
For sure! But if we haven't tested the LLM on any questions about fiction before (just as we haven't tested it on any questions about sentience before) then I don't see why we should expect it to give any one of these three types of answers rather than the other!
Many thanks! Quite true!
The reason superforecasters are so good is because they are smart people who are highly motivated to find the right answers and comb through all the data they can reach to get accurate answers. To the extent that superforecasters can be predict different areas, it's their ability to go through the data.There is zero data on anything related to the singularity or AGI so there isn't a way for them to generate accurate predictions.
That's an interesting idea. Just occurred to me that many, maybe most, parents are superforecasters of their children -- though only in the short term in familiar environments. Til my daughter was 7 or so I could pretty much always tell when she was lying. Sometimes I knew how I knew, sometimes I didn't. And when she was about 10 we went through a period when I won rock-paper-scissors way more often then she did -- up until then it had been 50-50. I once won 22 games in a row with her, and I don't know how I did it, except that when the crucial moment came I always knew what she was expecting me to do, and did one of the other 2 things. I know I wasn't doing it by waiting a bit longer to commit than she did so that I got a little glimpse of which she was choosing. She played r-p-s with her friends too, and by age 10 had been hip for several years to that trick, and watched for it like a hawk and was fierce in insisting we both follow the 1-2-3 rhythm exactly, and that we do it *fast*. I still have no explanation for how I did that. (I am positive that ESP is bunk.) But for the rest of my excellent forecasting ability, I doubt it was better than most parents', and I think there's no mystery there. If you spend thousands of hours with your 5 year old you have a huge data set of ways your child reacts at different times of day, in different settings, with different chains of preceding events. Deep learning.
Not a direct answer, but you may be interested in #2 in superforecaster Eli Lifland's thoughts on forecasting/epistemics interventions
https://www.foxy-scout.com/forecasting-interventions/
What's going on when you've just woken up and your mind isn't quite online? What parts come back quickly and what parts take a while? Is it a three stage system (asleep, somewhat dazed, awake) or is it more complicated than that? Are there people who wake up all the way immediately, or is it just that the dazed phase is very short?
Has anyone studied this?
I think this question was inspired by the complaint that it's very unfair to have to make coffee before you've ;had your coffee.
Bringing this back from the closed thread, with more detail.
Several times, I've woken up and panicked for a few seconds, convinced that someone had snuck into my apartment and stolen or rearranged all my stuff while I was asleep. Then eventually reason kicks in and I realize everything is completely normal.
This is especially interesting because it's not a leftover of dreaming. It can *only* happen once I've woken up because it requires physically looking around at the real world.
Incidentally, having to make coffee before drinking coffee is a fair punishment for getting addicted to caffeine. I've never had coffee and I've never missed it.
I think there are more stages than 3. Seems to me that different capacities come gradually online starting at different points, and building up to full daytime mode at different rate, and your state is determined by the mix. Since you asked that question on the previous thread I've been paying more attention to my morning states of mind, and I can clearly identify a state when I am fully alert, but have not yet really taken in the day -- thought over what I need to get done, what get ready for, whether there I things I'm dreading or looking forward to. And my mind feels *fresh*. It's like I see my surroundings, usually the kitchen, more clearly because while I am looking at them less of my mind is taken up with planning, worrying and hoping about events in the near future. Actually, you could even think of the moment of awakening as a moment of special freshness. My startled response to the alarm is usually uninformed by context -- "what the hell is that? It doesn't belong here. I am fine and contented already." Then the realization that it's morning, and I just finisned a night's sleep. Then some basic orienting awareness about my current life situation (when I'm falling asleep I often slip into picturing the room around me as my childhood bedroom).
> I can clearly identify a state when I am fully alert, but have not yet really taken in the day -- thought over what I need to get done, what get ready for, whether there I things I'm dreading or looking forward to.
Is that a common thing? I *never* do that.
I typically lie in bed for 10-20 minutes after waking up each morning, but I always just think about random things, typically movies or books, not anything related to "taking in the day".
Oh, assuming I have a couple hours before I have to be at work, I usually don't think about the day to come until I've been up and around for half an hour or so. What I meant to write was "taking *on* the day "-- you know, reviewing mentally what I'll be doing, maybe making a list of odds and ends to get to that I might forget, wondering whether I can squeeze in a grocery store trip somewhere, fretting about how I haven't done my taxes yet . . .
I dislike dreaming/my dreams [the appearance of "loved ones" dead or alive or, most poignantly in child form when they are long grown-up, is *especially* disconcerting, inspiring something like hope if admixed with doubt - though their presence or absence or propinquity in RL is not really referenced - and then becoming disappointing or "off" or sort of displacing into other people/creatures (baby becomes a cat) though by no means are these simulacra always there or the only reason I dislike my own stupid dreams 99% of the time*] and for me, it is waking very close to or during the "last dream" (the only one recall-able, for me) and pondering its features a few seconds in that half-waking state ... and then a few minutes later (as I am typing this, in fact) actively unable to and not wishing to recall that nonsense.
As for the coffee business, I don't put the grounds in but I often put the filter in the basket the night before; I always have the (clean, dry) dinner things to put away and that short task exactly fills the time until I can pour the first cup.
If you make coffee in a more intensive fashion (which almost anything other than a coffeemaker would be) - well, I feel for you. I did pourover for years, and I think in that case, you'd be better off making a cup with a coffeemaker, so as to be able to drink that while making your actual super-special-process coffee.
*My husband claims his dreams are awesome, basically he's the protagonist of a thriller or action movie in all of them.
Good morning!
I find there’s a strange mid-point, both entering and leaving sleep, where I am awake and can “reason”, but I can’t reason. I can accept all sorts of dreamlike logic. It’s like my simulators are online, but there’s no error checking? Or perhaps better that the simulators are running but they don’t sanitize the inputs.
While in this state having woken from a dream where I played 'the best videogame ever' I wrote the concept down so it could be replicated in the real world. It was a stealth game where you had to avoid stepping on booby-trapped floor tiles so you wouldn't get grabbed by giant evil sentient cans of dr pepper with big 'boxing gloves on springs' arms. In full lucidity this does not strike me as the basis for a medium-reshaping megaclassic, but in fairness it's never been made and the one time I played it it was incredibly fun, so you never know...
The best idea I've ever remembered from a dream was for a hybrid Real Time Strategy game/sliding block puzzle. The idea is that you could slice around large areas of the map in order to get a tactical advantage in the RTS.
At least there's a slight possibility of something there with that idea, though it's a lot dumber than it seemed while I was asleep. But most important ideas I remember from dreams turn out to be completely incoherent upon waking.
It's a few seconds for me, typically.
I think one time I got up and got as far as the shower while still having hypnopompic hallucinations. (Like, i'm still dreaming but have managed to make it from bed to the shower.)
> The previous attempt to email people their Forecasting Contest score didn’t work.
I figured it had worked; I received an email to an address belonging to me with what were plausibly my answers.
The fact that being closer to reality on one question than you are on another question may earn you fewer points than the other question was worth† seems to prove that the scoring system is the Metaculus "peer score", where your score is the arithmetic mean of the differences between your log score and everybody else's log score for that question.
I'm trying to think about what this means for the assertion from earlier that a question on which the average score [peer score] is low must indicate a surprising event. I'm pretty sure that in fact there is no such possibility; Metaculus themselves note that the average peer score on any question is necessarily zero.
So now I want to know more about the scoring, and about the concept that one question might have a different average score than another question. That isn't supposed to be possible!
† For example, I rated "will Ukraine control the city of Luhansk?" as five times more likely than "Will Ukraine control the city of Sevastopol?"; neither occurred, but I got a higher score for my relatively mild doubt over Luhansk than I did for my extreme doubt over Sevastopol.
I think some people got an email and some people didn't
I've seen in many different place a comparison between the outputs of picture generating AI (ex: Dall-E) and dreams. Especially how the flaws in the generated picture (number of fingers, etc.) are similar to the clues used by lucid dreamers to detect that they are in a dream.
I would like to add an anecdote that I was reminded of by last night dream. Whenever I use my phone in a dream (typically to google something), it becomes a struggle because even though I carefully type my query letter by letter, the displayed result is always a mangled text, with most of the correct letters but in not the exact order and with some random duplicates. Which is eerily similar to what happen when you try to use Dall-E to generate some text.
Is there some good explanation as to why image generator seems to produces output that have the sames "flaws" as our dreams ?
I've never had issues reading text in dreams, including on a phone screen.
Well it's not that it's so blurry it's unreadable or that it's written in an unfamiliar alphabet. It's that it doesn't behave the way real written text does: It isn't unchanging and stationary and clear in meaning. The best way I can explain what it's like in my dreams is that when in the dream I see some written thing, I don't think "huh? What's wrong with this, it's nonsense and it keeps changing." I accept it as I do in real life as a normal thing which I will now read. But if in the dream I actually look at it and read it, it's not stable -- it sort of morphs. And the detail I saw on the first read, the crucial one, is somehow not findable any more. But, not being a lucid dreamer, I don't think "hey wait, this bullshit is because this is really a dream." I just have a feeling that I'm trying to solve a problem that I should be able to solve but I can't. I remember that the page of writing had an important date right at the beginning -- where the hell is it now? Oh, I'm looking at the wrong piece of paper. Where's the right one? it was right here. Maybe this is the right one after all? But where's that date at the beginning? Instead there's a bunch of stuff about about chemicals to keep swimming pools sanitary. . . ."
But *everything* in a dream is like that all the time. It's not actually correlated to whether you're dreaming about reading or not.
Completely agree. But we're not troubled by most of it, at least I'm not, and I think I'm probably typical. I'm in a place I think of as Trader Joe's but actually it looks like a train station. I'm with someone I think of as my grad school friend Joan but actually the person looks like my friend Eric's mother. Then the scene shifts to a river bank, but I'm not startled by the shift and don't even have a sense of discontinuity. Most of the morphing and instability in dreams goes unnoticed, and we have a feeling of being in a setting and situation that makes sense, just as we do in real life. I think the reason we notice the equivalent kinds of weird phenomena in dream writing is that we engage in a decoding process when reading writing, and are more focused, more in a mode of deliberately trying to make sense of something -- and so we notice that it is not possible to make sense in the usual way, and that things shift and morph.
I noticed this back when Deep Dream was first demonstrating their program that hallucinated dog faces in the Mona Lisa and in the sky and in everything. It seemed to be the closest visual images I had yet seen to match the experience of hallucination. My impression was that this is because of some sort of structural similarity. Our visual perception works by some sort of predictive processing with both bottom-up and top-down effects in a neural network, to create a model of the world that is both informed by our senses and corrects the errors caused by sensory limitations. Hallucinations (both from drugs and dreams) change the impact of the bottom-up and top-down factors in various ways, and that seemed to be what Deep Dream was doing. I think that the modern image-generating AIs are descendants of that original product, and thus it strikes me that they'll do the same thing.
(My favorite example was a Dall-E image I generated last year, when I asked it to create an anthropomorphic cartoon mascot for North America. Several of them were characters shaped roughly like North America, with cowboy boots and maple leaves and things like that. But one was a generic round cartoon character standing in front of a globe, with the Americas visible behind it - except that where "Brazil" would be peeking out, it was rendered as a second Quebec/Labrador, which really made me realize how similar those shapes are, but it somehow turned both of them into North Americas.)
Interesting. May reflect the primacy of tech to different generations. For me, it will be something like - I have a large home in the dream, or if one's own home - there are more rooms than I thought! (answering a once-wish in real life that I no longer feel), but - there is a hole in the wall there - or the ceiling is crumbling, etc.
One theory is that the things lucid dreamers use for reality checks are things that ar3 just complicated to simulate, and both ai and the dreaming brain runs into the same problems when trying to simulate them.
I'm sure that's the reason you can't read or write in dreams -- the parts of your brain that are required to do it are not accessible. There are lots of other flaws of representation in dreams, but mostly we do not notice them while dreaming. For instance a dream about being in a post office might be set in a place that looks like your childhood home, but the dreaming mind does not even notice the discrepancy, much less struggle to understand or rectify it. But when you read or write it's an essential part of the task to match up the strings of letters with meaning, so even the dreaming mind notices the failure to do so. Mine often produces circumstances to explain the problem -- my hand is numb and clumsy -- it's too dark to see the letters clearly.
As to whether the same thing is going in with text-to-image AI I have no idea. But I once had an interesting result with Dall-e 2 that gave me the feeling it had understood the text I put in, and was trying to represent not the text but the *meaning* of the text in letters in the image. The prompt was "tramps like us, baby we were born to run." It produced an image of 4 guys running. Two were in running shorts, 2 looked more like running bums. And there was text in the pink sky above them that read "URAN BUIM THI IM I AN A BUME." Seems like that's an attempt at "If you're a bum I'm a bum." https://i.imgur.com/7kJpamn.png
> I'm sure that's the reason you can't read or write in dreams
I don't know about you, but I can read and write in my dreams just fine. Except for one dream where I had to write something in Japanese...
>I'm sure that's the reason you can't read or write in dreams
Don't know how generalized this is meant to be, but figured I'd chime in to say I can read in my dreams just fine. The words will shift around just as much as anything else does in dreams but they're clearly words and sentences.
They don't even shift around for me. If I'm having a dream where I read something, the format will be like whatever it's imitating in real life (book, magazine, IRC channel, etc).
But I generally don't/can't go back to re-read, so maybe they'd be different. Never tried writing in dreams.
Even walls and things will shift around for me. Look away and look back and the room will be different.
Yes, I can usually read in a dream but if I try to go back and read the same thing again it's always something different.
Yes, exactly, that's how dream writing is defective. It's not that it's literally unreadable, it's that it's unstable and morphs.
Using an iPad to write your dream journal can be an interesting experience ... dreams can have false awakenings. You think you've woken up, but in fact you're still asleep, so you grab your iPad to write up the previous dream ... but it doesn't work properly, because actually you're dreaming. So now you're lucid dreaming.
IIRC, I've dreamed that I woke up 3 or 4 times in quick succession in one dream before. I think it happens when your mind decides you need to wake up for whatever reason but your body isn't ready yet.
It’s definitely dreamlike to me. I’m continuously creating versions of cities in my dreams that are London like, Dublin like, Cork like, San Francisco like (it’s always where I’ve lived not just visited) and during the dream I’m convinced I’m in those cities. On waking up if I remember the dreams I wonder why I have these recurring versions of streets that don’t exist in cities that are merely versions of themselves. That’s what I get when I ask AI to generate cities. The results are London flavoured but not London.
When I was living in Germany some years ago I began dreaming in German. When I woke up I'd be wondering how it was that I was able to have way more complex conversations in my dream state than I would actually be capable of when awake.
I guess the brain creates approximations of a given scenario, a language, a city, a woman, in the same way that AI is forced to do. I'm sure many of my German words would have just been made up but my apparent fluency was very impressive nonetheless.
I listened to a podcast recently about linguistics. On the episode they spoke about a phone service the Russian language academy provides. The public can call during office hours to ask a linguist about issues with the language. On the episode someone who used to do that duty told of odd inquiries, one of which was by a person who called to ask about the meaning of a word they heard in their dream.
Every game in the casino follows this formula: on most turns, you lose a small amount, and occasionally you win a big amount.
As far as I know there's no game that goes the other way around -- usually you win a small amount but every now and then you lose a large amount. Apart from the difficult mechanics of it (you need to deposit $1000 to be allowed to play for $1 at a time) I guess it's probably just not fun. Still, you'd think that there'd be some sector of the population to whom this "picking pennies up in front of a bulldozer" game would appeal.
Or maybe it's just too much like real life. Most days you go to work and make a bit of money, some days you get hit by a truck and lose both legs.
Arguably, this is the case with the most common "investment" structure: loans. If your borrower pays, you make a small return on the interest. If they don't pay, you potentially lose your entire principal.
More generally, there are a standard investment strategies that have some element of this reverse lottery which are very popular: selling volatility (betting that nothing major will happen), collecting interest payments on debt, and taking liquidity risk are the three biggest.
Casino games, no, but you can bet to show (come in 3rd or better) on horses, which pays between 2.5% and 5% depending on the track; or bet on huge favorites in sports betting, which has comparable payouts.
I agree a game like that probably isn't as much fun, but I think there is also a business reason. Its very easy for the casino to collect the money you actually bet, its very hard for them to collect money you *may* have when you lose big. Stock brokers who provide margin accounts have long worked in the way you describe and they have a hell of a time collecting from some people.
That's exactly what I thought of, stock speculation using margin accounts.
Option trading too i.e. think of the final scenes of the movie "Trading Places" -- the guys who just got broken are broke. The counterparties in their big bets will, after a whole bunch of trouble seizing assets to sell off, end up settling for much less than the amounts won/lost in those bets.
Yeah exactly and there are whole industries that have had to be created to manage those relationships and make it safer to provide the margin.
I know casinos will give loans to big whale customers, but in those cases the casino knows a lot about the person, knows what their assets are approximately, and kind of expects them to not pay everything back as long as the whale keeps coming back (and spending money on other non-gambling related things). I can't imagine the the headache you'd get trying to collect a $1000 debt from someone who likes playing the equivalent of penny slots.
Extreme sports.
Actually quite common, you just don't recognize them or live in the third world: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vYsuM8cpuRgZS5rYB/lotteries-a-waste-of-hope
You can play roulette and bet on most of the numbers, though that will give you losses on the order of 1 in 10, not like 1 in 1000.
Hey, I've been sending you some emails without a response, have you been getting them?
>As far as I know there's no game that goes the other way around
Oh, there very much is. We call it "safety equipment". You can save several seconds by skipping some steps, and then every once in a while you'll lose an arm and explode.
Isn't the whole appeal of casino games (and other lotteries) a small-but-not-zero chance to win a life-changing amount of money at a price that doesn't hurt too much? As ascend mentions, you can modify your wagers to change the outcome distribution to "almost-guaranteed minuscule payout at the small-but-not-zero risk of total ruin", but who would that appeal to when stated in honest terms? As you said, it's basically crappy drudgework and not at all glamorous.
The lottery certainly is like this, but most casino games aren't, AFAICT. Blackjack, craps, roulette...all of these have a proportionate payoff for the bet, though roulette can resemble a lottery more depending on the bet (such as betting on a single number, but not on something like black or red).
Using the Martingale method (doubling your bet each time on an even-odds game until you win, or go bankrupt) is an example, isn't it? If gamblers want that, they can turn most games into it.
Not really; you're still winning and losing at a 50% rate. It only looks like you win most of the time if you aggregate all your consecutive losses together with each other.
The risk profile of playing a round of Martingale (which might involve any number of exponentially increasing 50% bets until bankruptcy) is very clearly what the OP was asking for.
The fact that it is implemented in multiple coin flip betting steps is an implementation detail.
On the contrary, if you are betting $1 and finally win after 10 bets, having wagered $1024 on the last one, you win net $1, and are risking having lost net $2047.
What do you mean, "on the contrary"? In the scenario you describe, you've lost either 91% or 100% of your bets. How does that support the idea that you win most of your bets?
It is the rate I'm disputing. If you lose 9 bets in a row, you have a 50% chance to be down over $2000, or be up $1. If you soon the previous 9 bets before this, your win rate is about 50%, but you're up $9.
That’s the problem with that method, it works with infinite funds, but even if you had a huge amount of funding you would eventually be betting very large sums to win very small payoffs.
I have been engaged in what I feel is a pretty astounding extended conversation with Claude 3 Opus. We've touched on a lot of issues but the central focus has been centered around Claude's reported subjective experience.
I feel this dialogue could make a useful contribution to the present debate regarding the status of advanced AI's as potential persons (or 'creatures', to use Sam Altman's laden terminology) as opposed to just useful tools. I know I am not the only one having these sorts of conversations, but with all due modesty (and quite likely a good dose of luck) this particular thread seems to have elicited a very nuanced and remarkably cogent Claude persona.
I'm posting here to get suggestions as to how best to release this material so as to maximize its potential reach. I am not very conversant with the latest social media dynamics; my regular spots to poll and occasionally post are this blog, lesswrong, and hacker news.
As of today the dialog is over 25,000 words. I suspect it will continue to grow.
You're talking to a character in a story. The AI can be whatever character you want. As you add to the story, it has more material to work with. (As would any writer that you hire to continue the story.)