At this point, nearly every industrialized country has total fertility rates below replacement levels. The US is doing better than many 1.7 births per woman. The situation is much worse elsewhere, with both Italy and Japan at 1.3, and South Korea at a disasterous 0.9. All of this is a problem because it tends to make the population top-heavy, with relatively few working-age adults supporting a relatively large pool of retired seniors.
Anyone care to make some predictions on what we will see countries doing to fight this trend?
I think it's a no-brainer that we will see a lot of money thrown at this problem. Pre-school child care will probably become highly subsidized. Quebec, Canada, for instance has a program where child care costs parents only CAN$9.10 per day. I also wouldn't be surprised to see subsidized housing for young families, although I don't remember seeing it yet. Medical fertility interventions like IVF might also be subsidized.
I also expect immigration to be permitted, and even encouraged, in many places. In some cases that may be temporary imports of labor though guest worker programs, but in other cases it will involve permanent residents.
Finally, I expect to see retirement ages pushed up. Retirement at 65 will probably become something of the past.
But what else might we see? And will any of this work?
China's TFR is 1.2, so they have it worse than most of the West. I wouldn't be surprised if they started restricting emigration within the next generation or so, when the problem really starts to bite.
Anyone looking to cover this problem with immigration really needs to be a fan of Africans, since that's where fertility tends to be the highest right now. There are also a few places in Asia (like Kyrgyzstan) and South America (Bolivia) with high TFR, but they are small.
There's a list of things I'd *like* to see them do. But I'm guessing the current industrialized-nation governments are not going to do anything effective, just pile on more of the same stuff that hasn't worked so far and probably never will.
Until a number of factors including but not limited to a top-heavy population pyramid lead to economic catastrophe. Which I suspect will increase TFR by reducing the *relative* cost of child-raising and removing some of the tempting alternatives.
Germany or Sweden seem to do much more when it comes to subsidizing families/children, yet families have less children than in the US for example. Is does't seem to be a lever we can use.
I would say the best chance of actually changing this trend is economic growth / technological change, in the way that we all work far less in the future (and therefore have more time). Another big impact could obviously come from artificial wombs, where women would no longer have to face any trade-offs. Life-extending medicine could also have an impact on demographics (because less people would die over a certain period of time).
> What do you mean "get rid of" [expectation of education] as if you're talking about a government policy that can be repealed?
Some jobs have some kind of education as a legal requirement. Makes sense for a surgeon, but much less sense for a hairdresser. The specific rules vary from place to place, but generally, formal education is usually required for many kinds of jobs. Software development is a huge *exception* in this aspect.
This also makes it more difficult to change profession, once you decide that the choice you made when you were 18 perhaps does not fit your current personality and situation. For example, once I seriously considered that maybe it would be better for me to walk away from software development, and become a plumber or a carpenter instead. No more meetings and Jira tickets, flexible working hours, doing something useful and relatively well paid using my hands while perhaps thinking about some open-source project I would do in my free time. How difficult could it be? I mean, there are YouTube videos for everything, I could start by doing things cheaply for the most desperate customers and gradually level up... Ha-ha, nope. Instead, it would be hundreds of hours of formal training (not even available in my city, so I would have to relocate or commute a lot), then a few years of practice working for someone else until I am finally allowed to work independently... nope, I am too old for that. (For the contrast, consider a former plumber who wants to become a software developer instead. If he has the skills, he could literally start the job tomorrow.)
The problem in Japan and South Korea is that while they let women get educated and work, they make it difficult for women with children to work outside the home. A lot of young women take a look at those options and say yes to the job and no to the kids.
but that's not really a solution unless you say how you would achieve it.
'have more babies' is not a solution unless you say how you would actually get people to do that.
perhaps I can read between the lines, and guess that the proposed solution is to roll back equal rights, but if that's the case than I can toss it out, since that is not a feasible solution.
Random thought: Christian Bale was drastically miscast as Patrick Bateman, he's too good-looking.
Patrick Bateman is a man who spends a lot of effort on his looks, but I don't think he's working with particularly good raw material, so he doesn't wind up looking like a movie star, just like an over-groomed average looking dude. I think that the deep sense of insecurity that Bateman has is not really compatible with natural good looks. Maybe he should look a bit more like Pete Campbell from Mad Men; not bad looking but not exactly lighting up the room with his smile.
He feels to me like an 1980s version of one of those guys who tries way too hard on Linkedin, but since it's the 1980s and there's no Linkedin he just murders people instead.
It works for me. I don't think I have personal experience with Bateman's particular type of psychopathy, but my impression is that it doesn't depend on looks. Whatever it is about him that reads as "insecurity" is more like a gaping internal void that can never be filled; no amount of success or status will ever be enough.
I thought the exact opposite: He was too well cast. A great actor is by definition a form of psychopath, a charming camouflaged thing. The outcome was a cartoon of a cartoon-- one too many layers deep.
Childhood and Education Roundup #5 by Zvi Mowshowitz: A wide-ranging discussion of various topics related to childhood and education, including bullying, truancy, active shooter drills, censorship, woke kindergarten, tracking, homeschooling, the impact of smartphones on children's mental health, and more.
1) The article cites a study that finds bullying has lifelong negative effects, including lower subjective well-being, increased mortality risk, and reduced job prospects in adulthood. However, Zvi expresses concern that the study's controls may be inadequate, as bullying is often a function of the victim's social status and response. How can researchers effectively control for these factors to isolate the causal impact of bullying itself?
2) Zvi discusses the case of "Woke Kindergarten," a controversial program implemented in a San Francisco school district that included materials with questions about abolishing work, landlords, Israel, and borders. The article also mentions that test scores in the district fell, with less than 4% of students proficient in math and under 12% at grade level in English. While the article does not directly attribute this decline to the "Woke Kindergarten" program, what does this case suggest about the challenges of implementing politically charged curricula in early childhood education, and how can schools ensure that educational content is both age-appropriate and academically rigorous?
3) The article presents data showing a substantial increase in homeschooling rates in the United States following the COVID-19 pandemic, with many families continuing to homeschool even after schools reopened. Zvi interprets this as a strong endorsement of homeschooling by families who tried it. What factors might contribute to this sustained shift toward homeschooling, and what implications could this have for the future of public education?
4) Citing survey data and time-use studies, Zvi argues that excessive smartphone use among children and adolescents is associated with reduced sleep, decreased in-person socializing, and worsening mental health outcomes. He critiques claims that the evidence is inconclusive, arguing that even the possibility of such significant negative impacts warrants serious concern. How can parents, educators, and policymakers navigate the trade-offs between the benefits and risks of youth smartphone use in an evidence-based manner?
5) The article discusses the potential benefits of student tracking and ability grouping, citing a study that found the introduction of flexible teacher pay in Wisconsin led to improved student outcomes by incentivizing the recruitment and retention of high-quality teachers. However, Zvi notes that tracking remains controversial, with some critics arguing that it exacerbates educational inequities. How can schools design tracking systems that maximize student learning while ensuring all students have access to rigorous, high-quality instruction?
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.
A possibly very stupid questions: Isn't Popper today more or less unimportant for social sciences like psychology? As you might know, every Psy student is taught about Popper: His critical rationalism is the key to our field. We don't validate theories, we falsify them. And for good reason: no matter how many white swans we find, we can never know, if all swans are white. If we find only one black swan, however, we can say with certainty that not all swans are white. Now, in the actual science, we find neither white nor black swans - at least not with a high degree of certainty. Small sample-sizes, failed replications, tests based on probability, internal or external validity, etc. make it questionable, what color the swans really have. And this discussion, the discussion about the real color, seem to be much more important than arguing that a black swan would be of a higher quality than a white one. What do you guys think?
Teaching "about" something doesn't make people actually good at it. Sometimes people answer the questions correctly in test, and then don't apply them in real life anyway. (I think there were experiments showing that courses on ethics or critical thinking do not make people actually more ethical or more critical thinkers.) Perhaps this could be improved by designing the course differently, with an emphasis on examples from everyday life, both professional and free time... rather than just "this is what Popper thought on the topic". I am not sure.
Probably more importantly, I do not think that Popper correctly describes what scientists (even in STEM) actually do. I think he proves too much... at least the version of him that most people on internet use, which probably lacks most of the original nuance.
Basically, Popper (as used by most people) seems completely one-sided. He argues against any feelings of certainty, ever; his approach is pure negativity. On one hand, sure, you should never be literally 100% certain about something; there is always a possibility of new evidence that will disprove things you thought were true. But he takes it too far, as if there is nothing positive a scientist could ever say about a theory, beyond "it hasn't been falsified yet". From that perspective, a theory that is supported by thousands experiments is no more certain than a crazy hypothesis I made up just now and no one had an opportunity to test it yet. Neither has been falsified yet... and according to (the popular interpretation of) Popper, that is all anyone can ever say about a scientific theory.
But we all know that this is *not* how actual scientists behave. They take certain things, such as gravity or evolution or relativity, as basically true. They may be open to re-examine them critically, if something new and surprising happens. But normally, they just treat them as true. Whenever a journalist reports that the speed of light has been experimentally exceeded (that used to happen quite often a few years ago), a scientist simply ignores that, because he knows that's pretty impossible... and usually a few weeks later it turns out that it was instead a mistake at some calculation. To act otherwise would be a waste of time. For most practical purposes, scientists act as if relativity has been validated.
A crackpot whose life mission is to prove that "relativity isn't true" will quote Popper every day.
Scientists should be open to the possibility that a new fact can make them reconsider the existing theories. They should even actively be looking for possible disconfirmations of the existing theories... of course, not all of them all the time; after the theory has been here for a while, most of the time they should just use it as a tool to derive new useful results. It is okay to take "all swans are warm-blooded" as a fact (unless something extraordinary happens).
The problem instead is that in fields such as psychology, the proper degree of certainty in existing theories should be much lower than in physics. Because there is less experimental evidence, few replications, small sample sizes, often people not even considering alternative explanations of the observed data, etc. Those are the actual problems. Falsifiability is a red herring, in my opinion. It is a one-sided weapon against all feelings of certainty, whether deserved or not. The problem is jumping to conclusions too soon, not making conclusions as such.
I completely agree! Popper is totally overused. His basic point (there could always be a black swan) is good and important, but in the scientific reality coming to a good valuation of a theory and deciding, how good an empirical study actually was (was that swan really white/black?) is much more relevant. Popper should be named in an introduction to the field, not as a user manual.
Is it actually true that 'sanctuary cities' policies against cooperation with ICE mean that they protect people suspected even of heinous crimes like raping children?
Do people have strategies for getting a good night's sleep for the nights they really need to? While I have sleep issues usually, they get especially bad when I have something big coming up/on my mind, which means I e.g. go to most interviews fairly exhausted and perform more poorly than I would otherwise. This is on my mind because I just had an interview on literally zero hours of sleep.
I'd like some technique/failsafe to try in situations like this to ensure I get a good sleep. I've tried a lot of the more standard advice like staying off screens and using melatonin which mostly hasn't worked but I'd be interested in hearing things that worked for other people in my situation. I'm fine with medication, but only if it actually leads to me feeling refreshed/alert in the morning and doesn't only knock me out for a while. If it helps for giving me advice, I tend to have issues both with falling asleep and with staying asleep, although my issues with falling asleep become especially acute before a big day.
1. Read something that's just kinda boring. For a while, Moby Dick was my go-to. I love the prose, but it's a style of writing that's hard to get in sync with in this day and age. Forcing myself to keep reading it was a good way to exhaust my brain.
2. Watch something kinda boring on my phone. This goes against most advice but it works for me (sometimes). Right now a good go-to is the Halo adaptation on Paramount. I like it just enough to keep watching but sometimes I find myself waiting for something actually interesting to happen and that's when I get sleepy.
3. The real trick, the one that usually works. I tell myself - and I actually believe it - that if I can't sleep, then just lying still with my eyes closed and thinking calm thoughts is a good substitute for sleep. I just try to do that as long as possible, and tell myself that it doesn't actually matter if I fall asleep if I can keep doing that instead. Almost invariably, I fall asleep.
I do something similar to #3: I lay perfectly still with my eyes close and don't move except for breathing and swallowing. I've never gone longer than 15 minutes before falling asleep no matter how awake i am.
It sounds so dumb, but it works. It's also way harder than it seems. You don't notice how many small movements you do all the time until you try to not do them. There is also a meditation/mindfulness piece to it: you'll get little itches and things all over and all you can do is focus on them and hope they go away. It often seems like your body will create this little irritations almost to "check if you are awake" - they will happen more frequently the closer you get to sleep.
I'll warn that I first learned of this as a technique to encourage lucid dreaming, which many people dont want. Its never produced lucid dreaming for me, though I have had lucid dreams by chance.
As far as reading goes, advanced math tends to work well as well. Or anything that requires mental effort.
The problem I've found with this is that you can be really sleepy while reading, and then instantly become non-sleepy once you stop reading and get into bed.
As for the third, that's a neat trick. I doubt I'd be able to delude myself into making it work, but it's a cool idea.
I've been pretty satisfied with CBD. As I've gotten older it's been harder to get through the night without waking up. Eating 5 Mg of CBD (in a gummy) before I go to bed have improved my sleep patterns considerably. However, not all the brands of CBD gummies I've tried have been equally effective.
Sadly enough, for my most recent interview, I had also slept poorly the previous evening. Usually that is enough for me to sleep better the next evening, but this time it wasn't.
I'd recommend the opposite. If there's a chance you are going to miss a night's sleep - have as much in your sleep bank as possible in the week leading up. Knowing that also takes the pressure to fall asleep on the big night off a bit which sounds useful as a sleep strategy in itself in this case.
I've tried this, with mixed results. The most regular outcome is that I do sleep better on the second night, but not by enough. My body wants 8-9 hours, if I did nothing I might get 4-5, and by reducing my sleep the night before I end up with 6-7. So two nights in a row with 6ish hours instead of 8 and 4 - mixed results at best.
I don't have anything that works all the time, but a number of things that increase the probability of a good night's sleep: Most powerful on eis 30 mins or so of cardio in any form done earlier in the day, cardio that's intense enough to get me really sweaty. Another powerful one is to get in the habit of using the bed only for sleep & sex. If you read, watch movies, talk on the phone, browse online while in bed you associate bed with relaxed wakefulness. Relaxed wakefulness is just want you don't want if you're lying in bed trying to go to sleep, right? So do all those winding down things like movies and internet browsing in a chair or sitting on a couch. If you're bothered by noise, use earplugs (I recommend the Macks silicone ones) and a white noise machine. When it comes to drugs I find that benedryl 25 mg or so works well, and does not give me a hangover. Benzodiazepines work extremely well for many people -- but watch out, because you can develop a tolerance, so don't use the stuff more than once a week.
One thing that works for me is long academic discussion podcasts like The Dissenter or Mindscape. Stuff that’s interesting enough that I would want to listen even if I wasn’t trying to sleep, but not so important to me that I’ll object if I doze off in the middle of it.
There's a technique I learned from an online post that works decently well for me.
First, and this is probably well known to you, don't try to relax. Because trying to relax is just going to keep you awake. Instead, try to focus on seeing with your eyes closed. Keep your eyes closed but otherwise make an effortful try to see something in the blackness. It will seem slippery and weird at first, but keep trying. Eventually you'll catch a glimpse of something: dark shapes moving in the blackness. If you try to look at them too hard they'll slip away, but that's okay. Keep looking.
Eventually you'll start seeing dream imagery. These will be vivid images, but you aren't actually seeing them with your eyes. Keep focused on trying to see them, on examining the images that come up. At this point you'll be on the edge of sleep, dipping into unconsciousness. You might bob up and down on this border for a while, but when you bob up into consciousness try to stay focused on seeing. Watching for the next dream image.
Eventually you fall asleep.
It is not a perfect "works every time" technique, but when I can't sleep it's my go to and it is fairly effective. I used it last night, which was a pretty rough night for me, and I'd say it took about 15-20 minutes to work. Your mind will want to wander, but just keep herding your attention back to watching for images.
> It will seem slippery and weird at first, but keep trying. Eventually you'll catch a glimpse of something: dark shapes moving in the blackness. If you try to look at them too hard they'll slip away, but that's okay. Keep looking.
Not going to lie, some nights my subconscious will generate a stream of frightening images. I learned how to deal with that from listening to an interview with a guy who does guided psychedelic psychotherapy. He said that most “bad trips” happen because you start to experience something disturbing and then you mentally flinch away from it. But trying to run away from a frightening thing your own mind conjured up is as pointless as trying not to think a thought: as long as you’re trying, you’re thinking about it. So the key is to not flinch away, to look it straight on and then go through it. If you do you may find something better on the other side. I have found that this works with the sleep technique as well, though it can be difficult.
This is my go-to technique, either learned from you or another ACX or DSL poster sometime last year/two years ago(?) This alone has potentially made lurking around this whole community a net positive for my cumulative amount of sleep.
One other advantage: it has made it much easier for me to fall asleep even if my environment is not totally dark. With a little bit of ambient light, it is easier to attend to the phantom images I see when my eyes are closed.
We definitely got it from the same place, though I can’t find the source offhand. It was a link to a blog with a long post about it, someone must have put it in the comments a few years ago.
Have you experimented with sleep podcasts at all? I particularly like The French Whisperer. He has a ton of content free on Spotify. Works both for falling asleep at bedtime and if I wake up in the middle of the night. YMMV of course but maybe worth trying.
Moderate exercise in the early evening, enough that I feel tired, but not enough that I'll be sore in the morning. Maybe followed by a warm shower, even if I also plan to shower in the morning.
Doing some things like dishes, cleaning, and sorting, which require a small amount of effort, and have clear end-conditions, so I feel like I've accomplished goals and am done for the day. Not things like studying or long-term projects which leave me feeling like there's always more to do.
Tiny amounts of alcohol, mostly smelled and slowly consumed, not enough to produce any real effect, but enough to trigger some of the pleasant associations in my mind.
Pleasure reading with a physical book, of something I enjoy that I've read before, in low warm light. I have a dawn simulator that also works in reverse, as a dusk simulator. But I can also turn the overhead dimmers all the way down, and turn on a side-lamp that has an old 40-watt incandescent bulb.
It's probably very individual. I get a good sleep after an exhausting workout, but my wife can't fall asleep after one. Sometimes white noise really helps, but not always. Same for reading in bed.
One thing I'd strongly advise against for this purpose is alcohol.
I guess I can't really blame new posters for self-promotion when the top of the page reads, "Post about anything you want."
I searched out that old "twice per year comment" about two weeks ago, intending to link it (and the general policy*) on the next Hidden Thread, hoping it might help other long-time readers who want to police the comments. (You're doing God's work Shaked Koplewitz)
I have to say, I really like the "symbolically banned for one day for interacting with trolls" policy. I wish that were enforced more consistently, even though I might eat a few myself. But Scott is probably doing the right thing by spending more time with his family, and less time policing trolls on his corner of the Internet.
My big fear in the move to Substack was that working for pay would cause Scott to experience the Over-justification effect. So I try not to complain if he avoids unpleasant chores.
From past experience here: a huge proportion of people skip over any header text of an "Open Thread", including unusual rules that apply to that thread.
I think we just need a general rule, something like don't plug your blog more than twice per year. Then the group here would need to remind posters who violate it, because Scott was never good at staying on top of that or on top of reports of incivility, even before he became the father of twins.
Elementary school age children in the passenger seat of cars with advanced airbags (that is: airbags with a weight sensor that are supposed to deactivate for small passengers): is there a real risk here?
It's easy to find breathless warnings that allowing your child into the front seat before they are thirteen is dangerous, but I was unable to find much in the way of actual data. A few studies from the 90s back when the problem with airbags and children was first being investigated, but nothing about modern cars.
I havent seen any about airbags, though i read a blog post a while ago about how car seats for kids above like 5 don't really reduce injuries (can't find it now, sorry). I'd like to see some data on front seats and airbags too.
Perhaps a pressure sensor in the lower half of the front passenger seat would solve the problem, combined with the weight sensor in the seat itself. Either that, or make the kids carry a hundredweight sack of potatos on their lap! :-)
As someone who has come around to the view race is real, but who also believes human rights is also real, this is showing me the former is going to be trumping the latter worldwide. Because the descendants of the Holocaust decided to open that door.
There's two groups whose opinions on the current conflict need to be absolutely and totally disregarded: Muslims and Jews. I don't want to read anything written by one of them on this subject, there's too much ingroup bias.
Found something not by Muslims. Although a better approach would be try to listen to literally everyone and discern the truth from that, muslims, jews, christians especially palestinian christians, etc.
"The Zionists slaughtered children in their hospital beds, dumped them in pits outside and drove over them with bulldozers. Many kids bodies were found with their drips still attached."
I'm not even in this conversation, but I am also unfamiliar with the term "cue in". If you have a few free minutes, would you please explain it? Seriously, as someone with a bit of a linguistics background, I'm curious about what it means and where it came from. I'm familiar with the usage "to cue someone in", but this is completely new to me.
In response to the comment that you deleted: yes. I did in fact have a perfectly civil conversation with Glenn on one subject, even though we disagree on another subject.
Really do report me, it will mean attention to you're comments I've reported and I would like this. You are the case in point commenter who defaults to denying, downplaying, or just flat out distracting from anyone who criticizes Israel. It is a pathetic method of sabotaging debate and reeks of insecurity which is natural I guess. You are not different from other atrocity deniers. I actually think you are more rabid and nasty than online communists who defend stalin and pol pot.
Question for Americans: how important is housing space to you?
I am quite aware that Europe is considerably poorer than the US, a topic that comes up frequently in US-Europe discussion, other through Americans triumphantly explaining this fact to Europoors. There are quite a few indicators that can be used to show this, from incomes to wealth levels to various owned appliances.
However, one of the most common things to come up is something that seems less important than all those: Americans consider Europeans to live in pitifully cramped houses with little space. Take this tweet (https://twitter.com/scottlincicome/status/1779635261661417518) and its reactions, for instance.
I, personally, live with my wife and two kids in an apartment that's a bit smaller than the average size of housing for Finland. If I had the choice I'd take those few extra square meters and put them in the kitchen, since I like to cook and a bit more space for appliances and shelves would be nice. Other than that, I don't really have a problem with the size: there's four rooms and a kitchen, enough for the kids to have their own rooms and for me to work quietly in the bedroom when I'm working from home.
When living in America for a few months in 2008, I visited ordinary American houses, and it was of course evident already then that the house sizes are indeed bigger than here. However, this particular difference aroused no envy in me; I mostly remember thinking that it's just more room to vacuum and mop. There are, of course, people who bitch about how houses are too small, but they are mostly concerned with the amount of rooms, i.e. "Why are they building all these two-bedroom places where you can't fit a family?", rather than the square meters, as such.
Is it one of those things where if you are used to comparatively compact houses, the bigger houses don't really seem that different, but if you are used to bigger housing, the compact houses and apartments immediately come off as hopelessly cramped?
I think there's something buried in the American mythos/dream, going back in Anglo-American history to before the Revolution, where we want space to do our own thing. With enough space, we can have privacy, we can do what we want without other people telling us "no", we can get away from "all that bullshit". The response to people getting in your face, telling you what to do, is to go somewhere else, somewhere on your own, and be free. This even applied to runaway slaves - the solution was to gather up the people you loved, and get the hell out of there.
I suppose it gets laid at the feet of the "germs" part of "Guns, Germs, and Steel".
It's kind of important to me that my house has a dedicated home office, a library, and a guest bedroom. The extra storage space and the big kitchen are also nice, as is having enough room for two indoor cats to do their thing. And the two-car garage is turning into a workshop; I can still fit one car into it if I need to, but I basically don't.
I could downsize my life to fit into a smaller space, but the things I'd be giving up are things I would miss. Being a Rich American(tm), I don't have to and I'm fine with that.
Large houses are nice. Having a spare bedroom for guests and bouts of flu, an office space for working from home, a large kitchen with a big stove, a workout space, and a garage for the two cars (no public transport and two working adults) is… I can’t complain?
If you were a billionaire, would you have a larger house? I know I would. When you remove financial constraints, people tend to choose much larger houses. They don't choose arbitrarily large houses (nobody lives in a house the size of an airport terminal even if they can easily afford it) but they tend to choose houses that are several times the size of a normal person's house.
Conclusion: larger houses are better, and any argument to the contrary is just poverty cope.
A few years ago we sold a flat in central London and bought a rambling great eight bedroom house in Devon, with a large garden. Although it is hard and time-consuming to keep on top of the cleaning indoors, and weeding and maintaining the garden, a big advantage of larger houses generally IMHO is that, all things being equal, the occupants of one have more exercise just making their way here and there round and about the house than people in more compact dwellings. It all adds up, if you think about it.
As some evidence (perhaps) for that contention, consider to the British Royal family, whose various members have reached very old ages in recent and even not so recent times, Queen Victoria for example, despite having more than a dozen children (I think). Then there was the late Queen Mother, 101, and nearly 100 for the late Duke of Edinburgh, and late 90s for the late QE2. Besides having the best medical care of course, I suggest that at least in part it is simply the extra exercise they gained trotting around in their vast dwellings, and the grounds outside!
It is true that some monarchs of recent times, such as Edward VII and George V died quite young. But that may have been due more to over-indulging in food and tobacco products (certainly in Edward's case) or just bad luck I guess, like King Charles having cancer.
All else being equal, larger houses are better (with qualifications).
But all else is not equal. Larger houses (or houses at all as opposed to apartments) lead to lower population density, and that comes with its own drawbacks.
I prefer to live in an apartment in a walkable city with good public transport, instead of living in a house while being car dependent. And that's not poverty cope, that's just understanding trade-offs.
It would be great if we could maintain higher conversational and discussion standards than accusing (?) people with different perspective of "X cope" rather than steelmanning their position properly.
Hypothesis: the median American has fewer available out-of-the-house spaces (especially if you only consider those that could reasonably be walked to) than the median European, such that space *in* the home is more important to Americans.
It's relatively common for Americans to have a roomba or other robot that will vacuum and mop for them. So that often isn't perceived as a major issue.
I've begun to suspect I'm somewhere in the autism spectrum. I've never been able to pick up on the subtle fluctuations in emotion/vibes that normies instinctively pick up on, and a friend told me recently he feels like I'm behind a wall (I've been reading neurotypicals can't pick up on the emotions of autistics), and also, reading and interacting with other autistics is like my whole life suddenly makes a lot of sense (I also got 26 out of 30 in an online test). I mean it's either that or I have enormous subconscious emotional repression (how would I be able to tell the difference?).
At any rate, I suspect there is a higher amount of people on the spectrum here than elsewhere on the internet, and I was wondering if there is anything they would like to say about thriving as an autistic in the social/romantic domain, which I hear, can be done.
One thing that helped me was that, when I was a little kid (1st grade ish), for one summer my parents had me attend some sort of junior theater class. I got a lot of practice there in emoting, and over the years, it helped.
It's like: there's me on the inside, and then a surface on the outside, which is my face and body language. Normals have a connection between them, so that what they feel on the inside is shown on the outside, but I don't. However, I can consciously work on dredging up feelings while making the appropriate facial expressions, and eventually they start working together, like the whole "hand-eye coordination" thing.
And so the next step is that my face shows my feelings, kinda like normal people. But after that, I can also brute force empathic mirroring, by using my imagination. If I can find the sadness in someone's sad story, even if I don't care, or find the humor in someone's joke, even if I find it boring or distasteful, I can project back the right emotion and make an appropriate response. (Tabletop roleplaying and LARPs can be good practice for this.) And the thing is, at some point it stops being a conscious artifice, and becomes real empathy. I interact with people, and see in them things I like, and respond to that automatically. The emotions are there, the patterns are built in, even if I have to thump the engine a few times before it catches.
It's tricky with romance. First, because in the times when I've been head-over-heels, my head is somewhere else and so it stops working, leading me to be less good at flirting with the people I most want to flirt with. Second, because the mirroring means that I wind up reflecting back other peoples' interest, and like I said the feelings are real: other people being interested in me is not the primary criterion for whether I should be interested in them. Plus, I've noticed that I tend to have a lot of emotional inertia, whereas most other people seem more changeable. And third, building on the previous, because while flirting can be very fun, it's only appropriate if both of you are on the same page: it's unethical to lead someone on and engage their emotions, if your emotions are not similarly engaged.
> But after that, I can also brute force empathic mirroring, by using my imagination. If I can find the sadness in someone's sad story, even if I don't care, or find the humor in someone's joke, even if I find it boring or distasteful, I can project back the right emotion and make an appropriate response. (Tabletop roleplaying and LARPs can be good practice for this.) And the thing is, at some point it stops being a conscious artifice, and becomes real empathy. I interact with people, and see in them things I like, and respond to that automatically.
Holy crap, oh man, did this ever describe my experience - but not as a product of ASD.
Someone in the classified thread speculated that some of my personal quirks could be a product of ASD, but I don't think so. I don't have most of the notable ASD traits, and never did. The ones I identify with tend to be borderline cold-reader-ish ("Do you get obsessive about stuff you like?" etc). I just took an ASD quiz linked above and was on the low end of "you have a few traits."
No, I suspect my identification with your internal experience generates from a whole other "disorder," one having to do with a deficit of involuntary (eg, "normal") empathy. I hesitate to use the "p" or "s" words here, because they specifically describe an *antisocial* behavior which I don't engage in - but "brute forcing empathy via imagination" was indeed something I had to consciously do in my young adulthood until it became the mostly automatic process that it is today...assuming I've judged someone to be worth of it, and almost everyone is indeed worthy of it.
Yeah, I've wondered about that in myself. Twice it's happened that I've been woken up in the middle of the night, and the "nice" part of me wasn't online. It was just a cold reptilian thing that wanted to fix the problem and get back to sleep, and would say whatever was necessary for that, while the "nice" part of me was way back somewhere, screaming "oh, no, this will wreck everything!" I had to do some serious damage control the following mornings, but both relationships did survive.
FWIW, I think it's possible for people without our particular internal setup to learn it, at least for certain situations or classes of people. That's what I tend to call the "s" word. And I've run into one of the, well, other "n" word, let's say, and it seemed in retrospect that what was inside was alternately a roaring black void, or something like a 2.5-year old. (I'm not good with child ages, but I have some friends with a 3.5-year old, and 2.5 seems about right from that one example.)
I often hesitate to refer to that article because only one tiny part of it resonates, but the *capacity* to opt in / out of empathy at all and perhaps even moreso a willingness to admit to it, seems to freak people out regardless of how pro-social the opt in / out behavior looks in practice.
I absolutely agree that prosocial behavior can be developed absent "normal" empathy. My chief values are fairness / justice, a result of decent parenting plus a love of storytelling (where fairness and justice are generally the guiding principle of the universe).
So in practice, I "opt in" to empathy in order to be maximally "fair" to people while I'm making a judgment about how to think/feel/interact with them. I have enough experience with both fictional and biographical stories to know that people's behaviors are usually informed by things which might not be apparent to an observer, so in order to be "fair," I am almost infinitely more ungrudging and patient and forgiving of certain kinds of unpleasant behavior than a "normie" who reflexively feels entitled to unexamined anger when they perceive an intrusion or slight. I am always ready to be "wrong" about someone "harmless" that I merely dislike.
My empathy only shuts off in response to unambiguously predatory victimizing behavior. And even then it's never reactive anger, the way it would be for a normie, but rather a sense of righteous pragmatism about wanting the threat stopped.
And, like, sorrynotsorry, but I think this framework results in a way more prosocial way of being than the normie empathetic reactivity.
But I can absolutely see how not having the framework (or some other framework of guiding principles) can send the empathic opt in / out in some truly monstrous directions.
> It's like: there's me on the inside, and then a surface on the outside, which is my face and body language. Normals have a connection between them, so that what they feel on the inside is shown on the outside, but I don't.
Haha, similar here. No matter what happens inside, good or bad, by default my face remains neutral. I need to consciously give it a little push to also show the emotion on the outside. (Or, with people who know me, I just express the emotion verbally, sometimes using a scale from 0 to 10 to express the strength of the emotion.)
Sometimes people compliment me for staying calm in situations where internally I feel I am falling apart. Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way. It's only my face staying calm, but my thinking is impaired by stress.
Huh, my face tends to run on autopilot these days, unless I get into a particularly grim mood. I sometimes wish I could add a little interrupt switch in, since it would make my life a bit easier if I didn't show what was going through my mind. I console myself that I like the enforced honesty, but it might be sour grapes. :-)
I wonder whether it would make sense to imagine normies as autists whose obsession happens to be humans... instead of trains or similar things. Just like an autist interested in trains will tell you thousand details about them, and would immediately notice that a picture of a train contains a wrong kind of wheel, a normie can tell you thousand details about celebrities, the birthdays of everyone around them, and will immediately notice a new haircut.
Autists can be shocked by strong sensory inputs, normies can be shocked by explicit discussion of things, or by thoughts that their social group would disapprove of. (Note that the social group does not necessarily refer to the mainstream. A normie rebel is triggered by thoughts that their fellow normie rebels would disapprove of.)
You need to start paying more attention to humans, no matter how boring that sounds. They *are* important, so the time invested here will pay off. But ultimately, you will never learn the same amount of information about humans (or trains) as someone who is naturally obsessed with them, so you need to focus on the most important parts. And maybe find normies who are more tolerant of someone who does not share their obsession.
Autistic women are often less visible than autistic men, for reasons that are not obvious to me. Maybe there is something about male/female brains which makes the expression of autism different. Or maybe it is different social expectations, which makes different parts of autism more or less visible. For example, in romantic relations, men are expected to approach women. So the autistic men typically screw up by "approaching in a clumsy way" and sometimes it gets reported in newspapers. Meanwhile autistic women typically screw up by "not noticing that they are approached", which means a lost opportunity for them, but does not get reported by newspapers, because from outside it seems like the normie way of rejection (i.e. not responding to subtle signals).
So.... I am out of the dating market for more than a decade, but my recommendation for a heterosexual male on a spectrum would be like this: Find an interesting girl (someone who has hobbies other than celebrity gossip). Say hello. Talk to her about her hobbies. If she refuses to talk to you, find another one. Find a moment with her alone (e.g. invite her for a walk or for a coffee/tea). At the end, tell her that you really like her and would like to spend more time with her... no pressure, it's okay when she tells you whether she likes you the next time you meet; goodbye. The next time, at the end, ask "so, this means we are dating?". (In the meanwhile, learn how to do massage and how to dance, those are basically cheat codes for progress from "no contact" to "full body on body contact" without being awkward.)
Though I've never been officially diagnosed, I'm pretty Aspergery. I had shitty social skills growing up (and some on ACX may say I still do). I'm very bad at reading facial expressions and social queues. And because we are bad at reading people — i.e. we're not picking anything up from their facial expressions and social queues — we pay attention to things that may provide us with more interest. That makes normies uneasy if you don't look like you're paying attention to them. Even though I'm bad at reading people I learned a few tricks along the way to disguise my neuro-atypicality — so normies will take me for a normie (which is half the battle). And this is advice for a cis straight males. YMMV if you're female or gay.
They are:
1. Look at people's eyes when you speak to them. Normies take that as being interested in them. Even if you're not interested in them it puts them at their ease. There are some caveats, though, and you'll need some practice to navigate them.
1a. Males may take eye contact as a threat if you hold it too long. So, if you're being introduced to somebody new and it's a male, only make eye contact while shaking their hand or fist-bumping them (as is more common in these post-COVID times). After the intro you should discontinue eye contact but look in their general direction while they're talking to you. Nodding your head will help put them at ease, even if you're thinking about something else and not paying attention to them (because, let's face it, a lot normies are pretty boring to talk to).
1b. Hold the eye contact longer with females. Don't forget to smile. Hold their gaze for a couple of seconds after you greet them. If you're attracted to them, make a point to reattach yourself to the gaze every so often during the conversation. And remember to smile whenever you catch their gaze again. If they brush their hair back with their hand, they're likely interested in you. I have no frigging clue why that is, but I had to be taught that. Normies seem to pick it up naturally. Human courtship rituals are weird. I cannot say I fully understand them. After the initial greeting ritual, when it comes time to look away DO NOT look down! — because women are likely to think you're looking at their breasts even though you aren't.
2. Remember to smile occasionally during your conversations with people. Not a big grin, but learn to curl your lips upward slightly. I found that very difficult to do. I had to practice in the mirror to not overdo it or underdo it. But after I learned to half-smile properly, I realized I could identify when other people were doing it — which gave me some more insight into the other person's internal psychological state.
3. Train yourself to keep your posture upright. Don't slouch. Normies read people who have upright postures as being confident. Even if you're not confident you want look like you're confident.
4. How's your sense of humor? Making people laugh is very important. I can't tell a joke worth shit, because I don't have a normie's ability to pace the joke (which requires a successful joke-teller to be sensitive to the vibes that other people are putting out). But I am quite good with logical absurdities. If you want an example of humor that's full of logical absurdities listen to Jerry Seinfeld's material. Don't steal his material though, because other people have probably already heard it.
5. Ask people about trivialities. As you get to know them, you'll get to know that people each have unique concerns and obsessions. If they're into gardening, ask them how their garden is doing. Try to look like you're sympathetic to their problems (even if you have no clue as to why they're getting upset about something).
5a. This is very important for dealing with female humans. They seem to be very sensitive to slights from their own sex (and they seem to be much more socially competitive than male humans). Nod a lot. And learn to make sympathetic noises and comments.
5b. Males are generally easier to socialize with because they tend to be less socially competitive than females — at least at the inter-individual level. However, males seem to be more socially competitive at the group level. You're either part of "the team" or you're not. If you are on the team, all sorts of slights and faux pas are ignored. If you're not on the team, well, you're likely not to be invited to the next BBQ or out to happy hour. Try not to talk politics, because that tends to trigger more primal emotional responses, and that will bring out the competitive team instincts in the males. Best to learn something about sports (yawn!). Make a point of knowing what the favored local sports team of the tribe is, so you can at least ask what they think their tribe's team chances are.
There's a lot to digest. Good luck. Hope I didn't piss off the normies with my advice.
Got 24/36, but after extensive cheating: the "multiple choice" thing of eliminating two or three options, and taking a protracted "System 2"-type approach to choosing answers. There may be a couple (possibly but not very likely slightly more) of pictures where I could guess the answer instinctively. There were also some answers where I remained confused after being shown what the right answer was: e.g., a woman being interested or having desire is not something I can make sense of as reflected in the eyes, even after seeing the picture and being told the answer.
Everybody feels like they're guessing. The version of the directions I read said "if you're not sure, just go with your feeling." I felt that way when I took it too. Not quite like I was taking wild guesses, but more like, well, these eyes look irritated to me, but I may just be talking myself into that so I'll have an answer, but I guess I'll go with it. I think some of the accurate responses come from parts of us we don't have introspective access to -- like when somebody asks you how it is you angle your key jiggle & it a certain way to make your finicky lock open, and you can't tell them -- only your hands know. Same with reading faces.
About half of my responses were just me looking at the words and clicking the right one without any conscious thought. The other ones, I'd be staring at the eyes, and have no clue, and I'd do the multiple-choice-test thing where I rule out one or maybe two answers, and randomly pick from the remaining answers. I guess I did a bit better than chance, so probably my proportions are off, or I still had some unconscious instinct pulling me toward the right answers.
Oh you did way better than chance. 27 or maybe it's 28 is average, so you're in the average range. I think everybody has a feeling of guessing a lot of the time, at least everybody I know who took the test. I only missed 2, and I was astounded that it was only 2, because I'd felt reasonably confident on at most 1/3 of them. If you feel that way on the SAT or a multiple choice test in a course you can be sure you're going to get a bad score, you know? I find this test fascinating because almost everybody feels very uncertain, yet most of those uncertain people I've given it to come out average or above.
13 out of 36. Many of them were just wild-ass guesses on my part. Actually, I've taken a similar test before and I scored less than random (go figure!).
Recently, some friends set me up with a nice lady. We went out a couple of times, and I was attracted to her. On our second date, I told her that I was on the spectrum and if she were interested in me she'd just have to outright tell me because I was crappy at reading signals. And I didn't say this, but I didn't want any #metoo misunderstandings (I've made a few embarrassing unwanted passes in my day — not because I was a predator but because I misunderstood the signals — and I have too much self-respect to cause women to be uncomfortable). Anyway, she didn't believe me, "but you're so sociable and funny!" That seemed encouraging, so I asked her out on a third date.
When I was younger, I'd go out on three dates with women I was interested in, and if it didn't click physically, I'd just stop calling them (because I figured further attentions from me would be unwelcome). We went out on a third date, but no kiss goodnight — but she talked about a restaurant that she wanted to try. Okay, I thought. I'd try a fourth date with her. Nothing happened on the fourth date. I dropped her off at her house. She didn't invite me in for a coffee. I figured, "Oh well, nothing ventured, nothing gained," and I wrote her off. Then she called me a couple of times and asked when we'd get together again. And she said, "I love you." Because I've learned to be cautious with my emotions, I've trained myself to dampen my feelings if I'm not getting anything back from women. Though I found her attractive early in our dating cycle, by the fourth date I figured it wasn't going anywhere, so I had fallen out of limerence with her. For some stupid reason, I went out on a fifth date with her! She was all very snuggly in the Uber to and from the restaurant, and she was very touchy-feely all through the evening. But I no longer had the spark. I was uncomfortable the whole evening. I didn't even make a token effort to kiss her good night. I didn't call her again. I'm sure she may have been puzzled and possibly hurt, but now I felt that I was being pushed into a relationship that I no longer was comfortable with. Normies are frigging crazy.
Wow, Beowulf, I don't know what to make of that. You do come across sociable and funny. And if you were that deep into Aspie-land I'd expect your sociability and humor to both be a little off, sort of overdone or underdone or, wait, how does that joke work? But none of that is the case. And I can't think of times when your responses to people here have seemed odd -- and they would if you were bad at reading people's affect and intention, unless you're better at reading people when you have their thoughts in writing, and can read between the lines. And if you're performing *below*( chance on tests like this one, that suggests that you know more than you think you know, right? Like you know the right answers some of the time, but refuse to go with them. (Though on here you performed better than chance.). Or could it be that you have prosopagnosia, and difficulty reading faces comes along for the ride with that?
Anyway, it's fine. There's something quite odd about me too. Not every oddity has a name, you know? Was wondering today what my oddity was. Looked up schizoid -- close, but no cigar.
"unless you're better at reading people when you have their thoughts in writing, and can read between the lines."
I would have thought that was obvious. Words are designed to facilitate clear and unambiguous communication, because often "Darmok and Jelad at Tanagra" has to give way to "Hand me the spanner, please - no, not the crescent wrench, the 9/16th inch spanner". And sometimes we, the normies in particular, *want* ambiguity, so we've got ways to use language for that. But ultimately, the speaker is trying to be understood and they're using a tool that's designed to facilitate clear and unambiguous communication, in a language that both parties are fluent in.
That limits the scope for misunderstanding, in a way that "communication" where 70% of the information is conveyed by intonation and microexpression and body language doesn't. Particularly when one party isn't fluent in body language.
BTW, that test was very helpful in that it gave me immediate feedback about which were the correct emotions. The other tests I've taken were paper tests, and they didn't give me any real-time feedback. Although there were some eye-expressions that I had no frigging clue about, a significant number of my mistakes were due to overthinking. If I had gone with my first choice, I would have scored significantly higher. This is an important clue to understand what's going on in my brain. Thanks!
I've bookmarked the link. I'll wait a week or so (to let the memory of the faces blur) and retake it again — but I'll go with my first choices. I bet I'll score a lot better. But damn! I wish I had this test back when I was an adolescent. If this is really all about not going with my gut feelings, I could have trained myself to be more sensitive to them, and I think I would have had an easier life (because a lot of the stress and failures in my life were due to my not having a good theory of mind when dealing with my professors, thesis advisor, bosses, and girlfriends). I'm tearing up now and it's getting hard to see what I'm typing! Shit.
My thing in dating situations is that I can tell when they like me, and I would like them too except that I have a bad bad feeling that it's not me they like but some construction in their mind, which they built using some parts of me as legos. And I distrust and resent them for having done that, so I don't really like them, but I maybe act like I do because I know my doubts about their view of me are sort of silly so it seems unfair to let them rule my behavior. Good luck finding a way out of that one.
I did notice sometimes where romantic interests had an idea of me in their head, which only loosely corresponded to reality. I never really managed to put that together with how I felt when infatuated, in any way that gave me anything useful to work with. It more felt like something where we all had to push through it, from both directions, over time, and eventually our models of each other would converge on reality.
If my vibe is that I'm behind a wall, is that something I'm bad at? What about all the other stuff? But sticking to the wall, I mean, I don't feel like I'm holding anything back in my interactions with this guy, so what am I supposed to do about that?
Not autistic myself, but have many psychotherapy patients who are. Two have partners who are also autistic, and those relationships seem to be solid and long-lasting. In both cases the people found each other not on dating apps but in college. Downside of having an autistic partner is that both parties are inclined to be avoidant of the new, and of socializing, so there's a danger of their lives contracting to hanging out indoors with the simpatico other.
Request for content: I originally found this "AI Parable" when someone asked for the same thing quite some time ago in the ACX, no idea if the same people still frequent but thought I would give it a shot.
There was some short story on some blog(?) somewhere where the premise was "everything is completely crazy and makes no sense, lots of random chaos in a world similar to ours but somewhat cyberpunk/dystopian". The closing line was something to the effect of "The machine had been talking, and I was the first to hear it speak." Or something like that. The premise was that the insanity and chaos was the work of an AI that was intentionally causing it in order to confuse people so that it could break human pattern matching and assume control/demoralize them or something similar.
I thought it was really well done, and there have been several times I'd liked to have shared it but of course I didn't bother to bookmark it and now it is lost to me. Figured I'd throw out a line just in case anyone has an idea what the heck I'm talking about!
Can someone link to some well-written piece that argues that yes, AI WILL take our jobs? Like doctors, lawyers, programmers and so on. From what I see most people argue to the contrary.
I think the question is not whether AI will take our job, but which one. ChatGPT-4 will not. If you ask people, most of them will assume that the currently most advance AI is as good as it ever gets, so of course they will say no. They will keep saying so, until one day they get replaced.
Important things that AI currently cannot do:
* read your company intranet
* participate in meetings, communicate with colleagues
* be legally responsible for screwing up
Connecting the AI to company internet and making sure that sensitive information will not leak is a technical problem that will be solved at one moment. Afterwards, as a software developer, I expect that soon most of my job will consist of sitting at meetings and checking what the AI did. I will be the person to yell at in the 1% of cases when the AI screws up.
Note that "taking our jobs" does not necessarily have to mean that companies will fire their existing employees. (Though yes, in the extreme case, it would mean exactly that.) It can also mean that companies stop hiring new people, especially ones freshly out of college. And what previously did 3 people, now will do 1 person supervising 3 AI agents. The salaries may even slightly increase temporarily, especially for people who can juggle more AI agents at the same time than the others. (In other words, out of 3 people, 2 may lose their jobs, and the remaining 1 may get a 50% raise.) So the reports may be inconsistent even as the loss of jobs happens.
Rich people may be willing to pay extra for human service, just because it feels instinctively better to be communicate with a human, or to be served by a human. This applies to doctors more than it does to programmers. The AI is unlikely to replace e.g. a homeopath.
Fwiw, connecting AI to company intranet is already possible (Copilot for Microsoft 365). Whether you trust Microsoft's promises that data won't leak is another matter.
I suppose in future we will expect this, and maybe have two company wikis, one that the AI can read and one that it can not.
The company source code in my experience would be mostly useless for a competitor, except as a general learning resource for software developers. A lot of code is handling company-specific processes and integrated with other software the company uses; a competitor would have to rewrite all of that, so it would probably be less work to make their own solution from scratch. A possible danger could be asking the AI to find possible exploits.
I'd like to read one too. Just googled around, mostly found clickbait and spokesman for various high-status professions saying Naw, AI will be our bitch. You know where there probably is something? One of the good Substack blogs about AI and society. But I don't think google searches return the titles of individual Substack posts. Maybe somebody here can suggest one. Actually, I can suggest a blog I like, though nobody here but me seems to follow it or take it seriously: Garbage Day, by Ryan Broderick. He's a young guy who sort of grew up on the internet, and knows all about memes and other internet phenoms that don't mean anything to me. But he's also quite smart and knows how to do all kinds of search inside of social media. Had a post a while ago where he traced the sources of some new and weird fad on Facebook - - I think it was photos of gross food, things like a plate of frozen raw egg -- and was able to tell who most of came from, and what the benefit to them was of posting this stuff. His overall view of AI is that we're fucked. Oh, remembered something else he said that I thought was smart, that I hadn't seen elsewhere. He was talking about how it's looking like search engines may soon yield AI summaries, rather than sites the content appears on, and pointed out that many people and businesses that post useful content do it as a way to advertise, or to increase their public visibility. For instance today looked at some text posts and videos explaining how to do a certain thing in Photoshop. Most of them were on sites selling related services -- become a paying member of our site, and you'll have access to our entire library of Photoshop how-tos, that sort of thing. If Photoshop queries do not drive people to their site, but instead bring an AI who sucks up their content along with that of other sites and summarizes it for the searcher, why would these sites continue to put up free useful content? The internet will come to contain fewer sources of direct info. Maybe in the future AI's will be summarizing whatever they cherry pick from summaries by earlier AI's. Reminds me of what I read about dust mites: they prefer fresh food, such as human skin flakes, but on the absence of that can eat their own feces and extract some nourishment for up to 3 cycles of feces consumption.
Who among us doesn't believe, or know in their bones, that our government at all levels, local, state and federal, fails on a regular basis. Overpromised and underdelivered. Big idea and great promises, the consequences of which they bury as they carry on. We pay a price for this, even for their small blunders. Also, don't ride a motorcycle in Michigan, or most other states for that matter. Among the dead in deer and vehicle accidents, the cyclist is over represented better than 2 to 1. Here's my writeup: https://falsechoices.substack.com/p/my-attempt-at-fairmindedness-soundly
"Who among us doesn't believe, or know in their bones, that our government at all levels, local, state and federal, fails on a regular basis."
I know this. I've known this for forty years or so, and I've been thinking about it off and on for forty years or so, and I've been talking to and reading the works of a lot of very smart people who have been thinking about it for longer still. At this point, almost every insight just downstream of "our government, at all levels, fails on a regular basis", and every proposed solution to the problem, is something I have heard many times before and dealt with as best I reasonably can.
Sometimes someone comes up with something new. But rarely is it going to be someone who thinks "Hey, did you notice that our government keeps failing us? I've got a substack where I talk about that!", is adequate reason for anyone like me to read their substack. You're going to need something more specific, and you should probably let people know what that is in your pitch.
My good fortune justfor thispost answered your comment below. This person apparently believes that more government is always the correct solution, for reasons I don't completely understand, but be that as it may. I understand I am not changing the world in any dramatic way, but I still think it's important to help people understand the government entity that created the deer problem is the one asked to manage the deer problem. There must be a connection there? 60,000 vehicle and deer accidents a year is unbelievable. And almost nothing is done about it because it would mean admitting that there management has created the problem.
"Have you considered that perhaps more government is not the answer?", does not lead me to believe that you are offering any insight that is at all novel here.
I think your statement is absurd. It sounds like libertarian cant to me — so, I'm sorry, but I'm not going to be suckered into reading your substack. Government as a bureaucratic entity can be tremendously successful. Look at how successful China is at taming the anarchistic Chinese social order through their social credit system. ;-)
As for functional benefits of governments, depending on the bureaucracy, government orgs can function as well or better than corporate bureaucracies — and I've worked for some very effed up corporate bureaucracies in my day! — but also I've worked for a few excellent ones. For instance, I just got involuntarily retired from a very effed-up bureaucratic corporation. It was a nightmare just to get them to direct-deposit my severance check (even though they had been direct depositing my other paychecks for the past five years). And I needed 2 months of COBRA to hold me over before I turned 65. That was all sorts of hassle (mostly because I couldn't find anyone who could answer my questions). But the month before I turned 65, I signed up for Medicare — no fuss or bother. They warned me it may take as long as 30 days to process my application. I signed up on Friday. Got my Medicare card the following Wednesday (!). Medicare Part D was a different story, though. Because private insurance companies handle that, they're competing for your business. Sales people outright lied to me. Getting the formularies was next to impossible from some of the providers. What a pain in the ass! The government part was efficient and painless though.
OTOH, do you really want governments to be too efficient? If you're a libertarian, I bet in your heart of hearts you don't. But I'm OK with the US government when it's been efficient. For instance, they've done a bang-up job rounding up and charging the January 6 coup rioters. More than 1,250 people have been charged with federal crimes. And more than half have either had their trial or pleaded out. Last I heard, the FBI is only still looking for 80 of the bastards. Damn! That's efficiency!
Absurd, eh? 60,000 deer and vehicle accidents in 2023, last year I could find the stats. This after millions of man hours 'managing' the deer herd. All the numbers in the article are real. And it's not a question of efficiency. You are hired to manage the deer herd, so the bigger the herd the greater the job security, the greater are the career prospects. I spent many years not believing that people respond to perverse incentives, but I can't argue against the idea any more. Glad you have your health care setup, at any rate.
Back when I lived in New England (35 years ago) hoof rats were becoming a real nuisance. My state's wildlife department hired professional hunters to cull the herds. Popular outrage was so intense that they dropped the plan. So the conflicting wills o' the people prevented anything from being done ("stop the deer from eating my garden, but don't kill them!") AFAIK, Uncle Malthus is still providing herd control and they're starving every winter. But I hear that cougars, bears, and possibly wolves have been spotted in my old neighborhood. Now its "OMG there was a cougar in my backyard! Please get rid of it, but don't kill it!"
(Tangentially, I remember a few decades ago when I was laughing at a story about people in some town (or suburb?) in the Rockies-area who were complaining about wolf sightings. I was laughing because the town was called "Wolf Creek".)
We can't ask government to run everything, to solve every problem, to manage every detail. We just open up the door to a never ending cascade of rules and regulations that have made life ridiculous. The administrative state is the issue, it's first and foremost goal is to enlarge the administrative state.
Big changes coming to manifold. Probably at the end of this month, full details not yet announced. What we do know is they're trying to reduce the availability of mana, in particular by removing the loan system. This just confirms what I've been saying for a while now: giving out loans doesn't work. It's extremely expensive for them, and doesn't really increase the prediction accuracy of long-run questions, as people on both sides just keep shoveling mana into popular questions.
The only thing loans achieve are to overleverage everyone, with no risk-of-ruin for the users: If my predictions don't pan out, I can just walk away from my account. I don't owe manifold anything for having a negative balance, since mana isn't a real currency. And I do think we'll see more and more such bankruptcies as some of the larger markets start resolving.
I'm sure you have posted this elsewhere, but I think providing a link to your prior (correct) prediction that this obviously sucked would be incredibly impressive, especially if you happened to use the same wording as manifold's announcement. At least having it available to crow about when the change gets made is good.
People often say things like "I predicted this" and then, when you look at their past writings they had something really vague and you're extremely disappointed, which is why being on record is great.
For less careful users, this just means that a bunch of them wipe out way into the negative, and a small amount shoot up to balances in the millions. Since manifold doesn't charge users for negative mana, this means they'll be giving away a lot of mana.
For reference: starting from 1000 and reinvesting into the same market every day, a user will have a position in that market of 91K after a year, 314K after 2 years.
Does Slavoj Zizek have a speech impediment? Or is it an accent?
His S sounds are sort of slurpy, like he is making them with his teeth and tongue at the sides of his mouth rather than the front. You can hear it very clearly here:
I remember a science fiction short story which consisted of a conversation between two people far in the future about the planet from which Man originated.
They don't know which one it is, and can't figure it out, but they ask a computer, and the computer brings up a readout.
At which point they're both disappointed at how unexceptional it is.
This feels wrong to me; they should have been able to find it themselves, with virtually no effort. That readout is going to say things like:
orbital period: 1 year
daily cycle: 1 day
surface pressure: 1 atmosphere
surface gravity: 1 g
I also have my doubts about a setting where, even though Earth is still inhabited, and information about it is readily available if you know what to ask for, and the historical information is still recorded that it is the origin of humankind, it might nevertheless not be well-known to everyone. A more plausible version of the above readout might be:
It's worth noting that over a sufficiently long timescale all of these parameters are subject to change. Orbital period is increasing, as is the length of the day, and surface pressure varies wildly depending on atmospheric conditions. The only thing that's relatively fixed is surface gravity and even that could be altered with some mega-engineering projects.
By the time that conversation happens it's so far into the future that humans have spread beyond the Milky Way, Sol has reached the end of its lifespan, and no one even has physical bodies anymore, let alone lives on Earth.
Given a big enough space empire, they might start using another planet's measurement systems. Or they might give in to rationality and the metric system, and stop basing units on accidents of geography. So you could end up with something like:
Orbital period: 1.21 imperial years
Daily cycle: 0.91 imperial days (9.1 imperial hours)
Minor spoilers for Asimov's Foundation series below.
This wasn't the entire point of the story, but a throwaway conversation between two characters near the end of Asimov's "The Last Question" comes pretty close. The two characters actually ask which is the original _galaxy_, then star, but the computer tells them the star has gone supernova long ago.
Also by Asimov, in one of the later Foundation books (probably "Foundation and Earth"), the main characters are searching for the (long-abandoned) earth and find it exactly because of these units (the year, at least) and the moon, but it turns out there was an independent actor deliberately obfuscating its location. (At this point in future history no one really knows where the year came from, and months are completely out of use.)
Funny how memories get distorted over time. I read the Foundation series many years ago, and I remember the search for Earth very differently:
The galactic empire mostly erased knowledge of Earth because they felt it undermined the capital planet's specialness, and it stays erased after the empire's fall. The protagonists manage to find a description of the solar system, but they don't believe it; too many unusual features in one place.
They find it by reinventing archeology. They investigate planets where human habitation was short-lived, and figure out how old the ruins are. Just as they'd hoped, ruins closer to Earth tend to be older. They zero in on a star named Alpha, which as far as they can tell means First. It's Alpha Centauri, and the locals there know where Earth is.
They go there, and are surprised to find the description they found was accurate. Sure enough, there are Saturn's rings, and Earth's huge moon that looks the same as the sun when you're on Earth. (Even if they had believed the description, they couldn't have just looked up which star system has those features; there's no database will all that information.) Also Earth's day and year are pretty close to the galactic calendar (the empire dropped leap years at some point), but, again, that's not how the find the place.
I know this has been asked many times across the internet over the years, but I figured there's at least a chance that this blog might be frequented by Netflix engineers who know something about 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?
The history is instructive. Maybe even an agentic systems takeaway way at the end, if you make it.
Back in 2006, Netflix launched the Netflix Prize, a competition inviting the public to improve their recommendation algorithm. At the time, people were waiting for DVDs to arrive, and if you got a dud, it was pretty disappointing because with round trips you wasted multiple days of your subscription with one less good movie from the service. The prize was famously won in 2009 by a team that improved the algorithm by 10%. This was a significant improvement for a recommendation engine that was already tuned by the company.
(Future Netflix prizes were canceled for fears of the Video Privacy Protection Act, which is a whole different story...)
And the recommendation engine was good. Sometimes it just agreed you'd like movies you knew you'd like, the genres with all the actors you like. But sometimes it would throw a curveball from a completely new genre, and if you took a chance it could be sublime, like having a friend with eclectic tastes who knew you better than you knew yourself.
One problem was... most people didn't like to rate things on 10 point scales. Or even 5 point scales. Or rate anything at all. So the ratings system became as simple as possible to avoid turning people off from rating completely, they kept trying to get more signal from less information.
And also the product changed. Streaming meant no more two days wait, so you can cater more to the mood of the person in the moment rather than trying to target some objectified ideal of the person's favorite movie.
Also people often highly rated things they didn't often watch. There were famous lists of the longest kept DVDs, with wrenching Academy Award winners just sitting on coffee tables for a month before returned. In general you might rate art films higher, but right now you just want to turn off your brain and watch something with explosions.
As people defected from ratings and wanted movies catering to specific moods, Netflix tried an era of hyperspecialized categories, to target those sub-sub-genres you liked or wanted to try. There were jokes about it, because you could filter on categories like "critically-acclaimed romantic dance movies" or "romantic crime movies based on classic literature" or "raunchy mad-scientist comedy" or "mistaken-identity movies for ages 5 to 7" (each of these had exactly one entry).
This worked a bit, and gave useful data to Netflix on what shows it might want to produce to fill some of these gaps.
Then someone realized internally that with streaming, the ideal metric wasn't watching a show that changed your life, it was just time on site. If you want to max time on site, you find filler content. Opiates not psychedelics. You don't find a series of profound life changing films or spectacles that people need to go digest and think about before even attempting another film because they know somehow nothing will ever come close. You want empty calories. Something cozy and familiar, so Netflix can become like a fireplace in your living room, always there, always on, always watching your decisions and learning about how to encourage you to keep it on.
So the recommendation engine stopped trying to be a recommendation engine. It is now providing a plausible default for somebody who just wants to put something on and doesn't care too much what. It's not trying to help you find the next great film you will love, it's just trying to be a digital comfort blanket and send you something familiar, on repeat, forever. And if that is not really your passion then you might not really be the target audience anymore.
The system started out targeting the sublime, making people watch a movie they would really remember for the next week as they waited for the next one. Eventually it started targeting satisficing, just keeping people plugged in. The general numbers go up, but I think at the expense of moments of profundity, revelation, and self-discovery.
If you want an overwrought analogy to AI, maybe it's a cautionary tale that illustrates that you don't need to maximize for paperclips to destroy human value. Even if you just shift slightly what aspect of human welfare you're prioritizing, you can end up with a radically different trap and arguably much worse outcome.
Huh. It almost sounds like the mailing delay was the key there. We went from thinking ahead about what we want, and prioritizing based on limited resources, to feeding whatever mood we happened to be in.
A lot of people do rewatch shows, and a lot of people just put on Netflix as white noise while they're doing some task or falling asleep. And while they could easily separate the "watch again" section from the new recommendations, I guess it's easier for the customer to navigate it you don't.
So in addition to the reasons mentioned by others, maybe it's also something people legitimately want.
There is a recurring discussion on Hacker News on the topic "when I buy [a refrigerator] from Amazon, why do they then continually recommend that I buy more?" (where [a refrigerator] could be any large, expensive object of which it is obvious that you're not going to need a second one).
In one case, there was a response from an Amazon engineer who didn't work on the recommendations team, who said "I've asked them about this in the past and they always swear up and down that a previous purchase is the strongest signal of likelihood to buy one of these objects. I've looked into a few different examples that caught my eye and in every case I was able to show that the pattern was spurious (for example, that these "repeat purchases" were actually returns, in which the customer was sent two [refrigerators] but only paid for one), but it's not worth the effort of correcting the team product-by-product".
> 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'm not sure I agree with that; my primary objection, when I look at what Netflix has to offer, is that none of it is even remotely attractive. It's hugely embarrassing to them. Displaying shows that I've already watched neatly sidesteps the issue that they've lost all the licenses for content that someone might actually want to watch; the average quality of that display is going to appear high. Any time I try to look for something new to watch, that's when I get a strong sense that Netflix has died.
The explanation I've heard for appliances is that sometimes you buy one and you don't like it so you get a different one. The odds of this happening aren't particularly high, but they're higher than the odds of you buying the appliance in a random month.
But I'm observing that it isn't the case for physical purchases, and yet the recommendations team treats it like it is, because they're looking at some behavior that isn't relevant to their goals for reasons that don't show up in the data summaries they work from.
This can easily also be true for Netflix.
For example, I find it easy to imagine that two people share a Netflix account and one of them watches a show, likes it, and recommends that the other one should watch it too. Netflix has a tool specifically to combat this problem, distinct personal accounts within a family account, but not everybody's going to bother with that.
My guess is that the team that wrote the module that recommends shows is different from the team that wrote the module that tracks what shows you've watched. Perhaps there's some intermediate phase where they look at your viewing history, try to reduce your complex human personality into a few buckets and bits, and then pass that along.
Alternatively, maybe people actually do re-watch shows a lot, and the recommendation engine is doing its job well? I know some people like to have the TV playing in the background.
Maybe those shows are owned by Netflix, so it's like putting the store brand toilet paper in a prominent spot?
Hm. They want you signing up, and maintaining a subscription. But actually watching anything is going to be a cost for them, both in use of technical resources, and in royalty payments. I'm assuming they're ignoring the technical resource side of the costs, but it's amusing to speculate that they aren't. ;-)
What is the opposite of "leaving money on the table"? "Taking money off the table" might make sense, but I'm looking for something along the lines of, "driving too hard of a bargain such that a deal doesn't even happen in the first place".
As some of you may know, I recently founded the company Open Asteroid Impact (openasteroidimpact.org) on April 1st. Some people complained that there was too much text. While a bit on the late side, we now have a video! It's an interview that covers our company's strategy, safety plan, DEI policies, windfall clause, and more!
Clearly the guy just didn't think I was funny, and sought to make his displeasure known. It's a bit ruder than what I'm used to but hey. That's one of the costs of being on the public internet.
Believe it or not, Downtown Redwood City will actually be top 10% "fun" in the Bay Area. There's a few walkable bars and I love Sandwich Spot. You'll soon find yourself travelling to SF or downtown Palo Alto though... For more natural amenities, you'll be pretty close to the beach in Half Moon Bay and a few hours from skiing in the Sierra Nevada mountains
Make fun of the dopes who bought property in Foster City, since they'll be underwater any day now.
But seriously, what's fun in Redwood City may be the wrong question. Redwood City is part of a continuous strip of suburbs reaching from Millbrae to Santa Clara. It might make more sense to ask what's fun to do in central Silicon Valley.
Well, Redwood City has a DMV office, which is more than most of those suburbs can say. I had to go there once to renew my driver's license, which is one of the most fun things I've done in Redwood City.
Woah, there. I hope during your wild adventures in the big city, you stopped to refuel at Redwood City's many fine dining establishments, like Panda Express, Taco Bell, and Burger King.
Hi everyone, I am currently writing about psychiatric advanced directives, particularly for bipolar disorder or other types of disorders that may involve involuntary treatment; if you have any experience with these kinds of advanced directives, either in issuing them as a patient, or enacting them as a practitioner, and you're open to talk about them, please contact me, I'd like to feature original sources rather than just look at all the metastudies about this. My gmail is hiphination.
And we later ended up comparing epidemic models where Saar/Yuri proposed a late September introduction with half the doubling rate, as compared to my proposed late November introduction at the market.
It would be an interesting debate to go over various models with sufficient detail to compare Pekar's 2021 and 2022 models, evaluate the impact of the first ascertained case on start date, build confidence intervals on case numbers at various dates, decide on a range of values for epidemic growth rate parameters, and so on. But that is certainly not the debate that we did have.
The long-awaited final version of the Independent review of gender identity services for children and young people (aka the Cass Report) was released this week. It's a ginormous meta-study and it makes recommendations for the UK's NHS about what the optimal healthcare approaches for treating children with gender dysphoria should be. In her intro, Dr Hilary Cass writes: "This Review is not about defining what it means to be trans, nor is it about undermining the validity of trans identities, challenging the right of people to express themselves, or rolling back on people’s rights to healthcare."
The report is written in a low-affect style that may disguise the seriousness of its salient points. But it's clear from reading it that a lot of what some people in the debate declare is settled science is not settled at all — for instance, treatments such as puberty blockers are being prescribed with little good data about their long-term effects. I haven't heard if any similar comprehensive review like this is being done in the US. Cass makes various recommendations, the most important of which (to my mind) are to get better long-term data on intervention outcomes.
This BMJ editorial doesn't mince words, though...
"The evidence base for interventions in gender medicine is threadbare, whichever research question you wish to consider—from social transition to hormone treatment.
"For example, of more than 100 studies examining the role of puberty blockers and hormone treatment for gender transition only two were of passable quality. To be clear, intervention studies—particularly of drug and surgical interventions—should include an appropriate control group, ideally be randomised, ensure concealment of treatment allocation (although open label studies are sometimes acceptable), and be designed to evaluate relevant outcomes with adequate follow-up.
"One emerging criticism of the Cass review is that it set the methodological bar too high for research to be included in its analysis and discarded too many studies on the basis of quality. In fact, the reality is different: studies in gender medicine fall woefully short in terms of methodological rigour; the methodological bar for gender medicine studies was set too low, generating research findings that are therefore hard to interpret. The methodological quality of research matters because a drug efficacy study in humans with an inappropriate or no control group is a potential breach of research ethics. Offering treatments without an adequate understanding of benefits and harms is unethical. All of this matters even more when the treatments are not trivial; puberty blockers and hormone therapies are major, life altering interventions...."
Sometimes, it;s basicallly impossible to do a plecebo controlled study/
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy has this issue, because you actually know if youve had therapy. This doesnt mean that we should ban CBT on principle as being impossible to evaluate. (Though, some care in interpreting trials may be in order)
Similarly, you cant plecebo control hormones, because the subject is aware of the effects/
There is also some discussion on different types of placebo effect that could be had...
a. some people randomly get better with many medical conditions. need to show tteatment is better than people getting better anyway
b. experimenter pleasing. patients are, effectivly, coerced inro saying the tteatment worked when it didnt. need to reduce the piossibility of this form of coercion
c. some kind of theory that the immune system uses information about your mental state, and believing you are being treated somehow kicks the immune system into overdrive. nb. there asre reasons to suspect this would be evolutionary advantageous
Rougly, theory is that mammals have to budget calorie expediture between running away from pedators and fighting off infection. An adaptation that throws more energy into the immune system when your not otherwise needing to expend calories on not dying would be evolutionary advantageous.
And large placebo effects with antideprssants might be a different mechanism.
it courred to me a while ago you could just tell yourself youve taken an antidepressant wihtout actually needing to get them preescribed. I mean, if the effect is almost entirely placebo, sugar pills are great.
How can you in principle conduct longterm double blind study of a treatment that has very obvious and well known effects several months in? I suppose, you can still make it double blind on paper, while in actuality everyone knows perfectly well whether they are in a control group or not, but what's even the point then?
On a related note, puberty blockers have been in use for decades for precocious puberty. How were the studies conducted back then? Were they double blind somehow? Do we accept their quality? Can we extrapolate the results of these studies for the new application? If no, why not?
It really seems that whatever long term side effects puberty blockers might have they should have already been discovered during their research and continuous use for treatment of precocious puberty. Theoretically, there may be some class of side effects which, for some reason, is not expressed specifically in patients with precocious puberty but the expected disutility of it appears quite low.
Presumably the puberty blockers are used with different timing in the two cases. It is entirely plausible that a puberty-blocking drug would have different side effects when used to delay the onset of puberty to the normal time versus delaying it until much later than usual.
I'm having a hard time taking the report seriously. How, exactly, are you supposed to do a blind control group for puberty blockers? It will be pretty obvious if you're still going through puberty, you can't placebo yourself into just not maturing. And some of these charts are *obviously* bullshit. The worst that I've seen so far, Figure 18, suggests that the gayest of boys are barely more interested in male partners than the least male-attracted girls. And every single curve in that chart is the exact same shape, and it implies that NO girls identify more with male gender than any boys, which is just obviously untrue because boys and girls identifying with the other gender is the entire *reason this study happened*. I'd expect better from a middle school science fair poster.
At this point I've stopped reading. It may be that my early skim has just picked out a couple of weak spots, but if a random sample of it is this bad I am not expecting the rest of it to be any better.
Listen, Beowulf is smart and critical and willing to call bullshit on anything and anybody. If he takes this report seriously then IMHO it's worth reading in full.
But to answer Unsaintly's question, the Cass report discusses this question in their chapter on Evidence-based Medicine in which they discuss the limitations of the current studies and they suggest methodological improvements.
But the bigger question here, Unsaintly, is why are you having trouble taking the report seriously if you haven't even bothered to glance at it? This seems to be the rationalist method, though — come up with reasons to support one's position without looking at the evidence.
I admit this report is huge, and I'll probably never get through the whole thing, but I was curious enough to check it out and bring it to this group's attention. What blows my mind is that most of the critical comments have come from people who are (a) either too lazy or too prejudiced against it to bother to look at it, and then (b) fail to mount an evidence-based argument against it.
Seconding Eremolalos' comment on it "not being the rationalist method, but a common result anyways"; the issue is at least partially one of time.
Namely, "the first replies will tend to be from people who haven't read whatever you're saying/linking/etc.", roughly proportionately to how long it takes to read it (and/or find time to read it in depth). Possibly with an additional multiplier for how much other interesting reading there is available in the vicinity.
I get how irritating it must be that almost nobody (or literally nobody?) read some of the thing on the strength of your post. You brought a big chunk of info about something people argue and speculate about here. That's like bringing home a big fresh kill for the tribe to feast on, and instead we all just sat on our rocks and kept speculating and arguing. I did that myself. Though Anon eventually got me to consider seriously the idea that transsexuals did not exist before the 1800's. But I am sort of impervious to new info these days. I am writing a novel and all the flow valves are set to out. I canceled all my news subscriptions, and don't even own a TV. Anything big I'll hear through the grapevine anyhow
>How, exactly, are you supposed to do a blind control group for puberty blockers? It will be pretty obvious if you're still going through puberty, you can't placebo yourself into just not maturing.
You do a blind control group by giving the control group a placebo and not telling them they're the control group. Just because they may be able to figure out that they're taking a placebo through observation doesn't invalidate it. Many blind control groups for medications are in the same boat, where the fact that the pill doesn't do anything opens the possibility of participants noticing that they're in the control group. You still have to do it anyway if you're going to have any idea what the effects of the medication you're studying actually are.
>Figure 18, suggests that the gayest of boys are barely more interested in male partners than the least male-attracted girls. And every single curve in that chart is the exact same shape, and it implies that NO girls identify more with male gender than any boys, which is just obviously untrue because boys and girls identifying with the other gender is the entire *reason this study happened*.
I checked the paper that she gets that chart from, and can confirm that the cart she presents is directly from that paper. Sadly I don't understand statistical analyses well enough to critique the paper itself, but here's what the paper had to say about it:
"Conventionally, d values of 0.8 or greater for group differences in human behavior/psychology are considered large, those of about 0.5 are considered moderate, those of about 0.2 are considered small, and those below 0.2 are considered negligible. The d value for the sex difference in height is 2.0. Most human behavioral/psychological sex differences are smaller in magnitude than the sex difference in height, but a few are larger. For instance, the sex differences in gender identity and sexual orientation are larger...This sex difference in gender identity is very large with an approximate d value greater than 10.0 (Hines et al., 2003a, 2004). Sexual orientation refers to the direction of a person’s erotic interests, e.g., in males, females, both or neither. Most people who have female-typical external genitalia are interested primarily in male partners, whereas most people who have male-typical external genitalia are not. This sex difference also is large, with an approximate d value of more than 5.0 (Hines et al., 2003a, 2004; Meyer-Bahlburg et al., 2008)."
I could see that chart being accurate: most men are not gay, and most women are not lesbians, so it would make sense that the vast majority of women are more attracted to men then the men who are most attracted to men. Similarly, most people do not have gender identity disorder, so it makes sense that even those with gender dysphoria may not identify with their chosen gender more than cisgender individuals.
> Just because they may be able to figure out that they're taking a placebo through observation doesn't invalidate it.
Of course it does? I mean, what's the point of double blind studies in the first place, in your opinion? So that people can publish *technically still double blind* studies in papers? Or is it about finding things about reality, regardless of researchers and participants beliefs?
We can say that when the chance of figuring it out is low, then the double blindness protocol is invalidated less. But with longterm puberty blockers study the chance of discovering whether you are in the control group or not is around 100%.
I think what FLWAB means is that in order to check the assumption that a treatment has obvious effects, you have to do a study that doesn't already assume the effects will be obvious.
I think the most interesting angle on this is the question of how one _would_ properly study gender dysphoria treatments.
And this is where I regret the polarization in our discussion. Half the population seems to have concluded that gender affirmation treatments are an absolute right and that it would be horrible to deny any kids as much treatment as their doctor and/or parents can push. The other half thinks any such treatment is self-evidently child abuse and thus totally bans it. So it's hard to see a context in which the kind of 'high quality' study the Cass report asks for can happen in the US.
It looks like Europe is doing better than we are at actually asking the important questions, and hopefully we'll be able to learn from them.
I don't know how one could do a proper study of the psychological aspects of gender dysphoria treatments, but studying the medium-term and long-term physical effects of puberty blockers does not seem undoable. You compare height, weight, bone strength, general health etc. of people who used them and people who are otherwise similar who did not use them. There are some subgroups whose development would also give useful info: People who took puberty blockers for a relatively short period then stopped. People who took them but never followed up with male or female hormones.
Yeah, I would definitely agree, though it's worth noting that nobody is taking these for physical health, so measuring mental health would be a necessary component. The goal is to give doctors/families/kids advice on side effects, not necessarily to prove that these drugs are per se harmful.
Anecdotally, a common story among many adolescents who detransitioned in adulthood is that many of them do not regret the treatment even if they changed their mind. I would love more rigorous data here, but it's possible these treatments have worthwhile benefits on mental health even if there are physical side effects and even if the treatment doesn't stick.
As far as I know, that’s not true. They were initially developed to push premature puberty. The daughter of a family friend got her puberty with 8 and took the blockers for I think 4 years und then stopped using them. She is around 35 now and the last thing that I heard is that she is doing fine.
Yes, I have heard informally that a majority of children taking puberty blockers are undergoing medical therapy to correct an otherwise messed-up puberty. This was cited as serious potential collateral damage from efforts in Texas to ban use of the drugs. I can't offer any sources at the moment.
If we were asking the question de novo, that would be the appropriate course, I think.
But we don't seem to be. I don't claim deep expertise here but my understanding is that puberty blockers have been in use for decades now, and while the evidence for their benefits is unclear, so is the evidence for their drawbacks. That's well short of a good medical study, but it's also not nothing.
To me, this justifies neither 'full speed ahead' or a complete ban, and from what I can read, the Cass report comes to the same conclusion: we should exercise more caution than we currently are, and should try to do better science. But it falls short of endorsing the sort of complete ban that we're seeing in many states.
Previous usage of puberty blockers is a red herring. It was universally used to delay precocious puberty to the natural timing. This is like arguing that since we have treated diabetes with insulin with tolerable side effects, we can therefore give people arbitrary amounts of insulin and it will never be an issue. But in reality, Hypoglycemia (caused by excess insulin) is very dangerous. In general as a rule-of-thumb, medication used to replicate the healthy natural human state can not be expeected to safely be used to push a human beyond the natural state. That doesn't mean everything unnatural is therefore bad, but it does mean that you have to be increasingly cautious the further you move away from the natural.
Why is precocious puberty considered to be a health problem? The only *possible physical* problems that I see listed are (a) an early growth spurt that *may* cause shorter stature, or (b) *possible* abnormal weight gain in girls. All the rest of the negative effects listed for precocious puberty seem to be emotional and psychological. Not that I want to discount the emotional/psychological component, but couldn't counseling handle that downside better and more safely than puberty blockers?
The NHS website says that puberty is considered precocious if it's before 8 for girls, or before 9 for boys. The idea of going through puberty at 7 is pretty awful to me, never mind even earlier than that. And even then, puberty blockers are only considered "if it's thought early puberty will cause emotional or physical problems, such as short height in adulthood or early periods in girls, which may cause significant distress." So it sounds like even puberty as young as 6 or 7 isn't automatically handled with blockers, although that's just from reading the website, I don't have any first or secondhand personal knowledge.
Mental health is far too complicated and individual for such blanket statements. Outside of transgender stuff, lots of cases of e.g. depression and anxiety respond far better to medication than to any form of counselling.
I'm skeptical that counseling will adequately handle either "my body is changing in ways I don't understand and none of my friends are going through this and I'm a GIANT FREAK", or "I really really want to have sex now but that would be a very bad idea and also massively illegal".
Can't we use Scott's "hairdryer" argument here, just as in the case of using puberty blockers for trans people? On the one hand, sure, we could engage in a lot of counseling and therapy, but on the other hand, why not just fix the problem?
I'm not deeply knowledgable either, but just googled puberty blockers advantage disadvantage, & Mayo Clinic listed these undesirable side effects: Possible effects on growth spurts (there's usually a big growth spurt in the year before puberty, with kids growing several inches), bone growth, bone density & fertiity.
I'm not sure why they're saying "possible effects" rather than "effects": maybe because of what was mentioned in Cass report of poor quality of most studies.
I would be surprised if there were not some substantial downsides to interfering with puberty: a crucial, profound, one-time developmental step. The process is probably very complex with many intertwined processes going on, and later maturational processes dependent on the changes at puberty, including of course the gender-specific hormones. Seems very unlikely to me that we could use one drug to stop the body from making the transition of puberty without interfering with a whole bunch of other things.
One of the obvious advantages of puberty blockers is that they make extensive cosmetic surgery unnecessary or at least much less necessary and less extensive.
It doesn't look good when we have used something for long time and still don't have good evidence that it is efficient and safe. It could be a snake oil or something worse. Most ineffective treatments or therapies are in this category.
What prevents collecting good evidence? When the therapy is ineffective or worse, all such evidence is buried and discarded. Instead poor quality evidence that shows some effectiveness is published.
It is very difficult to conduct human trials up to legal and ethical standards for publication in peer-reviewed journals. And this doesn't seem like an area of medical practice where there is a lot of profit to be made (compared to something like a glp-1 agonist for example). Lack of potential for profitable drugs or treatment makes it less likely for research to be privately supported, and because it is socially controversial, there are probably hurdles to public research funding and other resources.
There is a Slate Star Codex piece which breaks this down in the context of research that Scott Alexander was interested in conducting. You might find it relevant if you don't interact with research or structures like an Institutional Review Board https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/29/my-irb-nightmare/
That's not obvious to me given that the lack of treatment can have equally huge, life-altering consequences. With out clear answers either way I would default to using some mix of the best judgement of the patient, their doctors, and if the patient is a child their legal guardians, although when those people don't all agree it's not obvious how to weight their different opinions.
Can you give some examples of where lack of treatment in teenage years has had detrimental outcomes? Please link to studies. One common assertion is that it lowers the chance of teen suicides, but Cass addresses this...
Are you actually disputing that puberty has life-long, irreversible effects on the human body? I don't think I can be bothered to look for a study either way but under the circumstances I don't think it's really necessary.
To what extent that's "detrimental" is a little more complicated but again I believe pretty strongly that people should have the right to make their own choices about their own bodies- I think the burden of proof falls on the people who want to override their right to do that.
I'm not sure what your point is, but I didn't argue that. Yes, puberty has life-long irreversible effects on the human body. But going back to first-causes — and baring hormonal adjustments from the medical profession — our 23rd chromosome pair is the ultimate determinate of puberty and our biological sex. If one goes through gender reassignment therapy, one may be made to look like the opposite sex, but one will not be able to reproduce your 23rd pair. Considering that we don't really know the long-term health effects of hormonal therapies, it seems like a risky choice to make, especially if one isn't an adult.
I'll ask the question again: can you give some examples (research studies) of where lack of treatment in teenage years has had detrimental outcomes? Otherwise we're arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of pin.
Right, and while we're making hypotheticals that do not align with the evidence (since the report above went out of its way to *not* be about gender dysphoria), if the great majority of children with gender dysphoria DO NOT "recover naturally with no long-term harm", then it is in fact obvious that making it more difficult to access these treatments is a bad idea.
In the interim, though, it seems reasonable to provide treatment options that the overwhelming majority of people asking for them have said were beneficial, and insist on better research going forward so we can come to a sane conclusion, instead of making decisions based on "no evidence" (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-phrase-no-evidence-is-a-red-flag).
Also, this... A longitudinal study from the Netherlands about gender non-contentedness in teens. Turns out that gender non-contentedness peaks at the beginning of adolescence (age 11) and steadily declines until age 19, at which point it plateaued. The authors found that, overall, 78% of the children never experienced gender non-contentedness (gender dysphoria); 19% experienced gender non-contentedness that declined with age; and 2% experienced gender non-contentedness that increased with age.
By age 25, the share of people who always felt gender non-contentedness was 0.75% for men and 0.5% for women.
Question: given that some interventions are irreversible, shouldn't we wait until individuals reach adulthood before they choose their final gender identity?
One thing in life the provides a bit of an analogue to puberty blockers is training to be an elite athlete, where kids spend a vast amount of time training, miss a bunch of the stuff they'd have done if they weren't training, and are at considerable risk of developing things like repetitive stress injuries. Also female gymnast, skaters and dancers must be slender, and many of them do all kinds of unhealthy things to keep their weight down. I have never enjoyed watching the Olympic events where most participants are quite young because of thoughts about how much they had to miss to get to the Olympics. I expect most of these people as kids fell in love with their sport, and with being awesome at it, at a very young age, and were permitted or encouraged by parents and coaches to begin an elite training regimen. My daughter fell in love with gymnastics at age 5 or so, and if she had proved to be extraordinarily talented by age 9 or so I am sure she would have wanted to commit to elite training. Fortunately she was not a good enough gymnast for that possibility to loom, but if it ever had I don't think I would have let her do it. She was too young to understand the big picture -- what she would have to give up to make it to the top.
That study uses a fairly broad measure of "gender non-contentedness", i.e. answering "sometimes" or "often" to "I wish to be of the opposite sex" on a survey. A DSM-V gender dysphoria diagnosis requires at least six months of meeting at least two out of six specific definitions involving "strong desire" for medical or social transition or "marked incongruence" between internal gender identity and physical sex.
And "sometimes" appears to be doing almost all of the work in this study's data. If you just restrict your definition to people who reply "often" instead of "sometimes", then based on eyeballing Figure 1, the percentage of the sample experiencing gender incongruity drops to 1-2% at age 11, less than half a percentage point at age 13, and maybe 0.1% at age 16 before rising back to about 0.2-0.5% at age 25.
The study's authors explicitly call out their metric as being likely to over-estimate gender non-contentedness:
>In a previous study in youth, gender non-contentedness was assessed in a similar way, but with five instead of three response options; “never,” “rarely,” “sometimes,” “often,” or “always.” In that study, 9% of individuals answered one of the latter four, with 6% of them answering “rarely” (Potter et al., 2021). It can be speculated that a large percentage of individuals in our sample who answered to “sometimes” wish to be of the opposite sex, might have answered “rarely” if this answer option was provided. Therefore, our numbers may overestimate the prevalence of gender non-contentedness. Furthermore, this item is multi-interpretable, as positive endorsement may reflect the participants’ wish to have the opposite sex’s identity, but just as well their gender role characteristics.
About gender discontent at the beginning of puberty: I had that. I was revolted by my body hair and fuller hips, which to me just looked like an ugly fat butt, a perpetual scattering of zits, hair that got greasy overnight and, of course, my period. Seemed like a whole new level of nastiness, plus there was now the possibility of mortifying accidents. And I was on the swim team and couldn't figure out how to get a tampon in and if I just didn't show up for practice once a month everybody would know why and the idea of that was intolerably embarrassing.
It didn't occur to me to wish I was male, though. I just wanted my kid body back. But if the idea of gender dysphoria had been in the air, I might have concluded that's what I had.
I have, though, seen kids as young as 6 who do truly seem to have something inborn going on with gender. I remember a boy about that age who insisted on wearing dresses, and truly did have a female presence. I kept forgetting he was a boy. And this was 25 or so years ago, before gender dysphoria was so much a thing. The kid seemed happy. His parents worried about how life was going to work out for him, but had given up fighting with him about his clothing etc., and just enjoyed him as he was.
Can you be sure that puberty blockers will have no long-term effects on your health? Sorry, if I seem a bit persnickety about this subject. I'm not an MD, but I did take my med school's embryology course. And it's not just the hormones, but the timing of hormonal signals, that play an important role in human sexual development as well as bone and muscle development. Having said that, my knowledge is forty years out of date. But I was curious about the current state of our knowledge and I queried CoPilot, and different studies seem to be yielding contradictory results. If I were an MD, I would remember that line from the Hippocratic Oath where physicians are told, "first, do no harm".
You
What drugs are commonly used as puberty blockers, and are there any longitudinal studies on their long-term effects?
Copilot
Puberty blockers are medications used to delay the changes of puberty in transgender and gender-diverse youth who have already started puberty. The most commonly used drugs for this purpose are called gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) analogues. Here’s a summary of their possible benefits, side effects, and long-term effects:
Goserelin (Zoladex): This medication suppresses sex hormones (testosterone and estrogen) during puberty.
Histrelin (Supprelin LA): Another commonly used puberty blocker that helps pause physical development.
Leuprolide (Lupron Depot-Ped, Fensolvi): Also falls under the category of GnRH analogues and is used to delay puberty changes.
Now, regarding longitudinal studies on their long-term effects, there is evidence to consider:
A long-term study conducted by the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust in the United Kingdom found that the majority of children who took puberty blockers did not resume puberty after stopping the medication. Contrary to common beliefs, almost all children treated with puberty blockers went on to take cross-sex hormones to permanently alter their sex characteristics. Additionally, participants reported no improvement in psychological well-being, and bone density and normal growth were affected compared to their peers.
Another study suggests that young people who have been on puberty blockers have normal reproductive function after they stop taking them. Data also indicates that puberty blockers do not have long-term effects on bone or metabolic health.
However, a Mayo Clinic preprint study has raised concerns about long-term fertility issues in boys who have taken puberty blockers. The findings suggest that the impacts of these blockers may be permanent, disputing claims that such effects can be reversed.
In summary, while puberty blockers can be beneficial for gender-diverse youth, it’s essential to consider both their short-term benefits and potential long-term effects. As research continues, medical professionals must carefully weigh the risks and benefits when prescribing these medications.
>Can you be sure that puberty blockers will have no long-term effects on your health?
No, but we can be sure that *puberty* will have long-term effects on one's health, including ones that are clearly negative (in particular, there are a lot of serious diseases regarding the uterus and ovaries that only become an issue after female puberty). It seems like forcing trans people to go through that twice should also be included in your risk profile.
You know, I suppose you're right. In fact, being born is so dangerous that we often intentionally delay it! This can come with medical risks of its own, but we decide the benefits outweigh the risks. If only there were some other medical intervention this metaphor could apply to.
Nearly all medications in use fall under this category, in fact. Puberty blockers do too. The point is that "do no harm" should include, y'know, the potential harm from *both* puberty and blockers, rather than just blockers.
>Children are not capable of "figuring this stuff out" by definition
So it's a good thing we have puberty blockers to give them more time to figure out whether they want to make the serious medical decision to have hormones irreversibly alter their body in ways that have well documented effects to their health! (A process known as "puberty")
Legally, minors are not allowed to do all sorts of things because they're generally considered (under the law) to lack the capacity (due to their age and level of maturity) for things like signing contracts. This principle is based on the idea that minors may not fully understand the implications of the contract or they may be easily influenced.
There are all sorts of things that minors can't do. For instance, Federal law prohibits licensed firearms dealers from selling handguns to anyone under the age of 21 and long guns to anyone under the age of 18.
There are also all sorts of state-level age restrictions about sex between minors (for instance, a fourteen-year-old can't have sex with a twelve-year-old in some jurisdictions). And I think all states maintain that the age of consent for sex with an adult at at least age 16. (Of course, the minor doesn't get in trouble for violating the age of consent statutes, but the adults do — because those laws assume that minors don't have the "capacity" to resist the pressures that adults can put on them.)
Many states restrict abortion to minors without parental consent.
Minors can't vote.
And when the draft was in effect, minors couldn't be drafted for military service, and they could only volunteer with the consent of their parents at age 16. I don't know if this is still allowed.
In general, minors are not allowed to serve time in adult prisons, and their record is expunged upon adulthood because their crimes were perpetrated when they had diminished capacity.
So, State and Federal laws carve out all sorts of special cases for minors. If that's the case, why should we let minors have agency about their sexual identity? There may be good reasons, but I admit I've become more skeptical about the need for this exception.
Minors going on puberty blockers or hormones through a legitimate route are, to my knowledge, all doing so with parental consent with the possible exception of legally emancipated minors. Though I am personally very hesitant about the idea that parental consent should always be necessary, especially for older teens. This is consistent with existing policies on medical treatments.
The most important difference between accessing puberty blockers, and say, the right to own a gun or have sex with an adult, is that there are few to no consequences to simply waiting to do those things later. You can wait until 18 to buy a long gun, without being permanently harmed.
However, someone forced to wait until 18 for hormonal transition will, in the meantime, undergo a process that irreversibly changes their body in a way that is often highly distressing, and may require many additional surgeries to begin to correct. If not allowing minors to buy guns somehow made their fingers atrophy so that they struggle to operate tools in the future, I'd feel much more amendable to letting minors buy guns. Given that drastic changes will occur to someone's body either way, we should at least afford them some agency, even if they are underage.
If by "have agency about their sexual identity", you meant social transition such as names, pronouns, and clothes, I would defend this for the same reason minors should be allowed to have friends, hobbies, and political or religious views of their own: they're not property.
A key difference is that none of the standard drugs used for medical transition are newly developed for that purpose. All of them are secondary uses for drugs developed and approved to treat other conditions. In general, there is much, much less scrutiny applied to new uses for already-approved medications than for initial approval of new medications.
Puberty blockers were specifically created to give to developing kids (the original purpose was to treat precocious puberty), so I don't think that objection applies here.
There are at least three different GnRH analogues medications that can be used to delay puberty. Leuprorelin and Triptorelin indeed appear to have been developed to treat hormone-sensitive cancers. But Nafarelin was developed to treat precocious puberty.
And that doesn't contradict what I said earlier: "precocious puberty" refers to when puberty starts much earlier than normal, and as such is a medical condition that cisgendered people get.
Anti-androgens used for adult trans women (e.g. spiro, cypro, and bica) were developed for other purposes (high blood pressure, hormonal birth control, and prostate cancer, respectively, if I recall correctly), but I think they're generally reserved for adults and older teenagers.
It would seem that a large fraction of gid cases are a type of autism.
it is not "they have autism, not gid" but rather gid is misclassified in the DSM and should have been been put with the pervasive developmental disorders.
We had the lesbians who only have sex with men discussion last week. it seems everyone here thinks it is nuts to explain all gid cases as homosexuality, given that a significant portion arent attracted to thier assigned at birth sex.
>Many are gay, on the autism spectrum, or have other mental health issues.
None of these things are mutually exclusive. Autism in particular strongly correlates with gender dysphoria in both directions for reasons that are not well understood. And the most common other "mental health issues" are depression and anxiety symptoms, which may actually be caused by gender dysphoria in many cases.
For example, I have formal diagnoses for gender dysphoria, ADHD, depression, and anxiety. The depression and anxiety symptoms have almost completely gone away since I figured out I was probably trans, got diagnosed, and started medical transition. The ADHD seems to be more or less independent of dysphoria and transition.
That being said, there are diagnoses that can mimic the presentation of gender dysphoria and should be ruled out as part of the diagnosis process: specifically, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder type 1, and certain presentations of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Ruling these out is part of the WPATH-8 process.
These are my pet hypotheses on the correlation between dysphoria and autism:
1. Autistic people may experience what might be termed "gender incongruity" at roughly the same rate as the gender population, but they find a given degree of gender incongruity much more distressing than neurotypical people do, for similar reasons to why autistics tend to be a lot more bothered by unpleasant sounds, tastes, and textures than neurotypicals are.
2. It seems like a core feature of autism is being at least somewhat lacking in both the ability and the motivation to conform your identity and preferences to social norms. It seems plausible that an effect of this is that neurotypical people would have gender identities that are at least a bit more socially malleable.
> It seems like a core feature of autism is being at least somewhat lacking in both the ability and the motivation to conform your identity and preferences to social norms.
I hadn't thought of this before. I once dated someone who was only slightly on the autism spectrum, but when in intense emotional situations, they would revert to a very binary view of truth: statements were either true and good, or a lie and evil, and there were no exceptions for falsehood or imperfect knowledge or just making a mistake.
I am going to be very cautious about treating this as more than a theoretical potential contributing factor. But wow, the more I think about it, the more it seems to explain. :-/
I have a number of psychotherapy patients on the autism spectrum, not all of them so close to the mild end that they would fit right in in a setting with lots of "nerds." None are happy, and some are very unhappy. Re: the lack of joy and enthusiasm, my intuition is that a certain emotional flatness may come with the territory. But also, most are grievously deprived of companionship because of their social skills deficit, and also lead very restricted lives because of an aversion to novelty and a craving to know in advance exactly how something will turn out. I work to help them improve social skills, and become aware of their inner script of when-in-doubt-do-the-usual-thing and override it more often.
Also, am impressed by work being done by a Calif. researcher on using a brief, structured therapy incorporating 2 MDMA sessions to help people on the autism scale become less socially anhedonic. Can find links if you are interested.
Depression and anxiety is an obvious result of being autistic while living in non-autistic society, where people are mostly unable to straight communication and instinctively consider you rude and weird.
Non cis-genderness and general gender-non-conformity seem to have something to do with autistics being less susceptible to social rules. The fact that people still manage to twist it into "social contamination of transgenderness" is hillarious.
> If it does all turn out to be because of pollutants
On the other hand, imagine how ironic it would be if it turns out that polutants have serious contribution towards transgenderness. That the side which was actively worried about their children becoming trans was actually contributing towards it by supporting oil industry.
Why would it come from the oil industry specifically? There are lots of pollutants, and in fact if there was something we typically consider anodyne that we found out caused gender dysphoria, we would reclassify it as a pollutant.
Gender dysphoria is an unusually politically sensitive issue and you'd expect on priors for its diagnoses to be mush less trustworthy based on this. And psychiatric diagnoses for many illnesses or issues are pretty fuzzy in the first place.
Something being a politically sensitive issue has a much worse signal to noise ratio than getting a diagnosis from a medical professional. I can understand some amount of extra caution, but there is that, and than there are claims that diagnosis have no strong correlation with an actual condition.
This is not actually true, as I will apparently have to keep pointing out for the rest of my natural life. There is – in stark contrast to homosexuals – *no record*, not *one*, of a transsexual person in the entire West between the emperor Elagabalus (approx. 204-222 AD) and the mid-19th century. There are a number of eunuchs and crossdressers whom activists *choose* to spuriously reinterpret as transsexuals ex post facto, but an examination of these cases proves them wrongheaded in each instance. (Elagabalus is also a unique; there is no other instance preceding him either.)
Please stop repeating this false factoid. Trans people did not meaningfully exist before the industrial revolution. I have no idea why, but that's how it is.
Gender dysphoria as we recognize today has certainly been documented. The most famous example is the 14th century poem "On Becoming a Woman" by rabbi Qalonymos ben Qalonymos. The rabbi refers to maleness as a "lasting deformity" and laments to God to be made female. You can read the poem online if you'd like, it's quite moving. It makes no direct reference to attraction to men.
Examples of people who lived as the opposite of their birth sex include the surgeon James Barry (born 1789), stagecoach driver Charley Parkhurst (born 1812), and more recently, the Countess or Pauline/Arthur Berloget of 1850s France, who wrote, "I, who had so desired to be a girl, have triumphed over natural law." There is also the Quaker preacher Public Universal Friend (born 1752) who explicitly identified as neither male nor female, and requested their followers avoid gendered pronouns when referring to them, saying "I am as I am."
There are also many culturally-specifc third or fourth genders, yes, even in Europe: the femmenielli of Italy, and Balkan sworn virgins. These are social roles that fulfill social purposes, and not merely individual declarations of identity, but social roles develop in response to individual psychology. There are far more examples, of course, outside of "the West."
I take issue with your requirement of "lack of other motivations" to characterize a historical figure as transsexual, it is asking for too much. In a society with highly distinct roles for men and women, going from one category to another, or shunning both, will require taking on a drastically different lifestyle and career by definition. Any "legitimately transsexual" historical figure would also need, at the very least, to be able to cope with the demands of their chosen role.
It is one thing to say a woman crossdressing temporarily to fight in war or inherit an estate is not an example of a transsexual, and another to claim someone like James Barry, who lived his entire adult life as a man, and wanted his sex to be kept secret even after his death, is not reasonable evidence of a trans person, even if he originally transitioned to get into medical school.
If you don't think these examples are sufficiently "pure", I'd be curious to know what your standards are, and whether your standards are in fact similar to typical trans people today.
This is exactly the kind of disingenuous argumentation I mean. Most of your examples are trivially easily dismissed, and you probably know this, yet you repeat them anyway because when given in a group they have the appearance of truth and this allows you to trick others.
The femminielli were simply crossdressing homosexual prostitutes; this we have ample evidence of from late-medieval and early-modern Europe. In France they were called berdaches, and in Venice there exists a bridge called the "Ponte delle Tette", Bridge of Tits, because the city's ordinary prostitutes successfully sued to be allowed to display themselves there in order to compete with the crossdressing male prostitutes. It's strange that people are so keen to make much of these types of obvious drag performance when, in the modern day, conflating drag with transexualism is seen as a big no-no by the same people, and they clearly understand the distinction to be clear and sharp.
Sworn virgins are even worse and more disingenuous an example than this, of course, since they're exactly a case of a social structure existing to allow women to take on the social rights and duties of a man in case of necessity or (rarely, it seems) inclination. The fact that it took a lot longer for most people who are not Albanians to establish analogous forms of elective or universal emancipation doesn't make the sworn virgins transexual, any more than having her own bank account makes a woman transsexual today.
As for the individual persons named by you:
The rabbi Kalonymus is an interesting case, but I will point out that he is conventionally described as a satirist and that the Even Bochan "has long been acknowledged as a masterpiece of Hebrew satire" intended to make fun of Judaism's ideas about men's superior position in society and before the Lord; you know, presumably, as well as I do that the end of the poem is a reference to and paraphrase of the Orthodox Jewish man's morning prayer, in which he thanks God for not making him a woman. Nor indeed is this the only satire of this kind that Kalonymus wrote (Masekhet Purim is the other I can name offhand), so it's hardly strong evidence of *anything* in his personal life.
Margaret Bulkley a.k.a. "James Barry", as you point out yourself, crossdressed to get into medical school, another typical example of the opportunistic crossdressing I adverted to already. The evidence concerning her is also contradictory, with, for example, no indication of any relationships with women, a possible relationship with a man who was in on her secret, and the possibility that an early sexual assault and subsequent pregnancy led her to feign being a man as a form of traumatized self-defense. It's also worth noting that even if we accepted Bulkley/Barry as legitimately transexual, this would merely move the first appearance of transsexualism back by two or three decades, hardly a massive hole below the waterline to what I'm saying.
Charlotte Parkhurst is substantially the same; she crossdressed for protection (I hardly need to tell anyone that the western frontier could be notably fucked up for teenage girls traveling alone), had at some time a straight relationship and (non-surviving) baby, and, being born two decades after Bulkley, is even closer to the time in which I already agree that transsexuals were surfacing.
The PUF was brain-damaged by a fever, decided she had died and her soul had been replaced by that of an angel, and that since angels were understood (by various persons, anyway) to be sexless, she must therefore also be; her condition is much closer to what we would modernly term schizophrenia than to transsexualism (although, be it noted, it was clearly also not schizophrenia as typically understood, proceeding as it did from a severe physical illness. A stroke?). Frankly the PUF is almost the canonical example of a widely cited but obviously "fake" transexual, in that nothing whatsoever about her case resembles the generally accepted modern understanding of transsexualism.
Strangest of all is your use of Arthur Berloget, transexual of the 1850s and forward, as an example *against* my claim that transsexuals first appeared in the mid-19th century! Berloget is indeed precisely one of that handful of indisputable cases which do occur with no predecessors in the mid-19th century! There is indeed little question that Berloget is what we would modernly conceive of as a transsexual! Why would you concieve of this as an argument against me? I am frankly baffled by this, unless it merely shows the rote, copypaste nature of your response.
Incidentally, your use of terminology like "transitioned" is the worst kind of question-begging. Not only are you assuming that which is to be demonstrated, you're violating your own definitions, since you know very well that if it were decided today that transition should be a wholly non-medical issue and transexuals should be content with crossdressing, you would immediately raise the hue and cry about it.
I am interested in knowing your definition of what may fairly be described as "transsexual" (I will generally use the more common term transgender person) so that I can consider how it fits to some other historical examples. This seems better than potentially coming up with a list of historical examples to then work through on an ad hoc basis.
Maybe one way you could express this would be to look at examples you deem spurious and characterize why those examples don't fit with the definition you endorse.
I will put forward a modified version of the Wikipedia definition as my starting point: "A transgender person is someone whose gender identity differs from that associated with the gender that their family, community, and/or society identifies them with." And then "gender identity is the personal sense of one's own gender, which can correlate with a person's assigned sex or can differ from it."
Kind of a weird definition - does it imply that in a maximally trans-inclusive society, nobody would be trans? Since there would be no societal gender identification from which to differ
"I will put forward a modified version of the Wikipedia definition as my starting point: 'A transgender person is someone whose gender identity differs from that associated with the gender that their family, community, and/or society identifies them with.' And then 'gender identity is the personal sense of one's own gender, which can correlate with a person's assigned sex or can differ from it.'"
"Gender" as a concept is also ideological hogwash; most languages don't even have two words for this and English only does because Victorians were too prudish to say sex, so they used a grammatical term as a euphemism. The idea of a sex/gender distinction existing is itself false, enabled only by this accident of the English language. I also don't think that others' views are materially relevant. I would thus prefer to define a transsexual simply as "someone whose sex identity differs from their actual observable physical sex".
This being settled, allow me to begin in the way of examples with the two I already used elsewhere: the famous Chevalier d'Éon in the 18th century, and the castrato priests of Cybele in ancient Rome. These are two figures (or rather a type in the latter case) which are *frequently* claimed by transexual activists in our day as predecessors; there should therefore be no problem in using them as examples of the tendency, I hope you will agree.
d'Éon, despite engendering widespread dispute in his own day about whether he was in reality male or female, did not meaningfully have a sex identity different from his birth sex; of course, due to the controversy just mentioned it would be either impossible or inevitable for any sex identity he had to differ from that which others identified him with, depending on how you look at it, which strikes me as an example of where your definition is not adequate. Either way, I hope we can agree that the existence of letters from himself where he begs to be allowed to resume male clothing in France because he feels humiliated by having to dress as a woman makes it clear that he was in no way confused on the point. Granted, it was decided to require him to dress as a woman in the first place because in previous letters he claimed to be a girl who was raised as a boy to inherit his family estate, but given that that claim was made entirely for personal gain, well. It's also reasonably well established that d'Éon began to crossdress for the purposes of spying, as he was a member of the Secret du Roi, the Ancien Régime's intelligence agency and secret police; evidently in his youth he was able to pass for a woman, but every portrait of him from later in life makes clear that he thoroughly lost this ability with age.
Next, in the case of the priests of Cybele, the so-called galli, the idea that they were transsexual seems to me to crumble on every point where we have any evidence. First of all, "gallus" is the Latin for rooster, cockerel; the *whole point* is that they're *men* who have made the sacrifice of their manhood to the goddess; a costly signal if ever there was one. If they believed themselves to actually be women, there would be no sacrifice and they would not be able to function as priests. Secondly, in those periods when castration of Romans was illegal, the galli were evidently foreigners, which indicates that the animating impulse was religious piety or fervor, not a desire to change sex, which presumably would not have increased among Roman men just because a law changed. (Similarly to what I said in a previous comment, if people suggest this happened, I would like to know what law changes they think would cure/prevent transsexualism in our time and why they aren't advocating for this simple, effective, wholesome, socially nondisruptive, and evidently permanent one-time fix instead of complex medical interventions with significant residual suffering.) Thirdly, there is no sensible reason why Roman transexuals would have all, without exception, formed a religious cult to the point where there isn't a single known example of someone just doing the eunuch-and-women's-clothing part and staying out of the religion – not even Elagabalus, who AFAIK did not castrate himself. This is just asking for far too much acceptance of ludicrous coincidence, particularly considering how crass Romans were about matters of sex in both senses, especially if they could get a laugh out of it. Finally, as a sort of aside remark, I might point out that there were a reasonable number of eunuchs in ancient Rome, and vast numbers in other especially Eastern societes later; none of these are typically considered transsexual by modern activists, so it can't be the case that castration is inherently transsexual or evidence of transsexualism. Effectively nothing about the galli and their manifestation pattern-matches to how we're meant to understand the modern transsexual etiology or experience; therefore, it is reasonable to state that these are two different phenomena. (Note that many things about the galli *do* pattern-match to the behavior of adherents of other weird religions.)
I'm sort of dashing this off off the cuff and reading it over it seems a bit muddled, it could probably have been argued more forcefully with more time spent than I'm willing to dump into an individual comment, but hopefully this can form some reasonable basis at least.
"There are a number of eunuchs and crossdressers whom activists *choose* to spuriously reinterpret as transsexuals ex post facto"
How do you distinguish between a crossdresser and a transsexual, in an era where the word "transsexual" hadn't been coined yet, there was no social support for or acceptance of the thing we would later describe with that word, and the medical technology for a transsexual to do anything more than dress and pass as the opposite sex didn't exist?
Evident compulsiveness, lack of other motivations, presence of the comorbidities now known to us, voluntarity, expressions of distress. Those are just the most obvious criteria off the top of my head. But for example, transexual activists keep citing the Chevalier d'Éon as a historical transsexual even though autograph evidence (in the form of a letter from him to the relevant legal authority, I forget who) existed at least into the early 20th century, and probably still exists today, that he was appalled by the legal decision that required him positively to dress as a woman in France and wanted permission to stop. Or again, (a certain type of) people keep citing the Roman priests of Cybele, even though they're blatantly obviously self-castrati out of religious fervor and piety, much like a number of Christians later, natch.
These behaviors are, *at the very minimum*, sufficiently distinct from the modern transsexual that claiming them for that movement is the iffy angle, not refuting it.
(Also, you seem to inadvertently suggest here that if *we ourselves* were to remove all social support and acceptance of transsexualism, the observed presentation would then disappear and be reverted into other, largely more benign forms of crossdressing; do you really believe that? Given that "crossdresser without significant psychological distress or ailments" is clearly superior to even the outcomes of many hormonally and surgically treated persons, who report significant continued morbidities, that would if so be a forceful case *against* tolerance in this instance. I'm not sure I'm prepared to go there.)
Couldn't it be that the concept of being trans didn't exist, and that people who would now call themselves trans then thought of themselves homosexual? Also, my impression (based mostly on life experience and stuff Dan Savage has said) is that for most gay men wearing drag is a playful thing, done for parties or parades or the fun of feeling outrageous, but not a way of feeling more like a woman. So maybe crossdressers in the past were what we would now call trans? I.e.., maybe they were crossdressing so as to come as close as they could in real life to being the gender they felt they were.
My understanding is that most modern transsexuals are not even homosexual (with reference to their actual sex, that is), so it's hard to see how that could be possible for more than a portion of the group in any case. But also, the references we do have to crossdressing mainly suggest that it was opportunistic for access to male advantages in the case of women (e.g. the famous lady-pirates of Calico Jack's crew) and for men, either to hide from one thing or another (the Chevalier d'Éon, any number of French aristocrats escaping the guillotine dressed as washerwomen, etc.) or exactly the same sort of joking/party thing you describe. The best example of the latter would be a joke in Aristophanes' Thesmophoriazusai, which I started explaining here, but the digression was so long that it was of a size with the rest of the post, so look it up if you really want to know; in any case, that was written in 411 BC in Athens.
Either way, there's no sign or record of anything like what the current regime describes as *distress* around sex or gender, and there is not in literature any example of someone even asserting the impossible desire to switch, except on the pattern of Beatrice's lament in Much Ado About Nothing, where a woman wishes that she were a man so that she could behave like a man, or avenge herself.
<My understanding is that most modern transsexuals are not even homosexual (with reference to their actual sex, that is),
Well, yeah, but you know the thing about Eskimos have 15 (or whatever the number is) words for snow, while English has only one? Well maybe in other eras there weren't words for all the manflavors gender identification and sexual preference, so some word like "homosexual" or "queer" would have been used to cover all forms of being atypical with respect to gender and sexual preference.
As for personal accounts -- there are probably a lot of things we don't have personal accounts of from early on. Many people couldn't even read and write, and even for those who could it's unlkely their diaries and letters would survive unless they were famous. And if being sexually atypical was stigmatized, that makes it even less likely we'd have personal accounts of it. Do we have personal accounts of a taste for BDSM, or water sports, or fellatio? I dunno, maybe we do.
I realize that absent concrete knowledge this seems like a credible and rational line of reasoning. However, in practical fact: no. Some single vague term would not have been used to cover all sexual deviance, let alone consistently during all of 1500 years in the entirety of Europe. It's unlikely that this would have occurred *even in one country* for any period longer than a few generations. Rather, it's unlikely that if transexuals *had* existed, they'd have been conflated with gays other than in exceptional cases; the two concepts of "wanting to fuck other men" and "a strange misapprehension about one's body" are not intimately conceptually connected, however natural the connection seems here and now. It's more likely that they would have been associated with other kinds of lunatics who believed other absurd but largely harmless things.
"Do we have personal accounts of a taste for BDSM, or water sports, or fellatio? I dunno, maybe we do."
Yes, we do, actually. Tons of them. The Romans had separate words for giving head and facefucking. The fragmentary novel Satyricon is, as far as we can judge from the remaining portions, about two guys dragging their twink around due to a sex curse cast on them by a priestess of Priapus for spying on the secret rites. In The Golden Ass, a woman is sentenced to get screwed by the titular donkey; this is played for laughs as the donkey finds it repugnant to bed a criminal. There is any amount of graffiti in Pompeii and elsewhere describing the specific charms and skills of named women, wholly without euphemism. Again, this is Rome alone (starring Macaulay Culkin as the emperor, I guess). I understand that it can be tempting to attribute a sort of naivete or puritanism to the peple of the past wholesale, but they were literally just like us, often less inhibited. I would advise you to let go of this way of thinking, even if you don't feel like hitting the books (which I recommend, however; many of them are very entertaining).
It feels like someone should mention the following theory:
*********
No one is transgender *by nature*,
BUT, also
No one is cisgender *by nature*.
Because cisgender and transgender are cultural/societal concepts and they don't exist outside of a society.
Or as Scott put it:
"there is no neutral culture. Having lots of transgender people is downstream of cultural choices. But having lots of cisgender people is also downstream of cultural choices.....Even within evolution’s constraints, culture can do some pretty weird stuff. I think you could probably have a culture where 99% of people were transgender, where it was generally accepted that everyone transitioned on their 18th birthday"
Oh god, what the hell is this new Substack feature where the whole width of the text column narrows when you select something?? This is seriously annoying. You've got to find some way to turn this off.
(And geez, website makers in general should remember that lots of people are "selection readers"; having selection even just pop a little thing is annoying, let alone *this*!)
I've long been annoyed by how slow this blog loads on desktop browsers, especially when posts have a lot of comments (e.g., the Ivermectin post with over 2200 comments). I finally decided to do something about it, and created a browser extension that reimplements the comments section which speeds up page load considerably. I can finally open the Ivermectin post again!
The source code is available on Github: https://github.com/maksverver/astral-codex-eleven, and you can file bug reports or feature requests there too. If you are especially paranoid, you can unzip the extension before installing; it's implemented in 100% unobfuscated Javascript without frameworks or libraries, so it should be relatively easy to verify it does nothing inappropriate (no ads, click tracking, or uploading of data of any kind).
While the main goal was to be able to load posts with lots of comments in a reasonable amount of time, I also worked in a few other improvements, like keyboard navigation (h/j/k) and more precise comment timestamps.
Holy crap. I knew substack's code for displaying comments was bad, but I had chocked it up to there maybe being some technical limitation with the sheer amount of text on the page. But the speed at which they load in your extension (and how they don't take a full second to display when tabbing back) proves this is not the case, and makes substack's team just seem incompetent.
I will say that I disagree strongly that profile pictures "add little value"; I personally heavily rely on avatars in identifying who's commenting over just usernames, since my visual memory (and pattern recognition) is much stronger there. I'd certainly appreciate them. (If I have time, I might look into submitting a PR for this, but no promises)
I'd also like the avatars back, but if it's a huge effort to have them AND the lightning quick comment reading, I guess I can live without them. Or maybe just toggle the add-on off if I want to see them again (otherwise bye-bye Unicorn Power: https://pbfcomics.com/comics/nice-shirt/)
I focus more on the names, but I can see recognition value in the avatars.
One thing Substack is clearly doing wrong is setting the avatar to the left of the comment instead of above it. This ends up wasting tons and tons of horizontal space in any case where the commenters are talking to each other instead of doing nothing but responding directly to the post.
FWIW I blasted avatars with Ublock on Firefox, which significantly sped up the comment loading. It was weird at first, and then my correlation engine quickly adapted to seeing just the names. But I do like being able to see them again with this extension.
I don't doubt what you say, but there should be multiple layers of image caching to stop this exact problem. What the HELL has been going on in browsers, or Substack, to cause this?
Oh, it’s a disaster all right. I did it because someone mentioned it a couple of weeks ago in these here comment boxes, that the freaking avatars slow the comments down. So I made custom filter in Ublock that blasted almost, but not all (? - don’t ask! I’m a stranger here meself :) ), avatars. Significant speeding up of comment loading ensued.
I will be trying this. It's the first such fix I've seen that attempts to keep the comments, rather than just turning them off. Thank you for your work!
So my mother has a kidney tumor which may or may not be cancerous. She says that the doctors are quite confident but I've not been entirely convinced by the way my grandfather and uncle cancers were treated, so I'm looking for recommendations on what to read to be able to do at least a sanity check on what her doctors say.
Guidelines should be the default in treatment decisions, and physicians should be able to justify any decisions that don't follow guidelines--e.g., "This guideline doesn't apply because ___."
Confidence is not a good metric to judge physicians by. For important diagnoses and treatment decisions, it's worthwhile to try to get a second opinion.
I have a question about lgG4 antibodies and food intolerance.
Specifically, I recently made a lgG4 blood test and it showed reactions to almost two dozen foods. I already have celiac disease, and continue to have (much milder) GI issues on a gluten (and lactose) free diet.
Are elevated lgG4 levels merely indicative of exposure, or should I actually eliminate the foods? It would be logistically difficult to do so.
Have you recently switched to a gluten-free, lactose-free diet? I'm asking because for a while after switching it's not unusual to still have reactions to almost anything even if your diet is completely free from gluten (and lactose, in your case). It should eventually calm down - if it doesn't, then you need to go back and ask your doctor. As for elevated IgG4 antibodies, as far as I can tell from a quick search, they can indicate a lot of different things (including being raised in asymptomatic individuals) so I wouldn't rely on them as a tell-tale for things to cut out of your diet. Not as the only indicator, anyway.
Thank you so much for your answer! I switched to GFLF last September and the "getting better" seems to have plateau'd. Your answer made me hopeful that I might still get better, though I need to schedule a follow-up soon anyway. Thanks for the answer about lgG4 antibodies, too! That's about the same conclusion I'd also come to, but I was worried I'd missed something.
Also, if you are sufficiently motivated, you could try an elimination diet - cut out everything that you think might be causing problems for a few weeks and see if the problems subside. Then add things back in, one by one, monitoring the results. I'd trust that kind of test more than the IgG4 blood test.
I suppose the final question is, are you absolutely sure you've eliminated all gluten sources? It's a sneaky molecule.
Lately I've become easily "triggered" and upset about politics that I come across in my day-to-day. I didn't used to be this way - I was more open-minded about views I disagreed with, more intellectually charitable, and less emotionally invested. I am not able to avoid the triggers or situations where they happen (it's about coming across things "in the wild", rather than places, incl. online ones, where I can easily choose to opt out.)
I really don't like being this way, and don't want this vice to become amplified over time. How can I change?
I think listening to another side's framing and believing them has been the most helpful to me. For instance, the war in Ukraine. Both sides use peace, well being, and other utilitarian justifications in their framing, and paint the other side as stupid, evil liars. Anti war people point out: that weapons companies make money and use it to bribe politicians, conscription happens, and lots of civilians die. The other side is worried about 2nd order effects like defending democracy, the liberal International order, strategic stability, bad precedents, etc. You don't have to buy either side, but most news source will paint their opponents as believing "Hey we like killing babies, we want more of that" which is just not true for any political issues. Same for all the issues of the day: DEI, Israel, abortion, inflation, gun control, climate change, healthcare, immigration, etc.
"Knowing a man well never leads to hate and almost always leads to love."
I'm sorry that I don't have any real answers. I'm dealing with something similar, and haven't gotten rid of it, but here's some stuff that might help.
Maybe try looking into Zen or some other form of Buddhism? This sounds like textbook "attachment", where encountering a stimulus causes a series of reactions in your mind, which end in suffering.
Something that jumped out at me, was your use of the word "vice". That makes me worry that you're reinforcing this by positing a component of voluntariness that may not be warranted. (How good are you at not thinking of elephants?) Don't blame yourself like that, if for no other reason than that it might make the problem worse. Instead, I'd suggest trying to relax through it. Try to notice the process happening as quickly as you can, and then step back (inside) and watch what happens. Paying attention to your thoughts, breathing, and pulse. Find the "Litany against Fear" from the book "Dune", and do that, but with the upsetness. Understand the process, and slowly dissolve it. Get to a place where you can laugh at yourself and at the process.
Is it just one aspect of politics that you find triggering you, or many?
Because there's no point getting worked up about something you can't do anything about, and you can't really do anything about most political issues. You might be able to do something useful, at least on a local scale, regarding *one* issue. But you'd have to focus on it, and not get distracted by all the stupid people who are wrong about everything else.
So, maybe pick one political issue where you're going to make a difference, donating your time and/or money, and speaking on behalf of the cause you believe in. Everything else, is someone else's problem. There are lots of good people out there, some of whom will have chosen as their One Thing the very thing the clueless dolt in front of you is wrong about, and you've got to leave it to them while you go about your One Thing.
And when you're talking to other people about that thing, if they're the stupid ones who are wrong about it, the *only* way you can accomplish anything is to treat them with courtesy and respect and even then you're probably going to have to settle for planting the seed of an idea that might change their mind in a few months. But because you're actually there to *do something* rather than just venting your rage, you're going to suck it up and fake courtesy and respect while you make your case calmly, rationally, and hopefully persuasively. Eventually, you'll find that you aren't faking it any more.
Alternately, you might decide that you can't do anything about *any* of this. In which case, you treat politics the way you treat the weather - an arbitrary, impersonal thing you can't hope to control and can barely forecast. Do you get triggered by bad weather, directing emotional outbursts at the Storm God or the TV weatherman? Or do you go on with your life, and help your family, friends, and neighbors muddle through the storm as best you can?
Hard to answer without more details about what types of things are causing this and what you are feeling?
For instance is your relative "lack of charity" more of an emotional response but your rational brain is giving more charity to the problematic views?
Or is your rational brain saying "these views are abhorrent and have no merit" and you want to change your rational brain.
If it's the later it's hard to understand why you would want to change that.
Like if the views actually have no merit in your brain's evaluation why would you want yourself to believe that they do have merit.
If it's the former there might be a few things you should keep in mind:
1. Read: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/ and understand that the views that happen to percolate to your attention may do so because of their abhorrence so that the sample "views you are exposed to" is not a representative of "views people have" so you need not dispair for the sake of humanity.
2. Remember that sometimes bad actors (like the Russian government) might intentionally feed the toksoplasma for various reasons
3. Remember that lots of people say abhorrent things just to signal support with a side and not because they believe them. Like people who say "we should kill all the rich people" don't really mean that, usually. Like they wouldn't shoot a guy just because they happened to win the lottery.
4. exposure therapy. continuously seek out obhorent views until you become numb to the emotional impact
I find asking myself “what am I supposed to do about it?” really helps. Sometimes the answer is a something, like calling my congresscreature, or giving money to a cause. But for the most part… nothing. Then, why getting upset about it.
I don't know, I mostly grew out of this kind of thing as I got older. I don't know whether it's just age, or having closer-to-home things to worry about, or whether all my self-talk about not getting worked up about dumb political things eventually paid off.
Or maybe it's just the experience of seeing plenty of dumb political moments and fashions come and go with no real effect on my life increases my confidence that the next time I see some idiots saying something stupid it probably won't massively effect me either.
One thing I like to remind myself sometimes is that over the whole course of my life, roughly half of the elections will be won by the bunch of jerks that I hate more, and the other half of the elections will be won by the bunch of jerks that I hate less, that this has been going on for a long time, and that it mostly evens itself out.
This is very close to my experience. I also chock it up to how often I watch people on either/all sides make a complete fool of themselves. Nowadays they become memes and get repeated thousands of times by their ideological enemies. Like some guy with no sleeves and a misspelled sign or some purple hair screaming nonsense. I'm like - "Nope, Not me!"
I've gone back and forth on this axis over the last decade or so. So I obviously haven't solved the problem, but some things that have helped me improve include:
- Finding context. Either looking at "more important issues" like ex. who cares about the outcome of <this issue> honestly, there's a horrible famine in Sudan, this thing that's making me mad doesn't matter. Only works if you aren't getting mad about how little people care about important issues.
- Focusing on my personal life and family and friends. Assuming the political issue in question doesn't directly impact you, reminding myself of the important and meaningful parts of my own life and letting those distract me is helpful.
- Depending on how charitable you feel, reframing the people annoying you as either objects of sympathy - "Wow that thing they are saying is awful but they seem uneducated and exposed to bad influences. It's so sad they are like that." or as objects of derision - "Wow it is so not worth my time to engage with such an inbecile." Both result in me being able to step back from engaging/caring about the situation.
- Any form of irony, nihilism, and/or just plain laughing at the dark humor of the world that you find relatable. If you can laugh at yourself getting worked up that's great, if you can laugh at the situation for being so terrible, that's partial, and if you can laugh at the source of the frustration that at least let's the one off go.
- I read a lot, and fiction or nonfiction that covers the topics or themes you find enraging I find helps restore the charitable and open minded focus by putting me in the learning/listening mindset vs. the discussing/debating one.
YMMV on all of these, but as a fellow afflicted person, good luck!
There’s a very helpful book called “stop fixing yourself” which says, instead of trying to change yourself, try to understand the motives and reasons for the behavior you want to change. It’s been helpful for me.
When you think about tolerance as a cultural virtue, to what extent does it include tolerating intolerance in others?
For instance within a single country, if minor ethnic group A doesn’t tolerate people of major ethnic group B, is it more in line with tolerance as a virtue for group B to tolerate group A’s intolerance or to seek to enforce country-wide tolerance through legislation?
Edit: To clarify, group A’s intolerance doesn’t extend to an explicit, doctrinal call to violence against group B.
I read an article once called "Dissolving the paradox of tolerance". I can't find the article any more. It seems like the sort of thing that Scott would have written but apparently he didn't.
Anyway the argument was that the supposed paradox comes mostly from the vagueness of the word "tolerance". To be "intolerant" of someone is an extremely broad spectrum from "herd them into death camps", through "actively and publically shun them" to "think they're basically alright but you wouldn't want your sister to marry one". Once you start being more specific about what you mean about "be intolerant", most of the paradoxical examples go away.
1. Group A is intolerant of Group B, should we tolerate Group A? Stupid question, be more specific.
2. Group A advocates throwing Group B off rooftops, is it okay if we don't invite Group A to our cocktail parties? Yes.
3. Group A refuses to invite Group B to their cocktail parties, is it okay if we throw Group A off a rooftop? No.
For the most part the paradox goes away once you stop using vague terms.
For anyone else who, like me, was ignorant enough not to have known that there was an official “Paradox of Tolerance” (associated with Karl Popper), in Popper’s words it starts like this:
“Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.”
Popper goes on to say that the tolerant should still let the intolerant spout intolerance until they get irrational about it (such as denouncing all argument), which sounds good but hard to objectively evaluate.
Since I’m not aware of any serious advocates for unlimited tolerance, I’m not too concerned about the paradox specifically (I agree with Popper that unlimited tolerance sounds bad). I’m just trying to understand where other people draw the line and what’s reasonable to expect of a society.
The full original quote (which, should be noted, is a footnote in a text talking about something else and not a fully developed treatise) goes:
"Less well known [than other paradoxes] is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
The discriminant is not that the other group is being irrational -- there's hardly a political, ideological, religious, or ethical group that would be worthy of tolerance otherwise -- but resort to violence over argument, which seems to be how "intolerance" is actually defined in this context. At this point there isn't much of a paradox left: of course you cannot argue with someone who has decided not to take part in any argument, and of course when someone is shooting at you there is little you can do but shoot back.
>The discriminant is not that the other group is being irrational -- there's hardly a political, ideological, religious, or ethical group that would be worthy of tolerance otherwise -- but resort to violence over argument, which seems to be how "intolerance" is actually defined in this context.
You might think that intolerance just boils down to violence, but I don’t think that’s exactly what he said and I don’t think most people see intolerance that way. If a blue person won’t hire a purple person because blue people think purple people are barely people at all, and blue people dismiss any rational argument from purple people to the contrary, that would be considered intolerant by most folks because it is irrational, not violent. If a red teacher won’t let a green student in his classroom because he believes all green students are unclean even though they aren’t, that’s irrational and widely considered intolerant. Are you saying Popper believes this behavior should be tolerated because it doesn’t involve violence? I think based on what he said he thinks it might be ethical to suppress these behaviors if public opinion and rational argument aren’t enough to keep them in check.
> I’m just trying to understand where other people draw the line and what’s reasonable to expect of a society.
Part of the problem is that there's no way to draw a bright line, it's just a continual spectrum. And it doesn't help either that everyone's always trying to work the refs and get themselves treated more favorably and the other side less favorably while ignoring the meta level.
I see your point, but isn’t saying minor groups should be punished less for intolerance kind of like saying weaklings should be punished less for assault and battery?
I don't think you're necessarily obligated to find out if a given member of Group A happens to hold a rare sub-belief that the majority doesn't share. The whole point of group identification is as a shorthand for the things the group supports.
If someone self-identifies as a Nazi, I probably won't be interested in talking to them further to find out if they actually support killing Jews or if they just want to rebuild the German Empire.
(You do, however, have an obligation to know if the thing that "everyone in group A believes" is actually a majority or not.)
As an absolute minimum, you should tolerate people who are, let's say, half as tolerant as you. That is basically compensation for your biases, where you see your own actions as more reasonable and justified than the actions of others.
On the opposite extreme, tolerating physical attacks is basically a suicide pact. And when you start criticizing people who defend themselves from physical attacks for being insufficiently tolerant, then you are basically cheering for the baddies.
Problem is, in real life this often gets very complicated, because people act in groups, so (1) you always get some people doing the verbal intolerance and other people doing the physical violence, and it's quite difficult to stop the violent ones when all the onlookers are applauding for them, and (2) the victims of physical attacks often extend their definition of "defense" to include attacking random people from the other group.
> As an absolute minimum, you should tolerate people who are, let's say, half as tolerant as you. That is basically compensation for your biases, where you see your own actions as more reasonable and justified than the actions of others.
The simple idea behind this, of tolerating some greater level of perceived intolerance to compensate for your own inevitable biases, seems like a great place to start.
I have fallen on: tolerate _talk_ about intolerance completely. People are allowed to advocate for intolerance, express preference for intolerance, etc. But do not tolerate actions of intolerance. Actions must follow the law but speech can be anything. This is because it is an incredibly important norm to allow people to express opinions. When you disallow peaceful expression of opinions, you get back to people attempting force and violence. I'd much rather have the (admittedly odious) pressure release valve of intolerant speech.
In the United States, we have the legal concept of protected groups or protected classes which is where maybe the most substantial thinking about this that I am familiar with. And we do periodically change the list of protected groups.
Taking that as a starting point, one principle becomes clearer to me: this is an area where the law has to be kept up with evolving social practices and classes of people. So any solution (in my United States framework) would still involve periodic public debate about adding or removing protected classes, like our current system.
My impression of the United States approach to protected classes does emphasize identifying actual harms faced by members of protected classes and potential protected classes when making that designation. Unfortunately I only have an interested layperson's knowledge of the topic and I don't have any background reading ready at hand to offer.
Protected classes aren't "black" or "white," (your position within the classes) they're "black or white" (the class itself). This is a common misconception and I don't know how it got started as everyone is clearly stated to be equal before the law by every civil rights act ever enacted.
They may be equally protected on paper, but the chances of getting fired for tweeting "kill all whites" are probably very small. So people are referring to how the law works in practice, not in theory.
The laws are written to be applied equally, and the courts usually do so. Employers have the latitude to do things differently. Nobody can deny that they have the arbitrary power to ruin people's lives with no recourse to fairness, but that can't be confused with civil rights legislation.
As I can comprehend the intent of this aspect of American law, a protected class begins when one or more constituencies within the class experience enough intolerance to warrant protection. Then the class is named and enshrined in law as protected.
At that point, even constituencies within the class that did not historically experience intolerance are entitled to certain protections in American law. However it should not be surprising or an argument against the process or theory that the groups experiencing the most active protection under the law are the ones that have historically experienced intolerance, rather than groups whose collective experience would not generally warrant being protected as a class.
Understanding the power dynamics is useful for considering this scenario, although simply knowing more about power situation won't answer the question.
In other words, it is relevant to know what the relative power or status is between the two groups. It is particularly important to know whether your Group A has social advantages or disadvantages when compared to Group B in this society. Knowing that information doesn't resolve the dilemma, but it would help frame the stakes.
Probably this question as framed is too complex to answer without developing the scenario more.
The category of examples that come to mind for me involve religious communities with strict criteria for membership where some people might never be allowed based on their identity. Or there might be practices like banishment, excommunication, or shunning that are used to move people from being accepted Group A to being part of the un-tolerated Group B.
"society", as you use it here, is a dangerous overgeneralization. Every person moves in multiple circles in multiple dimensions. All it requires to harm someone through intolerance is a brief period of dominance in one of those circles or dimensions, and all it requires to make it a lasting harm is to find ways to prevent the other circles and dimensions from counterbalancing it.
I don't understand how it is an over-generalization or dangerous. The original prompt uses the term "country" and that naturally tends to lead to discussion about the legal framework of that hypothetical country. My use of the word society is only a little different from country, so I would suggest just reading "country" in my post to keep it aligned with the original prompt.
I don't see why it's a bad thing or dangerous to consider this within the scope of a single country. Or for that matter any self-described society that has laws or social mores. It's true people can be in multiple circles at once -- I would only say in reply that we could complexify the scenario by adding more of those circles if that seems more useful to you.
Is your point along the same lines as the idea of intersectionality? In other words, it is dangerous not to consider all intersecting social identities when considering this question?
Whether using "country", "circle", or "society", these social arrangements and their rules seem central to discussing intolerance. I don't know how it could be done otherwise.
I think that "whether your Group A has social advantages or disadvantages when compared to Group B in this society" is far too simplistic, and likely to lead to generalizations that erase certain types of problems from the discourse.
You bring up "intersectionality", and I think what's happened to that term in the last 20-30 years is a great example. It's gone from meaning that we need to look harder, to creating Venn diagrams, to justifying hierarchical rankings. I think an adversarial take on the concept would prove more useful: group A may have less formal power in area X than group B, but what other resources can someone from group A use to screw over someone from group B? Are there areas in which they have more power, what other groups are they a member of, are there other factions in society, are there outside powers that can be brought into play, is it possible to change the playing field somehow? Can you just walk up and stab them?
There's this urge to boil individuals down to a number, and collect the numbers into a graph, and then collapse the graph into a single number for all of society. But life's a lot messier than that.
I suggested reverting to the original "country" instead of my "society". I get the impression that you are very vested in using words that best describe the topic you are discussing.
I don't see the terminology I've selected as inevitably leading towards collapsing the graph to a single number for all society, but I'd be game if you have another approach and some other words for discussing this.
>In other words, it is relevant to know what the relative power or status is between the two groups.
I originally described the two groups as “minor ethnic group A” and “major ethnic group B” in an effort to illustrate that B is larger/more powerful than A.
Thanks. I initially understood that you meant that Group B was larger than Group A, but it wasn't clear that you meant that Group B also had greater power or status. With this clarification in mind, I am still coming up with examples like relatively small religious communities that are somewhat geographically based. I'm also trying to think of other categories of examples.
Depends heavily on what we're talking about when we say tolerance/intolerance. Does group A simply harbor a general dislike towards group B, e.g. they prefer not to mingle with members of group B? Then I think this is potentially concerning and perhaps should be addressed culturally/socially, but not necessarily legislatively. Are members of group A actively physically assaulting members of group B, engaging in discriminatory business practices against them, etc.? Then yes, that should be dealt with legally.
Thanks for your perspective. To clarify, group A’s intolerance doesn’t extend to an explicit, doctrinal call to violence against group B. I think most people agree that this can’t be tolerated within a functional society. Let’s just say group A thinks group B’s way of life is inherently immoral, unjust, fundamentally flawed.
Well, you can't really do anything legally about someone's thoughts/feelings, so it really depends on how that intolerance is materially expressed: hate speech, discriminative hiring practices, social stigma against in-group members who hang out with group B, etc.
> you can't really do anything legally about someone's thoughts/feelings
a) Sure you can! Depends on the legal system perhaps, but in America it's quite possible.
b) The legal cause of action can be different than the real cause of action. That is, if you identify wrongthink, then just find some other legal excuse to go after the person.
c) Really, why restrict yourself to "legal" means? Just don't get caught.
What I mean is you can't directly do anything about it. You can't just charge someone for "having the wrong thoughts"; at the very least, they need to say something or do something that you can charge them for.
Can this be exploited? Sure. But I don't think that's relevant to what we're talking about here, which is about "tolerance as virtue", i.e. what we believe, ideally, *should* be done.
"Creating a hostile environment" seems to work, depending on the exact type of wrongthink? Even if the person had only expressed the wrongthink outside of the environment in question.
And yeah, sorry, this is a tangent, and not a helpful one. I don't have much to say about main issue, at least not rationally. My PTSD thinks we should be tolerant of everyone except people who advocate for intolerance, who should be slowly tortured to death in public in ways that will give children nightmares 500 years from now. But I don't think my PTSD is always a reliable guide to ethical behavior; somehow it usually ends up advocating for schemes that would kill off everyone in the world.
I get up very early and get to the gym before sunrise. If I have ADHD medication upon waking up, it revs me up and I'm eager to start exercising. Caffeine works about half as well for these purposes.
If I don't have any stimulants, it's a struggle. Things improve as I start the workout, and then things really improve once the sun rises and I finish my workout. My mid-morning, I'm wide awake.
So I'm clearly not dependent on stimulants to feel alert during the day; it seems like a pre-sunrise issue. I've tried cold showers and artificial sunlight lamps, but they seem only marginally helpful. Any tips?
Is this something you only experience when waking up before dawn? It could be sleep inertia or a similar phenomenon that naturally fades as your body wakes up.
You could try something like nighttime bupriopion? The only study google is giving me is this collection of case studies (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8020706/), but I swear I also read about a larger study a few years ago.
Our school has recently had chicken pox, scarlet fever, whooping cough and covid all doing the rounds in the same couple of weeks! I was surprised about the chicken pox as it's a middle school (aged 9-13) and I had assumed virtually all children would have had it by that age.
"[T]here could be an increase in the rate of shingles in adults over time, which would make the vaccine programme not cost-effective.
"This is because, if chickenpox in children disappears as a result of a vaccine programme, adults would no longer have their immunity boosted by exposure to their chickenpox-suffering children and grandchildren and would be more likely to get shingles. Put simply, the conclusion of the previous review was that it would not be cost-effective for the NHS to immunise children against chickenpox."
I find that unconvincing. There is a shingles vaccine now. Why not vaccinate against chicken pox in childhood and then against shingles for the over-50 crowd? Letting kids get sick (and my case of chicken pox at age 9 was miserable) just so Grandma's immune system can get a boost seems like a weak argument.
They did say "cost-effective", so presumably that's what convinced them. It might be possible to do all the vaccinations you want, but is it cost-effective? Maybe that cash should be spent on bed-nets.
But the objection is to a temporary effect. If you vaccinate everyone against chickenpox, that might aggravate shingles in the elderly people of today. But it will flat-out prevent shingles in the elderly people of the future; how could this possibly fail to be cost-effective?
I thought the objection was: right now, the waves of chicken pox in young people are providing old people with free boosts to the partial immunity from their shingles vaccines. But if we vaccinate the young people against chicken pox, there won't be as many waves of the disease going around, and old people won't be as protected against shingles, and so the next time the disease goes through the country, they'll have worse cases.
Fwiw, I can’t imagine having two newborns at the same time and still produce the volume you produce. I steal all my time in the very early hours and between meetings.
Does orbital bombardment still make sense as a potential weapons systems? A couple years ago we discussed Project Thor on here (briefly, a satellite or launch system in orbit that would drop tungsten rods onto targets on Earth). People argued that Project Thor is not very realistic because you can't just leave a very expensive, very valuable weapons system sort of hanging around in orbit where anyone could attack or hack it. I agree with that argument.
But how about simply launching the tungsten rods as missiles? A land-based system sends the rods into orbit, likely via SpaceX. They maneuver into position and then fall onto the target back on Earth. It would undoubtedly be slower & more expensive than our existing missile capability. But would the drop from orbit offer enhanced damage against dug-in targets? I'm particularly thinking of Iran's underground nuclear facilities here. A tungsten rod from orbit might not be better than a nuclear weapon, but it does avoid nuclear weapon usage, and might just obliterate a ground-based target while being extremely difficult to defend against....
When I discussed this with the CEO of a NASA contractor that I know, he said he thought SpaceX had the right technical skillset to not just launch the rods, but also guide them back to Earth- he said their guidance systems for re-entry are top notch. The original issue with this idea was just cost, but SpaceX has also greatly reduced the cost-to-launch
Something like this, but taboo the word "orbit" except insofar as it appears in the word 'suborbital". At the time your weapon hits the target, it will be on a suborbital trajectory - by definition, because an orbital trajectory doesn't impact the surface. So just wait until you know what and where the target is, and then use your rocket to launch the payload onto a suborbital trajectory directly from your launch site to the target. There's no advantage to actually putting the thing in orbit here; that just requires adding another 500 m/s or so of velocity to circularize and then subtracting 500 m/s or so when you want to deorbit, leaving you exactly where you were before but having squandered a bunch of rocket fuel and propulsion hardware.
Basically, you're talking about an ICBM with a kinetic-energy warhead rather than a thermonuclear one. And if you go the SpaceX route, maybe an ICBM with a reusable first stage (but a more cumbersome launch procedure). People have proposed non-nuclear ICBMs before; with modern precision guidance it isn't a completely ridiculous idead.
It's never been done, for two reasons. First, ICBMs are expensive, and nobody has yet been willing to pay that price for delivering a mere few tons of TNT equivalent to a target. And second, because "everybody knows" ICBMs are only cost-effective with nuclear warheads, everybody tends to assume that any ICBM launched in wartime will be nuclear. And they might not wait to confirm that before nuking you in return.
Both of these will also apply to a hypothetical orbital or fractional-orbital system. If boosters get cheap enough, people might reconsider the suborbital version, but there's still no reason to go all the way to orbit and back.
Imagine, instead of just launching 1 large tungsten rod, you launch say a dozen or more tungsten artillery shells with their own guidance systems- maybe encased like a bullet to survive re-entry. You could launch those at ground targets, but also naval ones- say, one overly aggressive Asian nation trying to blockade an island 90 miles off their coast..... Would be impossible to defend against those falling from the sky
> There's no advantage to actually putting the thing in orbit here; that just requires adding another 500 m/s or so of velocity to circularize and then subtracting 500 m/s or so when you want to deorbit, leaving you exactly where you were before but having squandered a bunch of rocket fuel and propulsion hardware
I guess the advantage would be if you have enough of them in orbit that you'd have one passing overhead any given target in a short timeframe, so you could blow up anything you like with fifteen minutes' notice or something.
Although even then I guess you might as well use an explosive warhead while you're at it.
You need a *lot* of warheads in orbit to always have one fifteen minutes out from an arbitrary target. But having one warhead on one missile on the ground, allows you to engage any target in half an hour or so.
One problem: to a foreign observer, launching a tungsten rod on an ICBM looks a lot like launching a nuke on an ICBM. You don't want to start a nuclear war through a misunderstanding.
Yes and no; my understanding is that you can very quickly differentiate a missile whose intent is to arc back down to a target, and a mission into space.
Of course, throwing a bunch of instant-pounding rods into orbit to threaten any and every country is going to ruffle some feathers.
Fractional orbital bombardment systems are a thing, never particularly common but everybody knows the concept. If anyone launches a payload into low orbit in wartime, particularly one where the first orbit passes over the enemy's capital or whatnot, it's going to be presumed a nuclear warhead until proven otherwise.
If anybody launches a payload into low orbit in peacetime, lots of people are going to be curious about what it's for, some of them are going to be suspiciously curious as a matter of principle, and their spies and analysts will probably figure it out before you get around to starting a war.
I read an interesting substack a year ago about how the SpaceX Starship would deliver about as many Joule/$ as non-nuclear B52s do today, but now I can't seem to find it.
Cost would still be a gigantic issue; you can send explosives on an ICBM to accomplish the same thing.
On the fundamentals, you can look at the potential energy of an object in space (you can't just use mgh, because g is not constant over the distances involved, but this is a well-understood question) and assume that's how much energy you'll release on impact. Then you ask how much energy you want to release on impact and that will tell you the size of the rod you need. Then you can ask how much it will cost to launch that rod.
At orbital-reentry velocity, or ICBM velocity, the kinetic energy of an inert mass is at least a factor of five greater than the detonation energy of an equal mass of high explosives. And it's rare for anyone to build a warhead that's more than 50% explosives.
So if you're going to put a "warhead" on an orbital or ICBM-class rocket, there's no point in putting anything less than nuclear explosives inside. Conventional explosives would add maybe 10% to the yield, all else being equal, but all else won't be equal - the low density of explosives compared to steel will make the warhead bigger, so more drag and it will be moving slower when it hits, which will cost you more than 10% of the yield.
Just make it out of the densest material you can find, and make it as long and skinny and streamlined as you can manage to keep stable. Against some targets, you'll prefer a cannister that dispenses lots of heavy metal darts shortly before impact.
If you're willing to go nuclear, and you can afford to go nuclear, that will be more destructive still so just focus on efficiently packaging your H-bombs for re-entry.
You are correct! My back-of-the-envelope calculation using orbital velocity of 7 km/s yields 24.5 MJ/kg of kinetic energy (mV²/2), while I found a figure of 5 MJ/kg for high explosives. Of course the projectile will not hit the ground at the orbital velocity, but the numbers are at least in the ballpark.
Substack ate my reply, try again. The Reddit thread was confusing: they all talk about terminal velocity = escape velocity, but it makes no sense to me. For one, they are ignoring the atmosphere. And I don’t see how it applies to a projectile launched from a few 100s km away.
I think the argument is that a tungsten rod dropped from space would have superior firepower to existing non-nuclear weapons, and greater penetration against hardened underground targets. Specifically, in this case, Iran's nuclear facilities which are reportedly underneath a mountain
There would be something like that, but it would spread out quickly - the rough-and-ready metric that I used early seems to imply that a massive 10m-long rod could penetrate something like 70m. The deepest bunkers can be hundreds of metres underground, so any shockwave would have to pass through tens to hundreds of metres of rock and concrete to do any damage.
I have my doubts that a rod could possibly penetrate all that deeply and do all that much damage when it gets there. A concrete bunker sure, but a deeply buried facility? I don't know anything about the Iranian facility but Cheyenne Mountain in the US is beneath 600m of granite and there's no reason why the Iranians couldn't dig something similar. Even if you use a whole SpaceX starship to launch a single rod it can't have more than about 8 kT of kinetic energy (minus atmospheric losses, which would be significant) and that's a lot, but it's not "blow up a whole mountain" type energy.
𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗴𝗶𝗰 𝗼𝗯𝗷𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲𝘀 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗹𝗶𝗸𝗲𝗹𝘆 𝘁𝗼 𝗶𝗺𝗽𝗼𝘀𝗲 𝘀𝗵𝗮𝗿𝗽 𝗹𝗶𝗺𝗶𝘁𝘀 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗮𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝘁𝗼 𝘂𝘀𝗲 𝗼𝗿𝗯𝗶𝘁𝗮𝗹 𝗳𝗶𝗿𝗲𝗽𝗼𝘄𝗲𝗿 if the goal is to control the planet or even to be able to meaningfully extract resources from it. Blasting a world into uninhabitability using nuclear munitions or even just de-orbiting large rocks may be strategically unacceptable.
[...]
𝗧𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗻 𝘁𝗶𝗲𝘀 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗼 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘀𝗲𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗱 𝗽𝗼𝗶𝗻𝘁, 𝘄𝗵𝗶𝗰𝗵 𝗶𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗹𝗶𝗺𝗶𝘁𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝗳𝗶𝗿𝗲𝗽𝗼𝘄𝗲𝗿 𝗮𝗴𝗮𝗶𝗻𝘀𝘁 𝗶𝗻𝗳𝗮𝗻𝘁𝗿𝘆 𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗰𝗲𝘀 𝘂𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗰𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗿 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗰𝗲𝗮𝗹𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁. How much firepower do you need to remove deeply entrenched infantry? 𝗔 𝗹𝗼𝘁, 𝗶𝘁 𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗻𝘀 𝗼𝘂𝘁. Stephen Biddle (you may recall him) wrote a piece in 𝘍𝘰𝘳𝘦𝘪𝘨𝘯 𝘈𝘧𝘧𝘢𝘪𝘳𝘴 (82.2, 2003), “Afghanistan and the Future of Warfare” where he laid out some statistics for firepower against entrenched infantry. He noted, for instance that “French defenses at Verdun in 1916 endured a two-day German artillery barrage equal to about 1,200 tons of explosives — in nuclear parlance more than a kiloton, or more explosive power than the w48 𝙩𝙖𝙘𝙩𝙞𝙘𝙖𝙡 𝙣𝙪𝙘𝙡𝙚𝙖𝙧 𝙬𝙖𝙧𝙝𝙚𝙖𝙙 — yet enough of the entrenched defenders survived this maelstrom to halt the German assault [emphasis mine].” And “On July 18, 1944… [the allies] deposited… 𝗺𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝗻 𝟴 𝗸𝗶𝗹𝗼𝘁𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝗳𝗶𝗿𝗲𝗽𝗼𝘄𝗲𝗿 — on just seven kilometers of German frontage 𝗶𝗻 𝗹𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗿𝗲𝗲 𝗵𝗼𝘂𝗿𝘀 [emphasis again mine].” In both cases, there were enough defenders left not merely to fight, 𝙗𝙪𝙩 𝙩𝙤 𝙖𝙘𝙩𝙪𝙖𝙡𝙡𝙮 𝙬𝙞𝙣 𝙗𝙤𝙩𝙝 𝙗𝙖𝙩𝙩𝙡𝙚𝙨. Nor is this merely a feature of old dumb-bombs; in Afghanistan, Biddle notes, “One dug-in al Qaeda command-post was found surrounded by no fewer than five 2,000-pound bomb craters. Still, its garrison survived and resisted until overrun.” 𝗜𝗻 𝘀𝗵𝗼𝗿𝘁, 𝗶𝘁 𝗶𝘀 𝗽𝗼𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗯𝗹𝗲 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗶𝗻𝗳𝗮𝗻𝘁𝗿𝘆 – 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗼𝗻𝗹𝘆 𝙞𝙢𝙥𝙧𝙤𝙫𝙞𝙨𝙚𝙙 𝙛𝙞𝙚𝙡𝙙-𝙛𝙤𝙧𝙩𝙞𝙛𝙞𝙘𝙖𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙨 – 𝘁𝗼 𝘀𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗶𝗻 𝗲𝗻𝗲𝗿𝗴𝘆 𝗱𝗲𝗹𝗶𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘆 𝗼𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗹𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗹 𝗼𝗳 𝙩𝙖𝙘𝙩𝙞𝙘𝙖𝙡 𝙣𝙪𝙘𝙡𝙚𝙖𝙧 𝙮𝙞𝙚𝙡𝙙𝙨 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝗼𝗻𝗹𝘆 𝘀𝘂𝗿𝘃𝗶𝘃𝗲, 𝗯𝘂𝘁 𝗯𝗲 𝙛𝙞𝙜𝙝𝙩𝙖𝙗𝙡𝙚 𝗮𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗼𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿 𝗲𝗻𝗱.
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(All emphasis is original. I would emphasize that, for an attacking force that itself inhabits the same planet being attacked, rendering the planet uninhabitable is 𝘨𝘶𝘢𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘦𝘥 to be strategically unacceptable.)
That makes absolutely no sense. They do not have superior firepower in proportion to their cost, which is the only way that would matter, and dropping anything that affected facilities underneath a mountain would have catastrophic effects in most of the world; it would be the worst war crime ever committed, and whoever was responsible would get wiped out by a coalition of everyone else in the world.
I don't see why that would be. You have no fallout; possibly a lot of the energy is even released underground; the total energy of the explosion is not more than that released by a full load of B52 (conventional) bombs.
I don't like the idea because it's an explicit militarization of space without any really huge gain in capabilities. But I don't think the strikes would amount to some unprecedented crime against humanity.
> The above ground mass of Mt Everest is estimated at 357 trillion pounds or 1.619×10^14 kg. To melt 1 kg of granite starting from 200 C costs about 1.3 MJ. 20 Gigatons TNT is 8.4×10^13 MJ. So, no, even with 100% efficiency, such a bomb is simply not large enough to accomplish the task. It is a factor ten too small at least.
> This is ignoring of course, that most of the energy of such a bomb would be directed upwards, through the Earth’s atmosphere, as a huge pulse of thermal radiation, and would vanish uselessly into space. The energy would not be deposited directly downwards into the rock, where it needs to go, should you, for some unimaginably crazy reason, actually wish to destroy Mt. Everest.
> In comparison to what is needed to destroy mountains, the biggest explosions human beings can make are miniscule. They are laughably small. The biggest nuclear weapon ever exploded was in the range of 57 megatons-TNT.
A full load of B52 bombs, by the way, appears to be something like 30 megatons. This is obviously not enough to accomplish anything if the goal is to strike below an existing mountain.
Using our generous estimate of 40 gigatons of explosives' worth of energy released straight into the mountain to destroy Mount Everest, admittedly an unusually large mountain, first, let's note that we have exactly the same problem of most of the impact energy not going into the mountain, and second, that the Torino scale threshold for "impact will cause global catastrophe" is an impact with the equivalent kinetic energy of 10 (ten) gigatons of explosives.
For that threshold, we're not worried about the "problem" that impact energy mostly doesn't go right into the ground below the impact -- rather, that is the reason we expect a global catastrophe.
"dropping anything that affected facilities underneath a mountain would have catastrophic effects in most of the world; it would be the worst war crime ever committed, and whoever was responsible would get wiped out by a coalition of everyone else in the world."
Why do you say that? Basically you couldn't do it without a massive explosion that would put the mountain into the atmosphere, or something?
I recently noticed that I find historical or technical inaccuracies can really break my suspension of disbelief in media such as video games.
It depends on the setting, though. The space mechanics in the X universe and the like are fundamentally underwater mechanics, because you have a maximum speed (which depends on your engine strength) and also do not need to carry reaction mass, so you are acting more like a submarine than a spacecraft, not to mention that interesting things in space are many orders of magnitude further apart than in games. This does not break immersion for me because realistically simulating space is hard from a gameplay perspective. Likewise I won't complain that two dimensional games from FTL or Rimworld or Factorio enforce a square grid and do not have rooms which stack in z direction even though it this is obviously what would happen in reality. Or how research gets handled in every video game. Or how the probability of making a full recovery after having been shot half to death in most video games is close to 100%. Or how unrealistic it is in a deckcrafter game that you can only use abilities if you draw their card. This is all part of the genres, and I can accept that.
What gets me though is making an (implicit) promise of accuracy and then underdelivering. I really stumbled when (IIRC) The Doomsday Book mentioned Potatoes in medieval England, for example.
You can have the Roman Empire as a setting for your video game. You can have Julius Caesar in it. I might even give you a pass on making young Caesar a subordinate NPC in the party. Likewise, if you really want, your squad of Romans can have an archer. The Empire is a big place, plenty of space to find some mercenary coming from a culture with a tradition of archery. But if you make Julius Caesar the archer of the party I will stop playing your game right there. (Expeditions: Rome, for the curious.)
Or take Victoria 3. This game seems to put a lot of effort in historical accuracy. Building chains which produce resources required in the industrial revolution are also a major keystone, from what I gather. So why then is the Bessemer process (reality: 1856) on the same research tier as the atmospheric engine (reality: Newcomb 1712)? Why not throw nuclear power (~1945) in on the same tier while you are at it? This totally broke immersion for me.
> You can have the Roman Empire as a setting for your video game. You can have Julius Caesar in it. I might even give you a pass on making young Caesar a subordinate NPC in the party. Likewise, if you really want, your squad of Romans can have an archer. The Empire is a big place, plenty of space to find some mercenary coming from a culture with a tradition of archery. But if you make Julius Caesar the archer of the party I will stop playing your game right there.
This isn't something I'd expect you to tolerate if you hate seeing potatoes in medieval England. By definition, Julius Caesar cannot be present in the Roman Empire.
He also really can't be part of a "party"; he was a politician and their entire career track was well specified.
I knew when I wrote it that this phrasing was coming to bite me.
Is there a better phrase to mean 'the land masses controlled by ancient Rome in whatever state form'? In German, the term 'Roemisches Reich' fills that role, because 'Reich' is a large realm more generally, not necessarily ruled by a 'Kaiser', while in English there is an association between 'empire' and 'emperor'.
I would argue that the latin phrase 'Imperium Romanum' is also a bit more in that direction (from reading acoup, 'imperium' was a property of certain offices in the Republic which basically meant they were allowed to command armies), and German Wikipedia claims that the phrase 'Imperium Romanum' is used in Cicero's time (late republic), so it might be what I am looking for.
The English Wikipedia has a disambigiation page for Roman Empire, stating that "The Roman Empire usually refers to the post-republican, autocratic government period of Roman civilization" and then goes on to admit that it might also refer to other time periods.
> Is there a better phrase to mean 'the land masses controlled by ancient Rome in whatever state form'? In German, the term 'Roemisches Reich' fills that role, because 'Reich' is a large realm more generally, not necessarily ruled by a 'Kaiser', while in English there is an association between 'empire' and 'emperor'.
If I were going for that, I would probably use the phrase "ancient Rome". There are other options; I might refer to the general time and place by a phrase like "the classical Mediterranean", but that's overtly geographic and definitely includes areas that might not be under Roman control, depending on the details of what time it is. ("Rome" sounds geographic, but it has the same political extension that you see all the time when decisions are attributed to e.g. "Washington" or "Berlin".)
We have words like "realm" (as you've noted!) that refer to territory without specifying how the territory is governed, but they tend not to appear in the names of specific entities.
> from reading acoup, 'imperium' was a property of certain offices in the Republic which basically meant they were allowed to command armies
While that's true, it is surely not the sense that is meant in the phrase "imperium Romanum".
But you're right that "imperium Romanum" wouldn't refer to an "empire" in some technical sense, and certainly wouldn't be related to the concept of an "emperor" - as best I'm aware, there wasn't a Roman concept of an "emperor", and they technically held power by simultaneously holding many different formal offices, including some that were only for them. ("Trib. pot.") The closest title they had to "emperor" was "Caesar", which is technically a part of their name, not a title, and literally means "a member of Julius Caesar's family". So the phrase should mean something like "everything under Roman command", which seems like a good match for Reich.
One could conceive, for instance, a classical Mediterranean pirate game where the pirates capture young Caesar (following a notable episode of actual Caesar's game), and he features as a party member while they are bringing him back to the pirate... lair or whatever.
"Base" is the most neutral word I could think of for this.
Maybe "fortress" if it's fortified, but I don't really know how they were set up. Modern pirates operate out of regular towns populated mostly by non-pirates, and it seems like classical pirates could have easily done the same thing... except that they held a bunch of captives, which would probably be easier if they had their own fortress somewhere.
I'm pretty sure that captives being held against their will aren't allowed to have weapons. What would it mean for Caesar to be in the player's party here?
"While on his voyage thither [to Rhodes, to study rhetoric], in the winter season, he was taken by pirates near the island of Pharmacusa, and detained by them, burning with indignation, for nearly forty days; his only attendants being a physician and two chamberlains. For he had instantly dispatched his other servants and the friends who accompanied him, to raise money for his ransom."
So, he allegedly told the pirates that once he was freed, he would crucify them, and by jings he did do that. Clearly the pirates didn't believe him, or they preferred "collect ransom now, worry about that later". He was 25 at the time, so you could stretch it that, bored out of his mind as a 'guest' of the pirates, and maybe them having a jest at the expense of their 'guest' who was threatening to hunt them down and execute them afterwards, the pirates brought him along on a raid or similar where he was part of the party. "Let's see you put your money where your mouth is", as it were, if this snobby young Roman is as good as he's claiming to be in regards to leadership and fighting and the rest of it.
Plutarch's account certainly gives us leeway:
"2 1 To begin with, then, when the pirates demanded twenty talents for his ransom, he laughed at them for not knowing who their captive was, and of his own accord agreed to give them fifty. 2 In the next place, after he had sent various followers to various cities to procure the money and was left with one friend and two attendants among Cilicians, most murderous of men, he held them in such disdain that whenever he lay down to sleep he would send and order them to stop talking. 3 For eight and thirty days, as if the men were not his watchers, but his royal body-guard, he shared in their sports and exercises with great unconcern. 4 He also wrote poems and sundry speeches which he read aloud to them, and those who did not admire these he would call to their faces illiterate Barbarians, and often laughingly threatened to hang them all. The pirates were delighted at this, and attributed his boldness of speech to a certain simplicity and boyish mirth."
EDIT: Regarding pirate bases, seems they were a regular scourge and grew into a genuinely severe problem until Pompey eventually set about methodically to break their power. "Cilician" became a synonym for "pirate":
"Cilician pirates dominated the Mediterranean Sea from the 2nd century BC until their suppression by Pompey in 67–66 BC. Because there were notorious pirate strongholds in Cilicia, on the southern coast of Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey), the term "Cilician" was long used to generically refer to any pirates in the Mediterranean.
...It was thought that a war against the pirates would be big and expensive and that it was impossible to attack all the pirates at once or to drive them back everywhere. As not much was done against them, some towns were turned into pirate winter quarters and raids further inland were carried out. Many pirates settled on land in various places and relied on an informal network of mutual assistance.
...Western campaign
Pompey divided the Mediterranean into thirteen districts, to each of which he assigned a fleet and a commander. Pompey then swept through the western Mediterranean with his own powerful fleet, driving the pirates out or into the paths of his other commanders.
By keeping vigilance over all the sea at the same time (and at great cost), there was nowhere to run or hide. Those Cilician pirates that did escape fled to the eastern Mediterranean. Pompey completed this first part of his campaign in 40 days.
Eastern campaign
Pompey then turned to the eastern Mediterranean. He gave mild terms to those pirates who surrendered to him personally, as opposed to his other commanders. Some pirates surrendered their ships, their families and themselves up to Pompey. From these, he learned about where others were hiding.
Many pirates retreated to their strongholds of Asia Minor, where they gathered and waited for Pompey to attack them. At Coracesium Pompey won a decisive victory and blockaded the town. The Cilician pirates surrendered all their harbours and fortified islands."
So they had not alone harbours, used towns as winter quarters, but also had fortified islands. The pirates who captured Caesar could well have had a base on such an island, or a camp around their harbour.
So our Cilician pirates, holed up in their winter quarters (Suetonius says Caesar was captured while travelling in the winter season) while they await the return of the ransom for Caesar, decide to do a little light inland pillaging and looting, and bring the young lordling along with them as a joke member of their party.
Editors and proof-reading appear to be luxury optional items in modern publishing, the current practice seems to be "knock the raw manuscript into some sort of shape, then send the files to China for typesetting and printing the physical copies".
This is a huge problem with self-published books. I read a few of them years ago; their ebook forms are cheap on Amazon and often have attractive theming and blurbs.
Sadly, the big lesson I learned was "don't ever read self-published books".
It depends. I found that the real popular web serials (e.g. Worm, the bigger ratfict novels (HPMOR, Unsong, Worth the Candle, Luminosity)) are usually readable (even though Deiseach might disagree at least on HPMOR).
I am not sure if this is because of the feedback from writers, or if all the rationalists have someone editing their texts before publishing, or because to write a viral web serial you need to be able to edit your texts well in the first place.
I think people directly putting their work on Amazon is kind of a red flag not because of anything fundamental but more out of signaling concerns.
Sort of like a private car sale (instead of cutting in a dealer who might be obliged to give some guarantee on it) or hiring someone without formal education (instead of someone who payed their tributes of lifetime and debt in the ivory tower): sure, there are a lot of legitimate reasons to cut out the middle man, but there are also a lot of less legitimate reasons, namely, that you would not make it past the middle man. This information asymmetry makes deals difficult.
I tend to select on authors mostly through personal recommendations. (It used to be that I read Hugo and Nebula award winners, I don't mind reading SF with woke undertones as long as it is fun to read. (Contrast with Eneasz, who mentioned on some podcast that he uses these awards (iirc) to know what not to read.) Of course, after the 2023 debacle, Hugo has jumped the sharks.)
(Of course, I also don't do Amazon for ebooks because I refuse to deal with DRM for books. Kindle is great hardware though.)
I have read, and liked, HPMOR. I'm not saying it's impossible for self-published work to be good. But the odds are so poor that it's not worth finding out. (I read HPMOR on the strength of a personal recommendation.)
I would bet pretty heavily on your third reason, "to write a viral web serial you need to be able to edit your texts well in the first place".
I have found that by far the strongest predictor that a book will be good is "the author has written another book, and that one was good".
I seem to be four steps from Winston Churchill. The first step gets me to my grandfather, who I have met. During WWII, he served as a driver for senior officers in the Finnish military, where he almost certainly met some senior officer (step 2) who met Carl Mannerheim, the head of the Finnish military (step 3.) Mannerheim met Churchill twice in his life (step 4.)
Anyone have a Winston Churchill number lower than that?
Sure, I've met several people who have met Queen Elizabeth II, and she met Winston Churchill many times.
The Queen met a ridiculously high number of people in her life. I wouldn't be surprised if she met (under some reasonable definition of the word "meet") more people than anyone else in history.
This - and many more than any politician, even one with such a long career as WSC. So I think a Churchill number of 3 through the late Queen is easy mode in the UK. I'm in the UK, and although I never met HMQ I know dozens of people who have. In fact my grandfather, grandmother and mother all met HMQ *during the time that WSC was Prime Minister*. But none of them ever met him in person at any time.
Playing on harder mode, my father met every Prime Minister from 1963-2010 (Home, Wilson, Heath, Callaghan, Thatcher, Major, Blair, Brown), of whom the first five certainly knew WSC.
If you're British, as I am, and of an age, you are likely to have met quite a few people who met Churchill. I have, variously: Clarissa Eden, who I met at a book launch in London in the 90s, and who, amazingly, died as recently as 2021: 66 years after her husband took over from Churchill.
I also got to know a very senior civil servant who in early career worked in Churchill's private office at No 10 in the 1950s.
And perhaps above all else my late mother in law, who worked at an airfield in East Anglia, and met Churchill when he visited in summer 1944.
Four for me - as a teen I met Original Seven astronaut Deke Slayton, who was astronaut boss at the time, and would have worked with the Apollo 11 crew. They met with Prince Phillip, who would have met Churchill many times.
Not me, but as a reader of many of Churchill's own works plus several serious biographies, I'll bet that a decent number of people of European heritage can come up with 4 or fewer steps. His professional lifetime at high levels of responsibility and/or prominence was _so_ lengthy. Also he was always an enthusiastic traveler who wanted to meet people as part of his work and/or for its own sake.
Oh wait -- I met Walter Mondale, who as VP met Queen Elizabeth II. And I know two people who each met the Queen at honorific ceremonies (one got knighted the other got an OBE). So that's three 3's for me to Churchill just offhand....never thought of it this way before. Kind of neat actually.
Shook hands with George Will once, and George McGovern -- could be a couple more 3's there, not sure.
I'm two steps. One of my childhood neighbors was Lt-Col Montagu Cleeve, who I often used to meet, and he was Winnie's big gun expert in WW2 and so would certainly have met him.
Old timers of that generation rarely spoke of their wartime experiences, but he did once mention he had been at the front through most of the Battle of the Somme campaign in 1916, including the fateful first day. He was so whippet slim that I reckon he must have turned sideways and advanced crab-wise after going over the top, so to all the German machine gunners it would have been like trying to hit a playing card edge on!
Driving one day in the 1990s I suddenly heard him on the car radio. "Feck, that's Monty!" I thought, "What's he doing on Classic FM?". It turned out he was reminiscing about WW1 in a series called "Forgotten Voices of the Great War" (the latter being what it was called before WW2). He said the worse thing for him was not the mud, nor the lice, nor even the shells and bullets, but the giant rats everywhere!
I think I can do 2: I've met a European royal who likely met Churchill as a child or teen. I need to do more research to verify the link but it seems probable. If not I have 3 (through Queen Elizabeth), but so do others in this thread.
Many years ago I met Charles when he was still a prince. We shook hands, but didn't interact much beyond that. He was around 17 when Churchill died, so I imagine they must have been introduced at some point. So that's two steps?
I've met Gerry Adams, who - during the Northern Ireland peace negotations - would have almost certainly parlayed with senior British figures of the sort who could have very well met Winston Churchill at some point.
Al Franken was in the US Senate with John Kerry, and may have met him. John Kerry met Queen Elizabeth, who met Winston Churchill. So Al Franken's Churchill number may be 3. And yours may be 4.
A random thought - it appears Jewish-Americans are underrepresented as novelists.
Those who come to mind are Philip Roth, Jonathan and Faye Kellerman, Leon Uris, Chaim Potok, and Harlan Coben. (As a Canadian, I'll add the great Mordechai Richler.)
Surely I'm missing a bunch, but if not is there something in North-American Jewish culture that discourages fiction-writing?
I don't think that's likely. Even if we stopped with your list it's still a little unclear whether we'd actually be talking *under* representation, given how few Jewish people there actually are in America (2.4%). But you also missed Sidney Sheldon, Isaac Asimov, Herman Wouk, and probably twenty more that I can't call to mind off the top of my head.
Jack Kirby (Jacob Kurtzberg) suggested something along the lines that since comics weren't Proper Art and not Important, no-one took it away from them.
When in my peak SF-reading era (aged c. 12 to 15) I went through any number of paperback anthologies of short stories. In my memories, these collections were usually compiled and edited by Robert Silverberg.
Curse you, I was too slow. I have the 'reply' box open right now to say "the joke answer is that they all get hoovered up by screenwriting and never write that novel".
To me they seem solidly represented, perhaps even overrepresented considering they only make up 2% of the population. I think the overrepresentation of Jews everywhere else makes you think there should be more than there are, but there are a pretty good amount of fictional writers there.
As a space nerd, I have Mailer's Of A Fire On The Moon in the basement. Still haven't read it yet. Thanks for the nudge.
I read a John Updike short story (A Sense Of Shelter) in a 1st-year English Lit class in college many years ago. I've reread it a number of times. I found/find it very evocative. I've tried to borrow his Rabbit novels from the library, but it seems they've fallen out of fashion.
Currently the implied probability (to the nearest whole percentage point, mid-price) of the following people winning the US Presidential Election is, in the order Betfair/Polymarket/Metaculus/Manifold (numbers 3 weeks ago in brackets):
Trump: 43/46/50/49 (48/50/50/50)
Biden: 42/45/50/49 (38/41/49/47)
RFK: 4/4/1/0 (3/3/1/0)
(Michelle) Obama: 3/2/1/0 (3/2/1/0)
Newsom: 2/0/1/0 (2/1/1/0)
Harris: 1/1/1/0 (2/2/1/0)
Broadly Biden has improved and Trump has worsened across the board, but the effect has been more pronounced in real money markets. In fact Trump and Biden were at one point tied at 42% on Betfair, which caused me to cash out half my Biden position and reinvest it (at the same odds) on Trump, so that I now make 76% profit on my original stake if either of them wins, which feels like a good position to be in.
The odds on Betfair imply a 15% chance that somebody else wins, which seems too high to me, and I think is small odds bias. RFK specifically is also up in the real money markets, while the play markets continue to ignore him. My guess is that RFK bettors are acting from conviction in their guy rather than a rational assessment of his chances (and there is the usual problem that a return of 3.6% on a market which may not resolve until 6 January probably fails to compensate for the opportunity cost).
I’m not sure what has caused the tilt from Trump to Biden: in my judgment nothing very surprising has happened in the past 3 (or 6) weeks. Trump’s legal problems continue as expected, there’s been good and bad news on the economy (jobs up, inflation also up) and the situation in Gaza remains as it is. Broadly though, the new numbers are much closer to where I think they should be, so if anything the question is why Biden was so low before (a sitting president in a good economy with a campaign finance advantage should not have been at 28%, in my assessment).
>I’m not sure what has caused the tilt from Trump to Biden: in my judgment nothing very surprising has happened in the past 3 (or 6) weeks.
The number one threat to a sitting President is a bad economy, particularly the country being in a recession in the months before the election . The closer we get to the election without a recession having begun, the less likely that there will be one immediately before the election. Hence, "nothing happening" is good news for Biden, and if prediction markets did not shift towards him under those circumstances, that should undermine one's confidence in those markets.
The prediction markets in this case are following the polls, which also show a narrowing of Trump's lead over the last month.
My thinking is that Trump's numbers largely follow what's been going on in the news with him lately. Recently that's not much so his numbers have been dropping off; with another show trial starting up I predict his numbers will go up again in the short term.
The graph here https://www.economist.com/interactive/us-2024-election/trump-biden-polls does show a slight narrowing between the central lines in a wide spread, from Trump 45/Biden 44 to Trump 44/Biden 44, but while we need to give some weight to the polls (and the fact that Trump is polling so much better than at the same stage of the last cycle is the main reason to think he should be the favourite), we shouldn't give them too much weight so far out from the election, so a shift of that size should not have resulted in the probabilities (on Betfair) going from Trump 47/Biden 28 to Trump 43/Biden 42 over the same timeframe.
With all the emphasis on the presidency going to Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton, various Kennedies, etc., I'm kind of surprised Donald Trump Jr. never comes up.
At least with the Kennedies you can see the idea that "this family should be president" passing down to subsequent generations. If you think Michelle Obama would be a good president because she's related (not by blood!) to Barack Obama, surely Sasha Obama would be a better president. She doesn't yet meet the age requirement, but that's not true of Donald Trump Jr.
According to Polymarket, Junior is 3rd favourite to be the Republican Nominee, with mid-point odds of 0.9%, behind Haley but ahead of DeSantis. Betfair only gives him 0.15% (placing him behind Haley, Carson, DeSantis and Ramaswamy (in that order), but ahead of Tucker Carlson).
> The odds on Betfair imply a 15% chance that somebody else wins, which seems too high to me, and I think is small odds bias.
Definitely partly small odds bias, but we are talking about two old men here. There's a real chance that one or both of them is incapacitated on health grounds before the election and someone else gets drafted in. Someone popular enough might stand a decent chance in that case.
That's definitely a possibility but over such a short timeframe putting the odds anywhere near as high as 15% is insane. I'd guess closer to 5% myself, maybe less.
Biden is a sitting president. I'm always amused at people saying he can't win. For better or worse we have a two-party system (no, RFK will not win a single state or even a single EC vote), and half the country will vote for one, and the other half for the other, and the outcome will hang on weird turnout distributions in a handful of states, and a sitting president has an advantage.
I remember a bunch of guys in February making a push to retire Biden from the ticket on the small fact that he's old and the big fact that he's running even with Trump. I can't access Betfair from this computer but I'd put good money on Harris and Newsom being much higher back in January/February when replacing Biden seemed possible. Now that Biden is guaranteed to be the Democratic nominee, the money pivoted back to Biden.
As for Newsome or Harris, those odds kinda make sense to me, even now. Basically, what are the odds of Biden suffering some catastrophic infirmity, say a crippling stroke, at his age and stress level in the next six months. 3% doesn't seem wild to me and, contingent on Biden being removed from the ticket, Newsom or Harris stepping into that role and having a >50% chance of beating Trump seems reasonable.
I was getting 3.55 (=28% chance) on Biden in mid-February, and he was still about that level in early March (see https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-318/comment/50883466). Newsom and Harris were higher, although it's mostly Obama who made up the difference (there was a discussion about this on Open Thread 315).
Biden is still old and he's still running even with Trump: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/2024/national/. The "bunch of guys" never included anyone with any direct influence on the outcome. They've made less noise recently, but I've not seen any of them row back the argument. Few people thought that Biden might lose the primary: the argument has always been that he should step aside, which he still could. So this seems more like a vibe-shift than any change in the fundamentals.
By the way, if you could access Betfair, you would be able to get 1/7 on Biden being the nominee, which is of course free money if you consider this outcome to be guaranteed (and I myself have money on this outcome, so I don't entirely disagree).
I think this is definitely something to watch, but the move in the markets mostly predates the published decision in the Arizona Supreme Court, so unless somebody was betting inside information, that won't be the cause.
Does anyone have any resource recommendations for starting an online business that aren't clickbaity coursemongers with little actual value?
I'm a complete noob but would like to start a healthcare-related online blog and eventually service business. Any advice on how to get off the ground would be greatly appreciated. For example, I have a domain and have registered the domain but have no real idea on what steps to take next. What are the best practices for coding the website, brand design etc? Thanks
I've heard the statistic that, in the U.S., "half of all marriages end in divorce." That often leads to the observation that, of the remaining 50% of marriages that last until the end, many must be unhappy unions that persist only due to some combination of financial considerations, inertia (laziness), unwillingness to hurt their children with a divorce, or unwillingness to lose social status.
But has anyone considered the flip side of that? How many divorcees REGRET divorcing their spouses? And in how many instances is the regret mutual?
The rejoinder I've heard for that stat is that it came from measuring the marriage rate (number of marriages per 1000 people per year, or whatever) to the divorce rate measured the same way, and the latter was half of the former. Not taking into account that the marriage rate was lower at that time than it was in the past when the people then getting divorced, were getting married.
In addition I have heard that first marriages are less likely to end in divorce than later marriages (because of people who get serially married/divorced)
And divorce has gotten less common than when that stat was first being thrown around.
First marriages are much less likely to end in divorce. The number goes down again if your marriage passes some basic sanity checks (you are both over the age of 21 and have a reasonable age gap, you have been dating for at least a year, neither of you has a criminal record et cetera.
You'd think these numbers really ought to be easier to find though. The Bureau of Births, Deaths and Marriages (or your local equivalent) really should be shouting these numbers from the rooftops so that people can have a more realistic understanding of marriage success rates.
Another annoying fake statistic that often gets repeated is the "80% of small businesses fail within the first year", which as far as I can figure out is not based on anything in particular and is far from the truth for any reasonable definition of small business.
My understanding is that at one point in history, some number X of marriages were measured to occur in the United States, and approximately half that number were measured.
If that is the source of the claim about 50% of marriages ending in divorce, then it a poorly-informed statistic. It can't be used to estimate the probability of any marriage ending in divorce during the years between the marriage beginning and one (or both) spouses dying. It can't be used to measure the increase or decrease in the rate of divorce (or the rate of marriage).
Keep in mind that repeat divorcees make up a disproportionate number of the divorces, so it's something above 50% of the remaining that stay together. Quick stats I'm seeing show that 67% and 74% of second and third marriages end in divorce, greatly increasing the total number.
Some basic math: If 100 people get married and 30 get divorced twice while the remaining original 70 remain married, that would be a 46% divorce rate. Real rates are more complicated since some divorce once while a rare set might divorce 4, 5, or 10 times.
Also, by the time you're looking at people who changed stable partners several times in their adult life, you're pretty far away from the traditional model of marriage for life. So it might be more relevant to look at how much long-term relationships last regardless of whether they got married or not.
That's a tough question to answer, because "spiritual / mediation advice" ranges from light mindfulness taught by any rando, up to all kinds of spiritual practices from any of the world's traditions, taught by their respective qualified teachers. It goes as deep as the spiritual side of any of the world's religions can go, including yours if you have one.
In any case, learn to relax and see things holistically sounds like pretty decent beginner advice.
In my experience, meditation in this context is about focusing all of your awareness on some sensation before any mental processing of it can happen. This is very different than trying to relax. Though I'm not sure if the people you've heard this from mean something different.
Hmmm. Yes, but being relaxed wasn't the object of my meditation practice, rather it was a side-effect. The object of my meditation was to understand how thoughts, emotions, and sensations arise in the mind and to learn how to silence them. Relaxation, bliss, stress reduction, etc. were not the primary objectives the practices imparted to me by my Kagyu and Gelug teachers. Detachment was. And Prajna — "wisdom" — but wisdom in knowing how one's mind worked.
Kagyu and Gelug! Let me bother you with the same question I have been bothering others with. One thing that confounds me about figuring out thoughts arising in the mind is that I just can't do it: the closest to "watching thoughts" for me is *recalling* what I thought a few moments ago. It is so bad that as I sit to "meditate" and try to watch my thoughts, I sometimes scratch myself, and only after that realize that I had scratched myself. Is this level of mindlessness normal in the initial stages? Is this why vajrayana folks recommend competence in sutrayana before even starting vajrayana?
P.S., edit: If not for avoiding suffering, is it merely for curiosity that you wanted detachment and prajna? And -- if it is not too personal -- despite all that you need CBD to sleep?
> Is this level of mindlessness normal in the initial stages?
Yup. Most of what we think we're perceiving in real-time is the immediate memory of the perception that our mind has just processed (filtering out details, and tagging it with a hypertext of associated emotions and feelings etc.). The thoughts that arise within us are the same way. If you're initially losing track of your awareness, it's OK to count your breaths (though some of my teachers advised against it, some thought it was fine). At some point, you'll stop needing to count, and some further point along the path, you'll find the thoughts will stop spontaneously arising (think of thoughts as feeding off your attention, and if you starve them, they'll give up trying). After a year — or five — or ten of doing this practice (YMMV), you'll be able to achieve one-pointed (undistracted) awareness.
If you have an itch, scratch it, and try to return to your breath. The Zenners don't like that advice, though. They seem to think you're giving in by scratching the itch. I resisted the urge to scratch until the itching took over my entire body. I resisted further and I started to hallucinate that I was on fire — then I screamed, jumped up from my meditation, and left the hall until the feeling went away. The lay instructor thought I was crazy when I told him why I screamed. But he wasn't very clued into all the possible ways your mind can sabotage your intentions, though. A lama later told me to just scratch the itch and return to the breath. He pointed out that it was a positive sign that I was hallucinating though since that's what the Buddha went through before he achieved enlightenment.
After about five years of almost daily practice, I could achieve that one-pointed consciousness state for a block of time (not indefinitely). Then I reached a plateau (but I didn't have an instructor who I trusted — that's another story — and I was meditating on my own). I kept it up on my own for another five years, but I wouldn't say I achieved many benefits from my ten years of meditation, per se, except that it's made me more patient dealing with extreme boredom situations — like waiting in the DMV line. ;-)
Theoretically, one should be able to ignore all sorts of unpleasant things without flinching. For instance, those Vietnamese Buddhist monks who self-immolated didn't scream or move while the fire consumed them. I could never be able to do that! But I discontinued my meditation practice because I had a very different type of uncomfortable experience/hallucination. I was practicing without a teacher and trying some advanced visualizations (Vajrayana stuff), and the visualizations became real! Scary real. Dharma protector deities are happy to teach you a lesson, but the lesson won't necessarily be very pleasant. I never went back to meditation. So I advise you not to undertake meditation practice without at least the occasional supervision of an advanced meditator — and even the introductory stuff can backfire on you (viz. my itch that turned into fire).
BTW, some meditators confuse bliss with enlightenment. You might end up in a blissful state, and you might be able to cultivate at will — but that's not necessarily beneficial to your advancement, because you get attached to the bliss. We called those people bliss-heads. Detachment is the goal of the Middle Way. I can't speak for other Buddhist schools or the Vedanta schools.
I also undertook some Sufi meditation training. That was totally different from my Buddhist experiences. The Sufi practices put my mind into a high-energy state that was very exhilarating. They didn't explicitly say it, but it seemed like they were after an ecstatic state where they could merge with the godhead.
As for sleep, for most people, our sleep gets more brittle as we get older. Although according to Bob Thurman are some advanced sleeping and dreaming meditation practices (really!), I never had instructors who were familiar with them. And though relaxation techniques may help you get to sleep, they're hard to implement when you're suddenly wide awake at 3 in the morning. With CBD, I can sleep like I did when I was younger.
Absolutely fascinating. Thank you very much for sharing.
You say "After ... I could achieve that one-pointed consciousness state for a block of time" and "At ... some further point along the path, you'll find the thoughts will stop spontaneously arising". Was there a stage where you had thoughts, but you could watch them "from the outside"' without getting engrossed in them, and without the "hypertext"?
Everything else in your comments: dieties, sufi meditation, CBD etc. are interesting, though I am sorry about the unpleasant experiences, both fire and the "lesson", and that things did not work out. I am still intrigued as to why you wanted detachment if you didn't care about stress-control or bliss: just curiosity about the nature of reality?
There's a lot to unpack in your questions. I'll address your first one and get back to the second one later.
> Was there a stage where you had thoughts, but you could watch them "from the outside"' without getting engrossed in them, and without the "hypertext"?
I'm not sure I experience things the same way you do or anyone else does. We assume that we do, but I'm not convinced that we do. And verbalizing internal experiences is harder because it's a symbolic abstraction of experience (and then we fall down the rabbit hole of whether our shared symbols describe the same thing). Having said that, I am going to put down my laptop sit upright in my chair, and follow my breath for a few inhalations and exhalations (inhaling through my nose, exhaling through my mouth with my tongue lightly touching the front of my palate — eyelids barely open). I'll try to describe what I was experiencing. Back in a few minutes.
....
At the beginning of my first inhalation, I was in the middle of remembering all the arguments about the best way to breathe when meditating. There were a lot of quick almost subliminal associations that jangle with those memories — humor and frustration associated with dozens of earnest discussions about the best way to breathe are bundled together with those memories (but I'm NOT remembering any particular discussions or incidents, I'm just aware that they're there) — long inhalation through my nose — the memory thoughts drop away. I'm chest breathing on my first inhalation, and I'm aware of the air filling my lungs. I've stopped inhaling, and I'm aware of my heartbeat and the constant background tinnitus in my ears, but I have the familiar impression (association) of my mind being in a deep warm cavern. A morning dove is cooing outside my window (no associations or memories with that, I'm just aware that it's cooing). I exhale through my mouth slowly deflating my lungs and I have the subliminal (symbolic) visualization of all my thoughts and memories flowing out with my exhalation. Pause before I inhale again, and there's just stillness.
As I begin my next inhalation my normal mind processes start their chatter again. But their jangle decreases as I follow the air into my lungs — but It's not until I have air in my lungs that I'm in stillness again. I'm aware of my pulse and the gentle ringing in my ears. That's all. Exhale, I'm aware of the air leaving my lungs. Stillness until I'm about to begin my next inhalation and then random thoughts and memories start springing up again. They get snuffed out when I focus on the airflow through my nostrils and sinuses. Quick thought: funny that I'm unable to feel the air flowing down my trachea, but I feel it entering my lungs. Stillness again when my lungs are filled. And stillness as I exhale and pause before the next inhalation.
And so on...
So these were my remembered impressions of my first two inhalations and exhalations. I noticed that I'm pretty aware of everything around me. And when I conceptualize thoughts and perceptions, I see them as multidimensional things. They pop up through a chain of associations like beads on a string. If I clutch at a thought beed, my mind will automatically pull up another thought or impressions hung together along a string of associations. I can short-circuit that process by following the sensations of the breath and being aware of the sensations of my body. I'm waaaaaay out of practice though, and I can't help but get distracted by thoughts between each breath cycle. When I was in practicing regularly, I didn't.
And I don't see myself as watching my thoughts from outside. They're coming up from within the thing I consider to be the larger "me." But it's also important to note that I see the me kernal — identity part of my mind — as being nestled in a larger womb/pool/sea of consciousness. I can't really perceive the fluid that my identity is floating in, but shiny thought-fishes are always arising from the depths. I can either reel them in, or I can just sit in the boat — but the only way I can stop reeling them in is to follow my breath. I can just sit in the boat while I inhale and exhale until the thoughts and impressions start rising up from the depths again at the end of each breath cycle.
You may have a totally different visualization of your selfhood, so I don't know if this helps or not.
> Though, this apparently can result in some major psychological issues if overdone
For sure especially with bad guidance or going in without any knowledge (e.g. Goeanka retreats for people without knowledge/experience).
I didn't read the whole article but I thought it was interesting how the she pretty much perfectly describe A&P followed by Dissolution and Fear described in MCTB
What advice have you followed to help you be a better husband/wife?
I firmly believe that the most important factor in life satisfaction is a happy family. Most relationship advice centers managing a troublesome partner rather than improving oneself. While it’s obviously hard to be specific, this community is most like myself out of any I’ve found. What works for you?
I'm not married yet, but I'm in a long term relationship and I truly think they are my partner for life.
I find it's really important to be mindful of context and factors that may cause myself or my partner to have friction, and make decisions to reduce friction.
A really common issue - the friking dishes. We're in a privileged position of having a decent income and no kids, so when things are getting too much and I want to scream at my partner for not doing the dishes, I take a step back and interrogate what's happening. Usually what's happening is that I'm stressed and tired and I can't cope with another chore. This is the point where I say, "takeout tonight, then we'll tidy up when we get home".
A lot of people consider the shared pool of tangible resources (money) but not necessarily the intangible (time, energy), and it's important to notice when the demands of life is outstripping available time and energy. We don't fight when we're not tired and hungry!
This goes for a lot of things. Partner drank my coconut water? No big deal, he'll have to buy me another later.
We spend a lot of money on takeout, groceries, etc, because I think mutually we value our relationship more than money. And I have watched a lot of people in my family in unhappy marriages (they're an older generation, they won't divorce) because they just refuse to spend the money to reduce friction.
I think I learnt this from my parents, mostly. (Happily married for nearly 30 years now). Prioritise reducing friction whenever you can. For a frankly ridiculous number of petty grievances, money makes them go away. If you don't have money, then accepting help from family and friends.
More precisely: Peterson pre 2019 is a lot worth listening to, especially on the "do not let sleeping dragons lie". Raise long term issues with your partner. When there's some obvious elephant in the room, find a way to talk about it.
Other big advice: get married or find another sufficiently binding agreement that puts your backs to the wall and forces you to grow. Life's always going to throw cannonballs in your face. Any situation where giving up remains an option on the table is a situation where one of those cannonballs will one day lead to that option being picked up.
I was given some advice by the pastor who married us a few days before the service. I took the advice to heart, and have tried to live by it, and I do believe it has been helpful to my marriage.
He said, "Marriage is not 50-50. Its 100-100. You're going to find yourself thinking that your partner is not doing their fair share: fight that thought. You give 100% of yourself to this marriage, regardless of what your partner gives you. Do not keep score. It will seem unfair sometimes, because it is unfair. You two will never be 'even', so do not aim for that as a goal. Resentment will destroy any marriage."
My wife introduced me to a system called "Fair Play Cards" for managing household tasks. The goal is to reduce "mental load" and "second shift" problems by making tasks open and visible. In a nutshell:
1. List off all the tasks you're doing in your household, and agree on what they entail. Not just basics like cooking and cleaning, also think of more intermittent and hidden things like who's going to the kid's soccer game or who sends birthday/holiday cards to friends. The book has a big list of suggestions to consider.
2. Divvy up the tasks in a way that feels fair to both of you. Since you carefully listed off everything you could think of, you both should have a good idea of what sort of load the other is taking on. If one partner is doing a lot of work but the other doesn't know about it because they're keeping silent about it, that breeds resentment.
3. When you take on a task, you own both the planning and implementation, from start to finish. If you own the grocery shopping task, you are responsible for knowing what ingredients you need and deciding what to put on the shopping list, not just going out and buying stuff. This solves the "mental load" problem where one partner thinks "of course I help, I do all the grocery shopping" and doesn't realize how much time and effort it takes to keep track of the pantry stocks, plan meals, etc.
4. Meet once a week to update each other on your status, plan tasks for next week, and make sure you're both doing okay. Renegotiate tasks as needed. My wife and I get take-out so that we don't have to worry about cooking and cleaning for that night and can just talk.
It's worked pretty well for us. We've also noticed another benefit: when the other spouse is out of town for something, you have a good idea of what you need to take care of while they're gone.
Great question. I (married ~17 yrs) would suggest the following as things you can do unilaterally:
a) You gotta give up the ego around your partner, 100%. This is easy when times are good, but you also gotta do it when your partner is pissed at you over some trivial thing that makes no sense to you. It may help to remember they are not pissed at you, they are having a hard day and you just happened to do that one thing that drives them nuts. There is no argument you can win, because it's not an argument, it's an emotion. The best thing to do is say I'm sorry and put some distance between you ("I need to go check on the dog")
b) If something your partner does bugs you, don't react in the moment. First wait and see if it's a pattern, and see if you can put up with it. When we first moved in together I decided consciously to wait a year before before mentioning any of their annoying habits. After a year most of them had become things I was used to, or understood, or even appreciated as intrinsic to who she is. I gave the others another year, and so on - by now I'm pretty much used to everything except the kitchen mess, but she's such a great cook I decided it was the least I could do to clean up after her.
c) If it's a really big issue, raise it as the start of a conversation that may last days, weeks or months. Don't have all your talking points lined up and expect to come out with a decision or agreement that you want. Say from the start that you want to talk about x, want to hear what they think about your idea/concern/unhappiness, but don't expect a resolution right away. Because if it's a hard issue, you'll both need to listen, think a while, talk, listen, think a while, if you hope to land somewhere that works for both you.
The most widely applicable advice I can think of is: someone in the relationship has to keep their mouth shut when things are bothering them, and it might as well be you. The idea that couples should talk about problems and faults they have with each other is a mistake - for the most part you need to just deal with it. Be really, really judicious with criticisms and demands.
Depends on which side you err... if your tendency is already to keep your mouth shut and put up, you can accumulate serious amounts of resentment, and it's not pretty when it all bursts out. Bringing things up in time can help avoid that.
Yes, whoever came up with "never go to bed angry at each other" advice was on a mission to ruin relationship. Don't stay up till 4 am trying to "resolve" an argument, do go to bed, more often than not you'll wake up and won't even remember what the hell that angry argument was all about.
I think it's often misunderstood - I take it to mean that you should get your own head straight before you go to bed so you're not lying there mentally rehearsing the disagreement. Ideally you want to be able to say "I love you, I'm sorry we fought, sleep well and we'll figure it out tomorrow". I think it's good advice on the whole, but I agree with you some people take it to extremes.
"you should get your own head straight before you go to bed so you're not lying there mentally rehearsing the disagreement"
Ideally - yes. But it's often impossible because there's no space to get there in the middle of a fight. So "I can't do this anymore, I need to sleep" is as good a pretense to break the fight as any.
Everyone has a limit to what they'll tolerate. The major discontents get brought to the surface once that threshold is breached. Placing a premium on communication does not mean confronting on every little thing, it's about working through issues as harmoniously as possible.
Very often couples fight because of "tone", defensiveness / hurt feelings, or otherwise some other source of stress that may be out of the ordinary that leads to one more to get snappy. Since we're not mindreaders, communicating well and understanding where everyone is coming from can help diffuse disputes promptly. The confrontations will be inevitable, the difference is whether they will escalate in anger and blunt pointed criticism (all those things we tolerate big and small) versus taking a break and reconvening with honest thoughts and feelings *without* antagonizing your partner.
I would say the couples ONLY fight about tone, defensiveness, hurt feelings or the like. I mean sometimes genuinely large issues come up but it’s rare. Couples probably aren’t having knockdown battles over the Nicene Creed, or the status of trade agreements with China, or even money. It’s almost always tone, irritating habits, chores undone, general feelings of being disrespected or the like.
What you wrote sounds great, but the problem is that these things are incredibly unlike to change. Your wife might leave her family and move across the earth for you. Your husband will convert to Judaism if it means that much to you. But neither is going to stop sounding condescending when talking about proper nutrition for the kids or start cleaning the house “properly” because those things are too ingrained. It’s very difficult to change them at all, and if you start listing all the ways you would prefer you partner was different than they are you’re going to end up even angrier and more unhappy when they fail to update.
I disagree. If both parties approach in good faith for improved communication, the primary shift is that they better understand each other and sooner intervene to avoid needless blowups. No one is expected to be perfect or completely change in their habits for another person, and that isn't contingent on it being the case.
For example, were there a "tone" incident at a certain point in a relationship both parties are pretty aware of what's happening, and so one of two things could happen first a) the person speaking could clarify / apologize, b) the person offended could voice their concern rather than starting a silent treatment and accumulating more discontents, and then diffuse before anything starts.
None of this requires fundamentally changing a person. It's about understanding them, in a two-way street, and making certain concessions and compromises. Anyone who can't make a compromise in a relationship won't get far.
If you're in a situation where your partner won't meet halfway, and you've done all the couples therapy shit, then you have to decide whether you're better off swallowing it or leaving.
Being able to talk about issues seems to me one of the most important things about my relationship with my wife. I think it matters a lot how you approach, and "criticism" or "demand" seems like bad ideas, while "request" or other softer language works just fine.
That said, I definitely agree with you about learning to keep your mouth shut, especially in the heat of a moment. Calling your spouse a derogatory term or with a laundry list of everything that's ever bothered you about them while you're angry is going to make everything worse. Calming down and coming back in an hour with a more helpful approach is really good for relationships.
A very solid set, and I would expand upon a few things.
"Regular, consistent date nights" is often used as a code for "sex is really important", possibly because our culture codes that you must behave as though sex as fundamentally frivolous. I'll be more explicit and simply say "Sex is really, really important". If partnered (particularly life-partnered), you should almost certainly be having more sex. Sex for humans can be bonding. It can be a time to turn off your thoughts. It can be a time to be someone else. It can be a time for the pleasure of giving pleasure. It can be so many things, all the while being quick and inexpensive entertainment and a great sleep-aid. Both partners in a life-relationship need to get comfortable with the fact that if is to be "successful" (i.e., they carry one of you out feet-first) then you will be boinking literally thousands of times with the same person, so it behooves you both to get good at it.
I use "Regular, consistent date nights" as code for "For god's sakes get out of the house occasionally", which is also important.
Rations. In addition to everything else you and your partner will be doing together, you will quite often be eating together. It's a really good idea if one or both of you commit to being able to produce good meals for each other on a regular basis, and enjoy doing so. Poor rations lead to poor morale inexorably, and you often won't even notice _why_ morale is poor. Armies have mutinied over it. The rest of housework is important, but meal provision is an often overlooked key to long-term joint happiness.
You have limits, as you are human. Limits on what you will accept, on what you are capable of, and on what you enjoy. While you should be always be looking to overcome your limits, your partner should nonetheless know and respect them. That means _telling_ your partner when your limits are approached, and what you need with respect to them. This advice of course applies in reflection as well.
If possible, time apart (say a week or so) can be a great opportunity to gain perspective on the partnership. Traveling for work doesn't really count, as you are unlikely to have time for the necessary reflection. Separate vacations, long weekends with friends, hobby retreats, what have you.
These are excellent. I’m curious about “I don’t really know her” because I do feel I know my fiancée extremely well — we probably spend more time together than any couple I know, because of what we do.
What I’ve found is that the woman I thought I knew, when we were engaged existed more in my head than in reality. Training myself to both follow the breath and get in a habit of skepticism made it easier to see that, behind that idea of her, there is this immensely vast unknowable thing. When I focus on that, I’m open to being wrong and curious about what she’ll do next.
The boundary between self and other is, I think, a kind of fractal that grows exponentially. I become more of who I am in our relationship, in part because raising kids is so hard. These challenges make me better understand myself, which then helps me to learn more about her, which increases the surface area of that boundary.
Not apxhard, butting it a bit, hope you don't mind. I've been married for >20y and still don't think I really "know" my wife. Or, to say better, the "unknown" space is still vastly greater than the "known". But I know what you mean: in the early years I may have had a similar illusion.
I think it's fundamentally impossible to fully "know" another person, especially one of the opposite sex. Understanding that brings a degree of humility and curiosity that are vital for a long-term relationship.
If I could distill this to one sentence, it would be "don't assume, ask".
Yes, I'm sure he's a pretty smart guy with very wide reading habits, but I've been consistently unimpressed with his rigour of thought on Marginal Revolution or other work, or hearing him interviewed on podcasts; he's very confident, but I find his willingness to hold forth confidently to be unrelated to the actual extent to which he has thought about something (examples off the top of my head is a lack of thinking through how children or disabled people fit into his libertarianish socio political worldview, or his incoherent ideas about animals ethics.)
Allow me to point out one thing I appreciate, apart from the usefulness of his link aggregation. Cowen sometimes tries to indicate useful limits on how much explanatory power his favorite ideas have, in a way that is useful to the reader, rather than just as a parenthetical remark meant to dissuade criticism. This seems rare in the blogosphere.
I chose this example both because it is recent and because I think it would be a helpful one for the many ACX commenters who have read Hayek and/or Seeing Like a State.
>examples off the top of my head is a lack of thinking through how children or disabled people fit into his libertarianish socio political worldview
What do children have to do with libertarianism? This objection strikes me as a category error. Libertarianism is a political philosophy and children don't participate in politics. I believe the only libertarian attitude here would be to limit State interference and let families raise their kids however they like (modulo things like abuse).
I guess OP means: what about orphans or children with woefully inadequate parents, and what about people who have expensive care needs that a realistic salary can't pay for? Sometimes people can't stand on their own two feet without help — does libertarianism just say "bad luck, you're on your own?"
I think the stock libertarian reply would be that most people agree that helping needy people is important, and if we do agree that we're free to help via private charity. I think a libertarian would say that it's wrong to force people to be charitable if they don't want to be, and also that the state is an inefficient and untrustworthy means of allocating charity, so it's better overall to let people help directly.
Yes, I think this is both correct and consistent with my answer. "Letting people help via private charity" conforms to the libertarian notion of "this isn't within the State's remit, deal with it yourself." Some people might view this as a cruelly laissez faire attitude in the context of child care, but libertarians (rightly, in my opinion) view the harms caused by a potentially indifferent culture to be less than those caused by well-meaning policy enacted by incompetent bureaucrats. Government simply can't solve some problems directly and ultimately does more damage when it tries.
MR is a very frequently updated content aggregator, usually with something interesting.
He hosts interesting interviews with interesting people, and asks good questions.
He shares insightful comments even if I don't agree with him on 33-50%+ of everything. His readership seems to lean far more to the right and criticizes him at every turn, so in that microcosm the quasi-libertarianism seems moderate.
This does _not_ answer your steel-manning request, since that is way beyond my ken. As a lay person I attach a great deal of weight to how someone is viewed by peers and Professor Cowen appears to be held in high regard by peers. The breadth of his culture is unusual; in modern times with super-specializations finding a single human who knows so much about so much reveals both the interconnectedness of knowledge and the possibility of a modern "renaissance man". His writing is interesting, I almost always finish reading the full piece, of many others I abandon midway.
He has said that his routine for interviewing people is to read the top N books on Amazon. For example, he interviewed Martina Navratilova and read the top five books on tennis and a couple on Navratilova. When he interviewed her, he came across as something of an expert. When he interviewed Gary Kasparov, he asked him about an opening from, 1981 (or whatever) and was able to hold forth on the merits of moving his knight where he did (or whatever). I have heard him speak knowledgeably about my own profession (software engineering) too. I listened to him interviewing Fareed Zakaria last night. Cowen knew more about the history of India and foreign relations in the 80s than any non-expert has any right to know. He does this week after week.
I can't think of anyone in the world who has such a diversity of knowledge. Maybe he doesn't know as much about a topic as the experts in that topic but he sure knows a lot and his knowledge sure is diverse.
PS. I don't think Marginal Revolution provides credible evidence either way. It's a casual blog.
I should maybe clarify: it's not that he's not knowledgeable, relative to an average member of the public. It's that he seems to be performing a level of expertise and understanding that he lacks.
I’d like to hear this too. I’ve only followed Tyler for a couple years but I’ve noticed much more of an offputting soldier mindset in him. Not sure whether that’s him changing or just me noticing.
In what way is he a "soldier"? The comments on MR rightly accuse him of being far too Straussian, since he rarely takes any strong stands on issues. I've read MR since its inception btw.
I haven't seen "soldier"-ish behavior either; if at all he has chips on his shoulder he is good at hiding them. This is despite him seemingly obsessed with status -- this is not just about platonic discussions of the concept but of status, but a lot of "Who is the most underrated/overrated", who needs to increase in status type stuff. That said, one hears related complaints. Many accuse him of being provocative, and he seems to drive some sections of his readership really mad, but I am not sure what to think of this: in such situations the rest of his readership seems to barely notice any pressing of buttons. He *seems* sometimes to throw in gratuitous bits that at least superficially sound judgemental, like: "Via the apparently excellent Bruce Cleaver." He makes comments such as "Country X does this thing better than country Y" or "women tend to have a better attitude on this than men", using language that is mild, and yet more definitive and less tentative than one might normally expect.
True, and while it is clear Tyler is a bit of a troll, an underappreciated fact about the commenters on MR is they are mostly rather highly self aware and in on the joke. The median comment on MR would get a ban on ACX, so I always have to remember to be well behaved here after saying what I *really* think under one of my sockpuppet accounts on MR (yes, I could say what I really think here, but not without much prevarication and bowing to the rarionalist gods, and I simply don't have the patience, being a post-rationalist after all).
While Scott polices various bad faith attributions/conflict-theoretic behavior, MR seems to police content more. Yesterday in that Michael Cook post there was a handle called "Crusader", worrying about Khamenei asking Iranian Americans to fight against the US. Though I felt the comment was stupid, it wasn't phrased incitefully, and was anyway overwhelmed by numerous counters, some of which were insightful. But they deleted the comment and thereby the counters as well.
What is your explanation for the quality of MR comments having deteriorated over the last 10 years (if you agree with this)? Tyler was no more or less a troll back then. Is it that back then smart people tended to look up more to economists to explain the world to them (as a recent piece of Noahpinion suggests)?
I know what you mean by deteriorating comments, but they are worse in one dimension while being better in others. People who want a rationalist style pedantry have a forum here (I'm describing tradeoffs on Scott's moderation, not declaring it inferior). I would agree over the last year MR comments have gotten a bit ridiculous at times even for my taste.
I have seen the deletions you mention on occasion and it really is a puzzle as to why certain comments are targeted. Adds to the mystique of the place, though I personally never had any of my comments deleted.
I think where I disagree with the moderation here is that bad faith comments are fine if they provide a new perspective. Though I'm highly immune to getting emotional over political discussion, and admit that others may regard ridiculous comments to be inflammatory. (is in this thread, unlees deleted, you can see someone being accused of supporting Hamas and him going ballistic. If I was accused of X, I would just find it silly for pretty much all values of X if I judged it untrue; sometimes humans really confuse me)
I see Tyler as a great curator. He's great at finding interesting stuff from around the web and connecting it with other interesting stuff. He's also really good at drawing people out in conversation, so I find his podcast worth listening to. But, agreed, when I read his original stuff, it's mostly pretty mid.
TBH I don't get him either. He's on my list of people who a lot of people I respect seem to respect but just seems completely banal to me (Paul graham is an even more extreme case, even before, uh, recent trends).
Graham is at least successful in a field requiring more than "what your contemporaries let you get away with saying" (as Richard Rorty defined "truth").
Suppose you're a highly educated, socially conservative American Christian with two young children (a boy and a girl) and while you don't want to raise them as cloistered fundamentalists, you also think the broader culture has kind of gone crazy and you don't want them to end up woke or (God forbid) transgender. If you could choose to live anywhere in the US (any state, city/suburban/rural), where would you choose to live to best achieve this goal?
The obvious, and perhaps correct, answer is a strongly religious area in a red state. On the other hand, anecdotally many woke ex-Christians (or ex-conservative Christians) are rebelling against growing up in restrictive conservative environments. And there's a lot of crazy out there in conservative areas for children to rebel against. So maybe there's a case to be made for exposing your children to progressive craziness to inoculate them against it.
Correct me if I've got you wrong - so I think what you want to avoid is a specific kind of person that makes everything about politics?
If so, I think geography might not be the biggest factor. This is an attitude thing, and it comes from home. Besides, you're looking at a 10 - 15 year time horizon - a place can change a great deal in this time, and the "woke" that you're talking about will inevitably shapeshift. It'll be some completely new thing by the time your kids are teens.
I think the biggest thing you can do is model being a good, grounded human. This means try to avoid very biased, partisan content. Steer clear of the opinion columns. Personally don't engage with political content that makes you angry (much easier said than done).
The aim is to model someone who focuses on the important things in life - the day to day. Your family, loved ones, and doesn't spend energy raging about real or imagined slights on one political tribe or another.
Don't set a precedent that it's normal to spend all your time ranting about politics. That means even if say, your cashier is visibly trans, you treat them like a normal person - polite respect. You don't give them any special attention, negative or positive. Just normal.
Its different if there's a local issue that will impact your own day to day, but approach it with practicality and respect for community norms. Model the behaviour you wanna see, wrt to fitting in with community wishes. You might wanna pick a specific community that you think you can fit into - not necessarily for educational reasons, but because it would make you happy to be surrounded by people who understand you and have similar values.
I can't predict what stupid debate is going to dominate our attentions in 2038, but I hope this skillset and attitude will be broadly applicable. It doesn't require finding a homogeneous community and hoping it doesn't change over the next decade. It only requires being mindful of what you spend your time talking about and how you go about it.
Interestingly someone else suggested Austin specifically as a good place to move to. Perhaps it has both a disproportionate number of far-left progressives and principled conservatives, so that it depends on your social circles in the city?
Because I don't want to encourage any more conservatives to move here who will vote for the anti-abortion extremists in Austin. This used to be a nice state. You won't be welcome be people like me if you vote for Greg Abbot, Dan Patrick and his ilk.
There's always the midwest or certain large cities in the south, but I think your concern is mostly a boogeyman. Twitter-land doesn't reflect opinions on the ground. For all of it, kids just want to be kids, they're interested in sports videogames and anime, not politics. Even in later years, it's the always-online types who adopt more extreme views, in either direction.
If you're planning on going to Church or sending kids to a religious private school, then you already control for environment so it's a moot point.
I am inclined to think that "no smartphone" is 50% of the battle, and restricting Internet usage/encouraging them to play outside is another 25%. But I do think peer influence and IRL social environment also matter here.
Private school (or homeschooling) is an option but it's nice to not feel you have to rely on that. And I'm not totally convinced that either option is the best way to inoculate your children against progressive craziness, especially if they're not exposed to those ideas much outside of school and then are suddenly hit with them when they go to college.
Learning how to think and be skeptical is the only inoculation against bad ideas.
Having been to college, radicalism was not new to anyone by the time they arrived as it was all exposed through internet, but one's major of study (STEM vs liberal arts) is a reliable predictor of whether peer environment will be far left or moderate. Classmates are ultimately the ones you hang around with anyway.
All that said, I don't think you can force or expect your kids to reflect the same worldview you have.
At this point, nearly every industrialized country has total fertility rates below replacement levels. The US is doing better than many 1.7 births per woman. The situation is much worse elsewhere, with both Italy and Japan at 1.3, and South Korea at a disasterous 0.9. All of this is a problem because it tends to make the population top-heavy, with relatively few working-age adults supporting a relatively large pool of retired seniors.
Anyone care to make some predictions on what we will see countries doing to fight this trend?
I think it's a no-brainer that we will see a lot of money thrown at this problem. Pre-school child care will probably become highly subsidized. Quebec, Canada, for instance has a program where child care costs parents only CAN$9.10 per day. I also wouldn't be surprised to see subsidized housing for young families, although I don't remember seeing it yet. Medical fertility interventions like IVF might also be subsidized.
I also expect immigration to be permitted, and even encouraged, in many places. In some cases that may be temporary imports of labor though guest worker programs, but in other cases it will involve permanent residents.
Finally, I expect to see retirement ages pushed up. Retirement at 65 will probably become something of the past.
But what else might we see? And will any of this work?
Subsidize minivans, haha.
They'll simply import a billion Chinese to replace us. Chinese work hard and don't question authority, they make far better citizens than we do.
China's TFR is 1.2, so they have it worse than most of the West. I wouldn't be surprised if they started restricting emigration within the next generation or so, when the problem really starts to bite.
Anyone looking to cover this problem with immigration really needs to be a fan of Africans, since that's where fertility tends to be the highest right now. There are also a few places in Asia (like Kyrgyzstan) and South America (Bolivia) with high TFR, but they are small.
There's a list of things I'd *like* to see them do. But I'm guessing the current industrialized-nation governments are not going to do anything effective, just pile on more of the same stuff that hasn't worked so far and probably never will.
Until a number of factors including but not limited to a top-heavy population pyramid lead to economic catastrophe. Which I suspect will increase TFR by reducing the *relative* cost of child-raising and removing some of the tempting alternatives.
Have you been talking to the Nybbler again, John?
Germany or Sweden seem to do much more when it comes to subsidizing families/children, yet families have less children than in the US for example. Is does't seem to be a lever we can use.
I would say the best chance of actually changing this trend is economic growth / technological change, in the way that we all work far less in the future (and therefore have more time). Another big impact could obviously come from artificial wombs, where women would no longer have to face any trade-offs. Life-extending medicine could also have an impact on demographics (because less people would die over a certain period of time).
Since 2009, Sweden's TFR actually seems to have tracked the American TFR very closely until the last year or so. https://countryeconomy.com/countries/compare/sweden/usa?sc=XE26
One could always argue that the TFRs would be even lower without those generous policies.
Since 2009, Sweden's TFR actually seems to have tracked the American TFR very closely until the last year or so. https://countryeconomy.com/countries/compare/sweden/usa?sc=XE26
One could always argue that the TFRs would be even lower without those generous policies.
> What do you mean "get rid of" [expectation of education] as if you're talking about a government policy that can be repealed?
Some jobs have some kind of education as a legal requirement. Makes sense for a surgeon, but much less sense for a hairdresser. The specific rules vary from place to place, but generally, formal education is usually required for many kinds of jobs. Software development is a huge *exception* in this aspect.
This also makes it more difficult to change profession, once you decide that the choice you made when you were 18 perhaps does not fit your current personality and situation. For example, once I seriously considered that maybe it would be better for me to walk away from software development, and become a plumber or a carpenter instead. No more meetings and Jira tickets, flexible working hours, doing something useful and relatively well paid using my hands while perhaps thinking about some open-source project I would do in my free time. How difficult could it be? I mean, there are YouTube videos for everything, I could start by doing things cheaply for the most desperate customers and gradually level up... Ha-ha, nope. Instead, it would be hundreds of hours of formal training (not even available in my city, so I would have to relocate or commute a lot), then a few years of practice working for someone else until I am finally allowed to work independently... nope, I am too old for that. (For the contrast, consider a former plumber who wants to become a software developer instead. If he has the skills, he could literally start the job tomorrow.)
The problem in Japan and South Korea is that while they let women get educated and work, they make it difficult for women with children to work outside the home. A lot of young women take a look at those options and say yes to the job and no to the kids.
It probably doesn't help that Japan requires workers to stay late at the office and then go out drinking every night.
<quote>There is, of course, one solution that is almost sure to work that nobody wants to consider or even mention</quote>
I'm not sure the post actually proposed a solution? Only identified a problem.
but that's not really a solution unless you say how you would achieve it.
'have more babies' is not a solution unless you say how you would actually get people to do that.
perhaps I can read between the lines, and guess that the proposed solution is to roll back equal rights, but if that's the case than I can toss it out, since that is not a feasible solution.
The other one is cutting senior social support and letting the problem take care of itself.
This also works a lot faster than the other suggestion.
Say what you will about Nicolae Ceaușescu, but his fertility program ensured that he didn't have to worry about post-retirement life...
Random thought: Christian Bale was drastically miscast as Patrick Bateman, he's too good-looking.
Patrick Bateman is a man who spends a lot of effort on his looks, but I don't think he's working with particularly good raw material, so he doesn't wind up looking like a movie star, just like an over-groomed average looking dude. I think that the deep sense of insecurity that Bateman has is not really compatible with natural good looks. Maybe he should look a bit more like Pete Campbell from Mad Men; not bad looking but not exactly lighting up the room with his smile.
He feels to me like an 1980s version of one of those guys who tries way too hard on Linkedin, but since it's the 1980s and there's no Linkedin he just murders people instead.
I haven't read the book, but...
It works for me. I don't think I have personal experience with Bateman's particular type of psychopathy, but my impression is that it doesn't depend on looks. Whatever it is about him that reads as "insecurity" is more like a gaping internal void that can never be filled; no amount of success or status will ever be enough.
I thought the exact opposite: He was too well cast. A great actor is by definition a form of psychopath, a charming camouflaged thing. The outcome was a cartoon of a cartoon-- one too many layers deep.
OC ACXLW Sat April 20 Childhood and Education Roundup #5
Hello Folks!
We are excited to announce the 62nd 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 20 2024
Time 2 pm
Conversation Starter:
Childhood and Education Roundup #5 by Zvi Mowshowitz: A wide-ranging discussion of various topics related to childhood and education, including bullying, truancy, active shooter drills, censorship, woke kindergarten, tracking, homeschooling, the impact of smartphones on children's mental health, and more.
Text and Audio link: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a7YuB25vu35ajfxS2/childhood-and-education-roundup-5
Questions for discussion:
1) The article cites a study that finds bullying has lifelong negative effects, including lower subjective well-being, increased mortality risk, and reduced job prospects in adulthood. However, Zvi expresses concern that the study's controls may be inadequate, as bullying is often a function of the victim's social status and response. How can researchers effectively control for these factors to isolate the causal impact of bullying itself?
2) Zvi discusses the case of "Woke Kindergarten," a controversial program implemented in a San Francisco school district that included materials with questions about abolishing work, landlords, Israel, and borders. The article also mentions that test scores in the district fell, with less than 4% of students proficient in math and under 12% at grade level in English. While the article does not directly attribute this decline to the "Woke Kindergarten" program, what does this case suggest about the challenges of implementing politically charged curricula in early childhood education, and how can schools ensure that educational content is both age-appropriate and academically rigorous?
3) The article presents data showing a substantial increase in homeschooling rates in the United States following the COVID-19 pandemic, with many families continuing to homeschool even after schools reopened. Zvi interprets this as a strong endorsement of homeschooling by families who tried it. What factors might contribute to this sustained shift toward homeschooling, and what implications could this have for the future of public education?
4) Citing survey data and time-use studies, Zvi argues that excessive smartphone use among children and adolescents is associated with reduced sleep, decreased in-person socializing, and worsening mental health outcomes. He critiques claims that the evidence is inconclusive, arguing that even the possibility of such significant negative impacts warrants serious concern. How can parents, educators, and policymakers navigate the trade-offs between the benefits and risks of youth smartphone use in an evidence-based manner?
5) The article discusses the potential benefits of student tracking and ability grouping, citing a study that found the introduction of flexible teacher pay in Wisconsin led to improved student outcomes by incentivizing the recruitment and retention of high-quality teachers. However, Zvi notes that tracking remains controversial, with some critics arguing that it exacerbates educational inequities. How can schools design tracking systems that maximize student learning while ensuring all students have access to rigorous, high-quality instruction?
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.
A possibly very stupid questions: Isn't Popper today more or less unimportant for social sciences like psychology? As you might know, every Psy student is taught about Popper: His critical rationalism is the key to our field. We don't validate theories, we falsify them. And for good reason: no matter how many white swans we find, we can never know, if all swans are white. If we find only one black swan, however, we can say with certainty that not all swans are white. Now, in the actual science, we find neither white nor black swans - at least not with a high degree of certainty. Small sample-sizes, failed replications, tests based on probability, internal or external validity, etc. make it questionable, what color the swans really have. And this discussion, the discussion about the real color, seem to be much more important than arguing that a black swan would be of a higher quality than a white one. What do you guys think?
Teaching "about" something doesn't make people actually good at it. Sometimes people answer the questions correctly in test, and then don't apply them in real life anyway. (I think there were experiments showing that courses on ethics or critical thinking do not make people actually more ethical or more critical thinkers.) Perhaps this could be improved by designing the course differently, with an emphasis on examples from everyday life, both professional and free time... rather than just "this is what Popper thought on the topic". I am not sure.
Probably more importantly, I do not think that Popper correctly describes what scientists (even in STEM) actually do. I think he proves too much... at least the version of him that most people on internet use, which probably lacks most of the original nuance.
Basically, Popper (as used by most people) seems completely one-sided. He argues against any feelings of certainty, ever; his approach is pure negativity. On one hand, sure, you should never be literally 100% certain about something; there is always a possibility of new evidence that will disprove things you thought were true. But he takes it too far, as if there is nothing positive a scientist could ever say about a theory, beyond "it hasn't been falsified yet". From that perspective, a theory that is supported by thousands experiments is no more certain than a crazy hypothesis I made up just now and no one had an opportunity to test it yet. Neither has been falsified yet... and according to (the popular interpretation of) Popper, that is all anyone can ever say about a scientific theory.
But we all know that this is *not* how actual scientists behave. They take certain things, such as gravity or evolution or relativity, as basically true. They may be open to re-examine them critically, if something new and surprising happens. But normally, they just treat them as true. Whenever a journalist reports that the speed of light has been experimentally exceeded (that used to happen quite often a few years ago), a scientist simply ignores that, because he knows that's pretty impossible... and usually a few weeks later it turns out that it was instead a mistake at some calculation. To act otherwise would be a waste of time. For most practical purposes, scientists act as if relativity has been validated.
A crackpot whose life mission is to prove that "relativity isn't true" will quote Popper every day.
Scientists should be open to the possibility that a new fact can make them reconsider the existing theories. They should even actively be looking for possible disconfirmations of the existing theories... of course, not all of them all the time; after the theory has been here for a while, most of the time they should just use it as a tool to derive new useful results. It is okay to take "all swans are warm-blooded" as a fact (unless something extraordinary happens).
The problem instead is that in fields such as psychology, the proper degree of certainty in existing theories should be much lower than in physics. Because there is less experimental evidence, few replications, small sample sizes, often people not even considering alternative explanations of the observed data, etc. Those are the actual problems. Falsifiability is a red herring, in my opinion. It is a one-sided weapon against all feelings of certainty, whether deserved or not. The problem is jumping to conclusions too soon, not making conclusions as such.
I completely agree! Popper is totally overused. His basic point (there could always be a black swan) is good and important, but in the scientific reality coming to a good valuation of a theory and deciding, how good an empirical study actually was (was that swan really white/black?) is much more relevant. Popper should be named in an introduction to the field, not as a user manual.
Is it actually true that 'sanctuary cities' policies against cooperation with ICE mean that they protect people suspected even of heinous crimes like raping children?
I am sure there is at least one tweet out there saying that it is true, and I am expecting you to post it here as a fact.
No. Remove your tin foil hat and take your meds.
Do people have strategies for getting a good night's sleep for the nights they really need to? While I have sleep issues usually, they get especially bad when I have something big coming up/on my mind, which means I e.g. go to most interviews fairly exhausted and perform more poorly than I would otherwise. This is on my mind because I just had an interview on literally zero hours of sleep.
I'd like some technique/failsafe to try in situations like this to ensure I get a good sleep. I've tried a lot of the more standard advice like staying off screens and using melatonin which mostly hasn't worked but I'd be interested in hearing things that worked for other people in my situation. I'm fine with medication, but only if it actually leads to me feeling refreshed/alert in the morning and doesn't only knock me out for a while. If it helps for giving me advice, I tend to have issues both with falling asleep and with staying asleep, although my issues with falling asleep become especially acute before a big day.
I tend to cycle through 3 strategies:
1. Read something that's just kinda boring. For a while, Moby Dick was my go-to. I love the prose, but it's a style of writing that's hard to get in sync with in this day and age. Forcing myself to keep reading it was a good way to exhaust my brain.
2. Watch something kinda boring on my phone. This goes against most advice but it works for me (sometimes). Right now a good go-to is the Halo adaptation on Paramount. I like it just enough to keep watching but sometimes I find myself waiting for something actually interesting to happen and that's when I get sleepy.
3. The real trick, the one that usually works. I tell myself - and I actually believe it - that if I can't sleep, then just lying still with my eyes closed and thinking calm thoughts is a good substitute for sleep. I just try to do that as long as possible, and tell myself that it doesn't actually matter if I fall asleep if I can keep doing that instead. Almost invariably, I fall asleep.
I do something similar to #3: I lay perfectly still with my eyes close and don't move except for breathing and swallowing. I've never gone longer than 15 minutes before falling asleep no matter how awake i am.
It sounds so dumb, but it works. It's also way harder than it seems. You don't notice how many small movements you do all the time until you try to not do them. There is also a meditation/mindfulness piece to it: you'll get little itches and things all over and all you can do is focus on them and hope they go away. It often seems like your body will create this little irritations almost to "check if you are awake" - they will happen more frequently the closer you get to sleep.
I'll warn that I first learned of this as a technique to encourage lucid dreaming, which many people dont want. Its never produced lucid dreaming for me, though I have had lucid dreams by chance.
As far as reading goes, advanced math tends to work well as well. Or anything that requires mental effort.
The problem I've found with this is that you can be really sleepy while reading, and then instantly become non-sleepy once you stop reading and get into bed.
As for the third, that's a neat trick. I doubt I'd be able to delude myself into making it work, but it's a cool idea.
I've been pretty satisfied with CBD. As I've gotten older it's been harder to get through the night without waking up. Eating 5 Mg of CBD (in a gummy) before I go to bed have improved my sleep patterns considerably. However, not all the brands of CBD gummies I've tried have been equally effective.
Stay up late the night before. Then you'll be really tired the next day.
Sadly enough, for my most recent interview, I had also slept poorly the previous evening. Usually that is enough for me to sleep better the next evening, but this time it wasn't.
I'd recommend the opposite. If there's a chance you are going to miss a night's sleep - have as much in your sleep bank as possible in the week leading up. Knowing that also takes the pressure to fall asleep on the big night off a bit which sounds useful as a sleep strategy in itself in this case.
I've tried this, with mixed results. The most regular outcome is that I do sleep better on the second night, but not by enough. My body wants 8-9 hours, if I did nothing I might get 4-5, and by reducing my sleep the night before I end up with 6-7. So two nights in a row with 6ish hours instead of 8 and 4 - mixed results at best.
This doesn't work for me. When I stay up, my regular bedtime just gets later and later.
I don't have anything that works all the time, but a number of things that increase the probability of a good night's sleep: Most powerful on eis 30 mins or so of cardio in any form done earlier in the day, cardio that's intense enough to get me really sweaty. Another powerful one is to get in the habit of using the bed only for sleep & sex. If you read, watch movies, talk on the phone, browse online while in bed you associate bed with relaxed wakefulness. Relaxed wakefulness is just want you don't want if you're lying in bed trying to go to sleep, right? So do all those winding down things like movies and internet browsing in a chair or sitting on a couch. If you're bothered by noise, use earplugs (I recommend the Macks silicone ones) and a white noise machine. When it comes to drugs I find that benedryl 25 mg or so works well, and does not give me a hangover. Benzodiazepines work extremely well for many people -- but watch out, because you can develop a tolerance, so don't use the stuff more than once a week.
One thing that works for me is long academic discussion podcasts like The Dissenter or Mindscape. Stuff that’s interesting enough that I would want to listen even if I wasn’t trying to sleep, but not so important to me that I’ll object if I doze off in the middle of it.
There's a technique I learned from an online post that works decently well for me.
First, and this is probably well known to you, don't try to relax. Because trying to relax is just going to keep you awake. Instead, try to focus on seeing with your eyes closed. Keep your eyes closed but otherwise make an effortful try to see something in the blackness. It will seem slippery and weird at first, but keep trying. Eventually you'll catch a glimpse of something: dark shapes moving in the blackness. If you try to look at them too hard they'll slip away, but that's okay. Keep looking.
Eventually you'll start seeing dream imagery. These will be vivid images, but you aren't actually seeing them with your eyes. Keep focused on trying to see them, on examining the images that come up. At this point you'll be on the edge of sleep, dipping into unconsciousness. You might bob up and down on this border for a while, but when you bob up into consciousness try to stay focused on seeing. Watching for the next dream image.
Eventually you fall asleep.
It is not a perfect "works every time" technique, but when I can't sleep it's my go to and it is fairly effective. I used it last night, which was a pretty rough night for me, and I'd say it took about 15-20 minutes to work. Your mind will want to wander, but just keep herding your attention back to watching for images.
> It will seem slippery and weird at first, but keep trying. Eventually you'll catch a glimpse of something: dark shapes moving in the blackness. If you try to look at them too hard they'll slip away, but that's okay. Keep looking.
This sounds like the start of a creepypasta.
Not going to lie, some nights my subconscious will generate a stream of frightening images. I learned how to deal with that from listening to an interview with a guy who does guided psychedelic psychotherapy. He said that most “bad trips” happen because you start to experience something disturbing and then you mentally flinch away from it. But trying to run away from a frightening thing your own mind conjured up is as pointless as trying not to think a thought: as long as you’re trying, you’re thinking about it. So the key is to not flinch away, to look it straight on and then go through it. If you do you may find something better on the other side. I have found that this works with the sleep technique as well, though it can be difficult.
This is my go-to technique, either learned from you or another ACX or DSL poster sometime last year/two years ago(?) This alone has potentially made lurking around this whole community a net positive for my cumulative amount of sleep.
One other advantage: it has made it much easier for me to fall asleep even if my environment is not totally dark. With a little bit of ambient light, it is easier to attend to the phantom images I see when my eyes are closed.
We definitely got it from the same place, though I can’t find the source offhand. It was a link to a blog with a long post about it, someone must have put it in the comments a few years ago.
Do most people not put a second pillow on top of their head? That generally mitigates light issues.
I haven't seen a lot of people sleeping, but that isn't something I've observed.
For most of the year, it would be too hot for me to cover my head with another pillow, even partially.
One of my children does cover his eyes with a blanket that he claims is for light reduction.
Have you experimented with sleep podcasts at all? I particularly like The French Whisperer. He has a ton of content free on Spotify. Works both for falling asleep at bedtime and if I wake up in the middle of the night. YMMV of course but maybe worth trying.
Moderate exercise in the early evening, enough that I feel tired, but not enough that I'll be sore in the morning. Maybe followed by a warm shower, even if I also plan to shower in the morning.
Doing some things like dishes, cleaning, and sorting, which require a small amount of effort, and have clear end-conditions, so I feel like I've accomplished goals and am done for the day. Not things like studying or long-term projects which leave me feeling like there's always more to do.
Tiny amounts of alcohol, mostly smelled and slowly consumed, not enough to produce any real effect, but enough to trigger some of the pleasant associations in my mind.
Pleasure reading with a physical book, of something I enjoy that I've read before, in low warm light. I have a dawn simulator that also works in reverse, as a dusk simulator. But I can also turn the overhead dimmers all the way down, and turn on a side-lamp that has an old 40-watt incandescent bulb.
It's probably very individual. I get a good sleep after an exhausting workout, but my wife can't fall asleep after one. Sometimes white noise really helps, but not always. Same for reading in bed.
One thing I'd strongly advise against for this purpose is alcohol.
Hm, I posted on comment on Rootclaims blog (https://blog.rootclaim.com/covid-origins-debate-response-to-scott-alexander/) which was actually very friendly and constructive but it seems like it didn't get through moderation. Did this happen to anyone else?
Scott, Is it possible to make every 4th open thread have a ban on linking to personal substacks or yt pages? would be a fun experiment to run.
Once upon a time, linking to personal webpages was a reportable offense.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-283/comment/18019038
Wish it would still be enforced.
There's been way more of it lately. Feels like too much to me. I'd prefer it if there was some rule of thumb like not more than twice a year.
I guess I can't really blame new posters for self-promotion when the top of the page reads, "Post about anything you want."
I searched out that old "twice per year comment" about two weeks ago, intending to link it (and the general policy*) on the next Hidden Thread, hoping it might help other long-time readers who want to police the comments. (You're doing God's work Shaked Koplewitz)
*https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/register-of-bans
I have to say, I really like the "symbolically banned for one day for interacting with trolls" policy. I wish that were enforced more consistently, even though I might eat a few myself. But Scott is probably doing the right thing by spending more time with his family, and less time policing trolls on his corner of the Internet.
My big fear in the move to Substack was that working for pay would cause Scott to experience the Over-justification effect. So I try not to complain if he avoids unpleasant chores.
From past experience here: a huge proportion of people skip over any header text of an "Open Thread", including unusual rules that apply to that thread.
I think we just need a general rule, something like don't plug your blog more than twice per year. Then the group here would need to remind posters who violate it, because Scott was never good at staying on top of that or on top of reports of incivility, even before he became the father of twins.
Elementary school age children in the passenger seat of cars with advanced airbags (that is: airbags with a weight sensor that are supposed to deactivate for small passengers): is there a real risk here?
It's easy to find breathless warnings that allowing your child into the front seat before they are thirteen is dangerous, but I was unable to find much in the way of actual data. A few studies from the 90s back when the problem with airbags and children was first being investigated, but nothing about modern cars.
Does anyone have any good data?
I havent seen any about airbags, though i read a blog post a while ago about how car seats for kids above like 5 don't really reduce injuries (can't find it now, sorry). I'd like to see some data on front seats and airbags too.
Perhaps a pressure sensor in the lower half of the front passenger seat would solve the problem, combined with the weight sensor in the seat itself. Either that, or make the kids carry a hundredweight sack of potatos on their lap! :-)
Banned for this comment.
The people that I'm supposed to think are superior to Hamas because Hamas as infinity malintent points or something.
https://twitter.com/zoe_sottile/status/1779948428803395723
The kind of investigations the IDF does into their own crimes when the evidence is damning
https://x.com/jsternweiner/status/1778725035370295343
As someone who has come around to the view race is real, but who also believes human rights is also real, this is showing me the former is going to be trumping the latter worldwide. Because the descendants of the Holocaust decided to open that door.
https://x.com/BeckettUnite/status/1779574790669406577
Murdering people as they try to return to their homes.
Literally terrorizing little kids.
https://x.com/GozukaraFurkan/status/1779220248844968325
And when they decided to go ahead and snipe those kids
https://x.com/leloveluck/status/1779570958132543734
You're reposting stuff written by Muslims.
There's two groups whose opinions on the current conflict need to be absolutely and totally disregarded: Muslims and Jews. I don't want to read anything written by one of them on this subject, there's too much ingroup bias.
Found something not by Muslims. Although a better approach would be try to listen to literally everyone and discern the truth from that, muslims, jews, christians especially palestinian christians, etc.
https://x.com/evanhill/status/1780293554629194163
https://x.com/ggreenwald/status/1780253058389123321
https://x.com/LongTimeLefty/status/1780252359764934896
"The Zionists slaughtered children in their hospital beds, dumped them in pits outside and drove over them with bulldozers. Many kids bodies were found with their drips still attached."
Cartoonishly vile and moronic, even by the standards of the pro-Israel camp.
Normally Carateca would be banned for this comment, but I just got around to looking at my report queue which was 90% this guy, so whatever.
You are literally the cue in. Incredible.
I'm not even in this conversation, but I am also unfamiliar with the term "cue in". If you have a few free minutes, would you please explain it? Seriously, as someone with a bit of a linguistics background, I'm curious about what it means and where it came from. I'm familiar with the usage "to cue someone in", but this is completely new to me.
In response to the comment that you deleted: yes. I did in fact have a perfectly civil conversation with Glenn on one subject, even though we disagree on another subject.
Really do report me, it will mean attention to you're comments I've reported and I would like this. You are the case in point commenter who defaults to denying, downplaying, or just flat out distracting from anyone who criticizes Israel. It is a pathetic method of sabotaging debate and reeks of insecurity which is natural I guess. You are not different from other atrocity deniers. I actually think you are more rabid and nasty than online communists who defend stalin and pol pot.
Question for Americans: how important is housing space to you?
I am quite aware that Europe is considerably poorer than the US, a topic that comes up frequently in US-Europe discussion, other through Americans triumphantly explaining this fact to Europoors. There are quite a few indicators that can be used to show this, from incomes to wealth levels to various owned appliances.
However, one of the most common things to come up is something that seems less important than all those: Americans consider Europeans to live in pitifully cramped houses with little space. Take this tweet (https://twitter.com/scottlincicome/status/1779635261661417518) and its reactions, for instance.
I, personally, live with my wife and two kids in an apartment that's a bit smaller than the average size of housing for Finland. If I had the choice I'd take those few extra square meters and put them in the kitchen, since I like to cook and a bit more space for appliances and shelves would be nice. Other than that, I don't really have a problem with the size: there's four rooms and a kitchen, enough for the kids to have their own rooms and for me to work quietly in the bedroom when I'm working from home.
When living in America for a few months in 2008, I visited ordinary American houses, and it was of course evident already then that the house sizes are indeed bigger than here. However, this particular difference aroused no envy in me; I mostly remember thinking that it's just more room to vacuum and mop. There are, of course, people who bitch about how houses are too small, but they are mostly concerned with the amount of rooms, i.e. "Why are they building all these two-bedroom places where you can't fit a family?", rather than the square meters, as such.
Is it one of those things where if you are used to comparatively compact houses, the bigger houses don't really seem that different, but if you are used to bigger housing, the compact houses and apartments immediately come off as hopelessly cramped?
I think there's something buried in the American mythos/dream, going back in Anglo-American history to before the Revolution, where we want space to do our own thing. With enough space, we can have privacy, we can do what we want without other people telling us "no", we can get away from "all that bullshit". The response to people getting in your face, telling you what to do, is to go somewhere else, somewhere on your own, and be free. This even applied to runaway slaves - the solution was to gather up the people you loved, and get the hell out of there.
I suppose it gets laid at the feet of the "germs" part of "Guns, Germs, and Steel".
It's kind of important to me that my house has a dedicated home office, a library, and a guest bedroom. The extra storage space and the big kitchen are also nice, as is having enough room for two indoor cats to do their thing. And the two-car garage is turning into a workshop; I can still fit one car into it if I need to, but I basically don't.
I could downsize my life to fit into a smaller space, but the things I'd be giving up are things I would miss. Being a Rich American(tm), I don't have to and I'm fine with that.
Large houses are nice. Having a spare bedroom for guests and bouts of flu, an office space for working from home, a large kitchen with a big stove, a workout space, and a garage for the two cars (no public transport and two working adults) is… I can’t complain?
Having space to exercise at home (lift weights, stationary bike) is hugely convenient.
As a single person in a city, not very.
As a teenager in the suburbs, very.
I agree with Ghillie’s hypothesis.
If you were a billionaire, would you have a larger house? I know I would. When you remove financial constraints, people tend to choose much larger houses. They don't choose arbitrarily large houses (nobody lives in a house the size of an airport terminal even if they can easily afford it) but they tend to choose houses that are several times the size of a normal person's house.
Conclusion: larger houses are better, and any argument to the contrary is just poverty cope.
A few years ago we sold a flat in central London and bought a rambling great eight bedroom house in Devon, with a large garden. Although it is hard and time-consuming to keep on top of the cleaning indoors, and weeding and maintaining the garden, a big advantage of larger houses generally IMHO is that, all things being equal, the occupants of one have more exercise just making their way here and there round and about the house than people in more compact dwellings. It all adds up, if you think about it.
As some evidence (perhaps) for that contention, consider to the British Royal family, whose various members have reached very old ages in recent and even not so recent times, Queen Victoria for example, despite having more than a dozen children (I think). Then there was the late Queen Mother, 101, and nearly 100 for the late Duke of Edinburgh, and late 90s for the late QE2. Besides having the best medical care of course, I suggest that at least in part it is simply the extra exercise they gained trotting around in their vast dwellings, and the grounds outside!
It is true that some monarchs of recent times, such as Edward VII and George V died quite young. But that may have been due more to over-indulging in food and tobacco products (certainly in Edward's case) or just bad luck I guess, like King Charles having cancer.
All else being equal, larger houses are better (with qualifications).
But all else is not equal. Larger houses (or houses at all as opposed to apartments) lead to lower population density, and that comes with its own drawbacks.
I prefer to live in an apartment in a walkable city with good public transport, instead of living in a house while being car dependent. And that's not poverty cope, that's just understanding trade-offs.
It would be great if we could maintain higher conversational and discussion standards than accusing (?) people with different perspective of "X cope" rather than steelmanning their position properly.
Hypothesis: the median American has fewer available out-of-the-house spaces (especially if you only consider those that could reasonably be walked to) than the median European, such that space *in* the home is more important to Americans.
It's relatively common for Americans to have a roomba or other robot that will vacuum and mop for them. So that often isn't perceived as a major issue.
I've begun to suspect I'm somewhere in the autism spectrum. I've never been able to pick up on the subtle fluctuations in emotion/vibes that normies instinctively pick up on, and a friend told me recently he feels like I'm behind a wall (I've been reading neurotypicals can't pick up on the emotions of autistics), and also, reading and interacting with other autistics is like my whole life suddenly makes a lot of sense (I also got 26 out of 30 in an online test). I mean it's either that or I have enormous subconscious emotional repression (how would I be able to tell the difference?).
At any rate, I suspect there is a higher amount of people on the spectrum here than elsewhere on the internet, and I was wondering if there is anything they would like to say about thriving as an autistic in the social/romantic domain, which I hear, can be done.
I'm curious to know what Internet test you took. I'd like to do a trustworthy test (if there is one).
I took this one:
https://www.clinical-partners.co.uk/for-adults/autism-and-aspergers/adult-autism-test
Can't tell you about validity.
thanks, looks like I passed :)
One thing that helped me was that, when I was a little kid (1st grade ish), for one summer my parents had me attend some sort of junior theater class. I got a lot of practice there in emoting, and over the years, it helped.
It's like: there's me on the inside, and then a surface on the outside, which is my face and body language. Normals have a connection between them, so that what they feel on the inside is shown on the outside, but I don't. However, I can consciously work on dredging up feelings while making the appropriate facial expressions, and eventually they start working together, like the whole "hand-eye coordination" thing.
And so the next step is that my face shows my feelings, kinda like normal people. But after that, I can also brute force empathic mirroring, by using my imagination. If I can find the sadness in someone's sad story, even if I don't care, or find the humor in someone's joke, even if I find it boring or distasteful, I can project back the right emotion and make an appropriate response. (Tabletop roleplaying and LARPs can be good practice for this.) And the thing is, at some point it stops being a conscious artifice, and becomes real empathy. I interact with people, and see in them things I like, and respond to that automatically. The emotions are there, the patterns are built in, even if I have to thump the engine a few times before it catches.
It's tricky with romance. First, because in the times when I've been head-over-heels, my head is somewhere else and so it stops working, leading me to be less good at flirting with the people I most want to flirt with. Second, because the mirroring means that I wind up reflecting back other peoples' interest, and like I said the feelings are real: other people being interested in me is not the primary criterion for whether I should be interested in them. Plus, I've noticed that I tend to have a lot of emotional inertia, whereas most other people seem more changeable. And third, building on the previous, because while flirting can be very fun, it's only appropriate if both of you are on the same page: it's unethical to lead someone on and engage their emotions, if your emotions are not similarly engaged.
> But after that, I can also brute force empathic mirroring, by using my imagination. If I can find the sadness in someone's sad story, even if I don't care, or find the humor in someone's joke, even if I find it boring or distasteful, I can project back the right emotion and make an appropriate response. (Tabletop roleplaying and LARPs can be good practice for this.) And the thing is, at some point it stops being a conscious artifice, and becomes real empathy. I interact with people, and see in them things I like, and respond to that automatically.
Holy crap, oh man, did this ever describe my experience - but not as a product of ASD.
Someone in the classified thread speculated that some of my personal quirks could be a product of ASD, but I don't think so. I don't have most of the notable ASD traits, and never did. The ones I identify with tend to be borderline cold-reader-ish ("Do you get obsessive about stuff you like?" etc). I just took an ASD quiz linked above and was on the low end of "you have a few traits."
No, I suspect my identification with your internal experience generates from a whole other "disorder," one having to do with a deficit of involuntary (eg, "normal") empathy. I hesitate to use the "p" or "s" words here, because they specifically describe an *antisocial* behavior which I don't engage in - but "brute forcing empathy via imagination" was indeed something I had to consciously do in my young adulthood until it became the mostly automatic process that it is today...assuming I've judged someone to be worth of it, and almost everyone is indeed worthy of it.
Yeah, I've wondered about that in myself. Twice it's happened that I've been woken up in the middle of the night, and the "nice" part of me wasn't online. It was just a cold reptilian thing that wanted to fix the problem and get back to sleep, and would say whatever was necessary for that, while the "nice" part of me was way back somewhere, screaming "oh, no, this will wreck everything!" I had to do some serious damage control the following mornings, but both relationships did survive.
FWIW, I think it's possible for people without our particular internal setup to learn it, at least for certain situations or classes of people. That's what I tend to call the "s" word. And I've run into one of the, well, other "n" word, let's say, and it seemed in retrospect that what was inside was alternately a roaring black void, or something like a 2.5-year old. (I'm not good with child ages, but I have some friends with a 3.5-year old, and 2.5 seems about right from that one example.)
This study is a very small sample size of people at the very extreme end of the (very criminal) "p" spectrum, but some of it felt familiar: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-empathic-brain/201307/inside-the-mind-psychopath-empathic-not-always
I often hesitate to refer to that article because only one tiny part of it resonates, but the *capacity* to opt in / out of empathy at all and perhaps even moreso a willingness to admit to it, seems to freak people out regardless of how pro-social the opt in / out behavior looks in practice.
I absolutely agree that prosocial behavior can be developed absent "normal" empathy. My chief values are fairness / justice, a result of decent parenting plus a love of storytelling (where fairness and justice are generally the guiding principle of the universe).
So in practice, I "opt in" to empathy in order to be maximally "fair" to people while I'm making a judgment about how to think/feel/interact with them. I have enough experience with both fictional and biographical stories to know that people's behaviors are usually informed by things which might not be apparent to an observer, so in order to be "fair," I am almost infinitely more ungrudging and patient and forgiving of certain kinds of unpleasant behavior than a "normie" who reflexively feels entitled to unexamined anger when they perceive an intrusion or slight. I am always ready to be "wrong" about someone "harmless" that I merely dislike.
My empathy only shuts off in response to unambiguously predatory victimizing behavior. And even then it's never reactive anger, the way it would be for a normie, but rather a sense of righteous pragmatism about wanting the threat stopped.
And, like, sorrynotsorry, but I think this framework results in a way more prosocial way of being than the normie empathetic reactivity.
But I can absolutely see how not having the framework (or some other framework of guiding principles) can send the empathic opt in / out in some truly monstrous directions.
> It's like: there's me on the inside, and then a surface on the outside, which is my face and body language. Normals have a connection between them, so that what they feel on the inside is shown on the outside, but I don't.
Haha, similar here. No matter what happens inside, good or bad, by default my face remains neutral. I need to consciously give it a little push to also show the emotion on the outside. (Or, with people who know me, I just express the emotion verbally, sometimes using a scale from 0 to 10 to express the strength of the emotion.)
Sometimes people compliment me for staying calm in situations where internally I feel I am falling apart. Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way. It's only my face staying calm, but my thinking is impaired by stress.
Huh, my face tends to run on autopilot these days, unless I get into a particularly grim mood. I sometimes wish I could add a little interrupt switch in, since it would make my life a bit easier if I didn't show what was going through my mind. I console myself that I like the enforced honesty, but it might be sour grapes. :-)
I wonder whether it would make sense to imagine normies as autists whose obsession happens to be humans... instead of trains or similar things. Just like an autist interested in trains will tell you thousand details about them, and would immediately notice that a picture of a train contains a wrong kind of wheel, a normie can tell you thousand details about celebrities, the birthdays of everyone around them, and will immediately notice a new haircut.
Autists can be shocked by strong sensory inputs, normies can be shocked by explicit discussion of things, or by thoughts that their social group would disapprove of. (Note that the social group does not necessarily refer to the mainstream. A normie rebel is triggered by thoughts that their fellow normie rebels would disapprove of.)
You need to start paying more attention to humans, no matter how boring that sounds. They *are* important, so the time invested here will pay off. But ultimately, you will never learn the same amount of information about humans (or trains) as someone who is naturally obsessed with them, so you need to focus on the most important parts. And maybe find normies who are more tolerant of someone who does not share their obsession.
Autistic women are often less visible than autistic men, for reasons that are not obvious to me. Maybe there is something about male/female brains which makes the expression of autism different. Or maybe it is different social expectations, which makes different parts of autism more or less visible. For example, in romantic relations, men are expected to approach women. So the autistic men typically screw up by "approaching in a clumsy way" and sometimes it gets reported in newspapers. Meanwhile autistic women typically screw up by "not noticing that they are approached", which means a lost opportunity for them, but does not get reported by newspapers, because from outside it seems like the normie way of rejection (i.e. not responding to subtle signals).
So.... I am out of the dating market for more than a decade, but my recommendation for a heterosexual male on a spectrum would be like this: Find an interesting girl (someone who has hobbies other than celebrity gossip). Say hello. Talk to her about her hobbies. If she refuses to talk to you, find another one. Find a moment with her alone (e.g. invite her for a walk or for a coffee/tea). At the end, tell her that you really like her and would like to spend more time with her... no pressure, it's okay when she tells you whether she likes you the next time you meet; goodbye. The next time, at the end, ask "so, this means we are dating?". (In the meanwhile, learn how to do massage and how to dance, those are basically cheat codes for progress from "no contact" to "full body on body contact" without being awkward.)
Though I've never been officially diagnosed, I'm pretty Aspergery. I had shitty social skills growing up (and some on ACX may say I still do). I'm very bad at reading facial expressions and social queues. And because we are bad at reading people — i.e. we're not picking anything up from their facial expressions and social queues — we pay attention to things that may provide us with more interest. That makes normies uneasy if you don't look like you're paying attention to them. Even though I'm bad at reading people I learned a few tricks along the way to disguise my neuro-atypicality — so normies will take me for a normie (which is half the battle). And this is advice for a cis straight males. YMMV if you're female or gay.
They are:
1. Look at people's eyes when you speak to them. Normies take that as being interested in them. Even if you're not interested in them it puts them at their ease. There are some caveats, though, and you'll need some practice to navigate them.
1a. Males may take eye contact as a threat if you hold it too long. So, if you're being introduced to somebody new and it's a male, only make eye contact while shaking their hand or fist-bumping them (as is more common in these post-COVID times). After the intro you should discontinue eye contact but look in their general direction while they're talking to you. Nodding your head will help put them at ease, even if you're thinking about something else and not paying attention to them (because, let's face it, a lot normies are pretty boring to talk to).
1b. Hold the eye contact longer with females. Don't forget to smile. Hold their gaze for a couple of seconds after you greet them. If you're attracted to them, make a point to reattach yourself to the gaze every so often during the conversation. And remember to smile whenever you catch their gaze again. If they brush their hair back with their hand, they're likely interested in you. I have no frigging clue why that is, but I had to be taught that. Normies seem to pick it up naturally. Human courtship rituals are weird. I cannot say I fully understand them. After the initial greeting ritual, when it comes time to look away DO NOT look down! — because women are likely to think you're looking at their breasts even though you aren't.
2. Remember to smile occasionally during your conversations with people. Not a big grin, but learn to curl your lips upward slightly. I found that very difficult to do. I had to practice in the mirror to not overdo it or underdo it. But after I learned to half-smile properly, I realized I could identify when other people were doing it — which gave me some more insight into the other person's internal psychological state.
3. Train yourself to keep your posture upright. Don't slouch. Normies read people who have upright postures as being confident. Even if you're not confident you want look like you're confident.
4. How's your sense of humor? Making people laugh is very important. I can't tell a joke worth shit, because I don't have a normie's ability to pace the joke (which requires a successful joke-teller to be sensitive to the vibes that other people are putting out). But I am quite good with logical absurdities. If you want an example of humor that's full of logical absurdities listen to Jerry Seinfeld's material. Don't steal his material though, because other people have probably already heard it.
5. Ask people about trivialities. As you get to know them, you'll get to know that people each have unique concerns and obsessions. If they're into gardening, ask them how their garden is doing. Try to look like you're sympathetic to their problems (even if you have no clue as to why they're getting upset about something).
5a. This is very important for dealing with female humans. They seem to be very sensitive to slights from their own sex (and they seem to be much more socially competitive than male humans). Nod a lot. And learn to make sympathetic noises and comments.
5b. Males are generally easier to socialize with because they tend to be less socially competitive than females — at least at the inter-individual level. However, males seem to be more socially competitive at the group level. You're either part of "the team" or you're not. If you are on the team, all sorts of slights and faux pas are ignored. If you're not on the team, well, you're likely not to be invited to the next BBQ or out to happy hour. Try not to talk politics, because that tends to trigger more primal emotional responses, and that will bring out the competitive team instincts in the males. Best to learn something about sports (yawn!). Make a point of knowing what the favored local sports team of the tribe is, so you can at least ask what they think their tribe's team chances are.
There's a lot to digest. Good luck. Hope I didn't piss off the normies with my advice.
You really think you're Aspie? Jeez, you don't come across that way at all to me, and I spend 10 hours a week or so talking with smart male Aspies (patients, mostly). Here's a test of facial expression reading that's pretty well thought of: https://s3.amazonaws.com/he-assets-prod/interactives/233_reading_the_mind_through_eyes/Launch.html
Got 24/36, but after extensive cheating: the "multiple choice" thing of eliminating two or three options, and taking a protracted "System 2"-type approach to choosing answers. There may be a couple (possibly but not very likely slightly more) of pictures where I could guess the answer instinctively. There were also some answers where I remained confused after being shown what the right answer was: e.g., a woman being interested or having desire is not something I can make sense of as reflected in the eyes, even after seeing the picture and being told the answer.
25 of 36, but I felt like I was guessing about half the time.
Everybody feels like they're guessing. The version of the directions I read said "if you're not sure, just go with your feeling." I felt that way when I took it too. Not quite like I was taking wild guesses, but more like, well, these eyes look irritated to me, but I may just be talking myself into that so I'll have an answer, but I guess I'll go with it. I think some of the accurate responses come from parts of us we don't have introspective access to -- like when somebody asks you how it is you angle your key jiggle & it a certain way to make your finicky lock open, and you can't tell them -- only your hands know. Same with reading faces.
I've got a response to the original comment, slightly above this, and I'd be curious to hear what you think. :-)
About half of my responses were just me looking at the words and clicking the right one without any conscious thought. The other ones, I'd be staring at the eyes, and have no clue, and I'd do the multiple-choice-test thing where I rule out one or maybe two answers, and randomly pick from the remaining answers. I guess I did a bit better than chance, so probably my proportions are off, or I still had some unconscious instinct pulling me toward the right answers.
Oh you did way better than chance. 27 or maybe it's 28 is average, so you're in the average range. I think everybody has a feeling of guessing a lot of the time, at least everybody I know who took the test. I only missed 2, and I was astounded that it was only 2, because I'd felt reasonably confident on at most 1/3 of them. If you feel that way on the SAT or a multiple choice test in a course you can be sure you're going to get a bad score, you know? I find this test fascinating because almost everybody feels very uncertain, yet most of those uncertain people I've given it to come out average or above.
13 out of 36. Many of them were just wild-ass guesses on my part. Actually, I've taken a similar test before and I scored less than random (go figure!).
Recently, some friends set me up with a nice lady. We went out a couple of times, and I was attracted to her. On our second date, I told her that I was on the spectrum and if she were interested in me she'd just have to outright tell me because I was crappy at reading signals. And I didn't say this, but I didn't want any #metoo misunderstandings (I've made a few embarrassing unwanted passes in my day — not because I was a predator but because I misunderstood the signals — and I have too much self-respect to cause women to be uncomfortable). Anyway, she didn't believe me, "but you're so sociable and funny!" That seemed encouraging, so I asked her out on a third date.
When I was younger, I'd go out on three dates with women I was interested in, and if it didn't click physically, I'd just stop calling them (because I figured further attentions from me would be unwelcome). We went out on a third date, but no kiss goodnight — but she talked about a restaurant that she wanted to try. Okay, I thought. I'd try a fourth date with her. Nothing happened on the fourth date. I dropped her off at her house. She didn't invite me in for a coffee. I figured, "Oh well, nothing ventured, nothing gained," and I wrote her off. Then she called me a couple of times and asked when we'd get together again. And she said, "I love you." Because I've learned to be cautious with my emotions, I've trained myself to dampen my feelings if I'm not getting anything back from women. Though I found her attractive early in our dating cycle, by the fourth date I figured it wasn't going anywhere, so I had fallen out of limerence with her. For some stupid reason, I went out on a fifth date with her! She was all very snuggly in the Uber to and from the restaurant, and she was very touchy-feely all through the evening. But I no longer had the spark. I was uncomfortable the whole evening. I didn't even make a token effort to kiss her good night. I didn't call her again. I'm sure she may have been puzzled and possibly hurt, but now I felt that I was being pushed into a relationship that I no longer was comfortable with. Normies are frigging crazy.
Wow, Beowulf, I don't know what to make of that. You do come across sociable and funny. And if you were that deep into Aspie-land I'd expect your sociability and humor to both be a little off, sort of overdone or underdone or, wait, how does that joke work? But none of that is the case. And I can't think of times when your responses to people here have seemed odd -- and they would if you were bad at reading people's affect and intention, unless you're better at reading people when you have their thoughts in writing, and can read between the lines. And if you're performing *below*( chance on tests like this one, that suggests that you know more than you think you know, right? Like you know the right answers some of the time, but refuse to go with them. (Though on here you performed better than chance.). Or could it be that you have prosopagnosia, and difficulty reading faces comes along for the ride with that?
Anyway, it's fine. There's something quite odd about me too. Not every oddity has a name, you know? Was wondering today what my oddity was. Looked up schizoid -- close, but no cigar.
"unless you're better at reading people when you have their thoughts in writing, and can read between the lines."
I would have thought that was obvious. Words are designed to facilitate clear and unambiguous communication, because often "Darmok and Jelad at Tanagra" has to give way to "Hand me the spanner, please - no, not the crescent wrench, the 9/16th inch spanner". And sometimes we, the normies in particular, *want* ambiguity, so we've got ways to use language for that. But ultimately, the speaker is trying to be understood and they're using a tool that's designed to facilitate clear and unambiguous communication, in a language that both parties are fluent in.
That limits the scope for misunderstanding, in a way that "communication" where 70% of the information is conveyed by intonation and microexpression and body language doesn't. Particularly when one party isn't fluent in body language.
BTW, that test was very helpful in that it gave me immediate feedback about which were the correct emotions. The other tests I've taken were paper tests, and they didn't give me any real-time feedback. Although there were some eye-expressions that I had no frigging clue about, a significant number of my mistakes were due to overthinking. If I had gone with my first choice, I would have scored significantly higher. This is an important clue to understand what's going on in my brain. Thanks!
I've bookmarked the link. I'll wait a week or so (to let the memory of the faces blur) and retake it again — but I'll go with my first choices. I bet I'll score a lot better. But damn! I wish I had this test back when I was an adolescent. If this is really all about not going with my gut feelings, I could have trained myself to be more sensitive to them, and I think I would have had an easier life (because a lot of the stress and failures in my life were due to my not having a good theory of mind when dealing with my professors, thesis advisor, bosses, and girlfriends). I'm tearing up now and it's getting hard to see what I'm typing! Shit.
Sent you an email.
I hate that sort of back and forth. It's like sine and cosine, never quite in sync.
My thing in dating situations is that I can tell when they like me, and I would like them too except that I have a bad bad feeling that it's not me they like but some construction in their mind, which they built using some parts of me as legos. And I distrust and resent them for having done that, so I don't really like them, but I maybe act like I do because I know my doubts about their view of me are sort of silly so it seems unfair to let them rule my behavior. Good luck finding a way out of that one.
I did notice sometimes where romantic interests had an idea of me in their head, which only loosely corresponded to reality. I never really managed to put that together with how I felt when infatuated, in any way that gave me anything useful to work with. It more felt like something where we all had to push through it, from both directions, over time, and eventually our models of each other would converge on reality.
Or not. :-(
So you're bad at something. Is it better to conceptualise this as a disease, or just as a skill you happen to be bad at?
If my vibe is that I'm behind a wall, is that something I'm bad at? What about all the other stuff? But sticking to the wall, I mean, I don't feel like I'm holding anything back in my interactions with this guy, so what am I supposed to do about that?
W
Not autistic myself, but have many psychotherapy patients who are. Two have partners who are also autistic, and those relationships seem to be solid and long-lasting. In both cases the people found each other not on dating apps but in college. Downside of having an autistic partner is that both parties are inclined to be avoidant of the new, and of socializing, so there's a danger of their lives contracting to hanging out indoors with the simpatico other.
Request for content: I originally found this "AI Parable" when someone asked for the same thing quite some time ago in the ACX, no idea if the same people still frequent but thought I would give it a shot.
There was some short story on some blog(?) somewhere where the premise was "everything is completely crazy and makes no sense, lots of random chaos in a world similar to ours but somewhat cyberpunk/dystopian". The closing line was something to the effect of "The machine had been talking, and I was the first to hear it speak." Or something like that. The premise was that the insanity and chaos was the work of an AI that was intentionally causing it in order to confuse people so that it could break human pattern matching and assume control/demoralize them or something similar.
I thought it was really well done, and there have been several times I'd liked to have shared it but of course I didn't bother to bookmark it and now it is lost to me. Figured I'd throw out a line just in case anyone has an idea what the heck I'm talking about!
Thanks!
Can someone link to some well-written piece that argues that yes, AI WILL take our jobs? Like doctors, lawyers, programmers and so on. From what I see most people argue to the contrary.
I think the question is not whether AI will take our job, but which one. ChatGPT-4 will not. If you ask people, most of them will assume that the currently most advance AI is as good as it ever gets, so of course they will say no. They will keep saying so, until one day they get replaced.
Important things that AI currently cannot do:
* read your company intranet
* participate in meetings, communicate with colleagues
* be legally responsible for screwing up
Connecting the AI to company internet and making sure that sensitive information will not leak is a technical problem that will be solved at one moment. Afterwards, as a software developer, I expect that soon most of my job will consist of sitting at meetings and checking what the AI did. I will be the person to yell at in the 1% of cases when the AI screws up.
Note that "taking our jobs" does not necessarily have to mean that companies will fire their existing employees. (Though yes, in the extreme case, it would mean exactly that.) It can also mean that companies stop hiring new people, especially ones freshly out of college. And what previously did 3 people, now will do 1 person supervising 3 AI agents. The salaries may even slightly increase temporarily, especially for people who can juggle more AI agents at the same time than the others. (In other words, out of 3 people, 2 may lose their jobs, and the remaining 1 may get a 50% raise.) So the reports may be inconsistent even as the loss of jobs happens.
Rich people may be willing to pay extra for human service, just because it feels instinctively better to be communicate with a human, or to be served by a human. This applies to doctors more than it does to programmers. The AI is unlikely to replace e.g. a homeopath.
Fwiw, connecting AI to company intranet is already possible (Copilot for Microsoft 365). Whether you trust Microsoft's promises that data won't leak is another matter.
I suppose in future we will expect this, and maybe have two company wikis, one that the AI can read and one that it can not.
The company source code in my experience would be mostly useless for a competitor, except as a general learning resource for software developers. A lot of code is handling company-specific processes and integrated with other software the company uses; a competitor would have to rewrite all of that, so it would probably be less work to make their own solution from scratch. A possible danger could be asking the AI to find possible exploits.
I'd like to read one too. Just googled around, mostly found clickbait and spokesman for various high-status professions saying Naw, AI will be our bitch. You know where there probably is something? One of the good Substack blogs about AI and society. But I don't think google searches return the titles of individual Substack posts. Maybe somebody here can suggest one. Actually, I can suggest a blog I like, though nobody here but me seems to follow it or take it seriously: Garbage Day, by Ryan Broderick. He's a young guy who sort of grew up on the internet, and knows all about memes and other internet phenoms that don't mean anything to me. But he's also quite smart and knows how to do all kinds of search inside of social media. Had a post a while ago where he traced the sources of some new and weird fad on Facebook - - I think it was photos of gross food, things like a plate of frozen raw egg -- and was able to tell who most of came from, and what the benefit to them was of posting this stuff. His overall view of AI is that we're fucked. Oh, remembered something else he said that I thought was smart, that I hadn't seen elsewhere. He was talking about how it's looking like search engines may soon yield AI summaries, rather than sites the content appears on, and pointed out that many people and businesses that post useful content do it as a way to advertise, or to increase their public visibility. For instance today looked at some text posts and videos explaining how to do a certain thing in Photoshop. Most of them were on sites selling related services -- become a paying member of our site, and you'll have access to our entire library of Photoshop how-tos, that sort of thing. If Photoshop queries do not drive people to their site, but instead bring an AI who sucks up their content along with that of other sites and summarizes it for the searcher, why would these sites continue to put up free useful content? The internet will come to contain fewer sources of direct info. Maybe in the future AI's will be summarizing whatever they cherry pick from summaries by earlier AI's. Reminds me of what I read about dust mites: they prefer fresh food, such as human skin flakes, but on the absence of that can eat their own feces and extract some nourishment for up to 3 cycles of feces consumption.
Who among us doesn't believe, or know in their bones, that our government at all levels, local, state and federal, fails on a regular basis. Overpromised and underdelivered. Big idea and great promises, the consequences of which they bury as they carry on. We pay a price for this, even for their small blunders. Also, don't ride a motorcycle in Michigan, or most other states for that matter. Among the dead in deer and vehicle accidents, the cyclist is over represented better than 2 to 1. Here's my writeup: https://falsechoices.substack.com/p/my-attempt-at-fairmindedness-soundly
"Who among us doesn't believe, or know in their bones, that our government at all levels, local, state and federal, fails on a regular basis."
I know this. I've known this for forty years or so, and I've been thinking about it off and on for forty years or so, and I've been talking to and reading the works of a lot of very smart people who have been thinking about it for longer still. At this point, almost every insight just downstream of "our government, at all levels, fails on a regular basis", and every proposed solution to the problem, is something I have heard many times before and dealt with as best I reasonably can.
Sometimes someone comes up with something new. But rarely is it going to be someone who thinks "Hey, did you notice that our government keeps failing us? I've got a substack where I talk about that!", is adequate reason for anyone like me to read their substack. You're going to need something more specific, and you should probably let people know what that is in your pitch.
My good fortune justfor thispost answered your comment below. This person apparently believes that more government is always the correct solution, for reasons I don't completely understand, but be that as it may. I understand I am not changing the world in any dramatic way, but I still think it's important to help people understand the government entity that created the deer problem is the one asked to manage the deer problem. There must be a connection there? 60,000 vehicle and deer accidents a year is unbelievable. And almost nothing is done about it because it would mean admitting that there management has created the problem.
"Have you considered that perhaps more government is not the answer?", does not lead me to believe that you are offering any insight that is at all novel here.
novelty? I have no novelty to offer. Just to raise awareness of the issue is my point.
I think your statement is absurd. It sounds like libertarian cant to me — so, I'm sorry, but I'm not going to be suckered into reading your substack. Government as a bureaucratic entity can be tremendously successful. Look at how successful China is at taming the anarchistic Chinese social order through their social credit system. ;-)
As for functional benefits of governments, depending on the bureaucracy, government orgs can function as well or better than corporate bureaucracies — and I've worked for some very effed up corporate bureaucracies in my day! — but also I've worked for a few excellent ones. For instance, I just got involuntarily retired from a very effed-up bureaucratic corporation. It was a nightmare just to get them to direct-deposit my severance check (even though they had been direct depositing my other paychecks for the past five years). And I needed 2 months of COBRA to hold me over before I turned 65. That was all sorts of hassle (mostly because I couldn't find anyone who could answer my questions). But the month before I turned 65, I signed up for Medicare — no fuss or bother. They warned me it may take as long as 30 days to process my application. I signed up on Friday. Got my Medicare card the following Wednesday (!). Medicare Part D was a different story, though. Because private insurance companies handle that, they're competing for your business. Sales people outright lied to me. Getting the formularies was next to impossible from some of the providers. What a pain in the ass! The government part was efficient and painless though.
OTOH, do you really want governments to be too efficient? If you're a libertarian, I bet in your heart of hearts you don't. But I'm OK with the US government when it's been efficient. For instance, they've done a bang-up job rounding up and charging the January 6 coup rioters. More than 1,250 people have been charged with federal crimes. And more than half have either had their trial or pleaded out. Last I heard, the FBI is only still looking for 80 of the bastards. Damn! That's efficiency!
Absurd, eh? 60,000 deer and vehicle accidents in 2023, last year I could find the stats. This after millions of man hours 'managing' the deer herd. All the numbers in the article are real. And it's not a question of efficiency. You are hired to manage the deer herd, so the bigger the herd the greater the job security, the greater are the career prospects. I spent many years not believing that people respond to perverse incentives, but I can't argue against the idea any more. Glad you have your health care setup, at any rate.
Back when I lived in New England (35 years ago) hoof rats were becoming a real nuisance. My state's wildlife department hired professional hunters to cull the herds. Popular outrage was so intense that they dropped the plan. So the conflicting wills o' the people prevented anything from being done ("stop the deer from eating my garden, but don't kill them!") AFAIK, Uncle Malthus is still providing herd control and they're starving every winter. But I hear that cougars, bears, and possibly wolves have been spotted in my old neighborhood. Now its "OMG there was a cougar in my backyard! Please get rid of it, but don't kill it!"
(Tangentially, I remember a few decades ago when I was laughing at a story about people in some town (or suburb?) in the Rockies-area who were complaining about wolf sightings. I was laughing because the town was called "Wolf Creek".)
I do, but I struggle to come up with alternatives.
We can't ask government to run everything, to solve every problem, to manage every detail. We just open up the door to a never ending cascade of rules and regulations that have made life ridiculous. The administrative state is the issue, it's first and foremost goal is to enlarge the administrative state.
Big changes coming to manifold. Probably at the end of this month, full details not yet announced. What we do know is they're trying to reduce the availability of mana, in particular by removing the loan system. This just confirms what I've been saying for a while now: giving out loans doesn't work. It's extremely expensive for them, and doesn't really increase the prediction accuracy of long-run questions, as people on both sides just keep shoveling mana into popular questions.
The only thing loans achieve are to overleverage everyone, with no risk-of-ruin for the users: If my predictions don't pan out, I can just walk away from my account. I don't owe manifold anything for having a negative balance, since mana isn't a real currency. And I do think we'll see more and more such bankruptcies as some of the larger markets start resolving.
I'm sure you have posted this elsewhere, but I think providing a link to your prior (correct) prediction that this obviously sucked would be incredibly impressive, especially if you happened to use the same wording as manifold's announcement. At least having it available to crow about when the change gets made is good.
People often say things like "I predicted this" and then, when you look at their past writings they had something really vague and you're extremely disappointed, which is why being on record is great.
8 months ago: https://manifold.markets/market/will-manifold-lower-the-loan-rate-f?tab=comments#ykUTZRVml8wYzec48b0q
"""
For less careful users, this just means that a bunch of them wipe out way into the negative, and a small amount shoot up to balances in the millions. Since manifold doesn't charge users for negative mana, this means they'll be giving away a lot of mana.
For reference: starting from 1000 and reinvesting into the same market every day, a user will have a position in that market of 91K after a year, 314K after 2 years.
"""
Some more comments 2-3 months ago:
https://manifold.markets/market/in-2028-will-an-ai-be-able-to-gener?tab=comments#hI5n7NrwB7fgZhgFao9Q
https://manifold.markets/market/will-the-ai-movie-market-reach-25-f?tab=comments#3guxdud3UgP6URfwBoUs
Does Slavoj Zizek have a speech impediment? Or is it an accent?
His S sounds are sort of slurpy, like he is making them with his teeth and tongue at the sides of his mouth rather than the front. You can hear it very clearly here:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Sq3wkkX_lbo
The way he pronounces English /s/ and /z/ doesn't seem to be a part of the standard Slovenian accent: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2oB5SdLQ18
Both.
I remember a science fiction short story which consisted of a conversation between two people far in the future about the planet from which Man originated.
They don't know which one it is, and can't figure it out, but they ask a computer, and the computer brings up a readout.
At which point they're both disappointed at how unexceptional it is.
This feels wrong to me; they should have been able to find it themselves, with virtually no effort. That readout is going to say things like:
orbital period: 1 year
daily cycle: 1 day
surface pressure: 1 atmosphere
surface gravity: 1 g
I also have my doubts about a setting where, even though Earth is still inhabited, and information about it is readily available if you know what to ask for, and the historical information is still recorded that it is the origin of humankind, it might nevertheless not be well-known to everyone. A more plausible version of the above readout might be:
𝗘𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗵
orbital period: 1 Earth year
(...etc.)
It's worth noting that over a sufficiently long timescale all of these parameters are subject to change. Orbital period is increasing, as is the length of the day, and surface pressure varies wildly depending on atmospheric conditions. The only thing that's relatively fixed is surface gravity and even that could be altered with some mega-engineering projects.
Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky does something related/
A spacefaring civilisation, time is no longer tied to the rotation of any particular planet.
it's just a count of seconds since 1st January 1970.
And the characters have forgotten the real reason why/ (They think its the apollo moon landings, but really its Unix epoch)
As others have pointed out, that's The Last Question by Isaac Asimov. You can read it yourself here: https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~gamvrosi/thelastq.html
By the time that conversation happens it's so far into the future that humans have spread beyond the Milky Way, Sol has reached the end of its lifespan, and no one even has physical bodies anymore, let alone lives on Earth.
Given a big enough space empire, they might start using another planet's measurement systems. Or they might give in to rationality and the metric system, and stop basing units on accidents of geography. So you could end up with something like:
Orbital period: 1.21 imperial years
Daily cycle: 0.91 imperial days (9.1 imperial hours)
Surface pressure: 101,325 Pa
Surface gravity: 9.8 m/ss
Minor spoilers for Asimov's Foundation series below.
This wasn't the entire point of the story, but a throwaway conversation between two characters near the end of Asimov's "The Last Question" comes pretty close. The two characters actually ask which is the original _galaxy_, then star, but the computer tells them the star has gone supernova long ago.
Also by Asimov, in one of the later Foundation books (probably "Foundation and Earth"), the main characters are searching for the (long-abandoned) earth and find it exactly because of these units (the year, at least) and the moon, but it turns out there was an independent actor deliberately obfuscating its location. (At this point in future history no one really knows where the year came from, and months are completely out of use.)
Funny how memories get distorted over time. I read the Foundation series many years ago, and I remember the search for Earth very differently:
The galactic empire mostly erased knowledge of Earth because they felt it undermined the capital planet's specialness, and it stays erased after the empire's fall. The protagonists manage to find a description of the solar system, but they don't believe it; too many unusual features in one place.
They find it by reinventing archeology. They investigate planets where human habitation was short-lived, and figure out how old the ruins are. Just as they'd hoped, ruins closer to Earth tend to be older. They zero in on a star named Alpha, which as far as they can tell means First. It's Alpha Centauri, and the locals there know where Earth is.
They go there, and are surprised to find the description they found was accurate. Sure enough, there are Saturn's rings, and Earth's huge moon that looks the same as the sun when you're on Earth. (Even if they had believed the description, they couldn't have just looked up which star system has those features; there's no database will all that information.) Also Earth's day and year are pretty close to the galactic calendar (the empire dropped leap years at some point), but, again, that's not how the find the place.
I know this has been asked many times across the internet over the years, but I figured there's at least a chance that this blog might be frequented by Netflix engineers who know something about 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?
The history is instructive. Maybe even an agentic systems takeaway way at the end, if you make it.
Back in 2006, Netflix launched the Netflix Prize, a competition inviting the public to improve their recommendation algorithm. At the time, people were waiting for DVDs to arrive, and if you got a dud, it was pretty disappointing because with round trips you wasted multiple days of your subscription with one less good movie from the service. The prize was famously won in 2009 by a team that improved the algorithm by 10%. This was a significant improvement for a recommendation engine that was already tuned by the company.
(Future Netflix prizes were canceled for fears of the Video Privacy Protection Act, which is a whole different story...)
And the recommendation engine was good. Sometimes it just agreed you'd like movies you knew you'd like, the genres with all the actors you like. But sometimes it would throw a curveball from a completely new genre, and if you took a chance it could be sublime, like having a friend with eclectic tastes who knew you better than you knew yourself.
One problem was... most people didn't like to rate things on 10 point scales. Or even 5 point scales. Or rate anything at all. So the ratings system became as simple as possible to avoid turning people off from rating completely, they kept trying to get more signal from less information.
And also the product changed. Streaming meant no more two days wait, so you can cater more to the mood of the person in the moment rather than trying to target some objectified ideal of the person's favorite movie.
Also people often highly rated things they didn't often watch. There were famous lists of the longest kept DVDs, with wrenching Academy Award winners just sitting on coffee tables for a month before returned. In general you might rate art films higher, but right now you just want to turn off your brain and watch something with explosions.
As people defected from ratings and wanted movies catering to specific moods, Netflix tried an era of hyperspecialized categories, to target those sub-sub-genres you liked or wanted to try. There were jokes about it, because you could filter on categories like "critically-acclaimed romantic dance movies" or "romantic crime movies based on classic literature" or "raunchy mad-scientist comedy" or "mistaken-identity movies for ages 5 to 7" (each of these had exactly one entry).
This worked a bit, and gave useful data to Netflix on what shows it might want to produce to fill some of these gaps.
Then someone realized internally that with streaming, the ideal metric wasn't watching a show that changed your life, it was just time on site. If you want to max time on site, you find filler content. Opiates not psychedelics. You don't find a series of profound life changing films or spectacles that people need to go digest and think about before even attempting another film because they know somehow nothing will ever come close. You want empty calories. Something cozy and familiar, so Netflix can become like a fireplace in your living room, always there, always on, always watching your decisions and learning about how to encourage you to keep it on.
So the recommendation engine stopped trying to be a recommendation engine. It is now providing a plausible default for somebody who just wants to put something on and doesn't care too much what. It's not trying to help you find the next great film you will love, it's just trying to be a digital comfort blanket and send you something familiar, on repeat, forever. And if that is not really your passion then you might not really be the target audience anymore.
The system started out targeting the sublime, making people watch a movie they would really remember for the next week as they waited for the next one. Eventually it started targeting satisficing, just keeping people plugged in. The general numbers go up, but I think at the expense of moments of profundity, revelation, and self-discovery.
If you want an overwrought analogy to AI, maybe it's a cautionary tale that illustrates that you don't need to maximize for paperclips to destroy human value. Even if you just shift slightly what aspect of human welfare you're prioritizing, you can end up with a radically different trap and arguably much worse outcome.
Huh. It almost sounds like the mailing delay was the key there. We went from thinking ahead about what we want, and prioritizing based on limited resources, to feeding whatever mood we happened to be in.
(And yes, excellent post, thank you!!!)
A lot of people do rewatch shows, and a lot of people just put on Netflix as white noise while they're doing some task or falling asleep. And while they could easily separate the "watch again" section from the new recommendations, I guess it's easier for the customer to navigate it you don't.
So in addition to the reasons mentioned by others, maybe it's also something people legitimately want.
There is a recurring discussion on Hacker News on the topic "when I buy [a refrigerator] from Amazon, why do they then continually recommend that I buy more?" (where [a refrigerator] could be any large, expensive object of which it is obvious that you're not going to need a second one).
In one case, there was a response from an Amazon engineer who didn't work on the recommendations team, who said "I've asked them about this in the past and they always swear up and down that a previous purchase is the strongest signal of likelihood to buy one of these objects. I've looked into a few different examples that caught my eye and in every case I was able to show that the pattern was spurious (for example, that these "repeat purchases" were actually returns, in which the customer was sent two [refrigerators] but only paid for one), but it's not worth the effort of correcting the team product-by-product".
> 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'm not sure I agree with that; my primary objection, when I look at what Netflix has to offer, is that none of it is even remotely attractive. It's hugely embarrassing to them. Displaying shows that I've already watched neatly sidesteps the issue that they've lost all the licenses for content that someone might actually want to watch; the average quality of that display is going to appear high. Any time I try to look for something new to watch, that's when I get a strong sense that Netflix has died.
The explanation I've heard for appliances is that sometimes you buy one and you don't like it so you get a different one. The odds of this happening aren't particularly high, but they're higher than the odds of you buying the appliance in a random month.
Even if it were the case for physical purchases, you wouldn't expect the same pattern to hold for watching movies.
But I'm observing that it isn't the case for physical purchases, and yet the recommendations team treats it like it is, because they're looking at some behavior that isn't relevant to their goals for reasons that don't show up in the data summaries they work from.
This can easily also be true for Netflix.
For example, I find it easy to imagine that two people share a Netflix account and one of them watches a show, likes it, and recommends that the other one should watch it too. Netflix has a tool specifically to combat this problem, distinct personal accounts within a family account, but not everybody's going to bother with that.
My guess is that the team that wrote the module that recommends shows is different from the team that wrote the module that tracks what shows you've watched. Perhaps there's some intermediate phase where they look at your viewing history, try to reduce your complex human personality into a few buckets and bits, and then pass that along.
Alternatively, maybe people actually do re-watch shows a lot, and the recommendation engine is doing its job well? I know some people like to have the TV playing in the background.
Maybe those shows are owned by Netflix, so it's like putting the store brand toilet paper in a prominent spot?
I guess I've always assumed that Netflix's "recommendations" are little more than paid advertisements -- aren't they ?
I have found that "recommendations" nowadays generally are what the company wants you to do, not necessarily what would be best or even good for you.
Wouldn't that be Netflix paying itself? I don't see where the money could be coming from.
Hm. They want you signing up, and maintaining a subscription. But actually watching anything is going to be a cost for them, both in use of technical resources, and in royalty payments. I'm assuming they're ignoring the technical resource side of the costs, but it's amusing to speculate that they aren't. ;-)
What is the opposite of "leaving money on the table"? "Taking money off the table" might make sense, but I'm looking for something along the lines of, "driving too hard of a bargain such that a deal doesn't even happen in the first place".
(Something something pareto, abundance curses, etc.)
Getting paid.
Not leaving money on the table.
"Taking money off the table" is already in use in an unrelated meaning.
"Negotiate yourself out of a deal."
Edit- Weird. Google returns few results for this phrase, but my father used to use it all the time.
I think "talk yourself out of a deal" might be a more common variation.
I think we have a winner. Bonus points for being a "Dad"-ism!
Overfishing?
"Making perfect the enemy of good" is something like that, but more general.
As some of you may know, I recently founded the company Open Asteroid Impact (openasteroidimpact.org) on April 1st. Some people complained that there was too much text. While a bit on the late side, we now have a video! It's an interview that covers our company's strategy, safety plan, DEI policies, windfall clause, and more!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCzaE9sklrI
A very cogent presentation of your organisation, and I appreciate your commitment to supporting neurodivergence!
Short and to the point!
Are you ok?
[out of character]
Clearly the guy just didn't think I was funny, and sought to make his displeasure known. It's a bit ruder than what I'm used to but hey. That's one of the costs of being on the public internet.
What's fun to do in Redwood City? I'm moving there soon
Believe it or not, Downtown Redwood City will actually be top 10% "fun" in the Bay Area. There's a few walkable bars and I love Sandwich Spot. You'll soon find yourself travelling to SF or downtown Palo Alto though... For more natural amenities, you'll be pretty close to the beach in Half Moon Bay and a few hours from skiing in the Sierra Nevada mountains
Downtown RWC is really quite nice.
Make fun of the dopes who bought property in Foster City, since they'll be underwater any day now.
But seriously, what's fun in Redwood City may be the wrong question. Redwood City is part of a continuous strip of suburbs reaching from Millbrae to Santa Clara. It might make more sense to ask what's fun to do in central Silicon Valley.
Well, Redwood City has a DMV office, which is more than most of those suburbs can say. I had to go there once to renew my driver's license, which is one of the most fun things I've done in Redwood City.
Woah, there. I hope during your wild adventures in the big city, you stopped to refuel at Redwood City's many fine dining establishments, like Panda Express, Taco Bell, and Burger King.
Hi everyone, I am currently writing about psychiatric advanced directives, particularly for bipolar disorder or other types of disorders that may involve involuntary treatment; if you have any experience with these kinds of advanced directives, either in issuing them as a patient, or enacting them as a practitioner, and you're open to talk about them, please contact me, I'd like to feature original sources rather than just look at all the metastudies about this. My gmail is hiphination.
I just want to say I love your podcast!
Love you back Nihal.
I wrote a longer thread about the figure that I adapted from Pekar 2021:
https://twitter.com/tgof137/status/1778584767619043415
I captioned it accurately in my blog post:
https://twitter.com/tgof137/status/1778584788036890803
But I pared down all the text for my debate slides so that ended up not being clear. Sorry for any confusion there.
Let's hope I don't end up in jail for this:
https://twitter.com/breakfast_dogs/status/1778169418419478714
And at least they're not threatening to execute me, yet:
https://twitter.com/AGHuff/status/1725715568874135694
I also think this is all kind of funny because Saar explicitly responded to that slide by saying he doesn't care about any dates:
https://twitter.com/tgof137/status/1778584795163119748
And we later ended up comparing epidemic models where Saar/Yuri proposed a late September introduction with half the doubling rate, as compared to my proposed late November introduction at the market.
It would be an interesting debate to go over various models with sufficient detail to compare Pekar's 2021 and 2022 models, evaluate the impact of the first ascertained case on start date, build confidence intervals on case numbers at various dates, decide on a range of values for epidemic growth rate parameters, and so on. But that is certainly not the debate that we did have.
The long-awaited final version of the Independent review of gender identity services for children and young people (aka the Cass Report) was released this week. It's a ginormous meta-study and it makes recommendations for the UK's NHS about what the optimal healthcare approaches for treating children with gender dysphoria should be. In her intro, Dr Hilary Cass writes: "This Review is not about defining what it means to be trans, nor is it about undermining the validity of trans identities, challenging the right of people to express themselves, or rolling back on people’s rights to healthcare."
The report is written in a low-affect style that may disguise the seriousness of its salient points. But it's clear from reading it that a lot of what some people in the debate declare is settled science is not settled at all — for instance, treatments such as puberty blockers are being prescribed with little good data about their long-term effects. I haven't heard if any similar comprehensive review like this is being done in the US. Cass makes various recommendations, the most important of which (to my mind) are to get better long-term data on intervention outcomes.
This BMJ editorial doesn't mince words, though...
"The evidence base for interventions in gender medicine is threadbare, whichever research question you wish to consider—from social transition to hormone treatment.
"For example, of more than 100 studies examining the role of puberty blockers and hormone treatment for gender transition only two were of passable quality. To be clear, intervention studies—particularly of drug and surgical interventions—should include an appropriate control group, ideally be randomised, ensure concealment of treatment allocation (although open label studies are sometimes acceptable), and be designed to evaluate relevant outcomes with adequate follow-up.
"One emerging criticism of the Cass review is that it set the methodological bar too high for research to be included in its analysis and discarded too many studies on the basis of quality. In fact, the reality is different: studies in gender medicine fall woefully short in terms of methodological rigour; the methodological bar for gender medicine studies was set too low, generating research findings that are therefore hard to interpret. The methodological quality of research matters because a drug efficacy study in humans with an inappropriate or no control group is a potential breach of research ethics. Offering treatments without an adequate understanding of benefits and harms is unethical. All of this matters even more when the treatments are not trivial; puberty blockers and hormone therapies are major, life altering interventions...."
The complete report can be downloaded here...
https://cass.independent-review.uk/home/publications/final-report/
The link to BMJ editorial is here...
https://www.bmj.com/content/385/bmj.q837?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Sometimes, it;s basicallly impossible to do a plecebo controlled study/
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy has this issue, because you actually know if youve had therapy. This doesnt mean that we should ban CBT on principle as being impossible to evaluate. (Though, some care in interpreting trials may be in order)
Similarly, you cant plecebo control hormones, because the subject is aware of the effects/
There is also some discussion on different types of placebo effect that could be had...
a. some people randomly get better with many medical conditions. need to show tteatment is better than people getting better anyway
b. experimenter pleasing. patients are, effectivly, coerced inro saying the tteatment worked when it didnt. need to reduce the piossibility of this form of coercion
c. some kind of theory that the immune system uses information about your mental state, and believing you are being treated somehow kicks the immune system into overdrive. nb. there asre reasons to suspect this would be evolutionary advantageous
Rougly, theory is that mammals have to budget calorie expediture between running away from pedators and fighting off infection. An adaptation that throws more energy into the immune system when your not otherwise needing to expend calories on not dying would be evolutionary advantageous.
And large placebo effects with antideprssants might be a different mechanism.
it courred to me a while ago you could just tell yourself youve taken an antidepressant wihtout actually needing to get them preescribed. I mean, if the effect is almost entirely placebo, sugar pills are great.
How can you in principle conduct longterm double blind study of a treatment that has very obvious and well known effects several months in? I suppose, you can still make it double blind on paper, while in actuality everyone knows perfectly well whether they are in a control group or not, but what's even the point then?
On a related note, puberty blockers have been in use for decades for precocious puberty. How were the studies conducted back then? Were they double blind somehow? Do we accept their quality? Can we extrapolate the results of these studies for the new application? If no, why not?
It really seems that whatever long term side effects puberty blockers might have they should have already been discovered during their research and continuous use for treatment of precocious puberty. Theoretically, there may be some class of side effects which, for some reason, is not expressed specifically in patients with precocious puberty but the expected disutility of it appears quite low.
Presumably the puberty blockers are used with different timing in the two cases. It is entirely plausible that a puberty-blocking drug would have different side effects when used to delay the onset of puberty to the normal time versus delaying it until much later than usual.
I'm having a hard time taking the report seriously. How, exactly, are you supposed to do a blind control group for puberty blockers? It will be pretty obvious if you're still going through puberty, you can't placebo yourself into just not maturing. And some of these charts are *obviously* bullshit. The worst that I've seen so far, Figure 18, suggests that the gayest of boys are barely more interested in male partners than the least male-attracted girls. And every single curve in that chart is the exact same shape, and it implies that NO girls identify more with male gender than any boys, which is just obviously untrue because boys and girls identifying with the other gender is the entire *reason this study happened*. I'd expect better from a middle school science fair poster.
At this point I've stopped reading. It may be that my early skim has just picked out a couple of weak spots, but if a random sample of it is this bad I am not expecting the rest of it to be any better.
Listen, Beowulf is smart and critical and willing to call bullshit on anything and anybody. If he takes this report seriously then IMHO it's worth reading in full.
Why, thank you, Eremolalos!
But to answer Unsaintly's question, the Cass report discusses this question in their chapter on Evidence-based Medicine in which they discuss the limitations of the current studies and they suggest methodological improvements.
But the bigger question here, Unsaintly, is why are you having trouble taking the report seriously if you haven't even bothered to glance at it? This seems to be the rationalist method, though — come up with reasons to support one's position without looking at the evidence.
I admit this report is huge, and I'll probably never get through the whole thing, but I was curious enough to check it out and bring it to this group's attention. What blows my mind is that most of the critical comments have come from people who are (a) either too lazy or too prejudiced against it to bother to look at it, and then (b) fail to mount an evidence-based argument against it.
It's all very tiresome.
Seconding Eremolalos' comment on it "not being the rationalist method, but a common result anyways"; the issue is at least partially one of time.
Namely, "the first replies will tend to be from people who haven't read whatever you're saying/linking/etc.", roughly proportionately to how long it takes to read it (and/or find time to read it in depth). Possibly with an additional multiplier for how much other interesting reading there is available in the vicinity.
It's not the rationalist method, it's just that most of us are smart, stubborn, opinionated and articulate, so spouting opinions is our default mode.
...and never bring an opinion to a data fight.
I get how irritating it must be that almost nobody (or literally nobody?) read some of the thing on the strength of your post. You brought a big chunk of info about something people argue and speculate about here. That's like bringing home a big fresh kill for the tribe to feast on, and instead we all just sat on our rocks and kept speculating and arguing. I did that myself. Though Anon eventually got me to consider seriously the idea that transsexuals did not exist before the 1800's. But I am sort of impervious to new info these days. I am writing a novel and all the flow valves are set to out. I canceled all my news subscriptions, and don't even own a TV. Anything big I'll hear through the grapevine anyhow
>How, exactly, are you supposed to do a blind control group for puberty blockers? It will be pretty obvious if you're still going through puberty, you can't placebo yourself into just not maturing.
You do a blind control group by giving the control group a placebo and not telling them they're the control group. Just because they may be able to figure out that they're taking a placebo through observation doesn't invalidate it. Many blind control groups for medications are in the same boat, where the fact that the pill doesn't do anything opens the possibility of participants noticing that they're in the control group. You still have to do it anyway if you're going to have any idea what the effects of the medication you're studying actually are.
>Figure 18, suggests that the gayest of boys are barely more interested in male partners than the least male-attracted girls. And every single curve in that chart is the exact same shape, and it implies that NO girls identify more with male gender than any boys, which is just obviously untrue because boys and girls identifying with the other gender is the entire *reason this study happened*.
I checked the paper that she gets that chart from, and can confirm that the cart she presents is directly from that paper. Sadly I don't understand statistical analyses well enough to critique the paper itself, but here's what the paper had to say about it:
"Conventionally, d values of 0.8 or greater for group differences in human behavior/psychology are considered large, those of about 0.5 are considered moderate, those of about 0.2 are considered small, and those below 0.2 are considered negligible. The d value for the sex difference in height is 2.0. Most human behavioral/psychological sex differences are smaller in magnitude than the sex difference in height, but a few are larger. For instance, the sex differences in gender identity and sexual orientation are larger...This sex difference in gender identity is very large with an approximate d value greater than 10.0 (Hines et al., 2003a, 2004). Sexual orientation refers to the direction of a person’s erotic interests, e.g., in males, females, both or neither. Most people who have female-typical external genitalia are interested primarily in male partners, whereas most people who have male-typical external genitalia are not. This sex difference also is large, with an approximate d value of more than 5.0 (Hines et al., 2003a, 2004; Meyer-Bahlburg et al., 2008)."
I could see that chart being accurate: most men are not gay, and most women are not lesbians, so it would make sense that the vast majority of women are more attracted to men then the men who are most attracted to men. Similarly, most people do not have gender identity disorder, so it makes sense that even those with gender dysphoria may not identify with their chosen gender more than cisgender individuals.
> Just because they may be able to figure out that they're taking a placebo through observation doesn't invalidate it.
Of course it does? I mean, what's the point of double blind studies in the first place, in your opinion? So that people can publish *technically still double blind* studies in papers? Or is it about finding things about reality, regardless of researchers and participants beliefs?
We can say that when the chance of figuring it out is low, then the double blindness protocol is invalidated less. But with longterm puberty blockers study the chance of discovering whether you are in the control group or not is around 100%.
I think what FLWAB means is that in order to check the assumption that a treatment has obvious effects, you have to do a study that doesn't already assume the effects will be obvious.
Yup. The point of a double blind study is to find out what your medication actually does.
I think the most interesting angle on this is the question of how one _would_ properly study gender dysphoria treatments.
And this is where I regret the polarization in our discussion. Half the population seems to have concluded that gender affirmation treatments are an absolute right and that it would be horrible to deny any kids as much treatment as their doctor and/or parents can push. The other half thinks any such treatment is self-evidently child abuse and thus totally bans it. So it's hard to see a context in which the kind of 'high quality' study the Cass report asks for can happen in the US.
It looks like Europe is doing better than we are at actually asking the important questions, and hopefully we'll be able to learn from them.
I don't know how one could do a proper study of the psychological aspects of gender dysphoria treatments, but studying the medium-term and long-term physical effects of puberty blockers does not seem undoable. You compare height, weight, bone strength, general health etc. of people who used them and people who are otherwise similar who did not use them. There are some subgroups whose development would also give useful info: People who took puberty blockers for a relatively short period then stopped. People who took them but never followed up with male or female hormones.
Yeah, I would definitely agree, though it's worth noting that nobody is taking these for physical health, so measuring mental health would be a necessary component. The goal is to give doctors/families/kids advice on side effects, not necessarily to prove that these drugs are per se harmful.
Anecdotally, a common story among many adolescents who detransitioned in adulthood is that many of them do not regret the treatment even if they changed their mind. I would love more rigorous data here, but it's possible these treatments have worthwhile benefits on mental health even if there are physical side effects and even if the treatment doesn't stick.
But that's a tricky balance.
> nobody is taking these for physical health
As far as I know, that’s not true. They were initially developed to push premature puberty. The daughter of a family friend got her puberty with 8 and took the blockers for I think 4 years und then stopped using them. She is around 35 now and the last thing that I heard is that she is doing fine.
Yes, I have heard informally that a majority of children taking puberty blockers are undergoing medical therapy to correct an otherwise messed-up puberty. This was cited as serious potential collateral damage from efforts in Texas to ban use of the drugs. I can't offer any sources at the moment.
If we were asking the question de novo, that would be the appropriate course, I think.
But we don't seem to be. I don't claim deep expertise here but my understanding is that puberty blockers have been in use for decades now, and while the evidence for their benefits is unclear, so is the evidence for their drawbacks. That's well short of a good medical study, but it's also not nothing.
To me, this justifies neither 'full speed ahead' or a complete ban, and from what I can read, the Cass report comes to the same conclusion: we should exercise more caution than we currently are, and should try to do better science. But it falls short of endorsing the sort of complete ban that we're seeing in many states.
Previous usage of puberty blockers is a red herring. It was universally used to delay precocious puberty to the natural timing. This is like arguing that since we have treated diabetes with insulin with tolerable side effects, we can therefore give people arbitrary amounts of insulin and it will never be an issue. But in reality, Hypoglycemia (caused by excess insulin) is very dangerous. In general as a rule-of-thumb, medication used to replicate the healthy natural human state can not be expeected to safely be used to push a human beyond the natural state. That doesn't mean everything unnatural is therefore bad, but it does mean that you have to be increasingly cautious the further you move away from the natural.
Why is precocious puberty considered to be a health problem? The only *possible physical* problems that I see listed are (a) an early growth spurt that *may* cause shorter stature, or (b) *possible* abnormal weight gain in girls. All the rest of the negative effects listed for precocious puberty seem to be emotional and psychological. Not that I want to discount the emotional/psychological component, but couldn't counseling handle that downside better and more safely than puberty blockers?
The NHS website says that puberty is considered precocious if it's before 8 for girls, or before 9 for boys. The idea of going through puberty at 7 is pretty awful to me, never mind even earlier than that. And even then, puberty blockers are only considered "if it's thought early puberty will cause emotional or physical problems, such as short height in adulthood or early periods in girls, which may cause significant distress." So it sounds like even puberty as young as 6 or 7 isn't automatically handled with blockers, although that's just from reading the website, I don't have any first or secondhand personal knowledge.
Mental health is far too complicated and individual for such blanket statements. Outside of transgender stuff, lots of cases of e.g. depression and anxiety respond far better to medication than to any form of counselling.
I'm skeptical that counseling will adequately handle either "my body is changing in ways I don't understand and none of my friends are going through this and I'm a GIANT FREAK", or "I really really want to have sex now but that would be a very bad idea and also massively illegal".
Can't we use Scott's "hairdryer" argument here, just as in the case of using puberty blockers for trans people? On the one hand, sure, we could engage in a lot of counseling and therapy, but on the other hand, why not just fix the problem?
I'm not deeply knowledgable either, but just googled puberty blockers advantage disadvantage, & Mayo Clinic listed these undesirable side effects: Possible effects on growth spurts (there's usually a big growth spurt in the year before puberty, with kids growing several inches), bone growth, bone density & fertiity.
I'm not sure why they're saying "possible effects" rather than "effects": maybe because of what was mentioned in Cass report of poor quality of most studies.
I would be surprised if there were not some substantial downsides to interfering with puberty: a crucial, profound, one-time developmental step. The process is probably very complex with many intertwined processes going on, and later maturational processes dependent on the changes at puberty, including of course the gender-specific hormones. Seems very unlikely to me that we could use one drug to stop the body from making the transition of puberty without interfering with a whole bunch of other things.
One of the obvious advantages of puberty blockers is that they make extensive cosmetic surgery unnecessary or at least much less necessary and less extensive.
It doesn't look good when we have used something for long time and still don't have good evidence that it is efficient and safe. It could be a snake oil or something worse. Most ineffective treatments or therapies are in this category.
What prevents collecting good evidence? When the therapy is ineffective or worse, all such evidence is buried and discarded. Instead poor quality evidence that shows some effectiveness is published.
It is very difficult to conduct human trials up to legal and ethical standards for publication in peer-reviewed journals. And this doesn't seem like an area of medical practice where there is a lot of profit to be made (compared to something like a glp-1 agonist for example). Lack of potential for profitable drugs or treatment makes it less likely for research to be privately supported, and because it is socially controversial, there are probably hurdles to public research funding and other resources.
There is a Slate Star Codex piece which breaks this down in the context of research that Scott Alexander was interested in conducting. You might find it relevant if you don't interact with research or structures like an Institutional Review Board https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/29/my-irb-nightmare/
That's not obvious to me given that the lack of treatment can have equally huge, life-altering consequences. With out clear answers either way I would default to using some mix of the best judgement of the patient, their doctors, and if the patient is a child their legal guardians, although when those people don't all agree it's not obvious how to weight their different opinions.
Can you give some examples of where lack of treatment in teenage years has had detrimental outcomes? Please link to studies. One common assertion is that it lowers the chance of teen suicides, but Cass addresses this...
86. It has been suggested that hormone
treatment reduces the elevated risk of death
by suicide in this population, but the evidence
found did not support this conclusion.
Are you actually disputing that puberty has life-long, irreversible effects on the human body? I don't think I can be bothered to look for a study either way but under the circumstances I don't think it's really necessary.
To what extent that's "detrimental" is a little more complicated but again I believe pretty strongly that people should have the right to make their own choices about their own bodies- I think the burden of proof falls on the people who want to override their right to do that.
I'm not sure what your point is, but I didn't argue that. Yes, puberty has life-long irreversible effects on the human body. But going back to first-causes — and baring hormonal adjustments from the medical profession — our 23rd chromosome pair is the ultimate determinate of puberty and our biological sex. If one goes through gender reassignment therapy, one may be made to look like the opposite sex, but one will not be able to reproduce your 23rd pair. Considering that we don't really know the long-term health effects of hormonal therapies, it seems like a risky choice to make, especially if one isn't an adult.
I'll ask the question again: can you give some examples (research studies) of where lack of treatment in teenage years has had detrimental outcomes? Otherwise we're arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of pin.
Right, and while we're making hypotheticals that do not align with the evidence (since the report above went out of its way to *not* be about gender dysphoria), if the great majority of children with gender dysphoria DO NOT "recover naturally with no long-term harm", then it is in fact obvious that making it more difficult to access these treatments is a bad idea.
In the interim, though, it seems reasonable to provide treatment options that the overwhelming majority of people asking for them have said were beneficial, and insist on better research going forward so we can come to a sane conclusion, instead of making decisions based on "no evidence" (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-phrase-no-evidence-is-a-red-flag).
Well yes if you assume we know that. But we were just talking about how there's a shortage of high-quality evidence available.
Also, this... A longitudinal study from the Netherlands about gender non-contentedness in teens. Turns out that gender non-contentedness peaks at the beginning of adolescence (age 11) and steadily declines until age 19, at which point it plateaued. The authors found that, overall, 78% of the children never experienced gender non-contentedness (gender dysphoria); 19% experienced gender non-contentedness that declined with age; and 2% experienced gender non-contentedness that increased with age.
By age 25, the share of people who always felt gender non-contentedness was 0.75% for men and 0.5% for women.
Question: given that some interventions are irreversible, shouldn't we wait until individuals reach adulthood before they choose their final gender identity?
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-024-02817-5
One thing in life the provides a bit of an analogue to puberty blockers is training to be an elite athlete, where kids spend a vast amount of time training, miss a bunch of the stuff they'd have done if they weren't training, and are at considerable risk of developing things like repetitive stress injuries. Also female gymnast, skaters and dancers must be slender, and many of them do all kinds of unhealthy things to keep their weight down. I have never enjoyed watching the Olympic events where most participants are quite young because of thoughts about how much they had to miss to get to the Olympics. I expect most of these people as kids fell in love with their sport, and with being awesome at it, at a very young age, and were permitted or encouraged by parents and coaches to begin an elite training regimen. My daughter fell in love with gymnastics at age 5 or so, and if she had proved to be extraordinarily talented by age 9 or so I am sure she would have wanted to commit to elite training. Fortunately she was not a good enough gymnast for that possibility to loom, but if it ever had I don't think I would have let her do it. She was too young to understand the big picture -- what she would have to give up to make it to the top.
That study uses a fairly broad measure of "gender non-contentedness", i.e. answering "sometimes" or "often" to "I wish to be of the opposite sex" on a survey. A DSM-V gender dysphoria diagnosis requires at least six months of meeting at least two out of six specific definitions involving "strong desire" for medical or social transition or "marked incongruence" between internal gender identity and physical sex.
And "sometimes" appears to be doing almost all of the work in this study's data. If you just restrict your definition to people who reply "often" instead of "sometimes", then based on eyeballing Figure 1, the percentage of the sample experiencing gender incongruity drops to 1-2% at age 11, less than half a percentage point at age 13, and maybe 0.1% at age 16 before rising back to about 0.2-0.5% at age 25.
The study's authors explicitly call out their metric as being likely to over-estimate gender non-contentedness:
>In a previous study in youth, gender non-contentedness was assessed in a similar way, but with five instead of three response options; “never,” “rarely,” “sometimes,” “often,” or “always.” In that study, 9% of individuals answered one of the latter four, with 6% of them answering “rarely” (Potter et al., 2021). It can be speculated that a large percentage of individuals in our sample who answered to “sometimes” wish to be of the opposite sex, might have answered “rarely” if this answer option was provided. Therefore, our numbers may overestimate the prevalence of gender non-contentedness. Furthermore, this item is multi-interpretable, as positive endorsement may reflect the participants’ wish to have the opposite sex’s identity, but just as well their gender role characteristics.
About gender discontent at the beginning of puberty: I had that. I was revolted by my body hair and fuller hips, which to me just looked like an ugly fat butt, a perpetual scattering of zits, hair that got greasy overnight and, of course, my period. Seemed like a whole new level of nastiness, plus there was now the possibility of mortifying accidents. And I was on the swim team and couldn't figure out how to get a tampon in and if I just didn't show up for practice once a month everybody would know why and the idea of that was intolerably embarrassing.
It didn't occur to me to wish I was male, though. I just wanted my kid body back. But if the idea of gender dysphoria had been in the air, I might have concluded that's what I had.
I have, though, seen kids as young as 6 who do truly seem to have something inborn going on with gender. I remember a boy about that age who insisted on wearing dresses, and truly did have a female presence. I kept forgetting he was a boy. And this was 25 or so years ago, before gender dysphoria was so much a thing. The kid seemed happy. His parents worried about how life was going to work out for him, but had given up fighting with him about his clothing etc., and just enjoyed him as he was.
Can you be sure that puberty blockers will have no long-term effects on your health? Sorry, if I seem a bit persnickety about this subject. I'm not an MD, but I did take my med school's embryology course. And it's not just the hormones, but the timing of hormonal signals, that play an important role in human sexual development as well as bone and muscle development. Having said that, my knowledge is forty years out of date. But I was curious about the current state of our knowledge and I queried CoPilot, and different studies seem to be yielding contradictory results. If I were an MD, I would remember that line from the Hippocratic Oath where physicians are told, "first, do no harm".
You
What drugs are commonly used as puberty blockers, and are there any longitudinal studies on their long-term effects?
Copilot
Puberty blockers are medications used to delay the changes of puberty in transgender and gender-diverse youth who have already started puberty. The most commonly used drugs for this purpose are called gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) analogues. Here’s a summary of their possible benefits, side effects, and long-term effects:
Goserelin (Zoladex): This medication suppresses sex hormones (testosterone and estrogen) during puberty.
Histrelin (Supprelin LA): Another commonly used puberty blocker that helps pause physical development.
Leuprolide (Lupron Depot-Ped, Fensolvi): Also falls under the category of GnRH analogues and is used to delay puberty changes.
Now, regarding longitudinal studies on their long-term effects, there is evidence to consider:
A long-term study conducted by the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust in the United Kingdom found that the majority of children who took puberty blockers did not resume puberty after stopping the medication. Contrary to common beliefs, almost all children treated with puberty blockers went on to take cross-sex hormones to permanently alter their sex characteristics. Additionally, participants reported no improvement in psychological well-being, and bone density and normal growth were affected compared to their peers.
Another study suggests that young people who have been on puberty blockers have normal reproductive function after they stop taking them. Data also indicates that puberty blockers do not have long-term effects on bone or metabolic health.
However, a Mayo Clinic preprint study has raised concerns about long-term fertility issues in boys who have taken puberty blockers. The findings suggest that the impacts of these blockers may be permanent, disputing claims that such effects can be reversed.
In summary, while puberty blockers can be beneficial for gender-diverse youth, it’s essential to consider both their short-term benefits and potential long-term effects. As research continues, medical professionals must carefully weigh the risks and benefits when prescribing these medications.
>Can you be sure that puberty blockers will have no long-term effects on your health?
No, but we can be sure that *puberty* will have long-term effects on one's health, including ones that are clearly negative (in particular, there are a lot of serious diseases regarding the uterus and ovaries that only become an issue after female puberty). It seems like forcing trans people to go through that twice should also be included in your risk profile.
You know, I suppose you're right. In fact, being born is so dangerous that we often intentionally delay it! This can come with medical risks of its own, but we decide the benefits outweigh the risks. If only there were some other medical intervention this metaphor could apply to.
Nearly all medications in use fall under this category, in fact. Puberty blockers do too. The point is that "do no harm" should include, y'know, the potential harm from *both* puberty and blockers, rather than just blockers.
>Children are not capable of "figuring this stuff out" by definition
So it's a good thing we have puberty blockers to give them more time to figure out whether they want to make the serious medical decision to have hormones irreversibly alter their body in ways that have well documented effects to their health! (A process known as "puberty")
Good thing we're not talking about that, then.
Legally, minors are not allowed to do all sorts of things because they're generally considered (under the law) to lack the capacity (due to their age and level of maturity) for things like signing contracts. This principle is based on the idea that minors may not fully understand the implications of the contract or they may be easily influenced.
There are all sorts of things that minors can't do. For instance, Federal law prohibits licensed firearms dealers from selling handguns to anyone under the age of 21 and long guns to anyone under the age of 18.
There are also all sorts of state-level age restrictions about sex between minors (for instance, a fourteen-year-old can't have sex with a twelve-year-old in some jurisdictions). And I think all states maintain that the age of consent for sex with an adult at at least age 16. (Of course, the minor doesn't get in trouble for violating the age of consent statutes, but the adults do — because those laws assume that minors don't have the "capacity" to resist the pressures that adults can put on them.)
Many states restrict abortion to minors without parental consent.
Minors can't vote.
And when the draft was in effect, minors couldn't be drafted for military service, and they could only volunteer with the consent of their parents at age 16. I don't know if this is still allowed.
In general, minors are not allowed to serve time in adult prisons, and their record is expunged upon adulthood because their crimes were perpetrated when they had diminished capacity.
So, State and Federal laws carve out all sorts of special cases for minors. If that's the case, why should we let minors have agency about their sexual identity? There may be good reasons, but I admit I've become more skeptical about the need for this exception.
Minors going on puberty blockers or hormones through a legitimate route are, to my knowledge, all doing so with parental consent with the possible exception of legally emancipated minors. Though I am personally very hesitant about the idea that parental consent should always be necessary, especially for older teens. This is consistent with existing policies on medical treatments.
The most important difference between accessing puberty blockers, and say, the right to own a gun or have sex with an adult, is that there are few to no consequences to simply waiting to do those things later. You can wait until 18 to buy a long gun, without being permanently harmed.
However, someone forced to wait until 18 for hormonal transition will, in the meantime, undergo a process that irreversibly changes their body in a way that is often highly distressing, and may require many additional surgeries to begin to correct. If not allowing minors to buy guns somehow made their fingers atrophy so that they struggle to operate tools in the future, I'd feel much more amendable to letting minors buy guns. Given that drastic changes will occur to someone's body either way, we should at least afford them some agency, even if they are underage.
If by "have agency about their sexual identity", you meant social transition such as names, pronouns, and clothes, I would defend this for the same reason minors should be allowed to have friends, hobbies, and political or religious views of their own: they're not property.
Agreed!
A key difference is that none of the standard drugs used for medical transition are newly developed for that purpose. All of them are secondary uses for drugs developed and approved to treat other conditions. In general, there is much, much less scrutiny applied to new uses for already-approved medications than for initial approval of new medications.
Puberty blockers were specifically created to give to developing kids (the original purpose was to treat precocious puberty), so I don't think that objection applies here.
There are at least three different GnRH analogues medications that can be used to delay puberty. Leuprorelin and Triptorelin indeed appear to have been developed to treat hormone-sensitive cancers. But Nafarelin was developed to treat precocious puberty.
And that doesn't contradict what I said earlier: "precocious puberty" refers to when puberty starts much earlier than normal, and as such is a medical condition that cisgendered people get.
Anti-androgens used for adult trans women (e.g. spiro, cypro, and bica) were developed for other purposes (high blood pressure, hormonal birth control, and prostate cancer, respectively, if I recall correctly), but I think they're generally reserved for adults and older teenagers.
Agree completely
It would seem that a large fraction of gid cases are a type of autism.
it is not "they have autism, not gid" but rather gid is misclassified in the DSM and should have been been put with the pervasive developmental disorders.
We had the lesbians who only have sex with men discussion last week. it seems everyone here thinks it is nuts to explain all gid cases as homosexuality, given that a significant portion arent attracted to thier assigned at birth sex.
I agree, but saying this just means you get excommunicated by *both* sides.
Fortunately we still get to hang out here.
>Many are gay, on the autism spectrum, or have other mental health issues.
None of these things are mutually exclusive. Autism in particular strongly correlates with gender dysphoria in both directions for reasons that are not well understood. And the most common other "mental health issues" are depression and anxiety symptoms, which may actually be caused by gender dysphoria in many cases.
For example, I have formal diagnoses for gender dysphoria, ADHD, depression, and anxiety. The depression and anxiety symptoms have almost completely gone away since I figured out I was probably trans, got diagnosed, and started medical transition. The ADHD seems to be more or less independent of dysphoria and transition.
That being said, there are diagnoses that can mimic the presentation of gender dysphoria and should be ruled out as part of the diagnosis process: specifically, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder type 1, and certain presentations of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Ruling these out is part of the WPATH-8 process.
These are my pet hypotheses on the correlation between dysphoria and autism:
1. Autistic people may experience what might be termed "gender incongruity" at roughly the same rate as the gender population, but they find a given degree of gender incongruity much more distressing than neurotypical people do, for similar reasons to why autistics tend to be a lot more bothered by unpleasant sounds, tastes, and textures than neurotypicals are.
2. It seems like a core feature of autism is being at least somewhat lacking in both the ability and the motivation to conform your identity and preferences to social norms. It seems plausible that an effect of this is that neurotypical people would have gender identities that are at least a bit more socially malleable.
> It seems like a core feature of autism is being at least somewhat lacking in both the ability and the motivation to conform your identity and preferences to social norms.
I hadn't thought of this before. I once dated someone who was only slightly on the autism spectrum, but when in intense emotional situations, they would revert to a very binary view of truth: statements were either true and good, or a lie and evil, and there were no exceptions for falsehood or imperfect knowledge or just making a mistake.
I am going to be very cautious about treating this as more than a theoretical potential contributing factor. But wow, the more I think about it, the more it seems to explain. :-/
I have a number of psychotherapy patients on the autism spectrum, not all of them so close to the mild end that they would fit right in in a setting with lots of "nerds." None are happy, and some are very unhappy. Re: the lack of joy and enthusiasm, my intuition is that a certain emotional flatness may come with the territory. But also, most are grievously deprived of companionship because of their social skills deficit, and also lead very restricted lives because of an aversion to novelty and a craving to know in advance exactly how something will turn out. I work to help them improve social skills, and become aware of their inner script of when-in-doubt-do-the-usual-thing and override it more often.
Also, am impressed by work being done by a Calif. researcher on using a brief, structured therapy incorporating 2 MDMA sessions to help people on the autism scale become less socially anhedonic. Can find links if you are interested.
Depression and anxiety is an obvious result of being autistic while living in non-autistic society, where people are mostly unable to straight communication and instinctively consider you rude and weird.
Non cis-genderness and general gender-non-conformity seem to have something to do with autistics being less susceptible to social rules. The fact that people still manage to twist it into "social contamination of transgenderness" is hillarious.
> If it does all turn out to be because of pollutants
On the other hand, imagine how ironic it would be if it turns out that polutants have serious contribution towards transgenderness. That the side which was actively worried about their children becoming trans was actually contributing towards it by supporting oil industry.
Why would it come from the oil industry specifically? There are lots of pollutants, and in fact if there was something we typically consider anodyne that we found out caused gender dysphoria, we would reclassify it as a pollutant.
Is it your coherent stance on all diagnoses, or are you making an isolated demand for rigor in gender dysphoria case, in particular?
Gender dysphoria is an unusually politically sensitive issue and you'd expect on priors for its diagnoses to be mush less trustworthy based on this. And psychiatric diagnoses for many illnesses or issues are pretty fuzzy in the first place.
Something being a politically sensitive issue has a much worse signal to noise ratio than getting a diagnosis from a medical professional. I can understand some amount of extra caution, but there is that, and than there are claims that diagnosis have no strong correlation with an actual condition.
"Trans people have been around forever"
This is not actually true, as I will apparently have to keep pointing out for the rest of my natural life. There is – in stark contrast to homosexuals – *no record*, not *one*, of a transsexual person in the entire West between the emperor Elagabalus (approx. 204-222 AD) and the mid-19th century. There are a number of eunuchs and crossdressers whom activists *choose* to spuriously reinterpret as transsexuals ex post facto, but an examination of these cases proves them wrongheaded in each instance. (Elagabalus is also a unique; there is no other instance preceding him either.)
Please stop repeating this false factoid. Trans people did not meaningfully exist before the industrial revolution. I have no idea why, but that's how it is.
Gender dysphoria as we recognize today has certainly been documented. The most famous example is the 14th century poem "On Becoming a Woman" by rabbi Qalonymos ben Qalonymos. The rabbi refers to maleness as a "lasting deformity" and laments to God to be made female. You can read the poem online if you'd like, it's quite moving. It makes no direct reference to attraction to men.
Examples of people who lived as the opposite of their birth sex include the surgeon James Barry (born 1789), stagecoach driver Charley Parkhurst (born 1812), and more recently, the Countess or Pauline/Arthur Berloget of 1850s France, who wrote, "I, who had so desired to be a girl, have triumphed over natural law." There is also the Quaker preacher Public Universal Friend (born 1752) who explicitly identified as neither male nor female, and requested their followers avoid gendered pronouns when referring to them, saying "I am as I am."
There are also many culturally-specifc third or fourth genders, yes, even in Europe: the femmenielli of Italy, and Balkan sworn virgins. These are social roles that fulfill social purposes, and not merely individual declarations of identity, but social roles develop in response to individual psychology. There are far more examples, of course, outside of "the West."
I take issue with your requirement of "lack of other motivations" to characterize a historical figure as transsexual, it is asking for too much. In a society with highly distinct roles for men and women, going from one category to another, or shunning both, will require taking on a drastically different lifestyle and career by definition. Any "legitimately transsexual" historical figure would also need, at the very least, to be able to cope with the demands of their chosen role.
It is one thing to say a woman crossdressing temporarily to fight in war or inherit an estate is not an example of a transsexual, and another to claim someone like James Barry, who lived his entire adult life as a man, and wanted his sex to be kept secret even after his death, is not reasonable evidence of a trans person, even if he originally transitioned to get into medical school.
If you don't think these examples are sufficiently "pure", I'd be curious to know what your standards are, and whether your standards are in fact similar to typical trans people today.
This is exactly the kind of disingenuous argumentation I mean. Most of your examples are trivially easily dismissed, and you probably know this, yet you repeat them anyway because when given in a group they have the appearance of truth and this allows you to trick others.
The femminielli were simply crossdressing homosexual prostitutes; this we have ample evidence of from late-medieval and early-modern Europe. In France they were called berdaches, and in Venice there exists a bridge called the "Ponte delle Tette", Bridge of Tits, because the city's ordinary prostitutes successfully sued to be allowed to display themselves there in order to compete with the crossdressing male prostitutes. It's strange that people are so keen to make much of these types of obvious drag performance when, in the modern day, conflating drag with transexualism is seen as a big no-no by the same people, and they clearly understand the distinction to be clear and sharp.
Sworn virgins are even worse and more disingenuous an example than this, of course, since they're exactly a case of a social structure existing to allow women to take on the social rights and duties of a man in case of necessity or (rarely, it seems) inclination. The fact that it took a lot longer for most people who are not Albanians to establish analogous forms of elective or universal emancipation doesn't make the sworn virgins transexual, any more than having her own bank account makes a woman transsexual today.
As for the individual persons named by you:
The rabbi Kalonymus is an interesting case, but I will point out that he is conventionally described as a satirist and that the Even Bochan "has long been acknowledged as a masterpiece of Hebrew satire" intended to make fun of Judaism's ideas about men's superior position in society and before the Lord; you know, presumably, as well as I do that the end of the poem is a reference to and paraphrase of the Orthodox Jewish man's morning prayer, in which he thanks God for not making him a woman. Nor indeed is this the only satire of this kind that Kalonymus wrote (Masekhet Purim is the other I can name offhand), so it's hardly strong evidence of *anything* in his personal life.
Margaret Bulkley a.k.a. "James Barry", as you point out yourself, crossdressed to get into medical school, another typical example of the opportunistic crossdressing I adverted to already. The evidence concerning her is also contradictory, with, for example, no indication of any relationships with women, a possible relationship with a man who was in on her secret, and the possibility that an early sexual assault and subsequent pregnancy led her to feign being a man as a form of traumatized self-defense. It's also worth noting that even if we accepted Bulkley/Barry as legitimately transexual, this would merely move the first appearance of transsexualism back by two or three decades, hardly a massive hole below the waterline to what I'm saying.
Charlotte Parkhurst is substantially the same; she crossdressed for protection (I hardly need to tell anyone that the western frontier could be notably fucked up for teenage girls traveling alone), had at some time a straight relationship and (non-surviving) baby, and, being born two decades after Bulkley, is even closer to the time in which I already agree that transsexuals were surfacing.
The PUF was brain-damaged by a fever, decided she had died and her soul had been replaced by that of an angel, and that since angels were understood (by various persons, anyway) to be sexless, she must therefore also be; her condition is much closer to what we would modernly term schizophrenia than to transsexualism (although, be it noted, it was clearly also not schizophrenia as typically understood, proceeding as it did from a severe physical illness. A stroke?). Frankly the PUF is almost the canonical example of a widely cited but obviously "fake" transexual, in that nothing whatsoever about her case resembles the generally accepted modern understanding of transsexualism.
Strangest of all is your use of Arthur Berloget, transexual of the 1850s and forward, as an example *against* my claim that transsexuals first appeared in the mid-19th century! Berloget is indeed precisely one of that handful of indisputable cases which do occur with no predecessors in the mid-19th century! There is indeed little question that Berloget is what we would modernly conceive of as a transsexual! Why would you concieve of this as an argument against me? I am frankly baffled by this, unless it merely shows the rote, copypaste nature of your response.
Incidentally, your use of terminology like "transitioned" is the worst kind of question-begging. Not only are you assuming that which is to be demonstrated, you're violating your own definitions, since you know very well that if it were decided today that transition should be a wholly non-medical issue and transexuals should be content with crossdressing, you would immediately raise the hue and cry about it.
I am interested in knowing your definition of what may fairly be described as "transsexual" (I will generally use the more common term transgender person) so that I can consider how it fits to some other historical examples. This seems better than potentially coming up with a list of historical examples to then work through on an ad hoc basis.
Maybe one way you could express this would be to look at examples you deem spurious and characterize why those examples don't fit with the definition you endorse.
I will put forward a modified version of the Wikipedia definition as my starting point: "A transgender person is someone whose gender identity differs from that associated with the gender that their family, community, and/or society identifies them with." And then "gender identity is the personal sense of one's own gender, which can correlate with a person's assigned sex or can differ from it."
Kind of a weird definition - does it imply that in a maximally trans-inclusive society, nobody would be trans? Since there would be no societal gender identification from which to differ
"I will put forward a modified version of the Wikipedia definition as my starting point: 'A transgender person is someone whose gender identity differs from that associated with the gender that their family, community, and/or society identifies them with.' And then 'gender identity is the personal sense of one's own gender, which can correlate with a person's assigned sex or can differ from it.'"
"Gender" as a concept is also ideological hogwash; most languages don't even have two words for this and English only does because Victorians were too prudish to say sex, so they used a grammatical term as a euphemism. The idea of a sex/gender distinction existing is itself false, enabled only by this accident of the English language. I also don't think that others' views are materially relevant. I would thus prefer to define a transsexual simply as "someone whose sex identity differs from their actual observable physical sex".
This being settled, allow me to begin in the way of examples with the two I already used elsewhere: the famous Chevalier d'Éon in the 18th century, and the castrato priests of Cybele in ancient Rome. These are two figures (or rather a type in the latter case) which are *frequently* claimed by transexual activists in our day as predecessors; there should therefore be no problem in using them as examples of the tendency, I hope you will agree.
d'Éon, despite engendering widespread dispute in his own day about whether he was in reality male or female, did not meaningfully have a sex identity different from his birth sex; of course, due to the controversy just mentioned it would be either impossible or inevitable for any sex identity he had to differ from that which others identified him with, depending on how you look at it, which strikes me as an example of where your definition is not adequate. Either way, I hope we can agree that the existence of letters from himself where he begs to be allowed to resume male clothing in France because he feels humiliated by having to dress as a woman makes it clear that he was in no way confused on the point. Granted, it was decided to require him to dress as a woman in the first place because in previous letters he claimed to be a girl who was raised as a boy to inherit his family estate, but given that that claim was made entirely for personal gain, well. It's also reasonably well established that d'Éon began to crossdress for the purposes of spying, as he was a member of the Secret du Roi, the Ancien Régime's intelligence agency and secret police; evidently in his youth he was able to pass for a woman, but every portrait of him from later in life makes clear that he thoroughly lost this ability with age.
Next, in the case of the priests of Cybele, the so-called galli, the idea that they were transsexual seems to me to crumble on every point where we have any evidence. First of all, "gallus" is the Latin for rooster, cockerel; the *whole point* is that they're *men* who have made the sacrifice of their manhood to the goddess; a costly signal if ever there was one. If they believed themselves to actually be women, there would be no sacrifice and they would not be able to function as priests. Secondly, in those periods when castration of Romans was illegal, the galli were evidently foreigners, which indicates that the animating impulse was religious piety or fervor, not a desire to change sex, which presumably would not have increased among Roman men just because a law changed. (Similarly to what I said in a previous comment, if people suggest this happened, I would like to know what law changes they think would cure/prevent transsexualism in our time and why they aren't advocating for this simple, effective, wholesome, socially nondisruptive, and evidently permanent one-time fix instead of complex medical interventions with significant residual suffering.) Thirdly, there is no sensible reason why Roman transexuals would have all, without exception, formed a religious cult to the point where there isn't a single known example of someone just doing the eunuch-and-women's-clothing part and staying out of the religion – not even Elagabalus, who AFAIK did not castrate himself. This is just asking for far too much acceptance of ludicrous coincidence, particularly considering how crass Romans were about matters of sex in both senses, especially if they could get a laugh out of it. Finally, as a sort of aside remark, I might point out that there were a reasonable number of eunuchs in ancient Rome, and vast numbers in other especially Eastern societes later; none of these are typically considered transsexual by modern activists, so it can't be the case that castration is inherently transsexual or evidence of transsexualism. Effectively nothing about the galli and their manifestation pattern-matches to how we're meant to understand the modern transsexual etiology or experience; therefore, it is reasonable to state that these are two different phenomena. (Note that many things about the galli *do* pattern-match to the behavior of adherents of other weird religions.)
I'm sort of dashing this off off the cuff and reading it over it seems a bit muddled, it could probably have been argued more forcefully with more time spent than I'm willing to dump into an individual comment, but hopefully this can form some reasonable basis at least.
"There are a number of eunuchs and crossdressers whom activists *choose* to spuriously reinterpret as transsexuals ex post facto"
How do you distinguish between a crossdresser and a transsexual, in an era where the word "transsexual" hadn't been coined yet, there was no social support for or acceptance of the thing we would later describe with that word, and the medical technology for a transsexual to do anything more than dress and pass as the opposite sex didn't exist?
Evident compulsiveness, lack of other motivations, presence of the comorbidities now known to us, voluntarity, expressions of distress. Those are just the most obvious criteria off the top of my head. But for example, transexual activists keep citing the Chevalier d'Éon as a historical transsexual even though autograph evidence (in the form of a letter from him to the relevant legal authority, I forget who) existed at least into the early 20th century, and probably still exists today, that he was appalled by the legal decision that required him positively to dress as a woman in France and wanted permission to stop. Or again, (a certain type of) people keep citing the Roman priests of Cybele, even though they're blatantly obviously self-castrati out of religious fervor and piety, much like a number of Christians later, natch.
These behaviors are, *at the very minimum*, sufficiently distinct from the modern transsexual that claiming them for that movement is the iffy angle, not refuting it.
(Also, you seem to inadvertently suggest here that if *we ourselves* were to remove all social support and acceptance of transsexualism, the observed presentation would then disappear and be reverted into other, largely more benign forms of crossdressing; do you really believe that? Given that "crossdresser without significant psychological distress or ailments" is clearly superior to even the outcomes of many hormonally and surgically treated persons, who report significant continued morbidities, that would if so be a forceful case *against* tolerance in this instance. I'm not sure I'm prepared to go there.)
Couldn't it be that the concept of being trans didn't exist, and that people who would now call themselves trans then thought of themselves homosexual? Also, my impression (based mostly on life experience and stuff Dan Savage has said) is that for most gay men wearing drag is a playful thing, done for parties or parades or the fun of feeling outrageous, but not a way of feeling more like a woman. So maybe crossdressers in the past were what we would now call trans? I.e.., maybe they were crossdressing so as to come as close as they could in real life to being the gender they felt they were.
My understanding is that most modern transsexuals are not even homosexual (with reference to their actual sex, that is), so it's hard to see how that could be possible for more than a portion of the group in any case. But also, the references we do have to crossdressing mainly suggest that it was opportunistic for access to male advantages in the case of women (e.g. the famous lady-pirates of Calico Jack's crew) and for men, either to hide from one thing or another (the Chevalier d'Éon, any number of French aristocrats escaping the guillotine dressed as washerwomen, etc.) or exactly the same sort of joking/party thing you describe. The best example of the latter would be a joke in Aristophanes' Thesmophoriazusai, which I started explaining here, but the digression was so long that it was of a size with the rest of the post, so look it up if you really want to know; in any case, that was written in 411 BC in Athens.
Either way, there's no sign or record of anything like what the current regime describes as *distress* around sex or gender, and there is not in literature any example of someone even asserting the impossible desire to switch, except on the pattern of Beatrice's lament in Much Ado About Nothing, where a woman wishes that she were a man so that she could behave like a man, or avenge herself.
<My understanding is that most modern transsexuals are not even homosexual (with reference to their actual sex, that is),
Well, yeah, but you know the thing about Eskimos have 15 (or whatever the number is) words for snow, while English has only one? Well maybe in other eras there weren't words for all the manflavors gender identification and sexual preference, so some word like "homosexual" or "queer" would have been used to cover all forms of being atypical with respect to gender and sexual preference.
As for personal accounts -- there are probably a lot of things we don't have personal accounts of from early on. Many people couldn't even read and write, and even for those who could it's unlkely their diaries and letters would survive unless they were famous. And if being sexually atypical was stigmatized, that makes it even less likely we'd have personal accounts of it. Do we have personal accounts of a taste for BDSM, or water sports, or fellatio? I dunno, maybe we do.
"Well maybe [...]"
I realize that absent concrete knowledge this seems like a credible and rational line of reasoning. However, in practical fact: no. Some single vague term would not have been used to cover all sexual deviance, let alone consistently during all of 1500 years in the entirety of Europe. It's unlikely that this would have occurred *even in one country* for any period longer than a few generations. Rather, it's unlikely that if transexuals *had* existed, they'd have been conflated with gays other than in exceptional cases; the two concepts of "wanting to fuck other men" and "a strange misapprehension about one's body" are not intimately conceptually connected, however natural the connection seems here and now. It's more likely that they would have been associated with other kinds of lunatics who believed other absurd but largely harmless things.
"Do we have personal accounts of a taste for BDSM, or water sports, or fellatio? I dunno, maybe we do."
Yes, we do, actually. Tons of them. The Romans had separate words for giving head and facefucking. The fragmentary novel Satyricon is, as far as we can judge from the remaining portions, about two guys dragging their twink around due to a sex curse cast on them by a priestess of Priapus for spying on the secret rites. In The Golden Ass, a woman is sentenced to get screwed by the titular donkey; this is played for laughs as the donkey finds it repugnant to bed a criminal. There is any amount of graffiti in Pompeii and elsewhere describing the specific charms and skills of named women, wholly without euphemism. Again, this is Rome alone (starring Macaulay Culkin as the emperor, I guess). I understand that it can be tempting to attribute a sort of naivete or puritanism to the peple of the past wholesale, but they were literally just like us, often less inhibited. I would advise you to let go of this way of thinking, even if you don't feel like hitting the books (which I recommend, however; many of them are very entertaining).
It feels like someone should mention the following theory:
*********
No one is transgender *by nature*,
BUT, also
No one is cisgender *by nature*.
Because cisgender and transgender are cultural/societal concepts and they don't exist outside of a society.
Or as Scott put it:
"there is no neutral culture. Having lots of transgender people is downstream of cultural choices. But having lots of cisgender people is also downstream of cultural choices.....Even within evolution’s constraints, culture can do some pretty weird stuff. I think you could probably have a culture where 99% of people were transgender, where it was generally accepted that everyone transitioned on their 18th birthday"
in https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-geography-of-madness
Oh god, what the hell is this new Substack feature where the whole width of the text column narrows when you select something?? This is seriously annoying. You've got to find some way to turn this off.
(And geez, website makers in general should remember that lots of people are "selection readers"; having selection even just pop a little thing is annoying, let alone *this*!)
I've long been annoyed by how slow this blog loads on desktop browsers, especially when posts have a lot of comments (e.g., the Ivermectin post with over 2200 comments). I finally decided to do something about it, and created a browser extension that reimplements the comments section which speeds up page load considerably. I can finally open the Ivermectin post again!
If you want to try it, you can get the Chrome extension here: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/astral-codex-eleven/lmdipmgaknhfbndeaibopjnlckgghemn, or the Firefox add-on here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/astral-codex-eleven/.
The source code is available on Github: https://github.com/maksverver/astral-codex-eleven, and you can file bug reports or feature requests there too. If you are especially paranoid, you can unzip the extension before installing; it's implemented in 100% unobfuscated Javascript without frameworks or libraries, so it should be relatively easy to verify it does nothing inappropriate (no ads, click tracking, or uploading of data of any kind).
While the main goal was to be able to load posts with lots of comments in a reasonable amount of time, I also worked in a few other improvements, like keyboard navigation (h/j/k) and more precise comment timestamps.
What an improvement. Thank you for making this extension.
Wonderful
Wow, look at how fast that scrolls!
Good idea! And in case anyone wants a dedicated discussion page for problems with this website's commenting system , I created one: https://megaleaf2023.substack.com/p/reader-comments-matter
Holy crap. I knew substack's code for displaying comments was bad, but I had chocked it up to there maybe being some technical limitation with the sheer amount of text on the page. But the speed at which they load in your extension (and how they don't take a full second to display when tabbing back) proves this is not the case, and makes substack's team just seem incompetent.
I will say that I disagree strongly that profile pictures "add little value"; I personally heavily rely on avatars in identifying who's commenting over just usernames, since my visual memory (and pattern recognition) is much stronger there. I'd certainly appreciate them. (If I have time, I might look into submitting a PR for this, but no promises)
Agreed about avatar pictures, even the auto-generated ones. And especially in any conversation with more than 2 people.
I'd also like the avatars back, but if it's a huge effort to have them AND the lightning quick comment reading, I guess I can live without them. Or maybe just toggle the add-on off if I want to see them again (otherwise bye-bye Unicorn Power: https://pbfcomics.com/comics/nice-shirt/)
I focus more on the names, but I can see recognition value in the avatars.
One thing Substack is clearly doing wrong is setting the avatar to the left of the comment instead of above it. This ends up wasting tons and tons of horizontal space in any case where the commenters are talking to each other instead of doing nothing but responding directly to the post.
FWIW I blasted avatars with Ublock on Firefox, which significantly sped up the comment loading. It was weird at first, and then my correlation engine quickly adapted to seeing just the names. But I do like being able to see them again with this extension.
> which significantly sped up the comment loading
WHAT?!?!?!?!?!?!?
I don't doubt what you say, but there should be multiple layers of image caching to stop this exact problem. What the HELL has been going on in browsers, or Substack, to cause this?
Oh, it’s a disaster all right. I did it because someone mentioned it a couple of weeks ago in these here comment boxes, that the freaking avatars slow the comments down. So I made custom filter in Ublock that blasted almost, but not all (? - don’t ask! I’m a stranger here meself :) ), avatars. Significant speeding up of comment loading ensued.
I will be trying this. It's the first such fix I've seen that attempts to keep the comments, rather than just turning them off. Thank you for your work!
Holy Moly, that's a substantial amount of programming, with extra care to get auto-linking right. And the code is nice and readable too. Good job!
So my mother has a kidney tumor which may or may not be cancerous. She says that the doctors are quite confident but I've not been entirely convinced by the way my grandfather and uncle cancers were treated, so I'm looking for recommendations on what to read to be able to do at least a sanity check on what her doctors say.
You might start with the National Comprehensive Cancer Network's guidelines for treating kidney cancers: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10191161/
Guidelines should be the default in treatment decisions, and physicians should be able to justify any decisions that don't follow guidelines--e.g., "This guideline doesn't apply because ___."
Confidence is not a good metric to judge physicians by. For important diagnoses and treatment decisions, it's worthwhile to try to get a second opinion.
I have a question about lgG4 antibodies and food intolerance.
Specifically, I recently made a lgG4 blood test and it showed reactions to almost two dozen foods. I already have celiac disease, and continue to have (much milder) GI issues on a gluten (and lactose) free diet.
Are elevated lgG4 levels merely indicative of exposure, or should I actually eliminate the foods? It would be logistically difficult to do so.
Many thanks!
Have you recently switched to a gluten-free, lactose-free diet? I'm asking because for a while after switching it's not unusual to still have reactions to almost anything even if your diet is completely free from gluten (and lactose, in your case). It should eventually calm down - if it doesn't, then you need to go back and ask your doctor. As for elevated IgG4 antibodies, as far as I can tell from a quick search, they can indicate a lot of different things (including being raised in asymptomatic individuals) so I wouldn't rely on them as a tell-tale for things to cut out of your diet. Not as the only indicator, anyway.
Thank you so much for your answer! I switched to GFLF last September and the "getting better" seems to have plateau'd. Your answer made me hopeful that I might still get better, though I need to schedule a follow-up soon anyway. Thanks for the answer about lgG4 antibodies, too! That's about the same conclusion I'd also come to, but I was worried I'd missed something.
Also, if you are sufficiently motivated, you could try an elimination diet - cut out everything that you think might be causing problems for a few weeks and see if the problems subside. Then add things back in, one by one, monitoring the results. I'd trust that kind of test more than the IgG4 blood test.
I suppose the final question is, are you absolutely sure you've eliminated all gluten sources? It's a sneaky molecule.
Thank you for your advice!
You're welcome, but I only did a quick search so don't take it as good research or anything. I hope your follow-up helps.
Lately I've become easily "triggered" and upset about politics that I come across in my day-to-day. I didn't used to be this way - I was more open-minded about views I disagreed with, more intellectually charitable, and less emotionally invested. I am not able to avoid the triggers or situations where they happen (it's about coming across things "in the wild", rather than places, incl. online ones, where I can easily choose to opt out.)
I really don't like being this way, and don't want this vice to become amplified over time. How can I change?
If the triggering is caused by online political discussions, log off and focus on offline activities that bring you joy.
I think listening to another side's framing and believing them has been the most helpful to me. For instance, the war in Ukraine. Both sides use peace, well being, and other utilitarian justifications in their framing, and paint the other side as stupid, evil liars. Anti war people point out: that weapons companies make money and use it to bribe politicians, conscription happens, and lots of civilians die. The other side is worried about 2nd order effects like defending democracy, the liberal International order, strategic stability, bad precedents, etc. You don't have to buy either side, but most news source will paint their opponents as believing "Hey we like killing babies, we want more of that" which is just not true for any political issues. Same for all the issues of the day: DEI, Israel, abortion, inflation, gun control, climate change, healthcare, immigration, etc.
"Knowing a man well never leads to hate and almost always leads to love."
-John Steinbeck
I'm sorry that I don't have any real answers. I'm dealing with something similar, and haven't gotten rid of it, but here's some stuff that might help.
Maybe try looking into Zen or some other form of Buddhism? This sounds like textbook "attachment", where encountering a stimulus causes a series of reactions in your mind, which end in suffering.
Something that jumped out at me, was your use of the word "vice". That makes me worry that you're reinforcing this by positing a component of voluntariness that may not be warranted. (How good are you at not thinking of elephants?) Don't blame yourself like that, if for no other reason than that it might make the problem worse. Instead, I'd suggest trying to relax through it. Try to notice the process happening as quickly as you can, and then step back (inside) and watch what happens. Paying attention to your thoughts, breathing, and pulse. Find the "Litany against Fear" from the book "Dune", and do that, but with the upsetness. Understand the process, and slowly dissolve it. Get to a place where you can laugh at yourself and at the process.
Good luck.
Is it just one aspect of politics that you find triggering you, or many?
Because there's no point getting worked up about something you can't do anything about, and you can't really do anything about most political issues. You might be able to do something useful, at least on a local scale, regarding *one* issue. But you'd have to focus on it, and not get distracted by all the stupid people who are wrong about everything else.
So, maybe pick one political issue where you're going to make a difference, donating your time and/or money, and speaking on behalf of the cause you believe in. Everything else, is someone else's problem. There are lots of good people out there, some of whom will have chosen as their One Thing the very thing the clueless dolt in front of you is wrong about, and you've got to leave it to them while you go about your One Thing.
And when you're talking to other people about that thing, if they're the stupid ones who are wrong about it, the *only* way you can accomplish anything is to treat them with courtesy and respect and even then you're probably going to have to settle for planting the seed of an idea that might change their mind in a few months. But because you're actually there to *do something* rather than just venting your rage, you're going to suck it up and fake courtesy and respect while you make your case calmly, rationally, and hopefully persuasively. Eventually, you'll find that you aren't faking it any more.
Alternately, you might decide that you can't do anything about *any* of this. In which case, you treat politics the way you treat the weather - an arbitrary, impersonal thing you can't hope to control and can barely forecast. Do you get triggered by bad weather, directing emotional outbursts at the Storm God or the TV weatherman? Or do you go on with your life, and help your family, friends, and neighbors muddle through the storm as best you can?
Hard to answer without more details about what types of things are causing this and what you are feeling?
For instance is your relative "lack of charity" more of an emotional response but your rational brain is giving more charity to the problematic views?
Or is your rational brain saying "these views are abhorrent and have no merit" and you want to change your rational brain.
If it's the later it's hard to understand why you would want to change that.
Like if the views actually have no merit in your brain's evaluation why would you want yourself to believe that they do have merit.
If it's the former there might be a few things you should keep in mind:
1. Read: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/ and understand that the views that happen to percolate to your attention may do so because of their abhorrence so that the sample "views you are exposed to" is not a representative of "views people have" so you need not dispair for the sake of humanity.
2. Remember that sometimes bad actors (like the Russian government) might intentionally feed the toksoplasma for various reasons
3. Remember that lots of people say abhorrent things just to signal support with a side and not because they believe them. Like people who say "we should kill all the rich people" don't really mean that, usually. Like they wouldn't shoot a guy just because they happened to win the lottery.
4. exposure therapy. continuously seek out obhorent views until you become numb to the emotional impact
I find asking myself “what am I supposed to do about it?” really helps. Sometimes the answer is a something, like calling my congresscreature, or giving money to a cause. But for the most part… nothing. Then, why getting upset about it.
Also, what Melvin said.
I don't know, I mostly grew out of this kind of thing as I got older. I don't know whether it's just age, or having closer-to-home things to worry about, or whether all my self-talk about not getting worked up about dumb political things eventually paid off.
Or maybe it's just the experience of seeing plenty of dumb political moments and fashions come and go with no real effect on my life increases my confidence that the next time I see some idiots saying something stupid it probably won't massively effect me either.
One thing I like to remind myself sometimes is that over the whole course of my life, roughly half of the elections will be won by the bunch of jerks that I hate more, and the other half of the elections will be won by the bunch of jerks that I hate less, that this has been going on for a long time, and that it mostly evens itself out.
This is very close to my experience. I also chock it up to how often I watch people on either/all sides make a complete fool of themselves. Nowadays they become memes and get repeated thousands of times by their ideological enemies. Like some guy with no sleeves and a misspelled sign or some purple hair screaming nonsense. I'm like - "Nope, Not me!"
I've gone back and forth on this axis over the last decade or so. So I obviously haven't solved the problem, but some things that have helped me improve include:
- Finding context. Either looking at "more important issues" like ex. who cares about the outcome of <this issue> honestly, there's a horrible famine in Sudan, this thing that's making me mad doesn't matter. Only works if you aren't getting mad about how little people care about important issues.
- Focusing on my personal life and family and friends. Assuming the political issue in question doesn't directly impact you, reminding myself of the important and meaningful parts of my own life and letting those distract me is helpful.
- Depending on how charitable you feel, reframing the people annoying you as either objects of sympathy - "Wow that thing they are saying is awful but they seem uneducated and exposed to bad influences. It's so sad they are like that." or as objects of derision - "Wow it is so not worth my time to engage with such an inbecile." Both result in me being able to step back from engaging/caring about the situation.
- Any form of irony, nihilism, and/or just plain laughing at the dark humor of the world that you find relatable. If you can laugh at yourself getting worked up that's great, if you can laugh at the situation for being so terrible, that's partial, and if you can laugh at the source of the frustration that at least let's the one off go.
- I read a lot, and fiction or nonfiction that covers the topics or themes you find enraging I find helps restore the charitable and open minded focus by putting me in the learning/listening mindset vs. the discussing/debating one.
YMMV on all of these, but as a fellow afflicted person, good luck!
There’s a very helpful book called “stop fixing yourself” which says, instead of trying to change yourself, try to understand the motives and reasons for the behavior you want to change. It’s been helpful for me.
Have you tried using CBT and DBT techniques?
Username checks out.
Dial back the enthusiasm though.
When you think about tolerance as a cultural virtue, to what extent does it include tolerating intolerance in others?
For instance within a single country, if minor ethnic group A doesn’t tolerate people of major ethnic group B, is it more in line with tolerance as a virtue for group B to tolerate group A’s intolerance or to seek to enforce country-wide tolerance through legislation?
Edit: To clarify, group A’s intolerance doesn’t extend to an explicit, doctrinal call to violence against group B.
I read an article once called "Dissolving the paradox of tolerance". I can't find the article any more. It seems like the sort of thing that Scott would have written but apparently he didn't.
Anyway the argument was that the supposed paradox comes mostly from the vagueness of the word "tolerance". To be "intolerant" of someone is an extremely broad spectrum from "herd them into death camps", through "actively and publically shun them" to "think they're basically alright but you wouldn't want your sister to marry one". Once you start being more specific about what you mean about "be intolerant", most of the paradoxical examples go away.
1. Group A is intolerant of Group B, should we tolerate Group A? Stupid question, be more specific.
2. Group A advocates throwing Group B off rooftops, is it okay if we don't invite Group A to our cocktail parties? Yes.
3. Group A refuses to invite Group B to their cocktail parties, is it okay if we throw Group A off a rooftop? No.
For the most part the paradox goes away once you stop using vague terms.
For anyone else who, like me, was ignorant enough not to have known that there was an official “Paradox of Tolerance” (associated with Karl Popper), in Popper’s words it starts like this:
“Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.”
Popper goes on to say that the tolerant should still let the intolerant spout intolerance until they get irrational about it (such as denouncing all argument), which sounds good but hard to objectively evaluate.
Since I’m not aware of any serious advocates for unlimited tolerance, I’m not too concerned about the paradox specifically (I agree with Popper that unlimited tolerance sounds bad). I’m just trying to understand where other people draw the line and what’s reasonable to expect of a society.
The full original quote (which, should be noted, is a footnote in a text talking about something else and not a fully developed treatise) goes:
"Less well known [than other paradoxes] is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
The discriminant is not that the other group is being irrational -- there's hardly a political, ideological, religious, or ethical group that would be worthy of tolerance otherwise -- but resort to violence over argument, which seems to be how "intolerance" is actually defined in this context. At this point there isn't much of a paradox left: of course you cannot argue with someone who has decided not to take part in any argument, and of course when someone is shooting at you there is little you can do but shoot back.
>The discriminant is not that the other group is being irrational -- there's hardly a political, ideological, religious, or ethical group that would be worthy of tolerance otherwise -- but resort to violence over argument, which seems to be how "intolerance" is actually defined in this context.
You might think that intolerance just boils down to violence, but I don’t think that’s exactly what he said and I don’t think most people see intolerance that way. If a blue person won’t hire a purple person because blue people think purple people are barely people at all, and blue people dismiss any rational argument from purple people to the contrary, that would be considered intolerant by most folks because it is irrational, not violent. If a red teacher won’t let a green student in his classroom because he believes all green students are unclean even though they aren’t, that’s irrational and widely considered intolerant. Are you saying Popper believes this behavior should be tolerated because it doesn’t involve violence? I think based on what he said he thinks it might be ethical to suppress these behaviors if public opinion and rational argument aren’t enough to keep them in check.
> I’m just trying to understand where other people draw the line and what’s reasonable to expect of a society.
Part of the problem is that there's no way to draw a bright line, it's just a continual spectrum. And it doesn't help either that everyone's always trying to work the refs and get themselves treated more favorably and the other side less favorably while ignoring the meta level.
I see your point, but isn’t saying minor groups should be punished less for intolerance kind of like saying weaklings should be punished less for assault and battery?
I don't think you're necessarily obligated to find out if a given member of Group A happens to hold a rare sub-belief that the majority doesn't share. The whole point of group identification is as a shorthand for the things the group supports.
If someone self-identifies as a Nazi, I probably won't be interested in talking to them further to find out if they actually support killing Jews or if they just want to rebuild the German Empire.
(You do, however, have an obligation to know if the thing that "everyone in group A believes" is actually a majority or not.)
As an absolute minimum, you should tolerate people who are, let's say, half as tolerant as you. That is basically compensation for your biases, where you see your own actions as more reasonable and justified than the actions of others.
On the opposite extreme, tolerating physical attacks is basically a suicide pact. And when you start criticizing people who defend themselves from physical attacks for being insufficiently tolerant, then you are basically cheering for the baddies.
Problem is, in real life this often gets very complicated, because people act in groups, so (1) you always get some people doing the verbal intolerance and other people doing the physical violence, and it's quite difficult to stop the violent ones when all the onlookers are applauding for them, and (2) the victims of physical attacks often extend their definition of "defense" to include attacking random people from the other group.
> As an absolute minimum, you should tolerate people who are, let's say, half as tolerant as you. That is basically compensation for your biases, where you see your own actions as more reasonable and justified than the actions of others.
The simple idea behind this, of tolerating some greater level of perceived intolerance to compensate for your own inevitable biases, seems like a great place to start.
I have fallen on: tolerate _talk_ about intolerance completely. People are allowed to advocate for intolerance, express preference for intolerance, etc. But do not tolerate actions of intolerance. Actions must follow the law but speech can be anything. This is because it is an incredibly important norm to allow people to express opinions. When you disallow peaceful expression of opinions, you get back to people attempting force and violence. I'd much rather have the (admittedly odious) pressure release valve of intolerant speech.
Can't silently upvote, so have to say something here. I completely agree with this.
In the United States, we have the legal concept of protected groups or protected classes which is where maybe the most substantial thinking about this that I am familiar with. And we do periodically change the list of protected groups.
Taking that as a starting point, one principle becomes clearer to me: this is an area where the law has to be kept up with evolving social practices and classes of people. So any solution (in my United States framework) would still involve periodic public debate about adding or removing protected classes, like our current system.
My impression of the United States approach to protected classes does emphasize identifying actual harms faced by members of protected classes and potential protected classes when making that designation. Unfortunately I only have an interested layperson's knowledge of the topic and I don't have any background reading ready at hand to offer.
Protected classes aren't "black" or "white," (your position within the classes) they're "black or white" (the class itself). This is a common misconception and I don't know how it got started as everyone is clearly stated to be equal before the law by every civil rights act ever enacted.
They may be equally protected on paper, but the chances of getting fired for tweeting "kill all whites" are probably very small. So people are referring to how the law works in practice, not in theory.
The laws are written to be applied equally, and the courts usually do so. Employers have the latitude to do things differently. Nobody can deny that they have the arbitrary power to ruin people's lives with no recourse to fairness, but that can't be confused with civil rights legislation.
As I can comprehend the intent of this aspect of American law, a protected class begins when one or more constituencies within the class experience enough intolerance to warrant protection. Then the class is named and enshrined in law as protected.
At that point, even constituencies within the class that did not historically experience intolerance are entitled to certain protections in American law. However it should not be surprising or an argument against the process or theory that the groups experiencing the most active protection under the law are the ones that have historically experienced intolerance, rather than groups whose collective experience would not generally warrant being protected as a class.
Understanding the power dynamics is useful for considering this scenario, although simply knowing more about power situation won't answer the question.
In other words, it is relevant to know what the relative power or status is between the two groups. It is particularly important to know whether your Group A has social advantages or disadvantages when compared to Group B in this society. Knowing that information doesn't resolve the dilemma, but it would help frame the stakes.
Probably this question as framed is too complex to answer without developing the scenario more.
The category of examples that come to mind for me involve religious communities with strict criteria for membership where some people might never be allowed based on their identity. Or there might be practices like banishment, excommunication, or shunning that are used to move people from being accepted Group A to being part of the un-tolerated Group B.
"society", as you use it here, is a dangerous overgeneralization. Every person moves in multiple circles in multiple dimensions. All it requires to harm someone through intolerance is a brief period of dominance in one of those circles or dimensions, and all it requires to make it a lasting harm is to find ways to prevent the other circles and dimensions from counterbalancing it.
I don't understand how it is an over-generalization or dangerous. The original prompt uses the term "country" and that naturally tends to lead to discussion about the legal framework of that hypothetical country. My use of the word society is only a little different from country, so I would suggest just reading "country" in my post to keep it aligned with the original prompt.
I don't see why it's a bad thing or dangerous to consider this within the scope of a single country. Or for that matter any self-described society that has laws or social mores. It's true people can be in multiple circles at once -- I would only say in reply that we could complexify the scenario by adding more of those circles if that seems more useful to you.
Is your point along the same lines as the idea of intersectionality? In other words, it is dangerous not to consider all intersecting social identities when considering this question?
Whether using "country", "circle", or "society", these social arrangements and their rules seem central to discussing intolerance. I don't know how it could be done otherwise.
I think that "whether your Group A has social advantages or disadvantages when compared to Group B in this society" is far too simplistic, and likely to lead to generalizations that erase certain types of problems from the discourse.
You bring up "intersectionality", and I think what's happened to that term in the last 20-30 years is a great example. It's gone from meaning that we need to look harder, to creating Venn diagrams, to justifying hierarchical rankings. I think an adversarial take on the concept would prove more useful: group A may have less formal power in area X than group B, but what other resources can someone from group A use to screw over someone from group B? Are there areas in which they have more power, what other groups are they a member of, are there other factions in society, are there outside powers that can be brought into play, is it possible to change the playing field somehow? Can you just walk up and stab them?
There's this urge to boil individuals down to a number, and collect the numbers into a graph, and then collapse the graph into a single number for all of society. But life's a lot messier than that.
I suggested reverting to the original "country" instead of my "society". I get the impression that you are very vested in using words that best describe the topic you are discussing.
I don't see the terminology I've selected as inevitably leading towards collapsing the graph to a single number for all society, but I'd be game if you have another approach and some other words for discussing this.
>In other words, it is relevant to know what the relative power or status is between the two groups.
I originally described the two groups as “minor ethnic group A” and “major ethnic group B” in an effort to illustrate that B is larger/more powerful than A.
Thanks. I initially understood that you meant that Group B was larger than Group A, but it wasn't clear that you meant that Group B also had greater power or status. With this clarification in mind, I am still coming up with examples like relatively small religious communities that are somewhat geographically based. I'm also trying to think of other categories of examples.
Depends heavily on what we're talking about when we say tolerance/intolerance. Does group A simply harbor a general dislike towards group B, e.g. they prefer not to mingle with members of group B? Then I think this is potentially concerning and perhaps should be addressed culturally/socially, but not necessarily legislatively. Are members of group A actively physically assaulting members of group B, engaging in discriminatory business practices against them, etc.? Then yes, that should be dealt with legally.
Thanks for your perspective. To clarify, group A’s intolerance doesn’t extend to an explicit, doctrinal call to violence against group B. I think most people agree that this can’t be tolerated within a functional society. Let’s just say group A thinks group B’s way of life is inherently immoral, unjust, fundamentally flawed.
Well, you can't really do anything legally about someone's thoughts/feelings, so it really depends on how that intolerance is materially expressed: hate speech, discriminative hiring practices, social stigma against in-group members who hang out with group B, etc.
> you can't really do anything legally about someone's thoughts/feelings
a) Sure you can! Depends on the legal system perhaps, but in America it's quite possible.
b) The legal cause of action can be different than the real cause of action. That is, if you identify wrongthink, then just find some other legal excuse to go after the person.
c) Really, why restrict yourself to "legal" means? Just don't get caught.
What I mean is you can't directly do anything about it. You can't just charge someone for "having the wrong thoughts"; at the very least, they need to say something or do something that you can charge them for.
Can this be exploited? Sure. But I don't think that's relevant to what we're talking about here, which is about "tolerance as virtue", i.e. what we believe, ideally, *should* be done.
"Creating a hostile environment" seems to work, depending on the exact type of wrongthink? Even if the person had only expressed the wrongthink outside of the environment in question.
And yeah, sorry, this is a tangent, and not a helpful one. I don't have much to say about main issue, at least not rationally. My PTSD thinks we should be tolerant of everyone except people who advocate for intolerance, who should be slowly tortured to death in public in ways that will give children nightmares 500 years from now. But I don't think my PTSD is always a reliable guide to ethical behavior; somehow it usually ends up advocating for schemes that would kill off everyone in the world.
I get up very early and get to the gym before sunrise. If I have ADHD medication upon waking up, it revs me up and I'm eager to start exercising. Caffeine works about half as well for these purposes.
If I don't have any stimulants, it's a struggle. Things improve as I start the workout, and then things really improve once the sun rises and I finish my workout. My mid-morning, I'm wide awake.
So I'm clearly not dependent on stimulants to feel alert during the day; it seems like a pre-sunrise issue. I've tried cold showers and artificial sunlight lamps, but they seem only marginally helpful. Any tips?
Stimulant withdrawal?
Is this something you only experience when waking up before dawn? It could be sleep inertia or a similar phenomenon that naturally fades as your body wakes up.
I wouldn't know. I wake up at the same time every day! If it's sleep inertia wearing off, I'd sure like to accelerate the process.
You could try something like nighttime bupriopion? The only study google is giving me is this collection of case studies (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8020706/), but I swear I also read about a larger study a few years ago.
Interesting! I never would have guessed.
All the kids where I work are coming down with chicken pox, so it's the time of year for sickness. Good luck to all the Dr. Scott family!
Don't they get vaccinated for chicken pox?
The argument against routine vaccination seems to be related to increased vaccination for chicken pox leading to an increase in the rate of shingles in adults: https://www.ox.ac.uk/research/everything-you-need-know-about-chickenpox-and-why-more-countries-don%E2%80%99t-use-vaccine
Our school has recently had chicken pox, scarlet fever, whooping cough and covid all doing the rounds in the same couple of weeks! I was surprised about the chicken pox as it's a middle school (aged 9-13) and I had assumed virtually all children would have had it by that age.
"[T]here could be an increase in the rate of shingles in adults over time, which would make the vaccine programme not cost-effective.
"This is because, if chickenpox in children disappears as a result of a vaccine programme, adults would no longer have their immunity boosted by exposure to their chickenpox-suffering children and grandchildren and would be more likely to get shingles. Put simply, the conclusion of the previous review was that it would not be cost-effective for the NHS to immunise children against chickenpox."
I find that unconvincing. There is a shingles vaccine now. Why not vaccinate against chicken pox in childhood and then against shingles for the over-50 crowd? Letting kids get sick (and my case of chicken pox at age 9 was miserable) just so Grandma's immune system can get a boost seems like a weak argument.
They did say "cost-effective", so presumably that's what convinced them. It might be possible to do all the vaccinations you want, but is it cost-effective? Maybe that cash should be spent on bed-nets.
But the objection is to a temporary effect. If you vaccinate everyone against chickenpox, that might aggravate shingles in the elderly people of today. But it will flat-out prevent shingles in the elderly people of the future; how could this possibly fail to be cost-effective?
I thought the objection was: right now, the waves of chicken pox in young people are providing old people with free boosts to the partial immunity from their shingles vaccines. But if we vaccinate the young people against chicken pox, there won't be as many waves of the disease going around, and old people won't be as protected against shingles, and so the next time the disease goes through the country, they'll have worse cases.
I had to look it up and apparently we don't, which surprises me since they vaccinate for pretty much everything so far as I was aware.
The government is talking about introducing it, so sometime in the indefinite near future:
https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/question/2023-10-24/511/
Interesting. I had assumed that vax was more universal, since chicken pox is common, miserable, and can lead to shingles in later life.
Fwiw, I can’t imagine having two newborns at the same time and still produce the volume you produce. I steal all my time in the very early hours and between meetings.
Does orbital bombardment still make sense as a potential weapons systems? A couple years ago we discussed Project Thor on here (briefly, a satellite or launch system in orbit that would drop tungsten rods onto targets on Earth). People argued that Project Thor is not very realistic because you can't just leave a very expensive, very valuable weapons system sort of hanging around in orbit where anyone could attack or hack it. I agree with that argument.
But how about simply launching the tungsten rods as missiles? A land-based system sends the rods into orbit, likely via SpaceX. They maneuver into position and then fall onto the target back on Earth. It would undoubtedly be slower & more expensive than our existing missile capability. But would the drop from orbit offer enhanced damage against dug-in targets? I'm particularly thinking of Iran's underground nuclear facilities here. A tungsten rod from orbit might not be better than a nuclear weapon, but it does avoid nuclear weapon usage, and might just obliterate a ground-based target while being extremely difficult to defend against....
When I discussed this with the CEO of a NASA contractor that I know, he said he thought SpaceX had the right technical skillset to not just launch the rods, but also guide them back to Earth- he said their guidance systems for re-entry are top notch. The original issue with this idea was just cost, but SpaceX has also greatly reduced the cost-to-launch
Something like this, but taboo the word "orbit" except insofar as it appears in the word 'suborbital". At the time your weapon hits the target, it will be on a suborbital trajectory - by definition, because an orbital trajectory doesn't impact the surface. So just wait until you know what and where the target is, and then use your rocket to launch the payload onto a suborbital trajectory directly from your launch site to the target. There's no advantage to actually putting the thing in orbit here; that just requires adding another 500 m/s or so of velocity to circularize and then subtracting 500 m/s or so when you want to deorbit, leaving you exactly where you were before but having squandered a bunch of rocket fuel and propulsion hardware.
Basically, you're talking about an ICBM with a kinetic-energy warhead rather than a thermonuclear one. And if you go the SpaceX route, maybe an ICBM with a reusable first stage (but a more cumbersome launch procedure). People have proposed non-nuclear ICBMs before; with modern precision guidance it isn't a completely ridiculous idead.
It's never been done, for two reasons. First, ICBMs are expensive, and nobody has yet been willing to pay that price for delivering a mere few tons of TNT equivalent to a target. And second, because "everybody knows" ICBMs are only cost-effective with nuclear warheads, everybody tends to assume that any ICBM launched in wartime will be nuclear. And they might not wait to confirm that before nuking you in return.
Both of these will also apply to a hypothetical orbital or fractional-orbital system. If boosters get cheap enough, people might reconsider the suborbital version, but there's still no reason to go all the way to orbit and back.
Imagine, instead of just launching 1 large tungsten rod, you launch say a dozen or more tungsten artillery shells with their own guidance systems- maybe encased like a bullet to survive re-entry. You could launch those at ground targets, but also naval ones- say, one overly aggressive Asian nation trying to blockade an island 90 miles off their coast..... Would be impossible to defend against those falling from the sky
> There's no advantage to actually putting the thing in orbit here; that just requires adding another 500 m/s or so of velocity to circularize and then subtracting 500 m/s or so when you want to deorbit, leaving you exactly where you were before but having squandered a bunch of rocket fuel and propulsion hardware
I guess the advantage would be if you have enough of them in orbit that you'd have one passing overhead any given target in a short timeframe, so you could blow up anything you like with fifteen minutes' notice or something.
Although even then I guess you might as well use an explosive warhead while you're at it.
You need a *lot* of warheads in orbit to always have one fifteen minutes out from an arbitrary target. But having one warhead on one missile on the ground, allows you to engage any target in half an hour or so.
One problem: to a foreign observer, launching a tungsten rod on an ICBM looks a lot like launching a nuke on an ICBM. You don't want to start a nuclear war through a misunderstanding.
Yes and no; my understanding is that you can very quickly differentiate a missile whose intent is to arc back down to a target, and a mission into space.
Of course, throwing a bunch of instant-pounding rods into orbit to threaten any and every country is going to ruffle some feathers.
Fractional orbital bombardment systems are a thing, never particularly common but everybody knows the concept. If anyone launches a payload into low orbit in wartime, particularly one where the first orbit passes over the enemy's capital or whatnot, it's going to be presumed a nuclear warhead until proven otherwise.
If anybody launches a payload into low orbit in peacetime, lots of people are going to be curious about what it's for, some of them are going to be suspiciously curious as a matter of principle, and their spies and analysts will probably figure it out before you get around to starting a war.
I read an interesting substack a year ago about how the SpaceX Starship would deliver about as many Joule/$ as non-nuclear B52s do today, but now I can't seem to find it.
Maybe this one from Austin Vernon? https://austinvernon.site/blog/starshipsuperweapon.html
That's it! Thank you!
Cost would still be a gigantic issue; you can send explosives on an ICBM to accomplish the same thing.
On the fundamentals, you can look at the potential energy of an object in space (you can't just use mgh, because g is not constant over the distances involved, but this is a well-understood question) and assume that's how much energy you'll release on impact. Then you ask how much energy you want to release on impact and that will tell you the size of the rod you need. Then you can ask how much it will cost to launch that rod.
Agreed, I never understood the appeal of these rods and why they somehow would be superior to existing missiles.
At orbital-reentry velocity, or ICBM velocity, the kinetic energy of an inert mass is at least a factor of five greater than the detonation energy of an equal mass of high explosives. And it's rare for anyone to build a warhead that's more than 50% explosives.
So if you're going to put a "warhead" on an orbital or ICBM-class rocket, there's no point in putting anything less than nuclear explosives inside. Conventional explosives would add maybe 10% to the yield, all else being equal, but all else won't be equal - the low density of explosives compared to steel will make the warhead bigger, so more drag and it will be moving slower when it hits, which will cost you more than 10% of the yield.
Just make it out of the densest material you can find, and make it as long and skinny and streamlined as you can manage to keep stable. Against some targets, you'll prefer a cannister that dispenses lots of heavy metal darts shortly before impact.
If you're willing to go nuclear, and you can afford to go nuclear, that will be more destructive still so just focus on efficiently packaging your H-bombs for re-entry.
You are correct! My back-of-the-envelope calculation using orbital velocity of 7 km/s yields 24.5 MJ/kg of kinetic energy (mV²/2), while I found a figure of 5 MJ/kg for high explosives. Of course the projectile will not hit the ground at the orbital velocity, but the numbers are at least in the ballpark.
> Of course the projectile will not hit the ground at the orbital velocity
Just use impact velocity.
https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/11e32p9/why_is_11kms_said_to_be_the_slowest_possible/
Substack ate my reply, try again. The Reddit thread was confusing: they all talk about terminal velocity = escape velocity, but it makes no sense to me. For one, they are ignoring the atmosphere. And I don’t see how it applies to a projectile launched from a few 100s km away.
I think the argument is that a tungsten rod dropped from space would have superior firepower to existing non-nuclear weapons, and greater penetration against hardened underground targets. Specifically, in this case, Iran's nuclear facilities which are reportedly underneath a mountain
Realistically, your rod penetration would be limited at the upper end to something like the newtonian/impact depth equation.
So your tungsten alloy rod (~18g/cm3) can penetrate about 6.7 times it's own length into rock (~2.7g/cm3).
So no chance of punching through hundreds of metres of rock.
Wouldn't there be a shockwave of damage going much further than just the actual penetration?
There would be something like that, but it would spread out quickly - the rough-and-ready metric that I used early seems to imply that a massive 10m-long rod could penetrate something like 70m. The deepest bunkers can be hundreds of metres underground, so any shockwave would have to pass through tens to hundreds of metres of rock and concrete to do any damage.
I have my doubts that a rod could possibly penetrate all that deeply and do all that much damage when it gets there. A concrete bunker sure, but a deeply buried facility? I don't know anything about the Iranian facility but Cheyenne Mountain in the US is beneath 600m of granite and there's no reason why the Iranians couldn't dig something similar. Even if you use a whole SpaceX starship to launch a single rod it can't have more than about 8 kT of kinetic energy (minus atmospheric losses, which would be significant) and that's a lot, but it's not "blow up a whole mountain" type energy.
As a side note, here's Bret Devereaux on orbital bombardment ( https://acoup.blog/2020/07/17/fireside-friday-july-17th-2020/ ):
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𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗴𝗶𝗰 𝗼𝗯𝗷𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲𝘀 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗹𝗶𝗸𝗲𝗹𝘆 𝘁𝗼 𝗶𝗺𝗽𝗼𝘀𝗲 𝘀𝗵𝗮𝗿𝗽 𝗹𝗶𝗺𝗶𝘁𝘀 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗮𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝘁𝗼 𝘂𝘀𝗲 𝗼𝗿𝗯𝗶𝘁𝗮𝗹 𝗳𝗶𝗿𝗲𝗽𝗼𝘄𝗲𝗿 if the goal is to control the planet or even to be able to meaningfully extract resources from it. Blasting a world into uninhabitability using nuclear munitions or even just de-orbiting large rocks may be strategically unacceptable.
[...]
𝗧𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗻 𝘁𝗶𝗲𝘀 𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗼 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘀𝗲𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗱 𝗽𝗼𝗶𝗻𝘁, 𝘄𝗵𝗶𝗰𝗵 𝗶𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗹𝗶𝗺𝗶𝘁𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝗳𝗶𝗿𝗲𝗽𝗼𝘄𝗲𝗿 𝗮𝗴𝗮𝗶𝗻𝘀𝘁 𝗶𝗻𝗳𝗮𝗻𝘁𝗿𝘆 𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗰𝗲𝘀 𝘂𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗰𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗿 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗰𝗲𝗮𝗹𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁. How much firepower do you need to remove deeply entrenched infantry? 𝗔 𝗹𝗼𝘁, 𝗶𝘁 𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗻𝘀 𝗼𝘂𝘁. Stephen Biddle (you may recall him) wrote a piece in 𝘍𝘰𝘳𝘦𝘪𝘨𝘯 𝘈𝘧𝘧𝘢𝘪𝘳𝘴 (82.2, 2003), “Afghanistan and the Future of Warfare” where he laid out some statistics for firepower against entrenched infantry. He noted, for instance that “French defenses at Verdun in 1916 endured a two-day German artillery barrage equal to about 1,200 tons of explosives — in nuclear parlance more than a kiloton, or more explosive power than the w48 𝙩𝙖𝙘𝙩𝙞𝙘𝙖𝙡 𝙣𝙪𝙘𝙡𝙚𝙖𝙧 𝙬𝙖𝙧𝙝𝙚𝙖𝙙 — yet enough of the entrenched defenders survived this maelstrom to halt the German assault [emphasis mine].” And “On July 18, 1944… [the allies] deposited… 𝗺𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝗻 𝟴 𝗸𝗶𝗹𝗼𝘁𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝗳𝗶𝗿𝗲𝗽𝗼𝘄𝗲𝗿 — on just seven kilometers of German frontage 𝗶𝗻 𝗹𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗿𝗲𝗲 𝗵𝗼𝘂𝗿𝘀 [emphasis again mine].” In both cases, there were enough defenders left not merely to fight, 𝙗𝙪𝙩 𝙩𝙤 𝙖𝙘𝙩𝙪𝙖𝙡𝙡𝙮 𝙬𝙞𝙣 𝙗𝙤𝙩𝙝 𝙗𝙖𝙩𝙩𝙡𝙚𝙨. Nor is this merely a feature of old dumb-bombs; in Afghanistan, Biddle notes, “One dug-in al Qaeda command-post was found surrounded by no fewer than five 2,000-pound bomb craters. Still, its garrison survived and resisted until overrun.” 𝗜𝗻 𝘀𝗵𝗼𝗿𝘁, 𝗶𝘁 𝗶𝘀 𝗽𝗼𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗯𝗹𝗲 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗶𝗻𝗳𝗮𝗻𝘁𝗿𝘆 – 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗼𝗻𝗹𝘆 𝙞𝙢𝙥𝙧𝙤𝙫𝙞𝙨𝙚𝙙 𝙛𝙞𝙚𝙡𝙙-𝙛𝙤𝙧𝙩𝙞𝙛𝙞𝙘𝙖𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙨 – 𝘁𝗼 𝘀𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗶𝗻 𝗲𝗻𝗲𝗿𝗴𝘆 𝗱𝗲𝗹𝗶𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘆 𝗼𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗹𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗹 𝗼𝗳 𝙩𝙖𝙘𝙩𝙞𝙘𝙖𝙡 𝙣𝙪𝙘𝙡𝙚𝙖𝙧 𝙮𝙞𝙚𝙡𝙙𝙨 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝗼𝗻𝗹𝘆 𝘀𝘂𝗿𝘃𝗶𝘃𝗲, 𝗯𝘂𝘁 𝗯𝗲 𝙛𝙞𝙜𝙝𝙩𝙖𝙗𝙡𝙚 𝗮𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗼𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿 𝗲𝗻𝗱.
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(All emphasis is original. I would emphasize that, for an attacking force that itself inhabits the same planet being attacked, rendering the planet uninhabitable is 𝘨𝘶𝘢𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘦𝘥 to be strategically unacceptable.)
That makes absolutely no sense. They do not have superior firepower in proportion to their cost, which is the only way that would matter, and dropping anything that affected facilities underneath a mountain would have catastrophic effects in most of the world; it would be the worst war crime ever committed, and whoever was responsible would get wiped out by a coalition of everyone else in the world.
I don't see why that would be. You have no fallout; possibly a lot of the energy is even released underground; the total energy of the explosion is not more than that released by a full load of B52 (conventional) bombs.
I don't like the idea because it's an explicit militarization of space without any really huge gain in capabilities. But I don't think the strikes would amount to some unprecedented crime against humanity.
> the total energy of the explosion is not more than that released by a full load of B52 (conventional) bombs.
I'm not sure what you're thinking here. But here's a quora answer on point:
https://www.quora.com/If-humans-built-a-20-Gigaton-nuclear-bomb-on-Mt-Everest-detonated-would-it-be-enough-to-turn-the-mountain-into-a-crater
> The above ground mass of Mt Everest is estimated at 357 trillion pounds or 1.619×10^14 kg. To melt 1 kg of granite starting from 200 C costs about 1.3 MJ. 20 Gigatons TNT is 8.4×10^13 MJ. So, no, even with 100% efficiency, such a bomb is simply not large enough to accomplish the task. It is a factor ten too small at least.
> This is ignoring of course, that most of the energy of such a bomb would be directed upwards, through the Earth’s atmosphere, as a huge pulse of thermal radiation, and would vanish uselessly into space. The energy would not be deposited directly downwards into the rock, where it needs to go, should you, for some unimaginably crazy reason, actually wish to destroy Mt. Everest.
> In comparison to what is needed to destroy mountains, the biggest explosions human beings can make are miniscule. They are laughably small. The biggest nuclear weapon ever exploded was in the range of 57 megatons-TNT.
A full load of B52 bombs, by the way, appears to be something like 30 megatons. This is obviously not enough to accomplish anything if the goal is to strike below an existing mountain.
Using our generous estimate of 40 gigatons of explosives' worth of energy released straight into the mountain to destroy Mount Everest, admittedly an unusually large mountain, first, let's note that we have exactly the same problem of most of the impact energy not going into the mountain, and second, that the Torino scale threshold for "impact will cause global catastrophe" is an impact with the equivalent kinetic energy of 10 (ten) gigatons of explosives.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torino_scale
For that threshold, we're not worried about the "problem" that impact energy mostly doesn't go right into the ground below the impact -- rather, that is the reason we expect a global catastrophe.
"dropping anything that affected facilities underneath a mountain would have catastrophic effects in most of the world; it would be the worst war crime ever committed, and whoever was responsible would get wiped out by a coalition of everyone else in the world."
Why do you say that? Basically you couldn't do it without a massive explosion that would put the mountain into the atmosphere, or something?
See my response to Boris Bartlog's flat-out insane comment.
I recently noticed that I find historical or technical inaccuracies can really break my suspension of disbelief in media such as video games.
It depends on the setting, though. The space mechanics in the X universe and the like are fundamentally underwater mechanics, because you have a maximum speed (which depends on your engine strength) and also do not need to carry reaction mass, so you are acting more like a submarine than a spacecraft, not to mention that interesting things in space are many orders of magnitude further apart than in games. This does not break immersion for me because realistically simulating space is hard from a gameplay perspective. Likewise I won't complain that two dimensional games from FTL or Rimworld or Factorio enforce a square grid and do not have rooms which stack in z direction even though it this is obviously what would happen in reality. Or how research gets handled in every video game. Or how the probability of making a full recovery after having been shot half to death in most video games is close to 100%. Or how unrealistic it is in a deckcrafter game that you can only use abilities if you draw their card. This is all part of the genres, and I can accept that.
What gets me though is making an (implicit) promise of accuracy and then underdelivering. I really stumbled when (IIRC) The Doomsday Book mentioned Potatoes in medieval England, for example.
You can have the Roman Empire as a setting for your video game. You can have Julius Caesar in it. I might even give you a pass on making young Caesar a subordinate NPC in the party. Likewise, if you really want, your squad of Romans can have an archer. The Empire is a big place, plenty of space to find some mercenary coming from a culture with a tradition of archery. But if you make Julius Caesar the archer of the party I will stop playing your game right there. (Expeditions: Rome, for the curious.)
Or take Victoria 3. This game seems to put a lot of effort in historical accuracy. Building chains which produce resources required in the industrial revolution are also a major keystone, from what I gather. So why then is the Bessemer process (reality: 1856) on the same research tier as the atmospheric engine (reality: Newcomb 1712)? Why not throw nuclear power (~1945) in on the same tier while you are at it? This totally broke immersion for me.
> You can have the Roman Empire as a setting for your video game. You can have Julius Caesar in it. I might even give you a pass on making young Caesar a subordinate NPC in the party. Likewise, if you really want, your squad of Romans can have an archer. The Empire is a big place, plenty of space to find some mercenary coming from a culture with a tradition of archery. But if you make Julius Caesar the archer of the party I will stop playing your game right there.
This isn't something I'd expect you to tolerate if you hate seeing potatoes in medieval England. By definition, Julius Caesar cannot be present in the Roman Empire.
He also really can't be part of a "party"; he was a politician and their entire career track was well specified.
I knew when I wrote it that this phrasing was coming to bite me.
Is there a better phrase to mean 'the land masses controlled by ancient Rome in whatever state form'? In German, the term 'Roemisches Reich' fills that role, because 'Reich' is a large realm more generally, not necessarily ruled by a 'Kaiser', while in English there is an association between 'empire' and 'emperor'.
I would argue that the latin phrase 'Imperium Romanum' is also a bit more in that direction (from reading acoup, 'imperium' was a property of certain offices in the Republic which basically meant they were allowed to command armies), and German Wikipedia claims that the phrase 'Imperium Romanum' is used in Cicero's time (late republic), so it might be what I am looking for.
The English Wikipedia has a disambigiation page for Roman Empire, stating that "The Roman Empire usually refers to the post-republican, autocratic government period of Roman civilization" and then goes on to admit that it might also refer to other time periods.
> Is there a better phrase to mean 'the land masses controlled by ancient Rome in whatever state form'? In German, the term 'Roemisches Reich' fills that role, because 'Reich' is a large realm more generally, not necessarily ruled by a 'Kaiser', while in English there is an association between 'empire' and 'emperor'.
If I were going for that, I would probably use the phrase "ancient Rome". There are other options; I might refer to the general time and place by a phrase like "the classical Mediterranean", but that's overtly geographic and definitely includes areas that might not be under Roman control, depending on the details of what time it is. ("Rome" sounds geographic, but it has the same political extension that you see all the time when decisions are attributed to e.g. "Washington" or "Berlin".)
We have words like "realm" (as you've noted!) that refer to territory without specifying how the territory is governed, but they tend not to appear in the names of specific entities.
> from reading acoup, 'imperium' was a property of certain offices in the Republic which basically meant they were allowed to command armies
While that's true, it is surely not the sense that is meant in the phrase "imperium Romanum".
But you're right that "imperium Romanum" wouldn't refer to an "empire" in some technical sense, and certainly wouldn't be related to the concept of an "emperor" - as best I'm aware, there wasn't a Roman concept of an "emperor", and they technically held power by simultaneously holding many different formal offices, including some that were only for them. ("Trib. pot.") The closest title they had to "emperor" was "Caesar", which is technically a part of their name, not a title, and literally means "a member of Julius Caesar's family". So the phrase should mean something like "everything under Roman command", which seems like a good match for Reich.
One could conceive, for instance, a classical Mediterranean pirate game where the pirates capture young Caesar (following a notable episode of actual Caesar's game), and he features as a party member while they are bringing him back to the pirate... lair or whatever.
> the pirate... lair or whatever.
"Base" is the most neutral word I could think of for this.
Maybe "fortress" if it's fortified, but I don't really know how they were set up. Modern pirates operate out of regular towns populated mostly by non-pirates, and it seems like classical pirates could have easily done the same thing... except that they held a bunch of captives, which would probably be easier if they had their own fortress somewhere.
I'm pretty sure that captives being held against their will aren't allowed to have weapons. What would it mean for Caesar to be in the player's party here?
Let's see what Suetonius has to say:
"While on his voyage thither [to Rhodes, to study rhetoric], in the winter season, he was taken by pirates near the island of Pharmacusa, and detained by them, burning with indignation, for nearly forty days; his only attendants being a physician and two chamberlains. For he had instantly dispatched his other servants and the friends who accompanied him, to raise money for his ransom."
So, he allegedly told the pirates that once he was freed, he would crucify them, and by jings he did do that. Clearly the pirates didn't believe him, or they preferred "collect ransom now, worry about that later". He was 25 at the time, so you could stretch it that, bored out of his mind as a 'guest' of the pirates, and maybe them having a jest at the expense of their 'guest' who was threatening to hunt them down and execute them afterwards, the pirates brought him along on a raid or similar where he was part of the party. "Let's see you put your money where your mouth is", as it were, if this snobby young Roman is as good as he's claiming to be in regards to leadership and fighting and the rest of it.
Plutarch's account certainly gives us leeway:
"2 1 To begin with, then, when the pirates demanded twenty talents for his ransom, he laughed at them for not knowing who their captive was, and of his own accord agreed to give them fifty. 2 In the next place, after he had sent various followers to various cities to procure the money and was left with one friend and two attendants among Cilicians, most murderous of men, he held them in such disdain that whenever he lay down to sleep he would send and order them to stop talking. 3 For eight and thirty days, as if the men were not his watchers, but his royal body-guard, he shared in their sports and exercises with great unconcern. 4 He also wrote poems and sundry speeches which he read aloud to them, and those who did not admire these he would call to their faces illiterate Barbarians, and often laughingly threatened to hang them all. The pirates were delighted at this, and attributed his boldness of speech to a certain simplicity and boyish mirth."
EDIT: Regarding pirate bases, seems they were a regular scourge and grew into a genuinely severe problem until Pompey eventually set about methodically to break their power. "Cilician" became a synonym for "pirate":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cilician_pirates
"Cilician pirates dominated the Mediterranean Sea from the 2nd century BC until their suppression by Pompey in 67–66 BC. Because there were notorious pirate strongholds in Cilicia, on the southern coast of Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey), the term "Cilician" was long used to generically refer to any pirates in the Mediterranean.
...It was thought that a war against the pirates would be big and expensive and that it was impossible to attack all the pirates at once or to drive them back everywhere. As not much was done against them, some towns were turned into pirate winter quarters and raids further inland were carried out. Many pirates settled on land in various places and relied on an informal network of mutual assistance.
...Western campaign
Pompey divided the Mediterranean into thirteen districts, to each of which he assigned a fleet and a commander. Pompey then swept through the western Mediterranean with his own powerful fleet, driving the pirates out or into the paths of his other commanders.
By keeping vigilance over all the sea at the same time (and at great cost), there was nowhere to run or hide. Those Cilician pirates that did escape fled to the eastern Mediterranean. Pompey completed this first part of his campaign in 40 days.
Eastern campaign
Pompey then turned to the eastern Mediterranean. He gave mild terms to those pirates who surrendered to him personally, as opposed to his other commanders. Some pirates surrendered their ships, their families and themselves up to Pompey. From these, he learned about where others were hiding.
Many pirates retreated to their strongholds of Asia Minor, where they gathered and waited for Pompey to attack them. At Coracesium Pompey won a decisive victory and blockaded the town. The Cilician pirates surrendered all their harbours and fortified islands."
So they had not alone harbours, used towns as winter quarters, but also had fortified islands. The pirates who captured Caesar could well have had a base on such an island, or a camp around their harbour.
So our Cilician pirates, holed up in their winter quarters (Suetonius says Caesar was captured while travelling in the winter season) while they await the return of the ransom for Caesar, decide to do a little light inland pillaging and looting, and bring the young lordling along with them as a joke member of their party.
He'd be a temporary party member in a technical sense.
"I really stumbled when (IIRC) The Doomsday Book mentioned Potatoes in medieval England, for example."
Possibly the game creators confused that with the Red Book of Westmarch?
Editors and proof-reading appear to be luxury optional items in modern publishing, the current practice seems to be "knock the raw manuscript into some sort of shape, then send the files to China for typesetting and printing the physical copies".
This is a huge problem with self-published books. I read a few of them years ago; their ebook forms are cheap on Amazon and often have attractive theming and blurbs.
Sadly, the big lesson I learned was "don't ever read self-published books".
It depends. I found that the real popular web serials (e.g. Worm, the bigger ratfict novels (HPMOR, Unsong, Worth the Candle, Luminosity)) are usually readable (even though Deiseach might disagree at least on HPMOR).
I am not sure if this is because of the feedback from writers, or if all the rationalists have someone editing their texts before publishing, or because to write a viral web serial you need to be able to edit your texts well in the first place.
I think people directly putting their work on Amazon is kind of a red flag not because of anything fundamental but more out of signaling concerns.
Sort of like a private car sale (instead of cutting in a dealer who might be obliged to give some guarantee on it) or hiring someone without formal education (instead of someone who payed their tributes of lifetime and debt in the ivory tower): sure, there are a lot of legitimate reasons to cut out the middle man, but there are also a lot of less legitimate reasons, namely, that you would not make it past the middle man. This information asymmetry makes deals difficult.
I tend to select on authors mostly through personal recommendations. (It used to be that I read Hugo and Nebula award winners, I don't mind reading SF with woke undertones as long as it is fun to read. (Contrast with Eneasz, who mentioned on some podcast that he uses these awards (iirc) to know what not to read.) Of course, after the 2023 debacle, Hugo has jumped the sharks.)
(Of course, I also don't do Amazon for ebooks because I refuse to deal with DRM for books. Kindle is great hardware though.)
I have read, and liked, HPMOR. I'm not saying it's impossible for self-published work to be good. But the odds are so poor that it's not worth finding out. (I read HPMOR on the strength of a personal recommendation.)
I would bet pretty heavily on your third reason, "to write a viral web serial you need to be able to edit your texts well in the first place".
I have found that by far the strongest predictor that a book will be good is "the author has written another book, and that one was good".
I seem to be four steps from Winston Churchill. The first step gets me to my grandfather, who I have met. During WWII, he served as a driver for senior officers in the Finnish military, where he almost certainly met some senior officer (step 2) who met Carl Mannerheim, the head of the Finnish military (step 3.) Mannerheim met Churchill twice in his life (step 4.)
Anyone have a Winston Churchill number lower than that?
Sure, I've met several people who have met Queen Elizabeth II, and she met Winston Churchill many times.
The Queen met a ridiculously high number of people in her life. I wouldn't be surprised if she met (under some reasonable definition of the word "meet") more people than anyone else in history.
This - and many more than any politician, even one with such a long career as WSC. So I think a Churchill number of 3 through the late Queen is easy mode in the UK. I'm in the UK, and although I never met HMQ I know dozens of people who have. In fact my grandfather, grandmother and mother all met HMQ *during the time that WSC was Prime Minister*. But none of them ever met him in person at any time.
Playing on harder mode, my father met every Prime Minister from 1963-2010 (Home, Wilson, Heath, Callaghan, Thatcher, Major, Blair, Brown), of whom the first five certainly knew WSC.
If you're British, as I am, and of an age, you are likely to have met quite a few people who met Churchill. I have, variously: Clarissa Eden, who I met at a book launch in London in the 90s, and who, amazingly, died as recently as 2021: 66 years after her husband took over from Churchill.
I also got to know a very senior civil servant who in early career worked in Churchill's private office at No 10 in the 1950s.
And perhaps above all else my late mother in law, who worked at an airfield in East Anglia, and met Churchill when he visited in summer 1944.
Four for me - as a teen I met Original Seven astronaut Deke Slayton, who was astronaut boss at the time, and would have worked with the Apollo 11 crew. They met with Prince Phillip, who would have met Churchill many times.
Not me, but as a reader of many of Churchill's own works plus several serious biographies, I'll bet that a decent number of people of European heritage can come up with 4 or fewer steps. His professional lifetime at high levels of responsibility and/or prominence was _so_ lengthy. Also he was always an enthusiastic traveler who wanted to meet people as part of his work and/or for its own sake.
Oh wait -- I met Walter Mondale, who as VP met Queen Elizabeth II. And I know two people who each met the Queen at honorific ceremonies (one got knighted the other got an OBE). So that's three 3's for me to Churchill just offhand....never thought of it this way before. Kind of neat actually.
Shook hands with George Will once, and George McGovern -- could be a couple more 3's there, not sure.
I'm two steps. One of my childhood neighbors was Lt-Col Montagu Cleeve, who I often used to meet, and he was Winnie's big gun expert in WW2 and so would certainly have met him.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montagu_Cleeve
Old timers of that generation rarely spoke of their wartime experiences, but he did once mention he had been at the front through most of the Battle of the Somme campaign in 1916, including the fateful first day. He was so whippet slim that I reckon he must have turned sideways and advanced crab-wise after going over the top, so to all the German machine gunners it would have been like trying to hit a playing card edge on!
Driving one day in the 1990s I suddenly heard him on the car radio. "Feck, that's Monty!" I thought, "What's he doing on Classic FM?". It turned out he was reminiscing about WW1 in a series called "Forgotten Voices of the Great War" (the latter being what it was called before WW2). He said the worse thing for him was not the mud, nor the lice, nor even the shells and bullets, but the giant rats everywhere!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgotten_Voices_of_the_Great_War
I think I can do 2: I've met a European royal who likely met Churchill as a child or teen. I need to do more research to verify the link but it seems probable. If not I have 3 (through Queen Elizabeth), but so do others in this thread.
I met former U.S. Senator Jake Garn who met Queen Elizabeth who met Churchill. So 3 steps for me.
Doesn't count as a meeting if they never co-authored a paper :P
What counts as a meeting?
Many years ago I met Charles when he was still a prince. We shook hands, but didn't interact much beyond that. He was around 17 when Churchill died, so I imagine they must have been introduced at some point. So that's two steps?
I've met Gerry Adams, who - during the Northern Ireland peace negotations - would have almost certainly parlayed with senior British figures of the sort who could have very well met Winston Churchill at some point.
Both Biden and Obama met Queen Elizabeth, who definitely met Churchill.
> and your local mayor probably met your head of state.
Really? That would surprise me. England is tiny, but it's pretty common not to live in a tiny country.
Population isn't the right metric for whether you'd expect a mayor to have met the head of state. It would need to be adjusted by mayors per capita.
Geographic size is also relevant.
Al Franken was in the US Senate with John Kerry, and may have met him. John Kerry met Queen Elizabeth, who met Winston Churchill. So Al Franken's Churchill number may be 3. And yours may be 4.
A random thought - it appears Jewish-Americans are underrepresented as novelists.
Those who come to mind are Philip Roth, Jonathan and Faye Kellerman, Leon Uris, Chaim Potok, and Harlan Coben. (As a Canadian, I'll add the great Mordechai Richler.)
Surely I'm missing a bunch, but if not is there something in North-American Jewish culture that discourages fiction-writing?
I don't think that's likely. Even if we stopped with your list it's still a little unclear whether we'd actually be talking *under* representation, given how few Jewish people there actually are in America (2.4%). But you also missed Sidney Sheldon, Isaac Asimov, Herman Wouk, and probably twenty more that I can't call to mind off the top of my head.
Certainly not all fiction - for comics, the Wikipedia page is like a Who's Who of the greatest comics creators.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jewish_American_cartoonists
How true!
As a child I was highly (and very positively) influenced by the great Sam J. Glanzman's art, and Stan Lee's (Lieberman's) editorial positions.
Jack Kirby (Jacob Kurtzberg) suggested something along the lines that since comics weren't Proper Art and not Important, no-one took it away from them.
Ha! I liked Jack Kirby's work (Sgt Fury and his Howling Commandos) too. Had no idea he was Jewish.
I read that c. 12 to 15 years ago, and almost certainly noted the JK dedication, without realizing the Jewish connection.
What can I say? People are ethnocentric, and I'm no exception.
You might be interested in this non-statistics post from Andrew Gelman:
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/05/11/young-lions-how-jewish-authors-reinvented-the-american-war-novel/
You aren't doing much with SFF-- if you go there, you get Asimov, Silverberg, Novik, just off the top of my mind.
When in my peak SF-reading era (aged c. 12 to 15) I went through any number of paperback anthologies of short stories. In my memories, these collections were usually compiled and edited by Robert Silverberg.
> is there something in North-American Jewish culture that discourages fiction-writing?
Considering their representation in screenwriting... no. The opposite is obviously the case.
Curse you, I was too slow. I have the 'reply' box open right now to say "the joke answer is that they all get hoovered up by screenwriting and never write that novel".
Also, though, what about Joseph Heller dang.
Is Michael Chabon nothing to you? 😀
I'd never heard of him. Lots of catch-up reading ahead!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jewish_American_authors
To me they seem solidly represented, perhaps even overrepresented considering they only make up 2% of the population. I think the overrepresentation of Jews everywhere else makes you think there should be more than there are, but there are a pretty good amount of fictional writers there.
And J.D. Salinger? Wow, I never knew ...
Oh, now I feel stupid! I should have thought of at least Joseph Heller, Isaac Asimov, and Ayn Rand. Duh ...
As a space nerd, I have Mailer's Of A Fire On The Moon in the basement. Still haven't read it yet. Thanks for the nudge.
I read a John Updike short story (A Sense Of Shelter) in a 1st-year English Lit class in college many years ago. I've reread it a number of times. I found/find it very evocative. I've tried to borrow his Rabbit novels from the library, but it seems they've fallen out of fashion.
Not a joke - I only cited the ones that came to mind. I haven't read the ones you listed, though I've heard of Bellow and Wouk.
Thank you!
Currently the implied probability (to the nearest whole percentage point, mid-price) of the following people winning the US Presidential Election is, in the order Betfair/Polymarket/Metaculus/Manifold (numbers 3 weeks ago in brackets):
Trump: 43/46/50/49 (48/50/50/50)
Biden: 42/45/50/49 (38/41/49/47)
RFK: 4/4/1/0 (3/3/1/0)
(Michelle) Obama: 3/2/1/0 (3/2/1/0)
Newsom: 2/0/1/0 (2/1/1/0)
Harris: 1/1/1/0 (2/2/1/0)
Broadly Biden has improved and Trump has worsened across the board, but the effect has been more pronounced in real money markets. In fact Trump and Biden were at one point tied at 42% on Betfair, which caused me to cash out half my Biden position and reinvest it (at the same odds) on Trump, so that I now make 76% profit on my original stake if either of them wins, which feels like a good position to be in.
The odds on Betfair imply a 15% chance that somebody else wins, which seems too high to me, and I think is small odds bias. RFK specifically is also up in the real money markets, while the play markets continue to ignore him. My guess is that RFK bettors are acting from conviction in their guy rather than a rational assessment of his chances (and there is the usual problem that a return of 3.6% on a market which may not resolve until 6 January probably fails to compensate for the opportunity cost).
I’m not sure what has caused the tilt from Trump to Biden: in my judgment nothing very surprising has happened in the past 3 (or 6) weeks. Trump’s legal problems continue as expected, there’s been good and bad news on the economy (jobs up, inflation also up) and the situation in Gaza remains as it is. Broadly though, the new numbers are much closer to where I think they should be, so if anything the question is why Biden was so low before (a sitting president in a good economy with a campaign finance advantage should not have been at 28%, in my assessment).
>I’m not sure what has caused the tilt from Trump to Biden: in my judgment nothing very surprising has happened in the past 3 (or 6) weeks.
The number one threat to a sitting President is a bad economy, particularly the country being in a recession in the months before the election . The closer we get to the election without a recession having begun, the less likely that there will be one immediately before the election. Hence, "nothing happening" is good news for Biden, and if prediction markets did not shift towards him under those circumstances, that should undermine one's confidence in those markets.
PS: As for inflation , it is was up in March, but very slightly relative to 6 months ago (annual rate of 3.5% in Mar versus 3.2% in October), and food inflation is low https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/food-inflation
The prediction markets in this case are following the polls, which also show a narrowing of Trump's lead over the last month.
My thinking is that Trump's numbers largely follow what's been going on in the news with him lately. Recently that's not much so his numbers have been dropping off; with another show trial starting up I predict his numbers will go up again in the short term.
That would make sense, but I'm not seeing it https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/2024/national/. I see a wide range of outcomes, tending to favour Trump, both recently and in early March/late February.
The graph here https://www.economist.com/interactive/us-2024-election/trump-biden-polls does show a slight narrowing between the central lines in a wide spread, from Trump 45/Biden 44 to Trump 44/Biden 44, but while we need to give some weight to the polls (and the fact that Trump is polling so much better than at the same stage of the last cycle is the main reason to think he should be the favourite), we shouldn't give them too much weight so far out from the election, so a shift of that size should not have resulted in the probabilities (on Betfair) going from Trump 47/Biden 28 to Trump 43/Biden 42 over the same timeframe.
I was basing my comment on https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/president/general/2024/trump-vs-biden ; I meant to include a link in the comment but I guess I forgot.
With all the emphasis on the presidency going to Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton, various Kennedies, etc., I'm kind of surprised Donald Trump Jr. never comes up.
At least with the Kennedies you can see the idea that "this family should be president" passing down to subsequent generations. If you think Michelle Obama would be a good president because she's related (not by blood!) to Barack Obama, surely Sasha Obama would be a better president. She doesn't yet meet the age requirement, but that's not true of Donald Trump Jr.
According to Polymarket, Junior is 3rd favourite to be the Republican Nominee, with mid-point odds of 0.9%, behind Haley but ahead of DeSantis. Betfair only gives him 0.15% (placing him behind Haley, Carson, DeSantis and Ramaswamy (in that order), but ahead of Tucker Carlson).
The meme energy is all with Barron Trump as the next Trump president. He's eighteen feet tall ffs.
> The odds on Betfair imply a 15% chance that somebody else wins, which seems too high to me, and I think is small odds bias.
Definitely partly small odds bias, but we are talking about two old men here. There's a real chance that one or both of them is incapacitated on health grounds before the election and someone else gets drafted in. Someone popular enough might stand a decent chance in that case.
That's definitely a possibility but over such a short timeframe putting the odds anywhere near as high as 15% is insane. I'd guess closer to 5% myself, maybe less.
Yes, my all-things-considered view is around Trump 50%, Biden 45%, someone else 5%.
Biden is a sitting president. I'm always amused at people saying he can't win. For better or worse we have a two-party system (no, RFK will not win a single state or even a single EC vote), and half the country will vote for one, and the other half for the other, and the outcome will hang on weird turnout distributions in a handful of states, and a sitting president has an advantage.
Sure is fun how the polls always tighten the closer we get.
If it's at all a horse race, you'd expect the trailing campaign to course correct based on early polling more than the leading one does.
That certainly is an explanation, yes.
Wasn't there a big scare around Biden a few months ago and kinda a push to get him off the ticket?
https://www.natesilver.net/p/its-time-for-the-white-house-to-put
A ha! I do remember stuff.
I remember a bunch of guys in February making a push to retire Biden from the ticket on the small fact that he's old and the big fact that he's running even with Trump. I can't access Betfair from this computer but I'd put good money on Harris and Newsom being much higher back in January/February when replacing Biden seemed possible. Now that Biden is guaranteed to be the Democratic nominee, the money pivoted back to Biden.
As for Newsome or Harris, those odds kinda make sense to me, even now. Basically, what are the odds of Biden suffering some catastrophic infirmity, say a crippling stroke, at his age and stress level in the next six months. 3% doesn't seem wild to me and, contingent on Biden being removed from the ticket, Newsom or Harris stepping into that role and having a >50% chance of beating Trump seems reasonable.
I was getting 3.55 (=28% chance) on Biden in mid-February, and he was still about that level in early March (see https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-318/comment/50883466). Newsom and Harris were higher, although it's mostly Obama who made up the difference (there was a discussion about this on Open Thread 315).
Biden is still old and he's still running even with Trump: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/2024/national/. The "bunch of guys" never included anyone with any direct influence on the outcome. They've made less noise recently, but I've not seen any of them row back the argument. Few people thought that Biden might lose the primary: the argument has always been that he should step aside, which he still could. So this seems more like a vibe-shift than any change in the fundamentals.
By the way, if you could access Betfair, you would be able to get 1/7 on Biden being the nominee, which is of course free money if you consider this outcome to be guaranteed (and I myself have money on this outcome, so I don't entirely disagree).
My impression is something like
- There was lots of inflation, which made people angry at Biden
- But it hasn't gotten worse recently, and people have short memories
- The more time things go by without anything happening, the better Biden does
Abortion seems to have been a national discussion again in the US which, at this point, seems to clearly benefit Biden whenever it happens.
I think this is definitely something to watch, but the move in the markets mostly predates the published decision in the Arizona Supreme Court, so unless somebody was betting inside information, that won't be the cause.
In 18 years, lol. Chin up dad and thank you. As other members have said, certainly no need to apologize. We’re grateful and rooting for you.
Does anyone have any resource recommendations for starting an online business that aren't clickbaity coursemongers with little actual value?
I'm a complete noob but would like to start a healthcare-related online blog and eventually service business. Any advice on how to get off the ground would be greatly appreciated. For example, I have a domain and have registered the domain but have no real idea on what steps to take next. What are the best practices for coding the website, brand design etc? Thanks
Check out the podcast Startups for the Rest of Us and the related content from the host.
I’d be happy to give you a free 15 min consult on web dev and branding (I do this professionally). DM me if interested. :)
That would be awesome, I absolutely will! Thanks
I've heard the statistic that, in the U.S., "half of all marriages end in divorce." That often leads to the observation that, of the remaining 50% of marriages that last until the end, many must be unhappy unions that persist only due to some combination of financial considerations, inertia (laziness), unwillingness to hurt their children with a divorce, or unwillingness to lose social status.
But has anyone considered the flip side of that? How many divorcees REGRET divorcing their spouses? And in how many instances is the regret mutual?
The rejoinder I've heard for that stat is that it came from measuring the marriage rate (number of marriages per 1000 people per year, or whatever) to the divorce rate measured the same way, and the latter was half of the former. Not taking into account that the marriage rate was lower at that time than it was in the past when the people then getting divorced, were getting married.
In addition I have heard that first marriages are less likely to end in divorce than later marriages (because of people who get serially married/divorced)
And divorce has gotten less common than when that stat was first being thrown around.
First marriages are much less likely to end in divorce. The number goes down again if your marriage passes some basic sanity checks (you are both over the age of 21 and have a reasonable age gap, you have been dating for at least a year, neither of you has a criminal record et cetera.
You'd think these numbers really ought to be easier to find though. The Bureau of Births, Deaths and Marriages (or your local equivalent) really should be shouting these numbers from the rooftops so that people can have a more realistic understanding of marriage success rates.
Another annoying fake statistic that often gets repeated is the "80% of small businesses fail within the first year", which as far as I can figure out is not based on anything in particular and is far from the truth for any reasonable definition of small business.
My understanding is that at one point in history, some number X of marriages were measured to occur in the United States, and approximately half that number were measured.
If that is the source of the claim about 50% of marriages ending in divorce, then it a poorly-informed statistic. It can't be used to estimate the probability of any marriage ending in divorce during the years between the marriage beginning and one (or both) spouses dying. It can't be used to measure the increase or decrease in the rate of divorce (or the rate of marriage).
Keep in mind that repeat divorcees make up a disproportionate number of the divorces, so it's something above 50% of the remaining that stay together. Quick stats I'm seeing show that 67% and 74% of second and third marriages end in divorce, greatly increasing the total number.
Some basic math: If 100 people get married and 30 get divorced twice while the remaining original 70 remain married, that would be a 46% divorce rate. Real rates are more complicated since some divorce once while a rare set might divorce 4, 5, or 10 times.
Also, by the time you're looking at people who changed stable partners several times in their adult life, you're pretty far away from the traditional model of marriage for life. So it might be more relevant to look at how much long-term relationships last regardless of whether they got married or not.
Also complicated by different rates in different age cohorts, and by age at time of first marriage.
Apparently the regret is mutual 6-15% of divorces.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/a-better-divorce/202206/why-divorced-partners-end-up-remarrying-each-other#:~:text=Key%20points%201%20Research%20suggests%20that%2010-15%25%20of,help%20couples%20address%20the%20original%20reasons%20for%20divorce.
How much of “spiritual/meditation” type advice boils down to, “learn how to relax and see things holistically?” Is that, like, all of it?
I guess some people *will* never experience more than your summary ( https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/17/what-universal-human-experiences-are-you-missing-without-realizing-it/ ) but reading MCTB, Seeing that Frees or just r/streamentry tells me there's a lot more to it.
That's a tough question to answer, because "spiritual / mediation advice" ranges from light mindfulness taught by any rando, up to all kinds of spiritual practices from any of the world's traditions, taught by their respective qualified teachers. It goes as deep as the spiritual side of any of the world's religions can go, including yours if you have one.
In any case, learn to relax and see things holistically sounds like pretty decent beginner advice.
In my experience, meditation in this context is about focusing all of your awareness on some sensation before any mental processing of it can happen. This is very different than trying to relax. Though I'm not sure if the people you've heard this from mean something different.
No. It is about being aware of the breath, focusing on it, which relaxes the mind.
Hmmm. Yes, but being relaxed wasn't the object of my meditation practice, rather it was a side-effect. The object of my meditation was to understand how thoughts, emotions, and sensations arise in the mind and to learn how to silence them. Relaxation, bliss, stress reduction, etc. were not the primary objectives the practices imparted to me by my Kagyu and Gelug teachers. Detachment was. And Prajna — "wisdom" — but wisdom in knowing how one's mind worked.
Kagyu and Gelug! Let me bother you with the same question I have been bothering others with. One thing that confounds me about figuring out thoughts arising in the mind is that I just can't do it: the closest to "watching thoughts" for me is *recalling* what I thought a few moments ago. It is so bad that as I sit to "meditate" and try to watch my thoughts, I sometimes scratch myself, and only after that realize that I had scratched myself. Is this level of mindlessness normal in the initial stages? Is this why vajrayana folks recommend competence in sutrayana before even starting vajrayana?
P.S., edit: If not for avoiding suffering, is it merely for curiosity that you wanted detachment and prajna? And -- if it is not too personal -- despite all that you need CBD to sleep?
> Is this level of mindlessness normal in the initial stages?
Yup. Most of what we think we're perceiving in real-time is the immediate memory of the perception that our mind has just processed (filtering out details, and tagging it with a hypertext of associated emotions and feelings etc.). The thoughts that arise within us are the same way. If you're initially losing track of your awareness, it's OK to count your breaths (though some of my teachers advised against it, some thought it was fine). At some point, you'll stop needing to count, and some further point along the path, you'll find the thoughts will stop spontaneously arising (think of thoughts as feeding off your attention, and if you starve them, they'll give up trying). After a year — or five — or ten of doing this practice (YMMV), you'll be able to achieve one-pointed (undistracted) awareness.
If you have an itch, scratch it, and try to return to your breath. The Zenners don't like that advice, though. They seem to think you're giving in by scratching the itch. I resisted the urge to scratch until the itching took over my entire body. I resisted further and I started to hallucinate that I was on fire — then I screamed, jumped up from my meditation, and left the hall until the feeling went away. The lay instructor thought I was crazy when I told him why I screamed. But he wasn't very clued into all the possible ways your mind can sabotage your intentions, though. A lama later told me to just scratch the itch and return to the breath. He pointed out that it was a positive sign that I was hallucinating though since that's what the Buddha went through before he achieved enlightenment.
After about five years of almost daily practice, I could achieve that one-pointed consciousness state for a block of time (not indefinitely). Then I reached a plateau (but I didn't have an instructor who I trusted — that's another story — and I was meditating on my own). I kept it up on my own for another five years, but I wouldn't say I achieved many benefits from my ten years of meditation, per se, except that it's made me more patient dealing with extreme boredom situations — like waiting in the DMV line. ;-)
Theoretically, one should be able to ignore all sorts of unpleasant things without flinching. For instance, those Vietnamese Buddhist monks who self-immolated didn't scream or move while the fire consumed them. I could never be able to do that! But I discontinued my meditation practice because I had a very different type of uncomfortable experience/hallucination. I was practicing without a teacher and trying some advanced visualizations (Vajrayana stuff), and the visualizations became real! Scary real. Dharma protector deities are happy to teach you a lesson, but the lesson won't necessarily be very pleasant. I never went back to meditation. So I advise you not to undertake meditation practice without at least the occasional supervision of an advanced meditator — and even the introductory stuff can backfire on you (viz. my itch that turned into fire).
BTW, some meditators confuse bliss with enlightenment. You might end up in a blissful state, and you might be able to cultivate at will — but that's not necessarily beneficial to your advancement, because you get attached to the bliss. We called those people bliss-heads. Detachment is the goal of the Middle Way. I can't speak for other Buddhist schools or the Vedanta schools.
I also undertook some Sufi meditation training. That was totally different from my Buddhist experiences. The Sufi practices put my mind into a high-energy state that was very exhilarating. They didn't explicitly say it, but it seemed like they were after an ecstatic state where they could merge with the godhead.
As for sleep, for most people, our sleep gets more brittle as we get older. Although according to Bob Thurman are some advanced sleeping and dreaming meditation practices (really!), I never had instructors who were familiar with them. And though relaxation techniques may help you get to sleep, they're hard to implement when you're suddenly wide awake at 3 in the morning. With CBD, I can sleep like I did when I was younger.
Absolutely fascinating. Thank you very much for sharing.
You say "After ... I could achieve that one-pointed consciousness state for a block of time" and "At ... some further point along the path, you'll find the thoughts will stop spontaneously arising". Was there a stage where you had thoughts, but you could watch them "from the outside"' without getting engrossed in them, and without the "hypertext"?
Everything else in your comments: dieties, sufi meditation, CBD etc. are interesting, though I am sorry about the unpleasant experiences, both fire and the "lesson", and that things did not work out. I am still intrigued as to why you wanted detachment if you didn't care about stress-control or bliss: just curiosity about the nature of reality?
There's a lot to unpack in your questions. I'll address your first one and get back to the second one later.
> Was there a stage where you had thoughts, but you could watch them "from the outside"' without getting engrossed in them, and without the "hypertext"?
I'm not sure I experience things the same way you do or anyone else does. We assume that we do, but I'm not convinced that we do. And verbalizing internal experiences is harder because it's a symbolic abstraction of experience (and then we fall down the rabbit hole of whether our shared symbols describe the same thing). Having said that, I am going to put down my laptop sit upright in my chair, and follow my breath for a few inhalations and exhalations (inhaling through my nose, exhaling through my mouth with my tongue lightly touching the front of my palate — eyelids barely open). I'll try to describe what I was experiencing. Back in a few minutes.
....
At the beginning of my first inhalation, I was in the middle of remembering all the arguments about the best way to breathe when meditating. There were a lot of quick almost subliminal associations that jangle with those memories — humor and frustration associated with dozens of earnest discussions about the best way to breathe are bundled together with those memories (but I'm NOT remembering any particular discussions or incidents, I'm just aware that they're there) — long inhalation through my nose — the memory thoughts drop away. I'm chest breathing on my first inhalation, and I'm aware of the air filling my lungs. I've stopped inhaling, and I'm aware of my heartbeat and the constant background tinnitus in my ears, but I have the familiar impression (association) of my mind being in a deep warm cavern. A morning dove is cooing outside my window (no associations or memories with that, I'm just aware that it's cooing). I exhale through my mouth slowly deflating my lungs and I have the subliminal (symbolic) visualization of all my thoughts and memories flowing out with my exhalation. Pause before I inhale again, and there's just stillness.
As I begin my next inhalation my normal mind processes start their chatter again. But their jangle decreases as I follow the air into my lungs — but It's not until I have air in my lungs that I'm in stillness again. I'm aware of my pulse and the gentle ringing in my ears. That's all. Exhale, I'm aware of the air leaving my lungs. Stillness until I'm about to begin my next inhalation and then random thoughts and memories start springing up again. They get snuffed out when I focus on the airflow through my nostrils and sinuses. Quick thought: funny that I'm unable to feel the air flowing down my trachea, but I feel it entering my lungs. Stillness again when my lungs are filled. And stillness as I exhale and pause before the next inhalation.
And so on...
So these were my remembered impressions of my first two inhalations and exhalations. I noticed that I'm pretty aware of everything around me. And when I conceptualize thoughts and perceptions, I see them as multidimensional things. They pop up through a chain of associations like beads on a string. If I clutch at a thought beed, my mind will automatically pull up another thought or impressions hung together along a string of associations. I can short-circuit that process by following the sensations of the breath and being aware of the sensations of my body. I'm waaaaaay out of practice though, and I can't help but get distracted by thoughts between each breath cycle. When I was in practicing regularly, I didn't.
And I don't see myself as watching my thoughts from outside. They're coming up from within the thing I consider to be the larger "me." But it's also important to note that I see the me kernal — identity part of my mind — as being nestled in a larger womb/pool/sea of consciousness. I can't really perceive the fluid that my identity is floating in, but shiny thought-fishes are always arising from the depths. I can either reel them in, or I can just sit in the boat — but the only way I can stop reeling them in is to follow my breath. I can just sit in the boat while I inhale and exhale until the thoughts and impressions start rising up from the depths again at the end of each breath cycle.
You may have a totally different visualization of your selfhood, so I don't know if this helps or not.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/18/book-review-mastering-the-core-teachings-of-the-buddha/ this gives a good summary what enlightenment is about on one level.
> learn how to relax and see things holistically?
You could also summarize it with: "Just observe your experience", but that doesn't really tell you what will happen.
That does sum it up pretty nicely.
> Though, this apparently can result in some major psychological issues if overdone
For sure especially with bad guidance or going in without any knowledge (e.g. Goeanka retreats for people without knowledge/experience).
I didn't read the whole article but I thought it was interesting how the she pretty much perfectly describe A&P followed by Dissolution and Fear described in MCTB
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/18/book-review-mastering-the-core-teachings-of-the-buddha/.
What advice have you followed to help you be a better husband/wife?
I firmly believe that the most important factor in life satisfaction is a happy family. Most relationship advice centers managing a troublesome partner rather than improving oneself. While it’s obviously hard to be specific, this community is most like myself out of any I’ve found. What works for you?
I'm not married yet, but I'm in a long term relationship and I truly think they are my partner for life.
I find it's really important to be mindful of context and factors that may cause myself or my partner to have friction, and make decisions to reduce friction.
A really common issue - the friking dishes. We're in a privileged position of having a decent income and no kids, so when things are getting too much and I want to scream at my partner for not doing the dishes, I take a step back and interrogate what's happening. Usually what's happening is that I'm stressed and tired and I can't cope with another chore. This is the point where I say, "takeout tonight, then we'll tidy up when we get home".
A lot of people consider the shared pool of tangible resources (money) but not necessarily the intangible (time, energy), and it's important to notice when the demands of life is outstripping available time and energy. We don't fight when we're not tired and hungry!
This goes for a lot of things. Partner drank my coconut water? No big deal, he'll have to buy me another later.
We spend a lot of money on takeout, groceries, etc, because I think mutually we value our relationship more than money. And I have watched a lot of people in my family in unhappy marriages (they're an older generation, they won't divorce) because they just refuse to spend the money to reduce friction.
I think I learnt this from my parents, mostly. (Happily married for nearly 30 years now). Prioritise reducing friction whenever you can. For a frankly ridiculous number of petty grievances, money makes them go away. If you don't have money, then accepting help from family and friends.
Best advice? Communication is key.
More precisely: Peterson pre 2019 is a lot worth listening to, especially on the "do not let sleeping dragons lie". Raise long term issues with your partner. When there's some obvious elephant in the room, find a way to talk about it.
Other big advice: get married or find another sufficiently binding agreement that puts your backs to the wall and forces you to grow. Life's always going to throw cannonballs in your face. Any situation where giving up remains an option on the table is a situation where one of those cannonballs will one day lead to that option being picked up.
I was given some advice by the pastor who married us a few days before the service. I took the advice to heart, and have tried to live by it, and I do believe it has been helpful to my marriage.
He said, "Marriage is not 50-50. Its 100-100. You're going to find yourself thinking that your partner is not doing their fair share: fight that thought. You give 100% of yourself to this marriage, regardless of what your partner gives you. Do not keep score. It will seem unfair sometimes, because it is unfair. You two will never be 'even', so do not aim for that as a goal. Resentment will destroy any marriage."
Yes! Do not ever keep a score. Ask for help when you need it, not because "it's unfair that I do the laundry all the time".
My wife introduced me to a system called "Fair Play Cards" for managing household tasks. The goal is to reduce "mental load" and "second shift" problems by making tasks open and visible. In a nutshell:
1. List off all the tasks you're doing in your household, and agree on what they entail. Not just basics like cooking and cleaning, also think of more intermittent and hidden things like who's going to the kid's soccer game or who sends birthday/holiday cards to friends. The book has a big list of suggestions to consider.
2. Divvy up the tasks in a way that feels fair to both of you. Since you carefully listed off everything you could think of, you both should have a good idea of what sort of load the other is taking on. If one partner is doing a lot of work but the other doesn't know about it because they're keeping silent about it, that breeds resentment.
3. When you take on a task, you own both the planning and implementation, from start to finish. If you own the grocery shopping task, you are responsible for knowing what ingredients you need and deciding what to put on the shopping list, not just going out and buying stuff. This solves the "mental load" problem where one partner thinks "of course I help, I do all the grocery shopping" and doesn't realize how much time and effort it takes to keep track of the pantry stocks, plan meals, etc.
4. Meet once a week to update each other on your status, plan tasks for next week, and make sure you're both doing okay. Renegotiate tasks as needed. My wife and I get take-out so that we don't have to worry about cooking and cleaning for that night and can just talk.
It's worked pretty well for us. We've also noticed another benefit: when the other spouse is out of town for something, you have a good idea of what you need to take care of while they're gone.
Great question. I (married ~17 yrs) would suggest the following as things you can do unilaterally:
a) You gotta give up the ego around your partner, 100%. This is easy when times are good, but you also gotta do it when your partner is pissed at you over some trivial thing that makes no sense to you. It may help to remember they are not pissed at you, they are having a hard day and you just happened to do that one thing that drives them nuts. There is no argument you can win, because it's not an argument, it's an emotion. The best thing to do is say I'm sorry and put some distance between you ("I need to go check on the dog")
b) If something your partner does bugs you, don't react in the moment. First wait and see if it's a pattern, and see if you can put up with it. When we first moved in together I decided consciously to wait a year before before mentioning any of their annoying habits. After a year most of them had become things I was used to, or understood, or even appreciated as intrinsic to who she is. I gave the others another year, and so on - by now I'm pretty much used to everything except the kitchen mess, but she's such a great cook I decided it was the least I could do to clean up after her.
c) If it's a really big issue, raise it as the start of a conversation that may last days, weeks or months. Don't have all your talking points lined up and expect to come out with a decision or agreement that you want. Say from the start that you want to talk about x, want to hear what they think about your idea/concern/unhappiness, but don't expect a resolution right away. Because if it's a hard issue, you'll both need to listen, think a while, talk, listen, think a while, if you hope to land somewhere that works for both you.
Hope this is helpful.
Communication is a skill. If you practice it, you will get better at it. That includes both listening to your partner and expressing yourself.
Depends on how deep of a rabbit hole you really want. How 'spergy' would you and your fiancée consider yourselves?
See my response to Lasagna for #1.
The most widely applicable advice I can think of is: someone in the relationship has to keep their mouth shut when things are bothering them, and it might as well be you. The idea that couples should talk about problems and faults they have with each other is a mistake - for the most part you need to just deal with it. Be really, really judicious with criticisms and demands.
Depends on which side you err... if your tendency is already to keep your mouth shut and put up, you can accumulate serious amounts of resentment, and it's not pretty when it all bursts out. Bringing things up in time can help avoid that.
Yes, whoever came up with "never go to bed angry at each other" advice was on a mission to ruin relationship. Don't stay up till 4 am trying to "resolve" an argument, do go to bed, more often than not you'll wake up and won't even remember what the hell that angry argument was all about.
Epistemic status: >20 y first marriage.
That sounds like refuting the joke version of that advice: [i]Never go to bed angry with each other. Stay up and fight![/i]
The "joke version" is what often actually happens.
I think it's often misunderstood - I take it to mean that you should get your own head straight before you go to bed so you're not lying there mentally rehearsing the disagreement. Ideally you want to be able to say "I love you, I'm sorry we fought, sleep well and we'll figure it out tomorrow". I think it's good advice on the whole, but I agree with you some people take it to extremes.
"you should get your own head straight before you go to bed so you're not lying there mentally rehearsing the disagreement"
Ideally - yes. But it's often impossible because there's no space to get there in the middle of a fight. So "I can't do this anymore, I need to sleep" is as good a pretense to break the fight as any.
Sure! But there's a danger of it becoming a goal in and of itself. As often is the case, TLP had this one covered: https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2010/08/love_the_way_you_lie_with_me.html
Everyone has a limit to what they'll tolerate. The major discontents get brought to the surface once that threshold is breached. Placing a premium on communication does not mean confronting on every little thing, it's about working through issues as harmoniously as possible.
Very often couples fight because of "tone", defensiveness / hurt feelings, or otherwise some other source of stress that may be out of the ordinary that leads to one more to get snappy. Since we're not mindreaders, communicating well and understanding where everyone is coming from can help diffuse disputes promptly. The confrontations will be inevitable, the difference is whether they will escalate in anger and blunt pointed criticism (all those things we tolerate big and small) versus taking a break and reconvening with honest thoughts and feelings *without* antagonizing your partner.
I would say the couples ONLY fight about tone, defensiveness, hurt feelings or the like. I mean sometimes genuinely large issues come up but it’s rare. Couples probably aren’t having knockdown battles over the Nicene Creed, or the status of trade agreements with China, or even money. It’s almost always tone, irritating habits, chores undone, general feelings of being disrespected or the like.
What you wrote sounds great, but the problem is that these things are incredibly unlike to change. Your wife might leave her family and move across the earth for you. Your husband will convert to Judaism if it means that much to you. But neither is going to stop sounding condescending when talking about proper nutrition for the kids or start cleaning the house “properly” because those things are too ingrained. It’s very difficult to change them at all, and if you start listing all the ways you would prefer you partner was different than they are you’re going to end up even angrier and more unhappy when they fail to update.
> these things are incredibly unlike to change
I disagree. If both parties approach in good faith for improved communication, the primary shift is that they better understand each other and sooner intervene to avoid needless blowups. No one is expected to be perfect or completely change in their habits for another person, and that isn't contingent on it being the case.
For example, were there a "tone" incident at a certain point in a relationship both parties are pretty aware of what's happening, and so one of two things could happen first a) the person speaking could clarify / apologize, b) the person offended could voice their concern rather than starting a silent treatment and accumulating more discontents, and then diffuse before anything starts.
None of this requires fundamentally changing a person. It's about understanding them, in a two-way street, and making certain concessions and compromises. Anyone who can't make a compromise in a relationship won't get far.
If you're in a situation where your partner won't meet halfway, and you've done all the couples therapy shit, then you have to decide whether you're better off swallowing it or leaving.
Being able to talk about issues seems to me one of the most important things about my relationship with my wife. I think it matters a lot how you approach, and "criticism" or "demand" seems like bad ideas, while "request" or other softer language works just fine.
That said, I definitely agree with you about learning to keep your mouth shut, especially in the heat of a moment. Calling your spouse a derogatory term or with a laundry list of everything that's ever bothered you about them while you're angry is going to make everything worse. Calming down and coming back in an hour with a more helpful approach is really good for relationships.
A heuristic I’ve found helpful is, “whenever I’m annoyed at her for doing X, ask how I am doing the same thing, and focus on that.”
When I’m upset or mad at her, trying to imagine her perspective on things and think about how she feels.
Noticing my level of emotional arousal and walking away, rather than trying to talk. Doing the same for her.
Trusting that the future will be ok and I don’t need to solve this problem now, especially when I feel the need to to solve it now.
Remembering that my map isn’t the territory and that I dont really know her, so I can see her as a kind of joy to explore and mystery to partake in.
Noticing when I am upset at a caricature of her in my imagination and laughing at that.
Regular, consistent date nights.
Knowing a feel things that make her feel loved and doing those consistently.
Small attempts to give affection without any expectation of reciprocation.
Making little inside jokes.
Telling her she’s doing a great job and trying to learn from her.
Telling her what I admire about her, especially when I’m angry.
A very solid set, and I would expand upon a few things.
"Regular, consistent date nights" is often used as a code for "sex is really important", possibly because our culture codes that you must behave as though sex as fundamentally frivolous. I'll be more explicit and simply say "Sex is really, really important". If partnered (particularly life-partnered), you should almost certainly be having more sex. Sex for humans can be bonding. It can be a time to turn off your thoughts. It can be a time to be someone else. It can be a time for the pleasure of giving pleasure. It can be so many things, all the while being quick and inexpensive entertainment and a great sleep-aid. Both partners in a life-relationship need to get comfortable with the fact that if is to be "successful" (i.e., they carry one of you out feet-first) then you will be boinking literally thousands of times with the same person, so it behooves you both to get good at it.
I use "Regular, consistent date nights" as code for "For god's sakes get out of the house occasionally", which is also important.
Rations. In addition to everything else you and your partner will be doing together, you will quite often be eating together. It's a really good idea if one or both of you commit to being able to produce good meals for each other on a regular basis, and enjoy doing so. Poor rations lead to poor morale inexorably, and you often won't even notice _why_ morale is poor. Armies have mutinied over it. The rest of housework is important, but meal provision is an often overlooked key to long-term joint happiness.
You have limits, as you are human. Limits on what you will accept, on what you are capable of, and on what you enjoy. While you should be always be looking to overcome your limits, your partner should nonetheless know and respect them. That means _telling_ your partner when your limits are approached, and what you need with respect to them. This advice of course applies in reflection as well.
If possible, time apart (say a week or so) can be a great opportunity to gain perspective on the partnership. Traveling for work doesn't really count, as you are unlikely to have time for the necessary reflection. Separate vacations, long weekends with friends, hobby retreats, what have you.
Food + sex + expressing gratitude = making each other happy.
These are excellent. I’m curious about “I don’t really know her” because I do feel I know my fiancée extremely well — we probably spend more time together than any couple I know, because of what we do.
Can you explain that one any more?
What I’ve found is that the woman I thought I knew, when we were engaged existed more in my head than in reality. Training myself to both follow the breath and get in a habit of skepticism made it easier to see that, behind that idea of her, there is this immensely vast unknowable thing. When I focus on that, I’m open to being wrong and curious about what she’ll do next.
The boundary between self and other is, I think, a kind of fractal that grows exponentially. I become more of who I am in our relationship, in part because raising kids is so hard. These challenges make me better understand myself, which then helps me to learn more about her, which increases the surface area of that boundary.
Not apxhard, butting it a bit, hope you don't mind. I've been married for >20y and still don't think I really "know" my wife. Or, to say better, the "unknown" space is still vastly greater than the "known". But I know what you mean: in the early years I may have had a similar illusion.
I think it's fundamentally impossible to fully "know" another person, especially one of the opposite sex. Understanding that brings a degree of humility and curiosity that are vital for a long-term relationship.
If I could distill this to one sentence, it would be "don't assume, ask".
Yup. The map ain’t the territory, but it sure feels that way. Especially when im upset.
Your "fractal boundary" metaphor is great!
I love all of these pieces of advice and want to yes-and:
Make sure they know they are appreciated and they make you happy.
Small things and big things.
"I really appreciate you doing (small everyday chore) for me"
"I really appreciate the sacrifices you've made for the life we have"
What were you competing about?
3: No need to apologize! You're great. We love you. Hope you and your family are doing well.
Can someone steelman Tyler Cowen for me?
Yes, I'm sure he's a pretty smart guy with very wide reading habits, but I've been consistently unimpressed with his rigour of thought on Marginal Revolution or other work, or hearing him interviewed on podcasts; he's very confident, but I find his willingness to hold forth confidently to be unrelated to the actual extent to which he has thought about something (examples off the top of my head is a lack of thinking through how children or disabled people fit into his libertarianish socio political worldview, or his incoherent ideas about animals ethics.)
What's the draw?
Allow me to point out one thing I appreciate, apart from the usefulness of his link aggregation. Cowen sometimes tries to indicate useful limits on how much explanatory power his favorite ideas have, in a way that is useful to the reader, rather than just as a parenthetical remark meant to dissuade criticism. This seems rare in the blogosphere.
For example, Cowen's take on an issue is likely to be along the lines of 'What would Hayek say?', relative to just about any other social theorist. But he has also posted this: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/02/john-stuart-mill-on-women-as-explained-by-tc.html.
I chose this example both because it is recent and because I think it would be a helpful one for the many ACX commenters who have read Hayek and/or Seeing Like a State.
>examples off the top of my head is a lack of thinking through how children or disabled people fit into his libertarianish socio political worldview
What do children have to do with libertarianism? This objection strikes me as a category error. Libertarianism is a political philosophy and children don't participate in politics. I believe the only libertarian attitude here would be to limit State interference and let families raise their kids however they like (modulo things like abuse).
I guess OP means: what about orphans or children with woefully inadequate parents, and what about people who have expensive care needs that a realistic salary can't pay for? Sometimes people can't stand on their own two feet without help — does libertarianism just say "bad luck, you're on your own?"
I think the stock libertarian reply would be that most people agree that helping needy people is important, and if we do agree that we're free to help via private charity. I think a libertarian would say that it's wrong to force people to be charitable if they don't want to be, and also that the state is an inefficient and untrustworthy means of allocating charity, so it's better overall to let people help directly.
Yes, I think this is both correct and consistent with my answer. "Letting people help via private charity" conforms to the libertarian notion of "this isn't within the State's remit, deal with it yourself." Some people might view this as a cruelly laissez faire attitude in the context of child care, but libertarians (rightly, in my opinion) view the harms caused by a potentially indifferent culture to be less than those caused by well-meaning policy enacted by incompetent bureaucrats. Government simply can't solve some problems directly and ultimately does more damage when it tries.
MR is a very frequently updated content aggregator, usually with something interesting.
He hosts interesting interviews with interesting people, and asks good questions.
He shares insightful comments even if I don't agree with him on 33-50%+ of everything. His readership seems to lean far more to the right and criticizes him at every turn, so in that microcosm the quasi-libertarianism seems moderate.
This does _not_ answer your steel-manning request, since that is way beyond my ken. As a lay person I attach a great deal of weight to how someone is viewed by peers and Professor Cowen appears to be held in high regard by peers. The breadth of his culture is unusual; in modern times with super-specializations finding a single human who knows so much about so much reveals both the interconnectedness of knowledge and the possibility of a modern "renaissance man". His writing is interesting, I almost always finish reading the full piece, of many others I abandon midway.
I think the appeal is his breadth rather than depth. I agree on the lack of rigor.
Read his book Average is Over.
Can you please elaborate? I've got a long "to read" list.
This may or may not be Turok's point, but I think the best steelman for Cowen's rigor of thought is to read one of his books.
He has said that his routine for interviewing people is to read the top N books on Amazon. For example, he interviewed Martina Navratilova and read the top five books on tennis and a couple on Navratilova. When he interviewed her, he came across as something of an expert. When he interviewed Gary Kasparov, he asked him about an opening from, 1981 (or whatever) and was able to hold forth on the merits of moving his knight where he did (or whatever). I have heard him speak knowledgeably about my own profession (software engineering) too. I listened to him interviewing Fareed Zakaria last night. Cowen knew more about the history of India and foreign relations in the 80s than any non-expert has any right to know. He does this week after week.
I can't think of anyone in the world who has such a diversity of knowledge. Maybe he doesn't know as much about a topic as the experts in that topic but he sure knows a lot and his knowledge sure is diverse.
PS. I don't think Marginal Revolution provides credible evidence either way. It's a casual blog.
Which podcast does he talk about software engineering?
> I have heard him speak knowledgeably about my own profession
FWIW, I have the precise opposite impression when he speaks about my area of expertise (music)
I should maybe clarify: it's not that he's not knowledgeable, relative to an average member of the public. It's that he seems to be performing a level of expertise and understanding that he lacks.
Thank you; you have expressed more elegantly than me what rubs me the wrong way, despite him being, I freely admit, astonishingly widely read.
I’d like to hear this too. I’ve only followed Tyler for a couple years but I’ve noticed much more of an offputting soldier mindset in him. Not sure whether that’s him changing or just me noticing.
In what way is he a "soldier"? The comments on MR rightly accuse him of being far too Straussian, since he rarely takes any strong stands on issues. I've read MR since its inception btw.
I haven't seen "soldier"-ish behavior either; if at all he has chips on his shoulder he is good at hiding them. This is despite him seemingly obsessed with status -- this is not just about platonic discussions of the concept but of status, but a lot of "Who is the most underrated/overrated", who needs to increase in status type stuff. That said, one hears related complaints. Many accuse him of being provocative, and he seems to drive some sections of his readership really mad, but I am not sure what to think of this: in such situations the rest of his readership seems to barely notice any pressing of buttons. He *seems* sometimes to throw in gratuitous bits that at least superficially sound judgemental, like: "Via the apparently excellent Bruce Cleaver." He makes comments such as "Country X does this thing better than country Y" or "women tend to have a better attitude on this than men", using language that is mild, and yet more definitive and less tentative than one might normally expect.
True, and while it is clear Tyler is a bit of a troll, an underappreciated fact about the commenters on MR is they are mostly rather highly self aware and in on the joke. The median comment on MR would get a ban on ACX, so I always have to remember to be well behaved here after saying what I *really* think under one of my sockpuppet accounts on MR (yes, I could say what I really think here, but not without much prevarication and bowing to the rarionalist gods, and I simply don't have the patience, being a post-rationalist after all).
While Scott polices various bad faith attributions/conflict-theoretic behavior, MR seems to police content more. Yesterday in that Michael Cook post there was a handle called "Crusader", worrying about Khamenei asking Iranian Americans to fight against the US. Though I felt the comment was stupid, it wasn't phrased incitefully, and was anyway overwhelmed by numerous counters, some of which were insightful. But they deleted the comment and thereby the counters as well.
What is your explanation for the quality of MR comments having deteriorated over the last 10 years (if you agree with this)? Tyler was no more or less a troll back then. Is it that back then smart people tended to look up more to economists to explain the world to them (as a recent piece of Noahpinion suggests)?
I know what you mean by deteriorating comments, but they are worse in one dimension while being better in others. People who want a rationalist style pedantry have a forum here (I'm describing tradeoffs on Scott's moderation, not declaring it inferior). I would agree over the last year MR comments have gotten a bit ridiculous at times even for my taste.
I have seen the deletions you mention on occasion and it really is a puzzle as to why certain comments are targeted. Adds to the mystique of the place, though I personally never had any of my comments deleted.
I think where I disagree with the moderation here is that bad faith comments are fine if they provide a new perspective. Though I'm highly immune to getting emotional over political discussion, and admit that others may regard ridiculous comments to be inflammatory. (is in this thread, unlees deleted, you can see someone being accused of supporting Hamas and him going ballistic. If I was accused of X, I would just find it silly for pretty much all values of X if I judged it untrue; sometimes humans really confuse me)
I see Tyler as a great curator. He's great at finding interesting stuff from around the web and connecting it with other interesting stuff. He's also really good at drawing people out in conversation, so I find his podcast worth listening to. But, agreed, when I read his original stuff, it's mostly pretty mid.
TBH I don't get him either. He's on my list of people who a lot of people I respect seem to respect but just seems completely banal to me (Paul graham is an even more extreme case, even before, uh, recent trends).
Graham is at least successful in a field requiring more than "what your contemporaries let you get away with saying" (as Richard Rorty defined "truth").
What did Paul Graham do recently?
Suppose you're a highly educated, socially conservative American Christian with two young children (a boy and a girl) and while you don't want to raise them as cloistered fundamentalists, you also think the broader culture has kind of gone crazy and you don't want them to end up woke or (God forbid) transgender. If you could choose to live anywhere in the US (any state, city/suburban/rural), where would you choose to live to best achieve this goal?
The obvious, and perhaps correct, answer is a strongly religious area in a red state. On the other hand, anecdotally many woke ex-Christians (or ex-conservative Christians) are rebelling against growing up in restrictive conservative environments. And there's a lot of crazy out there in conservative areas for children to rebel against. So maybe there's a case to be made for exposing your children to progressive craziness to inoculate them against it.
> If you could choose to live anywhere in the US (any state, city/suburban/rural), where would you choose to live to best achieve this goal?
South Carolina
Correct me if I've got you wrong - so I think what you want to avoid is a specific kind of person that makes everything about politics?
If so, I think geography might not be the biggest factor. This is an attitude thing, and it comes from home. Besides, you're looking at a 10 - 15 year time horizon - a place can change a great deal in this time, and the "woke" that you're talking about will inevitably shapeshift. It'll be some completely new thing by the time your kids are teens.
I think the biggest thing you can do is model being a good, grounded human. This means try to avoid very biased, partisan content. Steer clear of the opinion columns. Personally don't engage with political content that makes you angry (much easier said than done).
The aim is to model someone who focuses on the important things in life - the day to day. Your family, loved ones, and doesn't spend energy raging about real or imagined slights on one political tribe or another.
Don't set a precedent that it's normal to spend all your time ranting about politics. That means even if say, your cashier is visibly trans, you treat them like a normal person - polite respect. You don't give them any special attention, negative or positive. Just normal.
Its different if there's a local issue that will impact your own day to day, but approach it with practicality and respect for community norms. Model the behaviour you wanna see, wrt to fitting in with community wishes. You might wanna pick a specific community that you think you can fit into - not necessarily for educational reasons, but because it would make you happy to be surrounded by people who understand you and have similar values.
I can't predict what stupid debate is going to dominate our attentions in 2038, but I hope this skillset and attitude will be broadly applicable. It doesn't require finding a homogeneous community and hoping it doesn't change over the next decade. It only requires being mindful of what you spend your time talking about and how you go about it.
You can't do anything to ensure your kids aren't transgender, the best you can do is to ensure they're closeted
I'd vote for Texas here. I'd move there in a second if the weather and geography weren't both so godawful. Avoid Austin though.
Interestingly someone else suggested Austin specifically as a good place to move to. Perhaps it has both a disproportionate number of far-left progressives and principled conservatives, so that it depends on your social circles in the city?
Anywhere in Texas would work, including Austin, as long as you stayed in the suburbs/exurbs and not the city. I also advise not voting.
Why not voting?
Because I don't want to encourage any more conservatives to move here who will vote for the anti-abortion extremists in Austin. This used to be a nice state. You won't be welcome be people like me if you vote for Greg Abbot, Dan Patrick and his ilk.
Can you define "anti-abortion extremist"? I feel like this has the potential to mean a lot of very different things.
There's always the midwest or certain large cities in the south, but I think your concern is mostly a boogeyman. Twitter-land doesn't reflect opinions on the ground. For all of it, kids just want to be kids, they're interested in sports videogames and anime, not politics. Even in later years, it's the always-online types who adopt more extreme views, in either direction.
If you're planning on going to Church or sending kids to a religious private school, then you already control for environment so it's a moot point.
I am inclined to think that "no smartphone" is 50% of the battle, and restricting Internet usage/encouraging them to play outside is another 25%. But I do think peer influence and IRL social environment also matter here.
Private school (or homeschooling) is an option but it's nice to not feel you have to rely on that. And I'm not totally convinced that either option is the best way to inoculate your children against progressive craziness, especially if they're not exposed to those ideas much outside of school and then are suddenly hit with them when they go to college.
Learning how to think and be skeptical is the only inoculation against bad ideas.
Having been to college, radicalism was not new to anyone by the time they arrived as it was all exposed through internet, but one's major of study (STEM vs liberal arts) is a reliable predictor of whether peer environment will be far left or moderate. Classmates are ultimately the ones you hang around with anyway.
All that said, I don't think you can force or expect your kids to reflect the same worldview you have.