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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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
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.
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:
Sticking around these parts isn't ideal for rhe most obvious of Passover related reasons. Particularly when the REALITY of what the Exodus was all about hits hardest when you're surrounded by the extensive extant evidence of the slavery-based society that Judaism was created to oppose.
Israel would be most comfortable for me physically but as I am in strong opposition to the reigning leadership I consider it spiritually discomfitting to throw my lot in with the nation in its current state.
So I'm thinking Sinai. Unfortunately, the Bible's take on the situation of the Jews who left Egypt is that there was a great series of miseries. They left the most comfortable society on earth (even for the working/enslaved classes) only to find themselves enjoined to TRUST that they'd be taken care of in a land without fresh water and with murderous raiders.
I would feel uncomfortable celebrating where they suffered.
"Elim" (where they enjoyed 12 wellsprings and 70 date trees, whatever that means) seems ideal, the area they lived for most of their desert stay seems second best, and the area around Mount Sinai is high up in the running too.
I'm open to other suggestions as well.
My own biblical geographical knowledge is acceptable but very very far from expert so if you know more about the most likely locations of these regions or have other suggestions I would be very pleased to hear from you!
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?
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!
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...."
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Can someone tell me how voting for the ACX Book Review contest works? Will it just be based on the likes that each review post gets? Or is there some sort of jury, or a ranked voting system? I tried looking up how it was last year, but found Substack quite difficult to navigate.
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?
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
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.
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?
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?
Are we all really descendents of Charlemagne? Is every European alive in the 10th century who left descendants the ancestor of every living European today?
All though I havent interrogated the mathematics on this it seems to depend on everybody having a large number of ancestors at that point, and of people alive at that era producing a lot of descendants. Hand wave a bit about big numbers and you are done.
Its easy enough to intuit a case ( by induction) where it isnt true. Imgaine an island isolated since the end of the 10th century, populated by exactly 100 people. Simple ancestor mathematics would suggest that by the end of the 19C, with 900/25 generations passing, everybody on the Island would have 68,719,476,735 ancestors, much more people than alive in Europe at the time. Everybody is a world citizen!
In fact they have, as we established, 100 unique ancestors at most. This pedigree collapse is ackowleged to a certain extent, but the amount of collapse is to my mind not taken into account.
The island of course, is an extreme example, but given that people married with 2 miles for most of history, not that extreme. [1]
With regard to descendents. Cities are population sinks for much of this time. Although I cant get the statistics on how much cities populations would fall without migration, it’s generally accepted that places like London are large population sinks over the Middle Ages. If we assume that the existing population of London reproduces only 90% of its population per generation ( a small enough sink), over many generations the population it contributes later on is negligible.
The population is continuously getting replenished from the countryside. The plague exagerated this process, with cities being widely hit.
Therefore a descendent of Charlmagne who arrives in London ( which is the most likely) around 1000AD, doesnt contribute much to London’s later population, and probably nothing to rural England, or the Shetlands or what have you. The reverse is true. The people from this area swamp the genetics in London.
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).
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?
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?
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.)
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 I suspect I have mild autism making it more difficult to make and keep friends, is it worth visiting a psychiatrist to maybe get a diagnosis? Is there anything practical they can offer that would actually help? And should I be worried that a formal diagnosis would make me less employable or more likely to be involuntarily committed?
I had a fairly traumatic life event happen recently. It's made me think about whether I'm really leading the life I want to. I fill my life with lots of fun and educational media, and I value learning new skills a lot. I play several instruments and have several other hobbies, and I love getting better at these things. I'm a very successful software engineer at a big big tech company, building very niche systems, striving for operational efficiency and delivery of small new features.
But it almost feels like I'm filling my life with valueless hobbies, and wasting my time. These fill my time and keep me busy and somewhat happy, but they don't really make the world a better place or bring me closer to the people I love.
I wonder if I should be doing something greater with my life, to try to make the world actively better, instead of just existing in it. There must be something I can do. I feel like I worked so hard to become an engineer in big tech, and my skill set includes management skills, design and coding skills, and business skills. I'd like to leverage those skills in some way. How did one leverage skills such as these to try to do something that is more impactful? The sheer magnitude of the question paralyzes me, and I never end up making progress on it
These sort of traumatic life examination-prompting events happen every few years, and I usually just eventually go back to existing and doing what I'm doing. I don't know if that is if either me getting over the trauma which allows me to go back to normal, or if it is me chickening out from a greater calling, choosing a selfish comfortable and non impactful life over trying to actually make the world better. I have had also many traumatic (in a different way) events in the past that have ended up making me scared about my ability to maintain my life as is, so striking out on something new (especially if I don't even know what it is) is extra terrifying to me.
Edit: Thanks for the replies so far, everyone! I'm trying to sort out my own feelings right now, and what I feel is impactful. I also agree with many of you, that it might be enough just to have a good life with family, and not hurt people. That's how I've generally lived so far, but what if I wanted to go further than just that? I guess maybe part of these traumatic experiences are making me believe that fostering (not necessarily romantic) love between people is the most important thing that I shouldn't lose track of, and extending people's lives so that they can feel each other's love as long as possible, or making it so that people can more easily care for others in some way. I want to do something that helps people live longer, or reduces suffering in the world by allowing people to better care for those they love. I don't really want to go into healthcare tech, though, because it's a total nightmare of legacy systems and red tape. Maybe that's just indication that there be dragons in the whole notion of "making people live longer", and it's not worth trying.
Has anyone had the experience of learning and replicating what a normal brain feels like from a psychiatric medication? I have two examples.
1) I used to have really bad speaking anxiety (I would shake, my voice would crack etc). I got beta blockers prescribed and my talks suddenly went amazingly. But the weird thing was that I lost the anxiety completely because I no longer had the expectation of a bad experience. I ended up only using the beta blockers 3-4 times but have not had any issues for over a decade.
2) I was also diagnosed with ADHD a few years ago (standard forgetfulness, procrastination symptoms). I got prescribed concerta and was shocked at what it felt like to just sit down and do what I intended to for an hour. The adderal shortage eventually spilled over into concerta too and I haven’t managed to get medication in 6 months. The weird thing is though that I feel like I’m much more organized and able to stay on task than I was before I took the medicine. It feels like I’ve learned what a normal functioning brain is like and have somewhat managed to replicate that.
I’d be interested if there’s literature on the idea of training your brain by giving it the example of normality to mimic through medication.
Ever since I started reading ACX a few years ago, there's something I've been finding a bit bewildering and a bit disturbing, that comes up now and then in Scott's writing, more often in the comments, and absolutely saturates any Less Wrong discussion that is linked from here: the obsessive reference to "status".
The first few times I saw this I thought little of it. Then it became clear that it's a pretty ubiquitous concept in this rationalist community. I've been kind of expecting that my issues with this concept would be addressed eventually as I read through Scott's old posts and bits of the Sequences (although I find the latter a pain to read and absolutely hate the writing style, but that's a separate issue that I've complained about before). But I don't think they really have been. I have three main issues with the way "status" is discussed around here.
1. Where does the idea of status, and the extreme focus on it, come from? I'm assuming there is some post or series of posts that lays out the concept, defines it, and argues for its pervasive importance, and that the community's obsession with the concept follows from that. But I don't think I've seen this post linked. The "blue tribe red tribe" jargon comes from Scott's Outgroup post, which is linked constantly. Other foundational concepts like "tabbo your words" are routinely linked to their founding post. Where is the founding post on status? All I can gather is that it seems to mostly come from Robin Hanson, but every post I've seen from him, EY and Scott, all just seem to take this concept for granted and not define or argue for it. And so does everyone in the comments who talks about it.
2. Following on, what *is* the definition of status (as people here are using it)? It strikes me as a weirdly useless term by being far too vague and far too broad to be of much clarity. Does it mean power? Respect and prestige from society? Having individual people personally like you? Being morally approved of? All of these are completely different things and "status" seems to sloppily lump them all together. One reason this is annoying is that more precise forms of status have much clearer definitions and are much easier to talk about. For example "power" has various clear definitions in political science; one I've often seen is "A has power over B if A can cause B to do something B does not want to do". That's a very clear concept that can be analysed in depth.
Another reason this is annoying is that the discussions about status can seem to be about one thing but actually be about another thing. The people talking about status often seem to introduce it as an important concept for the functioning of society, like they're basically talking about power. But much of the resulting discussion comes across as incredibly trivial, like a banal self-help book: how to be a boss, how to dominate people and achieve your goals, how to "achieve success" (vomit). Worse, sometimes it seems like what they're *really* talking about is sex, what with all the focus on reproductive fitness, and this makes it even creepier, like "wait, the whole time this was really just about how to seduce people?" (Note: I'm in no way calling it creepy to openly discuss sex, and don't want to endorse any kind of censorship of free discussion; it's only creepy or disturbing when it's done surreptitiously. If you want to discuss PUA-style "advice", by all means do so but do so *honestly*, and don't pretend you're talking about something else).
3. But the main thing that disturbs me here is that whenever discussions of status come up, all notions of morality seem to completely disappear. It's as if everyone becomes a moral nihilist (or an advocate of Master Morality or Objectivism) the moment they start talking about status. People talk about how this or that form of expressing romantic interest is high-status or low-status, or how X can be used to increase your status, or what behaviours can make you higher status than another person (even someone close to you) and I'm waiting for someone, *anyone*, to say that a person who treats all their interactions as struggles for status, even with friends and family and romantic interests, is, um, a bad person. Right??? Or, if they're consequentialists and have no concept of moral character, at least focus on using an understanding of status to do good, to prevent high-status people from getting away with their crap. Not simply to advance your own self-interest.
I get the sense that the attitude behind this is often a kind of cynical "everyone is *really* concerned with increasing their status, and if they think they're not they're just deceiving themselves". For one thing this radical claim requires, I think, *far* more evidence than is usually provided. But more importantly, I just can't comprehend the kind of person who responds to the revelation that almost everyone around them is a manipulative hypocrite, not with an angry "I'm going to expose these disgusting hypocrites", not with "let's try to create a rigorous rational method to keep people moral and honest", not even with a depressed "people are all horrible and you can't trust anyone", but with an enthusiastic "great, *I* can be a manipulative, dominating hypocrite as well!" Just...who thinks like that? That's how these discussions usually look to me, like I'm seeing a conversation among sociopaths. It's...kind of...completely terrifying. Unless I'm misunderstanding something fundamental.
(By comparison, there's a group of very prominent people who almost everyone agrees do everything with a sole concern for raising their status: politicians. The reaction of most people is to either adopt permanent distrust and dislike for politicians, or to advocate burning the whole political system to the ground. *Not* to happily become like a politician themselves.)
Can anyone shed some light on this rationalist weirdness?
Daniel Dennett obituary NYT
Daniel C. Dennett, Widely Read and Fiercely Debated Philosopher, Dies at 82
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/19/books/daniel-dennett-dead.html?unlocked_article_code=1.lk0.Zdew.tOISfV5SCPkC&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
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?
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.
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?
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.
The German left trying to ban a popular political party, to "save democracy" or something:
https://archive.is/Vk14X
(WaPo: Once wary of extremist violence, Europe now fears extremism in politics)
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.
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?
Cue in the rabid, frothing in the mouth responses from genocidal Zionists.
https://twitter.com/SaulStaniforth/status/1780252222279840036
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'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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.)
I'm currently stationed within a (small) stone's throw of The Pyramids and trying to figure out where to spend Passover.
https://ydydy.substack.com/p/new-extensive-footnote-theres-nothing
Sticking around these parts isn't ideal for rhe most obvious of Passover related reasons. Particularly when the REALITY of what the Exodus was all about hits hardest when you're surrounded by the extensive extant evidence of the slavery-based society that Judaism was created to oppose.
Israel would be most comfortable for me physically but as I am in strong opposition to the reigning leadership I consider it spiritually discomfitting to throw my lot in with the nation in its current state.
So I'm thinking Sinai. Unfortunately, the Bible's take on the situation of the Jews who left Egypt is that there was a great series of miseries. They left the most comfortable society on earth (even for the working/enslaved classes) only to find themselves enjoined to TRUST that they'd be taken care of in a land without fresh water and with murderous raiders.
I would feel uncomfortable celebrating where they suffered.
"Elim" (where they enjoyed 12 wellsprings and 70 date trees, whatever that means) seems ideal, the area they lived for most of their desert stay seems second best, and the area around Mount Sinai is high up in the running too.
I'm open to other suggestions as well.
My own biblical geographical knowledge is acceptable but very very far from expert so if you know more about the most likely locations of these regions or have other suggestions I would be very pleased to hear from you!
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?
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.)
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
What's fun to do in Redwood City? I'm moving there soon
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 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
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.
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.
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!
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?
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.
Can someone tell me how voting for the ACX Book Review contest works? Will it just be based on the likes that each review post gets? Or is there some sort of jury, or a ranked voting system? I tried looking up how it was last year, but found Substack quite difficult to navigate.
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?
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!
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
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.
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?
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?
Are we all really descendents of Charlemagne? Is every European alive in the 10th century who left descendants the ancestor of every living European today?
All though I havent interrogated the mathematics on this it seems to depend on everybody having a large number of ancestors at that point, and of people alive at that era producing a lot of descendants. Hand wave a bit about big numbers and you are done.
Its easy enough to intuit a case ( by induction) where it isnt true. Imgaine an island isolated since the end of the 10th century, populated by exactly 100 people. Simple ancestor mathematics would suggest that by the end of the 19C, with 900/25 generations passing, everybody on the Island would have 68,719,476,735 ancestors, much more people than alive in Europe at the time. Everybody is a world citizen!
In fact they have, as we established, 100 unique ancestors at most. This pedigree collapse is ackowleged to a certain extent, but the amount of collapse is to my mind not taken into account.
The island of course, is an extreme example, but given that people married with 2 miles for most of history, not that extreme. [1]
With regard to descendents. Cities are population sinks for much of this time. Although I cant get the statistics on how much cities populations would fall without migration, it’s generally accepted that places like London are large population sinks over the Middle Ages. If we assume that the existing population of London reproduces only 90% of its population per generation ( a small enough sink), over many generations the population it contributes later on is negligible.
The population is continuously getting replenished from the countryside. The plague exagerated this process, with cities being widely hit.
Therefore a descendent of Charlmagne who arrives in London ( which is the most likely) around 1000AD, doesnt contribute much to London’s later population, and probably nothing to rural England, or the Shetlands or what have you. The reverse is true. The people from this area swamp the genetics in London.
[1] This source says 1 mile (https://www.galibier.cc/love-is-but-a-field-away/) but I generally read about 2.
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).
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
I (at last) have a new post on my Substack:
https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/policy-tariffs-and-trade-3-china shock
Comments solicited as this is is a prelude to another post on what to do about a possible China Shock II.
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?
How much of “spiritual/meditation” type advice boils down to, “learn how to relax and see things holistically?” Is that, like, all of it?
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?
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?
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 I suspect I have mild autism making it more difficult to make and keep friends, is it worth visiting a psychiatrist to maybe get a diagnosis? Is there anything practical they can offer that would actually help? And should I be worried that a formal diagnosis would make me less employable or more likely to be involuntarily committed?
I had a fairly traumatic life event happen recently. It's made me think about whether I'm really leading the life I want to. I fill my life with lots of fun and educational media, and I value learning new skills a lot. I play several instruments and have several other hobbies, and I love getting better at these things. I'm a very successful software engineer at a big big tech company, building very niche systems, striving for operational efficiency and delivery of small new features.
But it almost feels like I'm filling my life with valueless hobbies, and wasting my time. These fill my time and keep me busy and somewhat happy, but they don't really make the world a better place or bring me closer to the people I love.
I wonder if I should be doing something greater with my life, to try to make the world actively better, instead of just existing in it. There must be something I can do. I feel like I worked so hard to become an engineer in big tech, and my skill set includes management skills, design and coding skills, and business skills. I'd like to leverage those skills in some way. How did one leverage skills such as these to try to do something that is more impactful? The sheer magnitude of the question paralyzes me, and I never end up making progress on it
These sort of traumatic life examination-prompting events happen every few years, and I usually just eventually go back to existing and doing what I'm doing. I don't know if that is if either me getting over the trauma which allows me to go back to normal, or if it is me chickening out from a greater calling, choosing a selfish comfortable and non impactful life over trying to actually make the world better. I have had also many traumatic (in a different way) events in the past that have ended up making me scared about my ability to maintain my life as is, so striking out on something new (especially if I don't even know what it is) is extra terrifying to me.
Edit: Thanks for the replies so far, everyone! I'm trying to sort out my own feelings right now, and what I feel is impactful. I also agree with many of you, that it might be enough just to have a good life with family, and not hurt people. That's how I've generally lived so far, but what if I wanted to go further than just that? I guess maybe part of these traumatic experiences are making me believe that fostering (not necessarily romantic) love between people is the most important thing that I shouldn't lose track of, and extending people's lives so that they can feel each other's love as long as possible, or making it so that people can more easily care for others in some way. I want to do something that helps people live longer, or reduces suffering in the world by allowing people to better care for those they love. I don't really want to go into healthcare tech, though, because it's a total nightmare of legacy systems and red tape. Maybe that's just indication that there be dragons in the whole notion of "making people live longer", and it's not worth trying.
Has anyone had the experience of learning and replicating what a normal brain feels like from a psychiatric medication? I have two examples.
1) I used to have really bad speaking anxiety (I would shake, my voice would crack etc). I got beta blockers prescribed and my talks suddenly went amazingly. But the weird thing was that I lost the anxiety completely because I no longer had the expectation of a bad experience. I ended up only using the beta blockers 3-4 times but have not had any issues for over a decade.
2) I was also diagnosed with ADHD a few years ago (standard forgetfulness, procrastination symptoms). I got prescribed concerta and was shocked at what it felt like to just sit down and do what I intended to for an hour. The adderal shortage eventually spilled over into concerta too and I haven’t managed to get medication in 6 months. The weird thing is though that I feel like I’m much more organized and able to stay on task than I was before I took the medicine. It feels like I’ve learned what a normal functioning brain is like and have somewhat managed to replicate that.
I’d be interested if there’s literature on the idea of training your brain by giving it the example of normality to mimic through medication.
How bad is the file draw effect?
Could there be important areas where the published data and unpublished point in completely different directions?
Should you ignore results if you think the alternative would not get published?
Ever since I started reading ACX a few years ago, there's something I've been finding a bit bewildering and a bit disturbing, that comes up now and then in Scott's writing, more often in the comments, and absolutely saturates any Less Wrong discussion that is linked from here: the obsessive reference to "status".
The first few times I saw this I thought little of it. Then it became clear that it's a pretty ubiquitous concept in this rationalist community. I've been kind of expecting that my issues with this concept would be addressed eventually as I read through Scott's old posts and bits of the Sequences (although I find the latter a pain to read and absolutely hate the writing style, but that's a separate issue that I've complained about before). But I don't think they really have been. I have three main issues with the way "status" is discussed around here.
1. Where does the idea of status, and the extreme focus on it, come from? I'm assuming there is some post or series of posts that lays out the concept, defines it, and argues for its pervasive importance, and that the community's obsession with the concept follows from that. But I don't think I've seen this post linked. The "blue tribe red tribe" jargon comes from Scott's Outgroup post, which is linked constantly. Other foundational concepts like "tabbo your words" are routinely linked to their founding post. Where is the founding post on status? All I can gather is that it seems to mostly come from Robin Hanson, but every post I've seen from him, EY and Scott, all just seem to take this concept for granted and not define or argue for it. And so does everyone in the comments who talks about it.
2. Following on, what *is* the definition of status (as people here are using it)? It strikes me as a weirdly useless term by being far too vague and far too broad to be of much clarity. Does it mean power? Respect and prestige from society? Having individual people personally like you? Being morally approved of? All of these are completely different things and "status" seems to sloppily lump them all together. One reason this is annoying is that more precise forms of status have much clearer definitions and are much easier to talk about. For example "power" has various clear definitions in political science; one I've often seen is "A has power over B if A can cause B to do something B does not want to do". That's a very clear concept that can be analysed in depth.
Another reason this is annoying is that the discussions about status can seem to be about one thing but actually be about another thing. The people talking about status often seem to introduce it as an important concept for the functioning of society, like they're basically talking about power. But much of the resulting discussion comes across as incredibly trivial, like a banal self-help book: how to be a boss, how to dominate people and achieve your goals, how to "achieve success" (vomit). Worse, sometimes it seems like what they're *really* talking about is sex, what with all the focus on reproductive fitness, and this makes it even creepier, like "wait, the whole time this was really just about how to seduce people?" (Note: I'm in no way calling it creepy to openly discuss sex, and don't want to endorse any kind of censorship of free discussion; it's only creepy or disturbing when it's done surreptitiously. If you want to discuss PUA-style "advice", by all means do so but do so *honestly*, and don't pretend you're talking about something else).
3. But the main thing that disturbs me here is that whenever discussions of status come up, all notions of morality seem to completely disappear. It's as if everyone becomes a moral nihilist (or an advocate of Master Morality or Objectivism) the moment they start talking about status. People talk about how this or that form of expressing romantic interest is high-status or low-status, or how X can be used to increase your status, or what behaviours can make you higher status than another person (even someone close to you) and I'm waiting for someone, *anyone*, to say that a person who treats all their interactions as struggles for status, even with friends and family and romantic interests, is, um, a bad person. Right??? Or, if they're consequentialists and have no concept of moral character, at least focus on using an understanding of status to do good, to prevent high-status people from getting away with their crap. Not simply to advance your own self-interest.
I get the sense that the attitude behind this is often a kind of cynical "everyone is *really* concerned with increasing their status, and if they think they're not they're just deceiving themselves". For one thing this radical claim requires, I think, *far* more evidence than is usually provided. But more importantly, I just can't comprehend the kind of person who responds to the revelation that almost everyone around them is a manipulative hypocrite, not with an angry "I'm going to expose these disgusting hypocrites", not with "let's try to create a rigorous rational method to keep people moral and honest", not even with a depressed "people are all horrible and you can't trust anyone", but with an enthusiastic "great, *I* can be a manipulative, dominating hypocrite as well!" Just...who thinks like that? That's how these discussions usually look to me, like I'm seeing a conversation among sociopaths. It's...kind of...completely terrifying. Unless I'm misunderstanding something fundamental.
(By comparison, there's a group of very prominent people who almost everyone agrees do everything with a sole concern for raising their status: politicians. The reaction of most people is to either adopt permanent distrust and dislike for politicians, or to advocate burning the whole political system to the ground. *Not* to happily become like a politician themselves.)
Can anyone shed some light on this rationalist weirdness?