Can anyone recommend CD releases of John Lewis piano solos?
I've found new Darrell Scott and Tim O'Brien, and Ralph Towner -- which had to come from Germany -- but I need an hour or so of John Lewis noodling around to play when I drive. I have only Marian McPartland's interview and one CD. Any ideas? I have plenty of MJQ.
I know this has been asked many times across the internet over the years, but I figured there's at least a chance that a Netflix employee who might know something reads this.
Why on earth does Netflix always only recommend the same 20 shows forever *most of which you have already watched*? Why do they recommend things you've already watched at all? Given this is the most obvious possible improvement to recommendations and trivial to implement, they must be doing it on purpose, but WHY?!?!
Some people have suggested that they recommend things you've already watched in order to cover up the lack of content, but even now they still have vastly more content than they show on the homepage, and while it may not be perfectly matched, anything would be better than just making the home page a static list of shows you've already watched. Doing this makes Netflix look *more* like a ghost town rather than less. So what gives?
I don't know any particular reason, but many people enjoy watching shows that they've watched before. Sometimes people share a user profile and in that case it makes sense to recommend that way, though that might be kinda rare.
If Netflix is trying to hook me into a show, it would have better luck recommending a show I loved 5 years ago than a show I haven't seen.
They had to save face because Israelis are completely out of control and bombing embassies. Israelis have been creating new normals in the past six months. The cat is out of the bag and the world will be following suit. "A light unto nations" eh
Somehow, somehow this means my country has to get dragged into all of it. We have to spend our money and reputation on the Israelis because reasons. Meanwhile https://x.com/ryangrim/status/1779496494434812323
There is precedent to this in Saddam's attacks in the 1990s, but in the 1990s Israel's ruling party was more committed to peace and Saddam didn't shoot Scuds in waves like this. Saddam was embroiled in vastly bigger conflicts than he could ever chew, unlike Iran which attacks US bases with impunity and has just took an Israeli owned ship off the coast of UAE earlier today.
Despite Arabic-speaking media making a substantially big deal out of this, English-speaking Haaretz reports the vast majority of cruise missiles intercepted and the only damage done is someone lightly wounded and a military base in Negev lightly damaged. Perhaps the biggest indication that this attack isn't as scary as some sources would want audiences to believe, is that the open-air anti-Netanyahu protests in Tel Aviv hasn't stopped yet.
But that's just the first wave, the slow-moving drones will arrive after launch by about 5 to 6 hours, some speculate that they will synchronize with faster moving later-wave cruise missiles timed so that they arrive after the drone exhaust the Israeli air defense. To say nothing of an opportunistic Hezbollah or Hamas barrage in the chaos.
I think it's important to note that that ship is "Israeli-owned" meaning "owned by an Israeli civilian". Not owned by the Israeli government, or the Israeli military, etc.
Yeah, that's not ideal. On the other hand, that civilian is a billionaire, which means he's pretty unsympathetic to begin with, before we even factor in his relationships and contacts with the scum ruling Israel.
I would support victimless Houthi/Iranian/other takeover of Israeli ships, owned by civilians or otherwise, everywhere in the Indian and the Pacific oceans. My only problem is that whatever money is made by those captures eventually goes into the coffers of scum, different scum than Likud, yes, but scum nonetheless. It's still a pressure tool on Israel, I wish the ones exercising it were a bit more eager to pretend they're the good guys.
Yeah, when I say "Israeli civilian", some people care about the word "civilian" and some people care about the word "Israeli."
Not much different than, say, Japanese interment in America. To some, these were Japanese civilians and thus should be treated like other civilians. To others, they were Japanese civilians and should be treated like Japanese soldiers.
So that's why it's "victimless" to take property from Israeli civilians. Or why you'd omit the word "civilian" in the first place. Once you know their nationality, what else do you need to know?
Your comparison is faulty. Property is not like Freedom. The right to Freedom is a fundamental human right that very few circumstances would persuade me to want to see innocent people deprived of. Property is very different. The Israeli state destroyed untold billions in property of Gazans, I don't see why people on the side of Gaza can't do the same. If anything, not killing any Israelis while doing it makes them win this tournament by at least 20000 to 0 ahead of Israel. That's no mean feat.
> To other, they were Japanese civilians and should be treated like Japanese soldiers.
You know who's treating civilians like soldiers and detaining them in facilities so torture-like that they die in captivity?
No points for guessing.
> Or why you'd omit the word "civilian" in the first place.
That wasn't intentional to begin with.
> that's why it's "victimless" to take property from Israeli civilians.
The civilian owning a Yacht is no ordinary civilian, and he/she can regain his/her property when the democratically elected state that he/she votes for learns to behave like a non-genocidal superorganism.
What I'm saying - by the way - is not new at all. Not One Bit. That's exactly what happened to every single Russian civilian with money anywhere a Western/Nato government could reach, at the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
At best, you're just describing revenge. The Israeli government kills/steals/etc. from civilians and thus other countries can do the same to Israeli civilians. It's not really a moral framework at all.
It's a way to excuse things that you know are wrong. You know it's wrong to go around looking at people's passports and taking their property if they were born in the wrong country. There's no way you'd support that if it was targeting people on your side.
The only reason that you support it targeting people on my side is as revenge. That's why we have a concept of revenge - to allow us to do things that we know are wrong.
But you can't seriously tell me that if tomorrow the Israelis took every piece of property from the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, you'd shrug and say "Ehh, property is not like freedom. They can regain their property when they [insert criteria for government here]." You understand why that'd be wrong.
I think there is a growing case to be made that the Israeli public is more culpable and participating in the murdering of Palestinian civilians than the average German during the holocaust was.
I had the unfortunate experience of watching a self-identified "Israeli special ops" man as a guest in a Fox interview a couple of hours earlier today, amidst all the posturing and the whining and the hand wringing at Iran he claimed that Israel killed 15K terrorists in total.
That figure is likely exaggerated. Israeli media (Haaretz and Times of Israel, in English editions) were reporting 13K just days ago, and when that number was 12K in mid February Hamas itself denied it and said only 6K were dead. Let's take a very generous "mean" and say that 10K combatant in this war has died.
That means that 23000 civilians, a square 1% of Gazan residents, has died to date, in 6 months. At this rate, all of Gaza - 2.3 million individuals - would be annihilated in 50 years, less than a 1/8 of the 408-years genocide that Europeans annihilated 95% (7.75 million) of Native Americans in.
I disagree with the specific point Glenn wants to make, as a matter of actual fact. But what's happening in Gaza is no ordinary war.
I'm fine with the way you're calculating combatant fatalities and I'm glad we're excluding them from the frequently cited figure of 33k dead, which includes both civilians (who should never die in war) and combatants (who die in every war).
To the point about this being "no ordinary war", that's true, but pretty easily explained. Most wars generate huge numbers of internally displaced people, moderate numbers of refugees, and low numbers of deaths.
Take the war in Sudan - 6 million internally displaced, 2 million refugees, at least 5,000 civilians killed.
In Gaza, there have been almost zero refugees. In fact, the UN High Commissioner on Refugees has come out *against* any civilians leaving this war zone. To my knowledge, that's a world first.
Predictably, if you don't let civilians flee violence, they will be caught up in the violence. That's precisely why we have a UN High Commissioner on Refugees - to help get people away from violence and towards safety.
Sadly, we're seeing what happens when people are categorically refused the ability to seek safety. It turns out, lots of civilians die.
How much % of the blame does Israel, which famously exploits the civilian tendency to flee combat zones and violence spots in every war it entered including - most infamously - the very war that birthed it, take for the fact that people don't want to displace Gazans again?
Before you calculate, make sure your output is a function of the input that is the fact that Israelis since the start of the war repeatedly declaring that Gaza must be resettled, culminating in a conference in late January in Jerusalem that 8 key ministers in the government including the Security Minister and the Finance Minister attended and were filmed dancing at.
So we have two conflicting desires - one is that Gazans not be killed, the other is that Gazans not be displaced. Becoming a refugee means you (likely) won't be killed, but increases the chances that you'll be displaced.
In every other conflict on Earth, we prefer the living civilians to the dead civilians with their graves in the right spot.
That's why we have a High Commissioner on Refugees, and not a High Commissioner on Keeping Civilians Put.
I'd infinitely prefer having every Palestinian civilian resurrected and living in Cairo or Osaka or New York to having them be dead in Gaza. How about you?
Do you really think it's worse for a Palestinian to be a refugee and live, than to stay in Palestine and die?
There is no doubt that if you leave me with admin access to Physics for an hour, and for some reason Physics only allows the Palestinians to **either** stay alive **or** stay in their ancestral homeland. I will very much choose them being alive every minute of this hour, whatever their own delusional religion might say, whatever their own delusional cousins speaking the same language might say.
Consider that Israel knows this. Israel also wants all of Mandatory Palestine to itself. So one very simple thing they could do is to exploit this, which is exactly what it did in 1948. Kill a few hundreds, rape a few tens, and 750K flee. Forever. Centuries old dreams, wiped. A society hollowed and collapsed. That's how Israel was formed. Humans might forget the moment of their birth, states never do. There is a lesson which is very tempting, if you're the wrong sort of person: How far can you push the Arabs? Rinse and repeat in Jerusalem? Rinse and repeat in Gaza? Rinse and repeat to the remnants of the Arabs in Israel? Rinse and repeat in the Western Bank of Jordan? Rinse and repeat in Southern Lebanon? Rinse and repeat in southern Syria? Assuming no morality and negative compassion, how far will this road take you?
Consider that the conflict between keeping Gazans alive and keeping them on their land is far from a natural property of Logic or Physics, but in a very large part a manufactured problem for a very precise and deliberate purpose.
Consider that the modern world is parceled into nation states that doesn't treat the stateless very well. This is the actual world we live in and which we have to calculate based on even if we hated it.
Your Book Review: Consciousness And The Brain: A review of Stanislas Dehaene's book "Consciousness and the Brain", which explores the cognitive neuroscience of consciousness. The book discusses the differences between conscious and unconscious processing, the neural signatures of consciousness, and theories of consciousness such as the Global Neuronal Workspace.
Summary: Dehaene's book delves into the neuroscience of consciousness, distinguishing between conscious and unconscious processes in the brain. He proposes that conscious perception occurs when information is globally broadcast and processed by multiple brain regions, leading to reportability and self-monitoring. Unconscious processing, on the other hand, is more localized and cannot be reported or used for complex tasks requiring working memory. Dehaene discusses various theories of consciousness, such as the Global Neuronal Workspace, Integrated Information Theory, and the Multiple Drafts Model, and presents evidence from experiments using techniques like masking and neuroimaging. The book also touches on the philosophical implications of the research, such as the hard problem of consciousness and the prospect of machine consciousness.
a) How does Dehaene's Global Neuronal Workspace theory account for the differences between conscious and unconscious processing? What are the key neural signatures of conscious perception according to this theory?
b) Dehaene argues that consciousness is necessary for tasks requiring working memory, such as complex reasoning and decision-making. What are the implications of this view for our understanding of human cognition and the potential for machine consciousness?
c) The book suggests that many animals, particularly mammals, are likely to be conscious in ways similar to humans. What are the ethical implications of this view? How should it inform our treatment of animals and our understanding of their cognitive and emotional lives?
The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority by Nassim Nicholas Taleb: An essay discussing how a small, intolerant minority can disproportionately influence and dictate the choices and behaviors of the majority in various domains, such as religion, politics, and markets.
a) In what ways does the "minority rule" described by Taleb differ from the traditional understanding of democratic decision-making? What are the implications of this rule for the functioning of societies and institutions?
b) Taleb provides several examples of how the preferences of a small, intolerant minority can determine the options available to the majority, such as in the case of Kosher food or allergen-free environments. Can you think of other examples where this dynamic plays out, either in your personal life or in the broader society?
c) How might the "minority rule" contribute to the polarization and gridlock in contemporary politics? What strategies, if any, could be employed to mitigate the negative effects of this dynamic while still respecting individual rights and preferences?
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.
From what I've seen, these kinds of planned cities tend to work in two scenarios: 1) it's a new capital (and thus the government can throw a huge amount of money at the city, regardless of return on investment) or 2) it's a suburb for an existing city.
Building a new city from scratch is really, really hard. So my reaction is that this is probably a huge waste of money, but I hope they prove me wrong and beat the odds.
Hamas are Palestinians; Palestinians overwhelmingly support Hamas's October 7 attack on Israel, and celebrated it. They're the same people who breathlessly complain about Israel's response to the attack nightly on the news.
If Gaza refugees move to a UAE city in Egypt, I'm sure the IDF will screen them for combatants on the way out. But Jordan and Egypt have long had a distaste for terrorists.
"For their study, Spanish researchers recruited 361 adults with an average age of 44 years old. More than two-thirds (251) were women. Participants were separated into two classes based on a measurement called the “obesity index”: low level of obesity or high level of obesity.
While many studies on obesity rely on body mass index or BMI alone, the investigators took a multifaceted approach with their obesity index. The obesity index is not a standardized gauge for obesity but one that includes three variables: BMI, fat mass percentage, and waist circumference.
...They looked at metagenomic data, which is genetic material from a collection of microorganisms in a sample — in this case, stool samples. In addition, they looked at metabolomic data to analyze small molecules known as metabolites produced during cellular metabolism.
These two types of data, when analyzed in concert, can give a very precise picture of gut health and metabolism.
Using all of this data, researchers profiled some of the specific strains of bacteria found in the guts of the participants.
The researchers then looked at the microbiome for people classified as “high” on the obesity index compared to those classified as “low” on the index.
They found certain bacteria were linked with obesity risk, but that it was different for men versus women.
In the study, the gut microbiome of both men and women who ranked high on the obesity index is characterized by a lack of a potentially protective bacteria known as Christensenella minuta.
Interestingly, women and men who were obese had distinct gut microbiota profiles from one another. In men, two other forms of bacteria associated with obesity were prolific: Parabacteroides helcogenes and Campylobacter canadensis.
“Different microbes can be protective or they can increase risk for obesity. The way that they do that is by stimulating different aspects of our metabolic response and of our immune response…There are microbes such as E. coli that have been shown to increase risk of obesity because they’re known to be pro-inflammatory,” Mariana X. Byndloss, DVM, PhD, the Co-director of the Vanderbilt Microbiome Innovation Center at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, told Healthline. She wasn’t affiliated with the research.
In the study the bacterium species Prevotella micans, Prevotella brevis, and Prevotella sacharolitica were associated with obesity in women but not in men."
I have no idea if this is a wild goose chase or not, but the emerging research on obesity is rather cold comfort for me; at least it helps me understand "how is it that my sister, born of the same parents and raised in the same environment, is thin and was thin all her life, while I am fat and was fat all my life?" as contributory factors besides "It's because you're stupid, lazy, and greedy and sit around stuffing your face with junk food 24/7, calories in = calories out, exercise, laws of thermodynamics, metabolism works the same for everyone, you dumb tub of lard".
But how can that coincide with your belief in free will? Why can't you just choose to eat less? Just because your metabolism is different doesn't mean you're going to instantly drop dead from a calorie deficiency. Obviously you are physically capable of losing weight without dying. So what's stopping you?
Does a belief in free will make it impossible for biology to intervene in any way?
Do you believe that, for example, drunk people can simply willpower their way through the biological effects of alcohol? Obviously they're physically capable of turning a steering wheel, so why don't drunk drivers simply not crash their cars?
A while back, Scott raises an eyebrows at the idea of lesbians who have extra with men..
Meanwhile, over in the U.K. we have the Cass report on treatment of trans kids ... and I'm getting the impression that certain political factions want to say "you're not trans, you're just a lesbian". Which, in the case of afab people who are masculin identified but attracted to men, would make them lesbians who have sex with men...
Just so you know, "afab" isn't a thing. Claiming that newborn babies are "assigned" a sex makes about as much sense as claiming they are "assigned" an eye color.
It means, precisely, what the doctor write on the birth certificate. In particular, in the case of intersex persons, it is most definitely not necessarly the same as chromosomal sex. If what you're measuring is what's on the birth certificate, that what your measuring
Imagine claiming that something is not a thing, then, when explained that it is, immediately switching to a accusing *other people* of doing motte-and-bailey.
Just because somewhat "explains that it is" doesn't mean it's real. I could "explain" all about Dread Cthul'hu lying dreaming at the bottom of the sea; that doesn't make Dread Cthul'hu an actual thing.
Speaking of which, "afab" continues to not be a thing.
Your counterexample would be more persuasive if it was a real thing. The fact that you need to invent an imaginary scenario means that in actual reality, the letter that the doctor wrote on a form is very good correlate towards whether a person was raised and lived first part of their life as a man or as a woman. Which is not at all a question of biological sex, but of social construct of gender and this is what everyone is actually interested in.
When I say something like "As AMAB I have such and such experience" I'm being more accurate than saying "As an XY-person I have such and such experience" because being assigned male is more correlated with such experience than having XY chromosomes. Also I've actually seen my birth certeficate but have never checked my chromosomes. It's quite likely that I indeed have XY chromosomes. But I can't be as certain as with the certificate that I've seen.
"certain political factions want to say "you're not trans, you're just a lesbian"
I'm not a political faction, but I am very inclined to say for some of them "You're not a lesbian and you're not trans, you're a straight guy with a fetish" when it comes to the transbians versus lesbians fight over "how can you reject me based on 'you have a penis and I'm not attracted to people with a penis', you bigot".
More seriously: is transness just about sexual preference? Particularly, is it just about sexual preference in the afab people who form a growing portion of trans patients? I think there gotta be more to it.
Why wouldn't a woman who is attracted to other women... just have sexual relationships with women? Why would the idea to seriously and irreversibly modify her body even come to her mind just in order to date other women which she can already perfectly do?
One can imagine a world where no one knows that homosexuality is a thing, but transgenderness is a well established phenomena. Or a world where trans people are universally supported and celebrated, while lesbians are an extremely oppressed minority. There, indeed, would be reasons for geniune lesbians to go through transition.
But our world is very different! Homosexuality is more acknowledged and respected phenomena that transgenderness. Trans people are generally more looked down upon than lesbians. So one has to believe that trans people are very stupid to think that they are going through gender transition just for the sake of sexual preference.
The original comment seems to be trying to argue as follows:
(1) Some people deny transness and claim that 'you are not trans (men), you are lesbian (women)' in regard to trans men who identify as straight men who are attracted to women
(2) This labels *all* trans people, be they trans women or trans men, as lesbians because of being trans
(3) Thus a trans man who is attracted to men is a lesbian (by virtue of being trans, not by virtue of sexual orientation)
(4) This then makes them a lesbian who sleeps with men
It's a very elaborate set-up for a joke, that doesn't quite come off
Here, I'm referring to people assigned female at birth, but male identified
U.K. schools guidance says to consider the possibility they might be lesbians
... but, a considerable portions of this group are asexual, or in relationship with a guy
.. who, therefore, are not lesbian by previous reasonable definition of what a lesbian is
.. but, hey, U.K. schools and nhs therapists are going to insist they're lesbians, not trans, despite them not being attracted to females
.. hence U.K. guidance to schools etc appears to be creating a class of person who is attracted to men, but is officially, in the eyes of their school and their therapist, a lesbian
Can you refer me to the actual guidance document or text so I can read it and not be arguing with you over second-hand accounts?
I think if you're in a relationship with a boy and identifying as male they won't take you as being lesbian, but neither would they say you must be trans. You could be non-gender conforming to notions of femininity. Or a butch lesbian, that too is a possibility. Or even bi.
This is what I've got so far, and while it's very cautious and clearly in response to parents' concerns, there's nothing there that says "tell them they're lesbians":
"In England, children can’t obtain a Gender Recognition Certificate so their legal sex will always be the same as their biological sex. There is also no general duty that says schools and colleges must support a child to take steps that are part of ‘social transition’ – such as agreeing to change their name or pronouns.
This guidance is clear that schools and colleges have a duty to safeguard and promote the welfare of all children, which means that a cautious approach should be taken when responding to requests to social transition.
Schools and colleges should create an environment that is respectful of all beliefs. This means no one should be expected to use preferred pronouns and they should not be sanctioned for making honest mistakes. In all cases, bullying must not be tolerated.
While the guidance is there to help teachers, parents’ views should be at the centre of every decision schools make about their child.
This is draft guidance for consultation and we would like to encourage schools, colleges, parents and the sector to share their feedback. The consultation will run for 12 weeks.
What does it mean for a child who asks to socially transition at school or college?
Teachers shouldn’t initiate or suggest to a child that they socially transition – they should begin to consider a request if a student has asked to do so.
If a child does ask to socially transition, for example, to use a pronoun that is different to their biological sex, then teachers shouldn’t automatically agree.
Parents have a right to know and teachers should discuss the child’s request with their parents or guardian and take into account their views, except in exceptional circumstances where this risks significant harm to the child.
They should also consider whether it’s in their best interest, considering the wider context, including whether it will have an impact on the wider school, and allow a good amount of time to think before rushing into a decision.
What about single-sex spaces like toilets and changing rooms?
It’s important that single-sex spaces such as toilets, showers and changing rooms, remain single-sex, and schools should continue to ensure children aged 11 or older should not be made to get changed or wash in front of children of the opposite sex.
Schools and colleges should also not allow children to share a room overnight with those of the opposite sex.
Where possible, schools and colleges should consider providing alternative facilities for gender questioning children who aren’t comfortable using the single-sex areas designated for their biological sex.
These alternative facilities, however, should never undermine the single-sex facilities, for example a boy should never be allowed to go into a girls toilet, or vice versa."
"This is non-statutory guidance from the Department for Education. Its focus is to provide practical advice, which we expect schools and colleges to follow to help them make decisions regarding children who are questioning their gender. Schools and colleges should make decisions to ensure that everyone is kept safe and treated with respect and understanding, within an environment that protects the rights of children fairly."
So it's non-statutory, meaning that if a school decides to do so, it can go "Okay Susie, you are now Johnny!" despite what the Department advises.
Okay, Ctrl+F for "lesbian" gets me this:
"Is there an interaction with a child’s sexual orientation? Schools and colleges should note that the Cass Review ‘heard from young lesbians who felt pressured to identify as transgender male, and conversely transgender males who felt pressured to come out as lesbian rather than transgender’. Where a child discloses that they are also questioning or exploring their sexual orientation, schools should make clear that they are under no pressure to reach a particular outcome."
So, you Cheeky Charlie you, the schools are *not* being told "Tell 'em they're really lesbian", they're being told "don't jump to 'you must be this or that' immediately".
I don't know where you got your view on what was being said, but I'm sure organisations like Mermaids (which I consider to have been steered by an absolute fruitcake raving parent to 'all trans all the time immediately now now now') would put the worst possible interpretation out there, e.g. "Schools are being told to force transgender male pupils to identify as lesbians" or the likes, for their own propaganda purposes.
Were you taught any astronomy in K-12? I don't remember, I think I picked up most of my astronomy from science fiction, but astronomy might have been included in other science courses.
Please include when you were in school, at least the decade, and where. If you were in the US, let me know the state or region.
I've seen a claim that astronomy isn't taught in K-12 in the US because it conflicts with young earth creationism, but I have no idea whether this is true. I would have guessed that if it isn't taught, it would be just because they didn't get around to it.
So I'm taking this little survey. I realize ACX isn't a random sample, but I started the survey on Facebook, and ACX is at least generally younger and more geographically varied.
The Facebook results so far is that people were mostly taught astronomy in school.
I do think that if schools were dropping astronomy, I'd have heard of it, but maybe some schools never had it.
I think news stories have been pretty good about what happened, at least at the level of saying the moon got in front of the sun.
Perhaps the people who didn't know what was happening were picked by reporters. Perhaps astronomy, even on the minimal level, is a blur for a lot of people so they don't pay attention.
In the 90s (Southern US), I took an astronomy class in middle school as an elective. I'm pretty sure the material wasn't covered in the standard science classes. (But certainly the basics like the number of pizzas my very elegant mother served us were covered.)
The actual young-earth-creationist I knew in grade school, way back when, was quite clear that the universe looked to be a lot older, because it was created that way. Dinosaur fossils and all. But they were at least as smart as I was, and also the child of a fundamentalist preacher, so their beliefs might not be representative.
The astronomy you'd get in grade school would just be planets and moons and orbits, and wouldn't conflict with young-earth creationism. I vaguely recall having Earth Science in 9th grade (in a very small town in the midwest) and hearing that the Earth was 4 billion years old, but I was a science-obsessed kid, so I'd probably read that a dozen times before then.
It actually takes some thought to work out why astronomy conflicts with a young-Earth creationist worldview, and I doubt many people have bothered. Those inclined to die on some related hill prefer dying on keeping the high school biology teacher from mentioning evolution.
There are also a bunch of other things that conflict with it (how far back does Egyptian history go?), but again, hardly anyone thinks that hard about the matter.
Not American, my primary school education (4 to 12 years of age) did not include astronomy as such, but as part of the general science/nature studies classes (if I'm remembering correctly all the way back then).
Secondary school education (12-17 years of age) would have included that as part of physics classes. Certainly was nothing to do with young earth creationism, even though I was taught by nuns all my school life, and I'm old enough to be able to remember the moon landing when I was a young child so I would have had some idea of "the moon goes around the earth" for that 😀
I would venture that wherever you read that, it was perhaps one particular example of some school or class that then got generalised out to "all them Bible-basher rednecks deny SCIENCE!!!! and use their influence, backed up by the nefarious Republican Party who want to keep the populace ignorant and superstitious for their own benefit, to prevent SCIENCE!!!! being taught in schools". Probably some offshoot of the whole 'creationism in schools' fight. Never heard that bit about astronomy before, though, they usually stick to evolution as the casus belli.
"I think news stories have been pretty good about what happened, at least at the level of saying the moon got in front of the sun."
Speaking of that, another instance of a politician getting science wrong happened recently and is being covered by (mostly) the right-wing press because, to quote Sky News Australia, it's another instance of "a lefty losing it galactically":
"The former top Democrat on the House Science Committee’s space subcommittee badly botched elementary lunar facts while speaking during the gathering at Booker T. Washington High School in Houston.
“You’ve heard the word ‘full moon.’ Sometimes you need to take the opportunity just to come out and see a full moon is that complete rounded circle, which is made up mostly of gases,” Jackson Lee, 74, told teenage pupils who gathered on a sports field ahead of the rare celestial event.
“And that’s why the question is why or how could we as humans live on the moon? Are the gases such that we could do that?” the congresswoman said.
“The sun is a mighty powerful heat, but it’s almost impossible to go near the sun. The moon is more manageable.”
I'm not mocking Texas Democrats for this (though it is tempting to have a jibe at the 'party of reason and science'), after all as pointed out on here, our own former Minister for Health thought Covid-19 was so named because there had been 18 previous Covids.
My public elementary school had a planetarium. This was not common. When they rebuilt the school there was a big campaign to save the planetarium and have it reinstalled in the new building.
We went to the planetarium at least a few times a year. I remember learning about constellations and how meteors caused craters and stuff like that. I believe the "teachers" were parents who volunteered to come in and had some kind of experience/education in astronomy related things.
Otherwise, we learned astronomy within other science curriculum.
My educational background is non-typical for the U.S. However, I had a good idea of Lunar Eclipse by the time I was about 12 years old, and likely had a similar understanding of Solar Eclipses within a couple of years.
My parents taught me at home for most of my elementary/secondary education, and they used science textbooks published by a BIblical-literalist (or at least, Young Earth Creationist friendly) private college.
My parents also were heavy readers. For part of my life, they liked to read biographies of important men and women from history as evening entertainment for the family.
Both sources of info spend a lot of time discussing astronomy. The science textbook had a section on how Galileo Galilei, Tycho Brahe, and Johannes Kepler together revolutionized astronomy and the model of the Solar System.
Among the biographies were stories of the life of Kepler, as well as the life of Isaac Newton. (The biography of Kepler included some mention of the effects of the Gregorian calendar reform on daily life, as well as the time Kepler tried to intervene to save his mother from accusations of witchcraft. It also tried to provide an explanation for the fact that Kepler published horoscope-style predictions based on his study of the stars. The biography of Newton included his interactions with other members of the Royal Society, his role as Chief of the Mint, and the fact that he spent a lot of time and effort writing commentaries on the Apocalyptic sections of the Bible. Both biographies presented the men as Heroes of Science.)
It took me a while to figure out that both sets of stories may have been motivated by opposition to the historical influence of the Catholic church, as much as to teaching the history of Science. I can't tell if the authors had that impact in mind specifically, but I noticed that the English-speaking world has lots of assumptions about Science escaping the grip of the organized Catholic Church, alongside assumptions about Protestant reformers escaping the grip of Papal error. It's not that the biographies were wrong, but that they told stories which supported those assumptions.
To add another layer to this: I was also an airplane-and-spaceship nerd for a time, so I read lots of stories-for-kids about the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo missions, Skylab, and the Space Shuttle. I also paged through some books published by National Geographic which had lots of detail about astronomy, planets, the solar system... and even a cute diagram of how Eratosthenes calculated the approximate size of the Earth. (This last detail led to an early case of me doubting a piece of history my parents told me. They both said that Columbus sailed in 1492 to prove the Earth was round. But Eratosthenes apparently knew that sometime before the birth of Christ, and it was taught by Aristotle and Ptolemy.)
So I don't know which source included eclipses, but I know that I was aware of them before I ever had a chance to observe one.
For reference, I was six years old when the Shuttle Challenger exploded on takeoff, and was a college student when the Shuttle Columbia disintegrated during re-entry.
People who complain about the loading time of comments here should probably be aware of how this works in tech.
Meeting.
Bob the engineer: next item, fixing the comments. They load very slowly after 500 or so.
Product manager: how many substacks is that?
Bob: er, less than 0.1% but obviously they are popular stacks given the number of comments. We estimate 1-2% of users. We could do a reddit type solution.
PM: we are not Reddit. Reddit is all about comments, and that’s what drives traffic there, we are driven by the top line posts.
Bob: which brings people who comment. And then it falls over.
PM: for 1-2% … what about the mobile apps?
Bob: the comments scroll quickly there
PM: so less than 1-2% then in total. And we have a workaround.
Bob: but the mobile apps have other problems like not being able to edit…
PM: that’s a different task also on the backlog. Are the people who complain leaving the platform
Bob: no evidence of that right now, but they do complain a lot.
PM: where? On the App Store?
Bob: (exasperated) … no, obviously on the website. We have 4.8/5.0 ratings on the store. They complain on the comment threads if they get too large.
Pm: well luckily those comments are not readable. How long would it take us to redesign the website like Reddit.
Bob: 1-2months if we applied all front end resources
I have a question if it is not too late to ask. I apologize in advance if it is a stupid one (and yes some questions are so ill-informed as to be stupid).. So here it is. Is there any? way to quantify the degree to which a particular course of action is subject to the law of unintended consequences. Two examples,
Corn Ethanol Subsidies: These subsidies were meant to promote energy independence and reduce carbon emissions. Instead, they contributed to the rise in food prices by diverting corn from food production to energy, affecting global food markets.
The Cobra Effect: This term comes from an incident during British rule in colonial India, where a bounty was offered for every dead cobra to reduce their numbers. Instead, people began breeding cobras for income, increasing the population when the program ended and breeders released the snakes.
In other words, if by definition you can't predict what unintended consequence will occur, can you somehow determine what actions are more likely to lead to one?
> if by definition you can't predict what unintended consequence will occur
There is a difference between "unintended" and "unpredictable". Sometimes the person who designs the rule is just insufficiently competent or does not care about long-term consequences, but someone else easily could have predicted the consequences.
So I would recommend to bring some people whose paycheck does not depend on the person proposing the rule, and tell them to brainstorm for 5 minutes about possible perverse incentives this rule would create or how someone could easily circumvent the rule.
Those people should be familiar with the concepts of "if something gets more expensive, people may start buying less of it", "if something gets less expensive, people may start using it wastefully", "people may follow the letter of the rule in a way that goes against its spirit", "if you provide support for people who are in some situation, people may now be more likely to get in that situation or less likely to get out of it", "if you increase the tax on something, people may start doing less of it (or move to a different country)", etc. It might help to provide them a list of examples of similar things that have already happened.
If I recall correctly the biggest boosters of ethanol subsidies — and ethanol mandates in gasoline — were politicians from the corn belt of the US (mostly Republican IIRC). The corn-belt pols were for them because they'd shore up corn prices for their constituents (and that was the primary reason they were put into the bill). This was part of a larger pork-barrel energy spending package to promote US energy independence. The (supposed) environmental benefits of ethanol were talked up, and pro-environmental pols were persuaded to get on board with the bill by a ban on oil drilling under the Great Lakes and the Alaska Wildlife Refuge (put in at the last minute, or it wouldn't have passed w/o some Dem support).
But let's be clear, the ethanol subsidies and gas formulation mandates were meant to boost corn prices, though. That was its primary intended consequence. And it did that. ;-)
By definition you cannot, but I think you can at least have some heuristics that help. For instance, the larger the change, the more likely there will be larger consequences. Also, the less we understand about the relevant systems or how those systems connect with other systems, the more likely the consequences will be unintended. New things we don't understand, such as AI, are more likely to have unintended consequences. How far-reaching those consequences will be (positive or negative) depends heavily on how much, in this case AI, gets integrated into other systems.
Do keep in mind that some unintended consequences must be positive, but, complex systems are much easier to break than to create, so we would also have to know that most unintended consequences must therefore be negative.
Global shipping is extremely complicated and massive, so most system-wide changes will cause negative unintended consequences and likely more problems than it solves. The same could be said of passenger airplanes, international law, etc.
I think this is in general hard, but probably you can see a little ahead by thinking about how your policy changes peoples' incentives, and then how the world created by those new incentives will change incentives, and so on. And probably even more by knowing about many past policy changes and how they worked out.
Yes, but the recursive nature of the changes only becomes clear in retrospect. First order incentives can be, though not necessarily are, relatively easy to guess. Second order effects are significantly harder, and depend completely on being correct about the first order effects. Anything beyond that feels like guesswork with massive error bars.
One of the trickiest things is knowing what people's real incentives are. Sometimes we think their incentives are A, but instead they are more B. Sometimes they don't even know until forced to make a choice, which means polling or any other kind of work to predict what people want will be wrong and wasted effort. In fact, worse, because you're reacting to incentives that don't really exist and ignoring the real incentives.
I agree that this is hard. In the example of the cobra bounties, the people offering the bounties expected the incentive "kill cobras to get bounties" but not the incentive of "raise cobras to get bounties."
I don’t think there’s a way to quantify that, however the first question is just simple economics. Food prices had to rise in that scenario. I assume that was an intended, but assumed acceptable, consequence
In a move nobody could have seen coming (or at least, not the gentlemen who hysterically calling Scott, myself and others "white supremacists" for casting doubts on the project when scott first posted on it), the Saudis have been forced to scale back their planes for 'The Line' linear city: https://archive.is/xetJQ
Instead of being open to residents by 2030 as first planned, the city is expected to measure only 1.5 miles of the full 105 miles by that time.
I remember a *lot* of people mocking The Line on this site, and I don't remember any of them getting called white supremacists for it. I'm not going to say there were *zero* comments, because it's the internet and there is always at least one nutcase who holds any position, but, come on man. Stop making every fucking news article on the planet into a story about how liberals are evil.
Exactly. It's like Hammond doesn't even read the site he's posting on. (Given the volume of his comments though, he obviously does read it and just doesn't care.)
Some dimwit on the internet will call you a racist if you put two sugars in your tea. (Probably because it proves you're not a real Scottsman.) But you don't have to care.
For those playing along at home, Cook was one of the co-authors of an infamous paper alleging that racist violence was responsible for a drop off in black patents after 1900, but which was revealed to be a product of the data of main dataset they were using ending in 1900: https://twitter.com/AnechoicMedia_/status/1489847148862742531
And all of this makes me laugh so much considering the number of people on here who have claimed, apparently very sincerely, that DEI is simply about making sure that capable minority candidates aren't discriminated against (this is trivially false from the name 'diversity, equity and inclusion', but it's nice to have real world counter-examples).
Of course, the fact that nobody seemed interested in a far more egregious case of affirmative action in government hiring when Scott posted a link to it makes me suspect we're dealing with people unwilling to update regardless of the evidence: https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-faas-hiring-scandal-a-quick-overview
Very disappointing dark pattern in Substack's iOS app.
I attempted to read the linked post below, which was subscriber-only. Substack offered an opportunity to “Continue reading this post, courtesy of Jeff Maurer [Claim my free post]”. Just to be clear, I don’t object to this arrangement—many other authors have similar terms.
Clicking [Claim my free post] opened a dialog to [Subscribe and unlock]. Clicking through opened another dialog: “Verify your number: We need to verify your phone number before unlocking this post”.
This is misleading and exploitative. I have never given Substack my phone number. There is nothing which can be “verified”. Substack is simply using Jeff Maurer’s article as a lever to collect my phone number.
Why?
(I had posted a version of this to Jeff in Substack Notes; posting to ACX for posterity.)
I'm on Safari on a laptop. I do not use Substack apps, just go to Substack site using my browser, and I seem to have less trouble with the site than many. (It loads very slowly when there are more than 500 comments, and occasionally swallows a half-written post, but those are the only 2 problems.). So I clicked that link, and after a few paragraphs of the author's post Substack offered me a free subscription, but first asked for my email address, which I gave, so it could send me a link to sign in. Substack has it already anyhow (and I was already signed in.) I was not asked for my phone number. Checked my email, and found I got not a link for signing in, but a link for downloading the app. WTF? I don't want the app.
This may be new, but Substack being an objectively awful website isn't new. I'm a little surprised that a competing platform hasn't popped up with the simple value proposition "Substack, but things work."
People who complain about the loading time of comments here should probably be aware of how this works in tech.
Meeting.
Bob the engineer: next item, fixing the comments. They load very slowly after 500 or so.
Product manager: how many substacks is that?
Bob: er, less than 0.1% but obviously they are popular stacks given the number of comments. We estimate 1-2% of users. We could do a reddit type solution.
PM: we are not Reddit. Reddit is all about comments, and that’s what drives traffic there, we are driven by the top line posts.
Bob: which brings people who comment. And then it falls over.
PM: for 1-2% … what about the mobile apps?
Bob: the comments scroll quickly there
PM: so less than 1-2% then in total. And we have a workaround.
Bob: but the mobile apps have other problems like not being able to edit…
PM: that’s a different task also on the backlog. Are the people who complain leaving the platform
Bob: no evidence of that right now, but they do complain a lot.
PM: where? On the App Store?
Bob: (exasperated) … no, obviously on the website. We have 4.8/5.0 ratings on the store. They complain on the comment threads if they get too large.
Pm: well luckily those comments are not readable. How long would it take us to redesign the website like Reddit.
Bob: 1-2months if we applied all front end resources
I am not at all surprised that a network monopoly with years of programmer time spent on the site has not been disrupted by an upstart spending years of programming time with zero revenue to catch up.
What exactly does being a network monopoly mean in this context? If another platform with better functionality emerged, I think most authors could easily move there, taking their audiences with them. The more money they make, the more careful they need to be, but they could also pay someone to help with the process.
Assuming that the other site is "like Substack, but better", that is, it supports the concept of paying subscribers, but offers better technical solutions for writing and commenting, you could simply start posting the same content on both websites, but only allow commenting on the new one. People who do not care about the comment section can stay subscribed on Substack. People who want to comment have a motivation to move to the new website, but if they procrastinate with the move, they still get to read your articles on the old website -- so it's not like you suddenly took away from them something they keep paying for.
You could even create an unpaid category "people who are still subscribed on Substack" on the new website (and you would pay someone to keep this category synchronized with the actual Substack membership) and give them a right to also comment on the new website. But new users could no longer subscribe on Substack, only on the new website. And once in a while you would add some content for the users subscribed on the new website only, to encourage the Substack subscribers to move. Basically, you would need to carefully balance "I don't want to make the Substack subscribers angry at me" with "but I want them to have an incentiive to move to the new website". Anyway, time is on your side now, because new users can only subscribe on the new website. And when the people who stayed on Substack become a minority of your total audience, you can increase the pressure on them by removing their ability to comment on the new website completely.
From the perspective of the new website, you don't have to become as big as Substack in short term. You only need to become big enough to survive. That should be doable with a fraction of authors. I may be wrong here, but I do not think that Substack is more complicated than LessWrong, so the costs should be comparable.
I've been wondering if liveable neighborhoods have been proven to have an effect on screen addiction, or screen time, but I can't seem to find any studies on it. Are any of you in the know?
I'm not aware of studies in on, but my guess is that the effect would be pretty minimal, based on my own experience. I live in what, by almost any definition, would be a "livable neighborhood" and kids don't play outside all that often. My best guess is that screens now provide so much of what people want from entertainment to social connection that there is less need to go outside. The solution to this would then need to be two-fold - safe and enjoyable places to go (your question) and screens offering less utility.
My hope at this point is that people begin to seriously recognize the disutility that comes from screens and more accurately rate their experience on them. I think that doing this will result in people spending less time on screens, if they have alternatives available.
"Liveable neighborhood" is a problematic term. I mean, I'm sure high-crime racial minorities being absent from the neighborhood actually counts *against* liveability metrics....
I would guess that people who live in nice neighbourhoods spend more time staring at screens. Why? Because they're white-collar workers with desk jobs. Although the _really_ nice neighbourhoods are disproprortionately populated by old people, who spend less time staring at screens.
Once you tease out all the age and class effects maybe you'll have a meaningful study, maybe you won't. But what's the point? If you're actively deciding whether to build a nice neighbourhood or a crappy neighbourhood then you don't need some crappy study to tell you to build a nice one. Crappy neighbourhoods are not built because people actively decide to build crappy neighbourhoods.
I guess I should have offered proxies for liveable neighborhoods in my opening comment. I think we can make a reasonable approximation. After all, liveability is what so many planners, architects and yimby/nimbys are fighting for, and I dont see them engaging in-fighting about definitions. It's a fuzzy cluster, where the center has the properties that:
The area surrounding the home...
- Either has a low rate of through traffic, maybe less than 500 motorized vehicles a day, and has slow moving motorized traffic, probably maximum 40 km/h
- Or has a separate path for soft traffic (bikes, pedestrians)
And when the home is no more than 4 floors up from ground level
And when there are "third spaces" in the vicinity of the home, such as:
- Seating that is comfortable year-round, that people can use without the expectation of paying
Etc. I'm sure it can be done more elegantly or with fewer parameters than I gave as example. Designing the study definitely requires attention, but I'm sure it's possible. I'd be surprised if it hasn't been done.
I just read Dr Bess Stillman's article, Debugging the Doctor Brain (about the perverse incentives that makes learning during residency difficult) and I'm wondering whether there's a single white collar field (I have no experience in blue collar, I don't know if it holds true there) that is actually good at (or taking steps to improve) training university graduates or if they're all awful.
I'm an engineer < 5 years out of uni, and many in my social circle are too. I'm finding, and this agrees with my other junior engineer friends, that there's not enough senior engineering oversight to go around. Most of us are making do, until we find out that management (often not engineering) has been asking us to sign off on things that are supposed to be checked by chartered engineers (which require evidence of professional development - most of us don't have that yet).
I learn in bits and pieces, and I'm grateful for any amount of time I get from senior people around me, but corporate cost-cutting has drastically shifted the ratios of experienced engineers and fresh grads. In many disciplines, there's a missing level of experience - around the 10 year mark. Most of us only have a group of equally clueless peers or one very busy subject matter expert (20+ years experience). I'm not sure if this is a retention issue or a retrenchment issue. It's all really really similar to Bess' observation on residents not being given sufficient guidance or learning space!
I am worried that this is happening to every professional field simultaneously - most of the workforce is inexperienced (because they're cheaper), experienced personnel are scarce and overloaded, the standard of the practice goes down because of this "figure it out" culture, where there's not quite enough people to even do the job, and people aren't being trained to do it properly. Obvious implications are worse healthcare, more mistakes in engineering (more expensive, less efficient, and unsafe infrastructure), more incompetence and fraud in everything.
I want to figure out if I'm noticing a real problem, but also wondering how to fix it.
>I'm wondering whether there's a single white collar field (I have no experience in blue collar, I don't know if it holds true there) that is actually good at (or taking steps to improve) training university graduates or if they're all awful.
Software engineering at Big Tech companies. I've worked for three (Microsoft, Google, and Adobe) and have friends who've worked for a bunch of others. In most cases, the companies recruit junior programmers primarily with the goal of developing them into senior programmers. In general, junior programmers start out doing well-defined bite-sized tasks under guidance from their more senior peers while mid-career programmers are gradually given bigger tasks with more autonomy. There's a pretty smooth pyramid between different experience levels, although past a certain point (maybe ~10 years of experience) you start seeing seniority becoming only very loosely correlated with years of experience as many people plateau at the the mid-career workhorse paygrades.
You're right! Software is also kind of unique - it's one of the only fields that has an actual skills test in the interview process. If you're interviewing to be an auditor (to my knowledge) they don't hand you a ledger to audit.
> I am worried that this is happening to every professional field simultaneously
One harmful meme that I noticed is the idea which many managers seem to share, that you can separate the company into "cost centers" and "profit centers" as if you could treat them independently. The salesmen bring you money, so they are the important ones. The people who actually produce the stuff you sell, they just increase your costs of running business, so you spend on them as little as possible... you experiment how far you can push things before the production collapses. The managers, well, technically they also don't sell, but they are the ones who make the reports, which usually allows them to spin their work as "saved the company a lot of money by cutting costs", which is almost as good as bringing the money from outside. (Except, the salesman can sell the same type of product every quarter, while the manager needs to always find new ways to cut costs.)
The way I remember it from business school in the mid-2000s, "profit centers" include the entire production and distribution chain for your money-making products: not just salesmen, but also manufacturing, logistics, procurement, and (often) R&D. "Cost centers" are stuff that supports (or is supposed to support) the profit centers' operation but don't directly make and sell stuff: HR, legal, IT, facilities, etc.
The takeaway isn't that you necessarily cut cost centers to the bone, just that you judge them on how cost-effective they are at enabling your profit centers to do their profit-generating activities.
Interesting that these terms have jumped from military to business jargon. You start to run into serious problems when staff orgs expand and begin to eclipse the line units. c.f. university admins, some militaries.
Though I wonder whether there is some game of telephone involved between the school and the real life. (Similarly how in IT development there is a theory of "agile development", and then there is the standard practice which is almost the exact opposite of it.)
I'm in a decidedly less high-stakes industry, at a high-end boutique luxury hotel, and have noticed a similar pattern, except that in this case I'm a 20+ year pro who has very deliberately chosen to be underemployed in a front-of-house role rather than taken on the stress and hassle of promoting into management.
So I'm in the unusual position of being almost infinitely more knowledgeable about our absurdly complex day-to-day processes than anyone who has promoted away from the product we sell (which is of course the onsite experience of the hotel stay). Just to give you an idea of why this matters, our onsite general manager would be the first to admit that, were the entire front of house team to walk off the job, he and every offsite executive above him would not know how to check a guest in, make a key, properly bill them, etc. I'm not totally confident they'd be able to even find the reports they'd need to run the hotel "analog." The software and systems have changed too much since they last touched the end product, and if you're thinking, "how hard could it be to check in a guest?", well, literally hundreds of travel agencies with thousands of rate codes and dozens of sales groups each with 5 different billing options for 13 different types of rooms and hair-trigger guests paying $450 a night with totally reasonable high expectations might reply, "we make it pretty difficult, especially when the luxury hotel experience requires a show of flawless, polished competence."
That's why, in the Before Times, no new front desk agent was ever left unsupervised for even ten minutes their first twelve weeks of the job, much less allowed to work a shift alone (with all of the administrative duties in addition to interacting with guests). The front of house manager or a supervisor always had an eye on them so that after 12 weeks, pretty much every agent could be depended on to deliver the end product more or less flawlessly.
That standard was starting to degrade a little even before the pandemic, but post-pandemic, it now feels like a golden age fever dream of competency, pun intended.
Almost our entire front of house staff was laid off in March of 2020 - over a dozen people who were all fully trained with highly polished soft skills and a deep understanding of how to deliver a truly luxury experience. The front of house manager, plus an accountant, plus me ran the front of house for 2-3 guests a night for the bulk of 2020. Luxury standards like daily housekeeping and turndown service, concierge services, doormen, wine hour, room service, amenity treats in rooms and so on were of course dropped - we weren't allowed to provide them and guests weren't expecting them and no one was on staff to perform them, anyway.
As demand gradually started to rise again, we went through a particularly dark period where we needed staff, but no one competent wanted to work. Literally. Job postings would go up and no one would answer. Then one person would answer, get hired, and be an absurd parody of insouciant slacker entitlement (or worse, and there was *much* worse!) before being replaced, usually be someone almost equally bad.
Oh, and while this was happening, our property had what was effectively a pandemic-enabled "hostile takeover" by a new hotel management company which didn't have any experience in the luxury market. The chaos of that transition drove away our remaining end-product-touching front-of-house manager.
Eventually pandemic unemployment benefits expired and "normal" new employees began to drift in. But with upper management not being able to train employees on the Before Times end product, and brand new lower level managers who never even knew the what the Before Times product was like, training new employees fell to...whomever was around, even if that was an almost equally new employee hired three weeks before.
So just to recap: We've gone from having no front-of-house staffer ever left alone until they were highly polished and competent to people who don't know what they're doing training people who know even less. The luxury product itself degraded at every level - most of the grace-note services haven't returned and the luxury standards dropped considerably. Positions which used to require a polished uniform are now performed in jeans and a t-shirt, often absent even a name-tag to differentiate an employee from a random person off the street. It's okay for a valet to tell a guest, "Oh, I don't drive stick," and for a front desk agent to say, "I don't know how to do that," or "I'll have to get my manager," or even, "No."
Oh, and the rate for a room?
It's as high as it was pre-pandemic, even though the competency of our staffing is wholly dependent on a given individual employee's work ethic.
And *none* of them understand the sort of Carson-the-Butler-from-Downton-Abbey-esque pride in delivering an expertly *professional* service to the upper class (or people who are paying for an upper class experience), so it's simply been lost as part of the product...unless a guest is interacting with *me.*
I think you're right, this phenomenon is happening everywhere. I see signs of it in almost every business I patronize, sometimes in large degrees, sometimes in small.
How to fix it?
Go six levels down.
Michael Lewis describes the idea in this podcast (https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/against-the-rules/six-levels-down). If a company's end product is broken, find the most knowledgeable person who is still touching the end product and then follow their advice about how to fix the system. This person is usually six levels down from the C-suite.
It makes sense. Upper management can't fix a product they no longer have time - or perhaps even understand how - to make. New employees can't fix a product they don't yet understand.
Only the "middle" can fix the issue, and just like the middle class, they are rapidly vanishing, and no one is interested in what the remaining few have to say.
I wonder if the vanishing middle managers (which, actually, tend to be peak technical knowledge and experience - it's the final layer of management that has contact with the core business, the layers above do more abstract management things)
That should be scary for everyone. The ability to buy a true luxury experience is now gone (the competency to make everything seamless is gone). The competency to treat patients is only being maintained by a system that abuses junior doctors and works them 80 hours a week - on the job learning, to make up for inadequate educstion. The competency for everything else - building a safe airplane, maintaining bridges, building products that work - are just being lost.
I think you're also onto something - culture. Pre pandemic, your workplace had a culture of excellence. You had a clear vision of what you're delivering and knew all the nuts and bolts to achieve it, including measures like "this is how long it takes to integrate a new person into our ways of working and culture".
At a place like Boeing, this is a safety and quality culture - when you make a big deal and get managers to look at things, how much effort you go to to deliver the plane. At a place like Burger King, it's also a safety culture, enforced by management. The corporate food safety guy has no ability to personally visit every store and check that they're storing lettuce correctly. They're writing rules and relying on the store manager to enforce it. They're relying on staff throwing out the onions when they're moldy instead of just cooking them anyway because ordering onions will be more effort and annoy the regional manager and affect the KPIs. PG&E let a guy who wasn't a chartered professional engineer look after all their buried gas pipeline in the suburbs, and it sounded like he didn't really have engineering oversight to check his risk assessments, just a non technical manager who approved the maintenance budget (who of course mostly grilled him if it costs too much).
I think this is completely because the corporate and business world no longer valid the business-specific technical knowledge and attitudes that make the whole business work. The middle manager is vanishing because people are correctly perceiving that the corporate world doesn't value doing your job well, it values whatever the hell upper management does, so they develop the skills to be upper managers at the expense of actual technical excellence.
I wonder if the same thing is happening in government? I do have a friend in government - same graduation year as me - who is already overseeing new intake, so probably a similar enough picture.
The inexperienced leading the incompetent. I hate it here!!!
Oh man I hit a button and my browser ate my draft.
But basically, yes, I agree with everything here!
I think because my job is much lower-stakes and not especially technical, it's a lot easier to spot the chain of events that led to a degradation in the product. Boeing is almost infinitely more complex (plus they're obviously willing to murder people to prevent details from getting out (oh sure a whistleblower committed "suicide" hours after saying he would never do that and the day before he was due to finally testify in court...sadlol)) but I think many of the same forces are present.
Apparel in general has followed the same track - pretty much every brand has noticeably worse quality of materials and construction than it did 10 or 15 years ago, a phenomenon frequently observed by folk in the fashion/apparel industry.
And veterinary medicine in the US is a real disaster after private equity bought huge numbers of private practices and then brutally raised prices.
Why only the middle? Why not also ask lower level employees of long standing? Is the assumption here that any lower-level employees who would have anything valuable to say have already been squeezed out or have left on their own?
Well of course exquisitely competent lower level employees should also be consulted, but I think they tend to be very rare in my particular industry - lower level positions tend to have high turnover as people either rise in the business or go elsewhere.
Ironically to your question, I actually *am* one of the lowest level employees in the corporate structure (though not at my property), which is one of many reasons I've not been consulted, even though a somewhat high-level visiting executive noticed my knowledge base and said I should probably be consulted on some property management software policy.
I enthusiastically volunteered myself in any capacity they needed, but never got the call.
In my field, the lower level now consists mostly of contractors. A constant churn of contractors. I'm fairly far down, I interact with the contractors, and while we'd like to keep the ones that already know the job really well, a few levels up from me someone is bungling an enterprise agreement (so the competent workers we have either strike or leave), or writing a new contract with a different cheaper company that we have to bring up to speed anew.
The sticker price of a new contract is highly legible. The amount of lost productivity from having to bring a new crop of people up to speed, not so much.
"if you're thinking, "how hard could it be to check in a guest?"
I think there's a lot of this attitude towards what I'd call 'support staff', the general administration - the receptionists, secretaries, filing clerks, etc. The assumption there also is "well this is pretty much unskilled labour, if you were smart enough you'd have a degree or qualification and be an accountant or manager". These are often the roles that get squeezed or cut to reduce costs (think of customer service, think of outsourcing to call centres and how they run on scripts and through-put rather than dealing with queries, and now the push to automate even that away with AI).
But as you say, if all the front-line/public-facing/support staff walked out in the morning, the people who feel they contribute the most to making the money (be they sales or software engineers) would find things that routinely operate to make the running of the company smooth are missing. You may complain about "what does HR/payroll/etc. actually *do*?" but if your salary with the bonuses or allowances or expenses included doesn't end up in your bank account by the end of the month, you'll find out.
A lot of those processes are automated, but not all, and some real person has to enter in the data in the first place and correct any mistakes or screw-ups. (This plaint brought to you courtesy of low-level minion/administrative staff 😁)
EDIT: I would say that while you are correct that the problem can only be fixed by going to the level of the last competent person, the big problem is in the C-suite level. If they are operating on "we can still charge pre-pandemic prices while delivering a degraded service, which means lower costs", they have no incentive to change. Pushing up the share price is what counts today, and one way of doing that is to reduce costs (hence rounds of lay-offs). If the ycan produce an X Quarter report that says profitability has gone up (because of degraded service), then this means all the reports on them will be favourable, share price go up, trebles all round! (as "Private Eye" likes to say).
I think the notion of pride in providing a service is slowly dying. I could rumble on about schools these days etc. but I honestly, genuinely think there is a big difference in how younger generations approach everything. There was a mention in a comment elsewhere in another thread, I think, about "honor is no longer a concept" and that made me go "But I hold to honour!"
But it could be mine is the last generation that does so, because the culture has changed around us so much. Values have shifted, emphases on different ideals, scorn for the past and the assumption that it was all hypocrisy, to say the least.
I wonder about the effects Covid/lockdown specifically had on that? I feel like, before 2020, I was much more concerned about pride in my work, and strived much more to do things properly. Now, I happen to be a student, and to have executive function issues from ASD, so maybe my workload just got harder as time went by, eventually exceeding my abilities, but that seems unlikely, and besides, a lot of people around me report the same feeling. I have no clue what could explain it, though.
Big picture, the last 3ish years have had employees with significantly more control over their careers, a lot of places hiring at dramatically increased wages and reduced expectations, and little obvious signs of that changing.
If I can get a 30% raise going to some place at the drop of a hat, my current employer is going to walk on eggshells around me, even if I'm not very good. If I say I want to wear jeans every day, that's much more likely to be accepted or at least tolerated. If I do a lackluster job, same thing.
Honor culture/pride in your work operates on longer timeframes and reputation. In a short timeframe, employers don't know you or your work ethic, so there's not much to show or prove. If your manager may be gone in six months, there's even less reason to do things that don't have a tracked metric somewhere - like volunteering for tough tasks or always being on time.
I think honor will come back if/when the economy tightens up again, and employees want and need to differentiate themselves better. It may also happen if society develops better social scoring technology. Maybe not as thorough as China, but something more than word-of-mouth references or Google searches.
I weirdly developed a much *better* work ethic during Covid. Sheer boredom pressed me into taking on more responsibilities than I normally would and I discovered it was actually personally satisfying to hammer all the nails, not just the ones my managers might notice.
That's definitely part of it, I know since I spent a lot of time at home during the lockdown that my attitude towards work has changed (I definitely much prefer working from home).
But at the same time, I do get my job done and don't shrug it off as "who cares?"
Incredible how many people and how many times all those people need to have the conversation, "you know janitors are important too right?" It's demoralizing.
I think people who've never worked those kinds of jobs, even as summer jobs, have no idea what's involved. There's the perennial comedy trope of the secretary who does nothing but file her nails and flirt with the boss, and from the outside it's easy to think "What is so hard about pushing a broom/answering the phone/typing some letters?"
Because those kind of jobs aren't *directly* making money for the business, then it's easy to think of them as useless/makeweight/ripe to be replaced by automation. Unless you need to know about it, or have worked those jobs, you don't realise the background support they provide. The first point of contact for potential clients and the public with your business is the person who answers the phone, and unprofessional attitudes will make a bad first impression and lose you business.
When hiring a local business for work around the house (plumbing, construction, etc.) it's pretty common to find an owner-operator that tries to do a lot of the actual work and also scheduling/front end tasks. These people are hard to get in touch with and often forget important details, like what work you wanted to get done.
Also pretty often some will hire their wives or adult daughter to answer the phone and do the scheduling, and these places are *significantly* easier to work with. Just someone keeping track of the details so the workers and owner can keep up with the important stuff.
I think you get that a lot with small tradesmen, they're doing every thing themselves plus probably working on three jobs at once, so they tend (at least the guys we've gotten to do small jobs at home) to hop around between your place and the other places they're working, so there is a lot of "are you doing that thing?/what thing? oh yeah that thing you wanted".
But there is such demand that they are kept busy, because it's a case of "well at least the guy is free now to work on this, if I turn him down I'll be waiting another six months for somebody else to do it". You can always tell when eventually wife/sister/daughter/someone takes over the paperwork, though 😁
Mind you, a lot of these guys are also "cash in hand" so... maybe not too anxious to have a paper trail behind them for tax purposes!
I absolutely agree with you that the C-suite has no incentive to change when a degraded end product continues to make money or possible makes even *more* money than the higher standard.
In fact, I'd argue that's one of the contributing factors to products degrading over time, especially if market forces occur across an entire industry. Consumers resign themselves to a universally lower standard and then...well...that's the new standard, until various forces lower the standard even more.
And I agree with you that the idea of "service," much less *pride* in service, is absolutely dying, and I think some of it can be laid at the feet of oppression olympics culture. I've occasionally had to pull neophyte agents aside to explain to them that yes, the complaints the older rich white guy unloaded on them are actually valid considering that he's paying an average total of $500 a night to have a "perfect" experience and not be annoyed by *anything at all,* much less preventable problems like room attendants waking him at 7:30 in the morning shouting to one another in the hallways and then almost being late to a critical meeting because the valet kept him waiting half an hour.
I've had early-20s newbies look me right in the eye and say, "He's rich, he should get over it."
That's the thing with culture. If this same agent is surrounded by people who take pride in providing a good service, they'll keep their opinions to themselves even just to fit in. Eventually they'll probably even come round to the idea that it's worth taking pride in providing top tier customer care - that this is a special thing your team can do.
But you lost your culture of amazing hospitality when corporate laid off the whole team overnight, and once lost it's somewhere between very difficult to impossible to rebuild.
Boeing used to have a culture of not accepting things not done to process, not accepting anything but perfect in their finished product - a big management shakeup completely destroyed that safety culture. The recent door thing - they couldn't even find a workpack relating to the door removal at the NTSB's request. There was a time when that course of action was unthinkable, but somehow now it's normal to bypass procedure when it's inconvenient.
Might some of this have to do with the fact that the company, the guests, and apparently you and Deiseach, expect Carson-the-butler-from-Downton-Abbey-level professionalism when these employees are not being provided with anything approaching a Carson-the-butler-from-Downton-Abbey level of lifetime job security and wages in exchange for such polished and flawless service?
My property pays a higher wage than any budget hotel because there is more "work" than an average budget hotel. Consistently performing the highest level of warm, professional, polished hospitality *IS* this particular job. In fact, onsite management is so serious about employees nailing this performance that there are significant cash bonuses whenever a guest mentions an employee's performance in a survey or review.
And when I say "performing," I literally mean "acting." Our front desk is a stage, and just like a theater company requires its actors to stay in character, so to does the hotel.
Let me make this clear: I have none of Carson-the-Butler's reverence for the people I serve or our relative class status. Guests often really annoy me, and sometimes their complaints are trivial (or simply insane).
But part of being a service professional is never letting them see that, and I am very, *very* good at never letting them see that. So good that I frequently receive bonuses for pleasing guests who I privately think are total assholes.
It's in the best interest of the folks receiving wages here to get as close to Carson-the-Butler as they can manage.
(1) Carson probably wasn't being paid all that much either
(2) There is the well-known saying "pay peanuts, get monkeys"
(3) I'm not on any level of bonuses etc. to go with increasing demands of the job
(4) All that being said, there's a bare minimum standard for every job, and half-assing it because "crappy pay, crappy conditions" won't make things better. I agree that crappy pay and crappy conditions will attract crappy workers, but the attitude that Christina is talking about, that of not even bothering to do the job because "fuck the rich" isn't good, either. Carry that over to a better job than being a hotel valet, and you'll be out the door for not doing your job competently.
There is a level of pride even in a crappy job, though I agree that being treated like dirt by management does engender the "fuck them, I'm doing the bare minimum" attitude. But that does mean the bare minimum, not "not even doing that much" e.g. turning up on time for the waiting customer.
Well, Carson was senior management. Most of the staff got a tiny dorm room, free meals, 16 hour days with one day off every few weeks, and a salary in the tens of pounds a year.
And job security, subject to the whims and financial situation of your employers. And if you lose your job you lose your home too.
How easy, in comparison, is the life of a modern day hotel employee!
"I've had early-20s newbies look me right in the eye and say, "He's rich, he should get over it.""
To which the answer is "You can think in the privacy of your mind as much as you like, 'fuck you rich guy', but outwardly you say 'I'm very sorry, sir, we'll get right on that' because he's the one paying your wages and you're doing a job".
"The valet was late" is a perfectly valid complaint. I'm sure if you kept these kids waiting half an hour or more for their break or their pay or whatever, they'd quickly start complaining. Someone complaining about something out of your control may be unreasonable, but you do the job. Someone complaining about bad service, be they rich or poor, is in the right. They're paying for a service/product, you're supplying it, it's no more acceptable than selling a defective product or item.
Yes, but also, one of many, *many* mistakes our inexperienced corporate overlords continue to make is not providing front-of-house employees the opportunity to be on the receiving end of a luxury experience themselves- and a chance to see how annoying it can be when it goes wrong.
Even I get so used to hearing the same set of complaints from guests (generally about unfixable infrastructure issues with the building) that I internally grow a bit indifferent and "what's the big deal?" about some of them out of sheer repetition.
That's why it's incredibly helpful to be a guest yourself. Six months ago I had an objectively shitty stay in a different hotel in the brand (on a discounted employee rate which is was nevertheless offensively high), and when I say "objectively," I mean the floor of the room and the bed were *visibly* slopped to one side by like 4-5 degrees, so sloped that a water bottle set on the floor would simply roll away under its own weight. It was *instantly* noticeable when one laid on the bed, as my mother did right before her hip replacement surgery.
Later we independently discovered some maniac installed motion-sensor light switches in all of the interior bathrooms which would shut off the light if it didn't detect activity within two feet of the switch after ten minutes.
You know what wasn't within two feet of the switch? The shower, and the toilet.
Nothing like being plunged into almost perfect pitch-black while standing in a glass shower with unfamiliar controls.
And the elevators were frequently out, an issue when we were on the 15th floor.
And - most outrageous - the front desk employees lied right to my fellow-employee face and told me they didn't have anywhere they could freeze my mother's medical cold packs. The answer to "wait, how can I get this cold?" was "I dunno, maybe put them in an ice bucket and scoop some ice on them?" A current co-worker who used to work for that property said there were 6 different employee office fridges and freezers that the cold packs could have been stored in without violating food safety codes.
Let me tell you.
I was *OUTRAGED.*
Outraged that I was paying what was a lot (to me) to experience very obvious, fixable problems. Outraged that I was told an absurd lie.
And especially outraged that when I gently mentioned this stuff at checkout from a, "hey I'm a fellow employee, if I had been a real guest, they'd probably be yelling right now" approach, I was dismissed with an upbeat "sorry, yeah, we know..." and nothing else.
Most brands give all employees 10+ free room nights a year across the brand, but our brand hasn't quite figured that out yet, and so we have employees at my front desk who've never stayed in a hotel of our caliber - *not even our own*, and thus *really* have no sense whatsoever of what it's like to be a guest, period.
It's that exactly. I try to be patient with retail and other customer-facing roles because I've been on the other side, I know things happen that are out of your control, I've had to deal with shitty customers, so I understand some of the problems. Getting mad and yelling at someone who can't do things faster than they already are doing them or magically pull a solution out of thin air is not going to do anything.
Someone with the sloppy attitude that they obviously don't care about the job is a different matter. But it really is that until you've had a similar experience you can't and don't understand why they can't take those coupons or do that return for cash or the other thing you're asking them to do. Not because they don't care or don't want to, but because they're not permitted to do so/don't have the resources.
Apparently professional consultants quite frequently figure out what's wrong in a company by asking the lower-level staff. It's one of their standard techniques.
That's often the problem with top-down implementation of new strategies; the 'mission statement' has grandiose goals, the idea is that naturally all the efficiency and cost-saving will happen as planned, but the tactics about how to make the plans work are missing and any input by the low-level staff who will have to carry out the new practices are dismissed or ignored. It'll work, and you will have to make it work. Telling them that "our clients are never going to be able to handle this", for instance, are brushed aside.
Just yesterday I had an example of this in work; the parents have to apply for a particular service. But they can no longer do this online or over the phone, they have to use "the app". So we had one parent coming in to us for help filling this out as they couldn't manage it.
I can only suppose the rationale there is "everyone has a smartphone, everyone knows how to use apps" but that is definitely not the case (and it's the most inconvenient way to try and fill out forms; part of this involved having to put a piece of paper with information on the desk, take a photo of it with the phone, and then upload that photo along with the form to the app).
That's somebody's Grand Top-Down Idea and how it works out in practice.
"Let's introduce an automated process to post credits to certain guests' accounts when they use certain services during their stay in a way that makes it invisible to agents unless they click through two different windows despite the fact that most usage of the credit will occur the day of check out and thus will not be automated and must be posted manually by the front desk agent."
"Seems like that automation is going to cause a lot of over-crediting. Can't we forget about the automation and manually post all credits at the end of the stay?"
"Nah, just tell the front desk agents to be more careful!"
Eternally. New ideas come down From Above, you can tell within five minutes This Won't Work (at least not like this), but who listens to the people who have to use the process? They've already paid ££££/$$$$/€€€€ for the shiny new software package (which won't work with existing systems and is unsuitable for the purposes we need), so just make it work, peon, and if it doesn't, that's *your* fault.
It only works if the professional consultant is genuinely interested in fixing the company rather than wracking up billable hours spinning plates AND upper management either never finds out where the consultant got their recommendations or has enough humility to acknowledge that lower-level staff know the products and systems much better than upper-level staff.
Jordan Peterson is so lame. A recent Dwarkish RT said to listen to him on Cain and Able. I have so many criticisms.
1) Peterson plays the classic boring preacher. His sin is the boringness of the lecture, the slow pace, the stupidity of the audience applauding an insipid point.
2) His interpretations don't ring true. In it, Able is successful and deservingly so. This plays to Peterson's biases. Outside the biblical story it is a good point: people do tend to demonize the successful for no other reason than that they are successful. But this point is made all the time in comedy. It's not profound and probably not Biblical. Is Able more deservingly successful than Cain? I thought the point of the story was that God simply decided he preferred one offering over the other. Cain nor Able could predict which one would be preferred. Yet Peterson considers Able more successful due to cause.
His moment in history has probably passed, but why did anyone consider Jordan Peterson deep ever?
>Is Able more deservingly successful than Cain? I thought the point of the story was that God simply decided he preferred one offering over the other
If an all-knowing and perfectly just deity decided that Abel's offering was better, then that's pretty strong evidence Abel was more deserving of the honour.
What is weird about JP is how often he shows up on my feeds. The algorithms seem to have decided I fit the profile of a JP cultist. Quite the opposite; he strikes me as devoid of content and incredibly banal. I get more insight from GPT. I have a rule now to simply give him none of my brain cycles; hopefully the algorithms will eventually catch on. (Actually lately they've decided I want true crime and air disasters, sprinkled with medieval torture pr0n)
I'd say that the main point of his Cain and Able lecture is not that people tend to demonize the successful, it's that *you don't want to be Cain*. Maybe Able deserved his success, or maybe he didn't (the passage in question is somewhat vague) but regardless if you allow yourself to submit to resentfulness and envy then you are in danger of becoming Cain. You will make the world worse instead of better. You will be consumed by your own sin. So don't be Cain!
Peterson's primary reason for lecturing is to try to teach people this basic idea: that you are capable of evil, and unless you shape up you will end up in a hell of your own making. That any of us is capable of being the Nazi gaurd at Auschwitz, or the NKVD officer driving a Black Maria, or a school shooter. But that you can do something about it. You can stand up straight with your shoulders back, you can clean your room, you can tell the truth, and you can make the world better instead of worse. That message resonates powerfully with a lot of people (evidence, the massive success of his books and lectures).
The Bible says that Able provided from the "fat portions from some of the firstborn" - meaning the highest value portions of the best animals. This was the best of the best that Able had. God reaches out to Cain in the next verses and asks why he is angry (rhetorically) and also asks rhetorically "If you do what is right, will you not be accepted?" This says that Cain has the same opportunity to be accepted that Able had, but there was a responsibility on his part if he wanted to be accepted. He had to reach a higher level than he was at now, implying that he was giving lesser portions and knew it. He could have chosen to give the better portions, but instead let his envy of his brother lead him to murder. He allows his own sin to compound into greater sin, which God warns him will happen if he doesn't choose a different path: "But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at the door; it desires to have you, but you must rule over it."
peterson was just fortunate to come along when half the country was being insane. sure his advice can be simple, but sometimes simple is effective. he is a motivational/self help speaker, and in that context he is fine. the problem is when people elevate him to be a deep intellectual. there are plenty of good motivational speakers that are helpful to many people, and we more or less are ok with that, but nobody is elevating how smart they are.
Peterson, much like Jesus, only became interesting after he got crucified.
At this point, a lot of the people who disagreed with his crucifixion started looking at the things he said earlier and finding that they seemed like reasonable common-sense things which they could get behind. But that's all they ever were.
(I am assuming that we are discussing his university lessons that were recorded and published on YouTube. If you meant something else, please correct me.)
As I see it, you make basically three objections: (1) the lessons are boring, (2) you could get the information from other sources, and (3) Peterson's interpretation of the Biblical stories and probably also other things is just that -- his interpretation.
I agree with you on point 3. I also had an impression that sometimes Peterson discusses the sources, but sometimes he merely uses the sources so that he can *project* on them the things he wants to talk about. A different guy could project completely different things on e.g. the story of C&A, so why should I specifically care about Peterson's version? (There is also a possibility that sometimes Peterson explains *someone else's* interpretation of the sources. But again, why should I care, unless I am specifically attending a lesson on the guy whose interpretation it was.)
I disagree on point 1, and I think that point 2 is irrelevant. Many people delivering the same information is a good thing per se, if they deliver the information better, or they reach a new audience. When I watch a video on e.g. some math concept, I don't care that other videos on the same topic exist. All I care about is whether this video explains the concept to me in a clear and nice way. And sometimes different versions work better for different people. Presumably, Peterson's videos are watched and recommended by people who like his style of explaining things. People who prefer to watch other sources should watch the other sources instead.
It would be wrong to deliver an information that exists elsewhere while pretending that it was you who invented it. But as far as I know, Peterson is *not* doing that. He plays the role of a teacher who explains things. Teachers are generally not expected to invent new things; they are expected to explain standard things, in a way accessible for their students. (Actually, we have just accused Peterson of the *opposite* sin -- talking about his own ideas, while pretending that he is merely teaching some standard knowledge.)
Point 1 is subjective. You find Peterson's lessons boring. I find them way more interesting than most lessons I had at university. Both perspectives are valid. Peterson's fans should not expect that everyone will like Peterson's style. That said, I like his style a lot, and I know a few more people who do.
> His moment in history has probably passed, but why did anyone consider Jordan Peterson deep ever?
I think that whatever message Peterson had to bring, he already did it. Listening to him now just means getting more of the same. (And that's the best case. The worst case would be, if in a desperate attempt to stay relevant, he went crazy.) I don't mean this as a criticism -- this is how things work naturally. His interpretation of mythology took him *decades* to develop: "Maps of Meaning" published in 1999 already contains the core of his philosophy; most of what he did since then was improving the delivery: the university lectures are way more accessible than the book, and his second book "12 Rules for Life" is even more accessible because shorter. (I haven't read the third one yet.) To bring a new content of comparable quality would again take years or decades of preparation.
I find his perspective on "chaos and order" useful in some situations, surprisingly so for such an abstract concept. For example, it provides some insight into dysfunctions of the rationalist community already described in the Sequences as "why our kind can't cooperate" (also the obsession with "akrasia"). If you adopt Peterson's perspective, it's all quite *obvious* -- we are psychologically out of balance, on the side of chaos. We instinctively say "no" to things; which on one hand allows us to avoid a lot of normie bullshit, on the other hand prevents us from building something better.
Basically, the extreme version of this is Mensa, which is completely chaotic (beyond having to pass the IQ test there is virtually no structure) and completely incompetent. And a large part of Eliezer's project could be interpreted as a pushback against this -- as an attempt to create a culture that keeps the good parts of the intelligent contrarianism, and hopefully overcomes the bad parts. On the ideological level, there is an invisible battle between Bayesianism and Popperianism. (Bayesianism vs Frequentism is just a red herring.) Popperianism, at least its version popular on the internet, is pure negativity: things can only be falsified, but saying anything nice about them, even "yeah, this seems likely", is a heresy. As a Popperian, you can only do science by compartmentalizing: by assuming that certain things (such as evolution, relativity, or quantum physics) are true, while verbally denying that you are doing so ("I am only *saying* that they were not falsified yet, not that they are true", yeah but you are *acting as if* they are true or at least very likely). Bayesianism brings back symmetry by saying that evidence against X is necessarily evidence for non-X, that "absence of evidence *is* evidence of absence", that we can't have a 100% certainty, but we definitely can have probabilities like 99% or higher; we are allowed to admit that sometimes we know things. Most rationalists do not participate in this battle explicitly, most are probably unaware that it exists, but there is a reason why so much importance is put on Bayesianism being the right way to think about beliefs.
Not sure how useful this perspective is, but I think it provides some intuition about which things might work and which might make the situation worse.
PART 2: More thoughts on implications of Peterson's "chaos and order"...
Peterson's message, as I understand it, is that although there are things you should say "no" to, you cannot build better things by saying "no" to everything; at some moment you need to also say "yes" to something else.
In politics, this is associated with right vs left, as the right traditionally represents saying "yes" to existing things (i.e. "order"), and the left represents saying "no" to existing things (i.e. "chaos"). That works fine as long as the left is the weaker side. But when the left *wins*, then... one option is the Soviet way, when the left basically becomes the new right (the leftists critical of Soviet Union call is "state capitalism") and you get all the thing the leftists originally fought against (inequality, lack of food, lack of freedoms, etc.) except now it is supposed to be okay, because under the new regime these things nominally happen in the name of the left... and the other option I would perhaps call the California way, when the left has the power but denies having it (e.g. the weird system where if you disagree with certain people, you will predictably lose your job, and yet those people call themselves oppressed and call you an oppressor), where the streets are full of homeless people on drugs, and universities produce pseudoscience.
When you look at the population the rationalist community recruits from, other typical words associated with them are "contrarian" or "skeptic" or "atheist". Notice that these are all *negative* words; they basically mean saying "no" to the mainstream, saying "no" to non-obvious ideas, and saying "no" to religion. This is not necessarily a problem per se (I am an atheist myself), but it becomes a problem when saying "no" becomes a strong habit (socially rewarded by other people having the same habit), and the entire thing converges to a 3 years old's mentality. When people start saying "no" to things merely because others believe those things, or because they know they will be applauded for saying "no", regardless of the actual merit of the thing they are saying "no" to. Now try to achieve something with the help of such people, and I can easily predict what happens... they will say "no". Yeah, funny game, until it gets boring. Stops being fun when there is something you actually care about ("something to protect").
So how does a herd of cats build a city? Ideological layer: Bayesianism, and reminding people that they have something to protect. Technical layer: forum with moderators, downvotes, bans. Knowledge layer: Sequences, yearly reviews of best posts. Fiction layer: "beisutsukai", "dath ilan" (note the evolution from a semi-permanent small group to a planet-wide civilization). From a certain perspective, these are all steps in the same direction; Eliezer yelling "cooperate", i.e. trying to bring more order. And as a result, a few things actually get built. Yeah, we have hoped for more. But the default option was getting even less.
This all reminds me of a great quote by Terry Pratchett:
"According to the philosopher, Ly Tin Wheedle, chaos is found in greatest abundance wherever order is being sought. It always defeats order, because it is better organized."
There is certainly going to be more web fiction/web comics, even if restricted to the ratfic genre. (Homestuck, HPMOR, Planecrash, etc. all come to mind.) I think that whether there's going to be anything *good* (or anything *very similar* to Unsong) is still up in the air, though.
Similar to Unsong is an incredible high bar, but there are some good web serials out there. (I am once again telling everyone I know to read A Practical Guide to Evil.)
Also, I wouldn't count Homestuck as ratfic. It's a good story, but it's very un-systematized and silly. It's not a story about understanding the world and making smart decisions, it's a story about... well... uh... I'm not sure how you sum it up in a pithy way. A research project to discover how many words you can invent before the story becomes incomprehensible to readers? An attempt to set the world record for most convoluted time-travel plot?
So during our get together for the eclipse the door into our garage broke and couldn't be opened. (I know! this a weak data point for equating total eclipses with the zombie apocalypse, because the first thing that happens when zombies arrive is either doors are locked or can't be locked.) So (after ripping the old door lock out.) I stopped at the local hardware and bought another.
"John" I said, "sell me your cheapest door lock, thingie, knob."
"My most cost effective you mean?" (John and I are old buddies, I go down to the hardware to have a beer or two on fridays.)
"Yeah that one", I say. He pulls down a box from the top shelf.
"I over ordered these." John says.
And for something less than $20 I go home with a new door knob.
And I wouldn't be writing this post if it hadn't been the best door knob gizmo to install ever. Now mind you I have no idea of the lifetime of this door knob, but if you've ever put in a door knob. (which you all should learn how to do, Because of zombies!) well after all the other stuff, you have to line up these two screws. which hold the whole door knob together. And it always is a pita. And on this new knob, you screwed the two screws into the outside first, and then you twist the inside knob on, and it has gaps for the screw shaft and a place for the head to catch. And then you tighten it up. And at the moment it get's my vote for the best door knob gizmo ever.
Ok so my understanding is that both (US) political parties are quite decentralized. Obviously primaries prevent much top-down control, but even party platforms and bylaws are decided pretty locally (?).
Given this, how hard would it be to “coup” a local political party? Eg imagine you’re a left-wing candidate running for election in a deep blue constituency. One strategy would be to get some of your friends to vote for you in the _Replublican_ primary, and then spend the general election convincing voters that you’re legit despite the nominal party label. Going further, you could imagine taking control of the whole local party apparatus and changing the “official” platform (not the these platforms mean much anyway).
Does this ever happen? I can’t find any instances but it’s a difficult-to-google scenario.
This American Life did an episode on a similar situation that happened in Michigan last year. https://www.thisamericanlife.org/820/believe-in-me Its not as extreme as democrats taking over the republican party, but does a great job showing how this can happen in practice. There are real time interview and audio as party decisions are being made and outsiders are taking over.
This is why Michael Bloomberg was nominally a Republican for the 2001 election in New York City. There were seven candidates in the primaries, all of whom had been Democrats prior to the campaign. The two most conservative of the seven democrats (Bloomberg and Badilo) ran as Republicans and faced a less-crowded primary than the other five who contested the Democratic nomination. It helped that both Bloomberg and Badilo were running on platforms of continuing at least some of the major policies of the outgoing Republican mayor (Giuliani), and Badilo had been part of Giuliani's administration. It also helped that no actual Republicans bothered to run.
A more systematic instance was the efforts of the Ron Paul campaigns in 2008 and 2012 and concurrent and subsequent activities of aligned organizations like the Campaign for Liberty and the Republican Liberty Caucus (*). The goal wasn't to get Paul the Republican nomination for President, and even getting the message out via debates and campaign appearances was a secondary goal. The main goal was to take control of local Republican Party organizations as part of a long-term effort to hijack the Republican Party. In many parts of the country, local party committee members are chosen in primaries or caucuses in races where hardly anyone pays attention (making it possible for a well-organized group take over by doing little more than showing up). And in some places (e.g. California) the Republican nominees for various offices get to appoint a certain number of delegates to the state party convention (that chooses the state party leadership and sets the platform) regardless of how badly they loose, enabling a strategy of running paper candidates for unwinnable races in order to get the otherwise-worthless nomination by default and thus gain control of a block of delegates.
(*) Campaign for Liberty was explicitly a Ron Paul organization. The Republican Liberty Caucus was not but had overlapping goals and a lot of people in this time period came to the RLC from the Ron Paul campaigns. When I was involved in the RLC (roughly 2009-2016), there was a significant spread of opinion between those who wanted to hijack the Republican party wholesale via organizational shenanigans and those who wanted to work with libertarian-adjacent groups within the mainstream Republican activist community to pull the party in a somewhat more libertarian direction; I was firmly in the latter camp.
Back in the early '00s — and I think it was in one of the blue counties of WA or OR — some local Dems noticed that there was no longer a functioning Republican local committee. They changed their voter registration from Dem to Republican and following the rules promulgated by the RNC created their own "Republican" local party committee. BTW, these were "progressive" Dems. They adopted their own local platform, which included things like urging the GOP to support a withdrawal from Iraq, and they fielded their own "progressive" candidates against the centrist Dems who controlled the local party apparatus. At some point before the election, the national RNC got wind that the local GOP party apparatus had been taken over by progressive Dems. I think the RNC got the Secretary of State (who was Republican at the time) of that state to disqualify those candidates. Sorry, I don't have any links for this. It was almost twenty years ago.
Yes, this happens a lot. Usually between competing wings within the same party, rather than an opposing party taking over the apparatus. For a complete outsider to take control would involve a significant amount of effort (as someone else said, more than participating in your own party's primary) and/or the opposing party essentially being non-existent.
Within the same party, this looks like factions who may support a particular candidate or slate or candidates or one or more particularly important policies within that faction. For instance Covid, education, trans sports, etc. which are all within the valence of the Republican party but may be more or less important to individual members. A group may get involved in local politics to pursue a stronger stance within those areas particularly.
I won't say it's a coup, but isn't this what happened with the DSA candidates? They ran under the aegis of the local Democratic Party:
"In recent years, the DSA's stated long-term goal has been to form an independent workers' party, while in the meantime it adopts a "proto-party" strategy called the "dirty break". DSA's elected leadership has often seen running in Democratic Party primary elections, rather than immediately forming a third party, as necessary for socialist visibility and electoral victories while the organization builds the resources for a viable workers' party. DSA also developed a stricter endorsement policy since 2016, endorsing only democratic socialists."
"The Democratic Socialists of America is a political nonprofit organization and not a political party, therefore DSA members usually run as members of the Democratic Party, Green Party, Working Families Party, or as independents."
At various times, there have been places where the local political party elected candidates quite different from the national party's preference. As I understand it, these were areas where one party was so dominant, that whatever candidate won that party's primary was guaranteed to win the general election. So everyone who wanted a say in the outcome joined the party. And so the local party base resembled the entire local electorate, and wound up choosing candidates in the primary who represented the overall electorate. And when the overall position of the local electorate shifted over time, the party affiliation stayed the same, leading to seemingly-odd results.
I think people have polarized enough in the last few decades that this might not be the case anywhere. But I had a friend during college who was quite liberal, outspokenly so, who was nevertheless a registered Republican in his home state.
'Does this ever happen' yes it extremely famously happened in 2016. The affected party did a 360 on its longtime positions on free trade and the role of America as a global power, among other things. Did you not know that Trump taking over the Republican party is like the famous example of a party coup, like, ever?
They’ll still be writing books about this a hundred years from now. It’s truly mind boggling.
World class sycophant Lindsey Graham ‘respectfully disagreed’ with Trump a couple days ago and Trump spent half a day publicly tearing Lindsey a new one.
It's scary how fast the Republican Party collapsed around him. And it's strange, because it resembles what's been going on at a grassroots level on the left, where the most extreme voices have been taking over and shaping the discourse around them, and it's hard to stand up against them. But the Democratic Party is still functional at higher levels.
I wonder what the difference is. Maybe the extremists took over low-level Republican discourse earlier, and the rot has had more time to spread? I remember things in the 2000s like the Tea Party and the purity spiral of calling people RINOs, but I've never been as plugged in to that side. Maybe it goes all the way back to the 90s and the rise of conservative talk radio and Fox News.
The thing that seems most salient for me is that the people who stood up against Trump from the right got shouted down and faded out of the discourse. There wasn't support for voices saying "this is wrong and stupid and dangerous", at least not as long as Trump polled well. And I wonder, if there were a Democratic candidate who was as venal and shallow as Trump, but got the same kind of reaction from the grassroots as Trump, would the establishment be able to stop them? Or is it just a matter of time?
>One strategy would be to get some of your friends to vote for you in the _Republican_ primary, and then spend the general election convincing voters that you’re legit despite the nominal party label.
But to what purpose? if the town is indifferent enough for you to pull it off, that just means you're running a Democratic Party campaign against the Democratic Party candidate, without the support of the Democratic Party's funds. You can do that cheaper in the primaries.
I'm clearly not cynical enough. There's at least good reason to believe that Amazon's Just Walk Out-- a system that lets people take their purchases, walk out, and be charged automatically is actually a thousand people in India evaluating video. Possible evidence-- shouldn't the charge for the purchase happen immediately rather than, as it does, taking hours?
I'd figured out that the answers to questions that appear after searches are scraped from web sites, but I didn't realize that the scraping sometimes adds errors and that google isn't directing people to the sites. The sites are in bad financial shape as a result. Talk about eating your seed corn.
Google ranking also involves a lot of work by humans.
The major point is that the stock market likes claims of using ai, which isn't the same thing as actually using ai.
I think this is an example of what we're discussing further up-thread about Great Top-Down Policies. I imagine people working in the stores objected about shoplifting, people deliberately not paying, and just simply 'how can you be sure every item is tagged and charged appropriately?" (If you've ever used a self-service checkout, or even the ordinary check-outs, you'll probably have had the experience of one item is not reading the barcode or isn't on the data base, so it has to be manually entered).
And I imagine the higher-ups brushed this aside with "of course it will work, don't you know AI is the future?"
And then it didn't work. So they needed humans. So they hired outsourced cheap labour, because having visible human checkout operators in their swish new 'just walk out' stores would be an admission of failure 😀
What Melvin said. Plus, if Amazon is doing it, it's probably a more cost-effective solution overall. I wouldn't be surprised if someone ran some numbers and figured that it would be better in the long run to roll out the service before the AI backend was capable of handling the entire thing, and then quietly ramp up the portion of the backend handled by AI. Or perhaps they're doing "on-the-job training": having humans double-check AI decisions, and then improving the AI based on the human feedback.
But it hasn't worked out, as they're scrapping it and going back to self-service checking out (this time you scan your products as you put them into the trolley). So the bugs haven't been worked out and whatever training or improving the AI they did with the experiment showed that they don't yet have the kind of product they want and need.
The *idea* is very seductive, but the notion of "as you walk around the RF signal goes to the automated till about what products you took off the shelves" clearly has problems; for a start, I wonder how they manage with the way all the products are put into the shopping cart, some must surely be blocking the tags/barcodes of others. And picking up something to look at it then putting it back on the shelf might trigger false charges if the sensitivity is too high.
As this story puts it, the Just Walk Out is (for them) the best experience, so why are Amazon junking it? It has to be because it's not working as intended:
"“Just Walk Out” is the most seamless way to shop here, faster than the other two options by a significant amount. We were left wondering why Amazon is moving away from this option at these stores.
Dash Carts were the most frustrating option, and didn’t save us much time. We found the process of scanning and entering items into the high-tech shopping cart to be clunky, inconsistent, and difficult to navigate.
Traditional shopping — using a non-digital cart and paying at the cashier — was the easiest and most simple option. It did take more time, including a few minutes waiting in line at the cashier’s station.“
Fair enough. It was a good idea, they just couldn't get it to work. I give them credit for trying. The good thing about being a $2 trillion company is that you can afford to try new ideas.
I very much doubt that it's _just_ a manual process, more likely it's an AI model combined with manual review for tricky cases. The hope was presumably to improve the model over time (as you collect millions of hours of labelled in-the-wild video) and reduce the number of tricky cases requiring manual review to near zero.
So at least in short term, artificial intelligence will *increase* employment. You may lose your job thanks to ChatGPT, but in turn you will be hired to write the answers for ChatGPT.
I imagine a glorious future where everything is automated, and everyone has a job where they sign a NDA and manually do some of the "automated" things.
Patients investigating long COVID-- they started with a survey of symptoms, then looked into which medications they were already taking that seemed to help. They've turned up some promising possibilities.
Left to themselves, scientists had been only studying specific symptoms, a very expensive way to learn anything.
There is *still* going to be another study of exercise even though there's a lot of evidence that exercise is bad for long COVID.
However, there are also studies being done or soon to be done based on the patients' research.
Do you know who Ivan Chonkin is? I'm sure that very few of you know the work of Vladimir Voinovich, an excellent satirist from the Soviet Union. His short stories and novels are both a telescope and a magnifying glass on life in a totalitarian cult of personality. He knows where the comi/tragedies are buried, and he unearths them all: https://falsechoices.substack.com/p/old-stories-ivan-chonkin-is-dead
I've read the first Chonkin novel and also the Ivankiad - his non-fiction work about being awarded a bigger flat by the Writers Union then having it rescinded because some party bigwig wanted the flat instead. Devastating satire all the way to the last line
I have to say, after this long discussion sub-thread, "Welcome to Theology Corner, your place in the rationalist blogging world for answers on questions of dogma, doctrine, and discipline!"
And all gratitude to Scott for putting up with us 😀
Nah. Only some Protestants. Or maybe it depends on how you define "Protestant".
Anglicans would be a counterexample, and there are probably others. Although they more did the "Good Omens" thing, and sauntered off in a vaguely protest-like direction.
Oh, that YouTuber. His "All Christian denominations explained in 12 minutes" went viral a while back. Its good as far as YouTube primers go. I had to laugh because at the end he shows a bunch of denominations that he says he didn't include because he isn't sure they're Christian at all: and right there among the Mormans and the rest I found my own denomination! That was a shock and a laugh. If you had told my father that someone would put us on the same level as the Mormans, he would have thought his hearing was going.
Turned out the problem was that my particular denomination is *too* Sola Scriptura: we don't hold that the Nicene Creed is necessarily true (because it's not in the Bible) and as far as he's concerned you have to believe the Creed to be considered Christian at all.
(I do believe in the Creed, and I'd say just about everyone I went to church would too, but we believed it because it matched what the Bible said, not because the Creed itself was authoritative).
"The Chalcedonian Definition (also called the Chalcedonian Creed or the Definition of Chalcedon) is a declaration of Christ's nature (that it is dyophysite), adopted at the Council of Chalcedon in AD 451. Chalcedon was an early centre of Christianity located in Asia Minor. The council was the fourth of the ecumenical councils that are accepted by Chalcedonian churches which include the Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Lutheran, Anglican and Reformed churches.
It was the first council not to be recognised by any Oriental Orthodox church; for this reason these churches may be classified as Non-Chalcedonian."
Technically no, but in practice yes. My denomination is about as far towards scripture as you can get on the "scripture vs tradition" slider. Back during the Second Great Awakening our movement had a few catchy slogans: "No creed but Christ! No book but the Bible!" So if it ain't in the Good Book, it ain't required.
On the other hand, we inherited a lot from Christian tradition without even knowing it. The trinity, a dyophysite Christ, and pretty much all the Nicene Creed is something just about everyone in my church would agree with. Another of our slogans was "In essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, in all things love". We'd define the essentials as things that are clearly in the scripture, but in practice "essentials" rounds out to the Apostles Creed. If there were any monophosites in the congregation we'd probably just agree to disagree.
I will mildly tsk-tsk at that, but then again it puts your set in the same group as the Oriental Orthodox, and if I'm happy to say the Ethiopian Church is Christian, why not?
Though to make mischief, if the denomination does not accept the determinations of the Councils as prescriptive, they're rather hung on the horns of the dilemma that it was those same Councils that set the canon of the Scriptures they are Sola-ing as the ultimate authority.
Generally we'd say that the scriptures that were officially made canon were made so because they were the best ones we have. So even if you don't believe the Councils should have authority over you, that doesn't change the fact that the scriptures they choose are the best we got. I mean, just compare the gospel of Matthew to the gospel of Thomas, it's pretty clear which is superior.
Definitely the gospel of Matthew is much more in line with our expectations than the gospel of Thomas, but at the time things like the gospel of Thomas and the Infancy gospel were floating around and being treated as similarly relevant. The Councils were needed to hammer this out, as well as defining doctrines. A different decision, and today we might be arguing that the gospel of Thomas is valid more than this Mark guy 😀
I don't think it's "the Bible as interpreted by Protestants" - it's rather "your interpretation of the Bible". They don't say you should defer to canonical Protestant interpretation.
I think there's some disagreement about whether the interpretation should be done on a personal level, or a congregational level, or on the level of the local priest/reverend/preacher, or on a local grouping of priests/reverends/preachers, or the local bishop (if they have them), or a grouping of bishops, or possibly even the local head of state. Among other disagreements.
"I sometimes think that writing is like driving a sheep down the road. If there's any gate open to the left or the right the reader will most certainly go into it.” -C. S. Lewis
The major difference back at the Reformation was the authority of Scripture versus Scripture plus Tradition. That's where the ever-popular "where is that in the Bible?" comes from when questioning Catholic/Orthodox practices and beliefs, and why Internet atheists keep believing that if they can only do enough quote verse-mining to show that verse A contradicts verse B, this is a knock-out blow (remember the "whales aren't fish" bit?), because for Americans, they're familiar with the inerrant literal Bible mindset of the USA denominations and take that as normative for global Christianity.
I've had enough of that that I sometimes think I should get a t-shirt made up reading "Not A Protestant", as Scripture is not the sole authority for us. The Anglicans, because they have to be awkward, prefer Hooker's formulation about the three legs of the stool - Scripture, Tradition, and Reason:
"The classic expression of the Anglican understanding of authority comes from Richard Hooker (d. 1600), favorite of Queen Elizabeth I and ardent preacher against the Puritans, whose masterful work Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity has been perhaps the authoritative voice of classic Anglicanism. In Book 5 he writes on the nature of authority in the Church, where we find what is probably his most famous passage:
“Be it in matter of the one kind or of the other [i.e. doctrine vs. church practice], what Scripture doth plainly deliver, to that the first place both of credit and obedience is due; the next whereunto is whatsoever any man can necessarily conclude by force of reason; after these the voice of the Church succeedeth. That which the Church by her ecclesiastical authority shall probably think and define to be true or good, must in congruity of reason overrule all other inferior judgments whatsoever.” (V.8.2)"
So for Hooker, the ordering goes Scripture -> Reason -> Tradition (the Church). This enables them to eat their cake and have it over changing doctrines (we're not like those Papists that invent and add on doctrines, we use reason to make up our minds!) and thus claim to be both Biblical Protestants and yet liberal as time goes on.
So for the very hardcore denominations, it's Sola Scriptura all the way. For the mainstream, it's Scripture filtered through Reason (or whatever the Zeitgeist wants). The authority of the church comes last, as it's mostly in arguments with Catholicism that they are downgrading the equal authority of Tradition.
> The classic expression of the Anglican understanding of authority comes from Richard Hooker
That's Anglican Classic, or maybe Mexican Anglican (with real sugar).* But I'm not sure how we get from there to Bishop Spong? I kinda feel like theology should be more rigorous than "it sounds good when I agree with him, and sounds like New Age nonsense when I don't". That is precisely the sort of thing that gets me questioning my own beliefs, and not in the way that they probably want.
* For non-Americans, this is a reference to varieties of Coca-Cola, including the good stuff that only comes from Mexico (or apparently with a yellow(!!!) cap during Passover).
The road from there to Bishop Spong is a long and torturous one, but arises out of the logical consequences of "the Pope is not the boss of me", which leads on to "no stinkin' Archbishop of Canterbury is the boss of me". When your church has been under the construction of someone like Henry VIII who did think of himself as the spiritual head, fancied himself a theologian, and liked to meddle directly with setting doctrine, then the foundations are laid for 'so long as the secular authorities authorise it, it's okay' and hence any internal fighting over what is or is not permissible has to be referred to the external authority of Parliament, in this case.
The seeds of this came to fruit with the Bishop Colenso affair:
After all, if each separate national church is its own thing, then the Anglican church in Britain can only have a notional authority over the church in another country. The liberal and modernist view can fight it out against the traditional view. This happens within Catholicism as well, of course, but the Pope is the ultimate authority in a way the Archbishop of Canterbury is not.
And with the prizing of "we believe in Reason, we're not superstitious like the Papists, we can adapt as Science increases knowledge" (I know, "but what about Darwin?", but that was one of the ways the reliance on "inerrant, literal, Sola Scriptura" was weakened) and so over time as things became socially acceptable, the call was on for the Church to liberalise right along with society. And since the secular authority was the ultimate one for Anglicanism, that pressure was exerted successfully - see Chesterton's scathing account of the Prayer Book Controversy:
"The proposal of an amended Prayer-Book, or rather two alternative Prayer-Books, was not decided for the Church by the Churchy or by the communicants; or by the congregation. It was settled by a mob of politicians, atheists, agnostics, dissenters, Parsees; avowed enemies of that Church or of any Church, who happened to have M.P. after their names. If the whole thing had any historic motto, or deserved anything higher than a headline, what was written across all that Anglican story was not Ecclesia Anglicana, or Via Media, or anything of the sort; it was Cujus Regio Ejus Religio; or rendering unto Caesar the things that are God’s.
I add one incident to contrast Style, among men who had been Catholics for fourteen-hundred years, with that among men who have been Protestants for four-hundred years. A Protestant organisation presented all the atheists, etc., who had voted Protestant, with a big black Bible or Prayer-Book, or both, decorated outside with a picture of the Houses of Parliament. In hoc signo vinces. It would be very idolatrous to put a cross or crucifix outside a book; but a picture of Parliament where the Party Funds are kept, and the peerages sold — . That is the temple where dwell the gods of Israel... We know the world progresses, and education is certainly extended, and there are fewer illiterates; and I suppose it is all right."
Now, if all this sounds like Catholic boasting, I think we dodged a bullet with Vatican II. We certainly scrapped a lot of things for the liberal faction, but the big loss was on "Humane Vitae" where Paul VI (considered a weak pope, generally) went in the face of the expectation that yeah, now the Church was going to get all modern from the liberals, and indeed against the advice of the Pontifical Commission established to examine this, and repeated and reinforced the teachings against artificial birth control. Anglicanism had given in on this at Lambeth in 1926, and it was expected that eventually the Catholics would drag their mediaeval asses into the modern era, but we didn't. Solely because the Pope is the pope.
So much for mainstream Protestant churches, which more or less all went the same way. For the non-mainstream churches in America, the big division came around Modernism and the effects of such things as the historical-critical method as applied to the Bible. Fundamentalism had its formal beginnings as such in the late 19th century, and by 1910 there were established declarations and principles of Fundamentalism, mainly the inerrancy of Scripture.
So of course there were splits between, very broadly speaking, the mainline churches which trended liberal theologically and socially, the evangelicals, and the fundamentalists.
"The Princeton theology, which responded to higher criticism of the Bible by developing from the 1840s to 1920 the doctrine of inerrancy, was another influence in the movement. This doctrine, also called biblical inerrancy, stated that the Bible was divinely inspired, religiously authoritative, and without error. The Princeton Seminary professor of theology Charles Hodge insisted that the Bible was inerrant because God inspired or "breathed" his exact thoughts into the biblical writers (2 Timothy 3:16). Princeton theologians believed that the Bible should be read differently than any other historical document, and they also believed that Christian modernism and liberalism led people to Hell just like non-Christian religions did."
And of course, since the church *structure* was not authoritative - every congregation its own independent church as it were - it is only on things like interpretation of the Bible they can agree, and as we've seen since the Reformation (and before), everyone interprets the Bible in their own way. Having chopped down the trunk of "The Pope can't tell you how to read the Bible", they had also sawed off the branch of "You can't come up with your own cuckoo interpretation" because you're not the boss of me, after all.
That's my understanding, but the test is surely going to be the branches that allow openly gay pastors, which is anti-biblical. Keep in mind the Latter Day Saints like Mormonism are not Protestants; I was surprised to hear from a Mormon friend that their church assigns congregations to churches based on where they live, akin to voting districts.
Google's first few results say there are three defining features of Protestantism, though the first article is paywalled and the second has a different three. https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Protestant-Heritage From experience, churchgoers are not as united on "faith through grace alone" as the articles suggest, though the church doctrines may well be.
The video does discuss liberal denominations, for which neither the Bible nor the church has much authority. But even for them (according to the video) the Bible has a bit more than church tradition.
I don't think there's anything in the Bible that cares about orientation, as long as the priest is celibate.
Once we start having priests (or rough equivalents) who have sexual relationships, then it starts to matter. But at that point I think it's still a matter of priests playing by the same rules as everyone else. If homosexual relationships are OK for ordinary people, and it's OK for priests to have sexual relationships, then it's OK for priests to have homosexual relationships. I don't recall ever seeing anything that goes against that logic.
The same chapter in Old Testament states that incest and homosexuality are bad and then in the New Testament it's reminded that adultery is still bad. Therefore homosexuality is also bad according to the New Testament. Seems like a bit of a stretch, considering that a lot of things stated in Old Testament are no longer considerd valid.
Moreover, even initial premise that according to the Old Testament Homosexuality is bad is kind of questionable. Chapter 18 first states "No incest!" and then meticulously explains what is considered incest to evade misinterpretations. All of this kinds of incest are about man to woman sexual encounters.
And then after all that it states "do not have sexual relationship with a man as one does with a woman". Which is kind of ambiguous. Is it about not having man to man sexual relationships? Or is it that sexual relationship between two man should be different from sexual relationship between man and a woman? It can even be interpreted that all these rules about man to woman sexual relationship do not apply to man to man sexual relationship and so same sex incest is fine - explains why it goes right after the talks about incest and makes some sense from genetics perspective.
Motivated reasoning through and through. "The Bible says do not murder, but it only talks about striking people so they die, it doesn't say anything about cutting them open and filling their wounds with salt. So that method must be fine." No, it doesn't specify the method because it doesn't have to.
The genetics argument is silly because it's right next to "don't have sex with a woman on her period." It's also right next to "do not have sex with an animal and defile yourself with it." (But of course "defile" is ambiguous, it's surely perfectly fine to have sex with an animal in a respectful way, right?)
Are there non-motivated ways to reason about an ambiguous sacred text?
> "The Bible says do not murder, but it only talks about striking people so they die, it doesn't say anything about cutting them open and filling their wounds with salt. So that method must be fine."
Well if it went like
Don't murder people
Don't murder people with a blade
Don't murder people with a blunt object
Don't murder people via suffucation
Don't murder people via creating an appearance of accident
Don't murder people indirectly
Don't murder people at all - murder is bad
Don't steal on Tuesdays
I think it would be a quite natural interpretation to think that stealing on other days of the week is fine. And Leviticus 18 has a somewhat similar structure.
> it's right next to "don't have sex with a woman on her period."
The interpretation that the rules for hetero relationships do not apply to homo relationships works here perfectly well .
> It's also right next to "do not have sex with an animal and defile yourself with it."
The bestiality verse goes *after* the "don't have sex with a man the same way as with a woman". First incest rules are described, then it's mentioned that they do not applied to homosexual relationships and then bestiality rules are described - makes perfect sense.
Also notice that how the bestiality verse goes. Even though the defile part is a bit up to interpretation, as you mention, the general prohibition is very clear: Don't do thing, don't let women do this thing. Why wasn't verse 22 designed in the same manner: Don't have sexual relationship with a man, a woman must not have sexual relationship with a woman? Why the ambiguity where in other places the text is very specific, extremely specific, to the point of directly describing all the possible incest varieties? This is weird, don't you think?
Can it be some artifact of translation? Is the Hebrew version ambiguous the same way?
Same problem as with St Paul's epistle discussing bishops and deacons, for churches that later permitted divorce and remarriage when the ex-spouse was still alive, so a lot of logic-chopping was done about "Well ackshully when Paul says 'the husband of one wife' he *really* means monogamous, not polygamous, so it's okay to be divorced and remarried and a minister!"
The below is a Protestant translation so it uses "overseer" instead of "bishop" 'cos y'know, "bishop" is one of the terms them there hierarchical liturgical churches, especially them Romanists, use 😁
3 The saying is trustworthy: If anyone aspires to the office of overseer, he desires a noble task. 2 Therefore an overseer must be above reproach, the husband of one wife, sober-minded, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, 3 not a drunkard, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money. 4 He must manage his own household well, with all dignity keeping his children submissive, 5 for if someone does not know how to manage his own household, how will he care for God's church? 6 He must not be a recent convert, or he may become puffed up with conceit and fall into the condemnation of the devil. 7 Moreover, he must be well thought of by outsiders, so that he may not fall into disgrace, into a snare of the devil.
Qualifications for Deacons
8 Deacons likewise must be dignified, not double-tongued, not addicted to much wine, not greedy for dishonest gain. 9 They must hold the mystery of the faith with a clear conscience. 10 And let them also be tested first; then let them serve as deacons if they prove themselves blameless. 11 Their wives likewise must be dignified, not slanderers, but sober-minded, faithful in all things. 12 Let deacons each be the husband of one wife, managing their children and their own households well. 13 For those who serve well as deacons gain a good standing for themselves and also great confidence in the faith that is in Christ Jesus."
>11 But now I am writing to you that you must not associate with anyone who claims to be a brother or sister[c] but is sexually immoral or greedy, an idolater or slanderer, a drunkard or swindler. Do not even eat with such people.
Are you willing to argue that someone deemed unworthy to be present in the church is nonetheless qualified to lead it?
Not at all - just that most people read that line in a way that doesn’t suggest a test for *any* of those categories that would disqualify someone for the priesthood, or for membership in a church.
There is a bit in 1st Timothy where Paul explains his view on the qualifications needed to be an "overseer" in the church, which is somewhat analogous to a priest/pastor.
"Now the overseer is to be above reproach, faithful to his wife, temperate, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not given to drunkenness, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money. He must manage his own family well and see that his children obey him, and he must do so in a manner worthy of full respect. (If anyone does not know how to manage his own family, how can he take care of God’s church?) He must not be a recent convert, or he may become conceited and fall under the same judgment as the devil. He must also have a good reputation with outsiders, so that he will not fall into disgrace and into the devil’s trap.
"In the same way, deacons are to be worthy of respect, sincere, not indulging in much wine, and not pursuing dishonest gain. They must keep hold of the deep truths of the faith with a clear conscience. They must first be tested; and then if there is nothing against them, let them serve as deacons."
At least that was the reason for founding the Protestant church by the reformers like Martin Luther. It's still visible in many aspects. For example, protestants celebrate only (or mainly) those church holidays which are motivated by the bible, they only accept the two sacraments that have foundations in the bible (out of the the 7 sacraments of the catholic church), and so on.
One can debate what authority means, and how much this survived the 4 centuries since then, but that is the core of what the founders tried to plant into the DNA of the Protestant church.
Polymarket seems to be by far the largest real-money prediction market, yet it was revealed to be less accurate than its smaller competitors(Manifold, Metaculus, etc.). Is there actual money making opportunity in Polymarket, including transaction costs and such?
What does modern psychology/psychiatry think about hypnosis? Is it useful? Mostly junk? No more useful than any other form of therapy? We don't know because it was first studied by weirdos in the 60s and nobody in modern times has tried replicating their results?
I've listened to a few hypnosis tracks out of curiosity, and it did put me into what I'd call an "altered state," so hypnosis certainly does *something*, but can you do anything *useful* with that state? Can you change behavior long-term with hypnotic suggestions? Is ignoring pain with hypnosis a thing?
Science Vs podcast did an episode about it a while ago, and basically came to the conclusion that human suggestibility has a lot of individual variation. A lot of the tricks hypnotists use are common relaxation tricks, but how well they work depends on individual temperament. So there probably won't be a single (non-chemical) way to hypnotize most people with consistent results.
PBS in its Frontline show did a four or five part series on hypnosis that included reporting from two of the researchers who did a lot of the basic research. It was very informative, and this was during the time that there was a hysteria about girls who had been sexually abused by their families. Of course this happens, but when put under hypnosis the stories became almost as crazy as the ones about sexual abuse at day care centers, another bizarre hysteria. During hypnosis the now young women remembered orgies with dozens of people doing almost impossible sexual acts. The people who monetized hypnosis did not look legit and the researchers were very clear about the limits and pitfalls of hypnosis. I think you can find it on youtube. I forgot about this - maybe time to revisit it myself, fascinating, and tragic. Tore families apart limb by limb, as you can imagine.
I recently read some studies on hypnosis. Hypnosis definitely can do a lot of things, but it is not standardizable. Some people are very strongly affected by hypnosis, and some people are not affected by it at all. I can't locate it offhand, but I remember one published case study where a woman who was allergic to most opioids (perhaps not allergic, but had a history of adverse outcomes from opioid administration) Was put under hypnosis as the sole form of analgesia during several dental surgeries. Apparently it worked very well, she was not in much pain at all.
The trouble is that it wouldn't work on everyone, and even on her the second time they did it it didn't work, they had to stop the procedure and try hypnotizing her again (after which it did work). Hypnosis's applications are limited because of how hit and miss it can be.
Maybe Sam Bankman-Fried is better off than I thought:
The WSJ of April 6-7 reports that "All in all, FTX customers currently stand to get back their full account balances, based on their value when FTX collapsed in November 2022." (Page B5.)
People are buying up the debt and speculating on it. Maybe SBF will buy the prison. Store for everybody!
Separately, I apologize for impugning the integrity of DuckDuckGo. I am told it is not owned by Google.
"Full account balances" is somewhat misleading. They will get back the USD value of their balance at the time of the bankruptcy, but not the crypto value. Most coins have gone up a lot since the bankruptcy date, so customers are much worse off.
It will be controlled by a Board consisting of Grimes, Kanye West, and 3 LLMs each trained on the corpus of Elon's tweets (but using slightly different algorithms).
But of course the new owners (Musk's heirs) may first install a new board, which makes it more complicated. Musk has (I think) either seven or eleven children whom he favours to varying degrees, mostly minors, and one can only speculate on what his will might have to say about how his assets would be split up.
Most likely if he died today then most of his assets would belong to some kind of trusts set up to benefit his minor heirs (or else trusts set up to benefit something else e.g. Mars colonisation), and these trusts would be obliged to act in the best fiduciary interests of said heirs, so you'd probably see the company getting run in a more conventional value-maximising fashion.
I'm confused. I thought that the starting situation (in Alexander Turok's comment) was one with an unexpected lack of a CEO (and, additionally, in your comment, the lack of a line of succession), rather than the presence of one that the board wished to eject.
I am imagining the board ejecting one of its own members into the fray that is the leaderless company. The ejection apparatus is to protect the ceo from environment effects until he is properly in place.
Climate change/control and pandemic prevention/management may both be viewed as enhancing government control over the populace. WHICH of these two do you feel has the greater potential for controlling/affecting the populace? Differentials between long-term and short-term are invited.
Pandemic by a mile. Fear is the driving force behind control, and "If you do this you will die this week" is just so much scarier than "if you and several million other people keep doing this your grandchildren will die in their thirties."
If you want to drastically, tyrannically cut climate change, you'd probably start with industrial policy, not individual behaviors, because that's where the juicy targets are. Seizing Joe Normie's SUV is a waste of time when you could be seizing coal mines and shutting them down. It might do crazy things to the economy if you implement it badly, but I think it doesn't demand a lot from individual liberties.
Pandemic control, on the other hand, really does benefit from telling people "you, specifically, aren't allowed to do this thing no matter how important you feel it is" and so is more likely to intrude on the average person's day to day life.
But I'm having trouble coming up with any pandemic *prevention* policies that would tyrannically enhance a government's control of its population.
Force everyone to get vaccinated for any pathogen that seems to be a threat? That may be good public health policy but it wouldn't strengthen the government, and it would radicalize the antivaxxer crazies and the societal discontents.
Force people to wear masks when there's no public health emergency? How does that strengthen a government's grip on its population?
Stop the free association of people in public places when there's no public health emergency? You'd crash the economy for no reason, and even ultra-totalitarian governments depend on an economy of some sort to prop up their regimes.
OTOH New Zealand developed a nifty tracker app for people's smartphones that allowed people to checkin whenever they visited a business, school, church, friends, etc. When the COVID outbreaks were few and far between they were able to trace down infected people quickly with the data provided by that app. However, China doesn't need a special app to track its citizens. Their social credit scores on social media give them greater control of their citizens.
So I think your thesis is flawed when it comes to pandemic prevention. During a state of emergency, some of the examples above could, but, with the exception of China (and their ZeroCOVID policy), it was generally the non-totalitarian governments that enforced restrictions and then loosened them up once the emergency was over. Totalitarian governments (except China) didn't give a shit about controlling the spread of COVID.
If the government has the right to force businesses to close due to a pandemic, it's much easier for the government to decide that businesses must be closed for other reasons, including individual businesses (or at least categories that can be rigged to apply to specific ones).
Really, any government action that reinforces or introduces powers helps create or empower a tighter grip. There are people who were very supportive and still are about vaccine mandates, mandatory closures, travel restrictions, etc. These are the same tools that a totalitarian government might use to enforce different rules. A curfew, for instance, is a very common tool for authoritarian governments, and it's a small difference from what was put into place for the pandemic. Similarly, requiring government-issued documentation (vaccination records) to go out in public is very similar to authoritarian practices.
Again, the main point there is that the government claims for itself the right to do these things, and then that allows future governments to reclaim the right. What's to stop a future bad-intentioned government from fabricating the reasoning behind an emergency and implementing similar controls? Let's say that Trump declares an emergency and you can only work or travel if you get a government-issued pass. Most people will try very hard to get that pass, even if it means they need to sign away other rights or give up privacy, independence, etc. That people could voluntarily give up constitutional rights in order to be allowed to do basic activities is exactly what happened with Covid. In many places people weren't allowed to peaceably assemble without a vaccination card. That's far too close to authoritarian government for my comfort level, whether or not I agree with vaccination.
Well, we're talking hypotheticals here. AFAIK, all the liberal democracies discontinued all the restrictive public health policies that were implemented as temporary measures during the state of emergencies that were declared during the SARS2 pandemic. So, it could happen, but it didn't. As for totalitarian regimes, the only one that I know of that was concerned with containing the pandemic using NPIs was China, and even they finally threw in the towel due to popular unrest.
BTW, I'm using liberal democracy in the traditional sense of the term: per Britannica, a liberal democracy is "a form of democracy in which the power of government is limited, and the freedom and rights of individuals are protected, by constitutionally established norms and institutions."
AFAIK all liberal democracies have a mechanism to declare states of emergency to deal with national-level emergencies when either (a) the state's sovereignty is threatened or (b) the welfare of their overall population is threatened. And during national emergencies, there are mechanisms whereby normal civil regulations and legal processes may be suspended or modified for the duration of the state of emergency. The mechanism for invoking a state of emergency, the actions that are taken to deal with the state of emergency, when and how the state of emergency is declared to be over, and how the emergency powers are devolved vary from nation-state to nation-state.
However, because these are liberal democracies, these governments don't have to "claim the right" to implement these mechanisms, because they *have* the right to implement them under their constitutional frameworks and/or under the regulations that democratically-elected legislatures have approved.
When it comes to pandemics, in the United States, per the Public Health Service Act of 1944, Under 42 U.S.C. § 247d, the Secretary of Health and Human Services can determine if a public health emergency exists. The HHS Secretary's scope of response is limited to the "appropriate actions" to respond to the public health emergency, and they include making grants, providing awards, and conducting investigations related to disease prevention or treatment. These powers can be invoked in response to significant outbreaks of infectious diseases or bioterrorist attacks.
Furthermore, under the National Emergencies Act of 1976 (50 U.S.C. 1601 et seq.), the President can declare a national emergency, which when triggered gives POTUS various powers, and there are no statutory limitations beyond the term “emergency” itself. For instance, President Donald Trump invoked these powers under the NEA (50 U.S.C) and then under (10 U.S. Code § 2808 - "Construction authority in the event of a declaration of war or national emergency.") to secure funding for the construction of a wall along the southern border, despite Congress denying such funding.
So, yes, these statutes give POTUS broad powers. Theoretically, POTUS could declare himself President for Life under these powers, but while there may be no statutory limitations against the POTUS doing this, there are constitutional limitations. The courts may not agree with him. Then you have a constitutional crisis. And I doubt POTUS would get very far unless the party controlling the legislature allowed it. It would all be very messy, indeed.
OTOH, if you don't like this setup, you're welcome to try to get the laws changed. You could start a letter-writing campaign to Congresspeeps to change he laws. You could try to make it part of your party's platform to change these laws. Or you could form your own political party — call it the I Don't Need No Stinking Emergency Powers Party — and the IDNNSEPP could try to elect candidates to Congress to change these laws. (Good luck with that!)
But the same inertia that would work against you to change these laws would also work against a would-be tinpot dictator who was trying to take control of the federal government. Cf. "January 6" and "The Deep State."
The question was whether these powers, those related to pandemics, increase a government's power over the population. I think the answer is clearly yes, and I responded to you because you said no. I think your current response agrees that yes, it does, but that there are no good alternatives. I generally agree with that take, but emphasize the need for citizens and parties to continue to fight against authoritarian abuses - even when it's our own policy preferences and political parties who are using the powers.
I feel like you're answering a different question than what was asked? OP asked which of these could have more control/effect on the populace, and you're saying "well, yes, you could force people to do some things, but that wouldn't help you justify controlling the populace to do *other* things." And on the flip side, pointing out that governments that are inclined for tyranny don't actually need a pandemic as an excuse to tyrannize the populace since they're already doing that.
And both of those seem true, but if that's your stance then OP's question seems totally irrelevant - what matters is how inclined your government is to abuse its power and not what specific crisis they're using to justify that power.
The OP seemed to be asking our opinions of whether pandemic or climate change laws would have greater potential to create a totalitarian government. Quote: "WHICH of these two do you feel has the greater potential for controlling/affecting the populace? Differentials between long-term and short-term are invited." You seemed to be arguing that pandemic policies would be of greater utility. I argued that I couldn't see that they would.
So, I'm genuinely puzzled why you think I'm answering a different question. Please explain how I've either misunderstood the topic of the OP's question or your response to the OP's question.
Knowing the interests of this community, I'd like to share my recent substack post that is dealing with ideas of e/acc and AI safety. In my blog I'm focusing on topics that are related to Futurism, Science, Technology.
If I won't feel urgency to write something different, in 2 weeks I'll post about the need for increased productivity in biomedical research, and how I envision it to happen in the coming decades.
I wrote my first blogpost which is about why one should be open to wise insights from "cringy" sources. It's basically a reformulation of the ad hominem fallacy, but focusing on vibes instead of intellectual rigor or ethics. Read it and give me praise and recognition.
Great post! I teach philosophy and find myself using dumb pop culture references all the time to reinforce stuff they read in “the canon”. My references are so out of date that my students don’t even realize that they’re cringe.
I did an analysis showing how the *time of day* that you submit a scientific preprint can influence how many citations that preprint later receives [1,2]. The basic thrust of this work is to show how institutions designed to deal with scientific work in a (seemingly) objective way can break down due to idiosyncrasies in social and technical processes.
Before I submit this work to a journal, I'm brainstorming other unexpected effects in citation trends that I could check for using article (meta)data alone, ideally with a mechanism for causal relationship that could be checked for in a controlled way. For example, something like "citation count vs. frequency of number of very uncommon words in the article text, because readers find the article more memorable and engaging" (I am not proposing this relationship nor interested in defending it here).
If anyone has ever thought about these kinds of effects, reach out to discuss!
This has been common knowledge (within certain communities) for at least a decade. The causal mechanism is believed to be the placement of the preprint in the arXiv listing. (Being top or bottom of the list is better for visibility). But it is also somewhat confounded by the effect where you go to the extra effort of `optimally timing' the submission only for those papers which you actually like and want to receive maximum posture, and don't bother for papers which are just ho-hum, graduate student needed a publication.
Which communities did you notice had good knowledge of this? Do you know how the knowledge usually spread about this technique?
>> But it is also somewhat confounded by the effect where you go to the extra effort of `optimally timing' the submission only for those papers which you actually like
The causal relationship was only partially confounded by that effect, historically, and this effect probably can't explain submitter behaviour any more based on my data. Probably 'word got out' and enough people who believed the causal mechanism started submitting any/every paper in this way (this is the behavior of many of the highest frequency 'offenders' that you can observe in my first link). Of the analyses on this topic that I'm aware of (mine and the four references I give above), each only partially explains excess citations by the "intention" of the submitter.
Regardless, i try to shift the narrative away from "excess citations are partially due to authors who want to make their best work stand out" to "excess citations are partially due to placement on the list(!)" because that second effect exists and strikes some folks as kind of a huge bug in disseminating research
In combinatorics and probability (math.CO and math.PR) there are quite a few people who skim the new arxiv publications of their subsection each morning. Arxiv offers an automatic email summary for this. If you see such a list each morning, it gets pretty obvious that you notice papers at the beginning of the list a bit better. So it's not exactly subtle.
It's been common knowledge in every department I've ever been in, from the time that I was a graduate student to now. When the word got out, I don't know, but it was more than fifteen years ago.
Words for emotions or state of mind, for ex.: interesting, surprising, disappointed, disagree, curious, decide, wonder, puzzled, hope for. Number of words of this type/total words. Seems like such words would engage reader more, all other things being equal.
I don't know whether the data is easily available, but I would find it interesting to know how submission ID at a peer-reviewed conference correlates with acceptance probability and/or citation count.
Background: the IDs are usually given by submission time. So small numbers correspond to papers that are submitted a few days in advance, large numbers correspond to papers which are submitted in the last minutes. Those are different working styles, and I suspect that it corresponds a lot with how polished papers are, but less with the actual content of the paper.
(Mind that some big conferences require pre-registration of an abstract a week before the deadline, so it might not work for those.)
How about day of week? I would expect it makes a bigger difference than time of day.
I would think that abstract features (total words, words in last sentence) would be impactful as well. Based on how I (n=1) judge papers based on the abstract.
It's not just theoretical. I know a few people (some of them co-authors of mine) who actively optimize for the time of the day to get better arxiv visibility.
Watched the Amazon reboot of Roadhouse, and was struck by how weird the whole endeavor seemed. It's not following the plot of the original movie, and it's not even following the original's tone, rather it's following what's presumably the audience's impression of the original's tone. It leans into a silliness that the Patrick Swayzee movie never acknowledged.
Not sure where I'm going with this. What do people think of this type of reboot, attempting to appeal to a post-hoc understanding of the original?
You can't recapture the mood and mindset of the late 80s or early 90s that would have made the original tone workable. That was the timeframe of such action movies as Rambo 2 (very different from the original) or Commando - over-the-top cheesy action that was played almost entirely straight. Schwarzenegger has had a whole side-career playing roles that deconstruct that persona, from Kindergarten Cop to Twins to Last Action Hero. Society has internalized the base instinct that pushes us towards that kind of movie while recognizing it's inherent silliness.
A modern movie that doesn't reconcile with that societal understanding will be ridiculed, and rightly so. An action movie can be grim, or gory, or dark, or even glorify violence, but that particular kind of obviously-silly-but-played-straight hits all the wrong marks. It has to have some tongue-in-cheek or the hero has to grow somehow outside of the original mindset for it to work.
That all said, I think remakes are a really bad thing for society, as it cuts down on creativity and also works to destroy older culture. I love watching movies from the 1970s because the way they made those movies is very different. They could have smaller stakes in a police drama that felt like bigger stakes than a Marvel movie balancing the end of the world. Remaking those movies with today's sentiments and approach will result in a movie with 1970s stakes and 2020s lack of character, tone, setting, etc. that makes the lower stakes work.
Maybe it's the best kind of low/mid-budget reboot: the og Roadhouse isn't sacred to most, but it's a familiar product of it's time. Rebooting beloved classics always leads to disappointment, it gambles on viewers being more intrigued than repelled. Robocop was a failure, Total Recall was a failure (mind you, this was spectacle sci-fi with a budget, if that makes any difference).
Expecting reboots of mediocre 90s films to follow.
I like this Onion headline: Biden Surges in the Polls after Convincing Terrified Voters He Caused the Eclipse.
> “I am sure you will make the wise choice to join me, the immense and all-powerful Mover of the Sun and Moon, in my reelection campaign,” said Biden, who at the moment the eclipse began waved his hands toward the darkening sky, causing Americans to cower in fear and promise to give him their votes so long as he restored the sun to the heavens.
I'm sure that not all of my statements are pristine, but I actually feel very confident in the general thrust of my arguments. There are big, intuitive moving parts to Paul's picture that I mainly tackle here.
My biweekly COVID update for epidemiological weeks 13 and 14 is at the link below. Apologies for the typos. I also address the HPAI scare in dairy cattle. Bottom line:
1. H5N1 is not very symptomatic in cattle, which means cases are likely being overlooked.
2. The virus doesn't seem to be spreading via droplets or aerosols, but it's definitely showing up in the milk.
3. This would be highly concerning because of its potential to contaminate the milk supply — except that there's no reason to think that pasteurization won't kill the virus (the only virus types that seem to be able to survive pasteurization are bacteriophages).
4. If for some reason pasteurization is ineffective we probably should have already seen cases in humans linked to the milk supply (because the current number of 15 infected dairy herds is probably the tip of the iceberg).
5. Until this passes, I wouldn't advise you to indulge in raw milk products.
Maybe I'm being overly sanguine, but if I'm wrong, we'll know soon if H5N1 is spreading to humans via the milk supply.
Even though it seems to be highly transmissible in other mammals (seals for instance), humans don't seem to catch it easily. Wikipedia has an article on this subject, and they quote few experts...
"So far, H5N1 infections in humans are attributed to bird-to-human transmission of the virus in most cases. Until May 2006, the WHO estimate of the number of human to human transmission had been "two or three cases". On May 24, 2006, Dr. Julie L. Gerberding, director of the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, estimated that there had been "at least three." On May 30, Maria Cheng, a WHO spokeswoman, said there were "probably about half a dozen," but that no one "has got a solid number."[31] A few isolated cases of suspected human to human transmission exist.[2] with the latest such case in June 2006 (among members of a family in Sumatra).[3] No pandemic strain of H5N1 has yet been found.[32]".
The WHO's pandemic global preparedness plan seems to imply that they think that new strains of influenzas may adapt themselves to livestock first and then will evolve to make the jump to humans. This sounds like a directed evolutionary argument to me. Could H5N1 adapt itself to humans? Back in 2014 (?) some virologists ran of gain of function experiment with H5N1 and they were able to make it highly transmissible by aerosol/droplet transmission in ferrets (ferrets being a good proxy for the biology of humans). This caused a huge shitstorm when it reached the media. If there had been a lab leak it could have caused a new flu pandemic, and that's why HHS temporarily banned GoF projects.
So it's possible it could become a pandemic-causing virus. But it hasn't so far. Also, we have a vaccine for the current strain. I don't know how long it would take it out to roll it out to the world's population.
In the past few months, I've noticed I've developed a kind of "productive dyslexia" when typing.
Essentially, I'll end up mistyping a word for a similar word. The most recent examples that I noticed were typing "with" instead of "wish" and "extend" instead of "extent", just to give you an idea of what I'm talking about.
- It's always a correct word that I end up typing, just the *wrong* word.
- It completely bypasses my normal "oh I just typoed, fix that" reflex.
This is somewhat distressing to me, especially given that I've typed fine for decades before this and I've regressed suddenly in a major way. Do any of you have any takes on this?
Like Theophylline, I experience this in connection with allergies, but also as a result of sleep deprivation or sickness. I suspect it is a symptom of impaired executive (frontal lobe) function, because executive function is relatively fragile (easily perturbed by the things people think of as negatively impacting their cognition), and one of the main "functions" comprising "executive function" is the inhibition of automatic or habitual processes when context dependent alternatives are called for.
Executive function does generally deteriorate during normal aging, with wide variation between individuals. Acute and seasonal changes in cognition are also not uncommon. How distressed you should be will depend on many factors (as a matter of base rates, you should probably not be), including your own assessments of your cognitive variability and its manifestations.
Happens to me too. In some cases, the cause is very clear. I did a phd in auction theory and now it's harder to type "action" rather than "auction", instead of the reverse.
More generically, as I get older, I notice that my brain works much much faster along a certain axis, let's call it "high-level plugging together of concepts", but pays much less attention to the lower layers. It's highly useful for having good priors, but really bad for actually proving stuff or avoiding mistakes.
As I see this happen to me too, I see it as a phenomenon of growth and learning. Your mental chunk size was once a letter, then it grew to a few letters, then a few words, then the context of multiple words. Your typos likewise expand as the chunked concepts you send to the little hand-operating gnomes get larger. Because the gnomes learn, you see. Hand-operating gnomes, yeah.
I wouldn't readily put it down to just aging if you noticed an abrupt shift. I'm in my 20s and have a weird undiagnosed illness thing that manifests in a slew of neurological ways that, combined, for quite a while made me essentially a genuine idiot, and one of the smaller effects of it has been that I would have a ton of intention-to-writing communication glitches like that. For me, the pattern I uncovered is that it gets worse in proportion to how much I'm exposed to several common allergens and goes away just about entirely when I can avoid the specific allergens (Even though I don't test positive for any of the relevant allergies and antihistamines don't help?). Not saying that's what's going on with you, just that ime even what might seem like serious and lasting cognitive decline can sometimes be very rapidly reversed if the relevant factors are noticed and adjusted, so it's always worth experimenting and keeping an eye out for patterns when it comes to these sorts of things.
The most significant allergens for me seem to be cat dander, at least one powdery whitish species of mold that had been growing where I live, something that seems to be in basically every modern form of soap/cleaner (i.e. detergents as opposed to traditional soap made with fat and lye), and for whatever reason rosemary. It's an eclectic list. Unfortunately, since I can't move out to live by myself, entirely avoiding the first three of those things isn't practical.
I also feel better when consistently avoiding basically all of the really common dietary allergens like treenuts, peanuts, wheat, sesame, and soy, though if I try any one of those after having avoided it for a while it doesn't usually have an immediately noticeable effect. I'm not totally sure how it works but it seems like there's some general neuroimmune aggravation factor involved where too much of any allergen lowers my tolerance for every allergen. Maybe that's a recognized thing that happens, idk.
Also on the few occasions when I've been able to entirely avoid the main allergens for about two weeks or more, when I'm exposed to them again I will at first only have a "normal" allergic reaction (sneezing, coughing, itchy rash), but then after about a week of continuous exposure it will shift away from that and go back to purely neurological symptoms. That happening is what first gave me the idea that my neurological issues might've actually been allergies that became distorted somehow.
> I'm not totally sure how it works but it seems like there's some general neuroimmune aggravation factor involved where too much of any allergen lowers my tolerance for every allergen. Maybe that's a recognized thing that happens, idk.
Secondary allergies from a heightened immune system response to primary allergens is a real thing. I'm only allergic to dairy and peanuts because they're close enough to the tree and grass pollens that my body really really doesn't like. And those only started after I lived in Florida around live oak trees, which are the devil.
I think it might be possible to install a handmade version of a new filter. Even if the automatic version of blocking errors like this has failed, learning it doesn't seem like a hard task. It's sort of like adapting to a keyboard that has a different feel. You just need to develop alertness for a new kind of typo -- not classic finger-based errors like hte, but sound-based ones, homophones. Try spending 60 secs a day picturing yourself catching homophones, or being aware as you type that they're an issue. Picture yourself being more aware as you think works you're about to type that some of them have homophones, & picture yourself catching things like that quickly if you type one. Put a little reminder in sight somewhere you'll see while you're typing.
Are you sure you aren’t a victim of autocomplete? That’s how completely incorrect words enter my text, especially when I’m using my phone. When I’m reading these sorts of errors made by others I do a sort of automatic ‘recorrect’. “Yeah, I know what you meant to type. No worries.”
I do it too, and have for the last couple years. It's always a homophone of the right word, or a word that that sounds very similar to it, things like "won" instead of "want." When writing I'm saying the sentence in my mind (though in general I definitely don't think always think in words). So sometimes my fingers on their own just type something that sounds like the word in my mind -- as though the filter to check to make sure what I'm typing isn't a homophone has been lost. I'm pretty sure it's an aging thing, crows feet of the mind, like having trouble remembering a familiar word.
I also find myself doing this, I do think it has to do with aging, and of course this leads on to merry thoughts about "is this an early symptom of early-onset Alzheimer's?"
I'm doing the same thing, but more when speaking compared to writing. I will typically just conflate similar concepts and use the wrong word for the current context without realizing. For example I recently conflated spot price with interest (on a loan), as I were discussing fixed electricity prices compared to spot prices, (similar in concept to floating and fixed interest rates in my head). It's been going on for a few years at least - very annoying.
No idea why, but my guess is just general deterioration with age?
I have a notion that part of what's going wrong these days is a crisis of conscientiousness. People and societies need a hard-to-define moderate amount of conscientiousness. Some things need to be done very well, some things need to be done pretty well, and some things don't matter.
At this point, we've got factions who are are anti-conscientiousness and pro-extreme conscientiousness. Neither one is trying to actually do things.
On the right, there's lack of interest in obeying rules that work-- for example a strong willingness to scam. On the left, there's willingness to destroy organizations which aren't sufficiently inclusive.
Both sides are very willing to break social connections.
Overall, I tend to agree. I see it as some sort of inability to admit that a state of "good enough" exists. Either absolute perfection is required, or the entire concept that one thing is better than another must be discarded as inherently invalid. In a big picture sense, democratic government is all about compromise, and our increasing inability to compromise is part of what's wrong with American government. And part of that unwillingness is simply because the factions are unable to hold their members to a compromise, because extremism gets people's emotions riled up, and intense emotion draws eyeballs and sells ads. Too many people have short-term self-interest in burning our civilizational commons.
I think this exists across the entire political spectrum (aside of course from virtuous centrists like me who, like Mary Poppins, are practically perfect in every way... drat, there I go again). Specifically, I'd call out left-wing groups like antifa as having a lack of interest in obeying rules that work, and as for right-wing destruction of organizations that aren't perfect, that's basically been what's happening to the Republican Party under Trump, and even stretching back to the Tea Party 20 years ago.
I'll second WoolyAI: I don't quite see how pro-inclusion purging campaigns match "excess conscientiousness," and I also don't quite get what you're seeing as specifically right-aligned anti-conscientiousness trends (general unapologetic grifting and fraud across the political spectrum, sure).
I agree that there's a strong willingness to scam - I don't think it's about right or left, it's just the way we do business now. Once you start going down that path, which started decades ago, you find everyone follows - rent seeking maximum is here: https://falsechoices.substack.com/p/polity-investments-llc
Dupuyten's Contracture is a disease of the body growing extra connective tissue in a hand. It's not properly connected to muscles, and can lead to being unable to extend one or more fingers.z
I'm wondering whether it would be an especially good starting point for exploring the idea that DNA becoming unreliable is a cause of aging. It becomes more likely with age and is weirdly specific, as though rules for specific connective tissue have been changed.
I have it in my right hand, though it has not progressed for ten or fifteen years. I didn’t realize it was also called Viking disease. I have no expertise on DNA reliability though.
Viking disease sounds way cooler than Dupuyten's Contracture. There needs to be an effort to give rare diseases cooler-sounding names so that their sufferers can at least feel slightly better about them.
I keep getting pushed to me short videos that appear to take place in south Asia in which rural people are participating in some kind of outdoor carnival game—weird variations of skee-ball or shooting baskets. Whoever succeeds is given a bag of grain or some other staple (the surrounding crowd cheers). Is this an actual method of dividing up resources used soemwhere? Who has time for this silliness? If the scenario is fake, who is making these videos with their large casts and elaborate setups? Do you guys know what I'm talking about?
I don't think it's a widespread thing, probably there was one guy in one village who noticed he could get clicks like this and then a bunch of copycats. Your average Indian village will not have these events. The crowd has time since they get paid, i.e. the videos are fake. Some guy with a camera is making them since these videos get eyeballs, engagement and likes and that can be monetized,
I have to seen the video, but the way you describe it, it doesn’t sound any different than American carnival games, except the prize is more useful. You might not see the participant being at an entry fee, but that just wouldn’t be included on in the video, just like if you to look at TikTok for American carnival games. It sounds like fun, and there is no reason to disbelieve that South Asians would not also like to have fun playing carnival games.
"Videos of many people in south asia outdoors" matches my heuristics for "elaborately staged for ad revenue", without seeing the videos you mention yet. Examples:
* Fake primitive technology videos, where they dig two inches by hand on camera, then excavators finish the underground swimming pool
* Fake animal rescue videos, where they put the animal down the well in the first place
Disclaimer; this heuristic is trained on reddit comments, not any deep independent analysis of multiple videos matching this heuristic. My prior still leans towards "hijack online attention for ad revenue", not "real distribution method of scarce staple grains"
Having unfortunately seen some of the fake primitive technology clones, I can confirm this heuristic. One video had captions that were literally stolen 1:1 from an actual primitive technology video, but the things the dude was doing didn't match up with the captions. "It's important for the pottery to glow red hot" --> shot of the pottery *not* glowing red hot.
My memory is that it gets around the instinct to refuse charity on pride. Making it a silly game preserves people's dignity to some degree, confusing as that sounds. You're earning your gift, or can act as though you were playing for the fun and not the prize.
I saw one of those once - it was this game (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYVkOtIHGl0) but with grown men competing for palates of soda, or something, surrounded by an entire village.
No idea why I can't seem to find the original video now, it had a huge view count if I'm recalling correctly.
It would probably help if you linked to some examples of what you are seeing so that people can properly assess them....
You have significantly mischaracterized the results of that survey, as I see others here are pointing out in detail.
Anyway, such polling does not necessarily tell us what those group members actually think or believe. Rather it tells us what the members of a group are willing to say to a pollster which may or may not be the same as what they actually think. See for instance the last decade of polling of Americans regarding the swirl of issues and resentments that coalesced into defiant support of Donald Trump's candidacies. There have been similar dynamics in the UK.
Polling is not gospel truth in other words, never has been and certainly isn't nowadays.
> British Muslims have a net positive view of Hamas
Checking the report, this looks wrong -- sums to 29% in the report (V. Positive 15%, Q. Positive 14%).
> Almost half of British Muslims sympathise with Hamas
The question is phrased this way:
"Of the following two entities, which do you feel more sympathy with?" [Hamas, Israel]
So, a more accurate statement would be to say that 46% are *more* sympathetic to Hamas than Israel. Otherwise you are smuggling antipathy towards Israel and general sympathy to Palestine as support for Hamas.
Note also that the first question asks about murder *and rape*. We don't know how much work the "and rape" part is doing, which is important because, while I personally have no doubt that rape was committed, it is my understanding that there is some contention around that issue, esp since at least one well-publicized claim apparently has been debunked, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/25/world/middleeast/video-sexual-assault-israel-kibbutz-hamas.html Again, my point is not that rape did not occur, but rather that there are grounds for those who do not want to believe that rape occurred to cling to that belief.
If you're going to keep posting inflammatory shit, could you at least stop beating around the bush and tell us how you want to deal with these undesirables? Hard to have a discussion if people don't know where you stand.
I think Hammond just believes it's a good first step if progressives finally, finally stop believing in ridiculous blank-slate nonsense like "Muslims from theocratic nations are fine and dandy as citizens and don't have beliefs different from others, they fit just fine in a civilized society in large numbers".
Hmmm. Let me go through the purported downsides of legal and illegal immigration...
1. Illegal immigration and crime rates: In the US, where illegal immigration peaked last year we haven't seen an overall increase in crime. In fact, crime has fallen to levels not seen since the 1960s. I don't know if this is the case for European countries, and if you can shove some stats my way, I'd be willing to consider this as an anti-immigration argument. Of course, crossing the border without clearing customs is a crime. But that sort of criminality doesn't seem to spawning other sorts of crime.
2. Illegal and Legal immigration and terrorism: In the US at least, most of the terrorist acts seem to have been by people who were legally in our country. But we haven't had that many lately now that we're not heavily invested in militarily intervening in Muslim countries. And homegrown terrorists are currently the biggest threat to our nation right now. And don't forget, we Americans are killing our selves off quite nicely without foreign help.
3. Legal immigration and the economy: Most of the current legal immigration pocilies in the US benefit big business. The H1-B visa system allows employers to keep tech wages low because it's functionally a type of indentured servitude (and the visa holder can't easily move to another employer — thus it's difficult to improve one's salary). It used to be that an engineering degree was a ticket to a middle-class lifestyle. Frankly, I think the H1-B visa system has stiffled this route for a lot of native-born Americans.
4. Illegal immigration and the economy: illegal immigrants seem to be taking the nasty jobs that most of the native-born don't want such as meat packing and farm labor. Seems like it's a net benefit to the US, even though we don't want to admit it.
I'm not in the UK, but given Hammond is quoting UK statistics I assume his main beefs are the crime mentioned by Shaked Koplewitz and the grotesque, despicable, indefensible, adjectives-to-taste Hamas demonstrations occurring regularly in London. I think we can agree that we don't need formal statistics to justify the claim that the latter are the direct product of letting in a shit-ton of Muslims from theocratic nations?
European and American immigration patterns are very different and shouldn't be directly extrapolated from one to the other. "Immigrants do a disproportionate amount of crime and most of the terrorism" is, afaict, false in America but true in Europe.
I would hazard a half-educated guess: for all its faults, the US is far more welcoming to immigrants. You just become an American with an accent, integrated into the wider society. Feel free to both be as American and as, say, Algerian, as you want.
Many European countries make it almost impossible to integrate, leaving the new arrivals hopeless and angry.
1. Stop issuing new residency visas to people from certain nations. Trumps list is a good start.
2. Stop extending visas and permanent residencies for people already in the country who are from the above countries. Make some exceptions for highly skilled people, perhaps.
3. Infiltrate religious organizations, put in government agents on the inside to catch extremists.
If we're going to block people from certain countries, surely it would make more sense to base the list on data about crime and other undesirable behaviors than go by somebody's list of ethnicities that creep them out.
In general, I don't think there should be a rule against bringing up a problem without suggesting solutions.
Whether this is needlessly inflammatory - harder to say. It could definitely easily be phrased in a more inflammatory way. Otoh If I try to imagine a similar post on, say, climate change (someone listing a bunch of bullet points like "we're emitting X tons of carbon and on track to being back the dinosaur age climate") that feels pretty inflammatory.
I think I still come down on the side of this not being pointlessly inflammatory because I think that (unlike hypothetical climate change guy) this actually does raise information that a lot of people are unaware of and should probably think about. A bit like the discussion below about many indigenous societies being very unequal or having slavery - sure, you can argue that this doesn't mean any specific implication, but people should be aware of the real situation (and I think many people aren't).
I sympathize with your stance in general, but Hammond has made this a pattern over the past several open threads. It's always the same - a link, a really inflammatory right-wing claim (last OT they started a thread with "Why do Jews hate white people?"), and then when you look at the link you usually find that Hammond heavily overstated the claim they made about it.
It's getting very annoying and so I'm sympathetic to anyone who tells him to fuck off and stop trying to start a fight in every OT.
I long for the days of the non-political threads and special political threads. Seems like there is a group of posters who are less concerned about discussions of rationalist and rationalist-adjacent issues and more concerned about foisting their political obsessions on the rest of us. Unfortunately, we as a group are not very good about demanding rigorous evidence for opinions and beliefs. So every time someone shouts, "Look, a squirrel!" we go chasing after it.
Yes, and I believe the link backing up the claim that Jews hate people was a photo of about 20 books with terms like "white trash" in them and authors with Jewish names.
Subject: Dumb things that people don't say any more.
Often it seems that the level of public discourse gets worse and worse with time, so I think it's nice occasionally to focus on dumb things that people used to say a lot when I was young, but which I haven't heard for a long time.
The whole "we only use 10% of our brains" thing is an obvious example, I haven't heard anyone seriously invoke that since the movie Lucy, and that was ten years ago. Back in the 90s you'd see it attributed to Albert Einstein and printed on posters.
"Money is the root of all evil" is another dumb cliche that used to come up a lot, and rarely does. That was of course a corruption of the original passage "The love of money is the root of all evil" but you don't hear that being said much these days either. My theory is 9/11 wiped it from the discourse by reminding us that there's plenty of evil that has nothing to do with the love of money.
What other (hopefully not too political) dumb things have you noticed people don't say any more?
I came across "What percentage of our brains do we actually use" as a pub quiz question, where they were expecting one of those bogus ~10% figures as the answer, some time in the last decade (probably 2016-ish). This isn't particularly strong evidence against what you're claiming, I just felt like sharing a particularly frustrating incident.
Hard to define but I feel like certain crass 90s tropes about old age have been quietly dropped - you don't any longer have to be either Grandpa Simpson or an 'aging hipster' - perfectly acceptable and normal for a 60-something to go to Glastonbury. Admittedly I'm now 39 and no longer a judgemental teenager so maybe it's me.
Re: "The love of money is the root of all evil": the actual meaning (in context -- my understanding is that the Greek for just this phrase could be interpreted either way) is that loving money leads to every kind of evil, not that there is no evil that does not originate with the love of money.
If anything (other than just pure randomness) the drop is probably due to random King James Bible quotes being less in the water now. Most popular English translations - including the NIV, NRSV, ESV, NASB, and New King James - now use "... all kinds of evil", and non-/cultural Christians are less likely than ever to know any Biblical quotations, even corruptions/misquotations.
Maybe it's the decline of the economic-left (Marxists, etc.), and the rise of other varieties of leftism that are concerned with other things? Religions that take that seriously (Catholicism and sharia Islam, at least?) have also had decreasing influence on politics.
But overall I'd guess that it was WWII and the Holocaust that did it in. There was too much evil there that was completely decoupled from money. Heck, the more corruptible Nazi administrators were less genocidal because they allowed themselves to be bribed to let Jews live!
I had in fact forgotten them. :-) But I was thinking of influential modern religions that have (at least at times) put restrictions on acceptable financial activity, like limits on interest and debt.
I mean, the Khmer Rouge probably weren't motivated by money, and they did their mass-torture-and-murder spree in the 70s. Earlier, the Communist takeover of Russia was presumably not motivated by money.
I think it is a bizarre over-literalism to take the saying in any of its forms to mean that there is no evil without financial motivations. There are plenty of evil deeds which have sexual motives but not financial ones, and for that matter it is surprisingly common for people to do evil things for the sole purpose of being seen as good. I have never seen anyone support the "root of all evil" saying in this over-literal manner, reasonable people take it as a warning that the love of money motivates people to do a wide variety of bad things.
Religious dogma has caused a lot of pointless suffering. I’d have to thumb through some physical paper books to get an exact quote but I’ll paraphrase Auldous Huxley here from ‘The Perennial Philosophy’ I believe.
Words to the effect that Martin Luther should share culpability for the holocaust with Hitler.
I stopped reading "The Perennial Philosophy" when he completely mischaracterized Luther's position of justification by faith. There were only two possibilities - either he had misread Luther so badly that he shouldn't be trusted to relate the positions of any religious thinker, or that he had a particular animus and was trying to pull a fast one on his readers. In either case, I felt I would be better off reading almost anything else.
Hm, socialism seems to also have gone up at the same time. Maybe it's that the "money bad" faction is just less into pithy quotes and more into angry activism now.
I think you may be on to something. "Not selling out" was big with Gen X and Boomers whereas socialism reeked too much of the Soviet Union. Idealism in the 60s through 90s meant not caring too much about money. It's hard for socialists to pretend they don't care about money; it's what they care most about.
Idealism now is about caring who gets what money rather than disdaining it altogether.
Which when I think about it, is tied into social polarization - being anti-money now is more a political statement against a distant outgroup than advice for your neighbors/community members now
It's very rare to see the false (and once common) claim that the point of searing meat is to seal in the juices. Although people often say "caramelization" when they mean "Maillard reaction", so there's that.
That was an interesting case of C.P. Snow's two cultures. Mid 20th century food writers were generally aware of the existence of work on the subject (e.g McCance and Shipp 1933) <https://www.abebooks.com/Chemistry-Flesh-Foods-Losses-Cooking-Privy/30744155045/bd>. Philip Harben mentioned this work in most of his books, and practically all food writers in the 50s and 60s read Harben, even if they didn't read McCance and Shipp directly. But for most food writers the fact that food scientists had done extensive research refuting culinary lore was of no interest to them.
Mixing up caramelization, dextrinization and the Maillard reaction is I think somewhat excusable. All three are nonenzymatic browning reactions which have similar seeming results at similar times and temperatures.
Fake Einstein quotes in general seems to be down. Also "every theory gets overturned, now they're saying some guy proved Einstein was wrong" is something I think I used to hear a lot and hear less now.
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then they forget about you and attribute the only noteworthy thing you ever said to Gandhi" -- Nicholas Klein
To be entirely fair LinkedIn is just a fake bot farm that Microshit managed to trick a couple of thousand managers and HR personnel into thinking it's real people saying real things, so that they can sell them analytics and recruitment tools and also find work for the surplus software engineers in the company who are otherwise bored into thinking about starting unions.
I seem to have had more than the expected number of instances of LLMs refusing or failing to answer my questions recently.
Example 1: I asked Copilot whether Sydney Sweeney appears in the holiday episodes of Euphoria: I have subsequently established that the answer to this question is "no". Copilot told me that there are no holiday episodes and that Sweeney portrays Cassie Howard throughout Seasons 1 and 2. I asked "Aren't there two episodes after the end of season 1 and before the start of season 2?" Copilot started to type out a long answer, then deleted it and wrote, "My mistake, I can't give a response to that right now. Let's try a different topic."
Example 2: There was some discussion on Twitter recently about a story about Marcus Aurelius's wife having an affair with a gladiator and the emperor killing the gladiator and making his wife bathe in his blood. I asked Claude about this and Claude (correctly) said the story was apocryphal. I then asked what happened next according to the story, and Claude declined to answer on the basis that it would have to make something up itself. But this isn't true: at least in the version from Historia Augusta, the answer is that Marcus succeeded in seducing this wife by this method, but the fruit of their union (Commodus) was more a gladiator than a prince. There may be other versions, but then Claude could tell me about those.
Example 3: I asked ChatGPT what the probability is of sampling a normal distribution more than 60 standard deviations above the mean. It wouldn't give a numerical answer other than zero, saying the number was "so small that it's beyond the precision of most numerical computation methods to accurately represent". When I asked to write the formula, it did so. When I asked to calculate the formula, it ran some python code and again told me the answer was zero. I reminded it that it is possible to express very small numbers using standard scientific notation, but it would not budge. When I told it the answer was 1.238×10^-784, it agreed that was right.
I don't know if it's getting worse over time but for as long as I've been using ChatGPT (a year now?) it not infrequently feeds me bullshit answers. For instance, if a I ask it for a list of scientific studies that discuss a question I'm interested in, at least one or two of the references seem to be "hallucinations"—at least I can't find them when I look for them in Google Scholar.
Maybe this is nobody's gripe but mine, but Chat, as aided by Dall-e in text-to-image generation is dumb as dirt. I ask for a woman and they give me one with huge jugs. So I say that's good but please can you change it so model has small breasts. Nope, they shut me down because I'm asking for breasts in a prompt. Recently asked for an image of a woman's forearm with palm up. Nope, because violence (dismembered arm!!!)
No, I hear you. I remember that. I played with it a little while a while back and it threatens you with shutting down your account if you do anything that could vaguely be interpreted as sexual. Once forgetting to fully describe an outfit got me threatened...I eventually realized it would theoretically involve nudity, I had assumed it would fill in the blanks with whatever the average in the training data was.
That was the funniest thing to me. 1954: no nudity, it's un-Christian. 2024: no nudity, it's objectification. 70 years pass and Americans still hate sex.
Then again the Russians seem to have passed from monarchy to left-wing dictatorship to right-wing dictatorship without ever getting a competent government, the Chinese move from one bureaucracy to another, and the Latin Americans cycle through fascism, liberalism, and socialism without ever getting rich...I guess national character is a thing.
There's a theory that the modern American left is what happens when kids who'd naturally be conservatives are raised on a diet of pure leftism. The result is extreme prudishness and puritanism, except applied to left-wing values instead of right-wing values. (And the reverse is the alt-right, kids who'd naturally be radicals are gravitating toward right-wing values, but with a very untraditional mindset.)
It's a very good point--the outsider energy is on the right--but seems more to me like the left won the culture war, with the result that they now have the enforcer 'church lady' personality types (who are now 'HR ladies') and the rebels without a cause are cosplaying (and sometimes being) white nationalists.
I don’t find the chatGPT answer to be wrong. Not at any precision level we would care about. Maybe this is an emerging sign of independent thought.
Perhaps if the guardrails were off chatGPT would agree with you that the result is indeed 1.238×10^-784, but add “or, as most sane people would call it, zero”.
Jeffrey Soreff, who posts here a lot, has asked ChatGPT quite a number of chemistry questions, at least one with an answer that's easily found via online search. He's posted a number of confident answers from Chat that are wrong.
Many Thanks! Here is another one I just tried (more physics than chemistry):
me: What is the name and atomic number of the heaviest element for which at least one atomic spectral line is known?
chatgpt: The heaviest element for which at least one atomic spectral line is known is Lawrencium, with the atomic number 103. Spectroscopic studies on lawrencium have been challenging due to its rarity and the difficulty in producing it, but these studies are essential for understanding the electronic structure of heavy elements.
That number's too small to represent in 64-bit floating point, which is why a simple python calculation returns zero. When I asked instead for the log of the probability, it used the appropriate scipy function: https://chat.openai.com/share/3c4fba55-8075-480f-9ee3-3ea71797fcd8
These things act like turbo-journalists or politicians. They give “right sounding” answers which are either nonsense or contradictory. And it makes sense because they both get rewarded for “sounding correct.”
Can someone recommend a good book for getting good at poker (Texas holdem)? I know how to play and understand the basics. I’m not afraid of math or numbers (though don’t have a high level math background).
MIT open courseware has two full courses on poker theory. IIRC the more recent one is more useful--more tips on how to play poker, less in-depth math analysis of why heuristics work.
If you're playing somewhat casual live poker, though, profiling and exploiting other players leaks might be a more profitable option than learning how to play "correctly."
>MIT open courseware has two full courses on poker theory. IIRC the more recent one is more useful--more tips on how to play poker, less in-depth math analysis of why heuristics work.
I do not recommend these courses. You need practical lessons, not academic ones. Nobody became a profitable poker player from watching MIT lectures on poker.
>If you're playing somewhat casual live poker, though, profiling and exploiting other players leaks might be a more profitable option than learning how to play "correctly."
Any training course worth its salt will cover this.
Because here's the thing - exploiting others players' leaks IS playing correctly. It's not necessarily playing game theory optimally, but no course says you have to/necessarily should always play in a game theory optimal way. The "optimal" way simply means *you* can't be exploited. But if others can't exploit you, no poker pro will tell you to focus on being unexploitable.
On the off chance that you plan to pursue a career in poker, here is a link to someone on the internet claiming that it is a not-so-great way to make a living (low income, brutal competition, weird hours, 'soul sucking'). [0]
Naturally, 'fun as a hobby but not fun as a job' is a description of many human activities from baking cakes to sports. FWIW, poker is probably one of the most interesting gambling games.
I would imagine that a training program which let's you play poker against some bots while also pointing out tactical errors (plus the math to know why they are errors) would be helpful. I imagine that against human opponents, the metagame of figuring out how their own strategies are non-optimal, plus face reading plus some psychological model of players (if they don't just execute a pre-chosen algorithm) is what it takes to win, but learning a reasonable good basic strategy could be done with bots. No idea if such a thing exists, though.
A book on cultivating the right attitude: The Mental Game of Poker - Jared Tendler
It does assume you have more experience than you actually have at the game - but since the how to is entirely on the mental side that doesn't really matter. I think there's a strong argument for learning how to manage your emotions and motivation in a more optimised way from the start.
Maybe its slow and inefficient but I'd still point a newer player to Harrington on Hold'em. It's more applied than the classic pure theory of Sklansky but it'll still give a solid theoretical underpinning.
Are you planning to play any live games? If so - definitely worth investing in Caro's Book of Poker Tells - Mike Caro. Funnily enough circlilng back to the mental game, and taking it meta- that book includes one of my favourite life advice quotes:
"When romances unravel or businesses fail, you might cross the Threshold of Misery and stop caring about making critical decisions regarding other things. That’s because the pain is already maximized and anything else that goes wrong can’t add to the agony. Listen closely. At these times, in poker and in life, the secret is to keep performing as if you care. Remember that, although you can’t emotionally feel the importance of making quality decisions at the moment, there will come a time when you will feel that importance and be grateful for the good decisions that you make now. Yes, you’ve crossed the threshold and decisions don’t seem to matter. They do still matter, and anything that suggests otherwise at this moment is an illusion."
If you're interested, start with a few of the super cheap courses and then if you like it consider signing up for the upswing lab, which is the best poker learning resource I've ever come across.
That being said, this is if you want to become as good as possible as poker and are willing to put in a lot of work. If you just want to become competent at smaller stakes, I would recommend starting with Jonathan Little's two free ebooks - Strategies for Beating Small Stakes Poker Cash Games & Strategies for Beating Small Stakes Poker Tournaments.
There's heaps of different sites though so feel free to shop around and see what people say about each.
I would generally recommend avoiding any of the 'classic' poker books - the ones that come up when you google search 'best poker books' or something. Most of these are either very outdated and/or very slow/inefficient ways of learning poker. And avoid anything - books, training sites - from any of the real celebrity poker pros of the poker boom (if you know anything about that) like Daniel Negreanu or Phil Ivey. For the love of god, don't bother with their MasterClass series....
You really don't need any high level math skills to become good at poker. Basic arithmetic (calculating ratios or the percent chance of a certain card(s) being dealt next) and a good memory are sufficient.
When you see this level of divorce from reality, it's really no wonder there were so many aggressively incorrect people disagreeing with Scott's posts on things like the ferguson effect.
I'm a white liberal. Please DO NOT lecture me about what I do and do not believe because you don't have a frigging clue. Honestly, you're as tiresome as the late-to-this-list Marxbro by the way you troll us with your self-assured opinions and discredited studies that you dig up on Twitter.
As for racists in general, having traveled the world I've concluded that 95% of humanity seems to be ethnocentric bigots. Most of the Chinese think anyone not Chinese is inferior (and intra-Chinese racism is also a big deal). Malaysia has a three-way racial stereotyping going on between its Malay, Indian, and Chinese ethnic communities. In South Africa tribal groups think they're superior to other tribal groups, and whites are only tolerated as a necessary evil. A lot of South Asians have their caste hangups — and Europeans don't really fit into that hierarchy, so guess where end up on the purity scale? Heck, I drove around Germany with a fellow who continually told me ethnic jokes about Austrians, Poles, Czechs, Turks, French, and the Dutch. No pan-European feeling with him! Anyway, the world is full of ethnocentric bigots, so you're in good company. The irony is that you seem to think you're somehow intellectually and morally superior. LoL!
Hey while I was on Twitter reading this awesome tweet I saw a post about this miniature backhoe you can control with your phone. You drive it into your ear canal and it like scrapes every bit of earwax off the walls and digs it off the floor, and it's way cheaper than seeing a professional, only costs $15.99. Damn that site is good for finding out the real deal about things.
You're right, I have zero interest in engaging with you. It's actually not because of your views, but because you come across as being so full of seething rage it seems pointless to engage with someone who seems driven solely by negative affect . You don't just hold certain views, many of which are defensible, you sound mad enough to bite when you express them. You sound like you can barely *stand* life without letting off a little bit of the pressure by putting up posts about your enraged takes on racial issues. Also, you sound as though you have no other interests. I can't imagine you writing here, in response to some subject unrelated to your preoccupations, "wow, I never knew that. Can you put up a link?" or "Well stated!" You never joke around. In short, you come across as the Racial Rageatron, and my experience is that no good ever comes from engaging with Rageatrons.
Oh, and one other thing: Many of the links you put up are to support your contentions are crappy -- tweets, photos of 20 or so books. Also, as quite a few people here have pointed out, your posted summaries of what the links show are often inaccurate.
Here's a really sound piece of advice I ran across once: If you fervently believe something, seek out the smartest, most honest, best-informed proponents of the opposite view and read their books. If your belief is wrong, you will be cured of it. If it is not, you will be a much better-informed advocate for it.
Taking Twitter posts about survey results as gospel truth, clearly without having bothered to look at the actual survey results yourself let alone spending 60 seconds thinking about them, ought to be an autoban here. Seems completely inimical to the spirit and ethos of ACX, and the presence of such childishness degrades these comments sections.
Say a week's ban on first offense, a month on second, etc.?
Try as I may, I can't find the black/white violence survey results that Goldberg posted on Twitter ("White liberals now also believe that white people are more violent than blacks") and Hammond gleefully reposted for our enlightenment. Are my neurodivergent qualia just not perceiving it?
You can follow the link. On the left side under "QUESTIONNAIRES" there should be a "Survey Questionnaire" PDF. You can search that. The questions are about violence start on page number 463.
If you want the results you have to log in and register and sign some forms. I didn't do that.
"The next set [of questions] asks if people in each group tend to be ‘peaceful’ or ‘violent’."
->"Where would you rate whites in general on this scale?"
Is it reasonable to assume this question is asking only about present day white Americans?
I don't think it's strange that 2020 liberals would choose to interpret the questions such that it allows them to give an answer that feels less racist, especially given what was going on at the time.
Is that the main reason for the change 1992->2020? I doubt it. But you should be more careful about your comments.
And if you think that it is obvious that the survey was referring to only Americans, note that it specifically asks questions to distinguish Hispanic-Americans from Hispanics and Asian-Americans from Asians.
For example,
-"Where would you rate Hispanic-Americans in general on this scale?"
-"Where would you rate Hispanics in general on this scale?"
I’m gonna call bullshit on that survey. The world is chock full of bullshit survey results - in fact one of the things I admire is how often this blog points out when people spin flawed non-replicating results into elaborate social science theories.
It’s dismaying to see someone blindly accept a result like this just because it (I’m guessing) confirms your priors. Show me some replication first.
You don't get to just "call bullshit" - you need a reason.
YOU'RE the one blindly rejecting them because you don't like the results.
I can't see any reason to reject it, so I accept it. You need to point out a reason not to accept it.
You literally have not shown that this survey is "flawed" in any way whatsoever.
>Show me some replication first.
I'm calling bullshit on YOU. You would never demand this for a result you approved of.
AT MOST, if you don't have a hard methodological criticism to make of the survey, you should remain agnostic. You don't get to just dismiss it out of hand. The evidence, as you're aware of it, suggests that white liberals believe false things about the world. In the absence of other evidence, you should assume that this is likely to be more correct than the alternative.
I haven't been able to find the black/white violence survey results that Goldberg posted on Twitter ("White liberals now also believe that white people are more violent than blacks") and that you gleefully reposted for our enlightenment. Can you point me to results? Because I'm not seeing them on the reports page.
Of course liberals believe stupid things. Most people believe stupid things.
On the one hand, you're absolutely correct. I stand by my assertion, and if I can bet money that that survey result will not replicate, I absolutely will. But what i said was not a useful or meaningful argument by itself.
On the other hand, you're spinning a lot of assumptions about me and my beliefs that I see no justification for, so you don't seem like the kind of person I would want to have a good faith argument with.
After careful consideration of my life priors, I would have answered that whites are more violent than blacks. During my sixty-plus years on this planet, the only people who've threatened my person have been whites. Of course, I haven't lived or worked in a predominantly black neighborhood in thirty-plus years, so the stochastic outcome of my life experiences of violent situations was influenced by which race I've interacted with the most. Having said that, I felt safer working in South Central LA than I ever did in Boston on a Friday night (when the mostly white college students came out to drink, fight, and puke).
Perhaps that makes me extra sensitive to instances like this but I stand by my assertion nonetheless. I do also reject studies that flatter my preconceptions.
Well it’s a survey. The methodology of opinion taking is well established. I’m sure what it is measuring is what people said, even if you don’t believe that they would say it. At the height of the racial reckoning of 2020 giving the politically correct answer here would be fairly common I think.
There are so many ways to make a bad survey: biased selection process, confusingly worded questions, etc. It's also been demonstrated that you can change results just by asking questions in a different order.
Survey science is real - but it's also a frequently _bad_ form of science. This, to my knowledge, part of the 'replication crisis' as well as the general sense that sociology isn't considered a very reputable science these days.
And of course, the most common way to manipulate a survey is to craft one that says something complicated and squash that nuance out of the conversation when you post about it for the sake of an attention-grabbing headline.
But if I want to be taken seriously I need to do better, and I should have engaged in this with more (i.e. any amount of) rigor. I do wish people would not engage in bad faith here. I have plenty of objections to woke liberalism and yes, I can and have challenged people on survey results that I otherwise wanted to believe.
If you read their FAQ (https://electionstudies.org/faq/) these folks seem to have a reasonably solid methodology (although the devil is in the details). The trouble is, using their question query tool, it looks like they only asked the rate races on a peaceful to violent scale beginning in 2020. So technically this Goldberg fellow TwiXter is correct that "2020 was the year they started.. a) rating whites as more violent than blacks" — but that's the only year they have data for.
2020 V202521
On this scale from 1 to 7, where 1 means PEACEFUL and 7 means violent, where would you rate whites in general on this scale?
2020 V202522
On this scale from 1 to 7, where 1 means PEACEFUL and 7 means violent, where would you rate blacks in general on this scale?
2020 V202523
On this scale from 1 to 7, where 1 means PEACEFUL and 7 means violent, where would you rate Hispanic-Americans in general on this scale?
2020 V202524
On this scale from 1 to 7, where 1 means PEACEFUL and 7 means violent, where would you rate Hispanics in general on this scale?
2020 V202525
On this scale from 1 to 7, where 1 means PEACEFUL and 7 means violent, where would you rate Asian-Americans in general on this scale?
2020 V202526
On this scale from 1 to 7, where 1 means PEACEFUL and 7 means violent, where would you rate Asians in general on this scale?
I rather believe at least some of the people who answer in this way are doing what migh be called "survey-balancing"; they believe, rightly of wrongly, that there's going to be a lot of conservatives who will answer the other way around, so to get their preferred result (the races are equal), they answer this way to "balance the result".
I wouldn't be lying if I said the only people who have threatened me with bodily harm over the course of my six decades of life have been white people (all males, except for one white woman who threatened to take me with her in a murder-suicide attempt in a moving vehicle). But that may be because I've interacted with white people significantly more often than I have black people. But I'd feel safer walking down a street in a black neighborhood than in a bar with drunk white college students. So I would've rated whites as more dangerous than blacks. Simple as that.
It's not a strategic scheming mentality, it's a toxoplasma of rage mentality. Someone else is being unfair to blacks, so I might as well be unfair to whites. It's really simple and I observe it in a lot of other conflicts and hot button issues.
Leftists are increasingly defined by the following ideology (call it woke or whatever you want)
- Indigenous societies were historically peaceful and lived in harmony with the land and with each other
- Over the course of the past 500 years, Western colonialist powers across America, Australia and Europe displaced these societies violently in order to extract their resources
- They imported Black people from Africa to enslave (in the case of America) and set up colonies across Africa and India to extract resources (in the case of Europe)
- Racism was the dominant tradition among white Europeans, in order to justify their sub-human treatment of Indigenous peoples, slaves, and colonies.
- While over the past 200 years, slavery and colonialism have been abolished, this is only a surface level change, and the systemic racism that allowed white Europeans to profit at the expense of others with darker skin is still alive and well
- The evidence for this is obvious - Black and Indigenous people still suffer lower life expectancies, disease, poverty, and violence at far higher rates that white Europeans, both in the West and across the globe
- Meanwhile, European whites have continued their rapacious exploitation of the environment and are now endangering all of humanity through climate change. The struggle for justice and equality has never been more urgent.
Sounds convincing, right? Unfortunately there are many inconvenient facts that are at odds with this worldview, though, like
- Indigenous societies were absolutely not peaceful; they were far more violent than our society today; some practiced human sacrifice
- Western colonialist powers won not because they were more rapacious and violent - the Natives were plenty violent too - but because they had more advanced technology and better weaponry. The losers are not necessarily more virtuous
- Slavery existed for thousands of years before America. Pre-industrial societies had slaves. Actually Western powers were the first to ABOLISH slavery, not the first to create it
- Racism was the dominant tradition among everyone! It's a fundamental, unpleasant fact of human psychology, and we're doing better at it in the West than most - look at Rwanda
- It is true that Black and Indigenous people suffer in today's society; however, ascribing this all to past injustice or to current anti-Black racism is too glib. Slavery was abolished 150 years ago. Clearly there are cultural factors at play as well. My main worry is that ANY statistical difference between races these days is treated as evidence of systemic racism; this "forced equality" is very reminiscent of communism. You take from the rich to give to the poor until the two are equal, never mind what the rich or the poor person did to deserve it.
- While climate change is indeed a serious problem, there are no serious climate scientists who believe it is a possible existential threat to humanity.
My own opinion is something like -
- The American revolution brought about the greatest successful experiment in governance in human history - America is indeed a shining city on a hill
- Western liberal democracy is the best way of government the world has yet produced
- Our current situation is precious and cannot be taken for granted - it has caused unprecedented peace between great powers over the past 80 years
- This is built on the bedrock of Enlightenment values like free speech and democracy, as well as Christian values like mercy and tolerance
- The arc of morality is long, but it bends towards justice. It is true that Western democracies have made lots of mistakes, but we can't judge the actions of hundreds of years ago by the moral standards of today. America played a huge role during World War II and its aftermath in building the peaceful world that we currently enjoy
- Humanity is best served by forgetting the past and focussing on building the future together
I have found that this position puts me at odds with a lot of the left which is sad because I used to think of myself as a liberal
> I have found that this position puts me at odds with a lot of the left which is sad because I used to think of myself as a liberal
It's a big tent. Your "position" is probably at odds with many on the right.
I think your caricature is more commonly reflected by those styled as Social Democrats or Socialists/Anarchists. They're more likely to be apprehensive about "Liberal" as a label owing to open distate for Capitalism, or neo-Liberalism as they sometimes say.
Don't forget that people's beliefs are often ideologically inconsistent with parties or loud always-online groups, as I'm sure is the case with you and I. We aren't remarkable that way. This is in part why message discipline is so important, and we've seen that work in the Dems' favor last mid-term: STFU about fringe woke-ism, stick to what concerns most people.
> I think your caricature is more commonly reflected by those styled as Social Democrats or Socialists/Anarchists.
SD and S/A are very different political ideologies (not sure if you mean to conflate them). I believe most SD's today are not generally opposed to capitalism, but want a (more heavily) regulated mixed-market economy.
There are probably some in those groups who believe something close to what is sketched here, but I don't think at least most SD's would go that far. At least not where I live. S/A I don't know, but that is a very fringe group.
I would guess you probably dont 'really know' what most leftists believe. Most leftists at least sort of follow a policy related to 'dont punch left'. Though there is also an element of 'dont punch down'. This is the exact opposite of how people present lefties but its true in my experience in a certain. People always over focus on the supposed infighting. But most leftists just aren't comfortable punching down against the downtrodden or the people who are actively fighting against inequality/oppression. Even if activists seem a little misguided many leftists still don't wanna be overly critical.
To make this easier to swallow you can read a link from Scott's last round up https://newaltright.substack.com/p/how-the-alt-right-won . Its by an altright guy. He talks about explicitly trying to encourage a policy of 'dont punch right'. The altrigt also seemed to have a lot of infighting but in important ways many parts of the alt right did hang together and avoid 'punching right'.
Im a quite leftwing guy. But that doesnt matter. It is totally rational and correct politics to be hesitant to punch your own side. Most people are emotional not rational. So they dont do some logical decision theory calculus to come to these conclusions. But this is definitely how many people authentically on the left feel. Same for people authentically on the right. I dont personally like punching left, or when people ask me to do it. I can understand people on the right with the same impulse. Its just logical and how most people approach being part of a team.
It also worth noting behind closed doors people can be a little more open. Which is why policy is often more reasonable than politics.
Left-right is undercomplex of course. But accepting that pattern, the middle line seems to have shifted much. The pattern doesn't work though. Marxism should be left; it's an economic theory based on christian morals. Stone age clan politics should be right; they are hopeless in functioning industrial societies. As someone who didn't grip Hegel at all, I should be careful here, but maybe the marxist view of necessary boom and bust, including destructive wars, has something right. Dysfunction of highly developed modern society like north America and maybe Europe as we see it smells like bust.
Well “my team vs your team” mentality is, imo, the problem. If I don't criticise the Nazis on my side, and you don't criticise the communists on your side, at some point the sides are going to notice "hey the other side is literally Nazis, or communists, as the case may be, and even the so-called reasonable ones don't disavow this" and then you get, you know, Israel/Palestine.
(EDIT - i am bringing up Israel/Palestine as a meta point about how the conversation about a topic can devolve into hate and deep partisan polarisation; you are welcome to express your views but I will probably not engage)
I agree. It seems to me that both teams are degrading to the point that they are substantially wrong. Thus the choice is devolving from which team is preferable overall, to which side creates the kind of harm I am most comfortable with.
Those identifying with either side are the problem, as our problem is too crazy parties, both divorced from sane evaluations of problems and practical solutions.
I lean left (social democratic) on many issues and I largely agree with many of the points you are making here. I think we need to stop conflating general leftwing politics with these type of (woke or whatever) beliefs.
Yeah if the left would take action to stamp out this harmful ideology and re commit itself to good old fashioned liberalism I would once more be a happy lefty
Alright, and while we're at it, it's high time for good muslims to do some serious reformation stuff like muhammad sharur at scale and reconcile their faith with, well, god.
I worry that this sentiment is the same kind of truth as "Brazil is the country of the future and always will be."
There are substantive differences in the two that affect success at domesticating them. The diminished role of the Pope has drastically reduced crusade-risk; there are multiple passages of the Quran which are often understood as calling for jihad (in the narrower crusade-analogous sense), and Islam without the Quran would be a bigger change than Christianity without the Pope.
I think people having open conversations with each other would help. We would probably realise we agree with each other a lot more than we realise. It’s very easy to silo yourself into an informational bubble these days and assume that people who don’t agree with you are evil - they’re not, they’re just in their own bubble
FWIW I've talked to many people IRL that I would say agree with the liberal but not "woke" position. In fact, I find that I mostly encounter these kind of opinions online. I find that most people have much more nuanced views than what you are describing. I'm not in the US though, so it might be a different political climate here.
I dislike the implication that the "West" is the one hoarding Wealth and/or Technology, when countless other words like "Corporations" and "Intellectual Property Law" would be far more apt.
You can make a historical arguments that those things in their modern forms can be attributed to Western ideas and Western people, but in the actual reality of today Saudi or Chinese or Russian corporations are no less wealth-hoarding or IP-jealous than their Western counterparts.
I also think that a much more accurate characterization of a right-wing nationalist is someone who wants (for whatever reasons) to keep the demographic majority in Western countries to be the historical majority that was, in short to prevent and reverse (certain kinds of) immigration. This is deliberately vague because there is a huge spectrum of those views. In particular, I don't think a significant majority of right wing nationalists would object to a deal that involved Europeans/Americans/Whites paying money or sharing technology for free with the countries of the immigrants they don't want in return for the flow of those immigrants to decrease or cease entirely. A sort of "I'm going to pay you 100$ to fuck off" [1] meme in real life, in practice this money and technology is going to flow right into the coffers of the dictators who make those immigrants want to get out of their homeland to begin with.
I’m definitely in favour of global development, but I see it a bit differently - as the West saying “hey, we have figured out a very good configuration of institutions and governance, let us share it with you” rather than some kind of penance.
I guess my concern is the narrative “West is evil” which can only supported if you selectively focus on the bad things Western powers have done in the past. It ignores a lot of history. Historically, by modern standards, everyone was pretty terrible.
This is the narrative that is explicitly anti capitalist and anti Western powers which provide a great standard of living to their citizens. In my country, Australia Day (Jan 26) used to be a celebration - now it is marked by anti Australia Day protests where people shout “stolen land” and “the colony must fall” implying that Australia is evil and we should give the land back to the Indigenous Aboriginal people. I think this narrative is widespread and both morally and factually mistaken.
My reaction to the selectivity of certain forms of anti-West narratives is to broaden the narrative further. That is to say, I think it's a good thing (and mostly a Western invention as far as I know, which is yet another thing to thank the West for as a Non-Western) for a society or an identity group to come clean about its historical crimes and try to compensate any sort of modern survivor of those crimes, I think that Russians should do this more to Ukrainians (and I'm not talking about the recent invasions, I'm talking about the Holodomor), I think the Japanese should do this more with the Koreans and the Chinese, the Turks with the Armenians, etc...
This might even piss off the very activists who advance those anti-Western narratives, as they might see my cosmopolitan attitude to their narratives as a form of corruption and co-opting, because they see Westerners as the primary oppressors and as unmatched in brutality. I really don't care, no one owns ideas, and the fundamental idea behind those narratives is sound: insofar as you claim any identity, you also implicitly claim all of its crimes. How meaningful is the phrase "I'm an American" if it doesn't include support for the genocide that the USA was founded on, or "I'm a Muslim" if it doesn't include support for the countless crimes that Islam did and does to the non-Muslims under its control? So, it does make sense to qualify, to say "I'm an X, but I don't condone and I regret all the historical crimes that X did to non-X, and I'm ready to put my money where my mouth is and prove that I'm really repentant about this". Again, my version of this has a far larger list of possible values of X than Westerners or Whites or Europeans and their constituent groups.
> Historically, by modern standards, everyone was pretty terrible.
Indeed so, but the West was terrible in the age of nuclear weapons and the tank and the aircraft, which means it did more in absolute damage than perhaps any other terrible power except perhaps the Mongols.
A specific thing about indigenous societies - there's a reasonable argument of the form "well they were often violent and unequal but various forms of colonialism were worse and on a larger scale so it's still more important to focus on how those were bad, and the people going on about the negatives of indigenous societies are just trying to misdirect attention to distractions". But a large fraction of people on the left, afaict, actually just don't believe indigenous societies were in fact often quite bad.
Societies which lived in the lands which was colonized by the Europeans were very different from each other, the only thing they have in common is that they had worse military tech than their conquerors.
On the one hand, you have neolithic nomadic tribes, on the other hand, you have feudal societies not so different from their European conquerors, and probably everything in between. From our value system, some of them were probably kind of ok (except for a fact that in any Malthusian society, a fraction of the population do not reproduce but fall victim to the horsemen famine, pestilence or war), others were genuinely terrible (Aztecs).
Most sedentary societies in history were kind of bad. A peasant whose feudal lord is of his own ethnicity and culture might have a slightly better deal on average, but interstate anarchy meant that most peasants did not get to enjoy this dubious benefit. I think the difference of a feudal lord othering his subjects because they are 'untouchable' versus because they are 'non-English colonial subjects' is probably not that large.
Industrialization is the tech which ultimately made slaves and serfs (whether kept by Europeans or non-Europeans) obsolete. Granted, it's human rights record is not exactly spotless (kids working in coal mines, WW1, etc), but ultimately it enabled mostly free societies as a somewhat stable equilibrium.
Maybe! But my meta-opinion is that “let’s not talk about this because it’s a distraction” is a bad argument - it’s the sign that you use arguments to advance a specific position that you favour, rather than genuinely seek the truth.
So it depends on the thing. For example someone who responds to every conversation about upzoning with "but we'd have to build more sewer systems which would be expensive" (or if you don't like that example pick your favorite nitpick) is probably being disingenuous about it and just doesn't want more housing built, and "sure but that's a minor effect we should ignore" is a legitimate response. If they keep bringing it up every time though, it becomes reasonable to develop a reflex to ignore that argument.
(Although it is dangerous, partly because you develop a habit of ignoring arguments you don't like and partly because you do at some point need to consider those second order effects).
I don't think it's the "extent" that was the particular problem. There have been other slave-based societies, even if you don't include serfs. IMO, the major innovation in America was the racial basis for slavery. In most other places, as I understand, there wasn't a need to justify slavery, and thus no need to create a hierarchical racial division, or buttress it with a lot of myth-making. It just... was.
Sparta would be the main counter-example here. But in places like Rome, anyone could become a slave, but also any slave could theoretically become free, sometimes through their own actions. It was bad, but it wasn't treated as some unshakeable fact about the universe.
But after a bit of experimentation, Americans figured out that it was easier to catch runaway black slaves, because runaway white slaves could blend in more easily with the rest of the population. So they switched over completely to black slaves, and cooked up some rationalizations for why this was actually a good thing, and the rest is history.
Random trivia, but accounts from one of Hitler's maids said that Hitler himself was a excellent employer, and never treated them badly. But she did not have good things to say about Himmler nor about one of the G's (Goebbels or Goring, but I forget which). So, strictly speaking, when it comes to neighbors, you might be better off with the big H himself.
> To take just one example, only 45% of people who score above 700 on the SAT (top 8% or so) are white, but what percent of people who make up the top 8% of our society are white? It’s probably at least 80-90%; certainly way more than 45%
I’m not sure that mathematics is what leads to entering the top of society even in purely egalitarian societies. Scientists and engineers are not that well paid.
Also of course the recent SAT scores are going to have fewer white candidates than the total white population given recent immigration.
What I find odd about American leftists is that the solution to the top 8% being white, is go to after the privileges of all the whites.
but if your conclusion is true then the top 8% of whites have the privilege, or most of it. Try inheritance taxes rather than affirmative action. That might reduce funding however from the elite whites.
>This is obvious seeing as there are no large slave-derived minorities today in China, India, etc
I don't think this true, it's just you don't know about them. In Indian and Pakistan you have the Siddi, in Sri Lanka the Kaffirs, etc. And in other cases, such as with Ottoman slavery, there were vast population exchanges and genocides at the end of World War I which eliminated those minorities.
This is not a question about "wars and conquests of the last 600 years". It's talking about the violent crime rate in 2020.
You know this, everyone knows this. White liberals knew this until recently. I mean, why on earth would anyone be asking about violence from 600 years ago? Does European conquest in india say anything about life in America in 2020? You're obviously much safer around white people on average than black people, and that's obviously what is meant and what matters. Your rationalization is just a way of rescuing black people from negative perceptions of their anti-social behavior.
And if we're talking about the world today, Africa is vastly more violent than anywhere full of white people is. And more violent than colonization was.
Also, even by this insane justification - nothing suggests that black people are more peaceful. They've just been categorically incapable of large scale violence that Europeans were. They have been killing, raping and enslaving one another since day dot. If I stab as many people as possible because I don't have a gun, and you shoot a bunch of people, and more die at your hands than mine, it's absurd to claim that you're more violent than me.
Also, did white liberals in the past not know about these things you're discussing? Or did they simply become vastly more black nationalist in 2020 and lied to make black people look better?
Isn't this a bit of a strawman? "If I don't start wars and conquests somebody *else* is going to start it, so it might as well be me?", I imagine there are quite a lot of alternatives where you both don't start wars or conquests and also engage in politics and sometimes wars to deter those who want to start wars and conquests.
The usage of "white" to denote a huge group of ethnicities that are rarely unified and often quarrelling among themselves (Germans and Slavs, USA whites and Mexican whites, Russian Slavs and Ukrainian Slavs) is a dumb framing imposed on us by the dumb phrasing of the survey that started the whole thread, which also used "black" even though it really means "slavery-descendent blacks of the USA".
I believe his comment was not meant to say that it was okay for Europeans to colonize because somebody was going to do it, but rather to say that conquest and colonization are not behaviors exclusive to Europe, and if you believe that there is something special about white people that makes them conquer and colonize, then you may end up ignoring non-white nations doing the same thing.
Race does seem to correspond to ethnicity/extended kinship groups however. And despite their quarrels it seems like people of various races instinctively recognize that race is often more of a distinction than culture/ideology is. I think whites and nonwhites tend to view a republican and democrat white person as more fundamentally "of the same group" and the same would go for a conservative vs liberal black person. I don't exactly like this but it's the view I've come around to.
I think a way to moderate things in the public sphere is just to acknowledge racial interests are a thing, will be distinct, and should be managed as legitimate instead of insisting that theoretically it shouldn't be a factor and the only issues are racism and the belief race exists as a category.
Hmmm...someone told me they use the same color terms as we do for races, but because white means death and yellow is good luck (and the emperor) the emotional valence is inverted so it works fine? That true?
"it seems reasonable to say that white people are more “violent” than black people even though they commit far fewer violent crimes"
Ah yes, alas that I wasn't born in time to invade Poland, but I was around for Afghanistan and everything since! I've had to renew my passport three times, I keep running out of pages flying hither and yon invading, pillaging and conquering!
Oh *that's* why we keep running into each other in airports! Today I'm gonna try to blow up the fucking moon in the middle of the eclipse. Watch the sky for my white ass zooming overhead laughing.
All we violent white people starting wars and invasions really need to co-ordinate better, imagine how embarrassing it would be for two of us to turn up in the same small Third World village to assassinate the same local rebel resistance leader! What a faux pas!
I can't in all honesty wish you good luck with the moon exploding, since I like the moon, but I do admire the cut of your jib!
Has there been any update on the Far Out Initiative? I thought Scott mentioned he was intending to write something about the project in more detail. Are we going to see it discussed on the blog again in the future?
The thing is with that idea: how to prevent the possibility of subjects becoming completely apathetic and unwilling to stick up for themselves if they are already artificially blissful?
Because that seems like disconcerting possibility to me.
Econ 101 question: (I'm trying to understand currencies by hyperbolic thought experiments.) Imagine that for some ridiculous and unrealistic premise all the leaders of the world agreed to adopt a new single world currency and discontinue all other currencies. Which groups would be the winners and losers of this policy?* Would e.g. rich westerners, people with lots of third-world debt, or third-world exporters be better or worse off? If the winners and losers would depends on the implementation, then what implementation details would matter?
*in an Econ101 spherical cows sense. "There would be a global mega-recession and everyone would die" is not the answer I'm looking for, even if it's true.
Funny, no crypto bros here? I have been quite impressed with "Bitcoin is Venice" but was too dumb, lazy and drunk to actually install a node and but some savings in bitcoin. If enough people use bitcoin, it should be a usable global currency, no?
I don't think this is entirely unrealistic. I mean, most of the civilized world did Bretton Woods for a few decades, which should have had basically the same effects. More recently, half of Europe switched to EUR. It would seem that the lesson is that currencies aren't that big a deal, as long as they're reasonable well managed, although if it's fiat money, it's basically an infinite money glitch for whoever controls the printer, so that's where the main winners/losers are.
A universal currency would mean the world adopts a single monetary policy. So, for example, Turkey and Argentina would need to set the same interest rate as Japan, even though the countries are facing very different economic challenges (i.e. high inflation vs almost no inflation). It would also become impossible to print your way out of debt or to devalue your currency, so countries running big deficits (looking at you, America) would risk default.
In the end who wins and who loses would ultimately depend on who controls the monetary policy. And that would surely result in a lot of conflict, unless the world moves towards a single cohesive monetary policy and some kind of world federation or world government.
demost_'s response is great on the Econ 101 aspects, but I note that you also ask about 'winners and losers' which is arguably more complex.
In the case of currency union, it doesn't completely make sense to talk about 'winners and losers' on a single axis:
Countries with strong economies benefit from currency union with weaker economies due to providing a wider and more stable market for their export goods. Similarly, countries with weak economies benefit from a currency union with strong economies because they can borrow at a lower rate (and so grow quicker) and anticipate price stability. There are also non-economic benefits which could accrue to high or low income countries, like for example some people may see a currency union as a necessary step to achieving a political union.
Countries with strong economies may not benefit from a currency union, however, if they are exposed to economic contagion from weaker countries (or are obliged to support weaker economies financially to prevent this contagion spreading). Similarly low income countries lose a lot of competitive advantage because they are no longer able to devalue their currency. Again, there are non-economic risks which could accrue to any kind of country - a very specific one is that the central bank could be captured by the interests of one kind of country and stop making policy in the interest of the union in its entirety and focus instead on the high / low income economies.
So a world currency could be good for everyone, bad for everyone, or a mix - and if it is a mix it could favour rich countries, poor countries, or something more complicated
One small note is that if we implemented the world currency overnight it would be absolute anarchy - standard theory is that countries need to achieve 'convergence', which is aligning economic and legal policies to match each other. Failure to do this would result in the currency union collapsing (or at least experiencing significant contagion) because there was no central agreement on how to manage the economy. So a more sensible route to creating a world currency would probably be to start with an existing strong economy (EU, US) and then countries would join one-by-one as they aligned their legal and economic policies.
It totally, totally depends. Mechanically, obviously it depends what exchange rate different countries are given. But hand waving that away, it depends on interest rate policy (which presumably is now also under the auspices of one central bank).
In 1990, the two currencies of the two German states (West-Mark of the Western FRD and Ost-Mark of the Eastern GDR) were replaced by a single one. I think this is a nice miniature version of your example, since the GDR was financially much weaker and had a stronger (at least implicit) inflation, meaning that before the union the Ost-Mark had a tendency to lose value over time compared to West-Mark.
The details mattered a lot, most importantly the exchange rates from Ost-Mark to West-Mark. Wages, pensions, rents etc. were exchanged 1:1. Saving accounts, debts etc. at a rate 1:2. Afterwards, East German economy developed not very well, we still see a substantial gap over 30 years la
ter. The Econ 1:1 explanation is:
- Eastern companies were not producing at competitive rates, because productivity was not high enough.
- Usually that would be counterbalanced because the exchange rates would drop. This means that citizen could buy less import goods, but companies would gain a relative advantage because their costs would go down.
- Due to the single currency, this was not possible. Costs for Eastern German companies stayed high, and large parts of the Eastern economy collapsed.
- This was to a good deal due to the (economically) too high exchange rates, but it also made it harder for Eastern German economy to recover and to catch up in the decades afterwards.
- In this particular case, the population of Eastern Germany was not just losing in the process, because pensions etc. came from the united German state. But otherwise, the high pensions would not have been sustainable, and if an Eastern German state had continued to exist with joint currency, it would have likely gone bankrupt or would have to adopt welfare cuts.
I think this would be the Econ 101 answer for your question:
- Countries with a too high exchange rate would see a hard crash of their economy. Countries with a too low exchange rate would see a considerable boom. If the exchange rates would miraculously be perfect, then it would stay stable for a while, but the problems slowly crouch back in as some economies get stronger (become undervalued) or get weaker (become overvalued). This is a bit what has happened with the Euro, even though I would still consider this quite a success story, as the economic strengths of the Euro countries are converging to some extent.
I think it's fair to say that the reunification of East and West Germany amounted in effect to East Germany's adoption of West Germany's capitalistic, free-market economic system. But what might have been the result if things had gone the other way round and West Germany had merged into and adopted the centralized control economy of East Germany? Would the short and long term outcomes still have been the same? Or would they have been reversed or otherwise modified?
Oof, that's quite out of the box for me. The short term effects would have been very different. Unemployment did not exist in centralized controlled governments of Eastern Europe. When someone was unemployed, they got assigned a job. I also don't think there is something like a company or factory going bankrupt in this system, unless the central planning committee decides to shut it down. If productivity is low, then that's the way it is. Of course, it did happen frequently that a factory couldn't produce because they were lacking important materials or parts, but again that's the way it is.
So I guess that not too much would have changed in the Eastern part of Germany. And in the Western part: well, assuming that the central authorities could gather enough information, then it depends on their decisions, I guess. They could have made it more or less disruptive.
It had already been one of the major problems of Eastern Germany for years and decades to get enough foreign (Western) currencies to buy at least some essentials from Western countries. Probably that would have become easier in the short run. But I have no idea how the whole system would have developed in the long run. I also think that exchange rates played a less central role in the communist systems because international trade played a much weaker role, at least between East and West. I don't know a lot about international trade within the Soviet block, so I am not sure how important it was there.
Thanks! It seemed to me that it *ought* to make a difference, but tbh I tend to get confused/suspicious about even the most basic principles of economics, so I thought it wouldn't hurt to ask.
Thank you, great answer! Which groups in Western and Eastern Germany won and lost based on this? If pensions were exchanged 1:1, I imagine Eastern German retirees were very happy with the currency unification, is that correct?
Yes, Eastern German retirees were clear winners. For workers/employees, there were some groups with "safe" jobs like teachers or other public sectors. They were also winners, because their wages were suddenly worth more.
Industry workers in Eastern Germany lost their jobs en masse. Industry production dropped by half within a years, and there were 3 million unemployed people after a year, in a population of 16 million. So, employees in the producing sectors or other sectors which had to compete in the market, they generally lost. Of course, many of them found new jobs sooner or later, and some could improve their status, but getting unemployed in a recession is generally not nice. This seems a pretty direct consequence of the exchange rates.
For groups in Western Germany, it is a bit harder to say who winners/losers were. I would say that companies in general profited because they had a larger market now, and also the additional option to open factories in Eastern Germany, which was good for several reasons (wages comparatively low, lots of people looking for jobs, skilled working class). For the general population of Western Germany, there may have been some positive trickle-down effects from the economic growth, but probably not too much, also because the population of West Germany was four times higher.
The winner-loser dynamics were leveled out somewhat by political action. The German reunion came with massive state intervention and huge investments into public infrastructure. This put notable costs on employees and companies, so the benefits for Western Germany was a bit counterbalanced by that, but also the losses for East German workers were counterbalanced by alternative jobs, a good safety net, great infrastructure, and so on. In the long run, 34 years later, I think the majority of Eastern Germans are winners of the reunion, but in 2000 the picture was a lot more mixed. Anyway, the long-term outcome is probably a lot more dominated by the political union than by the pure currency union, so it's going on a tangent here.
The dollar wouldn't be the international reserve currency anymore, which probably means the US can't fund its trade deficit through debt. In general my guess would be that since the existing world trading/financial system was established and is run by the developed Western countries, switching to something completely neutral would be bad for them.
There's also the problem of who would control the new World Central Bank. The Eurozone has had a lot of problems caused by by the different European contries wanting different monetary policies, usually Southern Europe wanting expansionary and Germany wanting contractory.
>the US can't fund its trade deficit through debt.
I assume you meant budget deficit, since the govt does not run a trade deficit, the economy does. But even re the budget deficit, that does not seem right; countries using the Euro are able to fund their budget deficits through debt.
"The US dollar's position as the world's primary reserve currency means that it is in high demand globally. This happens for a few key reasons:
The size and stability of the US economy: The US has the largest and most liquid financial markets in the world, which makes the dollar an attractive and reliable currency for global transactions and savings.
The petrodollar system: Many major commodities, especially oil, are priced and traded in US dollars. This creates consistent global demand for the currency.
Confidence in the US government and economy: The relative political and economic stability of the US, as well as the perceived strength of the US government, contribute to the dollar's status.
This high global demand for US dollars allows the country to run persistent trade deficits, as other countries and institutions are willing to hold US dollars and US Treasury securities. This effectively finances the US trade deficit.
Specifically, when the US runs a trade deficit by importing more goods and services than it exports, it receives payments in foreign currencies. However, these foreign currencies are then exchanged for US dollars, which are in high demand globally. This allows the US to fund its trade deficit by essentially exchanging Treasuries or other dollar-denominated assets for the foreign currencies it needs to pay for imports.
In contrast, countries without reserve currency status would typically need to drastically adjust their trade balances or face major currency devaluations and economic disruptions in order to finance trade deficits. The US, on the other hand, can rely on the unique global demand for its currency to finance its trade imbalances."
But, again, many countries on the Euro run trade deficits, and the US trade deficit is not particularly high. So, I am skeptical that it would make a huge difference.
The euro is also a reserve currency. That explains that. In fact you can’t run a trade deficit unless your currency has that status. In a world without reserve currencies imports would equal exports.
But, again, many countries on the Euro run trade deficits, and the US trade deficit is not particularly high. So, I am skeptical that it would make a huge difference.
I guess countries which depend more on imports or exports would be most at risk, which richer or more stable countries being a bit safer? Assuming no national bias in the way monetary policy is set? I'd love to hear an actual expert's opinion!
I gave this online presentation about Metamodernism a couple of days ago, and was subsequently invited to give a follow-up series of presentations on the same subject.
Someone on Manifold suggested that I share my Substack in the open thread so I thought, "ah, what the heck". Here's one of my latest posts, in which I detail my philosophical and personal frustrations with much of the public discussion about privacy, which I think focuses on the wrong things, in essence, treating it as an issue of abstract rights, rather than the concrete applications of power, and the negative effects these can have on peoples lives. https://philosophybear.substack.com/p/the-privacy-paradox-and-what-privacy
You do identify the the core of the problem with the privacy paradox: people keep doing things that they *should* be able to do, not what they can get away with doing. Anything you say or do, can and will be used against you. The past will haunt you forever, and your mistakes will never be forgiven. This idiotic delusion that "just" actions will always be rewarded has damned so many lives. There is no alternative to living in fear.
Of course there is an alternative to living in fear. I watched the pope doing urbi et orbi at easter and only have to worry about the sins I commenced since.
> When we left our small communities for the big city, sociologists said we were making a tradeoff. On the one hand, we wouldn’t have a robust community, to be sure, but we would at least have the anonymity of the city. That came with the liberal possibility to remake ourselves. Now it seems that capitalism wants to take it all away from us- to leave us with the isolation of the city, and the ferocious moral economy of a small village- nosey and full of grudges.
If you could resist the urge to throw in Marxist talking points, you'd win. Capitalism doesn't cause this.
If you somehow believe it does, you should probably argue that in a separate post, and leave it out of a snarky paragraph in the middle of what is otherwise a thoughtful post.
People have an averse reaction to Marxism because, you know, all those millions of murders. So if this wasn't some sort of "Marxism is right" you should also be VERY CLEAR you're not advocating for a Marxist alternative to Capitalism.
EDIT: a DJ friend of mine notes: "I'm not sure it's "capitalism" when, for example, radicals in the dance music underground cancel each other for having the wrong political views."
It seems ubiquitous. Perhaps it's more concentrated in tech, insurance, government, banking? But still... way more broad than just the awful tech people (like Zuckerberg and Gates) who are getting all the press for doing it.
Agreed. I think people who are not necessarily Marxists use capitalism as a short hand for all of those institutions. We need a better word. Maybe he just say “the modern world”.
If you get cancelled in the dance music underground, you're done in the dance music underground (presumably, I don't know, never been in a dance music underground). However the dance music underground isn't going to complain about you, say, to the Pathfinder club, or the scrabble association.
Meanwhile HR & recruitment processes are increasingly rolling out intrusive background checks as I discuss in the piece. It is becoming the norm to demand that would be applicants certify, for example, that they have never been subject to certain kinds of disciplinary processes. True, information is leaky everywhere in the internet age, but the proactive searching hunt is being spearheaded very much by the corporate world- and that is the point of difference. Social media checks etc. are becoming common. Obviously people seek dirt on each other outside job hiring on an informal basis, but it is in hiring that this stuff is reaching industrial precision. This very much is an innovation of capitalism.
I'm with Mark as a sibling comment. This is very much not an innovation of Capitalism. I've seen the exact sort of soul-less (evil?) person characterised in pretty much every Soviet or other Marxist hellhole ever documented. Still not sure you're in the Marxist camp, but if you are, you're doing it wrong.
Stasi did it. KGB did it. When the state is the one employer, the entire state turns into one giant HR nightmare.
At least in Capitalism, we can choose which soul-less evil institution to become a wage slave to. In all the others, it's forced on us, and there's no escape to anywhere less evil.
Also: if you're a DJ, the underground is your pathfinder and your scrabble and your HR. Getting outed as a non-woke non-idiot in the dance underground is the end of your career. You go back to being a pizza delivery guy or Amazon boxer or whatever.
EDIT: I was not strong enough on the DJ point. Getting outed is not just the end of your career. You lose a large set of your friends as well.
Yeah, I have no doubt Soviet states are also capable of in this area and did. Right now though its being pushed ahead by the labour market under capitalism.
Yes, I agree you're fucked if you get destroyed in the dance underground, that's always been possible- the difference is that there is the possibility of reinventing yourself.
>This is very much not an innovation of Capitalism.
Agreed - and it is not limited to Soviet governments either. IIRC, in the USA, there were (are?) restrictions on e.g. student loans if the government finds certain reasons to dislike the applicant (unrelated to student status) - though this was a while ago, and I don't recall the specific reasons they picked (anti-war activism???).
Come on, this is clearly not true. Public sector employers also have HR departments and recruitment processes. Meanwhile, it is possible to regulate what information an employer can be entitled to by law.
Personally, I think the whole privacy debate is moot. There will be no more privacy until some kind of singularity-scale societal change (and after that, anything is possible). The attack surface is just too large, and with advent of ever more sophisticated statistic tools, even disparate pieces of information will (not could - will!) be used to create a complete picture of almost everyone in the world, aside from a few off-grid hermits. Records of your life will be kept - it's just the way of digital society. And as long as they're there, someone will buy or steal them. And after a single leak, they usually end up in bulk databases, which will float around the net forever, getting cheaper and cheaper.
The only really important question - should we abandon all pretence of privacy at all and embrace complete openness, or cling to the last shreds of the old world? For now, I believe the later option is still preferable, as the tools are still not QUITE there to eliminate all privacy forever. Unless you're a person of interest to some powerful entity, or at least a determined human with enough money to buy necessary access (a stalker), you can keep your illusion of privacy for now. But personally, I still wonder - if a random criminal gang can get my telephone number, ID details and workplace records, why can't two government agencies share the same information between them, and still require me to bring them physical papers, or at least jump through a number of online hoops? This already failed to protect me from criminals, and I don't believe the lack of some stupid consent form would prevent a my (or other) government's security agency from getting this information on me, if I happen to draw its eye, so I won't be protected from this, too. At best, this protects me from criminals who are too poor to afford a relatively cheap data-as-service query about me, or too dumb to think of this. Which, I guess, isn't bad for now, but as prices will keep dropping, this protection won't be sufficient.
I laughed at the radiologist line. Accurate. Sorry to hear - if you are ever in Melbourne, Australia, hit me up and I'll help you navigate the clinical trial space here :)
If he's willing to try something experimental, would he like some queuine? Natural compound, sort of a vitamin—produced exclusively by bacteria but utilized by every healthy cell—incorporated into tRNA as queuosine. Seems to be depleted in a variety of cancers including SCC.
Intelligence is a very sensitive matter to people, sort of like physical appearance, but it's even worse because it's correlated to actual real-world success.
I imagine that if you made a group named "Thin People Confederation", or the "Tall People Gang", most people are similarly not going to be very thrilled about it, even if those groups never made any judgements or disparaging comments about the "worse" weights and heights of people who don't qualify. There is a fundamental unfairness to the Universe (or God, if you want to believe in one) in the distribution of physical and mental characteristics among humans, and forming groups explicitly premised on the selection of those characteristics is seen as "rubbing salt in the wound", so to speak.
A secondary source of hate might be all the flak from the IQ wars, because Mensa measures intelligence by IQ testing and so is a prime target for people who hate IQ tests and think they are all what's wrong with the world. But that's a distinct reason from the above.
I think it's amplified by the studies showing disparities among racial/ethnic groups. If it was merely randomly distributed among populations it would not be an issue. But some groups score higher than others just as some are taller than others. Knowing this is unlikely to slow down the scramble for resources either I imagine if this became the dominant world view (and it is not today) than we would see even more extreme races for biocapital. In Brazil for example I think it's the white sperm doners with blue eyes and blond hair that are more prized.
Do people really hate Mensa? I haven’t run into anyone IRL that feels this way. Online you can find people that hate anything, mom’s apple pie, well done three part harmony, the sight of the Milky Way on a cloudless and moonless night, the first robin of spring, really, just about anything.
A Mensa meeting might be a decent forum to find someone to play a complex board game with, or to debate some complex policy issue. But you know what's way more efficient for both of those things? Not filtering on IQ and instead checking out a the social events at a game shop or going to a debate club.
It leaves Mensa looking more like it's engaged in filtering for the sake of filtering. Member just gets a pat on the head and a badge that says "very smart."
In a vacuum, that might not matter much, but unfortunately, pretty much everybody on this board has had the privilege of dealing with self-professed-Mensa-types, waving that badge around in distasteful ways (example: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-240, which includes such gems as "[w]hat's the point in talking to people that don't have any intellectual achievements, eg contributions to human knowledge," and "[t]he minimum IQ for contribution to the knowledge of man is about 125... [p]eople under that level quite literally exist just to do labor for people above that leve[.]")
A person who posts interesting content and is sociable/pleasant to engage with is probably smart. But a person who posts his IQ or his smartness badge is probably just a dickwad, and Mensa is in the business of handing out smartness badges.
It may not be what Mensa wants, but it doesn't take many interactions with jackass members of a tribe to convince outsiders that the tribe is composed of jackasses. Similar principle to sports hooliganism.
- It's low status to express that you want to be in a club that only has smart people. This is because this is interpreted as "thinking you're better than" people who are not smart, which is taken to indicate (a) having too high an opinion of yourself, (b) a moral failure (in putting others down), and (c) a lack of the social skills to interact with people who aren't like you. (I have sometimes gotten interpreted as those things just because I like to talk about math and other intellectual topics; it's got to be much worse if people know you are a Mensa member.)
- Thus not only is joining Mensa low status (so people express hatred for it because of that), it tends to mostly attract people who either (a) actually fit the above negative stereotypes or (b) don't care if others think that they do. Even if you want to spend time with smart people, you might not want to spend time with people who went through those filters!
- Because the filter for membership is an IQ test, and some of their promotional stuff involves puzzles of uneven quality (I have a book of them that I got as a kid...), it has the reputation -- fairly earned or not -- of being composed of people who want to show off their smarts by doing puzzles of dubious merit, rather than anything deep or meaningful.
- Once something is generally hated, people absorb reasons to hate it rather than reasons to like it from the general discourse, so they hate it more.
I notice that Vitor also mentioned adverse selection due to many smart people already having organic ways to spend time with other smart people. This is probably also a big factor, and might be testable: is Mensa less hated in locations where there's few organic ways for smart people to spend time hanging out together? (Though this is possibly confounded by people in those locations maybe being more likely to interpret wanting to spend time with smart people as "they think they're better than others".)
Mensa isn't only less hated in those places; people aren't even aware of it. I've never seen Mensa mentioned anywhere else except try-hard forums like this, and a few places on Reddit. And, of course, in other places where "smart people have organic ways to spend time with other smart people."
I've never belonged, but some people who have have said that they wanted intellectual discussions but the members seemed more interested in just endlessly solving puzzles and stuff like that.
I like mensa. People in mensa share my taste in boardgames. And while they arent all champion boardgamers they are way better than random people. Always happy to hear someone is in mensa. The prior they wanna play 'A feast for Odin' with me goes way the fuck up.
Because we are all very proud of how very smart we are, and get deeply annoyed when someone we consider our inferior comes along claiming to be very smart too.
A bit less inflammatory: it's for those who want to hang out with other smart people, but for some reason this doesn't happen organically to them. If you're doing a phd or working at a big tech company, etc etc, you'll have an overabundance of the thing that mensa provides and you won't join. Therefore, mensa membership is subject to adverse selection.
For some reason, this happens much less to places with implicit filters for intelligence, because those places usually have a raison d'etre other than just being a club for smart people, and end up being such a club anyways as a bonus.
Mensa people have different tastes from elite university people. Or tech workers. There are advantages to literal Mensa. At least if you share the tastes.
Agreed. I'm not saying mensa is bad (I'm actually trying to be less judgmental overall), just saying that the adverse selection is real, because these things do substitute for each other to a significant degree.
The part "it's seen as X" is accurate, but it doesn't explain *why* it seems so.
(The implied explanation would be "it is seen as X, because it is X", and I have no idea whether you actually intended to imply that or not. Did you?)
I was a Mensa member in the past, and speaking for myself, I definitely *didn't* join in order to brag about my intelligence. Back then I assumed that intelligence was quite common. I mean, 2% may seem like little, but if you translate it to absolute numbers, in a city with population of half million, that already makes 10000 people. That doesn't feel like a very exclusive club. At that time, I was already a member of more exclusive groups, such as "people who participate in the international math olympiad". Finally, it doesn't make much sense to brag about high IQ when you are surrounded by people who passed literally the same IQ test as you.
So, from my perspective, the explanation of "bragging about intelligence" completely fails the Intellectual Turing Test.
Instead, the reason why I actually joined, was that I hoped to find... basically something like Less Wrong (which didn't exist back then), or at least like ACX. And I didn't. So after a few years, I left.
I think the situation deserves more than just a mocking response, because it is not completely obvious why this project has failed. To compare, most readers of ACX are highly intelligent, and most of them are not doing anything worthwhile while writing in the ACX comment section. So why does ACX feel so different from Mensa?
(And, some people would argue that it does not. That is probably the official position of the SneerClub. But I think that the differences are large, despite also some similarities.)
The obvious answer is that ACX is a community built around Scott, who provides interesting topics, insightful analysis, and a friendly environment for discussion. Scott is good at his work, and some of his articles are more or less related to his work.
But if "a smart and charismatic person in the center" is the ingredient that makes the difference, the obvious question is whether Mensa could be fixed by having someone like Scott. Imagine that Scott (or rather a more extraverted version of him) joins Mensa, and that he is so popular that he gets elected as the boss of Mensa. Imagine that Scott gives public lectures, which are equivalent to his current articles, and that the lectures are open for both the members and the non-members. And the membership in Mensa would provide an extra opportunity to interact with Scott, a bit like being a paying subscriber does here. -- Could this fix the problems with Mensa? Or is there a reason why this wouldn't work, and what exactly is that reason?
(Mensa has a concept of "special interest group", which is a group inside Mensa that has their own specific agenda; for example they have the same hobby. So in the proposed thought experiment, ACX would become a SIG inside Mensa. I am mentioning this technicality to address a possible objection that the culture of ACX can only be maintained by bans, and Scott would not be allowed to ban people from Mensa. He could still ban them from the SIG.)
"But if 'a smart and charismatic person in the center' is the ingredient that makes the difference, the obvious question is whether Mensa could be fixed by having someone like Scott"
I think without knowing the history of the organization, that it's possible Mensa gained traction in the first place by having one or a few of a previous generation's smart and charismatic people in the center, maybe in like the 1950s? (An era where social clubs were more common in any case; Lions, Rotary, Shriners...) Now, however, those people being deceased, they've lost the Mandate of Heaven and it has passed to a series of new petty-emperors, of which Scott is one.
Social democracy is a great example of this process. Once, the Fabians had Shaw and Wells spewing grand theories about how to fix society and save mankind, full of energy, zeal and good prose; Bertrand Russell joined and then left because he disagreed about some minor quibble, but still clearly a "fabiadjacent"! So it became huge and trendy among the intelligentsia and still today hordes of middle-class midwits believe in Fabian socialism – even though all their ideas demonstrably don't work or, when they might, as in eugenics (the Fabians were huge on this before WWII and then suddenly stopped talking about it for some reason), are regarded as monstrous. The rest of us look at them with contempt. They can't see that their secret society to restore the Ming Dynasty is hopelessly obsolete, being abandoned by Heaven.
I chatted George H from the last open thread: https://morelucid.substack.com/p/increasing-iq-by-10-points-is-possible . Dude sure seemed incredibly well informed to me. You can have whatever prior you want but he knew a ton of stuff about the subjects we discussed. Im not minimally informed myself but he super impressed me. Seems worth sharing because he was definitely WAY more informed than I expected. Top of the distribution outcome.
Good data point. My priors on this seem to be softer than most; I find it perfectly plausible that we are not extracting maximum IQ from our brains. There are a bunch of constraints on our learning and working environments. We satisfice instead of optimize, specially because raw brainpower has to combine with other traits (social influence, knowledge, experience) to result in productivity.
Intuitively I also lean towards explanations like "most people are actually mildly sleep deprived / nutrient deprived / overly tense", but George seems to claim these are not the cause of the IQ jump.
Do any of y'all have access to the Chaotic Thinking podcast (by Liminal Warmth)? I've googled it (as I recently remembered that it existed) but it seems that the major websites don't actually have the content of the podcast itself :(
Does anyone have high quality analysis of exercise using machines to share. I want specifically machines not bodyweight or free weight. Would super appreciate seeing anything cool!
FWIW, googling whatever question you have re fitness and adding "Greg Nuckols" to the query is a pretty good way to find quality evidence based content in this space.
Analysis of what exactly? Comparison between machines vs. free/bodyweight? Best machines for certain fitness goals? Best brand of machines? Please be more specific.
Im not the pickiest on operationalizing. More interested in the quality of the analysis. But some questions:
-- Do users get hurt frequently? Are the injuries chronic? (This is the most important question)
-- Do people who use them consistently gain muscle
-- Can you gain a 'lot' of muscle and strength liek you can with free weights. Or people cap out quickly if they are fit
-- Does strength from free weight carry over to other things. To barbells? To bodyweight calisthenics? To sports?
As I said im not the pickiest. Id rather have a great analysis of 'carryover to some random sport I dont care about' than a meh quality analysis that covered all of my questions.
One good reason to add some cable or machine stuff to your free weight routine is gravity. It sucks trying to develop lats with dumbbells while standing on your head. And pull-ups are fine only for lean or already quite strong people.
I don't think lats need a machine. Bent-over rows are an excellent lat-developing exercise, and if you want to pull really heavy weights, there's the knee-supported single-arm rows.
I'm not an expert and I don't have an analysis but I've been working out and following the bodybuilding space for a while, the main differences between machines and free weights are that with a machine you can better isolate the muscle you want to train (an obvious example, doing an exercise seated compared to standing up you'll be more stable by default, and for the same reason it's harder to get injured with a machine); free weights depends on gravity and can be inefficient (eg lateral raises, at the beginning of the movement with dumbbells you don't have any resistance horizontally and it increases as you lift your arm while with a cable you can have constant tension) about carryover I think it'll depends mainly on how similar the exercises/movements are.
I don’t have an analysis for you, but do have an education in the field (kinesiology) and work experience as well. I’ll keep my answers short since you are looking explicitly for an analysis, but the answers to your questions are:
1) Do users frequently get hurt, and are the injuries chronic?
No, machines are commonly used to avoid injuries. This will have some minor variance depending on the type of machine (a single-axle machine will be more stable than a cable machine, for example). Stability is the ability to focus on working a particular muscle in a certain range of motion and (in short) more stability means less risk of injury.
2) Do people who use them consistently gain muscle?
Yes. Many bodybuilders will use large amounts of machines are they allow you to focus on large muscle groups (to the exclusion of small stabilizer muscles).
3) Can you gain ‘a lot’ of muscle and strength like with free weights?
Yes, you can. Muscle and strength gain are directly correlated with the total weight or force you use, as well as the total volume of exercise you do (and other smaller things, but not relevant here). Machines will only limit you here if you grow strong enough that you can do all the weight on the machine.
4) Does strength from free weight carry over to other things? To barbells? To bodyweight calisthenics? To sports?
Yes. I will note that machines aren’t free weights, and it is here that they have the greatest risks and drawbacks. Avoiding training your stabilizing muscles means you will be significantly weaker in free weights, calisthenics, sports, etc, and risk injury. You will have the strength to “do things” but will struggle to do them properly. To use a car analogy, you could have a big horsepower engine but an axle made of balsa wood.
If you were actually asking specifically about free weights, then yes, there is great carryover to other things. So much so that virtually all types of athletes lift weights! Tiger Woods famously benched 300 pounds, and golf is much more a sport of coordination than of raw power.
However, your carryover will depend strongly on the free weight exercise and the sport. Squatting will not make you better at arm wrestling, and a strong barbell curl will do nothing for you in synchronized swimming. But squatting will make you better at many, many sports, and doing barbell curls likewise (albeit a slightly smaller selection, IMO).
Bodyweight calisthenics are a bit of an oddball. Yes, lifting weights will make you stronger and therefore make you better at calisthenics. However, adding muscle mass will also make you heavier, and thus directly make the calisthenics harder. You see this in sports that are classified by body weight as well. Generally, athletes in these sports will still strength train, but will focus on both low repetitions (powerlifting) and/or high repetitions (endurance), seeking to avoid excessive hypertrophy. They will also optimize their nutrition around getting very lean, but not very big.
Hope that helps, either you or someone else who’s interested.
Is it possible that the roles we consider high status in society today co-evolved with patriarchy in such a way that these are actually optimized for masculine traits? For example, in a world that was matriarchal, maybe companies would be lead by a triumvirate instead of a singular CEO Maybe in that world, after men have overcome social oppression through their masculist movement, they would be allowed and encouraged to form part of triumvirates but under perform on average? Or, say that we lived in a world were parenting was the highest status thing one could do, could men on average compete with women?
I’m not attempting to justify the lack of diversity in high status roles. Conditional on what we’ve got, I am fully in favor of increasing opportunity and access for all. I’m also not claiming that the above hypothesis implies genetics is the primary reason for a skewed distribution. I’m merely wondering if there’s something to it. For example in the same way we can argue humans domesticated dogs as much as dogs domesticated humans.
It's a very interesting question. Academia and publishing are becoming matriarchies and men are leaving those fields in droves. Smart guys now prefer to start their own tech companies rather than try to do research, and make video games not books. (In the second case of course there are large audience effects as well.)
Heck, media's turning into a women's field, and who do we see on Substack? When the field gets feminized, ambitious men go elsewhere.
In my opinion one of the main wrinkles with trying to analyze this is that you can have a role or task where women are on average better than men... and the very top of the field is still dominated by men. You see this in Scrabble and also (I believe) in marksmanship - the average woman has an edge over the average man, but the top competitors are still male. There are some hand-waving evo psych explanations for this - men have slightly greater trait variance, presumably due to greater returns (in terms of reproductive success) to being the best or being the top dog in whatever field.
It is noteworthy that in evolutionary terms, being a median or modal male gets you ... nothing.
I think it's less trait variance than differential payoffs (also a handwaving evo psych explanation). Being at the top of a hierarchy makes you attractive to women (perhaps not in cases as nerdy as Scrabble!) from what I can tell.
A little off-topic, but I dated a comedian for a while a few years back. She was bi, and commented being funny got her girls, but no guys. So there are certain things that are attractive to one sex and not the other.
"Study upon study have shown that businesses founded by women ultimately deliver higher revenue, even in the negative climate of less investor capital and support."
If people really believe this, there's a lot of money to be made by investing in firms founded by women.
Yeah, I wouldn't put too much faith in that quote... this is hard to study in a real apples to apples way, because women tend to found different businesses than men. You could limit it to something like a specific set of VC funded ventures but now you have other problems of confounding and probably small sample size.
I remember seeing one ETF (Ellevest or something) that was supposed to invest in firms founded by women, I checked a while later and it underperformed the S&P 500 significantly. Of course, there could be other factors--they could be shut out of the old boys' network for financing, they could be less concentrated in high-growth sectors like tech, they might have less capital, their principals might be bogged down by family responsibilities...
Well this feels like a terrible idea, but I'm doing it anyway.
I think the parenting thing answers the question, actually. Women make the better parents because men are physically incapable of feeding the baby, and by the time that's no longer a requirement the mother has the built-up experience of dealing with the child and it makes more sense to have her keep caring for the child than for the father to take over.
This in turn leads to a split in personalities; mothers tailor their thinking more toward dealing with children, encouraging them and helping them grow, leaving fathers free to tailor their thinking more to dealing with other adults, making sure things actually work and discouraging failures. And so, status. Children don't have status, they're stupid, and we don't want the people raising them to be driven by status, because children can't live up to those expectations. But if nobody cares about being the best, nothing improves and everything decays. So broadly, men care about creating status while women care about creating community.
Rates of breastfeed (in the US) have varied drastically over the past ~70 years: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK235588/ And breastfeeding rates are not uniform across the population, cultural and economic factors have a huge influence.
I dont know what that means for your hypothesis, only that it would be possible (though very difficult) with the right data to perform some cohort analysis to tease out the relationship between breastfeeding and parenting.
Not just responsibility, but reactivity is extremely important. My wife was supposed to be the stand-in for her prof in inter-institutional meetings for a certain project as long as the prof's baby was still small, but still relay all information to her and coordinate with her on what to do. After awhile it became clear how grossly inefficient this arrangement was (distilling long meetings into "core points" is always lossy, and vice versa rehashing 4 hour meetings in their entirety is plain insanity), and the prof would just let her make decisions herself, which quickly morphed into my wife taking the de-facto role over entirely. I've heard similar stories now multiple times, where there's nothing more destructive for productivity than having to wait for the agreement of multiple people until something gets done.
No one sits down and ordains what is high status or low - that comes from effectively market forces arising from the constraints and limitations of the physical world.
Where men got good at things that worked, their societies grew and we now call those things "high status". But that's just a shorthand term for a much larger chain of causality.
Taking parenting: if it was true 100% of the time that kids would come out healthy, grow big and strong, and stay around to earn lots of money and look after their mum in her old age, parenting would be high status because everyone can see that you as a mum have good things coming to you. If instead it's 100% that they'll cost you all your money then fuck off to Australia at 18 to do drugs and never write to you again, it'd be low status, because everyone can see you'll be out of pocket (financially and emotionally). We don't know which it's going to be, so the "status" of the parent isn't clear cut.
Trying to swap out what's high status like it's just a post it note you can move on to something else is like saying, "Okay, so what if we had ice cream, but it was nice and warm?"
It would make slightly more sense to ask, "What would need to be different about our world for the civilisational dominant strategy to have been something that "favours" women (in the form we know them)?"
"Is it possible that the roles we consider high status in society today co-evolved with patriarchy in such a way that these are actually optimized for masculine traits?"
Considering that seeking high status is itself a masculine trait that scenario seems highly unlikely.
But even in an extremely weird world where somehow high status was no longer a male trait or a long lasting matriarchy had established itself I would not feel comfortable answering that question. So many male traits are connected to seeking high status so if that variable was changed I would have no idea how the rest of it would shake out. At the same time if women would take over the masculine trait of seeking high status I would expect other traits to follow, so male and females might just trade places, with the same traits staying dominant - except physical strength, which by itself is a strong status multiplyer and makes it easier for men with high status to become dominant again, toppling the whole Pyramide and making the premise questionable again. I just don't think this scenario works and if it did would it would incredibly weird and impossible to predict.
"For example in the same way we can argue humans domesticated dogs as much as dogs domesticated humans."
That point is hard to agree with if you've ever seen a wolf and a pug. Dogs surely have influenced humans but they did not run thousands of years of eugenics experiments on us with nearly no ethical considerations. (and even to the point of mere domestication it takes many generations of breeding. Dogs did not breed humans.)
Given the relative costs of human muscle power and electric motors, I think that any job (excepting sports) that requires substantial physical strength is organized badly.
Electric motors are cheap. Applying them is not. The tradeoff is not against human strength, but human engineering ingenuity. Some jobs require such a flexible, creative workflow (think heavy equipment maintenance) that there is no standardized process which can be cost-effectively automated.
>Some jobs require such a flexible, creative workflow (think heavy equipment maintenance) that there is no standardized process which can be cost-effectively automated.
Yes, there are indeed some outliers. Though removing a demand for substantial physical strength is a weaker condition than automating a process. Using cranes and forklifts and power screwdrivers can substitute for human muscle power in many situations where the job is indeed flexible and creative and no standardized full process exists.
Such jobs are not outliers. Consider the nearest auto mechanic. Many other common trades--construction, electrical, plumbing, roofing--test individual human flexibility, stamina and strength to the limit on a daily basis. These jobs are already power-assisted, which often enables an increased workload rather than an easier job. While often repetitive, they are not assembly-line; tasks vary from moment to moment.
I mentioned heavy equipment maintenance because in that field pneumatic, hydraulic and electrical tools are large and heavy enough that managing them is a trial of strength on its own. Even a "small" 3/4" impact gun is a full-body workout, simply to place and operate on a prolonged basis.
Every year or so, for decades, Festo, Honda, or some other contender demonstrates some form of powered exoskeleton assistance device. This class of product is expensive, slow, and inflexible. It gets in the way for anything a human can manage. It can only be amortized by increasing workload to an inhuman scale.
I am more familiar with the trades I've listed, but janitor, maid, and personal caretaker are also physically demanding jobs. A leaf blower or vacuum cleaner is a labor-saving device only if the job is finite. In market competition, powered assist lets you take on e.g. ten jobs in the time of three: the day remains long, and your body will still wear out eventually.
This is how things happen outside of an office. If these very heavily economized and power-assisted fields seem poorly-organized, then I encourage you to familiarize yourself with their needs and pluck the low-hanging fruit. You will forge a dynasty of unfathomable wealth.
I'm pretty sure she was saying that women are fundamentally risk-averse, a trait that is easily observed in all societies all through history, and that stems from women's much, much greater biological investment in their (sharply, biologically) limited number of offspring.
I'm also pretty sure she's saying it in an exaggerated, humorous way, with some agressive in-your-face 'tude, a certain NYC-ish "Hey lemme ax youz sumpin" tone, because she's Camille Paglia.
* -- OK, here's the version of how she's right, if she was The Zvi. [Look, I just can't spell his last name -- it looks like "letters, bro!" (**) to me.]
from Zvi's Substack:
"Don't Worry About
-- the Last Three Incredibly Detailed Posts About AI That You Have Missed,
-- Or About Feeling That Maybe *I* Am the AI,
-- Or the Vase (Unless your Name is Sophie)"
Imagine an advanced (but isolated) Stone Age tribe, 100 adults: 50 men 50 women (with some children and elders who are not decision-makers.) Some of the Men have returned from a hunting trip, and say they have discovered better land two valleys away, no other tribes, perfect. Other men have seen the valley before so they agree, and a big group proposes the whole tribe move there. Since this is a game theory parable/simulation, let's say that by moving there, the whole tribe would be 3-5% better off in all ways, *BUT* one man and one woman will die along the way.
Every woman will vote NO. Because the benifit will be diffuse and spread over the whole tribe, including other women and offspring competing with their own, but a 2% chance of immediately dying is GAME OVER for a woman. This creates a kind of Nash Equiblibrium where the diffuse gains over the hill are never worth the direct existential risk of climbing. (It also creates a "Lysistrata/Clan-of-the-Cave-Bear" scenario, but I've already sold that series to Netflix, ka-CHING!) on Wednesday.
I like Paglia and I enjoyed Sexual Personae back in the 90s, but there's absolutely no way to prove that one way or the other. As Negentrope says below, unfalsifiable.
My suspicion about patriarchy is that by forcing women to breed over what they would prefer if given agency, it increases the birth rate to the point where you can produce more warriors, kill neighboring societies, and take their stuff (and women). Most people here wouldn't call that 'good', but it was a stable equilibrium for a very long time. Sort of like the way everyone has to have a big army because if you don't someone else will kill you and take your stuff.
Is that really the point? If people could only express opinions that were 'falsifiable' you would shut down....What?....around 99%? Is that what you would like? The world would be a lot quieter.....perhaps deathly silent.
I take the statement "If civilization had been..." as a prediction. One that posits that if certain conditions had been different then the course of events would have proceeded in a very different direction. Since the prediction in question is in regards to human history and the development path of human society, I would consider anthropological (i.e. scientific) prediction. Now I'm no strict Popperian, but when it comes to statements that fall under the umbrella of science I consider a lack of falsifiability to be a point against the argument (particularly when making such a grand, sweeping conclusion).
Perhaps I'm being overly critical. I haven't read any of Paglia's work and it's entirely possible that she backs up that statement with enough background research and evidence to justify it. But I'm very disinclined to be charitable to these kind of just-so stories.
That you find this bullshit confuses me. It's pretty obvious when you observe men/women in any situation where something needs to be done.
If you need a simple, quick illustration, go to your favourite video serving site (Youtube probably) and search for the survival on an island video. Two groups: one all men, one all women, on the same island, trying to survive for a week or whatever.
See it play out as Camille Paglia would predict.
I just did the search myself, and I found some entirely different video than the one I had in mind, but apparently it played out similarly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpaG4u6R-rE
I have no idea what such a video could possibly portray that would make me generalize that conclusion to literally billions of people living over thousands of years in hundreds of cultures.
I'm disengaging from this conversation because it seems pointless to argue with you specifically, sorry. Feel free to have the last word if you wish.
It was a question... (and a response to some questions posed by the original commenter.) My question was not posed to you but thanks anyway for your opinion.
My own view?....as a contrarian counter to the dominant feminist narrative of the past few decades I think it almost certainly overstates the case. Overstates it by how much?....I'm really not sure. But if one wants to rhetorically break the spell of an overwhelmingly dominant narrative, you do have to be punchy and pithy and - in this sense - I think Paglia's comment was a useful one.
>I’m not attempting to justify the lack of diversity in high status roles. Conditional on what we’ve got, I am fully in favor of increasing opportunity and access for all.
Increasing it about *what*? One in which women are already heavily favored?
>I’m also not claiming that the above hypothesis implies genetics is the primary reason for a skewed distribution.
Well, if you're not suggesting that then you're almost certainly wrong.
>For example in the same way we can argue humans domesticated dogs as much as dogs domesticated humans.
>Increasing it about *what*? One in which women are already heavily favored?
Surely you dont mean to imply that women are *universally* favored, e.g. in jobs? There are certainly jobs where thats the case. But I think you will find it hard to make any semi-complete list of high status jobs where women come out on top empirically. Or do you mean to say that women are heavily favored, but still incapable or unwilling to take those jobs, so its still men who win out at the end?
How many women trashmen are there? Women CHOOSE not to do those jobs. Because they don't have to. Because they're heavily favoured in high-status jobs.
If a woman wants a high-status job, and is willing to make the same sacrifices a man would make to get it and keep it, she will have it and keep it.
Even though women choose only a small fraction of jobs (the high-status ones), and only put in a small fraction of the effort as men, they are still able to pull off making more money given the same experience in the same job.
>How many women trashmen are there? Women CHOOSE not to do those jobs. Because they don't have to. Because they're heavily favoured in high-status jobs.
Ah I forgot! number of women - number of trashwomen = number of women in high status jobs, right? Because taking care of the trash is the only low status job (even IF only men would be doing it, there might be and certainly are low status jobs which are done primarily by women, e.g. in care-taking and cleaning). And because the only alternative to low status job is a high status one rather than the many jobs in the middle.
The sarcasm distracts, but your point is solid. I don't recall ever seeing a male in a home maid service position, for example. Both male and female janitors, sure.
I think what you're really asking is whether socioeconomic conventions that favor men are merely at local maxima by happenstance. Since it's impossible to know whether you're at a local vs absolute maximum, and since all maxima are effectively arrived at by a combination of random walk followed by hill climbing, it's an open question.
Would be interesting to experiment with the approach of hopping off the climb of the current local maximum in search of one with a higher peak elsewhere. Since that's something we should probably be giving some effort to on the side anyway, it sounds like a good cause.
Essentially, yes. Men naturally rally around a leader/try to become the leader, whereas women tend more towards 'cooperation' and consensus building. Triumvarate specifically may not be a great example so much as something more general like a non-hierarchical committee of some kind.
Arguably we already have something like a triumvirate, the Board of Directors. We accurately consider the CEO more important than the board of directors, but that doesn’t necessarily have to be the case in this world. A corporate character could quite easily take away more decisions from the CEO and place them with the Board. This doesn’t happen usually because the Board is seen as inefficient and slow. Companies without a powerful CEO get outcompeted. Even in a world with no men, the advantages in a single CEO seem significant, though the C-Suite would probably be much more collaborative.
I took your survey and found some of the questions confusing. For example, Number of Lifetime Sex Partners. I've had a number of long-term sexual relationships and expect my current one to last the rest of my life. How should the question be answered? Since I already submitted the survey, it's too late for me, but I'm still interested in what you meant.
"Tensegrity" (tensional integrity) is a... building technique I guess? that combines cables which are only under tension with parts such as rods that are only under compression. You can make some nifty stuff, like a table where it looks like the top is levitating and trying to float away.
I've read a bunch of abstract arguments for why it's a great idea. In particular, it's supposedly very strong compared to the weight of the components, and there are some vague claims that the human body (the spine in particular) is built according to those principles.
So, why isn't this used a bunch everywhere? All I've found are some art projects, one bridge in Melbourne (probably also categorized under "art" as opposed to "efficient building technique"), and SUPERball, a theoretical design by NASA for a probe that can survive impacts in arbitrary orientations. That scarcity makes my BS detector go off.
Is it a bad tradeoff because of its high complexity to design and build? Are the physical properties actually not that great? Some other problems (I could imagine tendency towards explosive failures)? Or is humanity actually missing out on this great technique?
I'm not sure what that bridge's collapse has to do with tensegrity per se? It looks like an under-damped resonant structure that ended up having a specific mode that was not properly controlled excited by the wind. This likely had to do with a complex interplay of support spacing, cable thicknesses/tensions, and the main bridge mass. Not an easy thing to model without today's FEA tools.
Thirty years ago they thought the collapse was caused by an accident of unfortunate mechanical resonance. Now engineers think it was more complicated problem involving aeroelastic flutter.
It’s simply cool pre light emitting diode video of a disaster that has been studied by engineers ever since. They played it for us in my first year physics class. The British narrator and newsreel style add a bit of dash too.
Yeah of course I bothered to read the Wiki entry on the topic AFTER posting my reply :)
I (looks around nervously) am going to pick a giant fight with all these esteemed physicists who say it wasn't a "resonance" but "flutter" (I benefit from the fact that they are unable to resist due to their absence from these here internets at the moment so my victory shall be total!). The fact that it wasn't a basic longitudinal mode but a complex rotational one doesn't change the fact that there was a dominant frequency at which the two reactive components (inertial and elastic) cancelled each other, leaving only the resistive component in control, and that resistive component, for the specific movement mode, was woefully inadequate, i.e., the resistance was too low relative to the reactances. So the bridge resonated out of control while the wind provided the energy for it. Which is what "resonance" is.
My impression is that tensegrity designs tend to be, for lack of a better term, wobbly. The strongly resist large deformations, but barely resist small deformations at all. And that's often not what people want in a building.
I think you're talking about a bridge in Brisbane, not Melbourne. And one important factor is that it's not exactly pretty; it has weird arbitrary-looking (but presumably very non-arbitrary) angles all over the place. Your aesthetic decisions are limited once you decide to build in this way. And it doesn't seem to have practical advantages -- a pedestrian bridge over a moderately wide river is easily built by many other means
I am familiar with this concept from legos. where the focus is to build things like the floating table. In this use case, the builds use chains (so you can move the floating pieces into place) and are very unstable. There is an equilibrium where all the pieces fit and its cool, but if you disturb the equilibrium it topples over. I dont know how generally applicable this is, but I offer that as a possible explanation for lack of wide spread use.
Pre-tension concrete is a great place where it's used all the time, but the true reason why it's not really that widely used is because it's not really necessary most of the time - we already have cheap and well proven ways to meet the strength requirements of large structures in both tension and compression.
That structure being steel. Carbon steel and stainless steel. Steels can meet pretty much all conventional tensile and compressive strength reqs and is basically dirt cheap. Where concrete is cheaper and can meet strength requirements, we use that instead, but we don't tend to bother with these kind of fancy composites unless steel/concrete can't do the job. And modern steel is absolutely batshit amazing at this job.
In the non-structural world, tempered glass is a tensegrity material, most notably used by cookware producer Corelle (Vitrelle). Its very easy to recognise Vitrelle crockery - it's usually white and it's extremely thin (compared to regular crockery). Its no less dense than regular china, it's just made of a 3-layer tempered glass/glass ceramic/tempered glass sandwich where the outer tempered glass layers are in tension and the inner glass ceramic is in compression, making it strong enough to eliminate about 70% of the weight. So they're light and cheap too (I got my entire set - 8 plates, 4 bowls, for around $50 AUD and they also threw in 4 regular mugs).
You can however argue that steel is basically the same thing but on a much smaller scale - most steel, microscopically, has a pearlitic structure - alternating crystalline plates of cementite and ferrite. Cementite is hard but brittle, ferrite is yields but is flexible. Almost all modern steel metallurgy amounts to making pearlitic structures consistently, because pearlitic steel (normally just called "carbon steel") is the backbone of basically everything in modern engineering.
I'm pretty sure I've seen reinforced concrete as an example of tensegrity: the concrete is strong under compression, while the embedded rebar is strong under tension. So in a sense it is used everywhere.
Or look at a suspension bridge - cables are under tension, while the bridge itself is compression.
I might be wrong, but IIUC reinforced concrete works under a different principle. It does not use the tensile strength of the rebar to resist compression forces, nor the compressive strength of the concrete to resist tensile forces. Hmm, it's tricky to define exactly what tensegrity actually is.
It’s widely used where needed. Pre-tensioned concrete is an example. Concrete has enormous compression strength, but low tensile. So it’s commonly pre-tensioned with steel cables to remove tensile stress.
Interesting example. IIUC, the concrete at rest is under a positive amount of compression (from a stressed "tendon"), and thus a load that would normally create tensile forces simply reduces this compression, while simultaneously reducing the tension of the tendon. I guess that counts as tensegrity, even though (IIUC) the typical examples of tensegrity structures do *not* have any permanent internal stresses.
I've also heard that pre-stressed concrete is very hard to repair, drill a hole through, etc, because it's subject to explosive failures.
> The hedge fund Bridgewater is running a forecasting contest on Metaculus. US residents only, extra prizes for undergraduates. Prizes include $25,000 and potentially getting recruited by Bridgewater (in which case read the “Corporate Culture” section on their wiki page before accepting).
An actual link to that "wiki page" ("Wikipedia article", to be more precise - "wiki page" implies a Bridgewater-hosted wiki, which resulted in five minutes of life wasted clicking around their website looking for an internal wiki) would have been nice.
I had initially wondered if it would attract autistic people looking for honest feedback--it's always a problem when you figure everyone's pretending to be nice to you to spare your feelings and you have no idea when you've actually screwed up.
It's only today that I finally figured out that Blackrock and Bridgewater are different things. I don't know why I had them confused, but I blame Bridgestone.
Dalio really is like a cult leader, and he literally believes the success of bridgewater was a result of his personal "system" of how he does things. He's also had systems developed where everyone is constantly rating everyone else on an app for how true/insightful their statements are, and of course it's all weighted such that Dalio himself always comes out on top.
And when I say 'success', I mean their strong investment performance early on. These days, they're basically just selling a brand name to people who care more about prestiege than actual performance. Or who never bother to check.
They have a policy of "radical transparency" which amounts to whenever you screw up, there will be a big meeting where each of your coworkers berates you about exactly what you did wrong.
Between this and the insistence that you read the corporate founder's book "Principles" it just set off too many "this is a cult" red flags when I was considering applying there years ago. Though unlike most cults it does make its adherents financially better off, just not enough for me to subject myself to that.
I’ve read “Principles” on personal time, and I liked it. At one point, the book describes the Bridgewater culture’s major transparency tool, “baseball cards”. Basically, a digest of every single person’s 360 review is continually updated and continually visible to everyone else. You can see each employee’s strengths and weaknesses as reported by their managers, peers, and subordinates. It’s a bold system that I’m curious about. Dalio swears by it.
Thar sounds like a bunch of metrics just waiting to be Goodharted. I can't imagine a set of metrics so wisely chosen that you can work to maximise them while also doing a good job.
I appreciate the lack of transparency at a normal company. Since I don't know exactly how I'm being judged, it leaves me free to concentrate on doing a good job and hoping that this will lead to good results for me.
"Stripping away the public-relations firm signal diluting that runs rampant throughout that section"
I followed the link once you said this, because this is in Wikipedia-rules-terms a very serious accusation, and I wanted to see just how bad the implied-paid-editing was. It didn't look like I thought it would from that description, but it *did* look pretty bad, in the proseline ("In X-month X-year..." decontextualized sentence-long paragraphs) and random jumps betwen over-positivity and over-negativity that characterize a lot of articles.
...then I scrolled up, and saw the page had a green plus sign in the upper right corner. Which means it passed Good Article, one of our two levels of peer review! How the hell did *that* happen?
(The answer seems to be that it passed GAN in 2011, and amongst other things has had an actual paid editor write chunks of it since then, but the chunks of text I can trace to the pre-GA rewrite all seem pretty bad too.)
> It didn't look like I thought it would from that description, but it *did* look pretty bad, in the proseline ("In X-month X-year..." decontextualized sentence-long paragraphs) and random jumps betwen over-positivity and over-negativity that characterize a lot of articles.
The "Corporate culture" section doesn't seem to have proseline AFAICT. The "History" section sure has proseline, but that's pretty typical of a lot of history sections on English Wikipedia to be quite fair.
I'd define the last three paragraphs of corp culture as proseline -- all are very detached from the article/fail to form a coherent whole, and 2/3 have the "in [year]" structure. (There are a few other spots of choppy proseliney-feeling sentences, which seem to be promotional edits made in 2017.) History is even worse, though, yeah.
There's been a question that's been bugging me ever since I read "Answer to Job" and "Unsong". (Spoilers for both)
Scott's theodicy says that God created every universe which is net good. But there's a problem with this theory which is also present in a Tegmark IV multiverse and modal realism: we should expect ourselves to exist in a universe which is much weirder and far more complex than both our universe and the universe of "Unsong". One in which there aren't any real "laws", or the laws are randomly and regularly broken for no real reason at all.
Advocates of multiverse theories have addressed this problem by introducing the concept of "measure". As far as I can tell, it's a mysterious factor that affects how likely you are to exist in a given universe. Advocates often say it's related to orderliness and simplicity in a universe. And I can find that believable.
But if God created the multiverse... well, that changes the equation, doesn't it? At least intuitively. Because if you have a billion simulations in a single universe, and almost all of them are chaotic and nonsensical, intuitively the concept of measure wouldn't really apply. We would expect the average inhabitant of such a simulation to live a chaotic and nonsensical life. And I don't really see why it would be different with God.
Unless, of course, God's authority over reality is absolute, and so He has the power to create all His universes with a given amount of measure in each of them. That almost works... except that if God, as portrayed in "Unsong", had this power, surely he'd make the probability of existing in a less-than-perfect universe infinitesimal.
I'd like some input here because I found this theodicy really elegant, except for this single fatal flaw.
That was my thought as well. Also my problem with Boltzmann brains.
There's no reason to expect an elegant and flawless explanation to the problem of evil. We don't live in a universe with evil when there's an omnipotent and omnibenevolent god because of some clever reason. We live in a universe with evil where there's no omnipotent and omnibenevolent god.
Why should you expect to be an average inhabitant of the uni/multiverse? You're not a soul randomly assigned a body.
In any world where you exist, regardless of who else exists and how numerous they are, the set of experiences that make up your life are being experienced; there's no mystery about why _you_ are experiencing them, because there's no 'you' that exists independently of them.
>we should expect ourselves to exist in a universe which is much weirder and far more complex than both our universe and the universe of "Unsong". One in which there aren't any real "laws", or the laws are randomly and regularly broken for no real reason at all.
Doesn't the Anthropic Principle answer this? Intelligent life is the result of evolution. The evolution of complex life can probably only happen in certain types of physical universes. Batshit-crazy universes with no predictable physical laws probably don't make the cut.
If universes with no predictable laws are a possibility, then shouldn't that mean that there vastly more crazy universes that just happen to *look* like an orderly universe up until some random point where the apparent order breaks down than there are truly orderly universes? Sort of like how there are infinitely many numbers that begin 0.333.... up to however many digits you like, but only one of them actually has 3s forever.
Maybe we're in one of those and science just isn't sophisticated enough to tell. Craziness rates below some threshold will look to most observers like having a predictable order.
But whatever, this is just mental masturbation. Ideas like modal realism are just total nonsense. IMO they should be banned from serious discourse because they're wastes of time that encourage anti-parsimonious thinking.
Intelligent life in our universe is the result of evolution. But if we look at all possible universes with intelligent life where life on the whole is worth living, most of them won't have evolution. They'll just have people that happen to pop into existence.
I think that infinite universes imply people that just pop into existence (Boltzmann brains) is a fallacy. Infinite universes does not imply that any configuration of atoms must exist somewhere. Consider an infinite number of empty universes for example.
The general Boltzmann brain thing is also assuming there's a constant probability of it happening. My instinct is that the expansion of the universe makes this false, but I'm not a cosmologist. Maybe virtual particles could still make Boltzmann brains pop into existence.
With the Job thing, it's all universes where life is worth living. Unless there's some reason universes that don't follow consistent laws aren't worth living in, they'd make up the vast majority of the multiverse.
If life is chaotic and nonsensical, maybe the God does not consider it good enough to exist? "Good" makes no sense in such worlds, so they wouldn't be "net good".
Forewarning of conditions for TERRORIST VIOLENCE (actually just the wilful use of technology for anti human, anti essentialist and wireheading purposes (unless you subsequently get violent about this))
Oh my, I'm sure the conservatives are very concerned about a few terrorists causing some minor damage and creating justification for things the conservatives wanted to do anyways.
My idea of terrorism for the moment is producing progressively more high fidelity and high commitment porn. The logical response to, for instance, Scott's "utopia should look like people meditating in a lotus garden" as an enforced regime is, to me, that you upload your mind into a hentai simulation and encrypt it and distribute it so ubiquitously it remains a permanent fixture of time.
I read the entire post, and you're just proving my point. They don't even need a reason to kill you, but you're just going give them one for free? *sigh*
It's more like if they're going to kill me no matter what then every action until then is without consequence including actions that have robust consequences longer than my death.
But that implies you have the capability to cause lasting consequences. What the hell are you expecting to be able to do? You're not going to be able to make a dent against the full might of the populace.
There is simply no way to win in a situation like this. All you can do is try to survive.
I hope conservatives don't try and "erase" transgenderism and queerness (whatever that would mean.) I am conservative I guess - I belong in the party of Elon Musk/Joe Rogan "people who used to think of themselves as liberal then ended up conservative when the left kept pushing crazier and crazier positions." I definitely don't wish ill on any transgender or queer person. Live and let live.
> I hope conservatives don't try and "erase" transgenderism
You're describing an idea that's staunchly progressive, i.e. a shift from the status quo.
> the left kept pushing crazier and crazier positions.
Name an actually "crazy" position and you'll find that vocal minorities push those. I don't see how this is any different than the allegation that the right is getting crazier because of the alt-right and conspiracy theorists, things like storming the capital, electing a grifting populist who appeals to the lowest common denominator vs a traditional conservative, etc.
If you're this concerned with being associated with people you don't like, consider dispensing with the mere left/right polarity and explore the political compass, e.g. neo-liberal, center-left/right, progressive conservative, etc.
I'd guess that I am not a million miles from Rogan or Musk (or you, probably) but I'm still very definitely a leftie (-5,-5 on the Political Compass). A lot of people on the left have been caught up in wokeness and progressive ideas that I disagree with but that doesn't change the ideas that I do believe in. A lot of people on the left have moved up to the top left of the Political Compass and they bother me a lot but none of them bother me as much as the likes of Donald Trump, Suella Braverman or Marjorie Taylor Greene.
I don't know much about politics in Australia but the right in the UK and the USA are heading for a scary place at the moment. An occasional bent politician on the left or some students who support causes that I don't believe in don't change that.
I think we'd all be better off if the people who consider themselves liberal continued to consider themselves as liberal.
I don’t know, man. There’s a lot of people on the left who support terrorism after Oct 7. My family is Jewish. Like a lot of Jewish families we are feeling very betrayed by the political side we’ve supported our whole lives. Of course we don’t agree with Netanyahu and we want peace, not oppression, but this nuance appears to be lost on the “from the river to the sea” crowd who want Israel gone. Very common on the left. Anti Zionism - Israel should be abolished - is deeply anti Semitic. No one argues Russia should be abolished because they don’t like Putin’s policies.
Is it true that Jews are unsafe in central London on weekends? I hear that from the UK
I mean, there are plenty of people outside the mainstream (students etc) who are antisemitic and deny the atrocities of Oct 7. That was ever thus. But that’s like blaming Charlottesville on the right.
There is no one anywhere near the mainstream left in the UK who is pro-Hamas or who defends Oct 7. Labour had a candidate for a by-election a week or two ago who said something vaguely anti-Israel and Labour ditched him and chose not to contest the election rather than have an anti-semitic candidate.
Australia is fine. I think as English speaking countries go it is not too polarised. Although we have had some local fall out from the Middle East situation too
> I belong in the party of Elon Musk/Joe Rogan "people who used to think of themselves as liberal then ended up conservative
Out of curiosity, how does this work - did you just start having conservative values because you no longer wanted to be associated with some of the more vocal liberals? You are allowed to have individual opinions that don't align with polarized parties you know?
No, some people/groups, who also had leftist/liberal beliefs started going overboard against free speech. I don't think "The left" is really a very homogenous group. I find it strange that many people would actually stop identifying as liberal/leftist just to avoid this association, if their values otherwise is more liberal than conservative. This seems like a great PR victory for conservatives/the right.
Well for sure, every group is heterogenous. I agree with some people on the left (the classic liberals who are unwoke) more than some people on the right (the MAGA election deniers.)
But I think you underestimate the scale of the problem, it’s not just a few bad apples. The Biden administration censored unwanted political speech on Twitter for years, and we only know this because Elon bought Twitter and exposed it. For all we know they might still be doing it on other platforms. And the way the intelligence agencies/big tech/media handled the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020 is scandalous.
My values are very classic liberal. I prefer peace, mercy, free speech, democracy, racial equality. I don’t think the Western left embodies this like it did two decades ago.
You may be right that the western left no longer embodies these values as well as 2 decades ago - in particular the free speech part, but do you think that the conservative label is a better fit? (Depending on what you put in those values, it might, for me it does not).
I think we might rather need a new label for classic non-woke liberals.
I think it's good to promote principled commitments to one's values, but it's a mistake to ignore or even discount the social influence on what people believe.
When the political party representing mainstream "left" or "right" values won't distance itself from high-visibility people you can't stomach (or worse, embraces them), that's going to push you away. Think of Republicans and David Duke, or Donald Trump, for that matter.
Our values are under the most pressure from our "Dunbar groups", radiating outward; if my daily experience brings me into contact with unpleasant people making terrorist threats because of abortion clinics, it's going to push me in a particular direction, politically. By contrast, I live in a +77 Biden city tucked into a +33 Biden county, so I get a dose of the opposite medicine.
A related mistake is thinking that values have a stable relationship to political labels, or that the labels align neatly with particular values. Activists try very hard to make political conflicts seem black-and-white, but almost all political conflicts pit multiple values against one another, often forcing people to prioritize their commitments.
I agree, but I also think it is a mistake to change political "label" to "the other team" to distance oneself from elements of a political party. Labels are a short-hand to quickly convey roughly where you stand. If you change label from republican to democrat just to distance yourself from Trump, then a whole lot of other assumptions follow. Rather, you could say you are a republican, but disagree with Trump specifically, or a liberal - but not the woke kind. Of course the meaning of labels are always changing, and you may find yourself no longer agreeing with the core of a label, at which point you should change label.
I'm reacting to Turtle, and others, changing label from liberal to conservative over disagreement with specifically "woke" values, that has little to do with traditional liberalism. If this is because of the shift in the label itself fine - but if you lean left on most issues, and just disagree with "woke" ideas conveyed by vocal elements of the left, just say so!
I had to look up what those things were. I hope they continue to not be normalised and transgender people like yourself can continue to live the life they choose.
People like Alephywyr going around thinking they're dragons - okay.
People like Alephwyr going around thinking they're dragons and setting buildings on fire because that's what dragons do, flame breath, rarrrrr! - not okay, that's where the "invasive chemical treatments" aka psychiatric drugs come in.
Not really. It's just due diligence. The nature of threats is that if they're unpersuasive, you have to follow through. So it's not really a threat in that sense. It doesn't and couldn't have the effect of a threat. You may think of it as a prophecy if you like.
And of course, if there were no record in history before 100 years ago of anybody being homosexual or having gender dysphoria, there's no chance in hell this would cause your views on these things to be different today
I'm curious about the following thesis: "A significant factor in making it possible for Donald Trump to represent a major party were decades of work by intellectuals to criticize the heroes of the past and emphasize the flaws of the great men of history." If you emphasize George Washington being a slaveowner, John F Kennedy a womanizer, and Columbus as an evil man, does that create an environment where people are more willing to accept a leader with the kind of glaring flaws Donald Trump has. Is there an argument here? Or not?
There might be an argument there, but it's a removed one. Trump is Rush Limbaugh, and others of the War Drum class. My take in 2016 was that the Republican Party had leaned so hard into war drumming that someone like Trump could just run for office and swamp out all the actual politicians in favor of being Just A War Drum, and that his loss would force them to reevaluate their strategy and redefine themselves as something more substantial than Left Bad. (And then he won, and not only did the right double down, the left decided they lost because they didn't have enough war drums.)
There's perhaps an argument somewhere that the War Drum class developed in response to people criticizing the heroes of the past. But I don't think so, I think the criticism is a symptom of the War Drum class getting bigger.
It was already possible in the 60s for a man like John F Kennedy (or worse, Teddy Kennedy) to get elected despite his obvious personal flaws, so this doesn't seem like anything new.
Not at all, especially since the people who support Trump are precisely the ones who have the most favorable views of people like Washington or Columbus.
Trump above all else supports populist political positions. These tend to be popular among the sort of people who vote for Trump. Few politicians before Trump has these kind of policy positions, and Trump's celebrity allowed him to get front and center without having a long political career first. That's really most of the Trump phenomenon explained.
If you think the country has been getting worse for decades and will continue to do so, are you going to let some "flaws" stop you voting from someone who you view as capable of turning things around? Does the average Trump supporter actually consider these things "flaws" in the first place? I personally consider Hillary to be a much more "flawed" person than Trump by far. if we're looking past superficial things and crude statements and consider Hillary's reprehensible actions as a politician.
If we're going to explain Trump in other terms, then if anything, Trump being flawed was a virtue. People like someone "real" who doesn't scould them for their own flaws. Because the Democrats in the modern age have become a party of uptight scoulds, a true historical inversion, and now they're exasperated and confused that 8 years of scoulding hasn't done anything to dampen the enthusiasm of Trump supporters.
I find the picking on politicians' personal flaws to be the most tedious part of politics.
I remember the massive amount of effort expended trying to persuade people that George W Bush might have somehow skived off his National Guard duty a few weeks early. Did anyone really fucking care? Certainly the people who were trying to sell the story didn't *actually* care about it, they hated GW Bush for reasons completely unrelated to the details of his National Guard duty. Did it really flip anyone's vote either way? If it's 2004 you've got plenty of reasons to vote for or against George W Bush for what he did in 2001-2004, not what he did in 1972.
Similarly does anyone *really* care if Joe Biden has a weird habit of sniffing children, and took showers with his daughter at an inappropriate age? If you're convinced that he did, are you going to go and vote Trump? If you're convinced he didn't, are you going to vote Biden again?
>I find the picking on politicians' personal flaws to be the most tedious part of politics.
Agreed. Just about any policy action that any high-ranking politician chooses is going to have vastly larger effects than almost anything that they do personally.
Intuitively if there was a connection there, I would expect the Trump-figure to show up on the left rather than on the right. Although I guess maybe we can posit a model where the right is unable to contest the literal truth of the criticisms of past heroes, but wants to keep idolizing them anyway, so they end up at the position that these flaws aren't that bad really? Whereas the left is more able to just say that they're bad?
People can have that argument, but they're arguing about what they think other people think, or should think, based on an assumption that other people share the same values and perspectives and information as themselves.
What you're doing is ultimately asking why you yourself might be lead to vote for Donald Trump; what reasons appeal in some sense to you.
You could of course just ask them. They'll tell you; they operate on the same kind of brain you do, and believe that, if they just share the values and perspectives and information they have, you'll automatically be converted to thinking the way they do.
What are the pluses and minuses of California creating a new UC?
We need to build more housing, but it's hard to do in any existing city. We could build new cities, but it's hard to get network effects going and they're not "cool" (ie there are a bunch of random towns in Northern California, but nobody moves there).
But cities with a UC campus have generally developed well and been desirable places to live, even when they were pretty new (eg Irvine, Davis, probably more I don't know about). If the state puts a new UC campus in some random part of the Central Valley, the Mojave Desert, or the northern forests, would an upper-middle-class town of 100,000 people grow around it?
There are many students trying to get into UCs, and many academics who want to be hired, and the project would more than pay for itself in land value, so what makes this hard?
Only jumping in because nobody's addressed this directly, but the pedigree issue. You don't learn anything magic at Harvard, going to Harvard is worth it because of the network and because employers want Harvard grads. Pedigree is self-perpetuating--it's not an accident most of the most prestigious colleges are also the oldest. A new UC would start at the bottom of the heap, and would not attract the best Californians (who would go to Berkeley and UCLA) or non-Californians (who wouldn't want to pay out-of-state tuition or live in California necessarily--the ultra-blue-state reputation probably does cost some people).
I'd like to see the experiment tried. For all the reasons you cite, but also because it would be a chance to demonstrate that we still have the mojo to create high-quality universities over the past fifty years. Merced doesn't really do that for me, and I really *hope* that it isn't the best we can do in the 21st century.
The minus is, maybe it turns out that the answer is "oops, we seem to have lost the mojo after all". A really good university requires a network of incentives that's hard to establish by either political or economic means, and our social toolset has changed enormously. And, as see high speed rail, California seems to be uniquely dysfunctional at building new infrastructure from scratch by government action, so I'd wonder how many billions of dollars we'd wind up spending so that in twenty years we can point to the spot where we're pretending a new university would stand in another twenty years.
If we can pull it off, the Mojave area gets my vote. The suggestion of Tehachipi also works for me.
It may have been better not to attach city names to the name of the UC. Let's assume Berkeley was a random word and not a city name. The UC System could then create UC Berkeley branches, at the cost of mild dilution in original UC Berkeley cache, but get newer ones off the ground.
Oh, and yes more universities, more research universities, more liberal arts programs, more of everything. The only cost is opportunity cost, but there is no better use of money :)
I would guess it's hard to build top tier departments.
For example, contrast UC Davis and UC Merced. Davis is a good school for lots of subjects but, from memory, its agriculture program is superb, probably the best in the state. And agriculture is big business in California; there's always going to be lots of smart, high income people coming in from the vineyards and other areas. Yeah, agriculture isn't tech, but there's still tons of money and good jobs in it. So, if you're in California and you want an agg degree, Davis is where you go. And the rest of the college and the city is kind of along for the ride; not that they're bad but it's much easier to build good programs when you have that core of excellence. Merced, by contrast...doesn't have anything like that. It's not even a party school like Santa Barbara.
It's not hard for me to imagine a UC Redding and it's not hard to imagine particular fields that might serve as the cornerstone for a good UC, say you've decided that UC Redding is going to have the best nursing program in the state...but I can't imagine any government employee actually building such a department, being able to steal the top talent from other programs and building top tier facilities. At which point it's....just another Merced.
And it's not a lack of talent, there are highly competent people in state government, but the bureaucracy would murder you. How would you get salary approval to offer top talent enough money to leave their current role to move their family to Redding? My read is that there are probably pre-approved salary ranges and that no force on earth is allowed to exceed those salary ranges and...you might be able to find a hack around that but there's hundreds of such hurdles and that would kill it. Building a top tier program is already really, really tough, adding in current bureaucratic hurdles makes it darn near impossible.
>There are many students trying to get into UCs, and many academics who want to be hired, and the project would more than pay for itself in land value, so what makes this hard?
Would students with money really be trying to get in? It's going to be the least prestigious of all the UCs jsutbyu virtue of being new. But also, it's obviously going to be the most DEI of any of the UCs, where any word remotely resembilng "meritocracy" will be grounds for referral to the campus pol......mental health officers. Obviously this kind of attitude exists significantly at other campuses, but there are very strong legacy effects of old, tenured professors and even administrators who are inadequately diverse but competent enough to ensure these universities publish good research and are sufficiently well run.
The "this is what Merced is doing" responses are accurate, but imo missing some nuance. I don't think you can present "students and academics getting into UCs" as fungible. "The UCs" don't form a single natural category -- the highest-tier and lowest-tier ones have very different reputations. Merced has probably improved the fortunes of its town, but it's not really substituting for Berkeley or UCLA. In fact, just recently I was reading about a controversy a few years ago when academics at UCSD petitioned for Merced et al to be shut down:
(This is not an *amazing* description of their goals -- they more wanted funding cuts to target Merced/Riverside/Santa Cruz first, rather than replace everyone at Berkeley with adjuncts, which is a much more reasonable proposition than how it got reported -- but they didn't *not* suggest shutting them down, let's put it that way.)
If someone wants to get accepted to Prestigious College or land a job with a research-focused institution, "build UC Ukiah" probably wouldn't solve this problem. Now, if you somehow *did* pour tons of research funding into UC Ukiah...
Aren't we watching that experiment now with UC Merced (founded 2005)? Merced's population has grown from about 70k to 90k in the past 20 years; I'd guess that's more than typical for the central valley, though I haven't actually checked. I think Merced is doing well -- just perceptions, I haven't really studied it -- but it's still considerably smaller than most UCs, with about 9k students, 8k of whom are undergraduates, about 1/3 the average undergraduate enrollment of other UC campus, and even smaller for graduate students.
I had the same thought and just finished looking it up. It looks like in most college rankings, Merced is at or near the bottom of the UCs but ahead of most of the CSUs. It's ahead of Riverside and Santa Cruz in the US News national ratings, but IIRC that uses selectiveness as a major input so Merced's relatively small size might be boosting it a bit there (i.e. a school with smaller enrollment can be more selective with a given applicant pool).
Skimming a few reddit threads from people asking for advice on choosing between Merced and another college seems to confirm the idea that Merced is near the bottom of the UC pack but still better than most CSUs campuses.
So at first glance it's successful but not overwhelmingly so as an addition to the UC system. It's not clear that the system is ready for another new campus.
As a driver for a new major city, it doesn't really seem to be doing the trick. Merced is growing as a decent rate, but it's still a relatively small city in the middle of nowhere. At best, it's a relatively long-term project.
Cal Poly SLO is another useful case study in good colleges in the middle of nowhere as drivers of urbanization. San Luis Obispo is a smallish city in a mostly agricultural area, like Merced, and Cal Poly is at or near the top of the CSUs in most rankings (ahead of the bottom few UCs). SLO isn't quite as remote as Merced: it's in the Central Coast region, a bit north of Santa Barbara and very close to a cluster of beach resort towns. SLO's population hasn't grown much in recent decades according to census numbers, but feels quite a bit bigger than I remember it being as a student or recent graduate in the early-to-mid 2000s, and seems to have acquired a small local tech industry. But SLO definitely has nowhere near the growth it would need to see to act as a significant outlet for population growth in the Bay Area or LA.
I’m just suddenly feeling UC Tehachapi. One thing it has going for it is it’s on the way from SoCal to Vegas - through traffic is important for growth in addition to local traffic or destination traffic. Some of these other locations are not between significant destinations. Also probably potential there for wind energy research, alternative energy research, there’s enough military out there already there could be academic/industry/military collaborations and it’s not so earthquake prone that you can’t run railroad track or underground cables easily (unlike some places in CA).
Potential future water shortage like all the other deserts in CA but I think a location like that has potential to college-town-ify given the right infrastructure investment to make it digitally interesting.
They seem to have done something like this with UC Merced. But it wasn’t fast, according to the link it was decided in 1988 and the first faculty arrived in 2003. And Merced had 168,000 people in 1988 and close to 230,000 by 2003 so it was growing anyway.
Taking a look at the map, I've always wondered why Eureka, CA couldn't grow more than it has. There is a community college there, Redwood College, that is part of the California Community College system. It might make sense to expand that into a full college with a graduate program. In Logan, UT, outside of the Utah State University, there were always a few businesses that were started by graduates that didn't want to leave the valley. I think the Eureka area should be even more appealing. (I've only visited there once on a road trip to San Francisco so maybe I'm missing something).
Looking at the map again, I forgot about Cal-State University. Nevertheless, It seemed when I visited that it should be a reasonable place for development if there were more jobs there.
Cal Poly Humboldt (formerly Humboldt State University) is one town north of Eureka (Arcata) and has especially strong biology/forestry/fisheries/environmental sciences programs.
Coastal Northern California has a lot of issues though. I don’t have the energy to kick off the full rant about the issues there but the combination of the geologically unstable coastline, busted pot growing economy and general remoteness makes establishing things there way more difficult than it seems it should be. I lived up there for a while. But it became a Cal Poly just a few years ago and that’s the intent, create some synergy.
Pluses: I went to school at Utah State University, it was the largest employer in the valley at the time. It attracted a lot of people, that while they complained about the conservative attitudes of Utah, like the mountains, skiing and the little community they developed. Cons: I think colleges in general are facing declining enrollments. The California colleges get a lot of applicants because they are still cheaper than the private colleges. The knock on effect might be to put an existing private college out of business. Your idea is certainly worth consideration.
Can anyone recommend CD releases of John Lewis piano solos?
I've found new Darrell Scott and Tim O'Brien, and Ralph Towner -- which had to come from Germany -- but I need an hour or so of John Lewis noodling around to play when I drive. I have only Marian McPartland's interview and one CD. Any ideas? I have plenty of MJQ.
I know this has been asked many times across the internet over the years, but I figured there's at least a chance that a Netflix employee who might know something reads this.
Why on earth does Netflix always only recommend the same 20 shows forever *most of which you have already watched*? Why do they recommend things you've already watched at all? Given this is the most obvious possible improvement to recommendations and trivial to implement, they must be doing it on purpose, but WHY?!?!
Some people have suggested that they recommend things you've already watched in order to cover up the lack of content, but even now they still have vastly more content than they show on the homepage, and while it may not be perfectly matched, anything would be better than just making the home page a static list of shows you've already watched. Doing this makes Netflix look *more* like a ghost town rather than less. So what gives?
I don't know any particular reason, but many people enjoy watching shows that they've watched before. Sometimes people share a user profile and in that case it makes sense to recommend that way, though that might be kinda rare.
If Netflix is trying to hook me into a show, it would have better luck recommending a show I loved 5 years ago than a show I haven't seen.
So, apparently Iran has finally launched an actual attack on Israel. https://apnews.com/article/strait-of-hormuz-vessel-33fcffde2d867380e98c89403776a8ac
Honestly, this whole situation has been a long time coming. It will be very interesting to see how bad it gets.
They had to save face because Israelis are completely out of control and bombing embassies. Israelis have been creating new normals in the past six months. The cat is out of the bag and the world will be following suit. "A light unto nations" eh
Somehow, somehow this means my country has to get dragged into all of it. We have to spend our money and reputation on the Israelis because reasons. Meanwhile https://x.com/ryangrim/status/1779496494434812323
There is precedent to this in Saddam's attacks in the 1990s, but in the 1990s Israel's ruling party was more committed to peace and Saddam didn't shoot Scuds in waves like this. Saddam was embroiled in vastly bigger conflicts than he could ever chew, unlike Iran which attacks US bases with impunity and has just took an Israeli owned ship off the coast of UAE earlier today.
Despite Arabic-speaking media making a substantially big deal out of this, English-speaking Haaretz reports the vast majority of cruise missiles intercepted and the only damage done is someone lightly wounded and a military base in Negev lightly damaged. Perhaps the biggest indication that this attack isn't as scary as some sources would want audiences to believe, is that the open-air anti-Netanyahu protests in Tel Aviv hasn't stopped yet.
But that's just the first wave, the slow-moving drones will arrive after launch by about 5 to 6 hours, some speculate that they will synchronize with faster moving later-wave cruise missiles timed so that they arrive after the drone exhaust the Israeli air defense. To say nothing of an opportunistic Hezbollah or Hamas barrage in the chaos.
I think it's important to note that that ship is "Israeli-owned" meaning "owned by an Israeli civilian". Not owned by the Israeli government, or the Israeli military, etc.
Yeah, that's not ideal. On the other hand, that civilian is a billionaire, which means he's pretty unsympathetic to begin with, before we even factor in his relationships and contacts with the scum ruling Israel.
I would support victimless Houthi/Iranian/other takeover of Israeli ships, owned by civilians or otherwise, everywhere in the Indian and the Pacific oceans. My only problem is that whatever money is made by those captures eventually goes into the coffers of scum, different scum than Likud, yes, but scum nonetheless. It's still a pressure tool on Israel, I wish the ones exercising it were a bit more eager to pretend they're the good guys.
No Rest for the Anarchists.
Yeah, when I say "Israeli civilian", some people care about the word "civilian" and some people care about the word "Israeli."
Not much different than, say, Japanese interment in America. To some, these were Japanese civilians and thus should be treated like other civilians. To others, they were Japanese civilians and should be treated like Japanese soldiers.
So that's why it's "victimless" to take property from Israeli civilians. Or why you'd omit the word "civilian" in the first place. Once you know their nationality, what else do you need to know?
EDIT: Fixed a typo.
Your comparison is faulty. Property is not like Freedom. The right to Freedom is a fundamental human right that very few circumstances would persuade me to want to see innocent people deprived of. Property is very different. The Israeli state destroyed untold billions in property of Gazans, I don't see why people on the side of Gaza can't do the same. If anything, not killing any Israelis while doing it makes them win this tournament by at least 20000 to 0 ahead of Israel. That's no mean feat.
> To other, they were Japanese civilians and should be treated like Japanese soldiers.
You know who's treating civilians like soldiers and detaining them in facilities so torture-like that they die in captivity?
No points for guessing.
> Or why you'd omit the word "civilian" in the first place.
That wasn't intentional to begin with.
> that's why it's "victimless" to take property from Israeli civilians.
The civilian owning a Yacht is no ordinary civilian, and he/she can regain his/her property when the democratically elected state that he/she votes for learns to behave like a non-genocidal superorganism.
What I'm saying - by the way - is not new at all. Not One Bit. That's exactly what happened to every single Russian civilian with money anywhere a Western/Nato government could reach, at the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
At best, you're just describing revenge. The Israeli government kills/steals/etc. from civilians and thus other countries can do the same to Israeli civilians. It's not really a moral framework at all.
It's a way to excuse things that you know are wrong. You know it's wrong to go around looking at people's passports and taking their property if they were born in the wrong country. There's no way you'd support that if it was targeting people on your side.
The only reason that you support it targeting people on my side is as revenge. That's why we have a concept of revenge - to allow us to do things that we know are wrong.
But you can't seriously tell me that if tomorrow the Israelis took every piece of property from the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, you'd shrug and say "Ehh, property is not like freedom. They can regain their property when they [insert criteria for government here]." You understand why that'd be wrong.
Revenge isn't going to make it right.
https://twitter.com/muhammadshehad2/status/1779198875925926360
I think there is a growing case to be made that the Israeli public is more culpable and participating in the murdering of Palestinian civilians than the average German during the holocaust was.
How many Palestinian civilians have died since the beginning of the war? Do we have a list that separates civilians from combatants?
I had the unfortunate experience of watching a self-identified "Israeli special ops" man as a guest in a Fox interview a couple of hours earlier today, amidst all the posturing and the whining and the hand wringing at Iran he claimed that Israel killed 15K terrorists in total.
That figure is likely exaggerated. Israeli media (Haaretz and Times of Israel, in English editions) were reporting 13K just days ago, and when that number was 12K in mid February Hamas itself denied it and said only 6K were dead. Let's take a very generous "mean" and say that 10K combatant in this war has died.
That means that 23000 civilians, a square 1% of Gazan residents, has died to date, in 6 months. At this rate, all of Gaza - 2.3 million individuals - would be annihilated in 50 years, less than a 1/8 of the 408-years genocide that Europeans annihilated 95% (7.75 million) of Native Americans in.
I disagree with the specific point Glenn wants to make, as a matter of actual fact. But what's happening in Gaza is no ordinary war.
I'm fine with the way you're calculating combatant fatalities and I'm glad we're excluding them from the frequently cited figure of 33k dead, which includes both civilians (who should never die in war) and combatants (who die in every war).
To the point about this being "no ordinary war", that's true, but pretty easily explained. Most wars generate huge numbers of internally displaced people, moderate numbers of refugees, and low numbers of deaths.
Take the war in Sudan - 6 million internally displaced, 2 million refugees, at least 5,000 civilians killed.
In Gaza, there have been almost zero refugees. In fact, the UN High Commissioner on Refugees has come out *against* any civilians leaving this war zone. To my knowledge, that's a world first.
Predictably, if you don't let civilians flee violence, they will be caught up in the violence. That's precisely why we have a UN High Commissioner on Refugees - to help get people away from violence and towards safety.
Sadly, we're seeing what happens when people are categorically refused the ability to seek safety. It turns out, lots of civilians die.
How much % of the blame does Israel, which famously exploits the civilian tendency to flee combat zones and violence spots in every war it entered including - most infamously - the very war that birthed it, take for the fact that people don't want to displace Gazans again?
Before you calculate, make sure your output is a function of the input that is the fact that Israelis since the start of the war repeatedly declaring that Gaza must be resettled, culminating in a conference in late January in Jerusalem that 8 key ministers in the government including the Security Minister and the Finance Minister attended and were filmed dancing at.
So we have two conflicting desires - one is that Gazans not be killed, the other is that Gazans not be displaced. Becoming a refugee means you (likely) won't be killed, but increases the chances that you'll be displaced.
In every other conflict on Earth, we prefer the living civilians to the dead civilians with their graves in the right spot.
That's why we have a High Commissioner on Refugees, and not a High Commissioner on Keeping Civilians Put.
I'd infinitely prefer having every Palestinian civilian resurrected and living in Cairo or Osaka or New York to having them be dead in Gaza. How about you?
Do you really think it's worse for a Palestinian to be a refugee and live, than to stay in Palestine and die?
EDIT: Corrected a typo.
There is no doubt that if you leave me with admin access to Physics for an hour, and for some reason Physics only allows the Palestinians to **either** stay alive **or** stay in their ancestral homeland. I will very much choose them being alive every minute of this hour, whatever their own delusional religion might say, whatever their own delusional cousins speaking the same language might say.
Consider that Israel knows this. Israel also wants all of Mandatory Palestine to itself. So one very simple thing they could do is to exploit this, which is exactly what it did in 1948. Kill a few hundreds, rape a few tens, and 750K flee. Forever. Centuries old dreams, wiped. A society hollowed and collapsed. That's how Israel was formed. Humans might forget the moment of their birth, states never do. There is a lesson which is very tempting, if you're the wrong sort of person: How far can you push the Arabs? Rinse and repeat in Jerusalem? Rinse and repeat in Gaza? Rinse and repeat to the remnants of the Arabs in Israel? Rinse and repeat in the Western Bank of Jordan? Rinse and repeat in Southern Lebanon? Rinse and repeat in southern Syria? Assuming no morality and negative compassion, how far will this road take you?
Consider that the conflict between keeping Gazans alive and keeping them on their land is far from a natural property of Logic or Physics, but in a very large part a manufactured problem for a very precise and deliberate purpose.
Consider that the modern world is parceled into nation states that doesn't treat the stateless very well. This is the actual world we live in and which we have to calculate based on even if we hated it.
OC ACXLW Sat April 13 Consciousness and The Dictatorship of the Small Minority
Hello Folks!
We are excited to announce the 61st 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, April 13 2024
Time 2 pm
Conversation Starters:
Your Book Review: Consciousness And The Brain: A review of Stanislas Dehaene's book "Consciousness and the Brain", which explores the cognitive neuroscience of consciousness. The book discusses the differences between conscious and unconscious processing, the neural signatures of consciousness, and theories of consciousness such as the Global Neuronal Workspace.
Summary: Dehaene's book delves into the neuroscience of consciousness, distinguishing between conscious and unconscious processes in the brain. He proposes that conscious perception occurs when information is globally broadcast and processed by multiple brain regions, leading to reportability and self-monitoring. Unconscious processing, on the other hand, is more localized and cannot be reported or used for complex tasks requiring working memory. Dehaene discusses various theories of consciousness, such as the Global Neuronal Workspace, Integrated Information Theory, and the Multiple Drafts Model, and presents evidence from experiments using techniques like masking and neuroimaging. The book also touches on the philosophical implications of the research, such as the hard problem of consciousness and the prospect of machine consciousness.
Text link:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-consciousness-and
Audio link:
https://podcastaddict.com/astral-codex-ten-podcast/episode/139738702
Questions for discussion:
a) How does Dehaene's Global Neuronal Workspace theory account for the differences between conscious and unconscious processing? What are the key neural signatures of conscious perception according to this theory?
b) Dehaene argues that consciousness is necessary for tasks requiring working memory, such as complex reasoning and decision-making. What are the implications of this view for our understanding of human cognition and the potential for machine consciousness?
c) The book suggests that many animals, particularly mammals, are likely to be conscious in ways similar to humans. What are the ethical implications of this view? How should it inform our treatment of animals and our understanding of their cognitive and emotional lives?
The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority by Nassim Nicholas Taleb: An essay discussing how a small, intolerant minority can disproportionately influence and dictate the choices and behaviors of the majority in various domains, such as religion, politics, and markets.
Text link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/19lQrNJ7-XNBvhjn0gSS7I2vAGJC-C3oJcKTJXIfz7K8/edit
Questions for discussion:
a) In what ways does the "minority rule" described by Taleb differ from the traditional understanding of democratic decision-making? What are the implications of this rule for the functioning of societies and institutions?
b) Taleb provides several examples of how the preferences of a small, intolerant minority can determine the options available to the majority, such as in the case of Kosher food or allergen-free environments. Can you think of other examples where this dynamic plays out, either in your personal life or in the broader society?
c) How might the "minority rule" contribute to the polarization and gridlock in contemporary politics? What strategies, if any, could be employed to mitigate the negative effects of this dynamic while still respecting individual rights and preferences?
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.
Last day to apply for jobs at MATS to help accelerate AI safety! Hiring a Community Manager and 1-3 Research Managers.
https://matsprogram.org/careers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9SGlBUMbeA&ab_channel=CaspianReport
The UAE is building a city in Egypt. I have no idea whether this is a good idea for either the UAE or Egypt.
From what I've seen, these kinds of planned cities tend to work in two scenarios: 1) it's a new capital (and thus the government can throw a huge amount of money at the city, regardless of return on investment) or 2) it's a suburb for an existing city.
Building a new city from scratch is really, really hard. So my reaction is that this is probably a huge waste of money, but I hope they prove me wrong and beat the odds.
Is there a connection between UAE and the Palestinians' Hamas?
It has been my impression that neither Egypt nor Jordan wants to accommodate them; I'm not sure about Lebanon.
Let's hope it's a temporary camp for refugees from Gaza.
I have no idea whether there's a connection to Hamas.
It's important to remember that there's more to the Middle East than what's going on with Israel and Palestine.
I'm assuming it will mostly be a loss for both countries, but that's a guess because I don't trust planned cities.
I don't think they'll be accepting Palestinian refugees in large numbers, and possibly not at all.
Hamas are Palestinians; Palestinians overwhelmingly support Hamas's October 7 attack on Israel, and celebrated it. They're the same people who breathlessly complain about Israel's response to the attack nightly on the news.
If Gaza refugees move to a UAE city in Egypt, I'm sure the IDF will screen them for combatants on the way out. But Jordan and Egypt have long had a distaste for terrorists.
So, remember that cautionary post about "studies in elderly Hispanic women" way back when?
That may be relevant here: a Spanish study appears to find gut bacteria linked to obesity, but different for men and women:
https://www.healthline.com/health-news/gut-bacteria-linked-to-higher-obesity-risk-is-different-for-men-and-women?utm_source=ReadNext
"For their study, Spanish researchers recruited 361 adults with an average age of 44 years old. More than two-thirds (251) were women. Participants were separated into two classes based on a measurement called the “obesity index”: low level of obesity or high level of obesity.
While many studies on obesity rely on body mass index or BMI alone, the investigators took a multifaceted approach with their obesity index. The obesity index is not a standardized gauge for obesity but one that includes three variables: BMI, fat mass percentage, and waist circumference.
...They looked at metagenomic data, which is genetic material from a collection of microorganisms in a sample — in this case, stool samples. In addition, they looked at metabolomic data to analyze small molecules known as metabolites produced during cellular metabolism.
These two types of data, when analyzed in concert, can give a very precise picture of gut health and metabolism.
Using all of this data, researchers profiled some of the specific strains of bacteria found in the guts of the participants.
The researchers then looked at the microbiome for people classified as “high” on the obesity index compared to those classified as “low” on the index.
They found certain bacteria were linked with obesity risk, but that it was different for men versus women.
In the study, the gut microbiome of both men and women who ranked high on the obesity index is characterized by a lack of a potentially protective bacteria known as Christensenella minuta.
Interestingly, women and men who were obese had distinct gut microbiota profiles from one another. In men, two other forms of bacteria associated with obesity were prolific: Parabacteroides helcogenes and Campylobacter canadensis.
“Different microbes can be protective or they can increase risk for obesity. The way that they do that is by stimulating different aspects of our metabolic response and of our immune response…There are microbes such as E. coli that have been shown to increase risk of obesity because they’re known to be pro-inflammatory,” Mariana X. Byndloss, DVM, PhD, the Co-director of the Vanderbilt Microbiome Innovation Center at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, told Healthline. She wasn’t affiliated with the research.
In the study the bacterium species Prevotella micans, Prevotella brevis, and Prevotella sacharolitica were associated with obesity in women but not in men."
I have no idea if this is a wild goose chase or not, but the emerging research on obesity is rather cold comfort for me; at least it helps me understand "how is it that my sister, born of the same parents and raised in the same environment, is thin and was thin all her life, while I am fat and was fat all my life?" as contributory factors besides "It's because you're stupid, lazy, and greedy and sit around stuffing your face with junk food 24/7, calories in = calories out, exercise, laws of thermodynamics, metabolism works the same for everyone, you dumb tub of lard".
But how can that coincide with your belief in free will? Why can't you just choose to eat less? Just because your metabolism is different doesn't mean you're going to instantly drop dead from a calorie deficiency. Obviously you are physically capable of losing weight without dying. So what's stopping you?
Does a belief in free will make it impossible for biology to intervene in any way?
Do you believe that, for example, drunk people can simply willpower their way through the biological effects of alcohol? Obviously they're physically capable of turning a steering wheel, so why don't drunk drivers simply not crash their cars?
A while back, Scott raises an eyebrows at the idea of lesbians who have extra with men..
Meanwhile, over in the U.K. we have the Cass report on treatment of trans kids ... and I'm getting the impression that certain political factions want to say "you're not trans, you're just a lesbian". Which, in the case of afab people who are masculin identified but attracted to men, would make them lesbians who have sex with men...
Just so you know, "afab" isn't a thing. Claiming that newborn babies are "assigned" a sex makes about as much sense as claiming they are "assigned" an eye color.
It means, precisely, what the doctor write on the birth certificate. In particular, in the case of intersex persons, it is most definitely not necessarly the same as chromosomal sex. If what you're measuring is what's on the birth certificate, that what your measuring
>It means, precisely, what the doctor write on the birth certificate.
Yes, that's the motte. The bailey is "so therefore biological sex is an arbitrary social construct that has no physical significance."
I recommend using the terms "girls" or "women."
Imagine claiming that something is not a thing, then, when explained that it is, immediately switching to a accusing *other people* of doing motte-and-bailey.
Just because somewhat "explains that it is" doesn't mean it's real. I could "explain" all about Dread Cthul'hu lying dreaming at the bottom of the sea; that doesn't make Dread Cthul'hu an actual thing.
Speaking of which, "afab" continues to not be a thing.
Yes, because doctors writing on birth certificates are exactly as real as Ctulhu - got it.
In any case, you knew what it meant.
Everyone would have known what you meant if you said "women," too. Why not say "women"? What makes you shy away from that word?
Your counterexample would be more persuasive if it was a real thing. The fact that you need to invent an imaginary scenario means that in actual reality, the letter that the doctor wrote on a form is very good correlate towards whether a person was raised and lived first part of their life as a man or as a woman. Which is not at all a question of biological sex, but of social construct of gender and this is what everyone is actually interested in.
When I say something like "As AMAB I have such and such experience" I'm being more accurate than saying "As an XY-person I have such and such experience" because being assigned male is more correlated with such experience than having XY chromosomes. Also I've actually seen my birth certeficate but have never checked my chromosomes. It's quite likely that I indeed have XY chromosomes. But I can't be as certain as with the certificate that I've seen.
This is an idea th seemed in need of some satirical skewering.
You're all (of whatever political slant) clear that transnesscan't be simply reduced to gayness.
"certain political factions want to say "you're not trans, you're just a lesbian"
I'm not a political faction, but I am very inclined to say for some of them "You're not a lesbian and you're not trans, you're a straight guy with a fetish" when it comes to the transbians versus lesbians fight over "how can you reject me based on 'you have a penis and I'm not attracted to people with a penis', you bigot".
That would just make them straight women, wouldn't it? The terminology confuses me.
More seriously: is transness just about sexual preference? Particularly, is it just about sexual preference in the afab people who form a growing portion of trans patients? I think there gotta be more to it.
>is transness just about sexual preference?
No, of course not.
Why wouldn't a woman who is attracted to other women... just have sexual relationships with women? Why would the idea to seriously and irreversibly modify her body even come to her mind just in order to date other women which she can already perfectly do?
One can imagine a world where no one knows that homosexuality is a thing, but transgenderness is a well established phenomena. Or a world where trans people are universally supported and celebrated, while lesbians are an extremely oppressed minority. There, indeed, would be reasons for geniune lesbians to go through transition.
But our world is very different! Homosexuality is more acknowledged and respected phenomena that transgenderness. Trans people are generally more looked down upon than lesbians. So one has to believe that trans people are very stupid to think that they are going through gender transition just for the sake of sexual preference.
The original comment seems to be trying to argue as follows:
(1) Some people deny transness and claim that 'you are not trans (men), you are lesbian (women)' in regard to trans men who identify as straight men who are attracted to women
(2) This labels *all* trans people, be they trans women or trans men, as lesbians because of being trans
(3) Thus a trans man who is attracted to men is a lesbian (by virtue of being trans, not by virtue of sexual orientation)
(4) This then makes them a lesbian who sleeps with men
It's a very elaborate set-up for a joke, that doesn't quite come off
Here, I'm referring to people assigned female at birth, but male identified
U.K. schools guidance says to consider the possibility they might be lesbians
... but, a considerable portions of this group are asexual, or in relationship with a guy
.. who, therefore, are not lesbian by previous reasonable definition of what a lesbian is
.. but, hey, U.K. schools and nhs therapists are going to insist they're lesbians, not trans, despite them not being attracted to females
.. hence U.K. guidance to schools etc appears to be creating a class of person who is attracted to men, but is officially, in the eyes of their school and their therapist, a lesbian
Can you refer me to the actual guidance document or text so I can read it and not be arguing with you over second-hand accounts?
I think if you're in a relationship with a boy and identifying as male they won't take you as being lesbian, but neither would they say you must be trans. You could be non-gender conforming to notions of femininity. Or a butch lesbian, that too is a possibility. Or even bi.
This is what I've got so far, and while it's very cautious and clearly in response to parents' concerns, there's nothing there that says "tell them they're lesbians":
https://educationhub.blog.gov.uk/2023/12/19/gender-questioning-children-guidance-schools-colleges/
"In England, children can’t obtain a Gender Recognition Certificate so their legal sex will always be the same as their biological sex. There is also no general duty that says schools and colleges must support a child to take steps that are part of ‘social transition’ – such as agreeing to change their name or pronouns.
This guidance is clear that schools and colleges have a duty to safeguard and promote the welfare of all children, which means that a cautious approach should be taken when responding to requests to social transition.
Schools and colleges should create an environment that is respectful of all beliefs. This means no one should be expected to use preferred pronouns and they should not be sanctioned for making honest mistakes. In all cases, bullying must not be tolerated.
While the guidance is there to help teachers, parents’ views should be at the centre of every decision schools make about their child.
This is draft guidance for consultation and we would like to encourage schools, colleges, parents and the sector to share their feedback. The consultation will run for 12 weeks.
What does it mean for a child who asks to socially transition at school or college?
Teachers shouldn’t initiate or suggest to a child that they socially transition – they should begin to consider a request if a student has asked to do so.
If a child does ask to socially transition, for example, to use a pronoun that is different to their biological sex, then teachers shouldn’t automatically agree.
Parents have a right to know and teachers should discuss the child’s request with their parents or guardian and take into account their views, except in exceptional circumstances where this risks significant harm to the child.
They should also consider whether it’s in their best interest, considering the wider context, including whether it will have an impact on the wider school, and allow a good amount of time to think before rushing into a decision.
What about single-sex spaces like toilets and changing rooms?
It’s important that single-sex spaces such as toilets, showers and changing rooms, remain single-sex, and schools should continue to ensure children aged 11 or older should not be made to get changed or wash in front of children of the opposite sex.
Schools and colleges should also not allow children to share a room overnight with those of the opposite sex.
Where possible, schools and colleges should consider providing alternative facilities for gender questioning children who aren’t comfortable using the single-sex areas designated for their biological sex.
These alternative facilities, however, should never undermine the single-sex facilities, for example a boy should never be allowed to go into a girls toilet, or vice versa."
Here's the draft document:
https://consult.education.gov.uk/equalities-political-impartiality-anti-bullying-team/gender-questioning-children-proposed-guidance/supporting_documents/Gender%20Questioning%20Children%20%20nonstatutory%20guidance.pdf
"This is non-statutory guidance from the Department for Education. Its focus is to provide practical advice, which we expect schools and colleges to follow to help them make decisions regarding children who are questioning their gender. Schools and colleges should make decisions to ensure that everyone is kept safe and treated with respect and understanding, within an environment that protects the rights of children fairly."
So it's non-statutory, meaning that if a school decides to do so, it can go "Okay Susie, you are now Johnny!" despite what the Department advises.
Okay, Ctrl+F for "lesbian" gets me this:
"Is there an interaction with a child’s sexual orientation? Schools and colleges should note that the Cass Review ‘heard from young lesbians who felt pressured to identify as transgender male, and conversely transgender males who felt pressured to come out as lesbian rather than transgender’. Where a child discloses that they are also questioning or exploring their sexual orientation, schools should make clear that they are under no pressure to reach a particular outcome."
So, you Cheeky Charlie you, the schools are *not* being told "Tell 'em they're really lesbian", they're being told "don't jump to 'you must be this or that' immediately".
I don't know where you got your view on what was being said, but I'm sure organisations like Mermaids (which I consider to have been steered by an absolute fruitcake raving parent to 'all trans all the time immediately now now now') would put the worst possible interpretation out there, e.g. "Schools are being told to force transgender male pupils to identify as lesbians" or the likes, for their own propaganda purposes.
Were you taught any astronomy in K-12? I don't remember, I think I picked up most of my astronomy from science fiction, but astronomy might have been included in other science courses.
Please include when you were in school, at least the decade, and where. If you were in the US, let me know the state or region.
I've seen a claim that astronomy isn't taught in K-12 in the US because it conflicts with young earth creationism, but I have no idea whether this is true. I would have guessed that if it isn't taught, it would be just because they didn't get around to it.
So I'm taking this little survey. I realize ACX isn't a random sample, but I started the survey on Facebook, and ACX is at least generally younger and more geographically varied.
The Facebook results so far is that people were mostly taught astronomy in school.
I do think that if schools were dropping astronomy, I'd have heard of it, but maybe some schools never had it.
I think news stories have been pretty good about what happened, at least at the level of saying the moon got in front of the sun.
Perhaps the people who didn't know what was happening were picked by reporters. Perhaps astronomy, even on the minimal level, is a blur for a lot of people so they don't pay attention.
In the 90s (Southern US), I took an astronomy class in middle school as an elective. I'm pretty sure the material wasn't covered in the standard science classes. (But certainly the basics like the number of pizzas my very elegant mother served us were covered.)
"I've seen a claim that astronomy isn't taught in K-12 in the US because it conflicts with young earth creationism"
This is a useful hint that you don't need to listen to the person saying that on any topic whatsoever.
The actual young-earth-creationist I knew in grade school, way back when, was quite clear that the universe looked to be a lot older, because it was created that way. Dinosaur fossils and all. But they were at least as smart as I was, and also the child of a fundamentalist preacher, so their beliefs might not be representative.
The astronomy you'd get in grade school would just be planets and moons and orbits, and wouldn't conflict with young-earth creationism. I vaguely recall having Earth Science in 9th grade (in a very small town in the midwest) and hearing that the Earth was 4 billion years old, but I was a science-obsessed kid, so I'd probably read that a dozen times before then.
It actually takes some thought to work out why astronomy conflicts with a young-Earth creationist worldview, and I doubt many people have bothered. Those inclined to die on some related hill prefer dying on keeping the high school biology teacher from mentioning evolution.
There are also a bunch of other things that conflict with it (how far back does Egyptian history go?), but again, hardly anyone thinks that hard about the matter.
Not American, my primary school education (4 to 12 years of age) did not include astronomy as such, but as part of the general science/nature studies classes (if I'm remembering correctly all the way back then).
Secondary school education (12-17 years of age) would have included that as part of physics classes. Certainly was nothing to do with young earth creationism, even though I was taught by nuns all my school life, and I'm old enough to be able to remember the moon landing when I was a young child so I would have had some idea of "the moon goes around the earth" for that 😀
I would venture that wherever you read that, it was perhaps one particular example of some school or class that then got generalised out to "all them Bible-basher rednecks deny SCIENCE!!!! and use their influence, backed up by the nefarious Republican Party who want to keep the populace ignorant and superstitious for their own benefit, to prevent SCIENCE!!!! being taught in schools". Probably some offshoot of the whole 'creationism in schools' fight. Never heard that bit about astronomy before, though, they usually stick to evolution as the casus belli.
"I think news stories have been pretty good about what happened, at least at the level of saying the moon got in front of the sun."
Speaking of that, another instance of a politician getting science wrong happened recently and is being covered by (mostly) the right-wing press because, to quote Sky News Australia, it's another instance of "a lefty losing it galactically":
https://nypost.com/2024/04/09/us-news/sheila-jackson-lee-tells-students-the-moon-is-a-planet-made-up-mostly-of-gases/
"The former top Democrat on the House Science Committee’s space subcommittee badly botched elementary lunar facts while speaking during the gathering at Booker T. Washington High School in Houston.
“You’ve heard the word ‘full moon.’ Sometimes you need to take the opportunity just to come out and see a full moon is that complete rounded circle, which is made up mostly of gases,” Jackson Lee, 74, told teenage pupils who gathered on a sports field ahead of the rare celestial event.
“And that’s why the question is why or how could we as humans live on the moon? Are the gases such that we could do that?” the congresswoman said.
“The sun is a mighty powerful heat, but it’s almost impossible to go near the sun. The moon is more manageable.”
I'm not mocking Texas Democrats for this (though it is tempting to have a jibe at the 'party of reason and science'), after all as pointed out on here, our own former Minister for Health thought Covid-19 was so named because there had been 18 previous Covids.
My public elementary school had a planetarium. This was not common. When they rebuilt the school there was a big campaign to save the planetarium and have it reinstalled in the new building.
We went to the planetarium at least a few times a year. I remember learning about constellations and how meteors caused craters and stuff like that. I believe the "teachers" were parents who volunteered to come in and had some kind of experience/education in astronomy related things.
Otherwise, we learned astronomy within other science curriculum.
I went to public schools in the U.S., and I was was taught astronomy in K-12. Also evolution, even though the teacher didn't believe it.
This was in Georgia. The town was conservative but not culturally southern.
What does a "not culturally southern" town mean in Georgia?
Are there "not culturally northern" towns in Massachusetts?
It's full of people from other parts of the country. Mostly military officers and airline pilots. I lost my southern accent living there.
I've never been to a comparable town in the north, but I suppose there probably are some.
My educational background is non-typical for the U.S. However, I had a good idea of Lunar Eclipse by the time I was about 12 years old, and likely had a similar understanding of Solar Eclipses within a couple of years.
My parents taught me at home for most of my elementary/secondary education, and they used science textbooks published by a BIblical-literalist (or at least, Young Earth Creationist friendly) private college.
My parents also were heavy readers. For part of my life, they liked to read biographies of important men and women from history as evening entertainment for the family.
Both sources of info spend a lot of time discussing astronomy. The science textbook had a section on how Galileo Galilei, Tycho Brahe, and Johannes Kepler together revolutionized astronomy and the model of the Solar System.
Among the biographies were stories of the life of Kepler, as well as the life of Isaac Newton. (The biography of Kepler included some mention of the effects of the Gregorian calendar reform on daily life, as well as the time Kepler tried to intervene to save his mother from accusations of witchcraft. It also tried to provide an explanation for the fact that Kepler published horoscope-style predictions based on his study of the stars. The biography of Newton included his interactions with other members of the Royal Society, his role as Chief of the Mint, and the fact that he spent a lot of time and effort writing commentaries on the Apocalyptic sections of the Bible. Both biographies presented the men as Heroes of Science.)
It took me a while to figure out that both sets of stories may have been motivated by opposition to the historical influence of the Catholic church, as much as to teaching the history of Science. I can't tell if the authors had that impact in mind specifically, but I noticed that the English-speaking world has lots of assumptions about Science escaping the grip of the organized Catholic Church, alongside assumptions about Protestant reformers escaping the grip of Papal error. It's not that the biographies were wrong, but that they told stories which supported those assumptions.
To add another layer to this: I was also an airplane-and-spaceship nerd for a time, so I read lots of stories-for-kids about the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo missions, Skylab, and the Space Shuttle. I also paged through some books published by National Geographic which had lots of detail about astronomy, planets, the solar system... and even a cute diagram of how Eratosthenes calculated the approximate size of the Earth. (This last detail led to an early case of me doubting a piece of history my parents told me. They both said that Columbus sailed in 1492 to prove the Earth was round. But Eratosthenes apparently knew that sometime before the birth of Christ, and it was taught by Aristotle and Ptolemy.)
So I don't know which source included eclipses, but I know that I was aware of them before I ever had a chance to observe one.
For reference, I was six years old when the Shuttle Challenger exploded on takeoff, and was a college student when the Shuttle Columbia disintegrated during re-entry.
People who complain about the loading time of comments here should probably be aware of how this works in tech.
Meeting.
Bob the engineer: next item, fixing the comments. They load very slowly after 500 or so.
Product manager: how many substacks is that?
Bob: er, less than 0.1% but obviously they are popular stacks given the number of comments. We estimate 1-2% of users. We could do a reddit type solution.
PM: we are not Reddit. Reddit is all about comments, and that’s what drives traffic there, we are driven by the top line posts.
Bob: which brings people who comment. And then it falls over.
PM: for 1-2% … what about the mobile apps?
Bob: the comments scroll quickly there
PM: so less than 1-2% then in total. And we have a workaround.
Bob: but the mobile apps have other problems like not being able to edit…
PM: that’s a different task also on the backlog. Are the people who complain leaving the platform
Bob: no evidence of that right now, but they do complain a lot.
PM: where? On the App Store?
Bob: (exasperated) … no, obviously on the website. We have 4.8/5.0 ratings on the store. They complain on the comment threads if they get too large.
Pm: well luckily those comments are not readable. How long would it take us to redesign the website like Reddit.
Bob: 1-2months if we applied all front end resources
PM: keep the task open. Priority 3.
Bob: as in never get to it. Anyway next item…
Surveilling people without their permission is illegal, you know...
I have a question if it is not too late to ask. I apologize in advance if it is a stupid one (and yes some questions are so ill-informed as to be stupid).. So here it is. Is there any? way to quantify the degree to which a particular course of action is subject to the law of unintended consequences. Two examples,
Corn Ethanol Subsidies: These subsidies were meant to promote energy independence and reduce carbon emissions. Instead, they contributed to the rise in food prices by diverting corn from food production to energy, affecting global food markets.
The Cobra Effect: This term comes from an incident during British rule in colonial India, where a bounty was offered for every dead cobra to reduce their numbers. Instead, people began breeding cobras for income, increasing the population when the program ended and breeders released the snakes.
In other words, if by definition you can't predict what unintended consequence will occur, can you somehow determine what actions are more likely to lead to one?
> if by definition you can't predict what unintended consequence will occur
There is a difference between "unintended" and "unpredictable". Sometimes the person who designs the rule is just insufficiently competent or does not care about long-term consequences, but someone else easily could have predicted the consequences.
So I would recommend to bring some people whose paycheck does not depend on the person proposing the rule, and tell them to brainstorm for 5 minutes about possible perverse incentives this rule would create or how someone could easily circumvent the rule.
Those people should be familiar with the concepts of "if something gets more expensive, people may start buying less of it", "if something gets less expensive, people may start using it wastefully", "people may follow the letter of the rule in a way that goes against its spirit", "if you provide support for people who are in some situation, people may now be more likely to get in that situation or less likely to get out of it", "if you increase the tax on something, people may start doing less of it (or move to a different country)", etc. It might help to provide them a list of examples of similar things that have already happened.
If I recall correctly the biggest boosters of ethanol subsidies — and ethanol mandates in gasoline — were politicians from the corn belt of the US (mostly Republican IIRC). The corn-belt pols were for them because they'd shore up corn prices for their constituents (and that was the primary reason they were put into the bill). This was part of a larger pork-barrel energy spending package to promote US energy independence. The (supposed) environmental benefits of ethanol were talked up, and pro-environmental pols were persuaded to get on board with the bill by a ban on oil drilling under the Great Lakes and the Alaska Wildlife Refuge (put in at the last minute, or it wouldn't have passed w/o some Dem support).
But let's be clear, the ethanol subsidies and gas formulation mandates were meant to boost corn prices, though. That was its primary intended consequence. And it did that. ;-)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Policy_Act_of_2005
By definition you cannot, but I think you can at least have some heuristics that help. For instance, the larger the change, the more likely there will be larger consequences. Also, the less we understand about the relevant systems or how those systems connect with other systems, the more likely the consequences will be unintended. New things we don't understand, such as AI, are more likely to have unintended consequences. How far-reaching those consequences will be (positive or negative) depends heavily on how much, in this case AI, gets integrated into other systems.
Do keep in mind that some unintended consequences must be positive, but, complex systems are much easier to break than to create, so we would also have to know that most unintended consequences must therefore be negative.
Global shipping is extremely complicated and massive, so most system-wide changes will cause negative unintended consequences and likely more problems than it solves. The same could be said of passenger airplanes, international law, etc.
I think this is in general hard, but probably you can see a little ahead by thinking about how your policy changes peoples' incentives, and then how the world created by those new incentives will change incentives, and so on. And probably even more by knowing about many past policy changes and how they worked out.
Yes, but the recursive nature of the changes only becomes clear in retrospect. First order incentives can be, though not necessarily are, relatively easy to guess. Second order effects are significantly harder, and depend completely on being correct about the first order effects. Anything beyond that feels like guesswork with massive error bars.
One of the trickiest things is knowing what people's real incentives are. Sometimes we think their incentives are A, but instead they are more B. Sometimes they don't even know until forced to make a choice, which means polling or any other kind of work to predict what people want will be wrong and wasted effort. In fact, worse, because you're reacting to incentives that don't really exist and ignoring the real incentives.
I agree that this is hard. In the example of the cobra bounties, the people offering the bounties expected the incentive "kill cobras to get bounties" but not the incentive of "raise cobras to get bounties."
I don’t think there’s a way to quantify that, however the first question is just simple economics. Food prices had to rise in that scenario. I assume that was an intended, but assumed acceptable, consequence
In a move nobody could have seen coming (or at least, not the gentlemen who hysterically calling Scott, myself and others "white supremacists" for casting doubts on the project when scott first posted on it), the Saudis have been forced to scale back their planes for 'The Line' linear city: https://archive.is/xetJQ
Instead of being open to residents by 2030 as first planned, the city is expected to measure only 1.5 miles of the full 105 miles by that time.
I remember a *lot* of people mocking The Line on this site, and I don't remember any of them getting called white supremacists for it. I'm not going to say there were *zero* comments, because it's the internet and there is always at least one nutcase who holds any position, but, come on man. Stop making every fucking news article on the planet into a story about how liberals are evil.
Exactly. It's like Hammond doesn't even read the site he's posting on. (Given the volume of his comments though, he obviously does read it and just doesn't care.)
Some dimwit on the internet will call you a racist if you put two sugars in your tea. (Probably because it proves you're not a real Scottsman.) But you don't have to care.
Black woman of color Lisa Cook, Biden's diversity hire at the fed, has all too predictably turned out to be a plagiarist: https://www.dailywire.com/news/trouble-at-the-fed
For those playing along at home, Cook was one of the co-authors of an infamous paper alleging that racist violence was responsible for a drop off in black patents after 1900, but which was revealed to be a product of the data of main dataset they were using ending in 1900: https://twitter.com/AnechoicMedia_/status/1489847148862742531
And all of this makes me laugh so much considering the number of people on here who have claimed, apparently very sincerely, that DEI is simply about making sure that capable minority candidates aren't discriminated against (this is trivially false from the name 'diversity, equity and inclusion', but it's nice to have real world counter-examples).
Of course, the fact that nobody seemed interested in a far more egregious case of affirmative action in government hiring when Scott posted a link to it makes me suspect we're dealing with people unwilling to update regardless of the evidence: https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-faas-hiring-scandal-a-quick-overview
Nobody here is playing along at home, and we'd prefer you not keep trying to drag us into your game.
Very disappointing dark pattern in Substack's iOS app.
I attempted to read the linked post below, which was subscriber-only. Substack offered an opportunity to “Continue reading this post, courtesy of Jeff Maurer [Claim my free post]”. Just to be clear, I don’t object to this arrangement—many other authors have similar terms.
https://imightbewrong.substack.com/p/more-evidence-emerges-that-lefty
Clicking [Claim my free post] opened a dialog to [Subscribe and unlock]. Clicking through opened another dialog: “Verify your number: We need to verify your phone number before unlocking this post”.
This is misleading and exploitative. I have never given Substack my phone number. There is nothing which can be “verified”. Substack is simply using Jeff Maurer’s article as a lever to collect my phone number.
Why?
(I had posted a version of this to Jeff in Substack Notes; posting to ACX for posterity.)
> Why?
...Because they want your phone number? Why are you still expecting anything of this site?
I'm on Safari on a laptop. I do not use Substack apps, just go to Substack site using my browser, and I seem to have less trouble with the site than many. (It loads very slowly when there are more than 500 comments, and occasionally swallows a half-written post, but those are the only 2 problems.). So I clicked that link, and after a few paragraphs of the author's post Substack offered me a free subscription, but first asked for my email address, which I gave, so it could send me a link to sign in. Substack has it already anyhow (and I was already signed in.) I was not asked for my phone number. Checked my email, and found I got not a link for signing in, but a link for downloading the app. WTF? I don't want the app.
And this is new.
This may be new, but Substack being an objectively awful website isn't new. I'm a little surprised that a competing platform hasn't popped up with the simple value proposition "Substack, but things work."
Whenever it annoys me enough (which is often), I go back to the old slatestarcodex site, to a post with over a thousand comments, like
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/27/book-review-albions-seed/
and grab the scroll bar, fling it up and down, and just marvel at the speed, the efficiency.
Remember what they took from you!
People who complain about the loading time of comments here should probably be aware of how this works in tech.
Meeting.
Bob the engineer: next item, fixing the comments. They load very slowly after 500 or so.
Product manager: how many substacks is that?
Bob: er, less than 0.1% but obviously they are popular stacks given the number of comments. We estimate 1-2% of users. We could do a reddit type solution.
PM: we are not Reddit. Reddit is all about comments, and that’s what drives traffic there, we are driven by the top line posts.
Bob: which brings people who comment. And then it falls over.
PM: for 1-2% … what about the mobile apps?
Bob: the comments scroll quickly there
PM: so less than 1-2% then in total. And we have a workaround.
Bob: but the mobile apps have other problems like not being able to edit…
PM: that’s a different task also on the backlog. Are the people who complain leaving the platform
Bob: no evidence of that right now, but they do complain a lot.
PM: where? On the App Store?
Bob: (exasperated) … no, obviously on the website. We have 4.8/5.0 ratings on the store. They complain on the comment threads if they get too large.
Pm: well luckily those comments are not readable. How long would it take us to redesign the website like Reddit.
Bob: 1-2months if we applied all front end resources
PM: keep the task open. Priority 3.
Bob: as in never get to it. Anyway next item…
I am not at all surprised that a network monopoly with years of programmer time spent on the site has not been disrupted by an upstart spending years of programming time with zero revenue to catch up.
What exactly does being a network monopoly mean in this context? If another platform with better functionality emerged, I think most authors could easily move there, taking their audiences with them. The more money they make, the more careful they need to be, but they could also pay someone to help with the process.
Assuming that the other site is "like Substack, but better", that is, it supports the concept of paying subscribers, but offers better technical solutions for writing and commenting, you could simply start posting the same content on both websites, but only allow commenting on the new one. People who do not care about the comment section can stay subscribed on Substack. People who want to comment have a motivation to move to the new website, but if they procrastinate with the move, they still get to read your articles on the old website -- so it's not like you suddenly took away from them something they keep paying for.
You could even create an unpaid category "people who are still subscribed on Substack" on the new website (and you would pay someone to keep this category synchronized with the actual Substack membership) and give them a right to also comment on the new website. But new users could no longer subscribe on Substack, only on the new website. And once in a while you would add some content for the users subscribed on the new website only, to encourage the Substack subscribers to move. Basically, you would need to carefully balance "I don't want to make the Substack subscribers angry at me" with "but I want them to have an incentiive to move to the new website". Anyway, time is on your side now, because new users can only subscribe on the new website. And when the people who stayed on Substack become a minority of your total audience, you can increase the pressure on them by removing their ability to comment on the new website completely.
From the perspective of the new website, you don't have to become as big as Substack in short term. You only need to become big enough to survive. That should be doable with a fraction of authors. I may be wrong here, but I do not think that Substack is more complicated than LessWrong, so the costs should be comparable.
I've been wondering if liveable neighborhoods have been proven to have an effect on screen addiction, or screen time, but I can't seem to find any studies on it. Are any of you in the know?
I'm not aware of studies in on, but my guess is that the effect would be pretty minimal, based on my own experience. I live in what, by almost any definition, would be a "livable neighborhood" and kids don't play outside all that often. My best guess is that screens now provide so much of what people want from entertainment to social connection that there is less need to go outside. The solution to this would then need to be two-fold - safe and enjoyable places to go (your question) and screens offering less utility.
My hope at this point is that people begin to seriously recognize the disutility that comes from screens and more accurately rate their experience on them. I think that doing this will result in people spending less time on screens, if they have alternatives available.
"Liveable neighborhood" is a problematic term. I mean, I'm sure high-crime racial minorities being absent from the neighborhood actually counts *against* liveability metrics....
Your pony has shown us its trick now.
Will every comment of yours have a race element? Its so tiring and low quality.
Also "screen addiction".
I would guess that people who live in nice neighbourhoods spend more time staring at screens. Why? Because they're white-collar workers with desk jobs. Although the _really_ nice neighbourhoods are disproprortionately populated by old people, who spend less time staring at screens.
Once you tease out all the age and class effects maybe you'll have a meaningful study, maybe you won't. But what's the point? If you're actively deciding whether to build a nice neighbourhood or a crappy neighbourhood then you don't need some crappy study to tell you to build a nice one. Crappy neighbourhoods are not built because people actively decide to build crappy neighbourhoods.
Well, there's the problem of defining "livable neighborhood" in a way that lends itself to a meaningful study.
I guess I should have offered proxies for liveable neighborhoods in my opening comment. I think we can make a reasonable approximation. After all, liveability is what so many planners, architects and yimby/nimbys are fighting for, and I dont see them engaging in-fighting about definitions. It's a fuzzy cluster, where the center has the properties that:
The area surrounding the home...
- Either has a low rate of through traffic, maybe less than 500 motorized vehicles a day, and has slow moving motorized traffic, probably maximum 40 km/h
- Or has a separate path for soft traffic (bikes, pedestrians)
And when the home is no more than 4 floors up from ground level
And when there are "third spaces" in the vicinity of the home, such as:
- Seating that is comfortable year-round, that people can use without the expectation of paying
Etc. I'm sure it can be done more elegantly or with fewer parameters than I gave as example. Designing the study definitely requires attention, but I'm sure it's possible. I'd be surprised if it hasn't been done.
Is the basic idea here just a neighborhood where it's easy to walk places, or pleasant to be outside?
I just read Dr Bess Stillman's article, Debugging the Doctor Brain (about the perverse incentives that makes learning during residency difficult) and I'm wondering whether there's a single white collar field (I have no experience in blue collar, I don't know if it holds true there) that is actually good at (or taking steps to improve) training university graduates or if they're all awful.
I'm an engineer < 5 years out of uni, and many in my social circle are too. I'm finding, and this agrees with my other junior engineer friends, that there's not enough senior engineering oversight to go around. Most of us are making do, until we find out that management (often not engineering) has been asking us to sign off on things that are supposed to be checked by chartered engineers (which require evidence of professional development - most of us don't have that yet).
I learn in bits and pieces, and I'm grateful for any amount of time I get from senior people around me, but corporate cost-cutting has drastically shifted the ratios of experienced engineers and fresh grads. In many disciplines, there's a missing level of experience - around the 10 year mark. Most of us only have a group of equally clueless peers or one very busy subject matter expert (20+ years experience). I'm not sure if this is a retention issue or a retrenchment issue. It's all really really similar to Bess' observation on residents not being given sufficient guidance or learning space!
I am worried that this is happening to every professional field simultaneously - most of the workforce is inexperienced (because they're cheaper), experienced personnel are scarce and overloaded, the standard of the practice goes down because of this "figure it out" culture, where there's not quite enough people to even do the job, and people aren't being trained to do it properly. Obvious implications are worse healthcare, more mistakes in engineering (more expensive, less efficient, and unsafe infrastructure), more incompetence and fraud in everything.
I want to figure out if I'm noticing a real problem, but also wondering how to fix it.
>I'm wondering whether there's a single white collar field (I have no experience in blue collar, I don't know if it holds true there) that is actually good at (or taking steps to improve) training university graduates or if they're all awful.
Software engineering at Big Tech companies. I've worked for three (Microsoft, Google, and Adobe) and have friends who've worked for a bunch of others. In most cases, the companies recruit junior programmers primarily with the goal of developing them into senior programmers. In general, junior programmers start out doing well-defined bite-sized tasks under guidance from their more senior peers while mid-career programmers are gradually given bigger tasks with more autonomy. There's a pretty smooth pyramid between different experience levels, although past a certain point (maybe ~10 years of experience) you start seeing seniority becoming only very loosely correlated with years of experience as many people plateau at the the mid-career workhorse paygrades.
You're right! Software is also kind of unique - it's one of the only fields that has an actual skills test in the interview process. If you're interviewing to be an auditor (to my knowledge) they don't hand you a ledger to audit.
Software engineering at smaller/mid sized tech companies is not usually like that, in my experience.
> I am worried that this is happening to every professional field simultaneously
One harmful meme that I noticed is the idea which many managers seem to share, that you can separate the company into "cost centers" and "profit centers" as if you could treat them independently. The salesmen bring you money, so they are the important ones. The people who actually produce the stuff you sell, they just increase your costs of running business, so you spend on them as little as possible... you experiment how far you can push things before the production collapses. The managers, well, technically they also don't sell, but they are the ones who make the reports, which usually allows them to spin their work as "saved the company a lot of money by cutting costs", which is almost as good as bringing the money from outside. (Except, the salesman can sell the same type of product every quarter, while the manager needs to always find new ways to cut costs.)
The way I remember it from business school in the mid-2000s, "profit centers" include the entire production and distribution chain for your money-making products: not just salesmen, but also manufacturing, logistics, procurement, and (often) R&D. "Cost centers" are stuff that supports (or is supposed to support) the profit centers' operation but don't directly make and sell stuff: HR, legal, IT, facilities, etc.
The takeaway isn't that you necessarily cut cost centers to the bone, just that you judge them on how cost-effective they are at enabling your profit centers to do their profit-generating activities.
I learned about "line" and "staff" positions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staff_and_line
Interesting that these terms have jumped from military to business jargon. You start to run into serious problems when staff orgs expand and begin to eclipse the line units. c.f. university admins, some militaries.
That makes more sense.
Though I wonder whether there is some game of telephone involved between the school and the real life. (Similarly how in IT development there is a theory of "agile development", and then there is the standard practice which is almost the exact opposite of it.)
I'm in a decidedly less high-stakes industry, at a high-end boutique luxury hotel, and have noticed a similar pattern, except that in this case I'm a 20+ year pro who has very deliberately chosen to be underemployed in a front-of-house role rather than taken on the stress and hassle of promoting into management.
So I'm in the unusual position of being almost infinitely more knowledgeable about our absurdly complex day-to-day processes than anyone who has promoted away from the product we sell (which is of course the onsite experience of the hotel stay). Just to give you an idea of why this matters, our onsite general manager would be the first to admit that, were the entire front of house team to walk off the job, he and every offsite executive above him would not know how to check a guest in, make a key, properly bill them, etc. I'm not totally confident they'd be able to even find the reports they'd need to run the hotel "analog." The software and systems have changed too much since they last touched the end product, and if you're thinking, "how hard could it be to check in a guest?", well, literally hundreds of travel agencies with thousands of rate codes and dozens of sales groups each with 5 different billing options for 13 different types of rooms and hair-trigger guests paying $450 a night with totally reasonable high expectations might reply, "we make it pretty difficult, especially when the luxury hotel experience requires a show of flawless, polished competence."
That's why, in the Before Times, no new front desk agent was ever left unsupervised for even ten minutes their first twelve weeks of the job, much less allowed to work a shift alone (with all of the administrative duties in addition to interacting with guests). The front of house manager or a supervisor always had an eye on them so that after 12 weeks, pretty much every agent could be depended on to deliver the end product more or less flawlessly.
That standard was starting to degrade a little even before the pandemic, but post-pandemic, it now feels like a golden age fever dream of competency, pun intended.
Almost our entire front of house staff was laid off in March of 2020 - over a dozen people who were all fully trained with highly polished soft skills and a deep understanding of how to deliver a truly luxury experience. The front of house manager, plus an accountant, plus me ran the front of house for 2-3 guests a night for the bulk of 2020. Luxury standards like daily housekeeping and turndown service, concierge services, doormen, wine hour, room service, amenity treats in rooms and so on were of course dropped - we weren't allowed to provide them and guests weren't expecting them and no one was on staff to perform them, anyway.
As demand gradually started to rise again, we went through a particularly dark period where we needed staff, but no one competent wanted to work. Literally. Job postings would go up and no one would answer. Then one person would answer, get hired, and be an absurd parody of insouciant slacker entitlement (or worse, and there was *much* worse!) before being replaced, usually be someone almost equally bad.
Oh, and while this was happening, our property had what was effectively a pandemic-enabled "hostile takeover" by a new hotel management company which didn't have any experience in the luxury market. The chaos of that transition drove away our remaining end-product-touching front-of-house manager.
Eventually pandemic unemployment benefits expired and "normal" new employees began to drift in. But with upper management not being able to train employees on the Before Times end product, and brand new lower level managers who never even knew the what the Before Times product was like, training new employees fell to...whomever was around, even if that was an almost equally new employee hired three weeks before.
So just to recap: We've gone from having no front-of-house staffer ever left alone until they were highly polished and competent to people who don't know what they're doing training people who know even less. The luxury product itself degraded at every level - most of the grace-note services haven't returned and the luxury standards dropped considerably. Positions which used to require a polished uniform are now performed in jeans and a t-shirt, often absent even a name-tag to differentiate an employee from a random person off the street. It's okay for a valet to tell a guest, "Oh, I don't drive stick," and for a front desk agent to say, "I don't know how to do that," or "I'll have to get my manager," or even, "No."
Oh, and the rate for a room?
It's as high as it was pre-pandemic, even though the competency of our staffing is wholly dependent on a given individual employee's work ethic.
And *none* of them understand the sort of Carson-the-Butler-from-Downton-Abbey-esque pride in delivering an expertly *professional* service to the upper class (or people who are paying for an upper class experience), so it's simply been lost as part of the product...unless a guest is interacting with *me.*
I think you're right, this phenomenon is happening everywhere. I see signs of it in almost every business I patronize, sometimes in large degrees, sometimes in small.
How to fix it?
Go six levels down.
Michael Lewis describes the idea in this podcast (https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/against-the-rules/six-levels-down). If a company's end product is broken, find the most knowledgeable person who is still touching the end product and then follow their advice about how to fix the system. This person is usually six levels down from the C-suite.
It makes sense. Upper management can't fix a product they no longer have time - or perhaps even understand how - to make. New employees can't fix a product they don't yet understand.
Only the "middle" can fix the issue, and just like the middle class, they are rapidly vanishing, and no one is interested in what the remaining few have to say.
(Just want to say, this is an excellent comment, thank you for posting it.)
Hey thanks for saying that!
I found myself thinking about it (and your followups) several times in the following day or two, and figured I should say something. :-)
I wonder if the vanishing middle managers (which, actually, tend to be peak technical knowledge and experience - it's the final layer of management that has contact with the core business, the layers above do more abstract management things)
That should be scary for everyone. The ability to buy a true luxury experience is now gone (the competency to make everything seamless is gone). The competency to treat patients is only being maintained by a system that abuses junior doctors and works them 80 hours a week - on the job learning, to make up for inadequate educstion. The competency for everything else - building a safe airplane, maintaining bridges, building products that work - are just being lost.
I think you're also onto something - culture. Pre pandemic, your workplace had a culture of excellence. You had a clear vision of what you're delivering and knew all the nuts and bolts to achieve it, including measures like "this is how long it takes to integrate a new person into our ways of working and culture".
At a place like Boeing, this is a safety and quality culture - when you make a big deal and get managers to look at things, how much effort you go to to deliver the plane. At a place like Burger King, it's also a safety culture, enforced by management. The corporate food safety guy has no ability to personally visit every store and check that they're storing lettuce correctly. They're writing rules and relying on the store manager to enforce it. They're relying on staff throwing out the onions when they're moldy instead of just cooking them anyway because ordering onions will be more effort and annoy the regional manager and affect the KPIs. PG&E let a guy who wasn't a chartered professional engineer look after all their buried gas pipeline in the suburbs, and it sounded like he didn't really have engineering oversight to check his risk assessments, just a non technical manager who approved the maintenance budget (who of course mostly grilled him if it costs too much).
I think this is completely because the corporate and business world no longer valid the business-specific technical knowledge and attitudes that make the whole business work. The middle manager is vanishing because people are correctly perceiving that the corporate world doesn't value doing your job well, it values whatever the hell upper management does, so they develop the skills to be upper managers at the expense of actual technical excellence.
I wonder if the same thing is happening in government? I do have a friend in government - same graduation year as me - who is already overseeing new intake, so probably a similar enough picture.
The inexperienced leading the incompetent. I hate it here!!!
Oh man I hit a button and my browser ate my draft.
But basically, yes, I agree with everything here!
I think because my job is much lower-stakes and not especially technical, it's a lot easier to spot the chain of events that led to a degradation in the product. Boeing is almost infinitely more complex (plus they're obviously willing to murder people to prevent details from getting out (oh sure a whistleblower committed "suicide" hours after saying he would never do that and the day before he was due to finally testify in court...sadlol)) but I think many of the same forces are present.
Apparel in general has followed the same track - pretty much every brand has noticeably worse quality of materials and construction than it did 10 or 15 years ago, a phenomenon frequently observed by folk in the fashion/apparel industry.
And veterinary medicine in the US is a real disaster after private equity bought huge numbers of private practices and then brutally raised prices.
And on, and on.
I'm not feeling good about where this is heading.
> Oh man I hit a button and my browser ate my draft.
As I do whenever I see someone mention this issue, I will now plug this browser plugin: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/textarea-cache/
Oh, hey thanks!
Why only the middle? Why not also ask lower level employees of long standing? Is the assumption here that any lower-level employees who would have anything valuable to say have already been squeezed out or have left on their own?
Well of course exquisitely competent lower level employees should also be consulted, but I think they tend to be very rare in my particular industry - lower level positions tend to have high turnover as people either rise in the business or go elsewhere.
Ironically to your question, I actually *am* one of the lowest level employees in the corporate structure (though not at my property), which is one of many reasons I've not been consulted, even though a somewhat high-level visiting executive noticed my knowledge base and said I should probably be consulted on some property management software policy.
I enthusiastically volunteered myself in any capacity they needed, but never got the call.
In my field, the lower level now consists mostly of contractors. A constant churn of contractors. I'm fairly far down, I interact with the contractors, and while we'd like to keep the ones that already know the job really well, a few levels up from me someone is bungling an enterprise agreement (so the competent workers we have either strike or leave), or writing a new contract with a different cheaper company that we have to bring up to speed anew.
The sticker price of a new contract is highly legible. The amount of lost productivity from having to bring a new crop of people up to speed, not so much.
I think the goal is to find the sergeants of whatever organization it is; privates wouldn't have the necessary perspective.
Yup, Senior NCOs who know their craft and describe the issues in terms that management will accept.
"if you're thinking, "how hard could it be to check in a guest?"
I think there's a lot of this attitude towards what I'd call 'support staff', the general administration - the receptionists, secretaries, filing clerks, etc. The assumption there also is "well this is pretty much unskilled labour, if you were smart enough you'd have a degree or qualification and be an accountant or manager". These are often the roles that get squeezed or cut to reduce costs (think of customer service, think of outsourcing to call centres and how they run on scripts and through-put rather than dealing with queries, and now the push to automate even that away with AI).
But as you say, if all the front-line/public-facing/support staff walked out in the morning, the people who feel they contribute the most to making the money (be they sales or software engineers) would find things that routinely operate to make the running of the company smooth are missing. You may complain about "what does HR/payroll/etc. actually *do*?" but if your salary with the bonuses or allowances or expenses included doesn't end up in your bank account by the end of the month, you'll find out.
A lot of those processes are automated, but not all, and some real person has to enter in the data in the first place and correct any mistakes or screw-ups. (This plaint brought to you courtesy of low-level minion/administrative staff 😁)
EDIT: I would say that while you are correct that the problem can only be fixed by going to the level of the last competent person, the big problem is in the C-suite level. If they are operating on "we can still charge pre-pandemic prices while delivering a degraded service, which means lower costs", they have no incentive to change. Pushing up the share price is what counts today, and one way of doing that is to reduce costs (hence rounds of lay-offs). If the ycan produce an X Quarter report that says profitability has gone up (because of degraded service), then this means all the reports on them will be favourable, share price go up, trebles all round! (as "Private Eye" likes to say).
I think the notion of pride in providing a service is slowly dying. I could rumble on about schools these days etc. but I honestly, genuinely think there is a big difference in how younger generations approach everything. There was a mention in a comment elsewhere in another thread, I think, about "honor is no longer a concept" and that made me go "But I hold to honour!"
But it could be mine is the last generation that does so, because the culture has changed around us so much. Values have shifted, emphases on different ideals, scorn for the past and the assumption that it was all hypocrisy, to say the least.
I wonder about the effects Covid/lockdown specifically had on that? I feel like, before 2020, I was much more concerned about pride in my work, and strived much more to do things properly. Now, I happen to be a student, and to have executive function issues from ASD, so maybe my workload just got harder as time went by, eventually exceeding my abilities, but that seems unlikely, and besides, a lot of people around me report the same feeling. I have no clue what could explain it, though.
Big picture, the last 3ish years have had employees with significantly more control over their careers, a lot of places hiring at dramatically increased wages and reduced expectations, and little obvious signs of that changing.
If I can get a 30% raise going to some place at the drop of a hat, my current employer is going to walk on eggshells around me, even if I'm not very good. If I say I want to wear jeans every day, that's much more likely to be accepted or at least tolerated. If I do a lackluster job, same thing.
Honor culture/pride in your work operates on longer timeframes and reputation. In a short timeframe, employers don't know you or your work ethic, so there's not much to show or prove. If your manager may be gone in six months, there's even less reason to do things that don't have a tracked metric somewhere - like volunteering for tough tasks or always being on time.
I think honor will come back if/when the economy tightens up again, and employees want and need to differentiate themselves better. It may also happen if society develops better social scoring technology. Maybe not as thorough as China, but something more than word-of-mouth references or Google searches.
I weirdly developed a much *better* work ethic during Covid. Sheer boredom pressed me into taking on more responsibilities than I normally would and I discovered it was actually personally satisfying to hammer all the nails, not just the ones my managers might notice.
That's definitely part of it, I know since I spent a lot of time at home during the lockdown that my attitude towards work has changed (I definitely much prefer working from home).
But at the same time, I do get my job done and don't shrug it off as "who cares?"
Incredible how many people and how many times all those people need to have the conversation, "you know janitors are important too right?" It's demoralizing.
Janitors are very important, but some janitors are much better than others. Source: I've been through a janitor strike.
I think people who've never worked those kinds of jobs, even as summer jobs, have no idea what's involved. There's the perennial comedy trope of the secretary who does nothing but file her nails and flirt with the boss, and from the outside it's easy to think "What is so hard about pushing a broom/answering the phone/typing some letters?"
Because those kind of jobs aren't *directly* making money for the business, then it's easy to think of them as useless/makeweight/ripe to be replaced by automation. Unless you need to know about it, or have worked those jobs, you don't realise the background support they provide. The first point of contact for potential clients and the public with your business is the person who answers the phone, and unprofessional attitudes will make a bad first impression and lose you business.
When hiring a local business for work around the house (plumbing, construction, etc.) it's pretty common to find an owner-operator that tries to do a lot of the actual work and also scheduling/front end tasks. These people are hard to get in touch with and often forget important details, like what work you wanted to get done.
Also pretty often some will hire their wives or adult daughter to answer the phone and do the scheduling, and these places are *significantly* easier to work with. Just someone keeping track of the details so the workers and owner can keep up with the important stuff.
I think you get that a lot with small tradesmen, they're doing every thing themselves plus probably working on three jobs at once, so they tend (at least the guys we've gotten to do small jobs at home) to hop around between your place and the other places they're working, so there is a lot of "are you doing that thing?/what thing? oh yeah that thing you wanted".
But there is such demand that they are kept busy, because it's a case of "well at least the guy is free now to work on this, if I turn him down I'll be waiting another six months for somebody else to do it". You can always tell when eventually wife/sister/daughter/someone takes over the paperwork, though 😁
Mind you, a lot of these guys are also "cash in hand" so... maybe not too anxious to have a paper trail behind them for tax purposes!
I absolutely agree with you that the C-suite has no incentive to change when a degraded end product continues to make money or possible makes even *more* money than the higher standard.
In fact, I'd argue that's one of the contributing factors to products degrading over time, especially if market forces occur across an entire industry. Consumers resign themselves to a universally lower standard and then...well...that's the new standard, until various forces lower the standard even more.
And I agree with you that the idea of "service," much less *pride* in service, is absolutely dying, and I think some of it can be laid at the feet of oppression olympics culture. I've occasionally had to pull neophyte agents aside to explain to them that yes, the complaints the older rich white guy unloaded on them are actually valid considering that he's paying an average total of $500 a night to have a "perfect" experience and not be annoyed by *anything at all,* much less preventable problems like room attendants waking him at 7:30 in the morning shouting to one another in the hallways and then almost being late to a critical meeting because the valet kept him waiting half an hour.
I've had early-20s newbies look me right in the eye and say, "He's rich, he should get over it."
That's the thing with culture. If this same agent is surrounded by people who take pride in providing a good service, they'll keep their opinions to themselves even just to fit in. Eventually they'll probably even come round to the idea that it's worth taking pride in providing top tier customer care - that this is a special thing your team can do.
But you lost your culture of amazing hospitality when corporate laid off the whole team overnight, and once lost it's somewhere between very difficult to impossible to rebuild.
Boeing used to have a culture of not accepting things not done to process, not accepting anything but perfect in their finished product - a big management shakeup completely destroyed that safety culture. The recent door thing - they couldn't even find a workpack relating to the door removal at the NTSB's request. There was a time when that course of action was unthinkable, but somehow now it's normal to bypass procedure when it's inconvenient.
Might some of this have to do with the fact that the company, the guests, and apparently you and Deiseach, expect Carson-the-butler-from-Downton-Abbey-level professionalism when these employees are not being provided with anything approaching a Carson-the-butler-from-Downton-Abbey level of lifetime job security and wages in exchange for such polished and flawless service?
Not really.
My property pays a higher wage than any budget hotel because there is more "work" than an average budget hotel. Consistently performing the highest level of warm, professional, polished hospitality *IS* this particular job. In fact, onsite management is so serious about employees nailing this performance that there are significant cash bonuses whenever a guest mentions an employee's performance in a survey or review.
And when I say "performing," I literally mean "acting." Our front desk is a stage, and just like a theater company requires its actors to stay in character, so to does the hotel.
Let me make this clear: I have none of Carson-the-Butler's reverence for the people I serve or our relative class status. Guests often really annoy me, and sometimes their complaints are trivial (or simply insane).
But part of being a service professional is never letting them see that, and I am very, *very* good at never letting them see that. So good that I frequently receive bonuses for pleasing guests who I privately think are total assholes.
It's in the best interest of the folks receiving wages here to get as close to Carson-the-Butler as they can manage.
(1) Carson probably wasn't being paid all that much either
(2) There is the well-known saying "pay peanuts, get monkeys"
(3) I'm not on any level of bonuses etc. to go with increasing demands of the job
(4) All that being said, there's a bare minimum standard for every job, and half-assing it because "crappy pay, crappy conditions" won't make things better. I agree that crappy pay and crappy conditions will attract crappy workers, but the attitude that Christina is talking about, that of not even bothering to do the job because "fuck the rich" isn't good, either. Carry that over to a better job than being a hotel valet, and you'll be out the door for not doing your job competently.
There is a level of pride even in a crappy job, though I agree that being treated like dirt by management does engender the "fuck them, I'm doing the bare minimum" attitude. But that does mean the bare minimum, not "not even doing that much" e.g. turning up on time for the waiting customer.
Well, Carson was senior management. Most of the staff got a tiny dorm room, free meals, 16 hour days with one day off every few weeks, and a salary in the tens of pounds a year.
And job security, subject to the whims and financial situation of your employers. And if you lose your job you lose your home too.
How easy, in comparison, is the life of a modern day hotel employee!
"I've had early-20s newbies look me right in the eye and say, "He's rich, he should get over it.""
To which the answer is "You can think in the privacy of your mind as much as you like, 'fuck you rich guy', but outwardly you say 'I'm very sorry, sir, we'll get right on that' because he's the one paying your wages and you're doing a job".
"The valet was late" is a perfectly valid complaint. I'm sure if you kept these kids waiting half an hour or more for their break or their pay or whatever, they'd quickly start complaining. Someone complaining about something out of your control may be unreasonable, but you do the job. Someone complaining about bad service, be they rich or poor, is in the right. They're paying for a service/product, you're supplying it, it's no more acceptable than selling a defective product or item.
Yes, but also, one of many, *many* mistakes our inexperienced corporate overlords continue to make is not providing front-of-house employees the opportunity to be on the receiving end of a luxury experience themselves- and a chance to see how annoying it can be when it goes wrong.
Even I get so used to hearing the same set of complaints from guests (generally about unfixable infrastructure issues with the building) that I internally grow a bit indifferent and "what's the big deal?" about some of them out of sheer repetition.
That's why it's incredibly helpful to be a guest yourself. Six months ago I had an objectively shitty stay in a different hotel in the brand (on a discounted employee rate which is was nevertheless offensively high), and when I say "objectively," I mean the floor of the room and the bed were *visibly* slopped to one side by like 4-5 degrees, so sloped that a water bottle set on the floor would simply roll away under its own weight. It was *instantly* noticeable when one laid on the bed, as my mother did right before her hip replacement surgery.
Later we independently discovered some maniac installed motion-sensor light switches in all of the interior bathrooms which would shut off the light if it didn't detect activity within two feet of the switch after ten minutes.
You know what wasn't within two feet of the switch? The shower, and the toilet.
Nothing like being plunged into almost perfect pitch-black while standing in a glass shower with unfamiliar controls.
And the elevators were frequently out, an issue when we were on the 15th floor.
And - most outrageous - the front desk employees lied right to my fellow-employee face and told me they didn't have anywhere they could freeze my mother's medical cold packs. The answer to "wait, how can I get this cold?" was "I dunno, maybe put them in an ice bucket and scoop some ice on them?" A current co-worker who used to work for that property said there were 6 different employee office fridges and freezers that the cold packs could have been stored in without violating food safety codes.
Let me tell you.
I was *OUTRAGED.*
Outraged that I was paying what was a lot (to me) to experience very obvious, fixable problems. Outraged that I was told an absurd lie.
And especially outraged that when I gently mentioned this stuff at checkout from a, "hey I'm a fellow employee, if I had been a real guest, they'd probably be yelling right now" approach, I was dismissed with an upbeat "sorry, yeah, we know..." and nothing else.
Most brands give all employees 10+ free room nights a year across the brand, but our brand hasn't quite figured that out yet, and so we have employees at my front desk who've never stayed in a hotel of our caliber - *not even our own*, and thus *really* have no sense whatsoever of what it's like to be a guest, period.
It's that exactly. I try to be patient with retail and other customer-facing roles because I've been on the other side, I know things happen that are out of your control, I've had to deal with shitty customers, so I understand some of the problems. Getting mad and yelling at someone who can't do things faster than they already are doing them or magically pull a solution out of thin air is not going to do anything.
Someone with the sloppy attitude that they obviously don't care about the job is a different matter. But it really is that until you've had a similar experience you can't and don't understand why they can't take those coupons or do that return for cash or the other thing you're asking them to do. Not because they don't care or don't want to, but because they're not permitted to do so/don't have the resources.
Apparently professional consultants quite frequently figure out what's wrong in a company by asking the lower-level staff. It's one of their standard techniques.
That's often the problem with top-down implementation of new strategies; the 'mission statement' has grandiose goals, the idea is that naturally all the efficiency and cost-saving will happen as planned, but the tactics about how to make the plans work are missing and any input by the low-level staff who will have to carry out the new practices are dismissed or ignored. It'll work, and you will have to make it work. Telling them that "our clients are never going to be able to handle this", for instance, are brushed aside.
Just yesterday I had an example of this in work; the parents have to apply for a particular service. But they can no longer do this online or over the phone, they have to use "the app". So we had one parent coming in to us for help filling this out as they couldn't manage it.
I can only suppose the rationale there is "everyone has a smartphone, everyone knows how to use apps" but that is definitely not the case (and it's the most inconvenient way to try and fill out forms; part of this involved having to put a piece of paper with information on the desk, take a photo of it with the phone, and then upload that photo along with the form to the app).
That's somebody's Grand Top-Down Idea and how it works out in practice.
I have a whole file folder of similar examples.
"Let's introduce an automated process to post credits to certain guests' accounts when they use certain services during their stay in a way that makes it invisible to agents unless they click through two different windows despite the fact that most usage of the credit will occur the day of check out and thus will not be automated and must be posted manually by the front desk agent."
"Seems like that automation is going to cause a lot of over-crediting. Can't we forget about the automation and manually post all credits at the end of the stay?"
"Nah, just tell the front desk agents to be more careful!"
LOL.
I've heard that in the military, this sort of thing is talked about in terms of the commanding officer having been visited by the "Good Idea Fairy".
Eternally. New ideas come down From Above, you can tell within five minutes This Won't Work (at least not like this), but who listens to the people who have to use the process? They've already paid ££££/$$$$/€€€€ for the shiny new software package (which won't work with existing systems and is unsuitable for the purposes we need), so just make it work, peon, and if it doesn't, that's *your* fault.
Indeed, that's what the podcast episode is about.
BUT.
It only works if the professional consultant is genuinely interested in fixing the company rather than wracking up billable hours spinning plates AND upper management either never finds out where the consultant got their recommendations or has enough humility to acknowledge that lower-level staff know the products and systems much better than upper-level staff.
Jordan Peterson is so lame. A recent Dwarkish RT said to listen to him on Cain and Able. I have so many criticisms.
1) Peterson plays the classic boring preacher. His sin is the boringness of the lecture, the slow pace, the stupidity of the audience applauding an insipid point.
2) His interpretations don't ring true. In it, Able is successful and deservingly so. This plays to Peterson's biases. Outside the biblical story it is a good point: people do tend to demonize the successful for no other reason than that they are successful. But this point is made all the time in comedy. It's not profound and probably not Biblical. Is Able more deservingly successful than Cain? I thought the point of the story was that God simply decided he preferred one offering over the other. Cain nor Able could predict which one would be preferred. Yet Peterson considers Able more successful due to cause.
His moment in history has probably passed, but why did anyone consider Jordan Peterson deep ever?
>Is Able more deservingly successful than Cain? I thought the point of the story was that God simply decided he preferred one offering over the other
If an all-knowing and perfectly just deity decided that Abel's offering was better, then that's pretty strong evidence Abel was more deserving of the honour.
>Jordan Peterson is so lame
Yep. He's basically a vice principle - annoying, pedantic, excited to enforce his rules or lecture you about them.
What is weird about JP is how often he shows up on my feeds. The algorithms seem to have decided I fit the profile of a JP cultist. Quite the opposite; he strikes me as devoid of content and incredibly banal. I get more insight from GPT. I have a rule now to simply give him none of my brain cycles; hopefully the algorithms will eventually catch on. (Actually lately they've decided I want true crime and air disasters, sprinkled with medieval torture pr0n)
Maybe he's a (lame) AI?
>His moment in history has probably passed, but why did anyone consider Jordan Peterson deep ever?
Not for his bible lectures. More for his self-help and his very public opposition to 'misgendering' laws.
But at least Peterson is obviously a smart guy. I'm more concerned that apparently many people think clowns like Cornell West are smart.
I'd say that the main point of his Cain and Able lecture is not that people tend to demonize the successful, it's that *you don't want to be Cain*. Maybe Able deserved his success, or maybe he didn't (the passage in question is somewhat vague) but regardless if you allow yourself to submit to resentfulness and envy then you are in danger of becoming Cain. You will make the world worse instead of better. You will be consumed by your own sin. So don't be Cain!
Peterson's primary reason for lecturing is to try to teach people this basic idea: that you are capable of evil, and unless you shape up you will end up in a hell of your own making. That any of us is capable of being the Nazi gaurd at Auschwitz, or the NKVD officer driving a Black Maria, or a school shooter. But that you can do something about it. You can stand up straight with your shoulders back, you can clean your room, you can tell the truth, and you can make the world better instead of worse. That message resonates powerfully with a lot of people (evidence, the massive success of his books and lectures).
Able is more deserving than Cain.
The Bible says that Able provided from the "fat portions from some of the firstborn" - meaning the highest value portions of the best animals. This was the best of the best that Able had. God reaches out to Cain in the next verses and asks why he is angry (rhetorically) and also asks rhetorically "If you do what is right, will you not be accepted?" This says that Cain has the same opportunity to be accepted that Able had, but there was a responsibility on his part if he wanted to be accepted. He had to reach a higher level than he was at now, implying that he was giving lesser portions and knew it. He could have chosen to give the better portions, but instead let his envy of his brother lead him to murder. He allows his own sin to compound into greater sin, which God warns him will happen if he doesn't choose a different path: "But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at the door; it desires to have you, but you must rule over it."
Am I missing a joke? Why are three people in this thread separately mispelling Abel and nobody is spelling it correctly?
I had a similar thought.
Oh goodness, call it mental autocorrect and not checking my work. Sorry about that.
(joke) AI is Berenstain Bearing us.
Autocorrect, probably.
peterson was just fortunate to come along when half the country was being insane. sure his advice can be simple, but sometimes simple is effective. he is a motivational/self help speaker, and in that context he is fine. the problem is when people elevate him to be a deep intellectual. there are plenty of good motivational speakers that are helpful to many people, and we more or less are ok with that, but nobody is elevating how smart they are.
You will probably enjoy this, which I've watched like eight times and it always makes me laugh:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Io9xTYvfbkk&pp=ygUcZnJlZWRvbXRvb25zIGNsZWFuIHlvdXIgcm9vbQ%3D%3D
...I just started watching it again, and I think I might need to make it into a ringtone.
Peterson, much like Jesus, only became interesting after he got crucified.
At this point, a lot of the people who disagreed with his crucifixion started looking at the things he said earlier and finding that they seemed like reasonable common-sense things which they could get behind. But that's all they ever were.
(I am assuming that we are discussing his university lessons that were recorded and published on YouTube. If you meant something else, please correct me.)
As I see it, you make basically three objections: (1) the lessons are boring, (2) you could get the information from other sources, and (3) Peterson's interpretation of the Biblical stories and probably also other things is just that -- his interpretation.
I agree with you on point 3. I also had an impression that sometimes Peterson discusses the sources, but sometimes he merely uses the sources so that he can *project* on them the things he wants to talk about. A different guy could project completely different things on e.g. the story of C&A, so why should I specifically care about Peterson's version? (There is also a possibility that sometimes Peterson explains *someone else's* interpretation of the sources. But again, why should I care, unless I am specifically attending a lesson on the guy whose interpretation it was.)
I disagree on point 1, and I think that point 2 is irrelevant. Many people delivering the same information is a good thing per se, if they deliver the information better, or they reach a new audience. When I watch a video on e.g. some math concept, I don't care that other videos on the same topic exist. All I care about is whether this video explains the concept to me in a clear and nice way. And sometimes different versions work better for different people. Presumably, Peterson's videos are watched and recommended by people who like his style of explaining things. People who prefer to watch other sources should watch the other sources instead.
It would be wrong to deliver an information that exists elsewhere while pretending that it was you who invented it. But as far as I know, Peterson is *not* doing that. He plays the role of a teacher who explains things. Teachers are generally not expected to invent new things; they are expected to explain standard things, in a way accessible for their students. (Actually, we have just accused Peterson of the *opposite* sin -- talking about his own ideas, while pretending that he is merely teaching some standard knowledge.)
Point 1 is subjective. You find Peterson's lessons boring. I find them way more interesting than most lessons I had at university. Both perspectives are valid. Peterson's fans should not expect that everyone will like Peterson's style. That said, I like his style a lot, and I know a few more people who do.
> His moment in history has probably passed, but why did anyone consider Jordan Peterson deep ever?
I think that whatever message Peterson had to bring, he already did it. Listening to him now just means getting more of the same. (And that's the best case. The worst case would be, if in a desperate attempt to stay relevant, he went crazy.) I don't mean this as a criticism -- this is how things work naturally. His interpretation of mythology took him *decades* to develop: "Maps of Meaning" published in 1999 already contains the core of his philosophy; most of what he did since then was improving the delivery: the university lectures are way more accessible than the book, and his second book "12 Rules for Life" is even more accessible because shorter. (I haven't read the third one yet.) To bring a new content of comparable quality would again take years or decades of preparation.
I find his perspective on "chaos and order" useful in some situations, surprisingly so for such an abstract concept. For example, it provides some insight into dysfunctions of the rationalist community already described in the Sequences as "why our kind can't cooperate" (also the obsession with "akrasia"). If you adopt Peterson's perspective, it's all quite *obvious* -- we are psychologically out of balance, on the side of chaos. We instinctively say "no" to things; which on one hand allows us to avoid a lot of normie bullshit, on the other hand prevents us from building something better.
Basically, the extreme version of this is Mensa, which is completely chaotic (beyond having to pass the IQ test there is virtually no structure) and completely incompetent. And a large part of Eliezer's project could be interpreted as a pushback against this -- as an attempt to create a culture that keeps the good parts of the intelligent contrarianism, and hopefully overcomes the bad parts. On the ideological level, there is an invisible battle between Bayesianism and Popperianism. (Bayesianism vs Frequentism is just a red herring.) Popperianism, at least its version popular on the internet, is pure negativity: things can only be falsified, but saying anything nice about them, even "yeah, this seems likely", is a heresy. As a Popperian, you can only do science by compartmentalizing: by assuming that certain things (such as evolution, relativity, or quantum physics) are true, while verbally denying that you are doing so ("I am only *saying* that they were not falsified yet, not that they are true", yeah but you are *acting as if* they are true or at least very likely). Bayesianism brings back symmetry by saying that evidence against X is necessarily evidence for non-X, that "absence of evidence *is* evidence of absence", that we can't have a 100% certainty, but we definitely can have probabilities like 99% or higher; we are allowed to admit that sometimes we know things. Most rationalists do not participate in this battle explicitly, most are probably unaware that it exists, but there is a reason why so much importance is put on Bayesianism being the right way to think about beliefs.
Not sure how useful this perspective is, but I think it provides some intuition about which things might work and which might make the situation worse.
PART 2: More thoughts on implications of Peterson's "chaos and order"...
Peterson's message, as I understand it, is that although there are things you should say "no" to, you cannot build better things by saying "no" to everything; at some moment you need to also say "yes" to something else.
In politics, this is associated with right vs left, as the right traditionally represents saying "yes" to existing things (i.e. "order"), and the left represents saying "no" to existing things (i.e. "chaos"). That works fine as long as the left is the weaker side. But when the left *wins*, then... one option is the Soviet way, when the left basically becomes the new right (the leftists critical of Soviet Union call is "state capitalism") and you get all the thing the leftists originally fought against (inequality, lack of food, lack of freedoms, etc.) except now it is supposed to be okay, because under the new regime these things nominally happen in the name of the left... and the other option I would perhaps call the California way, when the left has the power but denies having it (e.g. the weird system where if you disagree with certain people, you will predictably lose your job, and yet those people call themselves oppressed and call you an oppressor), where the streets are full of homeless people on drugs, and universities produce pseudoscience.
When you look at the population the rationalist community recruits from, other typical words associated with them are "contrarian" or "skeptic" or "atheist". Notice that these are all *negative* words; they basically mean saying "no" to the mainstream, saying "no" to non-obvious ideas, and saying "no" to religion. This is not necessarily a problem per se (I am an atheist myself), but it becomes a problem when saying "no" becomes a strong habit (socially rewarded by other people having the same habit), and the entire thing converges to a 3 years old's mentality. When people start saying "no" to things merely because others believe those things, or because they know they will be applauded for saying "no", regardless of the actual merit of the thing they are saying "no" to. Now try to achieve something with the help of such people, and I can easily predict what happens... they will say "no". Yeah, funny game, until it gets boring. Stops being fun when there is something you actually care about ("something to protect").
So how does a herd of cats build a city? Ideological layer: Bayesianism, and reminding people that they have something to protect. Technical layer: forum with moderators, downvotes, bans. Knowledge layer: Sequences, yearly reviews of best posts. Fiction layer: "beisutsukai", "dath ilan" (note the evolution from a semi-permanent small group to a planet-wide civilization). From a certain perspective, these are all steps in the same direction; Eliezer yelling "cooperate", i.e. trying to bring more order. And as a result, a few things actually get built. Yeah, we have hoped for more. But the default option was getting even less.
Thanks for writing these out. I found them interesting and helpful.
This all reminds me of a great quote by Terry Pratchett:
"According to the philosopher, Ly Tin Wheedle, chaos is found in greatest abundance wherever order is being sought. It always defeats order, because it is better organized."
Will there be another web series like Unsong in the future?
There is certainly going to be more web fiction/web comics, even if restricted to the ratfic genre. (Homestuck, HPMOR, Planecrash, etc. all come to mind.) I think that whether there's going to be anything *good* (or anything *very similar* to Unsong) is still up in the air, though.
Similar to Unsong is an incredible high bar, but there are some good web serials out there. (I am once again telling everyone I know to read A Practical Guide to Evil.)
Also, I wouldn't count Homestuck as ratfic. It's a good story, but it's very un-systematized and silly. It's not a story about understanding the world and making smart decisions, it's a story about... well... uh... I'm not sure how you sum it up in a pithy way. A research project to discover how many words you can invent before the story becomes incomprehensible to readers? An attempt to set the world record for most convoluted time-travel plot?
I would definitely be very interested in an Unsong sequel. After all, the story ends with the universe becoming perfect but...we never get to see it.
So during our get together for the eclipse the door into our garage broke and couldn't be opened. (I know! this a weak data point for equating total eclipses with the zombie apocalypse, because the first thing that happens when zombies arrive is either doors are locked or can't be locked.) So (after ripping the old door lock out.) I stopped at the local hardware and bought another.
"John" I said, "sell me your cheapest door lock, thingie, knob."
"My most cost effective you mean?" (John and I are old buddies, I go down to the hardware to have a beer or two on fridays.)
"Yeah that one", I say. He pulls down a box from the top shelf.
"I over ordered these." John says.
And for something less than $20 I go home with a new door knob.
And I wouldn't be writing this post if it hadn't been the best door knob gizmo to install ever. Now mind you I have no idea of the lifetime of this door knob, but if you've ever put in a door knob. (which you all should learn how to do, Because of zombies!) well after all the other stuff, you have to line up these two screws. which hold the whole door knob together. And it always is a pita. And on this new knob, you screwed the two screws into the outside first, and then you twist the inside knob on, and it has gaps for the screw shaft and a place for the head to catch. And then you tighten it up. And at the moment it get's my vote for the best door knob gizmo ever.
What's the brand? I have family working in construction & home renos. Door knobs can be a pain.
Kwikset... hang on. there's no part number but,
featuring
SMARTKEY
SECURITY
is on the front
and EASY INSTALL on the back.
Awesome, thanks!
Ok so my understanding is that both (US) political parties are quite decentralized. Obviously primaries prevent much top-down control, but even party platforms and bylaws are decided pretty locally (?).
Given this, how hard would it be to “coup” a local political party? Eg imagine you’re a left-wing candidate running for election in a deep blue constituency. One strategy would be to get some of your friends to vote for you in the _Replublican_ primary, and then spend the general election convincing voters that you’re legit despite the nominal party label. Going further, you could imagine taking control of the whole local party apparatus and changing the “official” platform (not the these platforms mean much anyway).
Does this ever happen? I can’t find any instances but it’s a difficult-to-google scenario.
This American Life did an episode on a similar situation that happened in Michigan last year. https://www.thisamericanlife.org/820/believe-in-me Its not as extreme as democrats taking over the republican party, but does a great job showing how this can happen in practice. There are real time interview and audio as party decisions are being made and outsiders are taking over.
This is why Michael Bloomberg was nominally a Republican for the 2001 election in New York City. There were seven candidates in the primaries, all of whom had been Democrats prior to the campaign. The two most conservative of the seven democrats (Bloomberg and Badilo) ran as Republicans and faced a less-crowded primary than the other five who contested the Democratic nomination. It helped that both Bloomberg and Badilo were running on platforms of continuing at least some of the major policies of the outgoing Republican mayor (Giuliani), and Badilo had been part of Giuliani's administration. It also helped that no actual Republicans bothered to run.
A more systematic instance was the efforts of the Ron Paul campaigns in 2008 and 2012 and concurrent and subsequent activities of aligned organizations like the Campaign for Liberty and the Republican Liberty Caucus (*). The goal wasn't to get Paul the Republican nomination for President, and even getting the message out via debates and campaign appearances was a secondary goal. The main goal was to take control of local Republican Party organizations as part of a long-term effort to hijack the Republican Party. In many parts of the country, local party committee members are chosen in primaries or caucuses in races where hardly anyone pays attention (making it possible for a well-organized group take over by doing little more than showing up). And in some places (e.g. California) the Republican nominees for various offices get to appoint a certain number of delegates to the state party convention (that chooses the state party leadership and sets the platform) regardless of how badly they loose, enabling a strategy of running paper candidates for unwinnable races in order to get the otherwise-worthless nomination by default and thus gain control of a block of delegates.
(*) Campaign for Liberty was explicitly a Ron Paul organization. The Republican Liberty Caucus was not but had overlapping goals and a lot of people in this time period came to the RLC from the Ron Paul campaigns. When I was involved in the RLC (roughly 2009-2016), there was a significant spread of opinion between those who wanted to hijack the Republican party wholesale via organizational shenanigans and those who wanted to work with libertarian-adjacent groups within the mainstream Republican activist community to pull the party in a somewhat more libertarian direction; I was firmly in the latter camp.
Back in the early '00s — and I think it was in one of the blue counties of WA or OR — some local Dems noticed that there was no longer a functioning Republican local committee. They changed their voter registration from Dem to Republican and following the rules promulgated by the RNC created their own "Republican" local party committee. BTW, these were "progressive" Dems. They adopted their own local platform, which included things like urging the GOP to support a withdrawal from Iraq, and they fielded their own "progressive" candidates against the centrist Dems who controlled the local party apparatus. At some point before the election, the national RNC got wind that the local GOP party apparatus had been taken over by progressive Dems. I think the RNC got the Secretary of State (who was Republican at the time) of that state to disqualify those candidates. Sorry, I don't have any links for this. It was almost twenty years ago.
Yes, this happens a lot. Usually between competing wings within the same party, rather than an opposing party taking over the apparatus. For a complete outsider to take control would involve a significant amount of effort (as someone else said, more than participating in your own party's primary) and/or the opposing party essentially being non-existent.
Within the same party, this looks like factions who may support a particular candidate or slate or candidates or one or more particularly important policies within that faction. For instance Covid, education, trans sports, etc. which are all within the valence of the Republican party but may be more or less important to individual members. A group may get involved in local politics to pursue a stronger stance within those areas particularly.
I won't say it's a coup, but isn't this what happened with the DSA candidates? They ran under the aegis of the local Democratic Party:
"In recent years, the DSA's stated long-term goal has been to form an independent workers' party, while in the meantime it adopts a "proto-party" strategy called the "dirty break". DSA's elected leadership has often seen running in Democratic Party primary elections, rather than immediately forming a third party, as necessary for socialist visibility and electoral victories while the organization builds the resources for a viable workers' party. DSA also developed a stricter endorsement policy since 2016, endorsing only democratic socialists."
"The Democratic Socialists of America is a political nonprofit organization and not a political party, therefore DSA members usually run as members of the Democratic Party, Green Party, Working Families Party, or as independents."
At various times, there have been places where the local political party elected candidates quite different from the national party's preference. As I understand it, these were areas where one party was so dominant, that whatever candidate won that party's primary was guaranteed to win the general election. So everyone who wanted a say in the outcome joined the party. And so the local party base resembled the entire local electorate, and wound up choosing candidates in the primary who represented the overall electorate. And when the overall position of the local electorate shifted over time, the party affiliation stayed the same, leading to seemingly-odd results.
I think people have polarized enough in the last few decades that this might not be the case anywhere. But I had a friend during college who was quite liberal, outspokenly so, who was nevertheless a registered Republican in his home state.
'Does this ever happen' yes it extremely famously happened in 2016. The affected party did a 360 on its longtime positions on free trade and the role of America as a global power, among other things. Did you not know that Trump taking over the Republican party is like the famous example of a party coup, like, ever?
I'm unable to like comments, so consider this a like.
They’ll still be writing books about this a hundred years from now. It’s truly mind boggling.
World class sycophant Lindsey Graham ‘respectfully disagreed’ with Trump a couple days ago and Trump spent half a day publicly tearing Lindsey a new one.
It's scary how fast the Republican Party collapsed around him. And it's strange, because it resembles what's been going on at a grassroots level on the left, where the most extreme voices have been taking over and shaping the discourse around them, and it's hard to stand up against them. But the Democratic Party is still functional at higher levels.
I wonder what the difference is. Maybe the extremists took over low-level Republican discourse earlier, and the rot has had more time to spread? I remember things in the 2000s like the Tea Party and the purity spiral of calling people RINOs, but I've never been as plugged in to that side. Maybe it goes all the way back to the 90s and the rise of conservative talk radio and Fox News.
The thing that seems most salient for me is that the people who stood up against Trump from the right got shouted down and faded out of the discourse. There wasn't support for voices saying "this is wrong and stupid and dangerous", at least not as long as Trump polled well. And I wonder, if there were a Democratic candidate who was as venal and shallow as Trump, but got the same kind of reaction from the grassroots as Trump, would the establishment be able to stop them? Or is it just a matter of time?
>One strategy would be to get some of your friends to vote for you in the _Republican_ primary, and then spend the general election convincing voters that you’re legit despite the nominal party label.
But to what purpose? if the town is indifferent enough for you to pull it off, that just means you're running a Democratic Party campaign against the Democratic Party candidate, without the support of the Democratic Party's funds. You can do that cheaper in the primaries.
What made the LANBY ocean navigation network obsolete?
If you don't get a decent answer here, try asking on this website:
https://www.navalgazing.net/ .
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbf4BGIBENk&ab_channel=SashaYanshin
I'm clearly not cynical enough. There's at least good reason to believe that Amazon's Just Walk Out-- a system that lets people take their purchases, walk out, and be charged automatically is actually a thousand people in India evaluating video. Possible evidence-- shouldn't the charge for the purchase happen immediately rather than, as it does, taking hours?
I'd figured out that the answers to questions that appear after searches are scraped from web sites, but I didn't realize that the scraping sometimes adds errors and that google isn't directing people to the sites. The sites are in bad financial shape as a result. Talk about eating your seed corn.
Google ranking also involves a lot of work by humans.
The major point is that the stock market likes claims of using ai, which isn't the same thing as actually using ai.
Maybe they trained a neural net to analyze the shopping.
https://xkcd.com/2173/
I think this is an example of what we're discussing further up-thread about Great Top-Down Policies. I imagine people working in the stores objected about shoplifting, people deliberately not paying, and just simply 'how can you be sure every item is tagged and charged appropriately?" (If you've ever used a self-service checkout, or even the ordinary check-outs, you'll probably have had the experience of one item is not reading the barcode or isn't on the data base, so it has to be manually entered).
And I imagine the higher-ups brushed this aside with "of course it will work, don't you know AI is the future?"
And then it didn't work. So they needed humans. So they hired outsourced cheap labour, because having visible human checkout operators in their swish new 'just walk out' stores would be an admission of failure 😀
What Melvin said. Plus, if Amazon is doing it, it's probably a more cost-effective solution overall. I wouldn't be surprised if someone ran some numbers and figured that it would be better in the long run to roll out the service before the AI backend was capable of handling the entire thing, and then quietly ramp up the portion of the backend handled by AI. Or perhaps they're doing "on-the-job training": having humans double-check AI decisions, and then improving the AI based on the human feedback.
But it hasn't worked out, as they're scrapping it and going back to self-service checking out (this time you scan your products as you put them into the trolley). So the bugs haven't been worked out and whatever training or improving the AI they did with the experiment showed that they don't yet have the kind of product they want and need.
The *idea* is very seductive, but the notion of "as you walk around the RF signal goes to the automated till about what products you took off the shelves" clearly has problems; for a start, I wonder how they manage with the way all the products are put into the shopping cart, some must surely be blocking the tags/barcodes of others. And picking up something to look at it then putting it back on the shelf might trigger false charges if the sensitivity is too high.
As this story puts it, the Just Walk Out is (for them) the best experience, so why are Amazon junking it? It has to be because it's not working as intended:
https://www.geekwire.com/2024/amazon-dash-cart-vs-just-walk-out-we-put-the-tech-giants-new-grocery-strategy-to-the-test/
"“Just Walk Out” is the most seamless way to shop here, faster than the other two options by a significant amount. We were left wondering why Amazon is moving away from this option at these stores.
Dash Carts were the most frustrating option, and didn’t save us much time. We found the process of scanning and entering items into the high-tech shopping cart to be clunky, inconsistent, and difficult to navigate.
Traditional shopping — using a non-digital cart and paying at the cashier — was the easiest and most simple option. It did take more time, including a few minutes waiting in line at the cashier’s station.“
Yeah, Amazon isn't scared of trying stuff, seeing if it works, and scrapping it. Or it wasn't, anyway. It might have changed.
Fair enough. It was a good idea, they just couldn't get it to work. I give them credit for trying. The good thing about being a $2 trillion company is that you can afford to try new ideas.
I've no objection at all to trying out new things, I'm just laughing at "We do it all by AI!" (the AI is "people in India").
I very much doubt that it's _just_ a manual process, more likely it's an AI model combined with manual review for tricky cases. The hope was presumably to improve the model over time (as you collect millions of hours of labelled in-the-wild video) and reduce the number of tricky cases requiring manual review to near zero.
So at least in short term, artificial intelligence will *increase* employment. You may lose your job thanks to ChatGPT, but in turn you will be hired to write the answers for ChatGPT.
I imagine a glorious future where everything is automated, and everyone has a job where they sign a NDA and manually do some of the "automated" things.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00901-3
Patients investigating long COVID-- they started with a survey of symptoms, then looked into which medications they were already taking that seemed to help. They've turned up some promising possibilities.
Left to themselves, scientists had been only studying specific symptoms, a very expensive way to learn anything.
There is *still* going to be another study of exercise even though there's a lot of evidence that exercise is bad for long COVID.
However, there are also studies being done or soon to be done based on the patients' research.
Do you know who Ivan Chonkin is? I'm sure that very few of you know the work of Vladimir Voinovich, an excellent satirist from the Soviet Union. His short stories and novels are both a telescope and a magnifying glass on life in a totalitarian cult of personality. He knows where the comi/tragedies are buried, and he unearths them all: https://falsechoices.substack.com/p/old-stories-ivan-chonkin-is-dead
I've read the first Chonkin novel and also the Ivankiad - his non-fiction work about being awarded a bigger flat by the Writers Union then having it rescinded because some party bigwig wanted the flat instead. Devastating satire all the way to the last line
Alright, thanks for the tip on the Ivankiad, it's on the list. The satire of Lysenko is some of the funniest I've read.
In this Youtube short, the author claims that there is one thing all Protestants agree on: the bible has more authority than the church.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/VMiM4khBVdM
Is he right?
I have to say, after this long discussion sub-thread, "Welcome to Theology Corner, your place in the rationalist blogging world for answers on questions of dogma, doctrine, and discipline!"
And all gratitude to Scott for putting up with us 😀
Nah. Only some Protestants. Or maybe it depends on how you define "Protestant".
Anglicans would be a counterexample, and there are probably others. Although they more did the "Good Omens" thing, and sauntered off in a vaguely protest-like direction.
Oh, that YouTuber. His "All Christian denominations explained in 12 minutes" went viral a while back. Its good as far as YouTube primers go. I had to laugh because at the end he shows a bunch of denominations that he says he didn't include because he isn't sure they're Christian at all: and right there among the Mormans and the rest I found my own denomination! That was a shock and a laugh. If you had told my father that someone would put us on the same level as the Mormans, he would have thought his hearing was going.
Turned out the problem was that my particular denomination is *too* Sola Scriptura: we don't hold that the Nicene Creed is necessarily true (because it's not in the Bible) and as far as he's concerned you have to believe the Creed to be considered Christian at all.
(I do believe in the Creed, and I'd say just about everyone I went to church would too, but we believed it because it matched what the Bible said, not because the Creed itself was authoritative).
Are your lot at least Chalcedon Compliant? 😁
"The Chalcedonian Definition (also called the Chalcedonian Creed or the Definition of Chalcedon) is a declaration of Christ's nature (that it is dyophysite), adopted at the Council of Chalcedon in AD 451. Chalcedon was an early centre of Christianity located in Asia Minor. The council was the fourth of the ecumenical councils that are accepted by Chalcedonian churches which include the Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Lutheran, Anglican and Reformed churches.
It was the first council not to be recognised by any Oriental Orthodox church; for this reason these churches may be classified as Non-Chalcedonian."
Technically no, but in practice yes. My denomination is about as far towards scripture as you can get on the "scripture vs tradition" slider. Back during the Second Great Awakening our movement had a few catchy slogans: "No creed but Christ! No book but the Bible!" So if it ain't in the Good Book, it ain't required.
On the other hand, we inherited a lot from Christian tradition without even knowing it. The trinity, a dyophysite Christ, and pretty much all the Nicene Creed is something just about everyone in my church would agree with. Another of our slogans was "In essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, in all things love". We'd define the essentials as things that are clearly in the scripture, but in practice "essentials" rounds out to the Apostles Creed. If there were any monophosites in the congregation we'd probably just agree to disagree.
"Technically no, but in practice yes."
OUT, HERETIC! 😁
I will mildly tsk-tsk at that, but then again it puts your set in the same group as the Oriental Orthodox, and if I'm happy to say the Ethiopian Church is Christian, why not?
Though to make mischief, if the denomination does not accept the determinations of the Councils as prescriptive, they're rather hung on the horns of the dilemma that it was those same Councils that set the canon of the Scriptures they are Sola-ing as the ultimate authority.
Generally we'd say that the scriptures that were officially made canon were made so because they were the best ones we have. So even if you don't believe the Councils should have authority over you, that doesn't change the fact that the scriptures they choose are the best we got. I mean, just compare the gospel of Matthew to the gospel of Thomas, it's pretty clear which is superior.
Definitely the gospel of Matthew is much more in line with our expectations than the gospel of Thomas, but at the time things like the gospel of Thomas and the Infancy gospel were floating around and being treated as similarly relevant. The Councils were needed to hammer this out, as well as defining doctrines. A different decision, and today we might be arguing that the gospel of Thomas is valid more than this Mark guy 😀
Oh it's the same dude who made the hilarious "Every atheist argument answered in 10 minutes" video!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k02_gcrsnLs
> the bible has more authority than the church.
The Bible as defined and interpreted by Protestants has more authority than the Catholic church. -- fixed that for you
I don't think it's "the Bible as interpreted by Protestants" - it's rather "your interpretation of the Bible". They don't say you should defer to canonical Protestant interpretation.
I think there's some disagreement about whether the interpretation should be done on a personal level, or a congregational level, or on the level of the local priest/reverend/preacher, or on a local grouping of priests/reverends/preachers, or the local bishop (if they have them), or a grouping of bishops, or possibly even the local head of state. Among other disagreements.
Isn't that every single totalitarian religion on Earth though? The Quran is a thinly-veiled sock puppet of Muhammed too.
Generally, books do not interpret themselves.
> Generally, books do not interpret themselves.
I think this only applies to sufficiently mysterious books though (the Bible and Quran being both examples). Most books seem pretty self-explanatory.
"I sometimes think that writing is like driving a sheep down the road. If there's any gate open to the left or the right the reader will most certainly go into it.” -C. S. Lewis
That's where God's grace comes in.
The major difference back at the Reformation was the authority of Scripture versus Scripture plus Tradition. That's where the ever-popular "where is that in the Bible?" comes from when questioning Catholic/Orthodox practices and beliefs, and why Internet atheists keep believing that if they can only do enough quote verse-mining to show that verse A contradicts verse B, this is a knock-out blow (remember the "whales aren't fish" bit?), because for Americans, they're familiar with the inerrant literal Bible mindset of the USA denominations and take that as normative for global Christianity.
I've had enough of that that I sometimes think I should get a t-shirt made up reading "Not A Protestant", as Scripture is not the sole authority for us. The Anglicans, because they have to be awkward, prefer Hooker's formulation about the three legs of the stool - Scripture, Tradition, and Reason:
"The classic expression of the Anglican understanding of authority comes from Richard Hooker (d. 1600), favorite of Queen Elizabeth I and ardent preacher against the Puritans, whose masterful work Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity has been perhaps the authoritative voice of classic Anglicanism. In Book 5 he writes on the nature of authority in the Church, where we find what is probably his most famous passage:
“Be it in matter of the one kind or of the other [i.e. doctrine vs. church practice], what Scripture doth plainly deliver, to that the first place both of credit and obedience is due; the next whereunto is whatsoever any man can necessarily conclude by force of reason; after these the voice of the Church succeedeth. That which the Church by her ecclesiastical authority shall probably think and define to be true or good, must in congruity of reason overrule all other inferior judgments whatsoever.” (V.8.2)"
So for Hooker, the ordering goes Scripture -> Reason -> Tradition (the Church). This enables them to eat their cake and have it over changing doctrines (we're not like those Papists that invent and add on doctrines, we use reason to make up our minds!) and thus claim to be both Biblical Protestants and yet liberal as time goes on.
So for the very hardcore denominations, it's Sola Scriptura all the way. For the mainstream, it's Scripture filtered through Reason (or whatever the Zeitgeist wants). The authority of the church comes last, as it's mostly in arguments with Catholicism that they are downgrading the equal authority of Tradition.
> The classic expression of the Anglican understanding of authority comes from Richard Hooker
That's Anglican Classic, or maybe Mexican Anglican (with real sugar).* But I'm not sure how we get from there to Bishop Spong? I kinda feel like theology should be more rigorous than "it sounds good when I agree with him, and sounds like New Age nonsense when I don't". That is precisely the sort of thing that gets me questioning my own beliefs, and not in the way that they probably want.
* For non-Americans, this is a reference to varieties of Coca-Cola, including the good stuff that only comes from Mexico (or apparently with a yellow(!!!) cap during Passover).
The road from there to Bishop Spong is a long and torturous one, but arises out of the logical consequences of "the Pope is not the boss of me", which leads on to "no stinkin' Archbishop of Canterbury is the boss of me". When your church has been under the construction of someone like Henry VIII who did think of himself as the spiritual head, fancied himself a theologian, and liked to meddle directly with setting doctrine, then the foundations are laid for 'so long as the secular authorities authorise it, it's okay' and hence any internal fighting over what is or is not permissible has to be referred to the external authority of Parliament, in this case.
The seeds of this came to fruit with the Bishop Colenso affair:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Colenso#Religious_debate
After all, if each separate national church is its own thing, then the Anglican church in Britain can only have a notional authority over the church in another country. The liberal and modernist view can fight it out against the traditional view. This happens within Catholicism as well, of course, but the Pope is the ultimate authority in a way the Archbishop of Canterbury is not.
And with the prizing of "we believe in Reason, we're not superstitious like the Papists, we can adapt as Science increases knowledge" (I know, "but what about Darwin?", but that was one of the ways the reliance on "inerrant, literal, Sola Scriptura" was weakened) and so over time as things became socially acceptable, the call was on for the Church to liberalise right along with society. And since the secular authority was the ultimate one for Anglicanism, that pressure was exerted successfully - see Chesterton's scathing account of the Prayer Book Controversy:
"The proposal of an amended Prayer-Book, or rather two alternative Prayer-Books, was not decided for the Church by the Churchy or by the communicants; or by the congregation. It was settled by a mob of politicians, atheists, agnostics, dissenters, Parsees; avowed enemies of that Church or of any Church, who happened to have M.P. after their names. If the whole thing had any historic motto, or deserved anything higher than a headline, what was written across all that Anglican story was not Ecclesia Anglicana, or Via Media, or anything of the sort; it was Cujus Regio Ejus Religio; or rendering unto Caesar the things that are God’s.
I add one incident to contrast Style, among men who had been Catholics for fourteen-hundred years, with that among men who have been Protestants for four-hundred years. A Protestant organisation presented all the atheists, etc., who had voted Protestant, with a big black Bible or Prayer-Book, or both, decorated outside with a picture of the Houses of Parliament. In hoc signo vinces. It would be very idolatrous to put a cross or crucifix outside a book; but a picture of Parliament where the Party Funds are kept, and the peerages sold — . That is the temple where dwell the gods of Israel... We know the world progresses, and education is certainly extended, and there are fewer illiterates; and I suppose it is all right."
Now, if all this sounds like Catholic boasting, I think we dodged a bullet with Vatican II. We certainly scrapped a lot of things for the liberal faction, but the big loss was on "Humane Vitae" where Paul VI (considered a weak pope, generally) went in the face of the expectation that yeah, now the Church was going to get all modern from the liberals, and indeed against the advice of the Pontifical Commission established to examine this, and repeated and reinforced the teachings against artificial birth control. Anglicanism had given in on this at Lambeth in 1926, and it was expected that eventually the Catholics would drag their mediaeval asses into the modern era, but we didn't. Solely because the Pope is the pope.
So much for mainstream Protestant churches, which more or less all went the same way. For the non-mainstream churches in America, the big division came around Modernism and the effects of such things as the historical-critical method as applied to the Bible. Fundamentalism had its formal beginnings as such in the late 19th century, and by 1910 there were established declarations and principles of Fundamentalism, mainly the inerrancy of Scripture.
So of course there were splits between, very broadly speaking, the mainline churches which trended liberal theologically and socially, the evangelicals, and the fundamentalists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_fundamentalism#History
"The Princeton theology, which responded to higher criticism of the Bible by developing from the 1840s to 1920 the doctrine of inerrancy, was another influence in the movement. This doctrine, also called biblical inerrancy, stated that the Bible was divinely inspired, religiously authoritative, and without error. The Princeton Seminary professor of theology Charles Hodge insisted that the Bible was inerrant because God inspired or "breathed" his exact thoughts into the biblical writers (2 Timothy 3:16). Princeton theologians believed that the Bible should be read differently than any other historical document, and they also believed that Christian modernism and liberalism led people to Hell just like non-Christian religions did."
And of course, since the church *structure* was not authoritative - every congregation its own independent church as it were - it is only on things like interpretation of the Bible they can agree, and as we've seen since the Reformation (and before), everyone interprets the Bible in their own way. Having chopped down the trunk of "The Pope can't tell you how to read the Bible", they had also sawed off the branch of "You can't come up with your own cuckoo interpretation" because you're not the boss of me, after all.
That's my view as an outsider, anyway.
That's my understanding, but the test is surely going to be the branches that allow openly gay pastors, which is anti-biblical. Keep in mind the Latter Day Saints like Mormonism are not Protestants; I was surprised to hear from a Mormon friend that their church assigns congregations to churches based on where they live, akin to voting districts.
Google's first few results say there are three defining features of Protestantism, though the first article is paywalled and the second has a different three. https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Protestant-Heritage From experience, churchgoers are not as united on "faith through grace alone" as the articles suggest, though the church doctrines may well be.
The video does discuss liberal denominations, for which neither the Bible nor the church has much authority. But even for them (according to the video) the Bible has a bit more than church tradition.
And I assume it's correct, but I've never interacted with those denominations and couldn't say how accurate that really is.
> the test is surely going to be the branches that allow openly gay pastors, which is anti-biblical.
Wait, really? Does the Bible actually forbid gay priests?
I don't think there's anything in the Bible that cares about orientation, as long as the priest is celibate.
Once we start having priests (or rough equivalents) who have sexual relationships, then it starts to matter. But at that point I think it's still a matter of priests playing by the same rules as everyone else. If homosexual relationships are OK for ordinary people, and it's OK for priests to have sexual relationships, then it's OK for priests to have homosexual relationships. I don't recall ever seeing anything that goes against that logic.
Leviticus chapter 18 covers sexual immorality, including homosexuality and adultery with your father's wife. https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Leviticus+18&version=NIV
1 Corinthians chapter 5 covers a man in the new church committing adultery with his father's wife, and Paul demanding they expel him as a member immediately. https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+Corinthians+5&version=NIV
Hmm...
The same chapter in Old Testament states that incest and homosexuality are bad and then in the New Testament it's reminded that adultery is still bad. Therefore homosexuality is also bad according to the New Testament. Seems like a bit of a stretch, considering that a lot of things stated in Old Testament are no longer considerd valid.
Moreover, even initial premise that according to the Old Testament Homosexuality is bad is kind of questionable. Chapter 18 first states "No incest!" and then meticulously explains what is considered incest to evade misinterpretations. All of this kinds of incest are about man to woman sexual encounters.
And then after all that it states "do not have sexual relationship with a man as one does with a woman". Which is kind of ambiguous. Is it about not having man to man sexual relationships? Or is it that sexual relationship between two man should be different from sexual relationship between man and a woman? It can even be interpreted that all these rules about man to woman sexual relationship do not apply to man to man sexual relationship and so same sex incest is fine - explains why it goes right after the talks about incest and makes some sense from genetics perspective.
Motivated reasoning through and through. "The Bible says do not murder, but it only talks about striking people so they die, it doesn't say anything about cutting them open and filling their wounds with salt. So that method must be fine." No, it doesn't specify the method because it doesn't have to.
The genetics argument is silly because it's right next to "don't have sex with a woman on her period." It's also right next to "do not have sex with an animal and defile yourself with it." (But of course "defile" is ambiguous, it's surely perfectly fine to have sex with an animal in a respectful way, right?)
Are there non-motivated ways to reason about an ambiguous sacred text?
> "The Bible says do not murder, but it only talks about striking people so they die, it doesn't say anything about cutting them open and filling their wounds with salt. So that method must be fine."
Well if it went like
Don't murder people
Don't murder people with a blade
Don't murder people with a blunt object
Don't murder people via suffucation
Don't murder people via creating an appearance of accident
Don't murder people indirectly
Don't murder people at all - murder is bad
Don't steal on Tuesdays
I think it would be a quite natural interpretation to think that stealing on other days of the week is fine. And Leviticus 18 has a somewhat similar structure.
> it's right next to "don't have sex with a woman on her period."
The interpretation that the rules for hetero relationships do not apply to homo relationships works here perfectly well .
> It's also right next to "do not have sex with an animal and defile yourself with it."
The bestiality verse goes *after* the "don't have sex with a man the same way as with a woman". First incest rules are described, then it's mentioned that they do not applied to homosexual relationships and then bestiality rules are described - makes perfect sense.
Also notice that how the bestiality verse goes. Even though the defile part is a bit up to interpretation, as you mention, the general prohibition is very clear: Don't do thing, don't let women do this thing. Why wasn't verse 22 designed in the same manner: Don't have sexual relationship with a man, a woman must not have sexual relationship with a woman? Why the ambiguity where in other places the text is very specific, extremely specific, to the point of directly describing all the possible incest varieties? This is weird, don't you think?
Can it be some artifact of translation? Is the Hebrew version ambiguous the same way?
None of that seems like a rule about priests - as I understand it, the Bible itself doesn't say much about any formal priesthood for Christians.
Same problem as with St Paul's epistle discussing bishops and deacons, for churches that later permitted divorce and remarriage when the ex-spouse was still alive, so a lot of logic-chopping was done about "Well ackshully when Paul says 'the husband of one wife' he *really* means monogamous, not polygamous, so it's okay to be divorced and remarried and a minister!"
The below is a Protestant translation so it uses "overseer" instead of "bishop" 'cos y'know, "bishop" is one of the terms them there hierarchical liturgical churches, especially them Romanists, use 😁
3 The saying is trustworthy: If anyone aspires to the office of overseer, he desires a noble task. 2 Therefore an overseer must be above reproach, the husband of one wife, sober-minded, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, 3 not a drunkard, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money. 4 He must manage his own household well, with all dignity keeping his children submissive, 5 for if someone does not know how to manage his own household, how will he care for God's church? 6 He must not be a recent convert, or he may become puffed up with conceit and fall into the condemnation of the devil. 7 Moreover, he must be well thought of by outsiders, so that he may not fall into disgrace, into a snare of the devil.
Qualifications for Deacons
8 Deacons likewise must be dignified, not double-tongued, not addicted to much wine, not greedy for dishonest gain. 9 They must hold the mystery of the faith with a clear conscience. 10 And let them also be tested first; then let them serve as deacons if they prove themselves blameless. 11 Their wives likewise must be dignified, not slanderers, but sober-minded, faithful in all things. 12 Let deacons each be the husband of one wife, managing their children and their own households well. 13 For those who serve well as deacons gain a good standing for themselves and also great confidence in the faith that is in Christ Jesus."
>11 But now I am writing to you that you must not associate with anyone who claims to be a brother or sister[c] but is sexually immoral or greedy, an idolater or slanderer, a drunkard or swindler. Do not even eat with such people.
Are you willing to argue that someone deemed unworthy to be present in the church is nonetheless qualified to lead it?
Not at all - just that most people read that line in a way that doesn’t suggest a test for *any* of those categories that would disqualify someone for the priesthood, or for membership in a church.
There is a bit in 1st Timothy where Paul explains his view on the qualifications needed to be an "overseer" in the church, which is somewhat analogous to a priest/pastor.
"Now the overseer is to be above reproach, faithful to his wife, temperate, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not given to drunkenness, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money. He must manage his own family well and see that his children obey him, and he must do so in a manner worthy of full respect. (If anyone does not know how to manage his own family, how can he take care of God’s church?) He must not be a recent convert, or he may become conceited and fall under the same judgment as the devil. He must also have a good reputation with outsiders, so that he will not fall into disgrace and into the devil’s trap.
"In the same way, deacons are to be worthy of respect, sincere, not indulging in much wine, and not pursuing dishonest gain. They must keep hold of the deep truths of the faith with a clear conscience. They must first be tested; and then if there is nothing against them, let them serve as deacons."
Wouldn't applying the criteria of "faithful to his wife" and "see[s] that his children obey him" forbid celibate priests as well as gay ones?
That does seem more relevant! But doesn't seem to single out a ban on gay priests any more than a ban on mean priests or a ban on greedy priests.
At least that was the reason for founding the Protestant church by the reformers like Martin Luther. It's still visible in many aspects. For example, protestants celebrate only (or mainly) those church holidays which are motivated by the bible, they only accept the two sacraments that have foundations in the bible (out of the the 7 sacraments of the catholic church), and so on.
One can debate what authority means, and how much this survived the 4 centuries since then, but that is the core of what the founders tried to plant into the DNA of the Protestant church.
Polymarket seems to be by far the largest real-money prediction market, yet it was revealed to be less accurate than its smaller competitors(Manifold, Metaculus, etc.). Is there actual money making opportunity in Polymarket, including transaction costs and such?
In Scott's livejournal era he wrote a book review of Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Does anyone know if this is still readable somewhere?
Found it: https://web.archive.org/web/20160908033258/http://squid314.livejournal.com/351010.html
I had planned to travel today to get into the path of the clipse's totality, but I cancelled my trip for various reasons that now seem small. Sigh.
There will be another eclipse on July 22, 2028, and that one will hit Sidney, Australia. That's one I won't miss.
Sydney
If I live to it, I plan on seeing totality on May 1, 2079.
With lifespans trending upward you should easily make it. Just remember to use your seatbelt.
I got lucky today. I live in the path of totality, and we got reasonable weather for it. There's a world of difference between partial and total.
There's also one in 2026 in Iceland, Spain, and Portugal.
It was cloudy here, but my first eclipse with totality, and yeah very different.
What does modern psychology/psychiatry think about hypnosis? Is it useful? Mostly junk? No more useful than any other form of therapy? We don't know because it was first studied by weirdos in the 60s and nobody in modern times has tried replicating their results?
I've listened to a few hypnosis tracks out of curiosity, and it did put me into what I'd call an "altered state," so hypnosis certainly does *something*, but can you do anything *useful* with that state? Can you change behavior long-term with hypnotic suggestions? Is ignoring pain with hypnosis a thing?
Science Vs podcast did an episode about it a while ago, and basically came to the conclusion that human suggestibility has a lot of individual variation. A lot of the tricks hypnotists use are common relaxation tricks, but how well they work depends on individual temperament. So there probably won't be a single (non-chemical) way to hypnotize most people with consistent results.
good article on the repressed memory syndrome scandal
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/divided-memories-part-1/ it was called Divided Memories
PBS in its Frontline show did a four or five part series on hypnosis that included reporting from two of the researchers who did a lot of the basic research. It was very informative, and this was during the time that there was a hysteria about girls who had been sexually abused by their families. Of course this happens, but when put under hypnosis the stories became almost as crazy as the ones about sexual abuse at day care centers, another bizarre hysteria. During hypnosis the now young women remembered orgies with dozens of people doing almost impossible sexual acts. The people who monetized hypnosis did not look legit and the researchers were very clear about the limits and pitfalls of hypnosis. I think you can find it on youtube. I forgot about this - maybe time to revisit it myself, fascinating, and tragic. Tore families apart limb by limb, as you can imagine.
I recently read some studies on hypnosis. Hypnosis definitely can do a lot of things, but it is not standardizable. Some people are very strongly affected by hypnosis, and some people are not affected by it at all. I can't locate it offhand, but I remember one published case study where a woman who was allergic to most opioids (perhaps not allergic, but had a history of adverse outcomes from opioid administration) Was put under hypnosis as the sole form of analgesia during several dental surgeries. Apparently it worked very well, she was not in much pain at all.
The trouble is that it wouldn't work on everyone, and even on her the second time they did it it didn't work, they had to stop the procedure and try hypnotizing her again (after which it did work). Hypnosis's applications are limited because of how hit and miss it can be.
Nice posts lately
Maybe Sam Bankman-Fried is better off than I thought:
The WSJ of April 6-7 reports that "All in all, FTX customers currently stand to get back their full account balances, based on their value when FTX collapsed in November 2022." (Page B5.)
People are buying up the debt and speculating on it. Maybe SBF will buy the prison. Store for everybody!
Separately, I apologize for impugning the integrity of DuckDuckGo. I am told it is not owned by Google.
"Full account balances" is somewhat misleading. They will get back the USD value of their balance at the time of the bankruptcy, but not the crypto value. Most coins have gone up a lot since the bankruptcy date, so customers are much worse off.
I don't think he gets any money at this point, so he can't buy the prison. But it would have made a great sitcom in a less censorious age.
Posting some recent interviews of mine. First, Alexander Murshak and Heghoulian: https://youtu.be/N4FIY2Izkoc?si=BpD-WWpvba8gQt2p
Second, Tracing Woodgrains and Peter Clarke: https://youtu.be/Lv9ibJpk3tw?si=ufeHYaLq1wH6YfjL
Third, Sheluyang Peng: https://youtu.be/p7De2Un5BLk?si=KA1fDqec0NAj7tAu
Lastly, Ivan Eland: https://youtu.be/2hmdMyx3eFY?si=TNL2ds5fCSzlRtkl
With Twitter, is there any plan for what happens if Musk falls down dead tomorrow?
It will be controlled by a Board consisting of Grimes, Kanye West, and 3 LLMs each trained on the corpus of Elon's tweets (but using slightly different algorithms).
Same plan as any company I imagine. There’s a line of succession. Or if not the board ejects a new CEO.
But of course the new owners (Musk's heirs) may first install a new board, which makes it more complicated. Musk has (I think) either seven or eleven children whom he favours to varying degrees, mostly minors, and one can only speculate on what his will might have to say about how his assets would be split up.
Most likely if he died today then most of his assets would belong to some kind of trusts set up to benefit his minor heirs (or else trusts set up to benefit something else e.g. Mars colonisation), and these trusts would be obliged to act in the best fiduciary interests of said heirs, so you'd probably see the company getting run in a more conventional value-maximising fashion.
You are right. I honestly forgot it was private now.
>Or if not the board ejects a new CEO.
Yes, I know it's just a typo, but I love the image!
No typo. Out the window like in the good old days.
I'm confused. I thought that the starting situation (in Alexander Turok's comment) was one with an unexpected lack of a CEO (and, additionally, in your comment, the lack of a line of succession), rather than the presence of one that the board wished to eject.
Yeh. I just leaned into the joke. I meant elect.
I am imagining the board ejecting one of its own members into the fray that is the leaderless company. The ejection apparatus is to protect the ceo from environment effects until he is properly in place.
Many Thanks!
That button on Bond’s Aston Martin stick shift!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PY8zxRjOuak
Yup! Many Thanks!
Climate change/control and pandemic prevention/management may both be viewed as enhancing government control over the populace. WHICH of these two do you feel has the greater potential for controlling/affecting the populace? Differentials between long-term and short-term are invited.
Pandemic by a mile. Fear is the driving force behind control, and "If you do this you will die this week" is just so much scarier than "if you and several million other people keep doing this your grandchildren will die in their thirties."
If you want to drastically, tyrannically cut climate change, you'd probably start with industrial policy, not individual behaviors, because that's where the juicy targets are. Seizing Joe Normie's SUV is a waste of time when you could be seizing coal mines and shutting them down. It might do crazy things to the economy if you implement it badly, but I think it doesn't demand a lot from individual liberties.
Pandemic control, on the other hand, really does benefit from telling people "you, specifically, aren't allowed to do this thing no matter how important you feel it is" and so is more likely to intrude on the average person's day to day life.
But I'm having trouble coming up with any pandemic *prevention* policies that would tyrannically enhance a government's control of its population.
Force everyone to get vaccinated for any pathogen that seems to be a threat? That may be good public health policy but it wouldn't strengthen the government, and it would radicalize the antivaxxer crazies and the societal discontents.
Force people to wear masks when there's no public health emergency? How does that strengthen a government's grip on its population?
Stop the free association of people in public places when there's no public health emergency? You'd crash the economy for no reason, and even ultra-totalitarian governments depend on an economy of some sort to prop up their regimes.
OTOH New Zealand developed a nifty tracker app for people's smartphones that allowed people to checkin whenever they visited a business, school, church, friends, etc. When the COVID outbreaks were few and far between they were able to trace down infected people quickly with the data provided by that app. However, China doesn't need a special app to track its citizens. Their social credit scores on social media give them greater control of their citizens.
So I think your thesis is flawed when it comes to pandemic prevention. During a state of emergency, some of the examples above could, but, with the exception of China (and their ZeroCOVID policy), it was generally the non-totalitarian governments that enforced restrictions and then loosened them up once the emergency was over. Totalitarian governments (except China) didn't give a shit about controlling the spread of COVID.
If the government has the right to force businesses to close due to a pandemic, it's much easier for the government to decide that businesses must be closed for other reasons, including individual businesses (or at least categories that can be rigged to apply to specific ones).
Really, any government action that reinforces or introduces powers helps create or empower a tighter grip. There are people who were very supportive and still are about vaccine mandates, mandatory closures, travel restrictions, etc. These are the same tools that a totalitarian government might use to enforce different rules. A curfew, for instance, is a very common tool for authoritarian governments, and it's a small difference from what was put into place for the pandemic. Similarly, requiring government-issued documentation (vaccination records) to go out in public is very similar to authoritarian practices.
Again, the main point there is that the government claims for itself the right to do these things, and then that allows future governments to reclaim the right. What's to stop a future bad-intentioned government from fabricating the reasoning behind an emergency and implementing similar controls? Let's say that Trump declares an emergency and you can only work or travel if you get a government-issued pass. Most people will try very hard to get that pass, even if it means they need to sign away other rights or give up privacy, independence, etc. That people could voluntarily give up constitutional rights in order to be allowed to do basic activities is exactly what happened with Covid. In many places people weren't allowed to peaceably assemble without a vaccination card. That's far too close to authoritarian government for my comfort level, whether or not I agree with vaccination.
Well, we're talking hypotheticals here. AFAIK, all the liberal democracies discontinued all the restrictive public health policies that were implemented as temporary measures during the state of emergencies that were declared during the SARS2 pandemic. So, it could happen, but it didn't. As for totalitarian regimes, the only one that I know of that was concerned with containing the pandemic using NPIs was China, and even they finally threw in the towel due to popular unrest.
BTW, I'm using liberal democracy in the traditional sense of the term: per Britannica, a liberal democracy is "a form of democracy in which the power of government is limited, and the freedom and rights of individuals are protected, by constitutionally established norms and institutions."
AFAIK all liberal democracies have a mechanism to declare states of emergency to deal with national-level emergencies when either (a) the state's sovereignty is threatened or (b) the welfare of their overall population is threatened. And during national emergencies, there are mechanisms whereby normal civil regulations and legal processes may be suspended or modified for the duration of the state of emergency. The mechanism for invoking a state of emergency, the actions that are taken to deal with the state of emergency, when and how the state of emergency is declared to be over, and how the emergency powers are devolved vary from nation-state to nation-state.
However, because these are liberal democracies, these governments don't have to "claim the right" to implement these mechanisms, because they *have* the right to implement them under their constitutional frameworks and/or under the regulations that democratically-elected legislatures have approved.
When it comes to pandemics, in the United States, per the Public Health Service Act of 1944, Under 42 U.S.C. § 247d, the Secretary of Health and Human Services can determine if a public health emergency exists. The HHS Secretary's scope of response is limited to the "appropriate actions" to respond to the public health emergency, and they include making grants, providing awards, and conducting investigations related to disease prevention or treatment. These powers can be invoked in response to significant outbreaks of infectious diseases or bioterrorist attacks.
Furthermore, under the National Emergencies Act of 1976 (50 U.S.C. 1601 et seq.), the President can declare a national emergency, which when triggered gives POTUS various powers, and there are no statutory limitations beyond the term “emergency” itself. For instance, President Donald Trump invoked these powers under the NEA (50 U.S.C) and then under (10 U.S. Code § 2808 - "Construction authority in the event of a declaration of war or national emergency.") to secure funding for the construction of a wall along the southern border, despite Congress denying such funding.
So, yes, these statutes give POTUS broad powers. Theoretically, POTUS could declare himself President for Life under these powers, but while there may be no statutory limitations against the POTUS doing this, there are constitutional limitations. The courts may not agree with him. Then you have a constitutional crisis. And I doubt POTUS would get very far unless the party controlling the legislature allowed it. It would all be very messy, indeed.
OTOH, if you don't like this setup, you're welcome to try to get the laws changed. You could start a letter-writing campaign to Congresspeeps to change he laws. You could try to make it part of your party's platform to change these laws. Or you could form your own political party — call it the I Don't Need No Stinking Emergency Powers Party — and the IDNNSEPP could try to elect candidates to Congress to change these laws. (Good luck with that!)
But the same inertia that would work against you to change these laws would also work against a would-be tinpot dictator who was trying to take control of the federal government. Cf. "January 6" and "The Deep State."
The question was whether these powers, those related to pandemics, increase a government's power over the population. I think the answer is clearly yes, and I responded to you because you said no. I think your current response agrees that yes, it does, but that there are no good alternatives. I generally agree with that take, but emphasize the need for citizens and parties to continue to fight against authoritarian abuses - even when it's our own policy preferences and political parties who are using the powers.
I feel like you're answering a different question than what was asked? OP asked which of these could have more control/effect on the populace, and you're saying "well, yes, you could force people to do some things, but that wouldn't help you justify controlling the populace to do *other* things." And on the flip side, pointing out that governments that are inclined for tyranny don't actually need a pandemic as an excuse to tyrannize the populace since they're already doing that.
And both of those seem true, but if that's your stance then OP's question seems totally irrelevant - what matters is how inclined your government is to abuse its power and not what specific crisis they're using to justify that power.
The OP seemed to be asking our opinions of whether pandemic or climate change laws would have greater potential to create a totalitarian government. Quote: "WHICH of these two do you feel has the greater potential for controlling/affecting the populace? Differentials between long-term and short-term are invited." You seemed to be arguing that pandemic policies would be of greater utility. I argued that I couldn't see that they would.
So, I'm genuinely puzzled why you think I'm answering a different question. Please explain how I've either misunderstood the topic of the OP's question or your response to the OP's question.
David Chapman recently posted about Ultraspeaking, giving it a glowing review. https://meaningness.substack.com/p/ultraspeaking
Has anyone looked into Ultraspeaking or given it a try?
Reading their free e-book https://drive.google.com/file/d/1AqVVdLEpKeRvk15SmRRX4N0H0zTOimIw/view
> In the following chapters we’re going to tackle:
> 1. Why thinking is the enemy of speaking
> 2. How to use your brain’s autocomplete feature to answer difficult questions
Isn't this basically what everyone outside the rationalist community is doing all the time?
The rationalist community does not have a monopoly on thinking before one speaks.
I think they mean this does not seem meaningfully distinguishable on the face of it from what the average person might do.
Knowing the interests of this community, I'd like to share my recent substack post that is dealing with ideas of e/acc and AI safety. In my blog I'm focusing on topics that are related to Futurism, Science, Technology.
If I won't feel urgency to write something different, in 2 weeks I'll post about the need for increased productivity in biomedical research, and how I envision it to happen in the coming decades.
https://open.substack.com/pub/rationalmagic/p/making-sense-of-eacc-vs-ai-safety?r=36e5vn&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
I wrote my first blogpost which is about why one should be open to wise insights from "cringy" sources. It's basically a reformulation of the ad hominem fallacy, but focusing on vibes instead of intellectual rigor or ethics. Read it and give me praise and recognition.
(or, uh, constructive criticism)
https://soupofthenight.substack.com/p/pick-up-wisdom-from-the-ground
Great post! I teach philosophy and find myself using dumb pop culture references all the time to reinforce stuff they read in “the canon”. My references are so out of date that my students don’t even realize that they’re cringe.
I did an analysis showing how the *time of day* that you submit a scientific preprint can influence how many citations that preprint later receives [1,2]. The basic thrust of this work is to show how institutions designed to deal with scientific work in a (seemingly) objective way can break down due to idiosyncrasies in social and technical processes.
[1] https://peterse.github.io/2023/06/06/Early-bird-gets-the-worm.html
[2] https://peterse.github.io/2024/04/02/Survival-of-the-firstest.html
Before I submit this work to a journal, I'm brainstorming other unexpected effects in citation trends that I could check for using article (meta)data alone, ideally with a mechanism for causal relationship that could be checked for in a controlled way. For example, something like "citation count vs. frequency of number of very uncommon words in the article text, because readers find the article more memorable and engaging" (I am not proposing this relationship nor interested in defending it here).
If anyone has ever thought about these kinds of effects, reach out to discuss!
This has been common knowledge (within certain communities) for at least a decade. The causal mechanism is believed to be the placement of the preprint in the arXiv listing. (Being top or bottom of the list is better for visibility). But it is also somewhat confounded by the effect where you go to the extra effort of `optimally timing' the submission only for those papers which you actually like and want to receive maximum posture, and don't bother for papers which are just ho-hum, graduate student needed a publication.
Which communities did you notice had good knowledge of this? Do you know how the knowledge usually spread about this technique?
>> But it is also somewhat confounded by the effect where you go to the extra effort of `optimally timing' the submission only for those papers which you actually like
The causal relationship was only partially confounded by that effect, historically, and this effect probably can't explain submitter behaviour any more based on my data. Probably 'word got out' and enough people who believed the causal mechanism started submitting any/every paper in this way (this is the behavior of many of the highest frequency 'offenders' that you can observe in my first link). Of the analyses on this topic that I'm aware of (mine and the four references I give above), each only partially explains excess citations by the "intention" of the submitter.
Regardless, i try to shift the narrative away from "excess citations are partially due to authors who want to make their best work stand out" to "excess citations are partially due to placement on the list(!)" because that second effect exists and strikes some folks as kind of a huge bug in disseminating research
In combinatorics and probability (math.CO and math.PR) there are quite a few people who skim the new arxiv publications of their subsection each morning. Arxiv offers an automatic email summary for this. If you see such a list each morning, it gets pretty obvious that you notice papers at the beginning of the list a bit better. So it's not exactly subtle.
In both fields I know people who optimize for it.
It's been common knowledge in every department I've ever been in, from the time that I was a graduate student to now. When the word got out, I don't know, but it was more than fifteen years ago.
Words for emotions or state of mind, for ex.: interesting, surprising, disappointed, disagree, curious, decide, wonder, puzzled, hope for. Number of words of this type/total words. Seems like such words would engage reader more, all other things being equal.
I don't know whether the data is easily available, but I would find it interesting to know how submission ID at a peer-reviewed conference correlates with acceptance probability and/or citation count.
Background: the IDs are usually given by submission time. So small numbers correspond to papers that are submitted a few days in advance, large numbers correspond to papers which are submitted in the last minutes. Those are different working styles, and I suspect that it corresponds a lot with how polished papers are, but less with the actual content of the paper.
(Mind that some big conferences require pre-registration of an abstract a week before the deadline, so it might not work for those.)
That's a super interesting idea. I think I'll talk to one of the conference organizers I know and see what kind of metadata they have on hand.
How about day of week? I would expect it makes a bigger difference than time of day.
I would think that abstract features (total words, words in last sentence) would be impactful as well. Based on how I (n=1) judge papers based on the abstract.
It's not just theoretical. I know a few people (some of them co-authors of mine) who actively optimize for the time of the day to get better arxiv visibility.
Watched the Amazon reboot of Roadhouse, and was struck by how weird the whole endeavor seemed. It's not following the plot of the original movie, and it's not even following the original's tone, rather it's following what's presumably the audience's impression of the original's tone. It leans into a silliness that the Patrick Swayzee movie never acknowledged.
Not sure where I'm going with this. What do people think of this type of reboot, attempting to appeal to a post-hoc understanding of the original?
You can't recapture the mood and mindset of the late 80s or early 90s that would have made the original tone workable. That was the timeframe of such action movies as Rambo 2 (very different from the original) or Commando - over-the-top cheesy action that was played almost entirely straight. Schwarzenegger has had a whole side-career playing roles that deconstruct that persona, from Kindergarten Cop to Twins to Last Action Hero. Society has internalized the base instinct that pushes us towards that kind of movie while recognizing it's inherent silliness.
A modern movie that doesn't reconcile with that societal understanding will be ridiculed, and rightly so. An action movie can be grim, or gory, or dark, or even glorify violence, but that particular kind of obviously-silly-but-played-straight hits all the wrong marks. It has to have some tongue-in-cheek or the hero has to grow somehow outside of the original mindset for it to work.
That all said, I think remakes are a really bad thing for society, as it cuts down on creativity and also works to destroy older culture. I love watching movies from the 1970s because the way they made those movies is very different. They could have smaller stakes in a police drama that felt like bigger stakes than a Marvel movie balancing the end of the world. Remaking those movies with today's sentiments and approach will result in a movie with 1970s stakes and 2020s lack of character, tone, setting, etc. that makes the lower stakes work.
Maybe it's the best kind of low/mid-budget reboot: the og Roadhouse isn't sacred to most, but it's a familiar product of it's time. Rebooting beloved classics always leads to disappointment, it gambles on viewers being more intrigued than repelled. Robocop was a failure, Total Recall was a failure (mind you, this was spectacle sci-fi with a budget, if that makes any difference).
Expecting reboots of mediocre 90s films to follow.
The Onion has gotten on board the anti-hyperstition train.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6YF-nxc7XI
That video is an important context for https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWCNDbWcSLY
I like this Onion headline: Biden Surges in the Polls after Convincing Terrified Voters He Caused the Eclipse.
> “I am sure you will make the wise choice to join me, the immense and all-powerful Mover of the Sun and Moon, in my reelection campaign,” said Biden, who at the moment the eclipse began waved his hands toward the darkening sky, causing Americans to cower in fear and promise to give him their votes so long as he restored the sun to the heavens.
https://www.theonion.com/biden-surges-in-polls-after-convincing-terrified-voters-1851379136
Gosh, an actually funny Onion article, it's been a while!
It was a good one. Snorted my coffee back up through my nose when I looked at.
I'm going to try something a tad risky (to me, in the sense that I might have to deal with criticism I would not otherwise receive). I wrote a rebuttal to Paul Christiano's claim that the Universal Prior is malign: https://open.substack.com/pub/thothhermes/p/i-dont-see-how-the-universal-prior?r=28a5y9&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
I'm sure that not all of my statements are pristine, but I actually feel very confident in the general thrust of my arguments. There are big, intuitive moving parts to Paul's picture that I mainly tackle here.
My biweekly COVID update for epidemiological weeks 13 and 14 is at the link below. Apologies for the typos. I also address the HPAI scare in dairy cattle. Bottom line:
1. H5N1 is not very symptomatic in cattle, which means cases are likely being overlooked.
2. The virus doesn't seem to be spreading via droplets or aerosols, but it's definitely showing up in the milk.
3. This would be highly concerning because of its potential to contaminate the milk supply — except that there's no reason to think that pasteurization won't kill the virus (the only virus types that seem to be able to survive pasteurization are bacteriophages).
4. If for some reason pasteurization is ineffective we probably should have already seen cases in humans linked to the milk supply (because the current number of 15 infected dairy herds is probably the tip of the iceberg).
5. Until this passes, I wouldn't advise you to indulge in raw milk products.
Maybe I'm being overly sanguine, but if I'm wrong, we'll know soon if H5N1 is spreading to humans via the milk supply.
https://x.com/beowulf888/status/1777003679494848567
If some drinkers of raw milk do contract it, do we know how transmissible it is from human to human? And how lethal?
Even though it seems to be highly transmissible in other mammals (seals for instance), humans don't seem to catch it easily. Wikipedia has an article on this subject, and they quote few experts...
"So far, H5N1 infections in humans are attributed to bird-to-human transmission of the virus in most cases. Until May 2006, the WHO estimate of the number of human to human transmission had been "two or three cases". On May 24, 2006, Dr. Julie L. Gerberding, director of the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, estimated that there had been "at least three." On May 30, Maria Cheng, a WHO spokeswoman, said there were "probably about half a dozen," but that no one "has got a solid number."[31] A few isolated cases of suspected human to human transmission exist.[2] with the latest such case in June 2006 (among members of a family in Sumatra).[3] No pandemic strain of H5N1 has yet been found.[32]".
The WHO's pandemic global preparedness plan seems to imply that they think that new strains of influenzas may adapt themselves to livestock first and then will evolve to make the jump to humans. This sounds like a directed evolutionary argument to me. Could H5N1 adapt itself to humans? Back in 2014 (?) some virologists ran of gain of function experiment with H5N1 and they were able to make it highly transmissible by aerosol/droplet transmission in ferrets (ferrets being a good proxy for the biology of humans). This caused a huge shitstorm when it reached the media. If there had been a lab leak it could have caused a new flu pandemic, and that's why HHS temporarily banned GoF projects.
So it's possible it could become a pandemic-causing virus. But it hasn't so far. Also, we have a vaccine for the current strain. I don't know how long it would take it out to roll it out to the world's population.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_and_infection_of_H5N1#Avian_flu_in_humans
https://web.archive.org/web/20080316222806/http://www.who.int/csr/resources/publications/influenza/GIP_2005_5Eweb.pdf
Thank you, this is very useful.
What is the state of online poker since libratus (or just advances in weaker engines)?
a) weirdly nothing, impractical to implement
b) weirdly nothing, already full of bots anyway, some of which cheat or collude
c) now ghost towns
d) some other things
In the past few months, I've noticed I've developed a kind of "productive dyslexia" when typing.
Essentially, I'll end up mistyping a word for a similar word. The most recent examples that I noticed were typing "with" instead of "wish" and "extend" instead of "extent", just to give you an idea of what I'm talking about.
- It's always a correct word that I end up typing, just the *wrong* word.
- It completely bypasses my normal "oh I just typoed, fix that" reflex.
This is somewhat distressing to me, especially given that I've typed fine for decades before this and I've regressed suddenly in a major way. Do any of you have any takes on this?
Like Theophylline, I experience this in connection with allergies, but also as a result of sleep deprivation or sickness. I suspect it is a symptom of impaired executive (frontal lobe) function, because executive function is relatively fragile (easily perturbed by the things people think of as negatively impacting their cognition), and one of the main "functions" comprising "executive function" is the inhibition of automatic or habitual processes when context dependent alternatives are called for.
Executive function does generally deteriorate during normal aging, with wide variation between individuals. Acute and seasonal changes in cognition are also not uncommon. How distressed you should be will depend on many factors (as a matter of base rates, you should probably not be), including your own assessments of your cognitive variability and its manifestations.
Happens to me too. In some cases, the cause is very clear. I did a phd in auction theory and now it's harder to type "action" rather than "auction", instead of the reverse.
More generically, as I get older, I notice that my brain works much much faster along a certain axis, let's call it "high-level plugging together of concepts", but pays much less attention to the lower layers. It's highly useful for having good priors, but really bad for actually proving stuff or avoiding mistakes.
As I see this happen to me too, I see it as a phenomenon of growth and learning. Your mental chunk size was once a letter, then it grew to a few letters, then a few words, then the context of multiple words. Your typos likewise expand as the chunked concepts you send to the little hand-operating gnomes get larger. Because the gnomes learn, you see. Hand-operating gnomes, yeah.
I wouldn't readily put it down to just aging if you noticed an abrupt shift. I'm in my 20s and have a weird undiagnosed illness thing that manifests in a slew of neurological ways that, combined, for quite a while made me essentially a genuine idiot, and one of the smaller effects of it has been that I would have a ton of intention-to-writing communication glitches like that. For me, the pattern I uncovered is that it gets worse in proportion to how much I'm exposed to several common allergens and goes away just about entirely when I can avoid the specific allergens (Even though I don't test positive for any of the relevant allergies and antihistamines don't help?). Not saying that's what's going on with you, just that ime even what might seem like serious and lasting cognitive decline can sometimes be very rapidly reversed if the relevant factors are noticed and adjusted, so it's always worth experimenting and keeping an eye out for patterns when it comes to these sorts of things.
Which allergens are you avoiding?
The most significant allergens for me seem to be cat dander, at least one powdery whitish species of mold that had been growing where I live, something that seems to be in basically every modern form of soap/cleaner (i.e. detergents as opposed to traditional soap made with fat and lye), and for whatever reason rosemary. It's an eclectic list. Unfortunately, since I can't move out to live by myself, entirely avoiding the first three of those things isn't practical.
I also feel better when consistently avoiding basically all of the really common dietary allergens like treenuts, peanuts, wheat, sesame, and soy, though if I try any one of those after having avoided it for a while it doesn't usually have an immediately noticeable effect. I'm not totally sure how it works but it seems like there's some general neuroimmune aggravation factor involved where too much of any allergen lowers my tolerance for every allergen. Maybe that's a recognized thing that happens, idk.
Also on the few occasions when I've been able to entirely avoid the main allergens for about two weeks or more, when I'm exposed to them again I will at first only have a "normal" allergic reaction (sneezing, coughing, itchy rash), but then after about a week of continuous exposure it will shift away from that and go back to purely neurological symptoms. That happening is what first gave me the idea that my neurological issues might've actually been allergies that became distorted somehow.
> I'm not totally sure how it works but it seems like there's some general neuroimmune aggravation factor involved where too much of any allergen lowers my tolerance for every allergen. Maybe that's a recognized thing that happens, idk.
Secondary allergies from a heightened immune system response to primary allergens is a real thing. I'm only allergic to dairy and peanuts because they're close enough to the tree and grass pollens that my body really really doesn't like. And those only started after I lived in Florida around live oak trees, which are the devil.
I think it might be possible to install a handmade version of a new filter. Even if the automatic version of blocking errors like this has failed, learning it doesn't seem like a hard task. It's sort of like adapting to a keyboard that has a different feel. You just need to develop alertness for a new kind of typo -- not classic finger-based errors like hte, but sound-based ones, homophones. Try spending 60 secs a day picturing yourself catching homophones, or being aware as you type that they're an issue. Picture yourself being more aware as you think works you're about to type that some of them have homophones, & picture yourself catching things like that quickly if you type one. Put a little reminder in sight somewhere you'll see while you're typing.
Are you sure you aren’t a victim of autocomplete? That’s how completely incorrect words enter my text, especially when I’m using my phone. When I’m reading these sorts of errors made by others I do a sort of automatic ‘recorrect’. “Yeah, I know what you meant to type. No worries.”
I do it too, and have for the last couple years. It's always a homophone of the right word, or a word that that sounds very similar to it, things like "won" instead of "want." When writing I'm saying the sentence in my mind (though in general I definitely don't think always think in words). So sometimes my fingers on their own just type something that sounds like the word in my mind -- as though the filter to check to make sure what I'm typing isn't a homophone has been lost. I'm pretty sure it's an aging thing, crows feet of the mind, like having trouble remembering a familiar word.
I also find myself doing this, I do think it has to do with aging, and of course this leads on to merry thoughts about "is this an early symptom of early-onset Alzheimer's?"
I'm doing the same thing, but more when speaking compared to writing. I will typically just conflate similar concepts and use the wrong word for the current context without realizing. For example I recently conflated spot price with interest (on a loan), as I were discussing fixed electricity prices compared to spot prices, (similar in concept to floating and fixed interest rates in my head). It's been going on for a few years at least - very annoying.
No idea why, but my guess is just general deterioration with age?
I have a notion that part of what's going wrong these days is a crisis of conscientiousness. People and societies need a hard-to-define moderate amount of conscientiousness. Some things need to be done very well, some things need to be done pretty well, and some things don't matter.
At this point, we've got factions who are are anti-conscientiousness and pro-extreme conscientiousness. Neither one is trying to actually do things.
On the right, there's lack of interest in obeying rules that work-- for example a strong willingness to scam. On the left, there's willingness to destroy organizations which aren't sufficiently inclusive.
Both sides are very willing to break social connections.
Overall, I tend to agree. I see it as some sort of inability to admit that a state of "good enough" exists. Either absolute perfection is required, or the entire concept that one thing is better than another must be discarded as inherently invalid. In a big picture sense, democratic government is all about compromise, and our increasing inability to compromise is part of what's wrong with American government. And part of that unwillingness is simply because the factions are unable to hold their members to a compromise, because extremism gets people's emotions riled up, and intense emotion draws eyeballs and sells ads. Too many people have short-term self-interest in burning our civilizational commons.
I think this exists across the entire political spectrum (aside of course from virtuous centrists like me who, like Mary Poppins, are practically perfect in every way... drat, there I go again). Specifically, I'd call out left-wing groups like antifa as having a lack of interest in obeying rules that work, and as for right-wing destruction of organizations that aren't perfect, that's basically been what's happening to the Republican Party under Trump, and even stretching back to the Tea Party 20 years ago.
I'll second WoolyAI: I don't quite see how pro-inclusion purging campaigns match "excess conscientiousness," and I also don't quite get what you're seeing as specifically right-aligned anti-conscientiousness trends (general unapologetic grifting and fraud across the political spectrum, sure).
I agree that there's a strong willingness to scam - I don't think it's about right or left, it's just the way we do business now. Once you start going down that path, which started decades ago, you find everyone follows - rent seeking maximum is here: https://falsechoices.substack.com/p/polity-investments-llc
All too plausible.
I really enjoyed that story, thanks for sharing!
The connection to politics is confusing. I don't get what you're getting at.
Dupuyten's Contracture is a disease of the body growing extra connective tissue in a hand. It's not properly connected to muscles, and can lead to being unable to extend one or more fingers.z
I'm wondering whether it would be an especially good starting point for exploring the idea that DNA becoming unreliable is a cause of aging. It becomes more likely with age and is weirdly specific, as though rules for specific connective tissue have been changed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dupuytren%27s_contracture
I have it in my right hand, though it has not progressed for ten or fifteen years. I didn’t realize it was also called Viking disease. I have no expertise on DNA reliability though.
Viking disease sounds way cooler than Dupuyten's Contracture. There needs to be an effort to give rare diseases cooler-sounding names so that their sufferers can at least feel slightly better about them.
I keep getting pushed to me short videos that appear to take place in south Asia in which rural people are participating in some kind of outdoor carnival game—weird variations of skee-ball or shooting baskets. Whoever succeeds is given a bag of grain or some other staple (the surrounding crowd cheers). Is this an actual method of dividing up resources used soemwhere? Who has time for this silliness? If the scenario is fake, who is making these videos with their large casts and elaborate setups? Do you guys know what I'm talking about?
I see these as well on my Instagram.
I don't think it's a widespread thing, probably there was one guy in one village who noticed he could get clicks like this and then a bunch of copycats. Your average Indian village will not have these events. The crowd has time since they get paid, i.e. the videos are fake. Some guy with a camera is making them since these videos get eyeballs, engagement and likes and that can be monetized,
I have to seen the video, but the way you describe it, it doesn’t sound any different than American carnival games, except the prize is more useful. You might not see the participant being at an entry fee, but that just wouldn’t be included on in the video, just like if you to look at TikTok for American carnival games. It sounds like fun, and there is no reason to disbelieve that South Asians would not also like to have fun playing carnival games.
"Videos of many people in south asia outdoors" matches my heuristics for "elaborately staged for ad revenue", without seeing the videos you mention yet. Examples:
* Fake primitive technology videos, where they dig two inches by hand on camera, then excavators finish the underground swimming pool
* Fake animal rescue videos, where they put the animal down the well in the first place
Disclaimer; this heuristic is trained on reddit comments, not any deep independent analysis of multiple videos matching this heuristic. My prior still leans towards "hijack online attention for ad revenue", not "real distribution method of scarce staple grains"
Having unfortunately seen some of the fake primitive technology clones, I can confirm this heuristic. One video had captions that were literally stolen 1:1 from an actual primitive technology video, but the things the dude was doing didn't match up with the captions. "It's important for the pottery to glow red hot" --> shot of the pottery *not* glowing red hot.
I wouldn’t put too much stock in the credibility of Reddit comments.
My memory is that it gets around the instinct to refuse charity on pride. Making it a silly game preserves people's dignity to some degree, confusing as that sounds. You're earning your gift, or can act as though you were playing for the fun and not the prize.
I saw one of those once - it was this game (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYVkOtIHGl0) but with grown men competing for palates of soda, or something, surrounded by an entire village.
No idea why I can't seem to find the original video now, it had a huge view count if I'm recalling correctly.
It would probably help if you linked to some examples of what you are seeing so that people can properly assess them....
They're always Facebook "reels" interpolated into my feed, so I'm not sure they're linkable, but next time I see one I'll try!
https://twitter.com/jamesjohnson252/status/1776936399612125478
From a sample of 1,000 muslims in the UK:
🔴 Only 1 in 4 believe Hamas committed murder and rape on 7/10
🔴 Almost half of British Muslims sympathise with Hamas
🔴 British Muslims have a net positive view of Hamas
🔴 Almost half (46%) say Jews have too much power over the UK Government
🔴 52% want to make it illegal to show an image of the Prophet Mohammed in the UK
🔴 Only 28% say it would be undesirable for homosexuality to be outlawed in the UK
You have significantly mischaracterized the results of that survey, as I see others here are pointing out in detail.
Anyway, such polling does not necessarily tell us what those group members actually think or believe. Rather it tells us what the members of a group are willing to say to a pollster which may or may not be the same as what they actually think. See for instance the last decade of polling of Americans regarding the swirl of issues and resentments that coalesced into defiant support of Donald Trump's candidacies. There have been similar dynamics in the UK.
Polling is not gospel truth in other words, never has been and certainly isn't nowadays.
> You have significantly mischaracterized the results of that survey
That's what he always does. Seriously, just ban this guy.
+1
> British Muslims have a net positive view of Hamas
Checking the report, this looks wrong -- sums to 29% in the report (V. Positive 15%, Q. Positive 14%).
> Almost half of British Muslims sympathise with Hamas
The question is phrased this way:
"Of the following two entities, which do you feel more sympathy with?" [Hamas, Israel]
So, a more accurate statement would be to say that 46% are *more* sympathetic to Hamas than Israel. Otherwise you are smuggling antipathy towards Israel and general sympathy to Palestine as support for Hamas.
Tables: https://jlpartners.com/s/Henry-Jackson-Society-tables.xlsx
Net means positive larger than negative, not majority positive.
Note also that the first question asks about murder *and rape*. We don't know how much work the "and rape" part is doing, which is important because, while I personally have no doubt that rape was committed, it is my understanding that there is some contention around that issue, esp since at least one well-publicized claim apparently has been debunked, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/25/world/middleeast/video-sexual-assault-israel-kibbutz-hamas.html Again, my point is not that rape did not occur, but rather that there are grounds for those who do not want to believe that rape occurred to cling to that belief.
If you're going to keep posting inflammatory shit, could you at least stop beating around the bush and tell us how you want to deal with these undesirables? Hard to have a discussion if people don't know where you stand.
I think Hammond just believes it's a good first step if progressives finally, finally stop believing in ridiculous blank-slate nonsense like "Muslims from theocratic nations are fine and dandy as citizens and don't have beliefs different from others, they fit just fine in a civilized society in large numbers".
Hmmm. Let me go through the purported downsides of legal and illegal immigration...
1. Illegal immigration and crime rates: In the US, where illegal immigration peaked last year we haven't seen an overall increase in crime. In fact, crime has fallen to levels not seen since the 1960s. I don't know if this is the case for European countries, and if you can shove some stats my way, I'd be willing to consider this as an anti-immigration argument. Of course, crossing the border without clearing customs is a crime. But that sort of criminality doesn't seem to spawning other sorts of crime.
2. Illegal and Legal immigration and terrorism: In the US at least, most of the terrorist acts seem to have been by people who were legally in our country. But we haven't had that many lately now that we're not heavily invested in militarily intervening in Muslim countries. And homegrown terrorists are currently the biggest threat to our nation right now. And don't forget, we Americans are killing our selves off quite nicely without foreign help.
3. Legal immigration and the economy: Most of the current legal immigration pocilies in the US benefit big business. The H1-B visa system allows employers to keep tech wages low because it's functionally a type of indentured servitude (and the visa holder can't easily move to another employer — thus it's difficult to improve one's salary). It used to be that an engineering degree was a ticket to a middle-class lifestyle. Frankly, I think the H1-B visa system has stiffled this route for a lot of native-born Americans.
4. Illegal immigration and the economy: illegal immigrants seem to be taking the nasty jobs that most of the native-born don't want such as meat packing and farm labor. Seems like it's a net benefit to the US, even though we don't want to admit it.
I'm not in the UK, but given Hammond is quoting UK statistics I assume his main beefs are the crime mentioned by Shaked Koplewitz and the grotesque, despicable, indefensible, adjectives-to-taste Hamas demonstrations occurring regularly in London. I think we can agree that we don't need formal statistics to justify the claim that the latter are the direct product of letting in a shit-ton of Muslims from theocratic nations?
European and American immigration patterns are very different and shouldn't be directly extrapolated from one to the other. "Immigrants do a disproportionate amount of crime and most of the terrorism" is, afaict, false in America but true in Europe.
OK. ,Certainly the French are having trouble with radicalized Muslims. Why the difference between Europe and the US?
I would hazard a half-educated guess: for all its faults, the US is far more welcoming to immigrants. You just become an American with an accent, integrated into the wider society. Feel free to both be as American and as, say, Algerian, as you want.
Many European countries make it almost impossible to integrate, leaving the new arrivals hopeless and angry.
1. Stop issuing new residency visas to people from certain nations. Trumps list is a good start.
2. Stop extending visas and permanent residencies for people already in the country who are from the above countries. Make some exceptions for highly skilled people, perhaps.
3. Infiltrate religious organizations, put in government agents on the inside to catch extremists.
If we're going to block people from certain countries, surely it would make more sense to base the list on data about crime and other undesirable behaviors than go by somebody's list of ethnicities that creep them out.
In general, I don't think there should be a rule against bringing up a problem without suggesting solutions.
Whether this is needlessly inflammatory - harder to say. It could definitely easily be phrased in a more inflammatory way. Otoh If I try to imagine a similar post on, say, climate change (someone listing a bunch of bullet points like "we're emitting X tons of carbon and on track to being back the dinosaur age climate") that feels pretty inflammatory.
I think I still come down on the side of this not being pointlessly inflammatory because I think that (unlike hypothetical climate change guy) this actually does raise information that a lot of people are unaware of and should probably think about. A bit like the discussion below about many indigenous societies being very unequal or having slavery - sure, you can argue that this doesn't mean any specific implication, but people should be aware of the real situation (and I think many people aren't).
I sympathize with your stance in general, but Hammond has made this a pattern over the past several open threads. It's always the same - a link, a really inflammatory right-wing claim (last OT they started a thread with "Why do Jews hate white people?"), and then when you look at the link you usually find that Hammond heavily overstated the claim they made about it.
It's getting very annoying and so I'm sympathetic to anyone who tells him to fuck off and stop trying to start a fight in every OT.
I long for the days of the non-political threads and special political threads. Seems like there is a group of posters who are less concerned about discussions of rationalist and rationalist-adjacent issues and more concerned about foisting their political obsessions on the rest of us. Unfortunately, we as a group are not very good about demanding rigorous evidence for opinions and beliefs. So every time someone shouts, "Look, a squirrel!" we go chasing after it.
Yes, and I believe the link backing up the claim that Jews hate people was a photo of about 20 books with terms like "white trash" in them and authors with Jewish names.
Subject: Dumb things that people don't say any more.
Often it seems that the level of public discourse gets worse and worse with time, so I think it's nice occasionally to focus on dumb things that people used to say a lot when I was young, but which I haven't heard for a long time.
The whole "we only use 10% of our brains" thing is an obvious example, I haven't heard anyone seriously invoke that since the movie Lucy, and that was ten years ago. Back in the 90s you'd see it attributed to Albert Einstein and printed on posters.
"Money is the root of all evil" is another dumb cliche that used to come up a lot, and rarely does. That was of course a corruption of the original passage "The love of money is the root of all evil" but you don't hear that being said much these days either. My theory is 9/11 wiped it from the discourse by reminding us that there's plenty of evil that has nothing to do with the love of money.
What other (hopefully not too political) dumb things have you noticed people don't say any more?
We’re just saying different stupid things now. Things in the memeosphere just cycle more quickly with everyone online.
"Seed cycling"
Yeah. Ugh.
How do we tell apart not saying something incorrect because
a) we know it's incorrect?
b) it's not cool to say it any more?
I came across "What percentage of our brains do we actually use" as a pub quiz question, where they were expecting one of those bogus ~10% figures as the answer, some time in the last decade (probably 2016-ish). This isn't particularly strong evidence against what you're claiming, I just felt like sharing a particularly frustrating incident.
Hard to define but I feel like certain crass 90s tropes about old age have been quietly dropped - you don't any longer have to be either Grandpa Simpson or an 'aging hipster' - perfectly acceptable and normal for a 60-something to go to Glastonbury. Admittedly I'm now 39 and no longer a judgemental teenager so maybe it's me.
Re: "The love of money is the root of all evil": the actual meaning (in context -- my understanding is that the Greek for just this phrase could be interpreted either way) is that loving money leads to every kind of evil, not that there is no evil that does not originate with the love of money.
If anything (other than just pure randomness) the drop is probably due to random King James Bible quotes being less in the water now. Most popular English translations - including the NIV, NRSV, ESV, NASB, and New King James - now use "... all kinds of evil", and non-/cultural Christians are less likely than ever to know any Biblical quotations, even corruptions/misquotations.
> My theory is 9/11 wiped it from the discourse by reminding us that there's plenty of evil that has nothing to do with the love of money.
9/11 is a big deal in USA but much less so in all the other countries. And it seems that this phrase lost its popularity there as well.
Good point.
Maybe it's the decline of the economic-left (Marxists, etc.), and the rise of other varieties of leftism that are concerned with other things? Religions that take that seriously (Catholicism and sharia Islam, at least?) have also had decreasing influence on politics.
But overall I'd guess that it was WWII and the Holocaust that did it in. There was too much evil there that was completely decoupled from money. Heck, the more corruptible Nazi administrators were less genocidal because they allowed themselves to be bribed to let Jews live!
If you are talking about religious socialism, don’t forget the Essenes circa year 0.
I had in fact forgotten them. :-) But I was thinking of influential modern religions that have (at least at times) put restrictions on acceptable financial activity, like limits on interest and debt.
I’ve been reading Philip K Dick VALIS and his weird Exegesis so the Dead Sea Scrolls have been on my mind.
Thanks for the tip on LA Confidential. They had me at 10 gauge shotgun and Packard. Pretty entertaining.
I'm glad you liked it! Book and movie, I hope? :-)
I mean, the Khmer Rouge probably weren't motivated by money, and they did their mass-torture-and-murder spree in the 70s. Earlier, the Communist takeover of Russia was presumably not motivated by money.
I think it is a bizarre over-literalism to take the saying in any of its forms to mean that there is no evil without financial motivations. There are plenty of evil deeds which have sexual motives but not financial ones, and for that matter it is surprisingly common for people to do evil things for the sole purpose of being seen as good. I have never seen anyone support the "root of all evil" saying in this over-literal manner, reasonable people take it as a warning that the love of money motivates people to do a wide variety of bad things.
Religious dogma has caused a lot of pointless suffering. I’d have to thumb through some physical paper books to get an exact quote but I’ll paraphrase Auldous Huxley here from ‘The Perennial Philosophy’ I believe.
Words to the effect that Martin Luther should share culpability for the holocaust with Hitler.
I stopped reading "The Perennial Philosophy" when he completely mischaracterized Luther's position of justification by faith. There were only two possibilities - either he had misread Luther so badly that he shouldn't be trusted to relate the positions of any religious thinker, or that he had a particular animus and was trying to pull a fast one on his readers. In either case, I felt I would be better off reading almost anything else.
I also think this phase died out much later than 9/11. Maybe it's more about secularization.
No, I think it's increased worship of Mammon.
Hm, socialism seems to also have gone up at the same time. Maybe it's that the "money bad" faction is just less into pithy quotes and more into angry activism now.
Socialism is also worship of Mammon, only it's the version for the losers.
I think you may be on to something. "Not selling out" was big with Gen X and Boomers whereas socialism reeked too much of the Soviet Union. Idealism in the 60s through 90s meant not caring too much about money. It's hard for socialists to pretend they don't care about money; it's what they care most about.
Idealism now is about caring who gets what money rather than disdaining it altogether.
Which when I think about it, is tied into social polarization - being anti-money now is more a political statement against a distant outgroup than advice for your neighbors/community members now
It's very rare to see the false (and once common) claim that the point of searing meat is to seal in the juices. Although people often say "caramelization" when they mean "Maillard reaction", so there's that.
That was an interesting case of C.P. Snow's two cultures. Mid 20th century food writers were generally aware of the existence of work on the subject (e.g McCance and Shipp 1933) <https://www.abebooks.com/Chemistry-Flesh-Foods-Losses-Cooking-Privy/30744155045/bd>. Philip Harben mentioned this work in most of his books, and practically all food writers in the 50s and 60s read Harben, even if they didn't read McCance and Shipp directly. But for most food writers the fact that food scientists had done extensive research refuting culinary lore was of no interest to them.
Mixing up caramelization, dextrinization and the Maillard reaction is I think somewhat excusable. All three are nonenzymatic browning reactions which have similar seeming results at similar times and temperatures.
Fake Einstein quotes in general seems to be down. Also "every theory gets overturned, now they're saying some guy proved Einstein was wrong" is something I think I used to hear a lot and hear less now.
I see fake Einstein quotes almost every week on linkedIN. Particularly the fish and the tree.
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then they forget about you and attribute the only noteworthy thing you ever said to Gandhi" -- Nicholas Klein
To be entirely fair LinkedIn is just a fake bot farm that Microshit managed to trick a couple of thousand managers and HR personnel into thinking it's real people saying real things, so that they can sell them analytics and recruitment tools and also find work for the surplus software engineers in the company who are otherwise bored into thinking about starting unions.
Hm. Yeah, with all of these it's hard to say whether people stopped saying them or I just gradually filtered those people out of my life.
I seem to have had more than the expected number of instances of LLMs refusing or failing to answer my questions recently.
Example 1: I asked Copilot whether Sydney Sweeney appears in the holiday episodes of Euphoria: I have subsequently established that the answer to this question is "no". Copilot told me that there are no holiday episodes and that Sweeney portrays Cassie Howard throughout Seasons 1 and 2. I asked "Aren't there two episodes after the end of season 1 and before the start of season 2?" Copilot started to type out a long answer, then deleted it and wrote, "My mistake, I can't give a response to that right now. Let's try a different topic."
Example 2: There was some discussion on Twitter recently about a story about Marcus Aurelius's wife having an affair with a gladiator and the emperor killing the gladiator and making his wife bathe in his blood. I asked Claude about this and Claude (correctly) said the story was apocryphal. I then asked what happened next according to the story, and Claude declined to answer on the basis that it would have to make something up itself. But this isn't true: at least in the version from Historia Augusta, the answer is that Marcus succeeded in seducing this wife by this method, but the fruit of their union (Commodus) was more a gladiator than a prince. There may be other versions, but then Claude could tell me about those.
Example 3: I asked ChatGPT what the probability is of sampling a normal distribution more than 60 standard deviations above the mean. It wouldn't give a numerical answer other than zero, saying the number was "so small that it's beyond the precision of most numerical computation methods to accurately represent". When I asked to write the formula, it did so. When I asked to calculate the formula, it ran some python code and again told me the answer was zero. I reminded it that it is possible to express very small numbers using standard scientific notation, but it would not budge. When I told it the answer was 1.238×10^-784, it agreed that was right.
I don't know if it's getting worse over time but for as long as I've been using ChatGPT (a year now?) it not infrequently feeds me bullshit answers. For instance, if a I ask it for a list of scientific studies that discuss a question I'm interested in, at least one or two of the references seem to be "hallucinations"—at least I can't find them when I look for them in Google Scholar.
Maybe this is nobody's gripe but mine, but Chat, as aided by Dall-e in text-to-image generation is dumb as dirt. I ask for a woman and they give me one with huge jugs. So I say that's good but please can you change it so model has small breasts. Nope, they shut me down because I'm asking for breasts in a prompt. Recently asked for an image of a woman's forearm with palm up. Nope, because violence (dismembered arm!!!)
No, I hear you. I remember that. I played with it a little while a while back and it threatens you with shutting down your account if you do anything that could vaguely be interpreted as sexual. Once forgetting to fully describe an outfit got me threatened...I eventually realized it would theoretically involve nudity, I had assumed it would fill in the blanks with whatever the average in the training data was.
That was the funniest thing to me. 1954: no nudity, it's un-Christian. 2024: no nudity, it's objectification. 70 years pass and Americans still hate sex.
Then again the Russians seem to have passed from monarchy to left-wing dictatorship to right-wing dictatorship without ever getting a competent government, the Chinese move from one bureaucracy to another, and the Latin Americans cycle through fascism, liberalism, and socialism without ever getting rich...I guess national character is a thing.
There's a theory that the modern American left is what happens when kids who'd naturally be conservatives are raised on a diet of pure leftism. The result is extreme prudishness and puritanism, except applied to left-wing values instead of right-wing values. (And the reverse is the alt-right, kids who'd naturally be radicals are gravitating toward right-wing values, but with a very untraditional mindset.)
It's a very good point--the outsider energy is on the right--but seems more to me like the left won the culture war, with the result that they now have the enforcer 'church lady' personality types (who are now 'HR ladies') and the rebels without a cause are cosplaying (and sometimes being) white nationalists.
I don’t find the chatGPT answer to be wrong. Not at any precision level we would care about. Maybe this is an emerging sign of independent thought.
Perhaps if the guardrails were off chatGPT would agree with you that the result is indeed 1.238×10^-784, but add “or, as most sane people would call it, zero”.
Jeffrey Soreff, who posts here a lot, has asked ChatGPT quite a number of chemistry questions, at least one with an answer that's easily found via online search. He's posted a number of confident answers from Chat that are wrong.
Many Thanks! Here is another one I just tried (more physics than chemistry):
me: What is the name and atomic number of the heaviest element for which at least one atomic spectral line is known?
chatgpt: The heaviest element for which at least one atomic spectral line is known is Lawrencium, with the atomic number 103. Spectroscopic studies on lawrencium have been challenging due to its rarity and the difficulty in producing it, but these studies are essential for understanding the electronic structure of heavy elements.
url: https://chat.openai.com/share/1a503fbe-3a86-44ee-ba48-a558452c7a9b
actual answer: 4 spectral lines from Darmstadtium atomic number 110
url: https://physics.nist.gov/cgi-bin/ASD/lines_hold.pl?el=Ds
That number's too small to represent in 64-bit floating point, which is why a simple python calculation returns zero. When I asked instead for the log of the probability, it used the appropriate scipy function: https://chat.openai.com/share/3c4fba55-8075-480f-9ee3-3ea71797fcd8
These things act like turbo-journalists or politicians. They give “right sounding” answers which are either nonsense or contradictory. And it makes sense because they both get rewarded for “sounding correct.”
I wish Stephen Colbert had stuck with his faux-conservative schtick. We need a refresher on "truthiness" now.
Can someone recommend a good book for getting good at poker (Texas holdem)? I know how to play and understand the basics. I’m not afraid of math or numbers (though don’t have a high level math background).
MIT open courseware has two full courses on poker theory. IIRC the more recent one is more useful--more tips on how to play poker, less in-depth math analysis of why heuristics work.
If you're playing somewhat casual live poker, though, profiling and exploiting other players leaks might be a more profitable option than learning how to play "correctly."
>MIT open courseware has two full courses on poker theory. IIRC the more recent one is more useful--more tips on how to play poker, less in-depth math analysis of why heuristics work.
I do not recommend these courses. You need practical lessons, not academic ones. Nobody became a profitable poker player from watching MIT lectures on poker.
>If you're playing somewhat casual live poker, though, profiling and exploiting other players leaks might be a more profitable option than learning how to play "correctly."
Any training course worth its salt will cover this.
Because here's the thing - exploiting others players' leaks IS playing correctly. It's not necessarily playing game theory optimally, but no course says you have to/necessarily should always play in a game theory optimal way. The "optimal" way simply means *you* can't be exploited. But if others can't exploit you, no poker pro will tell you to focus on being unexploitable.
On the off chance that you plan to pursue a career in poker, here is a link to someone on the internet claiming that it is a not-so-great way to make a living (low income, brutal competition, weird hours, 'soul sucking'). [0]
Naturally, 'fun as a hobby but not fun as a job' is a description of many human activities from baking cakes to sports. FWIW, poker is probably one of the most interesting gambling games.
I would imagine that a training program which let's you play poker against some bots while also pointing out tactical errors (plus the math to know why they are errors) would be helpful. I imagine that against human opponents, the metagame of figuring out how their own strategies are non-optimal, plus face reading plus some psychological model of players (if they don't just execute a pre-chosen algorithm) is what it takes to win, but learning a reasonable good basic strategy could be done with bots. No idea if such a thing exists, though.
[0] https://www.themotte.org/comment/171479?context=3#context
A book on cultivating the right attitude: The Mental Game of Poker - Jared Tendler
It does assume you have more experience than you actually have at the game - but since the how to is entirely on the mental side that doesn't really matter. I think there's a strong argument for learning how to manage your emotions and motivation in a more optimised way from the start.
Maybe its slow and inefficient but I'd still point a newer player to Harrington on Hold'em. It's more applied than the classic pure theory of Sklansky but it'll still give a solid theoretical underpinning.
Are you planning to play any live games? If so - definitely worth investing in Caro's Book of Poker Tells - Mike Caro. Funnily enough circlilng back to the mental game, and taking it meta- that book includes one of my favourite life advice quotes:
"When romances unravel or businesses fail, you might cross the Threshold of Misery and stop caring about making critical decisions regarding other things. That’s because the pain is already maximized and anything else that goes wrong can’t add to the agony. Listen closely. At these times, in poker and in life, the secret is to keep performing as if you care. Remember that, although you can’t emotionally feel the importance of making quality decisions at the moment, there will come a time when you will feel that importance and be grateful for the good decisions that you make now. Yes, you’ve crossed the threshold and decisions don’t seem to matter. They do still matter, and anything that suggests otherwise at this moment is an illusion."
https://youtu.be/kNnrTNFWcsg?si=oKKTKbw78aLADcF0
How much are you willing to spend?
The absolute best way to learn is a poker training site, not a book.
I can personally recommend Upswing poker: https://upswingpoker.com/
If you're interested, start with a few of the super cheap courses and then if you like it consider signing up for the upswing lab, which is the best poker learning resource I've ever come across.
That being said, this is if you want to become as good as possible as poker and are willing to put in a lot of work. If you just want to become competent at smaller stakes, I would recommend starting with Jonathan Little's two free ebooks - Strategies for Beating Small Stakes Poker Cash Games & Strategies for Beating Small Stakes Poker Tournaments.
If you click this link you should get a popup for the free book download: https://jonathanlittlepoker.com/books/
Little also has some good free lessons on youtube to get you started: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMYHGfD_v6wsb5iYsouTm8XWtBqLsslTg And if you like his style of teaching he's also got paid courses which I haven't done but have seen highly regarded: https://pokercoaching.com/home/
There's heaps of different sites though so feel free to shop around and see what people say about each.
I would generally recommend avoiding any of the 'classic' poker books - the ones that come up when you google search 'best poker books' or something. Most of these are either very outdated and/or very slow/inefficient ways of learning poker. And avoid anything - books, training sites - from any of the real celebrity poker pros of the poker boom (if you know anything about that) like Daniel Negreanu or Phil Ivey. For the love of god, don't bother with their MasterClass series....
You really don't need any high level math skills to become good at poker. Basic arithmetic (calculating ratios or the percent chance of a certain card(s) being dealt next) and a good memory are sufficient.
As of 2020, white liberals believe that white Americans are both less intelligent and more violent than black americans: https://twitter.com/eyeslasho/status/1776290465291051281
When you see this level of divorce from reality, it's really no wonder there were so many aggressively incorrect people disagreeing with Scott's posts on things like the ferguson effect.
I'm a white liberal. Please DO NOT lecture me about what I do and do not believe because you don't have a frigging clue. Honestly, you're as tiresome as the late-to-this-list Marxbro by the way you troll us with your self-assured opinions and discredited studies that you dig up on Twitter.
As for racists in general, having traveled the world I've concluded that 95% of humanity seems to be ethnocentric bigots. Most of the Chinese think anyone not Chinese is inferior (and intra-Chinese racism is also a big deal). Malaysia has a three-way racial stereotyping going on between its Malay, Indian, and Chinese ethnic communities. In South Africa tribal groups think they're superior to other tribal groups, and whites are only tolerated as a necessary evil. A lot of South Asians have their caste hangups — and Europeans don't really fit into that hierarchy, so guess where end up on the purity scale? Heck, I drove around Germany with a fellow who continually told me ethnic jokes about Austrians, Poles, Czechs, Turks, French, and the Dutch. No pan-European feeling with him! Anyway, the world is full of ethnocentric bigots, so you're in good company. The irony is that you seem to think you're somehow intellectually and morally superior. LoL!
Feel free to ban me for being so blunt, Scott
Hey while I was on Twitter reading this awesome tweet I saw a post about this miniature backhoe you can control with your phone. You drive it into your ear canal and it like scrapes every bit of earwax off the walls and digs it off the floor, and it's way cheaper than seeing a professional, only costs $15.99. Damn that site is good for finding out the real deal about things.
It's amazing how hostile you are to ever actually engaging in real argument, and always resort to this brainless snark.
You're right, I have zero interest in engaging with you. It's actually not because of your views, but because you come across as being so full of seething rage it seems pointless to engage with someone who seems driven solely by negative affect . You don't just hold certain views, many of which are defensible, you sound mad enough to bite when you express them. You sound like you can barely *stand* life without letting off a little bit of the pressure by putting up posts about your enraged takes on racial issues. Also, you sound as though you have no other interests. I can't imagine you writing here, in response to some subject unrelated to your preoccupations, "wow, I never knew that. Can you put up a link?" or "Well stated!" You never joke around. In short, you come across as the Racial Rageatron, and my experience is that no good ever comes from engaging with Rageatrons.
Oh, and one other thing: Many of the links you put up are to support your contentions are crappy -- tweets, photos of 20 or so books. Also, as quite a few people here have pointed out, your posted summaries of what the links show are often inaccurate.
Here's a really sound piece of advice I ran across once: If you fervently believe something, seek out the smartest, most honest, best-informed proponents of the opposite view and read their books. If your belief is wrong, you will be cured of it. If it is not, you will be a much better-informed advocate for it.
Taking Twitter posts about survey results as gospel truth, clearly without having bothered to look at the actual survey results yourself let alone spending 60 seconds thinking about them, ought to be an autoban here. Seems completely inimical to the spirit and ethos of ACX, and the presence of such childishness degrades these comments sections.
Say a week's ban on first offense, a month on second, etc.?
I did read them. You did not. You simply want a way of dismissing research you do not like.
Fact check: False data on U.S. racial murder rates...
https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKCN24I29S/
You can find the survey questions here: https://electionstudies.org/data-center/2020-time-series-study/
The questions on violence start on 467.
The question does not seem to be limited to “Americans”, so we can consider things like Verdun or the Holocaust.
A 0.2 difference on a 7 point scale isn’t a divorce from reality.
Try as I may, I can't find the black/white violence survey results that Goldberg posted on Twitter ("White liberals now also believe that white people are more violent than blacks") and Hammond gleefully reposted for our enlightenment. Are my neurodivergent qualia just not perceiving it?
You can follow the link. On the left side under "QUESTIONNAIRES" there should be a "Survey Questionnaire" PDF. You can search that. The questions are about violence start on page number 463.
If you want the results you have to log in and register and sign some forms. I didn't do that.
Well, the results don't seem to be on their reports page.
https://electionstudies.org/data-tools/anes-guide/index.html
So, white liberals of the past didn't know about the holocaust?
Or did they do what any reasonable person would do and assume this was referring to present day white americans?
From the survey:
"The next set [of questions] asks if people in each group tend to be ‘peaceful’ or ‘violent’."
->"Where would you rate whites in general on this scale?"
Is it reasonable to assume this question is asking only about present day white Americans?
I don't think it's strange that 2020 liberals would choose to interpret the questions such that it allows them to give an answer that feels less racist, especially given what was going on at the time.
Is that the main reason for the change 1992->2020? I doubt it. But you should be more careful about your comments.
And if you think that it is obvious that the survey was referring to only Americans, note that it specifically asks questions to distinguish Hispanic-Americans from Hispanics and Asian-Americans from Asians.
For example,
-"Where would you rate Hispanic-Americans in general on this scale?"
-"Where would you rate Hispanics in general on this scale?"
I’m gonna call bullshit on that survey. The world is chock full of bullshit survey results - in fact one of the things I admire is how often this blog points out when people spin flawed non-replicating results into elaborate social science theories.
It’s dismaying to see someone blindly accept a result like this just because it (I’m guessing) confirms your priors. Show me some replication first.
You don't get to just "call bullshit" - you need a reason.
YOU'RE the one blindly rejecting them because you don't like the results.
I can't see any reason to reject it, so I accept it. You need to point out a reason not to accept it.
You literally have not shown that this survey is "flawed" in any way whatsoever.
>Show me some replication first.
I'm calling bullshit on YOU. You would never demand this for a result you approved of.
AT MOST, if you don't have a hard methodological criticism to make of the survey, you should remain agnostic. You don't get to just dismiss it out of hand. The evidence, as you're aware of it, suggests that white liberals believe false things about the world. In the absence of other evidence, you should assume that this is likely to be more correct than the alternative.
I haven't been able to find the black/white violence survey results that Goldberg posted on Twitter ("White liberals now also believe that white people are more violent than blacks") and that you gleefully reposted for our enlightenment. Can you point me to results? Because I'm not seeing them on the reports page.
https://electionstudies.org/data-tools/anes-guide/index.html
Of course liberals believe stupid things. Most people believe stupid things.
On the one hand, you're absolutely correct. I stand by my assertion, and if I can bet money that that survey result will not replicate, I absolutely will. But what i said was not a useful or meaningful argument by itself.
On the other hand, you're spinning a lot of assumptions about me and my beliefs that I see no justification for, so you don't seem like the kind of person I would want to have a good faith argument with.
To be fair, you’ve blindly rejected it because of your priors.
After careful consideration of my life priors, I would have answered that whites are more violent than blacks. During my sixty-plus years on this planet, the only people who've threatened my person have been whites. Of course, I haven't lived or worked in a predominantly black neighborhood in thirty-plus years, so the stochastic outcome of my life experiences of violent situations was influenced by which race I've interacted with the most. Having said that, I felt safer working in South Central LA than I ever did in Boston on a Friday night (when the mostly white college students came out to drink, fight, and puke).
Yeah, the only workable heuristic I've found is to be suspicious of everything, and doubly-suspicious if I want it to be true. :-(
Yes! Thankyouthankyouthankyou!
Perhaps that makes me extra sensitive to instances like this but I stand by my assertion nonetheless. I do also reject studies that flatter my preconceptions.
Well it’s a survey. The methodology of opinion taking is well established. I’m sure what it is measuring is what people said, even if you don’t believe that they would say it. At the height of the racial reckoning of 2020 giving the politically correct answer here would be fairly common I think.
There are so many ways to make a bad survey: biased selection process, confusingly worded questions, etc. It's also been demonstrated that you can change results just by asking questions in a different order.
Survey science is real - but it's also a frequently _bad_ form of science. This, to my knowledge, part of the 'replication crisis' as well as the general sense that sociology isn't considered a very reputable science these days.
And of course, the most common way to manipulate a survey is to craft one that says something complicated and squash that nuance out of the conversation when you post about it for the sake of an attention-grabbing headline.
But if I want to be taken seriously I need to do better, and I should have engaged in this with more (i.e. any amount of) rigor. I do wish people would not engage in bad faith here. I have plenty of objections to woke liberalism and yes, I can and have challenged people on survey results that I otherwise wanted to believe.
If you read their FAQ (https://electionstudies.org/faq/) these folks seem to have a reasonably solid methodology (although the devil is in the details). The trouble is, using their question query tool, it looks like they only asked the rate races on a peaceful to violent scale beginning in 2020. So technically this Goldberg fellow TwiXter is correct that "2020 was the year they started.. a) rating whites as more violent than blacks" — but that's the only year they have data for.
2020 V202521
On this scale from 1 to 7, where 1 means PEACEFUL and 7 means violent, where would you rate whites in general on this scale?
2020 V202522
On this scale from 1 to 7, where 1 means PEACEFUL and 7 means violent, where would you rate blacks in general on this scale?
2020 V202523
On this scale from 1 to 7, where 1 means PEACEFUL and 7 means violent, where would you rate Hispanic-Americans in general on this scale?
2020 V202524
On this scale from 1 to 7, where 1 means PEACEFUL and 7 means violent, where would you rate Hispanics in general on this scale?
2020 V202525
On this scale from 1 to 7, where 1 means PEACEFUL and 7 means violent, where would you rate Asian-Americans in general on this scale?
2020 V202526
On this scale from 1 to 7, where 1 means PEACEFUL and 7 means violent, where would you rate Asians in general on this scale?
I rather believe at least some of the people who answer in this way are doing what migh be called "survey-balancing"; they believe, rightly of wrongly, that there's going to be a lot of conservatives who will answer the other way around, so to get their preferred result (the races are equal), they answer this way to "balance the result".
Yes, absolutely. But extreme dishonesty is hardly better than ignorance. Perhaps its worse.
I highly doubt that survey takers do that much strategic calculating before formulating their reply.
It's not that complicated - they don't want the result to be that blacks are viewed as more violent so they lie
I wouldn't be lying if I said the only people who have threatened me with bodily harm over the course of my six decades of life have been white people (all males, except for one white woman who threatened to take me with her in a murder-suicide attempt in a moving vehicle). But that may be because I've interacted with white people significantly more often than I have black people. But I'd feel safer walking down a street in a black neighborhood than in a bar with drunk white college students. So I would've rated whites as more dangerous than blacks. Simple as that.
It's not a strategic scheming mentality, it's a toxoplasma of rage mentality. Someone else is being unfair to blacks, so I might as well be unfair to whites. It's really simple and I observe it in a lot of other conflicts and hot button issues.
I think if the question is asked in person there would be a lot of editorialising. Of course 2020 was a different era.
Leftists are increasingly defined by the following ideology (call it woke or whatever you want)
- Indigenous societies were historically peaceful and lived in harmony with the land and with each other
- Over the course of the past 500 years, Western colonialist powers across America, Australia and Europe displaced these societies violently in order to extract their resources
- They imported Black people from Africa to enslave (in the case of America) and set up colonies across Africa and India to extract resources (in the case of Europe)
- Racism was the dominant tradition among white Europeans, in order to justify their sub-human treatment of Indigenous peoples, slaves, and colonies.
- While over the past 200 years, slavery and colonialism have been abolished, this is only a surface level change, and the systemic racism that allowed white Europeans to profit at the expense of others with darker skin is still alive and well
- The evidence for this is obvious - Black and Indigenous people still suffer lower life expectancies, disease, poverty, and violence at far higher rates that white Europeans, both in the West and across the globe
- Meanwhile, European whites have continued their rapacious exploitation of the environment and are now endangering all of humanity through climate change. The struggle for justice and equality has never been more urgent.
Sounds convincing, right? Unfortunately there are many inconvenient facts that are at odds with this worldview, though, like
- Indigenous societies were absolutely not peaceful; they were far more violent than our society today; some practiced human sacrifice
- Western colonialist powers won not because they were more rapacious and violent - the Natives were plenty violent too - but because they had more advanced technology and better weaponry. The losers are not necessarily more virtuous
- Slavery existed for thousands of years before America. Pre-industrial societies had slaves. Actually Western powers were the first to ABOLISH slavery, not the first to create it
- Racism was the dominant tradition among everyone! It's a fundamental, unpleasant fact of human psychology, and we're doing better at it in the West than most - look at Rwanda
- It is true that Black and Indigenous people suffer in today's society; however, ascribing this all to past injustice or to current anti-Black racism is too glib. Slavery was abolished 150 years ago. Clearly there are cultural factors at play as well. My main worry is that ANY statistical difference between races these days is treated as evidence of systemic racism; this "forced equality" is very reminiscent of communism. You take from the rich to give to the poor until the two are equal, never mind what the rich or the poor person did to deserve it.
- While climate change is indeed a serious problem, there are no serious climate scientists who believe it is a possible existential threat to humanity.
My own opinion is something like -
- The American revolution brought about the greatest successful experiment in governance in human history - America is indeed a shining city on a hill
- Western liberal democracy is the best way of government the world has yet produced
- Our current situation is precious and cannot be taken for granted - it has caused unprecedented peace between great powers over the past 80 years
- This is built on the bedrock of Enlightenment values like free speech and democracy, as well as Christian values like mercy and tolerance
- The arc of morality is long, but it bends towards justice. It is true that Western democracies have made lots of mistakes, but we can't judge the actions of hundreds of years ago by the moral standards of today. America played a huge role during World War II and its aftermath in building the peaceful world that we currently enjoy
- Humanity is best served by forgetting the past and focussing on building the future together
I have found that this position puts me at odds with a lot of the left which is sad because I used to think of myself as a liberal
> I have found that this position puts me at odds with a lot of the left which is sad because I used to think of myself as a liberal
It's a big tent. Your "position" is probably at odds with many on the right.
I think your caricature is more commonly reflected by those styled as Social Democrats or Socialists/Anarchists. They're more likely to be apprehensive about "Liberal" as a label owing to open distate for Capitalism, or neo-Liberalism as they sometimes say.
Don't forget that people's beliefs are often ideologically inconsistent with parties or loud always-online groups, as I'm sure is the case with you and I. We aren't remarkable that way. This is in part why message discipline is so important, and we've seen that work in the Dems' favor last mid-term: STFU about fringe woke-ism, stick to what concerns most people.
I’m very in favour of capitalism as it happens
> I think your caricature is more commonly reflected by those styled as Social Democrats or Socialists/Anarchists.
SD and S/A are very different political ideologies (not sure if you mean to conflate them). I believe most SD's today are not generally opposed to capitalism, but want a (more heavily) regulated mixed-market economy.
There are probably some in those groups who believe something close to what is sketched here, but I don't think at least most SD's would go that far. At least not where I live. S/A I don't know, but that is a very fringe group.
> not sure if you mean to conflate them
I'm not. They are distinct.
I would guess you probably dont 'really know' what most leftists believe. Most leftists at least sort of follow a policy related to 'dont punch left'. Though there is also an element of 'dont punch down'. This is the exact opposite of how people present lefties but its true in my experience in a certain. People always over focus on the supposed infighting. But most leftists just aren't comfortable punching down against the downtrodden or the people who are actively fighting against inequality/oppression. Even if activists seem a little misguided many leftists still don't wanna be overly critical.
To make this easier to swallow you can read a link from Scott's last round up https://newaltright.substack.com/p/how-the-alt-right-won . Its by an altright guy. He talks about explicitly trying to encourage a policy of 'dont punch right'. The altrigt also seemed to have a lot of infighting but in important ways many parts of the alt right did hang together and avoid 'punching right'.
Im a quite leftwing guy. But that doesnt matter. It is totally rational and correct politics to be hesitant to punch your own side. Most people are emotional not rational. So they dont do some logical decision theory calculus to come to these conclusions. But this is definitely how many people authentically on the left feel. Same for people authentically on the right. I dont personally like punching left, or when people ask me to do it. I can understand people on the right with the same impulse. Its just logical and how most people approach being part of a team.
It also worth noting behind closed doors people can be a little more open. Which is why policy is often more reasonable than politics.
Dude. Most of the recent era is the left engaging in a circular firing squad.
See:
https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-education/the-meltdown-at-a-middle-school-in-a-liberal-town
Of course being purist, the left is more prone to these kind of excitements. Still it’s probably not great for the education system.
Left-right is undercomplex of course. But accepting that pattern, the middle line seems to have shifted much. The pattern doesn't work though. Marxism should be left; it's an economic theory based on christian morals. Stone age clan politics should be right; they are hopeless in functioning industrial societies. As someone who didn't grip Hegel at all, I should be careful here, but maybe the marxist view of necessary boom and bust, including destructive wars, has something right. Dysfunction of highly developed modern society like north America and maybe Europe as we see it smells like bust.
For example, I think Trump is an asshole and Jan 6 was his fault. Does that help?
Well “my team vs your team” mentality is, imo, the problem. If I don't criticise the Nazis on my side, and you don't criticise the communists on your side, at some point the sides are going to notice "hey the other side is literally Nazis, or communists, as the case may be, and even the so-called reasonable ones don't disavow this" and then you get, you know, Israel/Palestine.
(EDIT - i am bringing up Israel/Palestine as a meta point about how the conversation about a topic can devolve into hate and deep partisan polarisation; you are welcome to express your views but I will probably not engage)
I agree. It seems to me that both teams are degrading to the point that they are substantially wrong. Thus the choice is devolving from which team is preferable overall, to which side creates the kind of harm I am most comfortable with.
Those identifying with either side are the problem, as our problem is too crazy parties, both divorced from sane evaluations of problems and practical solutions.
I lean left (social democratic) on many issues and I largely agree with many of the points you are making here. I think we need to stop conflating general leftwing politics with these type of (woke or whatever) beliefs.
Yeah if the left would take action to stamp out this harmful ideology and re commit itself to good old fashioned liberalism I would once more be a happy lefty
Alright, and while we're at it, it's high time for good muslims to do some serious reformation stuff like muhammad sharur at scale and reconcile their faith with, well, god.
I have heard the take that Islam now is a lot like Christianity in the 13th century. I know most are peace loving but less crusades/jihad please
I worry that this sentiment is the same kind of truth as "Brazil is the country of the future and always will be."
There are substantive differences in the two that affect success at domesticating them. The diminished role of the Pope has drastically reduced crusade-risk; there are multiple passages of the Quran which are often understood as calling for jihad (in the narrower crusade-analogous sense), and Islam without the Quran would be a bigger change than Christianity without the Pope.
How does this happen, though? Or how could it happen on the right, for that matter?
I think people having open conversations with each other would help. We would probably realise we agree with each other a lot more than we realise. It’s very easy to silo yourself into an informational bubble these days and assume that people who don’t agree with you are evil - they’re not, they’re just in their own bubble
FWIW I've talked to many people IRL that I would say agree with the liberal but not "woke" position. In fact, I find that I mostly encounter these kind of opinions online. I find that most people have much more nuanced views than what you are describing. I'm not in the US though, so it might be a different political climate here.
I dislike the implication that the "West" is the one hoarding Wealth and/or Technology, when countless other words like "Corporations" and "Intellectual Property Law" would be far more apt.
You can make a historical arguments that those things in their modern forms can be attributed to Western ideas and Western people, but in the actual reality of today Saudi or Chinese or Russian corporations are no less wealth-hoarding or IP-jealous than their Western counterparts.
I also think that a much more accurate characterization of a right-wing nationalist is someone who wants (for whatever reasons) to keep the demographic majority in Western countries to be the historical majority that was, in short to prevent and reverse (certain kinds of) immigration. This is deliberately vague because there is a huge spectrum of those views. In particular, I don't think a significant majority of right wing nationalists would object to a deal that involved Europeans/Americans/Whites paying money or sharing technology for free with the countries of the immigrants they don't want in return for the flow of those immigrants to decrease or cease entirely. A sort of "I'm going to pay you 100$ to fuck off" [1] meme in real life, in practice this money and technology is going to flow right into the coffers of the dictators who make those immigrants want to get out of their homeland to begin with.
[1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/im-gonna-pay-you-100-to-fuck-off
I’m definitely in favour of global development, but I see it a bit differently - as the West saying “hey, we have figured out a very good configuration of institutions and governance, let us share it with you” rather than some kind of penance.
I guess my concern is the narrative “West is evil” which can only supported if you selectively focus on the bad things Western powers have done in the past. It ignores a lot of history. Historically, by modern standards, everyone was pretty terrible.
This is the narrative that is explicitly anti capitalist and anti Western powers which provide a great standard of living to their citizens. In my country, Australia Day (Jan 26) used to be a celebration - now it is marked by anti Australia Day protests where people shout “stolen land” and “the colony must fall” implying that Australia is evil and we should give the land back to the Indigenous Aboriginal people. I think this narrative is widespread and both morally and factually mistaken.
My reaction to the selectivity of certain forms of anti-West narratives is to broaden the narrative further. That is to say, I think it's a good thing (and mostly a Western invention as far as I know, which is yet another thing to thank the West for as a Non-Western) for a society or an identity group to come clean about its historical crimes and try to compensate any sort of modern survivor of those crimes, I think that Russians should do this more to Ukrainians (and I'm not talking about the recent invasions, I'm talking about the Holodomor), I think the Japanese should do this more with the Koreans and the Chinese, the Turks with the Armenians, etc...
This might even piss off the very activists who advance those anti-Western narratives, as they might see my cosmopolitan attitude to their narratives as a form of corruption and co-opting, because they see Westerners as the primary oppressors and as unmatched in brutality. I really don't care, no one owns ideas, and the fundamental idea behind those narratives is sound: insofar as you claim any identity, you also implicitly claim all of its crimes. How meaningful is the phrase "I'm an American" if it doesn't include support for the genocide that the USA was founded on, or "I'm a Muslim" if it doesn't include support for the countless crimes that Islam did and does to the non-Muslims under its control? So, it does make sense to qualify, to say "I'm an X, but I don't condone and I regret all the historical crimes that X did to non-X, and I'm ready to put my money where my mouth is and prove that I'm really repentant about this". Again, my version of this has a far larger list of possible values of X than Westerners or Whites or Europeans and their constituent groups.
> Historically, by modern standards, everyone was pretty terrible.
Indeed so, but the West was terrible in the age of nuclear weapons and the tank and the aircraft, which means it did more in absolute damage than perhaps any other terrible power except perhaps the Mongols.
There’s nothing stopping most countries using technology. IP is generally protected though, which is different.
Do you feel the US should hand over technology to China - rather than banning some exports of technology as it is doing now.
A specific thing about indigenous societies - there's a reasonable argument of the form "well they were often violent and unequal but various forms of colonialism were worse and on a larger scale so it's still more important to focus on how those were bad, and the people going on about the negatives of indigenous societies are just trying to misdirect attention to distractions". But a large fraction of people on the left, afaict, actually just don't believe indigenous societies were in fact often quite bad.
Societies which lived in the lands which was colonized by the Europeans were very different from each other, the only thing they have in common is that they had worse military tech than their conquerors.
On the one hand, you have neolithic nomadic tribes, on the other hand, you have feudal societies not so different from their European conquerors, and probably everything in between. From our value system, some of them were probably kind of ok (except for a fact that in any Malthusian society, a fraction of the population do not reproduce but fall victim to the horsemen famine, pestilence or war), others were genuinely terrible (Aztecs).
Most sedentary societies in history were kind of bad. A peasant whose feudal lord is of his own ethnicity and culture might have a slightly better deal on average, but interstate anarchy meant that most peasants did not get to enjoy this dubious benefit. I think the difference of a feudal lord othering his subjects because they are 'untouchable' versus because they are 'non-English colonial subjects' is probably not that large.
Industrialization is the tech which ultimately made slaves and serfs (whether kept by Europeans or non-Europeans) obsolete. Granted, it's human rights record is not exactly spotless (kids working in coal mines, WW1, etc), but ultimately it enabled mostly free societies as a somewhat stable equilibrium.
Maybe! But my meta-opinion is that “let’s not talk about this because it’s a distraction” is a bad argument - it’s the sign that you use arguments to advance a specific position that you favour, rather than genuinely seek the truth.
So it depends on the thing. For example someone who responds to every conversation about upzoning with "but we'd have to build more sewer systems which would be expensive" (or if you don't like that example pick your favorite nitpick) is probably being disingenuous about it and just doesn't want more housing built, and "sure but that's a minor effect we should ignore" is a legitimate response. If they keep bringing it up every time though, it becomes reasonable to develop a reflex to ignore that argument.
(Although it is dangerous, partly because you develop a habit of ignoring arguments you don't like and partly because you do at some point need to consider those second order effects).
I agree with your meta point
> but not to nearly the same extent.
I don't think it's the "extent" that was the particular problem. There have been other slave-based societies, even if you don't include serfs. IMO, the major innovation in America was the racial basis for slavery. In most other places, as I understand, there wasn't a need to justify slavery, and thus no need to create a hierarchical racial division, or buttress it with a lot of myth-making. It just... was.
Sparta would be the main counter-example here. But in places like Rome, anyone could become a slave, but also any slave could theoretically become free, sometimes through their own actions. It was bad, but it wasn't treated as some unshakeable fact about the universe.
But after a bit of experimentation, Americans figured out that it was easier to catch runaway black slaves, because runaway white slaves could blend in more easily with the rest of the population. So they switched over completely to black slaves, and cooked up some rationalizations for why this was actually a good thing, and the rest is history.
> I’d rather have Himmler as a neighbor
Random trivia, but accounts from one of Hitler's maids said that Hitler himself was a excellent employer, and never treated them badly. But she did not have good things to say about Himmler nor about one of the G's (Goebbels or Goring, but I forget which). So, strictly speaking, when it comes to neighbors, you might be better off with the big H himself.
> To take just one example, only 45% of people who score above 700 on the SAT (top 8% or so) are white, but what percent of people who make up the top 8% of our society are white? It’s probably at least 80-90%; certainly way more than 45%
I’m not sure that mathematics is what leads to entering the top of society even in purely egalitarian societies. Scientists and engineers are not that well paid.
Also of course the recent SAT scores are going to have fewer white candidates than the total white population given recent immigration.
What I find odd about American leftists is that the solution to the top 8% being white, is go to after the privileges of all the whites.
but if your conclusion is true then the top 8% of whites have the privilege, or most of it. Try inheritance taxes rather than affirmative action. That might reduce funding however from the elite whites.
>This is obvious seeing as there are no large slave-derived minorities today in China, India, etc
I don't think this true, it's just you don't know about them. In Indian and Pakistan you have the Siddi, in Sri Lanka the Kaffirs, etc. And in other cases, such as with Ottoman slavery, there were vast population exchanges and genocides at the end of World War I which eliminated those minorities.
This is not a question about "wars and conquests of the last 600 years". It's talking about the violent crime rate in 2020.
You know this, everyone knows this. White liberals knew this until recently. I mean, why on earth would anyone be asking about violence from 600 years ago? Does European conquest in india say anything about life in America in 2020? You're obviously much safer around white people on average than black people, and that's obviously what is meant and what matters. Your rationalization is just a way of rescuing black people from negative perceptions of their anti-social behavior.
And if we're talking about the world today, Africa is vastly more violent than anywhere full of white people is. And more violent than colonization was.
Also, even by this insane justification - nothing suggests that black people are more peaceful. They've just been categorically incapable of large scale violence that Europeans were. They have been killing, raping and enslaving one another since day dot. If I stab as many people as possible because I don't have a gun, and you shoot a bunch of people, and more die at your hands than mine, it's absurd to claim that you're more violent than me.
Also, did white liberals in the past not know about these things you're discussing? Or did they simply become vastly more black nationalist in 2020 and lied to make black people look better?
For this reason white people ( of colonial descent or not) should be careful not to interfere in the world from now on. So let China take over Taiwan.
The Chinese themselves use the term Anglo to define their enemies - which is a more useful use of language than white.
Isn't this a bit of a strawman? "If I don't start wars and conquests somebody *else* is going to start it, so it might as well be me?", I imagine there are quite a lot of alternatives where you both don't start wars or conquests and also engage in politics and sometimes wars to deter those who want to start wars and conquests.
The usage of "white" to denote a huge group of ethnicities that are rarely unified and often quarrelling among themselves (Germans and Slavs, USA whites and Mexican whites, Russian Slavs and Ukrainian Slavs) is a dumb framing imposed on us by the dumb phrasing of the survey that started the whole thread, which also used "black" even though it really means "slavery-descendent blacks of the USA".
I believe his comment was not meant to say that it was okay for Europeans to colonize because somebody was going to do it, but rather to say that conquest and colonization are not behaviors exclusive to Europe, and if you believe that there is something special about white people that makes them conquer and colonize, then you may end up ignoring non-white nations doing the same thing.
Race does seem to correspond to ethnicity/extended kinship groups however. And despite their quarrels it seems like people of various races instinctively recognize that race is often more of a distinction than culture/ideology is. I think whites and nonwhites tend to view a republican and democrat white person as more fundamentally "of the same group" and the same would go for a conservative vs liberal black person. I don't exactly like this but it's the view I've come around to.
I think a way to moderate things in the public sphere is just to acknowledge racial interests are a thing, will be distinct, and should be managed as legitimate instead of insisting that theoretically it shouldn't be a factor and the only issues are racism and the belief race exists as a category.
Hmmm...someone told me they use the same color terms as we do for races, but because white means death and yellow is good luck (and the emperor) the emotional valence is inverted so it works fine? That true?
Good thing the Chinese don't mention Saxon. Might have aroused me.
They do add Saxon sometimes.
"it seems reasonable to say that white people are more “violent” than black people even though they commit far fewer violent crimes"
Ah yes, alas that I wasn't born in time to invade Poland, but I was around for Afghanistan and everything since! I've had to renew my passport three times, I keep running out of pages flying hither and yon invading, pillaging and conquering!
Oh *that's* why we keep running into each other in airports! Today I'm gonna try to blow up the fucking moon in the middle of the eclipse. Watch the sky for my white ass zooming overhead laughing.
I feel like this clip is now appropriate. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMC0uZY2iH0&t=770s
(NSFW, probably.)
Awesome!
Nuke the moon.
All we violent white people starting wars and invasions really need to co-ordinate better, imagine how embarrassing it would be for two of us to turn up in the same small Third World village to assassinate the same local rebel resistance leader! What a faux pas!
I can't in all honesty wish you good luck with the moon exploding, since I like the moon, but I do admire the cut of your jib!
> organized state violence
What is that? Are you referring to police?
> The big wars and conquests
That follows directly after the phrase you quoted.
Perhaps the last 600 years, but wars had declined among European states until the recent invasion of Ukraine.
Has there been any update on the Far Out Initiative? I thought Scott mentioned he was intending to write something about the project in more detail. Are we going to see it discussed on the blog again in the future?
The thing is with that idea: how to prevent the possibility of subjects becoming completely apathetic and unwilling to stick up for themselves if they are already artificially blissful?
Because that seems like disconcerting possibility to me.
Is there a way to amend a survey response if we've responded but have since remembered something which changes one of the answers?
No, but don't worry about it.
Econ 101 question: (I'm trying to understand currencies by hyperbolic thought experiments.) Imagine that for some ridiculous and unrealistic premise all the leaders of the world agreed to adopt a new single world currency and discontinue all other currencies. Which groups would be the winners and losers of this policy?* Would e.g. rich westerners, people with lots of third-world debt, or third-world exporters be better or worse off? If the winners and losers would depends on the implementation, then what implementation details would matter?
*in an Econ101 spherical cows sense. "There would be a global mega-recession and everyone would die" is not the answer I'm looking for, even if it's true.
Check out Keynes’ Bancor idea.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bancor
Not quite a currency but a unit of exchange.
Funny, no crypto bros here? I have been quite impressed with "Bitcoin is Venice" but was too dumb, lazy and drunk to actually install a node and but some savings in bitcoin. If enough people use bitcoin, it should be a usable global currency, no?
Not unless it’s a universal medium of exchange. So no. Not ever.
The winner will be whoever gets to decide how much money is printed.
I don't think this is entirely unrealistic. I mean, most of the civilized world did Bretton Woods for a few decades, which should have had basically the same effects. More recently, half of Europe switched to EUR. It would seem that the lesson is that currencies aren't that big a deal, as long as they're reasonable well managed, although if it's fiat money, it's basically an infinite money glitch for whoever controls the printer, so that's where the main winners/losers are.
A universal currency would mean the world adopts a single monetary policy. So, for example, Turkey and Argentina would need to set the same interest rate as Japan, even though the countries are facing very different economic challenges (i.e. high inflation vs almost no inflation). It would also become impossible to print your way out of debt or to devalue your currency, so countries running big deficits (looking at you, America) would risk default.
In the end who wins and who loses would ultimately depend on who controls the monetary policy. And that would surely result in a lot of conflict, unless the world moves towards a single cohesive monetary policy and some kind of world federation or world government.
demost_'s response is great on the Econ 101 aspects, but I note that you also ask about 'winners and losers' which is arguably more complex.
In the case of currency union, it doesn't completely make sense to talk about 'winners and losers' on a single axis:
Countries with strong economies benefit from currency union with weaker economies due to providing a wider and more stable market for their export goods. Similarly, countries with weak economies benefit from a currency union with strong economies because they can borrow at a lower rate (and so grow quicker) and anticipate price stability. There are also non-economic benefits which could accrue to high or low income countries, like for example some people may see a currency union as a necessary step to achieving a political union.
Countries with strong economies may not benefit from a currency union, however, if they are exposed to economic contagion from weaker countries (or are obliged to support weaker economies financially to prevent this contagion spreading). Similarly low income countries lose a lot of competitive advantage because they are no longer able to devalue their currency. Again, there are non-economic risks which could accrue to any kind of country - a very specific one is that the central bank could be captured by the interests of one kind of country and stop making policy in the interest of the union in its entirety and focus instead on the high / low income economies.
So a world currency could be good for everyone, bad for everyone, or a mix - and if it is a mix it could favour rich countries, poor countries, or something more complicated
One small note is that if we implemented the world currency overnight it would be absolute anarchy - standard theory is that countries need to achieve 'convergence', which is aligning economic and legal policies to match each other. Failure to do this would result in the currency union collapsing (or at least experiencing significant contagion) because there was no central agreement on how to manage the economy. So a more sensible route to creating a world currency would probably be to start with an existing strong economy (EU, US) and then countries would join one-by-one as they aligned their legal and economic policies.
It totally, totally depends. Mechanically, obviously it depends what exchange rate different countries are given. But hand waving that away, it depends on interest rate policy (which presumably is now also under the auspices of one central bank).
In 1990, the two currencies of the two German states (West-Mark of the Western FRD and Ost-Mark of the Eastern GDR) were replaced by a single one. I think this is a nice miniature version of your example, since the GDR was financially much weaker and had a stronger (at least implicit) inflation, meaning that before the union the Ost-Mark had a tendency to lose value over time compared to West-Mark.
The details mattered a lot, most importantly the exchange rates from Ost-Mark to West-Mark. Wages, pensions, rents etc. were exchanged 1:1. Saving accounts, debts etc. at a rate 1:2. Afterwards, East German economy developed not very well, we still see a substantial gap over 30 years la
ter. The Econ 1:1 explanation is:
- Eastern companies were not producing at competitive rates, because productivity was not high enough.
- Usually that would be counterbalanced because the exchange rates would drop. This means that citizen could buy less import goods, but companies would gain a relative advantage because their costs would go down.
- Due to the single currency, this was not possible. Costs for Eastern German companies stayed high, and large parts of the Eastern economy collapsed.
- This was to a good deal due to the (economically) too high exchange rates, but it also made it harder for Eastern German economy to recover and to catch up in the decades afterwards.
- In this particular case, the population of Eastern Germany was not just losing in the process, because pensions etc. came from the united German state. But otherwise, the high pensions would not have been sustainable, and if an Eastern German state had continued to exist with joint currency, it would have likely gone bankrupt or would have to adopt welfare cuts.
I think this would be the Econ 101 answer for your question:
- Countries with a too high exchange rate would see a hard crash of their economy. Countries with a too low exchange rate would see a considerable boom. If the exchange rates would miraculously be perfect, then it would stay stable for a while, but the problems slowly crouch back in as some economies get stronger (become undervalued) or get weaker (become overvalued). This is a bit what has happened with the Euro, even though I would still consider this quite a success story, as the economic strengths of the Euro countries are converging to some extent.
A follow-up question if I may --
I think it's fair to say that the reunification of East and West Germany amounted in effect to East Germany's adoption of West Germany's capitalistic, free-market economic system. But what might have been the result if things had gone the other way round and West Germany had merged into and adopted the centralized control economy of East Germany? Would the short and long term outcomes still have been the same? Or would they have been reversed or otherwise modified?
Oof, that's quite out of the box for me. The short term effects would have been very different. Unemployment did not exist in centralized controlled governments of Eastern Europe. When someone was unemployed, they got assigned a job. I also don't think there is something like a company or factory going bankrupt in this system, unless the central planning committee decides to shut it down. If productivity is low, then that's the way it is. Of course, it did happen frequently that a factory couldn't produce because they were lacking important materials or parts, but again that's the way it is.
So I guess that not too much would have changed in the Eastern part of Germany. And in the Western part: well, assuming that the central authorities could gather enough information, then it depends on their decisions, I guess. They could have made it more or less disruptive.
It had already been one of the major problems of Eastern Germany for years and decades to get enough foreign (Western) currencies to buy at least some essentials from Western countries. Probably that would have become easier in the short run. But I have no idea how the whole system would have developed in the long run. I also think that exchange rates played a less central role in the communist systems because international trade played a much weaker role, at least between East and West. I don't know a lot about international trade within the Soviet block, so I am not sure how important it was there.
Thanks! It seemed to me that it *ought* to make a difference, but tbh I tend to get confused/suspicious about even the most basic principles of economics, so I thought it wouldn't hurt to ask.
Thank you, great answer! Which groups in Western and Eastern Germany won and lost based on this? If pensions were exchanged 1:1, I imagine Eastern German retirees were very happy with the currency unification, is that correct?
Yes, Eastern German retirees were clear winners. For workers/employees, there were some groups with "safe" jobs like teachers or other public sectors. They were also winners, because their wages were suddenly worth more.
Industry workers in Eastern Germany lost their jobs en masse. Industry production dropped by half within a years, and there were 3 million unemployed people after a year, in a population of 16 million. So, employees in the producing sectors or other sectors which had to compete in the market, they generally lost. Of course, many of them found new jobs sooner or later, and some could improve their status, but getting unemployed in a recession is generally not nice. This seems a pretty direct consequence of the exchange rates.
For groups in Western Germany, it is a bit harder to say who winners/losers were. I would say that companies in general profited because they had a larger market now, and also the additional option to open factories in Eastern Germany, which was good for several reasons (wages comparatively low, lots of people looking for jobs, skilled working class). For the general population of Western Germany, there may have been some positive trickle-down effects from the economic growth, but probably not too much, also because the population of West Germany was four times higher.
The winner-loser dynamics were leveled out somewhat by political action. The German reunion came with massive state intervention and huge investments into public infrastructure. This put notable costs on employees and companies, so the benefits for Western Germany was a bit counterbalanced by that, but also the losses for East German workers were counterbalanced by alternative jobs, a good safety net, great infrastructure, and so on. In the long run, 34 years later, I think the majority of Eastern Germans are winners of the reunion, but in 2000 the picture was a lot more mixed. Anyway, the long-term outcome is probably a lot more dominated by the political union than by the pure currency union, so it's going on a tangent here.
The dollar wouldn't be the international reserve currency anymore, which probably means the US can't fund its trade deficit through debt. In general my guess would be that since the existing world trading/financial system was established and is run by the developed Western countries, switching to something completely neutral would be bad for them.
There's also the problem of who would control the new World Central Bank. The Eurozone has had a lot of problems caused by by the different European contries wanting different monetary policies, usually Southern Europe wanting expansionary and Germany wanting contractory.
>the US can't fund its trade deficit through debt.
I assume you meant budget deficit, since the govt does not run a trade deficit, the economy does. But even re the budget deficit, that does not seem right; countries using the Euro are able to fund their budget deficits through debt.
I mean the current account deficit.
I asked Claude to explain it and it said:
"The US dollar's position as the world's primary reserve currency means that it is in high demand globally. This happens for a few key reasons:
The size and stability of the US economy: The US has the largest and most liquid financial markets in the world, which makes the dollar an attractive and reliable currency for global transactions and savings.
The petrodollar system: Many major commodities, especially oil, are priced and traded in US dollars. This creates consistent global demand for the currency.
Confidence in the US government and economy: The relative political and economic stability of the US, as well as the perceived strength of the US government, contribute to the dollar's status.
This high global demand for US dollars allows the country to run persistent trade deficits, as other countries and institutions are willing to hold US dollars and US Treasury securities. This effectively finances the US trade deficit.
Specifically, when the US runs a trade deficit by importing more goods and services than it exports, it receives payments in foreign currencies. However, these foreign currencies are then exchanged for US dollars, which are in high demand globally. This allows the US to fund its trade deficit by essentially exchanging Treasuries or other dollar-denominated assets for the foreign currencies it needs to pay for imports.
In contrast, countries without reserve currency status would typically need to drastically adjust their trade balances or face major currency devaluations and economic disruptions in order to finance trade deficits. The US, on the other hand, can rely on the unique global demand for its currency to finance its trade imbalances."
But, again, many countries on the Euro run trade deficits, and the US trade deficit is not particularly high. So, I am skeptical that it would make a huge difference.
The euro is also a reserve currency. That explains that. In fact you can’t run a trade deficit unless your currency has that status. In a world without reserve currencies imports would equal exports.
But, again, many countries on the Euro run trade deficits, and the US trade deficit is not particularly high. So, I am skeptical that it would make a huge difference.
Yeah, hard to quantify how big an advantage the US gets, even roughly.
The Euro is the second most used reserve currency globally though.
I guess countries which depend more on imports or exports would be most at risk, which richer or more stable countries being a bit safer? Assuming no national bias in the way monetary policy is set? I'd love to hear an actual expert's opinion!
I gave this online presentation about Metamodernism a couple of days ago, and was subsequently invited to give a follow-up series of presentations on the same subject.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5AW9Gh6zs8&ab_channel=52LivingIdeas
I explain what Metamodernism is, how it could resolve culture war debates/time-wasting, and how it could sweep the culture.
Someone on Manifold suggested that I share my Substack in the open thread so I thought, "ah, what the heck". Here's one of my latest posts, in which I detail my philosophical and personal frustrations with much of the public discussion about privacy, which I think focuses on the wrong things, in essence, treating it as an issue of abstract rights, rather than the concrete applications of power, and the negative effects these can have on peoples lives. https://philosophybear.substack.com/p/the-privacy-paradox-and-what-privacy
Very good points. Behaving freely in a police state does not mean one's revealed preference is to be sent to Siberia.
You do identify the the core of the problem with the privacy paradox: people keep doing things that they *should* be able to do, not what they can get away with doing. Anything you say or do, can and will be used against you. The past will haunt you forever, and your mistakes will never be forgiven. This idiotic delusion that "just" actions will always be rewarded has damned so many lives. There is no alternative to living in fear.
Of course there is an alternative to living in fear. I watched the pope doing urbi et orbi at easter and only have to worry about the sins I commenced since.
> When we left our small communities for the big city, sociologists said we were making a tradeoff. On the one hand, we wouldn’t have a robust community, to be sure, but we would at least have the anonymity of the city. That came with the liberal possibility to remake ourselves. Now it seems that capitalism wants to take it all away from us- to leave us with the isolation of the city, and the ferocious moral economy of a small village- nosey and full of grudges.
If you could resist the urge to throw in Marxist talking points, you'd win. Capitalism doesn't cause this.
If you somehow believe it does, you should probably argue that in a separate post, and leave it out of a snarky paragraph in the middle of what is otherwise a thoughtful post.
People have an averse reaction to Marxism because, you know, all those millions of murders. So if this wasn't some sort of "Marxism is right" you should also be VERY CLEAR you're not advocating for a Marxist alternative to Capitalism.
EDIT: a DJ friend of mine notes: "I'm not sure it's "capitalism" when, for example, radicals in the dance music underground cancel each other for having the wrong political views."
If he used “elite technocrats like bill gates and Zuckerberg” would that work for you.
It seems ubiquitous. Perhaps it's more concentrated in tech, insurance, government, banking? But still... way more broad than just the awful tech people (like Zuckerberg and Gates) who are getting all the press for doing it.
Agreed. I think people who are not necessarily Marxists use capitalism as a short hand for all of those institutions. We need a better word. Maybe he just say “the modern world”.
If you get cancelled in the dance music underground, you're done in the dance music underground (presumably, I don't know, never been in a dance music underground). However the dance music underground isn't going to complain about you, say, to the Pathfinder club, or the scrabble association.
Meanwhile HR & recruitment processes are increasingly rolling out intrusive background checks as I discuss in the piece. It is becoming the norm to demand that would be applicants certify, for example, that they have never been subject to certain kinds of disciplinary processes. True, information is leaky everywhere in the internet age, but the proactive searching hunt is being spearheaded very much by the corporate world- and that is the point of difference. Social media checks etc. are becoming common. Obviously people seek dirt on each other outside job hiring on an informal basis, but it is in hiring that this stuff is reaching industrial precision. This very much is an innovation of capitalism.
I'm with Mark as a sibling comment. This is very much not an innovation of Capitalism. I've seen the exact sort of soul-less (evil?) person characterised in pretty much every Soviet or other Marxist hellhole ever documented. Still not sure you're in the Marxist camp, but if you are, you're doing it wrong.
Stasi did it. KGB did it. When the state is the one employer, the entire state turns into one giant HR nightmare.
At least in Capitalism, we can choose which soul-less evil institution to become a wage slave to. In all the others, it's forced on us, and there's no escape to anywhere less evil.
Also: if you're a DJ, the underground is your pathfinder and your scrabble and your HR. Getting outed as a non-woke non-idiot in the dance underground is the end of your career. You go back to being a pizza delivery guy or Amazon boxer or whatever.
EDIT: I was not strong enough on the DJ point. Getting outed is not just the end of your career. You lose a large set of your friends as well.
Yeah, I have no doubt Soviet states are also capable of in this area and did. Right now though its being pushed ahead by the labour market under capitalism.
Yes, I agree you're fucked if you get destroyed in the dance underground, that's always been possible- the difference is that there is the possibility of reinventing yourself.
>This is very much not an innovation of Capitalism.
Agreed - and it is not limited to Soviet governments either. IIRC, in the USA, there were (are?) restrictions on e.g. student loans if the government finds certain reasons to dislike the applicant (unrelated to student status) - though this was a while ago, and I don't recall the specific reasons they picked (anti-war activism???).
> This very much is an innovation of capitalism.
Come on, this is clearly not true. Public sector employers also have HR departments and recruitment processes. Meanwhile, it is possible to regulate what information an employer can be entitled to by law.
More likely, it's an innovation of the Stasi or similar socialist institutions.
See also, the (pre-capitalist) inquisition.
I think it’s time to get over the inquisition.
Is that a part of history that can teach us nothing? Or is this some sort of a twist on the old "no-one expects" joke?
Personally, I think the whole privacy debate is moot. There will be no more privacy until some kind of singularity-scale societal change (and after that, anything is possible). The attack surface is just too large, and with advent of ever more sophisticated statistic tools, even disparate pieces of information will (not could - will!) be used to create a complete picture of almost everyone in the world, aside from a few off-grid hermits. Records of your life will be kept - it's just the way of digital society. And as long as they're there, someone will buy or steal them. And after a single leak, they usually end up in bulk databases, which will float around the net forever, getting cheaper and cheaper.
The only really important question - should we abandon all pretence of privacy at all and embrace complete openness, or cling to the last shreds of the old world? For now, I believe the later option is still preferable, as the tools are still not QUITE there to eliminate all privacy forever. Unless you're a person of interest to some powerful entity, or at least a determined human with enough money to buy necessary access (a stalker), you can keep your illusion of privacy for now. But personally, I still wonder - if a random criminal gang can get my telephone number, ID details and workplace records, why can't two government agencies share the same information between them, and still require me to bring them physical papers, or at least jump through a number of online hoops? This already failed to protect me from criminals, and I don't believe the lack of some stupid consent form would prevent a my (or other) government's security agency from getting this information on me, if I happen to draw its eye, so I won't be protected from this, too. At best, this protects me from criminals who are too poor to afford a relatively cheap data-as-service query about me, or too dumb to think of this. Which, I guess, isn't bad for now, but as prices will keep dropping, this protection won't be sufficient.
Jake’s cancer has stopped responding to the clinical trial drug petosemtamab. Here’s an update he’s written for those following our story:
https://jakeseliger.com/2024/03/18/in-which-the-squamous-cell-carcinoma-tumors-in-my-neck-grow-by-20-in-two-months/
I laughed at the radiologist line. Accurate. Sorry to hear - if you are ever in Melbourne, Australia, hit me up and I'll help you navigate the clinical trial space here :)
If he's willing to try something experimental, would he like some queuine? Natural compound, sort of a vitamin—produced exclusively by bacteria but utilized by every healthy cell—incorporated into tRNA as queuosine. Seems to be depleted in a variety of cancers including SCC.
https://aacrjournals.org/cancerres/article/52/17/4696/497934/Relationship-of-the-Queuine-Content-of-Transfer
In a recent blog post, Scott said we all hate mensa. Why do we all hate mensa?
Intelligence is a very sensitive matter to people, sort of like physical appearance, but it's even worse because it's correlated to actual real-world success.
I imagine that if you made a group named "Thin People Confederation", or the "Tall People Gang", most people are similarly not going to be very thrilled about it, even if those groups never made any judgements or disparaging comments about the "worse" weights and heights of people who don't qualify. There is a fundamental unfairness to the Universe (or God, if you want to believe in one) in the distribution of physical and mental characteristics among humans, and forming groups explicitly premised on the selection of those characteristics is seen as "rubbing salt in the wound", so to speak.
A secondary source of hate might be all the flak from the IQ wars, because Mensa measures intelligence by IQ testing and so is a prime target for people who hate IQ tests and think they are all what's wrong with the world. But that's a distinct reason from the above.
I think it's amplified by the studies showing disparities among racial/ethnic groups. If it was merely randomly distributed among populations it would not be an issue. But some groups score higher than others just as some are taller than others. Knowing this is unlikely to slow down the scramble for resources either I imagine if this became the dominant world view (and it is not today) than we would see even more extreme races for biocapital. In Brazil for example I think it's the white sperm doners with blue eyes and blond hair that are more prized.
I wonder how many of the people talking about Mensa have ever been? I haven't.
Do people really hate Mensa? I haven’t run into anyone IRL that feels this way. Online you can find people that hate anything, mom’s apple pie, well done three part harmony, the sight of the Milky Way on a cloudless and moonless night, the first robin of spring, really, just about anything.
A Mensa meeting might be a decent forum to find someone to play a complex board game with, or to debate some complex policy issue. But you know what's way more efficient for both of those things? Not filtering on IQ and instead checking out a the social events at a game shop or going to a debate club.
It leaves Mensa looking more like it's engaged in filtering for the sake of filtering. Member just gets a pat on the head and a badge that says "very smart."
In a vacuum, that might not matter much, but unfortunately, pretty much everybody on this board has had the privilege of dealing with self-professed-Mensa-types, waving that badge around in distasteful ways (example: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-240, which includes such gems as "[w]hat's the point in talking to people that don't have any intellectual achievements, eg contributions to human knowledge," and "[t]he minimum IQ for contribution to the knowledge of man is about 125... [p]eople under that level quite literally exist just to do labor for people above that leve[.]")
A person who posts interesting content and is sociable/pleasant to engage with is probably smart. But a person who posts his IQ or his smartness badge is probably just a dickwad, and Mensa is in the business of handing out smartness badges.
It may not be what Mensa wants, but it doesn't take many interactions with jackass members of a tribe to convince outsiders that the tribe is composed of jackasses. Similar principle to sports hooliganism.
- It's low status to express that you want to be in a club that only has smart people. This is because this is interpreted as "thinking you're better than" people who are not smart, which is taken to indicate (a) having too high an opinion of yourself, (b) a moral failure (in putting others down), and (c) a lack of the social skills to interact with people who aren't like you. (I have sometimes gotten interpreted as those things just because I like to talk about math and other intellectual topics; it's got to be much worse if people know you are a Mensa member.)
- Thus not only is joining Mensa low status (so people express hatred for it because of that), it tends to mostly attract people who either (a) actually fit the above negative stereotypes or (b) don't care if others think that they do. Even if you want to spend time with smart people, you might not want to spend time with people who went through those filters!
- Because the filter for membership is an IQ test, and some of their promotional stuff involves puzzles of uneven quality (I have a book of them that I got as a kid...), it has the reputation -- fairly earned or not -- of being composed of people who want to show off their smarts by doing puzzles of dubious merit, rather than anything deep or meaningful.
- Once something is generally hated, people absorb reasons to hate it rather than reasons to like it from the general discourse, so they hate it more.
I notice that Vitor also mentioned adverse selection due to many smart people already having organic ways to spend time with other smart people. This is probably also a big factor, and might be testable: is Mensa less hated in locations where there's few organic ways for smart people to spend time hanging out together? (Though this is possibly confounded by people in those locations maybe being more likely to interpret wanting to spend time with smart people as "they think they're better than others".)
Mensa isn't only less hated in those places; people aren't even aware of it. I've never seen Mensa mentioned anywhere else except try-hard forums like this, and a few places on Reddit. And, of course, in other places where "smart people have organic ways to spend time with other smart people."
I've never belonged, but some people who have have said that they wanted intellectual discussions but the members seemed more interested in just endlessly solving puzzles and stuff like that.
I like mensa. People in mensa share my taste in boardgames. And while they arent all champion boardgamers they are way better than random people. Always happy to hear someone is in mensa. The prior they wanna play 'A feast for Odin' with me goes way the fuck up.
Because we are all very proud of how very smart we are, and get deeply annoyed when someone we consider our inferior comes along claiming to be very smart too.
It's basically seen as a club for underacheivers who would rather brag about their intelligence than using it to doing anythin noteworthy.
A bit less inflammatory: it's for those who want to hang out with other smart people, but for some reason this doesn't happen organically to them. If you're doing a phd or working at a big tech company, etc etc, you'll have an overabundance of the thing that mensa provides and you won't join. Therefore, mensa membership is subject to adverse selection.
For some reason, this happens much less to places with implicit filters for intelligence, because those places usually have a raison d'etre other than just being a club for smart people, and end up being such a club anyways as a bonus.
Mensa people have different tastes from elite university people. Or tech workers. There are advantages to literal Mensa. At least if you share the tastes.
Agreed. I'm not saying mensa is bad (I'm actually trying to be less judgmental overall), just saying that the adverse selection is real, because these things do substitute for each other to a significant degree.
>A bit less inflammatory
I'm not trying to not be inflammatory, I'm trying to accurately capture the view that many people actually have of the organization
The part "it's seen as X" is accurate, but it doesn't explain *why* it seems so.
(The implied explanation would be "it is seen as X, because it is X", and I have no idea whether you actually intended to imply that or not. Did you?)
I was a Mensa member in the past, and speaking for myself, I definitely *didn't* join in order to brag about my intelligence. Back then I assumed that intelligence was quite common. I mean, 2% may seem like little, but if you translate it to absolute numbers, in a city with population of half million, that already makes 10000 people. That doesn't feel like a very exclusive club. At that time, I was already a member of more exclusive groups, such as "people who participate in the international math olympiad". Finally, it doesn't make much sense to brag about high IQ when you are surrounded by people who passed literally the same IQ test as you.
So, from my perspective, the explanation of "bragging about intelligence" completely fails the Intellectual Turing Test.
Instead, the reason why I actually joined, was that I hoped to find... basically something like Less Wrong (which didn't exist back then), or at least like ACX. And I didn't. So after a few years, I left.
I think the situation deserves more than just a mocking response, because it is not completely obvious why this project has failed. To compare, most readers of ACX are highly intelligent, and most of them are not doing anything worthwhile while writing in the ACX comment section. So why does ACX feel so different from Mensa?
(And, some people would argue that it does not. That is probably the official position of the SneerClub. But I think that the differences are large, despite also some similarities.)
The obvious answer is that ACX is a community built around Scott, who provides interesting topics, insightful analysis, and a friendly environment for discussion. Scott is good at his work, and some of his articles are more or less related to his work.
But if "a smart and charismatic person in the center" is the ingredient that makes the difference, the obvious question is whether Mensa could be fixed by having someone like Scott. Imagine that Scott (or rather a more extraverted version of him) joins Mensa, and that he is so popular that he gets elected as the boss of Mensa. Imagine that Scott gives public lectures, which are equivalent to his current articles, and that the lectures are open for both the members and the non-members. And the membership in Mensa would provide an extra opportunity to interact with Scott, a bit like being a paying subscriber does here. -- Could this fix the problems with Mensa? Or is there a reason why this wouldn't work, and what exactly is that reason?
(Mensa has a concept of "special interest group", which is a group inside Mensa that has their own specific agenda; for example they have the same hobby. So in the proposed thought experiment, ACX would become a SIG inside Mensa. I am mentioning this technicality to address a possible objection that the culture of ACX can only be maintained by bans, and Scott would not be allowed to ban people from Mensa. He could still ban them from the SIG.)
"But if 'a smart and charismatic person in the center' is the ingredient that makes the difference, the obvious question is whether Mensa could be fixed by having someone like Scott"
I think without knowing the history of the organization, that it's possible Mensa gained traction in the first place by having one or a few of a previous generation's smart and charismatic people in the center, maybe in like the 1950s? (An era where social clubs were more common in any case; Lions, Rotary, Shriners...) Now, however, those people being deceased, they've lost the Mandate of Heaven and it has passed to a series of new petty-emperors, of which Scott is one.
Social democracy is a great example of this process. Once, the Fabians had Shaw and Wells spewing grand theories about how to fix society and save mankind, full of energy, zeal and good prose; Bertrand Russell joined and then left because he disagreed about some minor quibble, but still clearly a "fabiadjacent"! So it became huge and trendy among the intelligentsia and still today hordes of middle-class midwits believe in Fabian socialism – even though all their ideas demonstrably don't work or, when they might, as in eugenics (the Fabians were huge on this before WWII and then suddenly stopped talking about it for some reason), are regarded as monstrous. The rest of us look at them with contempt. They can't see that their secret society to restore the Ming Dynasty is hopelessly obsolete, being abandoned by Heaven.
Less inflammatory more explanatory.
I appreciated the detail
I chatted George H from the last open thread: https://morelucid.substack.com/p/increasing-iq-by-10-points-is-possible . Dude sure seemed incredibly well informed to me. You can have whatever prior you want but he knew a ton of stuff about the subjects we discussed. Im not minimally informed myself but he super impressed me. Seems worth sharing because he was definitely WAY more informed than I expected. Top of the distribution outcome.
Good data point. My priors on this seem to be softer than most; I find it perfectly plausible that we are not extracting maximum IQ from our brains. There are a bunch of constraints on our learning and working environments. We satisfice instead of optimize, specially because raw brainpower has to combine with other traits (social influence, knowledge, experience) to result in productivity.
Intuitively I also lean towards explanations like "most people are actually mildly sleep deprived / nutrient deprived / overly tense", but George seems to claim these are not the cause of the IQ jump.
I wish it were possible to increase my drive and motivation, which I think I'm lacking a lot more than actual IQ points :(
Do any of y'all have access to the Chaotic Thinking podcast (by Liminal Warmth)? I've googled it (as I recently remembered that it existed) but it seems that the major websites don't actually have the content of the podcast itself :(
Does anyone have high quality analysis of exercise using machines to share. I want specifically machines not bodyweight or free weight. Would super appreciate seeing anything cool!
https://www.strongerbyscience.com/free-weights-vs-machines/
FWIW, googling whatever question you have re fitness and adding "Greg Nuckols" to the query is a pretty good way to find quality evidence based content in this space.
Analysis of what exactly? Comparison between machines vs. free/bodyweight? Best machines for certain fitness goals? Best brand of machines? Please be more specific.
Im not the pickiest on operationalizing. More interested in the quality of the analysis. But some questions:
-- Do users get hurt frequently? Are the injuries chronic? (This is the most important question)
-- Do people who use them consistently gain muscle
-- Can you gain a 'lot' of muscle and strength liek you can with free weights. Or people cap out quickly if they are fit
-- Does strength from free weight carry over to other things. To barbells? To bodyweight calisthenics? To sports?
As I said im not the pickiest. Id rather have a great analysis of 'carryover to some random sport I dont care about' than a meh quality analysis that covered all of my questions.
One good reason to add some cable or machine stuff to your free weight routine is gravity. It sucks trying to develop lats with dumbbells while standing on your head. And pull-ups are fine only for lean or already quite strong people.
I don't think lats need a machine. Bent-over rows are an excellent lat-developing exercise, and if you want to pull really heavy weights, there's the knee-supported single-arm rows.
And of course pull-ups can be done with bands or as an "inverted row" with a low bar (for example: https://breakingmuscle.com/inverted-row/).
I'm not an expert and I don't have an analysis but I've been working out and following the bodybuilding space for a while, the main differences between machines and free weights are that with a machine you can better isolate the muscle you want to train (an obvious example, doing an exercise seated compared to standing up you'll be more stable by default, and for the same reason it's harder to get injured with a machine); free weights depends on gravity and can be inefficient (eg lateral raises, at the beginning of the movement with dumbbells you don't have any resistance horizontally and it increases as you lift your arm while with a cable you can have constant tension) about carryover I think it'll depends mainly on how similar the exercises/movements are.
I don’t have an analysis for you, but do have an education in the field (kinesiology) and work experience as well. I’ll keep my answers short since you are looking explicitly for an analysis, but the answers to your questions are:
1) Do users frequently get hurt, and are the injuries chronic?
No, machines are commonly used to avoid injuries. This will have some minor variance depending on the type of machine (a single-axle machine will be more stable than a cable machine, for example). Stability is the ability to focus on working a particular muscle in a certain range of motion and (in short) more stability means less risk of injury.
2) Do people who use them consistently gain muscle?
Yes. Many bodybuilders will use large amounts of machines are they allow you to focus on large muscle groups (to the exclusion of small stabilizer muscles).
3) Can you gain ‘a lot’ of muscle and strength like with free weights?
Yes, you can. Muscle and strength gain are directly correlated with the total weight or force you use, as well as the total volume of exercise you do (and other smaller things, but not relevant here). Machines will only limit you here if you grow strong enough that you can do all the weight on the machine.
4) Does strength from free weight carry over to other things? To barbells? To bodyweight calisthenics? To sports?
Yes. I will note that machines aren’t free weights, and it is here that they have the greatest risks and drawbacks. Avoiding training your stabilizing muscles means you will be significantly weaker in free weights, calisthenics, sports, etc, and risk injury. You will have the strength to “do things” but will struggle to do them properly. To use a car analogy, you could have a big horsepower engine but an axle made of balsa wood.
If you were actually asking specifically about free weights, then yes, there is great carryover to other things. So much so that virtually all types of athletes lift weights! Tiger Woods famously benched 300 pounds, and golf is much more a sport of coordination than of raw power.
However, your carryover will depend strongly on the free weight exercise and the sport. Squatting will not make you better at arm wrestling, and a strong barbell curl will do nothing for you in synchronized swimming. But squatting will make you better at many, many sports, and doing barbell curls likewise (albeit a slightly smaller selection, IMO).
Bodyweight calisthenics are a bit of an oddball. Yes, lifting weights will make you stronger and therefore make you better at calisthenics. However, adding muscle mass will also make you heavier, and thus directly make the calisthenics harder. You see this in sports that are classified by body weight as well. Generally, athletes in these sports will still strength train, but will focus on both low repetitions (powerlifting) and/or high repetitions (endurance), seeking to avoid excessive hypertrophy. They will also optimize their nutrition around getting very lean, but not very big.
Hope that helps, either you or someone else who’s interested.
Is it possible that the roles we consider high status in society today co-evolved with patriarchy in such a way that these are actually optimized for masculine traits? For example, in a world that was matriarchal, maybe companies would be lead by a triumvirate instead of a singular CEO Maybe in that world, after men have overcome social oppression through their masculist movement, they would be allowed and encouraged to form part of triumvirates but under perform on average? Or, say that we lived in a world were parenting was the highest status thing one could do, could men on average compete with women?
I’m not attempting to justify the lack of diversity in high status roles. Conditional on what we’ve got, I am fully in favor of increasing opportunity and access for all. I’m also not claiming that the above hypothesis implies genetics is the primary reason for a skewed distribution. I’m merely wondering if there’s something to it. For example in the same way we can argue humans domesticated dogs as much as dogs domesticated humans.
It's a very interesting question. Academia and publishing are becoming matriarchies and men are leaving those fields in droves. Smart guys now prefer to start their own tech companies rather than try to do research, and make video games not books. (In the second case of course there are large audience effects as well.)
Heck, media's turning into a women's field, and who do we see on Substack? When the field gets feminized, ambitious men go elsewhere.
Well, these days women actually start more business than men (in the US; but might also be true worldwide). Whether they are more successful on average is a little murky, but there's evidence that suggests that's true as well, see https://europeanchamberofdigitalcommerce.com/statistics-show-women-are-better-entrepreneurs-than-men/
In my opinion one of the main wrinkles with trying to analyze this is that you can have a role or task where women are on average better than men... and the very top of the field is still dominated by men. You see this in Scrabble and also (I believe) in marksmanship - the average woman has an edge over the average man, but the top competitors are still male. There are some hand-waving evo psych explanations for this - men have slightly greater trait variance, presumably due to greater returns (in terms of reproductive success) to being the best or being the top dog in whatever field.
It is noteworthy that in evolutionary terms, being a median or modal male gets you ... nothing.
I think it's less trait variance than differential payoffs (also a handwaving evo psych explanation). Being at the top of a hierarchy makes you attractive to women (perhaps not in cases as nerdy as Scrabble!) from what I can tell.
A little off-topic, but I dated a comedian for a while a few years back. She was bi, and commented being funny got her girls, but no guys. So there are certain things that are attractive to one sex and not the other.
"Study upon study have shown that businesses founded by women ultimately deliver higher revenue, even in the negative climate of less investor capital and support."
If people really believe this, there's a lot of money to be made by investing in firms founded by women.
Yeah, I wouldn't put too much faith in that quote... this is hard to study in a real apples to apples way, because women tend to found different businesses than men. You could limit it to something like a specific set of VC funded ventures but now you have other problems of confounding and probably small sample size.
I remember seeing one ETF (Ellevest or something) that was supposed to invest in firms founded by women, I checked a while later and it underperformed the S&P 500 significantly. Of course, there could be other factors--they could be shut out of the old boys' network for financing, they could be less concentrated in high-growth sectors like tech, they might have less capital, their principals might be bogged down by family responsibilities...
Well this feels like a terrible idea, but I'm doing it anyway.
I think the parenting thing answers the question, actually. Women make the better parents because men are physically incapable of feeding the baby, and by the time that's no longer a requirement the mother has the built-up experience of dealing with the child and it makes more sense to have her keep caring for the child than for the father to take over.
This in turn leads to a split in personalities; mothers tailor their thinking more toward dealing with children, encouraging them and helping them grow, leaving fathers free to tailor their thinking more to dealing with other adults, making sure things actually work and discouraging failures. And so, status. Children don't have status, they're stupid, and we don't want the people raising them to be driven by status, because children can't live up to those expectations. But if nobody cares about being the best, nothing improves and everything decays. So broadly, men care about creating status while women care about creating community.
Rates of breastfeed (in the US) have varied drastically over the past ~70 years: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK235588/ And breastfeeding rates are not uniform across the population, cultural and economic factors have a huge influence.
I dont know what that means for your hypothesis, only that it would be possible (though very difficult) with the right data to perform some cohort analysis to tease out the relationship between breastfeeding and parenting.
I agree with this
It strikes me that singular leaders are generally necessary in order to provide a single point of responsibility.
Not just responsibility, but reactivity is extremely important. My wife was supposed to be the stand-in for her prof in inter-institutional meetings for a certain project as long as the prof's baby was still small, but still relay all information to her and coordinate with her on what to do. After awhile it became clear how grossly inefficient this arrangement was (distilling long meetings into "core points" is always lossy, and vice versa rehashing 4 hour meetings in their entirety is plain insanity), and the prof would just let her make decisions herself, which quickly morphed into my wife taking the de-facto role over entirely. I've heard similar stories now multiple times, where there's nothing more destructive for productivity than having to wait for the agreement of multiple people until something gets done.
No one sits down and ordains what is high status or low - that comes from effectively market forces arising from the constraints and limitations of the physical world.
Where men got good at things that worked, their societies grew and we now call those things "high status". But that's just a shorthand term for a much larger chain of causality.
Taking parenting: if it was true 100% of the time that kids would come out healthy, grow big and strong, and stay around to earn lots of money and look after their mum in her old age, parenting would be high status because everyone can see that you as a mum have good things coming to you. If instead it's 100% that they'll cost you all your money then fuck off to Australia at 18 to do drugs and never write to you again, it'd be low status, because everyone can see you'll be out of pocket (financially and emotionally). We don't know which it's going to be, so the "status" of the parent isn't clear cut.
Trying to swap out what's high status like it's just a post it note you can move on to something else is like saying, "Okay, so what if we had ice cream, but it was nice and warm?"
It would make slightly more sense to ask, "What would need to be different about our world for the civilisational dominant strategy to have been something that "favours" women (in the form we know them)?"
"Is it possible that the roles we consider high status in society today co-evolved with patriarchy in such a way that these are actually optimized for masculine traits?"
Considering that seeking high status is itself a masculine trait that scenario seems highly unlikely.
But even in an extremely weird world where somehow high status was no longer a male trait or a long lasting matriarchy had established itself I would not feel comfortable answering that question. So many male traits are connected to seeking high status so if that variable was changed I would have no idea how the rest of it would shake out. At the same time if women would take over the masculine trait of seeking high status I would expect other traits to follow, so male and females might just trade places, with the same traits staying dominant - except physical strength, which by itself is a strong status multiplyer and makes it easier for men with high status to become dominant again, toppling the whole Pyramide and making the premise questionable again. I just don't think this scenario works and if it did would it would incredibly weird and impossible to predict.
"For example in the same way we can argue humans domesticated dogs as much as dogs domesticated humans."
That point is hard to agree with if you've ever seen a wolf and a pug. Dogs surely have influenced humans but they did not run thousands of years of eugenics experiments on us with nearly no ethical considerations. (and even to the point of mere domestication it takes many generations of breeding. Dogs did not breed humans.)
Physical strength is probably less important than it has been for a very long time.
Given the relative costs of human muscle power and electric motors, I think that any job (excepting sports) that requires substantial physical strength is organized badly.
Electric motors are cheap. Applying them is not. The tradeoff is not against human strength, but human engineering ingenuity. Some jobs require such a flexible, creative workflow (think heavy equipment maintenance) that there is no standardized process which can be cost-effectively automated.
Many Thanks!
>Some jobs require such a flexible, creative workflow (think heavy equipment maintenance) that there is no standardized process which can be cost-effectively automated.
Yes, there are indeed some outliers. Though removing a demand for substantial physical strength is a weaker condition than automating a process. Using cranes and forklifts and power screwdrivers can substitute for human muscle power in many situations where the job is indeed flexible and creative and no standardized full process exists.
Such jobs are not outliers. Consider the nearest auto mechanic. Many other common trades--construction, electrical, plumbing, roofing--test individual human flexibility, stamina and strength to the limit on a daily basis. These jobs are already power-assisted, which often enables an increased workload rather than an easier job. While often repetitive, they are not assembly-line; tasks vary from moment to moment.
I mentioned heavy equipment maintenance because in that field pneumatic, hydraulic and electrical tools are large and heavy enough that managing them is a trial of strength on its own. Even a "small" 3/4" impact gun is a full-body workout, simply to place and operate on a prolonged basis.
Every year or so, for decades, Festo, Honda, or some other contender demonstrates some form of powered exoskeleton assistance device. This class of product is expensive, slow, and inflexible. It gets in the way for anything a human can manage. It can only be amortized by increasing workload to an inhuman scale.
I am more familiar with the trades I've listed, but janitor, maid, and personal caretaker are also physically demanding jobs. A leaf blower or vacuum cleaner is a labor-saving device only if the job is finite. In market competition, powered assist lets you take on e.g. ten jobs in the time of three: the day remains long, and your body will still wear out eventually.
This is how things happen outside of an office. If these very heavily economized and power-assisted fields seem poorly-organized, then I encourage you to familiarize yourself with their needs and pluck the low-hanging fruit. You will forge a dynasty of unfathomable wealth.
Shurely “triumfeminate”?
What do you make of Camille Paglia's famous quote "If civilization had been left in female hands we would still be living in grass huts"?
I'm pretty sure she was saying that women are fundamentally risk-averse, a trait that is easily observed in all societies all through history, and that stems from women's much, much greater biological investment in their (sharply, biologically) limited number of offspring.
I'm also pretty sure she's saying it in an exaggerated, humorous way, with some agressive in-your-face 'tude, a certain NYC-ish "Hey lemme ax youz sumpin" tone, because she's Camille Paglia.
I'm also pretty sure she is right. (*)
BRetty
I said something similar in my reply to MoltenOak on this thread
* -- OK, here's the version of how she's right, if she was The Zvi. [Look, I just can't spell his last name -- it looks like "letters, bro!" (**) to me.]
from Zvi's Substack:
"Don't Worry About
-- the Last Three Incredibly Detailed Posts About AI That You Have Missed,
-- Or About Feeling That Maybe *I* Am the AI,
-- Or the Vase (Unless your Name is Sophie)"
Imagine an advanced (but isolated) Stone Age tribe, 100 adults: 50 men 50 women (with some children and elders who are not decision-makers.) Some of the Men have returned from a hunting trip, and say they have discovered better land two valleys away, no other tribes, perfect. Other men have seen the valley before so they agree, and a big group proposes the whole tribe move there. Since this is a game theory parable/simulation, let's say that by moving there, the whole tribe would be 3-5% better off in all ways, *BUT* one man and one woman will die along the way.
Every woman will vote NO. Because the benifit will be diffuse and spread over the whole tribe, including other women and offspring competing with their own, but a 2% chance of immediately dying is GAME OVER for a woman. This creates a kind of Nash Equiblibrium where the diffuse gains over the hill are never worth the direct existential risk of climbing. (It also creates a "Lysistrata/Clan-of-the-Cave-Bear" scenario, but I've already sold that series to Netflix, ka-CHING!) on Wednesday.
-- The ZVBRettinator
Not much. Why?
See my replies to MoltenOak on this thread.
I like Paglia and I enjoyed Sexual Personae back in the 90s, but there's absolutely no way to prove that one way or the other. As Negentrope says below, unfalsifiable.
My suspicion about patriarchy is that by forcing women to breed over what they would prefer if given agency, it increases the birth rate to the point where you can produce more warriors, kill neighboring societies, and take their stuff (and women). Most people here wouldn't call that 'good', but it was a stable equilibrium for a very long time. Sort of like the way everyone has to have a big army because if you don't someone else will kill you and take your stuff.
Sounds completely unfalsifiable.
Is that really the point? If people could only express opinions that were 'falsifiable' you would shut down....What?....around 99%? Is that what you would like? The world would be a lot quieter.....perhaps deathly silent.
I take the statement "If civilization had been..." as a prediction. One that posits that if certain conditions had been different then the course of events would have proceeded in a very different direction. Since the prediction in question is in regards to human history and the development path of human society, I would consider anthropological (i.e. scientific) prediction. Now I'm no strict Popperian, but when it comes to statements that fall under the umbrella of science I consider a lack of falsifiability to be a point against the argument (particularly when making such a grand, sweeping conclusion).
Perhaps I'm being overly critical. I haven't read any of Paglia's work and it's entirely possible that she backs up that statement with enough background research and evidence to justify it. But I'm very disinclined to be charitable to these kind of just-so stories.
Clearly seems like bullshit + no justification provided = no grounds for entertaining the idea provided. Make a case for the point if you want though
That you find this bullshit confuses me. It's pretty obvious when you observe men/women in any situation where something needs to be done.
If you need a simple, quick illustration, go to your favourite video serving site (Youtube probably) and search for the survival on an island video. Two groups: one all men, one all women, on the same island, trying to survive for a week or whatever.
See it play out as Camille Paglia would predict.
I just did the search myself, and I found some entirely different video than the one I had in mind, but apparently it played out similarly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpaG4u6R-rE
I have no idea what such a video could possibly portray that would make me generalize that conclusion to literally billions of people living over thousands of years in hundreds of cultures.
I'm disengaging from this conversation because it seems pointless to argue with you specifically, sorry. Feel free to have the last word if you wish.
It was a question... (and a response to some questions posed by the original commenter.) My question was not posed to you but thanks anyway for your opinion.
I am aware of that, but wanted to join in on this public exchange.
My own view?....as a contrarian counter to the dominant feminist narrative of the past few decades I think it almost certainly overstates the case. Overstates it by how much?....I'm really not sure. But if one wants to rhetorically break the spell of an overwhelmingly dominant narrative, you do have to be punchy and pithy and - in this sense - I think Paglia's comment was a useful one.
>I’m not attempting to justify the lack of diversity in high status roles. Conditional on what we’ve got, I am fully in favor of increasing opportunity and access for all.
Increasing it about *what*? One in which women are already heavily favored?
>I’m also not claiming that the above hypothesis implies genetics is the primary reason for a skewed distribution.
Well, if you're not suggesting that then you're almost certainly wrong.
>For example in the same way we can argue humans domesticated dogs as much as dogs domesticated humans.
They didn't.
>Increasing it about *what*? One in which women are already heavily favored?
Surely you dont mean to imply that women are *universally* favored, e.g. in jobs? There are certainly jobs where thats the case. But I think you will find it hard to make any semi-complete list of high status jobs where women come out on top empirically. Or do you mean to say that women are heavily favored, but still incapable or unwilling to take those jobs, so its still men who win out at the end?
How many women trashmen are there? Women CHOOSE not to do those jobs. Because they don't have to. Because they're heavily favoured in high-status jobs.
If a woman wants a high-status job, and is willing to make the same sacrifices a man would make to get it and keep it, she will have it and keep it.
Even though women choose only a small fraction of jobs (the high-status ones), and only put in a small fraction of the effort as men, they are still able to pull off making more money given the same experience in the same job.
>How many women trashmen are there? Women CHOOSE not to do those jobs. Because they don't have to. Because they're heavily favoured in high-status jobs.
Ah I forgot! number of women - number of trashwomen = number of women in high status jobs, right? Because taking care of the trash is the only low status job (even IF only men would be doing it, there might be and certainly are low status jobs which are done primarily by women, e.g. in care-taking and cleaning). And because the only alternative to low status job is a high status one rather than the many jobs in the middle.
The sarcasm distracts, but your point is solid. I don't recall ever seeing a male in a home maid service position, for example. Both male and female janitors, sure.
I think what you're really asking is whether socioeconomic conventions that favor men are merely at local maxima by happenstance. Since it's impossible to know whether you're at a local vs absolute maximum, and since all maxima are effectively arrived at by a combination of random walk followed by hill climbing, it's an open question.
Would be interesting to experiment with the approach of hopping off the climb of the current local maximum in search of one with a higher peak elsewhere. Since that's something we should probably be giving some effort to on the side anyway, it sounds like a good cause.
I loved this synthesis. Thank you.
> For example, in a world that was matriarchal, maybe companies would be lead by a triumvirate instead of a singular CEO
Are triumvirates inherently more feminine? I don't think there are a lot of triumvirates.
Essentially, yes. Men naturally rally around a leader/try to become the leader, whereas women tend more towards 'cooperation' and consensus building. Triumvarate specifically may not be a great example so much as something more general like a non-hierarchical committee of some kind.
Arguably we already have something like a triumvirate, the Board of Directors. We accurately consider the CEO more important than the board of directors, but that doesn’t necessarily have to be the case in this world. A corporate character could quite easily take away more decisions from the CEO and place them with the Board. This doesn’t happen usually because the Board is seen as inefficient and slow. Companies without a powerful CEO get outcompeted. Even in a world with no men, the advantages in a single CEO seem significant, though the C-Suite would probably be much more collaborative.
No. I’m just making something up as an alternative order that could exist under different historical precedent.
I took your survey and found some of the questions confusing. For example, Number of Lifetime Sex Partners. I've had a number of long-term sexual relationships and expect my current one to last the rest of my life. How should the question be answered? Since I already submitted the survey, it's too late for me, but I'm still interested in what you meant.
Hm, good point. I wonder if someone put 10^15, as in "after we solve alignment and the singularity happens I will live forever and also get laid".
I assume it meant "until now". These things tend to get adjusted for (or plotted against) age.
Yes, it's a pretty standard formulation to ask the question "number of sexual partners until now".
"Tensegrity" (tensional integrity) is a... building technique I guess? that combines cables which are only under tension with parts such as rods that are only under compression. You can make some nifty stuff, like a table where it looks like the top is levitating and trying to float away.
I've read a bunch of abstract arguments for why it's a great idea. In particular, it's supposedly very strong compared to the weight of the components, and there are some vague claims that the human body (the spine in particular) is built according to those principles.
So, why isn't this used a bunch everywhere? All I've found are some art projects, one bridge in Melbourne (probably also categorized under "art" as opposed to "efficient building technique"), and SUPERball, a theoretical design by NASA for a probe that can survive impacts in arbitrary orientations. That scarcity makes my BS detector go off.
Is it a bad tradeoff because of its high complexity to design and build? Are the physical properties actually not that great? Some other problems (I could imagine tendency towards explosive failures)? Or is humanity actually missing out on this great technique?
Seems like an appropriate place to put aa link to video of the spectacular Tacoma Bridge collapse.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XggxeuFDaDU
I'm not sure what that bridge's collapse has to do with tensegrity per se? It looks like an under-damped resonant structure that ended up having a specific mode that was not properly controlled excited by the wind. This likely had to do with a complex interplay of support spacing, cable thicknesses/tensions, and the main bridge mass. Not an easy thing to model without today's FEA tools.
Thirty years ago they thought the collapse was caused by an accident of unfortunate mechanical resonance. Now engineers think it was more complicated problem involving aeroelastic flutter.
It’s simply cool pre light emitting diode video of a disaster that has been studied by engineers ever since. They played it for us in my first year physics class. The British narrator and newsreel style add a bit of dash too.
Yeah of course I bothered to read the Wiki entry on the topic AFTER posting my reply :)
I (looks around nervously) am going to pick a giant fight with all these esteemed physicists who say it wasn't a "resonance" but "flutter" (I benefit from the fact that they are unable to resist due to their absence from these here internets at the moment so my victory shall be total!). The fact that it wasn't a basic longitudinal mode but a complex rotational one doesn't change the fact that there was a dominant frequency at which the two reactive components (inertial and elastic) cancelled each other, leaving only the resistive component in control, and that resistive component, for the specific movement mode, was woefully inadequate, i.e., the resistance was too low relative to the reactances. So the bridge resonated out of control while the wind provided the energy for it. Which is what "resonance" is.
My impression is that tensegrity designs tend to be, for lack of a better term, wobbly. The strongly resist large deformations, but barely resist small deformations at all. And that's often not what people want in a building.
Good point. Also, long time no see Johan!
I think you're talking about a bridge in Brisbane, not Melbourne. And one important factor is that it's not exactly pretty; it has weird arbitrary-looking (but presumably very non-arbitrary) angles all over the place. Your aesthetic decisions are limited once you decide to build in this way. And it doesn't seem to have practical advantages -- a pedestrian bridge over a moderately wide river is easily built by many other means
I am familiar with this concept from legos. where the focus is to build things like the floating table. In this use case, the builds use chains (so you can move the floating pieces into place) and are very unstable. There is an equilibrium where all the pieces fit and its cool, but if you disturb the equilibrium it topples over. I dont know how generally applicable this is, but I offer that as a possible explanation for lack of wide spread use.
I have seen that lego table design, and it has one less chain than needed. Presumably to make it easier to assemble.
Pre-tension concrete is a great place where it's used all the time, but the true reason why it's not really that widely used is because it's not really necessary most of the time - we already have cheap and well proven ways to meet the strength requirements of large structures in both tension and compression.
That structure being steel. Carbon steel and stainless steel. Steels can meet pretty much all conventional tensile and compressive strength reqs and is basically dirt cheap. Where concrete is cheaper and can meet strength requirements, we use that instead, but we don't tend to bother with these kind of fancy composites unless steel/concrete can't do the job. And modern steel is absolutely batshit amazing at this job.
In the non-structural world, tempered glass is a tensegrity material, most notably used by cookware producer Corelle (Vitrelle). Its very easy to recognise Vitrelle crockery - it's usually white and it's extremely thin (compared to regular crockery). Its no less dense than regular china, it's just made of a 3-layer tempered glass/glass ceramic/tempered glass sandwich where the outer tempered glass layers are in tension and the inner glass ceramic is in compression, making it strong enough to eliminate about 70% of the weight. So they're light and cheap too (I got my entire set - 8 plates, 4 bowls, for around $50 AUD and they also threw in 4 regular mugs).
You can however argue that steel is basically the same thing but on a much smaller scale - most steel, microscopically, has a pearlitic structure - alternating crystalline plates of cementite and ferrite. Cementite is hard but brittle, ferrite is yields but is flexible. Almost all modern steel metallurgy amounts to making pearlitic structures consistently, because pearlitic steel (normally just called "carbon steel") is the backbone of basically everything in modern engineering.
I'm pretty sure I've seen reinforced concrete as an example of tensegrity: the concrete is strong under compression, while the embedded rebar is strong under tension. So in a sense it is used everywhere.
Or look at a suspension bridge - cables are under tension, while the bridge itself is compression.
I might be wrong, but IIUC reinforced concrete works under a different principle. It does not use the tensile strength of the rebar to resist compression forces, nor the compressive strength of the concrete to resist tensile forces. Hmm, it's tricky to define exactly what tensegrity actually is.
It’s widely used where needed. Pre-tensioned concrete is an example. Concrete has enormous compression strength, but low tensile. So it’s commonly pre-tensioned with steel cables to remove tensile stress.
Interesting example. IIUC, the concrete at rest is under a positive amount of compression (from a stressed "tendon"), and thus a load that would normally create tensile forces simply reduces this compression, while simultaneously reducing the tension of the tendon. I guess that counts as tensegrity, even though (IIUC) the typical examples of tensegrity structures do *not* have any permanent internal stresses.
I've also heard that pre-stressed concrete is very hard to repair, drill a hole through, etc, because it's subject to explosive failures.
Yes, when you live in one of those fancy high-rises they tell you not to drill into the ceiling beyond certain depth lest you snap a cable.
I'm going to guess that it's fine until something goes wrong, and then everything goes spectacularly wrong. Whatever the opposite of "fail-safe" is.
(Auto-correct wanted "Daryl-sace", which I may steal for an RPG character name.)
Fail deadly
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fail-deadly
As other weeks, I invite readers to "Radical Centrist"
https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/
Recent topics: climate change, macroeconomic data, trade policy
> The hedge fund Bridgewater is running a forecasting contest on Metaculus. US residents only, extra prizes for undergraduates. Prizes include $25,000 and potentially getting recruited by Bridgewater (in which case read the “Corporate Culture” section on their wiki page before accepting).
An actual link to that "wiki page" ("Wikipedia article", to be more precise - "wiki page" implies a Bridgewater-hosted wiki, which resulted in five minutes of life wasted clicking around their website looking for an internal wiki) would have been nice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgewater_Associates#Corporate_culture
Stripping away the public-relations firm signal diluting that runs rampant throughout that section, we get:
> The company has been likened to a cult,[36] but Dalio denies that and insists that the firm is a dedicated "community".[11] . . .
I get the feeling it's like Wolf of Wall Street but with a bunch of dopey corporate futurist newspeak instead of cocaine and midget tossing.
I had initially wondered if it would attract autistic people looking for honest feedback--it's always a problem when you figure everyone's pretending to be nice to you to spare your feelings and you have no idea when you've actually screwed up.
It's probably pretty unpleasant.
It's only today that I finally figured out that Blackrock and Bridgewater are different things. I don't know why I had them confused, but I blame Bridgestone.
Sounds like you could use this handy chart:
https://x.com/nbouscal/status/1404374463844651008
No, it's much, much worse than that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfasR5p7YJI
Dalio really is like a cult leader, and he literally believes the success of bridgewater was a result of his personal "system" of how he does things. He's also had systems developed where everyone is constantly rating everyone else on an app for how true/insightful their statements are, and of course it's all weighted such that Dalio himself always comes out on top.
And when I say 'success', I mean their strong investment performance early on. These days, they're basically just selling a brand name to people who care more about prestiege than actual performance. Or who never bother to check.
They have a policy of "radical transparency" which amounts to whenever you screw up, there will be a big meeting where each of your coworkers berates you about exactly what you did wrong.
Between this and the insistence that you read the corporate founder's book "Principles" it just set off too many "this is a cult" red flags when I was considering applying there years ago. Though unlike most cults it does make its adherents financially better off, just not enough for me to subject myself to that.
I’ve read “Principles” on personal time, and I liked it. At one point, the book describes the Bridgewater culture’s major transparency tool, “baseball cards”. Basically, a digest of every single person’s 360 review is continually updated and continually visible to everyone else. You can see each employee’s strengths and weaknesses as reported by their managers, peers, and subordinates. It’s a bold system that I’m curious about. Dalio swears by it.
Thar sounds like a bunch of metrics just waiting to be Goodharted. I can't imagine a set of metrics so wisely chosen that you can work to maximise them while also doing a good job.
I appreciate the lack of transparency at a normal company. Since I don't know exactly how I'm being judged, it leaves me free to concentrate on doing a good job and hoping that this will lead to good results for me.
You really need to watch this video then: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfasR5p7YJI
Dalio is absolutely bonkers.
"Stripping away the public-relations firm signal diluting that runs rampant throughout that section"
I followed the link once you said this, because this is in Wikipedia-rules-terms a very serious accusation, and I wanted to see just how bad the implied-paid-editing was. It didn't look like I thought it would from that description, but it *did* look pretty bad, in the proseline ("In X-month X-year..." decontextualized sentence-long paragraphs) and random jumps betwen over-positivity and over-negativity that characterize a lot of articles.
...then I scrolled up, and saw the page had a green plus sign in the upper right corner. Which means it passed Good Article, one of our two levels of peer review! How the hell did *that* happen?
(The answer seems to be that it passed GAN in 2011, and amongst other things has had an actual paid editor write chunks of it since then, but the chunks of text I can trace to the pre-GA rewrite all seem pretty bad too.)
> It didn't look like I thought it would from that description, but it *did* look pretty bad, in the proseline ("In X-month X-year..." decontextualized sentence-long paragraphs) and random jumps betwen over-positivity and over-negativity that characterize a lot of articles.
The "Corporate culture" section doesn't seem to have proseline AFAICT. The "History" section sure has proseline, but that's pretty typical of a lot of history sections on English Wikipedia to be quite fair.
I'd define the last three paragraphs of corp culture as proseline -- all are very detached from the article/fail to form a coherent whole, and 2/3 have the "in [year]" structure. (There are a few other spots of choppy proseliney-feeling sentences, which seem to be promotional edits made in 2017.) History is even worse, though, yeah.
There's been a question that's been bugging me ever since I read "Answer to Job" and "Unsong". (Spoilers for both)
Scott's theodicy says that God created every universe which is net good. But there's a problem with this theory which is also present in a Tegmark IV multiverse and modal realism: we should expect ourselves to exist in a universe which is much weirder and far more complex than both our universe and the universe of "Unsong". One in which there aren't any real "laws", or the laws are randomly and regularly broken for no real reason at all.
Advocates of multiverse theories have addressed this problem by introducing the concept of "measure". As far as I can tell, it's a mysterious factor that affects how likely you are to exist in a given universe. Advocates often say it's related to orderliness and simplicity in a universe. And I can find that believable.
But if God created the multiverse... well, that changes the equation, doesn't it? At least intuitively. Because if you have a billion simulations in a single universe, and almost all of them are chaotic and nonsensical, intuitively the concept of measure wouldn't really apply. We would expect the average inhabitant of such a simulation to live a chaotic and nonsensical life. And I don't really see why it would be different with God.
Unless, of course, God's authority over reality is absolute, and so He has the power to create all His universes with a given amount of measure in each of them. That almost works... except that if God, as portrayed in "Unsong", had this power, surely he'd make the probability of existing in a less-than-perfect universe infinitesimal.
I'd like some input here because I found this theodicy really elegant, except for this single fatal flaw.
Is there a way to justify "expecting ourselves to exist" in a certain class of universe that doesn't use measure?
That was my thought as well. Also my problem with Boltzmann brains.
There's no reason to expect an elegant and flawless explanation to the problem of evil. We don't live in a universe with evil when there's an omnipotent and omnibenevolent god because of some clever reason. We live in a universe with evil where there's no omnipotent and omnibenevolent god.
Why should you expect to be an average inhabitant of the uni/multiverse? You're not a soul randomly assigned a body.
In any world where you exist, regardless of who else exists and how numerous they are, the set of experiences that make up your life are being experienced; there's no mystery about why _you_ are experiencing them, because there's no 'you' that exists independently of them.
>we should expect ourselves to exist in a universe which is much weirder and far more complex than both our universe and the universe of "Unsong". One in which there aren't any real "laws", or the laws are randomly and regularly broken for no real reason at all.
Doesn't the Anthropic Principle answer this? Intelligent life is the result of evolution. The evolution of complex life can probably only happen in certain types of physical universes. Batshit-crazy universes with no predictable physical laws probably don't make the cut.
If universes with no predictable laws are a possibility, then shouldn't that mean that there vastly more crazy universes that just happen to *look* like an orderly universe up until some random point where the apparent order breaks down than there are truly orderly universes? Sort of like how there are infinitely many numbers that begin 0.333.... up to however many digits you like, but only one of them actually has 3s forever.
Maybe we're in one of those and science just isn't sophisticated enough to tell. Craziness rates below some threshold will look to most observers like having a predictable order.
But whatever, this is just mental masturbation. Ideas like modal realism are just total nonsense. IMO they should be banned from serious discourse because they're wastes of time that encourage anti-parsimonious thinking.
Intelligent life in our universe is the result of evolution. But if we look at all possible universes with intelligent life where life on the whole is worth living, most of them won't have evolution. They'll just have people that happen to pop into existence.
That’s the wrong kind of infinity you are thinking about.
I think that infinite universes imply people that just pop into existence (Boltzmann brains) is a fallacy. Infinite universes does not imply that any configuration of atoms must exist somewhere. Consider an infinite number of empty universes for example.
The general Boltzmann brain thing is also assuming there's a constant probability of it happening. My instinct is that the expansion of the universe makes this false, but I'm not a cosmologist. Maybe virtual particles could still make Boltzmann brains pop into existence.
With the Job thing, it's all universes where life is worth living. Unless there's some reason universes that don't follow consistent laws aren't worth living in, they'd make up the vast majority of the multiverse.
Yes. This is almost the same as the classical anthropic principle argument
If life is chaotic and nonsensical, maybe the God does not consider it good enough to exist? "Good" makes no sense in such worlds, so they wouldn't be "net good".
Sometimes we're outliers? People have said to my face that, in effect, I don't exist because the probability of people like me is so low. **shrug**
I'm not sure "I" **could** exist in a significantly less odd universe, so...
THERE IS NO OBJECTIVE COSMIC UNEMPLOYMENT RATE.
My podcast episode with Walt Bismarck, the Alt-Right Veteran mentioned by Scott on his
earlier SSC links post on the alleged victory of the Alt-Right - describing my evolution into a Far-Righter.
https://newaltright.substack.com/p/episode-8-dimes-square-hot-takes
Based
How far to the right are you?
Apparently not so far he won't recruit on Jewish people's blogs...
Well, that's something....
Forewarning of conditions for TERRORIST VIOLENCE (actually just the wilful use of technology for anti human, anti essentialist and wireheading purposes (unless you subsequently get violent about this))
https://open.substack.com/pub/alephwyr/p/explicit-redlines-for-conservatives
Oh my, I'm sure the conservatives are very concerned about a few terrorists causing some minor damage and creating justification for things the conservatives wanted to do anyways.
Motte and Baileys are hard when nobody reads past the title.
My idea of terrorism for the moment is producing progressively more high fidelity and high commitment porn. The logical response to, for instance, Scott's "utopia should look like people meditating in a lotus garden" as an enforced regime is, to me, that you upload your mind into a hentai simulation and encrypt it and distribute it so ubiquitously it remains a permanent fixture of time.
I read the entire post, and you're just proving my point. They don't even need a reason to kill you, but you're just going give them one for free? *sigh*
It's more like if they're going to kill me no matter what then every action until then is without consequence including actions that have robust consequences longer than my death.
But that implies you have the capability to cause lasting consequences. What the hell are you expecting to be able to do? You're not going to be able to make a dent against the full might of the populace.
There is simply no way to win in a situation like this. All you can do is try to survive.
I hope conservatives don't try and "erase" transgenderism and queerness (whatever that would mean.) I am conservative I guess - I belong in the party of Elon Musk/Joe Rogan "people who used to think of themselves as liberal then ended up conservative when the left kept pushing crazier and crazier positions." I definitely don't wish ill on any transgender or queer person. Live and let live.
> I hope conservatives don't try and "erase" transgenderism
You're describing an idea that's staunchly progressive, i.e. a shift from the status quo.
> the left kept pushing crazier and crazier positions.
Name an actually "crazy" position and you'll find that vocal minorities push those. I don't see how this is any different than the allegation that the right is getting crazier because of the alt-right and conspiracy theorists, things like storming the capital, electing a grifting populist who appeals to the lowest common denominator vs a traditional conservative, etc.
If you're this concerned with being associated with people you don't like, consider dispensing with the mere left/right polarity and explore the political compass, e.g. neo-liberal, center-left/right, progressive conservative, etc.
I'd guess that I am not a million miles from Rogan or Musk (or you, probably) but I'm still very definitely a leftie (-5,-5 on the Political Compass). A lot of people on the left have been caught up in wokeness and progressive ideas that I disagree with but that doesn't change the ideas that I do believe in. A lot of people on the left have moved up to the top left of the Political Compass and they bother me a lot but none of them bother me as much as the likes of Donald Trump, Suella Braverman or Marjorie Taylor Greene.
I don't know much about politics in Australia but the right in the UK and the USA are heading for a scary place at the moment. An occasional bent politician on the left or some students who support causes that I don't believe in don't change that.
I think we'd all be better off if the people who consider themselves liberal continued to consider themselves as liberal.
I don’t know, man. There’s a lot of people on the left who support terrorism after Oct 7. My family is Jewish. Like a lot of Jewish families we are feeling very betrayed by the political side we’ve supported our whole lives. Of course we don’t agree with Netanyahu and we want peace, not oppression, but this nuance appears to be lost on the “from the river to the sea” crowd who want Israel gone. Very common on the left. Anti Zionism - Israel should be abolished - is deeply anti Semitic. No one argues Russia should be abolished because they don’t like Putin’s policies.
Is it true that Jews are unsafe in central London on weekends? I hear that from the UK
I mean, there are plenty of people outside the mainstream (students etc) who are antisemitic and deny the atrocities of Oct 7. That was ever thus. But that’s like blaming Charlottesville on the right.
I would be a lot more concerned about the right if Charlottesville style protests were happening every week in most major Western cities
What are the rallies happening on the left every week that concern you?
There is no one anywhere near the mainstream left in the UK who is pro-Hamas or who defends Oct 7. Labour had a candidate for a by-election a week or two ago who said something vaguely anti-Israel and Labour ditched him and chose not to contest the election rather than have an anti-semitic candidate.
Didn’t Jeremy Corbyn pass on condemning Hamas when Piers Morgan interviewed him?
The Jeremy Corbyn who was expelled from the Labour Party for anti-semitism?
Australia is fine. I think as English speaking countries go it is not too polarised. Although we have had some local fall out from the Middle East situation too
> I belong in the party of Elon Musk/Joe Rogan "people who used to think of themselves as liberal then ended up conservative
Out of curiosity, how does this work - did you just start having conservative values because you no longer wanted to be associated with some of the more vocal liberals? You are allowed to have individual opinions that don't align with polarized parties you know?
Well I strongly believe in free speech and the left started attacking that…
No, some people/groups, who also had leftist/liberal beliefs started going overboard against free speech. I don't think "The left" is really a very homogenous group. I find it strange that many people would actually stop identifying as liberal/leftist just to avoid this association, if their values otherwise is more liberal than conservative. This seems like a great PR victory for conservatives/the right.
Well for sure, every group is heterogenous. I agree with some people on the left (the classic liberals who are unwoke) more than some people on the right (the MAGA election deniers.)
But I think you underestimate the scale of the problem, it’s not just a few bad apples. The Biden administration censored unwanted political speech on Twitter for years, and we only know this because Elon bought Twitter and exposed it. For all we know they might still be doing it on other platforms. And the way the intelligence agencies/big tech/media handled the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020 is scandalous.
My values are very classic liberal. I prefer peace, mercy, free speech, democracy, racial equality. I don’t think the Western left embodies this like it did two decades ago.
You may be right that the western left no longer embodies these values as well as 2 decades ago - in particular the free speech part, but do you think that the conservative label is a better fit? (Depending on what you put in those values, it might, for me it does not).
I think we might rather need a new label for classic non-woke liberals.
I think it's good to promote principled commitments to one's values, but it's a mistake to ignore or even discount the social influence on what people believe.
When the political party representing mainstream "left" or "right" values won't distance itself from high-visibility people you can't stomach (or worse, embraces them), that's going to push you away. Think of Republicans and David Duke, or Donald Trump, for that matter.
Our values are under the most pressure from our "Dunbar groups", radiating outward; if my daily experience brings me into contact with unpleasant people making terrorist threats because of abortion clinics, it's going to push me in a particular direction, politically. By contrast, I live in a +77 Biden city tucked into a +33 Biden county, so I get a dose of the opposite medicine.
A related mistake is thinking that values have a stable relationship to political labels, or that the labels align neatly with particular values. Activists try very hard to make political conflicts seem black-and-white, but almost all political conflicts pit multiple values against one another, often forcing people to prioritize their commitments.
I agree, but I also think it is a mistake to change political "label" to "the other team" to distance oneself from elements of a political party. Labels are a short-hand to quickly convey roughly where you stand. If you change label from republican to democrat just to distance yourself from Trump, then a whole lot of other assumptions follow. Rather, you could say you are a republican, but disagree with Trump specifically, or a liberal - but not the woke kind. Of course the meaning of labels are always changing, and you may find yourself no longer agreeing with the core of a label, at which point you should change label.
I'm reacting to Turtle, and others, changing label from liberal to conservative over disagreement with specifically "woke" values, that has little to do with traditional liberalism. If this is because of the shift in the label itself fine - but if you lean left on most issues, and just disagree with "woke" ideas conveyed by vocal elements of the left, just say so!
...You are going to be sorely disappointed.
We’ll see! There are quite a few principled conservatives still out there
Possible examples of erasure that fit my criteria:
* Normalization of Reparative therapy
* Normalization of invasive "treatments" with the same goal as reparative therapy, such as neuralink or chemical treatments
* The removal of trans people, or the commitment to falsified ontology about trans people, within the context of ancestor simulations
There are a lot of lesser things I don't like and will resist, but these are a taboo more extreme than nuclear weapons or genocide to me.
I had to look up what those things were. I hope they continue to not be normalised and transgender people like yourself can continue to live the life they choose.
People like Alephywyr going around thinking they're dragons - okay.
People like Alephwyr going around thinking they're dragons and setting buildings on fire because that's what dragons do, flame breath, rarrrrr! - not okay, that's where the "invasive chemical treatments" aka psychiatric drugs come in.
Appreciate it
Is this supposed to be scary or something?
As if you have any kind of political influence or are capable of physical intimidation or something?
Not really. It's just due diligence. The nature of threats is that if they're unpersuasive, you have to follow through. So it's not really a threat in that sense. It doesn't and couldn't have the effect of a threat. You may think of it as a prophecy if you like.
> I think that transgenderism and queerness are traditional
say more?
They are naturally occurring phenomenon in humans which are as old as sexuality
That's not what "tradition" means
And of course, if there were no record in history before 100 years ago of anybody being homosexual or having gender dysphoria, there's no chance in hell this would cause your views on these things to be different today
It's from the Bible, dude.
Tradition doesn't mean anything. Or at best it represents the conditions under which different ethnic groups are biologically incapable of truth.
I'm curious about the following thesis: "A significant factor in making it possible for Donald Trump to represent a major party were decades of work by intellectuals to criticize the heroes of the past and emphasize the flaws of the great men of history." If you emphasize George Washington being a slaveowner, John F Kennedy a womanizer, and Columbus as an evil man, does that create an environment where people are more willing to accept a leader with the kind of glaring flaws Donald Trump has. Is there an argument here? Or not?
There might be an argument there, but it's a removed one. Trump is Rush Limbaugh, and others of the War Drum class. My take in 2016 was that the Republican Party had leaned so hard into war drumming that someone like Trump could just run for office and swamp out all the actual politicians in favor of being Just A War Drum, and that his loss would force them to reevaluate their strategy and redefine themselves as something more substantial than Left Bad. (And then he won, and not only did the right double down, the left decided they lost because they didn't have enough war drums.)
There's perhaps an argument somewhere that the War Drum class developed in response to people criticizing the heroes of the past. But I don't think so, I think the criticism is a symptom of the War Drum class getting bigger.
It was already possible in the 60s for a man like John F Kennedy (or worse, Teddy Kennedy) to get elected despite his obvious personal flaws, so this doesn't seem like anything new.
You might find this post goes some way towards answering your question https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/invasion-of-the-virtue-signallers
(An account of the Trump phenomenon is discussed at the end.)
Not at all, especially since the people who support Trump are precisely the ones who have the most favorable views of people like Washington or Columbus.
Trump above all else supports populist political positions. These tend to be popular among the sort of people who vote for Trump. Few politicians before Trump has these kind of policy positions, and Trump's celebrity allowed him to get front and center without having a long political career first. That's really most of the Trump phenomenon explained.
If you think the country has been getting worse for decades and will continue to do so, are you going to let some "flaws" stop you voting from someone who you view as capable of turning things around? Does the average Trump supporter actually consider these things "flaws" in the first place? I personally consider Hillary to be a much more "flawed" person than Trump by far. if we're looking past superficial things and crude statements and consider Hillary's reprehensible actions as a politician.
If we're going to explain Trump in other terms, then if anything, Trump being flawed was a virtue. People like someone "real" who doesn't scould them for their own flaws. Because the Democrats in the modern age have become a party of uptight scoulds, a true historical inversion, and now they're exasperated and confused that 8 years of scoulding hasn't done anything to dampen the enthusiasm of Trump supporters.
I find the picking on politicians' personal flaws to be the most tedious part of politics.
I remember the massive amount of effort expended trying to persuade people that George W Bush might have somehow skived off his National Guard duty a few weeks early. Did anyone really fucking care? Certainly the people who were trying to sell the story didn't *actually* care about it, they hated GW Bush for reasons completely unrelated to the details of his National Guard duty. Did it really flip anyone's vote either way? If it's 2004 you've got plenty of reasons to vote for or against George W Bush for what he did in 2001-2004, not what he did in 1972.
Similarly does anyone *really* care if Joe Biden has a weird habit of sniffing children, and took showers with his daughter at an inappropriate age? If you're convinced that he did, are you going to go and vote Trump? If you're convinced he didn't, are you going to vote Biden again?
>I find the picking on politicians' personal flaws to be the most tedious part of politics.
Agreed. Just about any policy action that any high-ranking politician chooses is going to have vastly larger effects than almost anything that they do personally.
I agree with this
Intuitively if there was a connection there, I would expect the Trump-figure to show up on the left rather than on the right. Although I guess maybe we can posit a model where the right is unable to contest the literal truth of the criticisms of past heroes, but wants to keep idolizing them anyway, so they end up at the position that these flaws aren't that bad really? Whereas the left is more able to just say that they're bad?
People can have that argument, but they're arguing about what they think other people think, or should think, based on an assumption that other people share the same values and perspectives and information as themselves.
What you're doing is ultimately asking why you yourself might be lead to vote for Donald Trump; what reasons appeal in some sense to you.
You could of course just ask them. They'll tell you; they operate on the same kind of brain you do, and believe that, if they just share the values and perspectives and information they have, you'll automatically be converted to thinking the way they do.
It sounds like I let too much of my prejudices leak into how I framed the thesis.
Many such cases!
What are the pluses and minuses of California creating a new UC?
We need to build more housing, but it's hard to do in any existing city. We could build new cities, but it's hard to get network effects going and they're not "cool" (ie there are a bunch of random towns in Northern California, but nobody moves there).
But cities with a UC campus have generally developed well and been desirable places to live, even when they were pretty new (eg Irvine, Davis, probably more I don't know about). If the state puts a new UC campus in some random part of the Central Valley, the Mojave Desert, or the northern forests, would an upper-middle-class town of 100,000 people grow around it?
There are many students trying to get into UCs, and many academics who want to be hired, and the project would more than pay for itself in land value, so what makes this hard?
Are talking about a theoretical new "Univ. of California at [City]", or a real current UC project to buld a new campus. ?
Only jumping in because nobody's addressed this directly, but the pedigree issue. You don't learn anything magic at Harvard, going to Harvard is worth it because of the network and because employers want Harvard grads. Pedigree is self-perpetuating--it's not an accident most of the most prestigious colleges are also the oldest. A new UC would start at the bottom of the heap, and would not attract the best Californians (who would go to Berkeley and UCLA) or non-Californians (who wouldn't want to pay out-of-state tuition or live in California necessarily--the ultra-blue-state reputation probably does cost some people).
I'd like to see the experiment tried. For all the reasons you cite, but also because it would be a chance to demonstrate that we still have the mojo to create high-quality universities over the past fifty years. Merced doesn't really do that for me, and I really *hope* that it isn't the best we can do in the 21st century.
The minus is, maybe it turns out that the answer is "oops, we seem to have lost the mojo after all". A really good university requires a network of incentives that's hard to establish by either political or economic means, and our social toolset has changed enormously. And, as see high speed rail, California seems to be uniquely dysfunctional at building new infrastructure from scratch by government action, so I'd wonder how many billions of dollars we'd wind up spending so that in twenty years we can point to the spot where we're pretending a new university would stand in another twenty years.
If we can pull it off, the Mojave area gets my vote. The suggestion of Tehachipi also works for me.
It may have been better not to attach city names to the name of the UC. Let's assume Berkeley was a random word and not a city name. The UC System could then create UC Berkeley branches, at the cost of mild dilution in original UC Berkeley cache, but get newer ones off the ground.
Oh, and yes more universities, more research universities, more liberal arts programs, more of everything. The only cost is opportunity cost, but there is no better use of money :)
I would guess it's hard to build top tier departments.
For example, contrast UC Davis and UC Merced. Davis is a good school for lots of subjects but, from memory, its agriculture program is superb, probably the best in the state. And agriculture is big business in California; there's always going to be lots of smart, high income people coming in from the vineyards and other areas. Yeah, agriculture isn't tech, but there's still tons of money and good jobs in it. So, if you're in California and you want an agg degree, Davis is where you go. And the rest of the college and the city is kind of along for the ride; not that they're bad but it's much easier to build good programs when you have that core of excellence. Merced, by contrast...doesn't have anything like that. It's not even a party school like Santa Barbara.
It's not hard for me to imagine a UC Redding and it's not hard to imagine particular fields that might serve as the cornerstone for a good UC, say you've decided that UC Redding is going to have the best nursing program in the state...but I can't imagine any government employee actually building such a department, being able to steal the top talent from other programs and building top tier facilities. At which point it's....just another Merced.
And it's not a lack of talent, there are highly competent people in state government, but the bureaucracy would murder you. How would you get salary approval to offer top talent enough money to leave their current role to move their family to Redding? My read is that there are probably pre-approved salary ranges and that no force on earth is allowed to exceed those salary ranges and...you might be able to find a hack around that but there's hundreds of such hurdles and that would kill it. Building a top tier program is already really, really tough, adding in current bureaucratic hurdles makes it darn near impossible.
>There are many students trying to get into UCs, and many academics who want to be hired, and the project would more than pay for itself in land value, so what makes this hard?
Would students with money really be trying to get in? It's going to be the least prestigious of all the UCs jsutbyu virtue of being new. But also, it's obviously going to be the most DEI of any of the UCs, where any word remotely resembilng "meritocracy" will be grounds for referral to the campus pol......mental health officers. Obviously this kind of attitude exists significantly at other campuses, but there are very strong legacy effects of old, tenured professors and even administrators who are inadequately diverse but competent enough to ensure these universities publish good research and are sufficiently well run.
The "this is what Merced is doing" responses are accurate, but imo missing some nuance. I don't think you can present "students and academics getting into UCs" as fungible. "The UCs" don't form a single natural category -- the highest-tier and lowest-tier ones have very different reputations. Merced has probably improved the fortunes of its town, but it's not really substituting for Berkeley or UCLA. In fact, just recently I was reading about a controversy a few years ago when academics at UCSD petitioned for Merced et al to be shut down:
https://abc30.com/archive/6907862/
https://theaggie.org/2009/08/13/ucsd-professors-suggest-closing-ucs/
(This is not an *amazing* description of their goals -- they more wanted funding cuts to target Merced/Riverside/Santa Cruz first, rather than replace everyone at Berkeley with adjuncts, which is a much more reasonable proposition than how it got reported -- but they didn't *not* suggest shutting them down, let's put it that way.)
If someone wants to get accepted to Prestigious College or land a job with a research-focused institution, "build UC Ukiah" probably wouldn't solve this problem. Now, if you somehow *did* pour tons of research funding into UC Ukiah...
Aren't we watching that experiment now with UC Merced (founded 2005)? Merced's population has grown from about 70k to 90k in the past 20 years; I'd guess that's more than typical for the central valley, though I haven't actually checked. I think Merced is doing well -- just perceptions, I haven't really studied it -- but it's still considerably smaller than most UCs, with about 9k students, 8k of whom are undergraduates, about 1/3 the average undergraduate enrollment of other UC campus, and even smaller for graduate students.
I had the same thought and just finished looking it up. It looks like in most college rankings, Merced is at or near the bottom of the UCs but ahead of most of the CSUs. It's ahead of Riverside and Santa Cruz in the US News national ratings, but IIRC that uses selectiveness as a major input so Merced's relatively small size might be boosting it a bit there (i.e. a school with smaller enrollment can be more selective with a given applicant pool).
Skimming a few reddit threads from people asking for advice on choosing between Merced and another college seems to confirm the idea that Merced is near the bottom of the UC pack but still better than most CSUs campuses.
So at first glance it's successful but not overwhelmingly so as an addition to the UC system. It's not clear that the system is ready for another new campus.
As a driver for a new major city, it doesn't really seem to be doing the trick. Merced is growing as a decent rate, but it's still a relatively small city in the middle of nowhere. At best, it's a relatively long-term project.
Cal Poly SLO is another useful case study in good colleges in the middle of nowhere as drivers of urbanization. San Luis Obispo is a smallish city in a mostly agricultural area, like Merced, and Cal Poly is at or near the top of the CSUs in most rankings (ahead of the bottom few UCs). SLO isn't quite as remote as Merced: it's in the Central Coast region, a bit north of Santa Barbara and very close to a cluster of beach resort towns. SLO's population hasn't grown much in recent decades according to census numbers, but feels quite a bit bigger than I remember it being as a student or recent graduate in the early-to-mid 2000s, and seems to have acquired a small local tech industry. But SLO definitely has nowhere near the growth it would need to see to act as a significant outlet for population growth in the Bay Area or LA.
I’m just suddenly feeling UC Tehachapi. One thing it has going for it is it’s on the way from SoCal to Vegas - through traffic is important for growth in addition to local traffic or destination traffic. Some of these other locations are not between significant destinations. Also probably potential there for wind energy research, alternative energy research, there’s enough military out there already there could be academic/industry/military collaborations and it’s not so earthquake prone that you can’t run railroad track or underground cables easily (unlike some places in CA).
Potential future water shortage like all the other deserts in CA but I think a location like that has potential to college-town-ify given the right infrastructure investment to make it digitally interesting.
https://www.ucmerced.edu/history
They seem to have done something like this with UC Merced. But it wasn’t fast, according to the link it was decided in 1988 and the first faculty arrived in 2003. And Merced had 168,000 people in 1988 and close to 230,000 by 2003 so it was growing anyway.
Taking a look at the map, I've always wondered why Eureka, CA couldn't grow more than it has. There is a community college there, Redwood College, that is part of the California Community College system. It might make sense to expand that into a full college with a graduate program. In Logan, UT, outside of the Utah State University, there were always a few businesses that were started by graduates that didn't want to leave the valley. I think the Eureka area should be even more appealing. (I've only visited there once on a road trip to San Francisco so maybe I'm missing something).
Looking at the map again, I forgot about Cal-State University. Nevertheless, It seemed when I visited that it should be a reasonable place for development if there were more jobs there.
Cal Poly Humboldt (formerly Humboldt State University) is one town north of Eureka (Arcata) and has especially strong biology/forestry/fisheries/environmental sciences programs.
Coastal Northern California has a lot of issues though. I don’t have the energy to kick off the full rant about the issues there but the combination of the geologically unstable coastline, busted pot growing economy and general remoteness makes establishing things there way more difficult than it seems it should be. I lived up there for a while. But it became a Cal Poly just a few years ago and that’s the intent, create some synergy.
Pluses: I went to school at Utah State University, it was the largest employer in the valley at the time. It attracted a lot of people, that while they complained about the conservative attitudes of Utah, like the mountains, skiing and the little community they developed. Cons: I think colleges in general are facing declining enrollments. The California colleges get a lot of applicants because they are still cheaper than the private colleges. The knock on effect might be to put an existing private college out of business. Your idea is certainly worth consideration.
If you also put a bunch of internships there it might work