I am a mathematics postdoc, and I am leading a group of undergrad computer science majors in a project to build Alpha Algebra (along the lines of Alpha Geometry as built recently by DeepMind). Are there any programmers here who would like to help us with this? It will mostly require training an LLM on synthetic data.
I spent hours writing an impressive essay asking for help figuring some things out about the pharmaceutical industry.
It was a thing of beauty, and I am sure someone with relevant expertise would have been delighted to help; certainly, upon reading the pure ambrosia of its prose, none could have resisted — nor desired to!
My eyes are tired and gritty, and I long to finally lie down; and lo, finally, I am done! I try to scroll over to read through one last time, to ensure no niggling typo or mistaken neologism enfoolishes me in front of my heroes¹; one last scan before posting and—
Substack ate the post.
No worries. I am prepared. My "select all → copy" trick will—
...oh. It failed to record any of the copied text, as it sometimes does. Clipboard has not even been used today, as far as it knows!
(there's even a helpful note to the effect of "you can copy stuff here to save it :D")
Well, the clipboard /does/ occasionally just... stop keeping any history whatsoever; I know this is a risk.
And, of course, Substack's comment-handling processes were written by some sort of cognitively-handicapped chimpanzee whose mother evidently had a fondness for "bush hooch"; recent estimates indicate she also — very likely — favored the practice of dealing her drooling, idiot offspring daily (if not hourly, IMO) severe, IQ-leeching blows directly to the head.²
Yes, I knew these things could happen....
/...just not BOTH AT ONCE when I had spent over A GODDAMN HOUR on formatting and typing and waiting for unfreezing and aAAAAHSJDJDJDKA)dnajsjdjf;;nd/
¹: (anyone peripherally or centrally involved in drug development, I might say. 👍 it was my dream — before I realized that having dreams is itself a dream, heh.
"follow your heart~" and "FiNd yOur PaSSiOn!" and all that nonsense...
OR: take the first OK job you can get anywhere, so your mother can get good care and stick around on Earth with you?
well, as cool as it might have been to do something interesting /as your work/ — I mean, THEY pay YOU, to use their fancy labs and learn more of & research upon your favorite subject, I hear! — still: me ol' ma had to come first...
...she gave up on /her/ own dreams for my sake, after all; what kinda son would not return the favor?! heh.
and, anyway, as she always reminded me: "you've got to be practical". it's not such a bad motto to remember, I guess!)
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²: (Really, it's a miracle the creature was able to program even *this* abomination, I suppose. Sadly, any "thinking" beings — and I use the term loosely — that, somehow, managed to make text /more resource-intensive/ than a triple-A FPS title... are undoubtedly even now squatting fearfully in filth and darkness, angrily attempting to develop a video player from fæcal discharge. A hard life, even for a subchimp.)
One of my proudest moments was having badly configured bug reporting system time out after I was many minutes into an epic report - I successfully installed HxD, opened my entire RAM as a file, found the memory that contained the in progress comment, and successfully saved it (if poorly formatted).
I know I got lucky; every second you wait increases the chance that memory is re-used.
I'm sorry for your loss. I generally consider any writing via a browser to be prone to loss and if I'm writing something lengthy I'll switch to my own editor then paste the result (also for the sake of easier editing)
"I'm actually really worried about how heated the israel/palestine debate has become and how vitriolic both sides have gotten. It almost seems like if one person were heroic enough to do something drastic like set themselves on fire it could really change the course of history."
In an earlier thread you compared your posts to mine, and said that I have no right to be annoyed about your repetitive axe-grinding because I'm also - according to you - axe-grinding in the same way.
I reject the comparison, needless to say. But if you want to make this comparison, maybe go with it to the very end. Here's a couple of guidelines that I have self-imposed on myself since my first post under the LearnsHebrew prefix here in October:
(1) Never post more than 1 top-level comment per Open Thread. Preferably leave several Open Threads pass with 0 top-level comments by you before making a top-level comment in the next.
(2) Never post on ACX posts other than Open Threads.
As far as my memory serve, I have never once violated (1), and I have violated (2) about 3 or 4 times in 7 months of posting.
Those self-imposed guidelines were necessary back when my username was much "spicier" and more controversial than it's now, I have adopted them because I didn't want to exhaust my "weirdness points", so that people don't get fatigued by every sub-thread and every conversation on the blog getting hijacked by the topic I'm angry about and going to chaos.
I claim that those guidelines would be good for you too, even if you don't care about the health of the general conversation in Open Threads and the people following it. If you're looking at it from the purely "What's in it for me" angle, then what's in it for you is that people become fatigued and zoned-out when every Open Thread they have to see you arguing the same point 3 or 4 or 5 times, barely separated by a day or 2. Posting one, long, top-level comment is better for your case than repetitively posting 4 or 5 minor rephrasing of the same post. Pedagogically, a good teacher has to give students a break.
You might also find a very long advice post I wrote to another Pro-Palestinian commenter in late last December [1] helpful, many points don't apply to you, but the two points about how changing minds is not a sequential process that you can accelerate by posting more and more, and how argumentation is not necessarily a war where those arguing against you are the enemy, might have an effect on your posting style.
You people hate people like me for their race, and you expect me to sit here and be lectured to by you? Why the hell should I listen to hateful, racist assholes like you?
Previously, the topic was embedded into my very username, so I estimated that wherever I go and whatever I chose to comment on, the conversation would be inevitably rail-switched abruptly to the topic and that people will increasingly resent and hate that.
After I changed the name, there is no good reason not to comment on other non-Open-Thread posts, and indeed all my violations of (2) was after I changed the username. But I still value it as a self-regulation mechanism because I can get lost in writing walls of text on forums like ACX for days on end, which might eventually lead to me starving :D
--------
The subtext in my comment to Hammond isn't "I'm so better than you, plz emulate me to the last detail", and I really do hope he doesn't understand it like that. My comment is fundamentally "If you're going to be provocative and/or contrarian, there are ways to do it that won't upset people unnecessarily and make you come across as a generic spammer/troller intent on using the forum as a cheap write-and-forget log database where you just dump your stream of thoughts and go about your day". And that doesn't mean that I'm *perfect* or even acceptably good at this either, I wish, it's just something I always have in mind and try to achieve.
One principle of pedagogy is to always try to introduce one unknown thing at a time, never dump all the lesson points on the students all at once, they will drown. If we conceive of argumentation as a kind of pedagogy (where the opinions that people don't agree with are the "lesson points"), then the equivalent advice is the "Weirdness Points" advice, don't be needlessly provocative, don't make a game out of contrariness, use your tolerance budget wisely, go out of your way to dispel the common craziness associated with your position. (e.g. for me, "No I don't hate Jews. No I don't want an Islamic Caliphate in Palestine. Yes I'm an Atheist Arab who wants both Arabs and Jews and everyone to live in peace, and yes I'm first-hand aware that my people aren't known for being great fans of my religious choice, and no that's not an excuse to stay silent while a significant subset of them are being bombed and starved to death.")
The 2 guidelines I'm self-imposing on myself are my own way of trying to achieve this fundamentally good advice, but they're not necessarily the most suitable or optimal solution. All the better if Hammond heeds the fundamental message but invents his own guidelines, but if he starts from my guidelines, I would say that's not too bad either compared to the current state.
LHHIP: within my experience, you are the unique internet commentator who has learned, become more moderate, and adapted. I strongly congratulate and admire you. Also, at least for me, it does make your arguments significantly more persuasive.
I think this whole thing is fascinating in that the consequences of a fundamental tension or contradiction on the left are being materialized more than at any other point - that is, the tension between the 'anti-anti-semitism' and 'anti-colonialist' aspects of the American left.
It's easy to have said this at many points in recent history, but I think this time it could be for real: The ADL strategy has well and truly backfired and zionists now face the real prospect of losing their dominant political and institutional power in the US.
Columbia obviously sided with the 'anything that is anti-israel is anti-semitic' contingent, as did much of the media, but this was ineffective to an ahistorical degree.
Harvard zionists already taking the same line:
"Harvard Chabad Rabbi Hirschy Zarchi called on the University to clear out the encampment in Harvard Yard in a statement posted to Chabad’s X account just before 11 p.m., referring to the protesters as “Jew haters and Hamas lovers.”"
"Harvard Divinity School student Shabbos “Alexander” Kestenbaum, who is suing the University over allegations of tolerating antisemitism on campus, also slammed the protest in a post on X after Passover ended.
“President Garber: expel these terrorist supporters NOW or resign,” Kestenbaum wrote. “We Jews have had enough of your inaction!”"
But it seems claims of 'anti-semitism' are not the magic bullet they once were. I wonder how this all ends?
I think that 'anti-anti-semitism' stopped being fashionable on the political left at least a decade ago. Of course, you will still find *Jewish* leftists complaining about anti-semitism, but that's it.
Even the concept of a "Nazi" (the ultimate bad guy you are always ethically allowed to punch without any attempt to communicate with and maybe find a mutually satisfactory solution first) has gradually changed from "a violent authoritarian anti-semitic fanatic" to mere "someone who disagrees with me" (or the specifically Russian flavor: "someone who opposes Russia"). So even complaining about Nazis all the time no longer has the connotation of anti-semitism; it became a general label for the outgroup.
Anti-Antisemitism seems to still have a place on the left when it can 1) be legibly applied to their enemies and 2) doesn't appear to be supporting Israel itself.
This was much clearer around 2016-17 when Trump was elected and there was a sudden outcry about antisemitism (for which a surprisingly large number turned out to be hoaxes). That lasted at least as long as Trump was president, so far less than a decade ago .
It's far less clear right at this moment that antisemitism is actually coming from the left's enemies. It's hard to argue that the right are the antisemites when the left openly protests against Israel (and maybe Jews? - lots of tension on that question) on college campuses.
The left will still happily label an antisemite a Nazi, but you're right that the term has become much more of a general boo-word so lots of political enemies might get that - including Jews sometimes!
Defining Nazi as "Someone who opposes Russia" seems to not be a Russian or Soviet invention, Israel has a venerable tradition of defining Nazi as "someone who hates Jews". Ben Gurion, the literal founding father of Israel, called Menachem Begin, the one who later secured peace with Egypt, a "Hitlerist type" [1], i.e. a Nazi.
In actual truth, a Nazi isn't (just) "a violent authoritarian antisemitic fanatic", that would qualify the Spanish crown in 1492 to be Nazis, or Russian communists in the 1920s, as well as many many **many** others. A Nazi is someone who meets a compound definition that must at least hit all the following notes (1) Has a racial hierarchy where the highest race is their own, and is both an objectively superior race as well as a morally better race that the lower races conspire against (2) Uses Fascism, totalitarian devotion of the individual to the imagined national group and a nostalgia to an imagined past where the national group (conceived of as essential and as immutable as the laws of physics themselves) was dominant, and scapegoats several selected groups from the lower races as the culprits in the national group's decline (3) Engages in Genocide against the lower races.
Most groups called "Nazis" seem to fail one of those. Modern White Supremacists might satisfy (1) and (2) in some of their more extreme forms but they don't satisfy (3), American White Supremacists might want to re-instill segregation and the European ones definitely want to cleanse Europe from all non-Europeans (which include those who were recently European, as far recently as the 1970s and the 1980s), but none of them seriously contemplate or advance Genocide as a serious proposition. Islamic jihadist groups might very well contemplate (3) and are notoriously whiny and won't shut up about the "Golden age of Islam" so they arguably satisfy (2), but they fail (1).
As an aside, what groups "who were recently European, as far recently as the 1970s and the 1980s" that European White Supremacists want to eliminate do you have in mind?
Hmmm, that phrasing is somewhat confusing, now that I read it again. It somewhat implies "Those who were European till the 1970s and the 1980s then were no longer", whereas I really mean "Those who were not European till the 1970s and the 1980s and beyond, then were naturalized and became European".
As for the actual groups I was thinking of, in France I mean the people from former colonies (e.g. Tunisians and Algerians), in the UK I meant the Pakistanis and Indians, and in Germany I meant Syrians and Turks. Naturalized citizens in France and UK have a long history extending to the 1960s and the 1970s, but a lot of White Supremacists don't view them as truly European, because they define this using race.
Thanks for the clarification, it makes sense to me now, and I agree. In fact, it doesn't have to be *naturalized* citizens. People *born* in e.g. France, but of North-African ancestry, are often not seen as "French" (they are seen as "Arabs" or "beurs" or "rebeux" or whatever) and not just by White Supremacists. Of course the problem is compounded by the fact that they also often don't see themselves as French but tend to identify with some idealized version of their ancestry which makes them reject French or Western values, inexorably leading to an unstable feedback loop.
For example, I always found it interesting that the grown grand-children of North-Africans immigrants (Algerians, Moroccans, Tunisians) in France are *more* religious (see themselves more as Muslims) than their grand-parents did. (Although maybe that's just a consequence of the fall of secular ideologies (pan-Arab socialism and communism), since that seems true in the countries of origin as well, and therefore not just a reaction against the host country.)
BTW, thanks for sticking around, even when your ideas aren't the most popular. I agree with the commenter above that you often add a lot of value and insights to the discussions.
French (grand-)children of North African ancestry seeing themselves as more Muslim than their ancestors is a new thing to know, what I previously knew of this is that the American children and grandchildren of Middle Eastern ancestry gradually loosen the ties of religion and adopt an Americanized Islam (all while maintaining that this is the one true Islam of course, as all Muslims like to do). This is often in the context of their parents complaining and advising other people from the Middle East who want to immigrate to the USA that they should fortify Islamic values in their children well.
It's not easy for me to articulate my views about immigration. On the one hand, I'm an Anarchist and I believe nation states are rubbish, geographic jealousy and caring about whose territory is whose is quintessentially nation-state-ish and I don't believe it goes well with Anarchism. On the other hand, some immigration is objectively bad for both the source and the destination. Refugees from wars are troubled and radicalized, people think that suppressing statistics about their higher levels of crimes is doing them a service but it has backfired before and is going to backfire again. High-skill immigrants deprive their native land from much-needed brains, further dooming it to another iteration of the downward spiral. But of course, the counterargument (which I'm very convinced of) is that the native land is going to spiral downward anyway, because those in charge fundamentally don't have the intelligence or the willingness to be anything except dumbasses, so better those high-skilled workers be in a land that appreciates them and where they can prosper than in a land where they will dwindle and possibly be locked in jail over a social media post.
I don't think I'm adequately represented by any of the 2 sides in the current immigration debate.
Thanks a lot for the kind words at the end. I don't think I deserve them, but I'm heart warmed you wrote them.
Hi! I'm looking for participants to take a questionnaire inspired by some research spun off from the Astral Codex Ten reader survey. Because I've talked about the research on Reddit, I'm only looking for people who haven't looked at the Slate Star Codex subreddit recently and don't follow my Substack. Anyway, the survey is here: https://forms.gle/mHAyiuci4mb9hyCY6
It deals with personality and how it influences the ways in which people allocate resources. That link again: https://forms.gle/mHAyiuci4mb9hyCY6
For some reason, you must be logged in using your Google account before it lets you do the survey. You might want to turn this off? The ACX survey did not require this.
(I am not familiar with Google Forms, so I don't know how these things are set up.)
I'm currently doing my econ undergrad, and as a 6-month research project (not final thesis), I have to learn about one regression technique, do some simulations with it, and apply it to some real data. Below are all the options I can choose from. I know very little about most of them (and just reading the wiki article doesn't help that much), so any advice on which one is most interesting or useful would be welcomed. Even just "I only know three of these methods, but I like this one most" would be useful for me. At the moment I only know IV and Logistic Regression so those would be a little less interesting to me.
(About me: pretty average, young, EA, ACX reader, also interested in AI.)
If you are interested in predictive analytics in general, ridge regression and lasso regression are good introductions to regularization and provide solid heuristics for understanding of loss functions.
As an econ student, you probably won't get much exposure to unsupervised learning models. So if that's something you would like in order to round out your knowledge, K nearest and principal component stand out.
With the recently passed ban on TikTok, anyone who is legally knowledgeable know how this works?
The text (https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7521/text) says "It shall be unlawful for an entity to distribute..a foreign adversary controlled application by carrying out..internet hosting services to enable the distribution", and it specifics that this includes source code. But https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernstein_v._United_States specified that the publication of source code was protected by the first amendment, so the government would need a compelling interest to prevent that publication.
Is there a conflict here? Is preventing the publication of an apk likely to withstand court scrutiny?
EDIT: My best guess currently is that the government is claiming there is a compelling state interest, that of national security, and that is why they should be allowed to ban the publication of this app and it's code. And even if it were to go to the court the courts don't like telling the government was is and isn't national security related, so they would probably just ok this.
The committee notes are claiming that it's malware.
>For example, outside researchers have found embedded vulnerabilities that allow the company to collect more data than the app's privacy policy indicates.<
I would assume an attempt to publish source code would at least have to disprove this.
I wonder what is the intended purpose. It's not like most people could install the source code. Someone else building the binaries for them would be illegal. Studying the source code to make a different but similar application out of it... well, if Americans would do it, this is kinda what the bill originally proposed (that the problem is not TikTok per se, but the fact that it has Chinese owners)... and if Chinese would do it, they can share the source code on their own part of internet, so the ban is irrelevant.
What I'm alarmed about is specifically how they define "foreign adversary controlled". The Chinese government can trivially make a personal GitHub account and publish source code, is that source code then "foreign adversary controlled"? Does that mean every Chinese or Iranian developer on GitHub is potentially a target of banning or repo takedowns?
Or do they define an "app" as something that must have a central database somewhere else than the computer it's running on? In which case... fair, but why do they want to restrain the mere source code publishing of those apps? If anything, publishing source code ***helps*** you to know that the app talks to a central server somewhere.
Why is the bill so general and convoluted anyway? Why can't they just say the legalese equivalent of "We're banning TikTok because fuck China."
Also, consider the possible perverse incentives. Next time a powerful American software company tries to compete against an established foreign software solution, they may decide to lobby politicians to declare a war, just so they could classify the competition as "foreign adversary controlled".
So if tomorrow social networks inexplicably start promoting articles about how Estonia is full of terrorists, at least we will know why. Or maybe a World War 3 will start over SAP.
I don't know Tatu, they had five years to find physical evidence in the McMartin case, and two full jury trials. They never presented any. But thank you for the comment.
I think a lot of the people on the Open Thread are young so I thought I would invite you to read about a hysteria that happened in the US, and some other countries, in the 1980's and 90's. Perhaps they cover this in school, I have no idea. But the child care sexual abuse hysteria is a black eye on the US and our justice system. https://falsechoices.substack.com/p/our-endless-hysteria
On the other hand, this book presented several convincing arguments that the idea of a "satanic panic" regarding child care abuse was itself overblown and that the media focus on ritual abuse allegations did not present the full picture of the actual investigations, that the most notable abuse cases were based on physical evidence and that even in McMartin case there were grounds to at least allow for a credible suspicion (whether ultimately unfounded or not) that Ray Buckey was guilty of sexual abuse.
Can you imagine if a major publisher or university press released a book about 'jewish privilege'? Or gentile professors at elite US colleges ran courses on 'destroying jewishness'? This would be absolutely scandalous and people here would be furious.
And yet, I point out the exact opposite situation is true and people are furious...at me for pointing it out.
If these jewish intellectuals hate me for my race, why am I supposed to cry when their ideological bedfellows starting seeing them as oppressive white people themselves? Especially when the hegemonic institutions of America are almost universally on their side and will help them, a privilege not afforded to white people who feel the consequences of left wing race ideology.
Cuz they're jealous of non-Jews' foreskins? I recommend wearing a codpiece when sleeping to block possibility of its theft. https://imgur.com/a/zip5qTE
> Why do Jewish intellectuals hate white people so much?
They don't, I don't remember Einstein being a particularly gleeful advocate against Micro-Aggressions, maybe his use of non-Euclidean geometry stems from a deep hatred to the proto-Western Euclid but those who invented non-Euclidean geometries were all White, mostly Germans and French, so there's that. Scott Aronson has atrocious opinions on the Palestinians (**checks Shtetl-Optimized** yup, another one) but I have never read or listened to him popularizing White Fragility.
Lastly, insofar as an "Intellectual" is simply someone who explores and explains ideas for a living and not necessarily an academic, then the very guy who owns the very blog you're writing this on is a Jewish intellectual, can you cite one instance where he hints he hates White people, of which his readers are the vast majority?
So its not Jewish intellectuals, is it? It's "Woke Jewish Intellectuals", and at this point the signifier "Jewish" adds no information of value and can be safely discarded without losing too much information, some would say that this even gains us new information.
> If these Jewish intellectuals hate me for my race, why am I supposed to cry when their ideological bedfellows starting seeing them as oppressive white people themselves
If dictators hate the Rule of Law, why should you be crying when their country plunges into a civil war? If some people hate and pollute rivers, why should be crying when those rivers become poisoned by their chemical trash and are now slowly killing everybody who drinks from them?
I agree the temptations to seek "Poetic Justice" everywhere is very strong, but like it or not, you're among "those people". You live among the River Polluters, you live among those who agree with Dictators and hate the Rule of Law. When the consequences come, they won't distinguish between you and them. Free Speech and Civilized Discourse are public-good norms much like the Rule of Law and clean rivers, they benefit everyone, and their absence comes for everyone.
As for S. Aronson's anti-anti-Zionist piece, I have read it 5 days after it was published and the comment section was already closed by then (whether by choice or due to a certain capacity limit), so I didn't have the chance to respond at the time in the comment section.
I will start by answering the central question of the letter:
>> Let’s assume that not only has Netanyahu lost the next election in a landslide, but is justly spending the rest of his life in Israeli prison. Waving my wand, I’ve made *you* [The Reader] Prime Minister in his stead, with an overwhelming majority in the Knesset. You now get to go down in history as the liberator of Palestine. But you’re now also in charge of protecting Israel’s 7 million Jews (and 2 million other residents) from near-immediate slaughter at the hands of those who you’ve liberated.
I have thought about this question before, and my answer is scattered over a bunch of comments in several Open Threads. To compile them all here, I would:
(1) Withdraw IDF presence and settlers from West Bank and Gaza. The Golan and Sheba farms (taken from Syria in the 1967 war, Sheba farms claimed by Lebanon) are also not Israeli land, but withdrawing from there is more challenging due to the current nature of the neighbors.
(2) Alternatively to (1), fully annex Gaza and/or the West Bank as Israeli provinces, and make all of their resident full citizens of Israel with equal rights and protections under the law
(3) Admit full historical responsibility for the Nakba, and release all classified historical documents documenting the war crimes against Palestinians
(4) Pay reparations for whomever can prove they're descendent from Nakba survivors, modeled after German reparations for the Holocaust
Because the premise of the question is fundamentally impossible, I won't spend any more time thinking on what I would do if I was the Israeli PM. But over the course of several hundred comments in 7 months here, I think have made quite clear what I think the general shape of a fair end to the fighting looks like.
Scott then writes terrible paragraph where he makes a combination of historical/factual and moral mistakes:
>> Granted, it seems pretty paranoid to expect such a slaughter! Or rather: it would seem paranoid, if the Palestinians’ Grand Mufti (progenitor of the Muslim Brotherhood and hence Hamas) hadn’t allied himself with Hitler in WWII, enthusiastically supported the Nazi Final Solution, and tried to export it to Palestine; if in 1947 the Palestinians hadn’t rejected the UN’s two-state solution (the one Israel agreed to) and instead launched another war to exterminate the Jews (a war they lost); if they hadn’t joined the quest to exterminate the Jews a third time in 1967; etc., or if all this hadn’t happened back before there were any settlements or occupation, when the only question on the table was Israel’s existence. It would seem paranoid if Arafat had chosen a two-state solution when Israel offered it to him at Camp David, rather than suicide bombings. It would seem paranoid if not for the candies passed out in the streets in celebration on October 7.
(1) The Grand Mufti isn't the progenitor of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt in 1928 by the Egyptian Hassan Al Bannah. The Grand Mufti also has nothing to do with Hamas, which was founded by Ahmed Yassin, a Muslim Brotherhood high-ranking leader in Gaza who Israel was friendly towards because they both hated the secular and leftist Fatah (which was violent at that time before Oslo), Ahmed Yassin then made a 180 turn in the 1980s and founded Hamas. Hamas didn't commit any violence till the 1990s. Ahmed Yassin was a child when the Nakba happened, back when the Grand Mufti was in charge in Jerusalem.
(2) The Grand Mufti is not the leader of the Palestinians. He was a local leader of Jerusalem under the Ottomans because he was an Ottoman noble (allegedly tracing bloodline to prophet Muhammed). He was then appointed by the British in a made-up position "Grand Mufti of Palestine" and considered a vital ally. He allied himself with Nazi Germany out of pure self-preservation: Because he played a role in the 1936 Arab uprising and the British issued an arrest warrant against him.
(3) If Scott wants to use what a few hundred Palestinians did after October 7th as evidence that all Arabs are hateful antisemitic untermenschen, perhaps I can also use what a few hundred Jewish wedding guests [1] did as evidence of the same, here's what Wikipedia says:
>>>> In December 2015, Israeli police began investigating a video of a Jewish wedding in Jerusalem celebrating the marriage of a person known to have been involved in price tag attacks, in which guests are shown stabbing a photo of the toddler, Ali Dawabsheh, who had died in the Duma arson attack. The same video contained scenes of guests, armed with guns, knives and Molotov cocktails, chanting a song with the words from the book of Judges (16:28), "O God, that I may be this once avenged of the Philistines for my two eyes", replacing "Philistines" with "Palestinians". A lawyer for the defendants in the case, Attorney Itamar Ben-Gvir, was also present and later said "No one realized these were photos of a member of the Dawabsheh family"
Look at the masterful defense by Ben Gvir! Nobody realized that the photo of the toddler they were stabbing is the photo of the particular toddler who was just burned alive! If he was just any **other** toddler, it would have been totally okay.
So maybe atrocity-hunting is not the best or most charitable way to look at this? Just like I see this type of Jews and this type of Israelis and deliberately choose to forget they exist, maybe Aronson would do well to deliberately choose to forget the type of Arab who gives out sweets after October 7th.
(4) The Palestinians didn't start the war of 1948. The war of 1948 started as a civil war between paramilitary groups. Civil wars don't have clear instigators or a single initiating event and are instead the result of a series of escalation-and-counter-escalation. When Zionist paramilitaries prevailed and started slaughtering Arabs and expelling them in the hundreds of thousands (Wikipedia's Nakba page says 300K expelled before May 1948), Arab armies tried to intervene after public outcry from their own populations, and they did so without coordination or a clear plan.
(5) Israel never offered a good faith offer of a Palestinian state. A state is by definition an entity with a monopoly on violence, and not a single one of Israeli offers of statehood included an army, or the guarantee that the IDF won't violate its borders.
Then Scott says:
>> But if someone has a whole ideology, which they teach their children and from which they’ve never really wavered for a century, about how murdering you is a religious honor, and also they’ve actually tried to murder you at every opportunity—-what more do you want them to do, before you’ll believe them?
Perhaps he should remember then that this "someone" is actually 2.3 million someones, who the state he is supporting have been blockading and chokeholding since 2007. I would like to see his evidence that all 2.3 millions of Gazans see killing Jews as religious honor. (Because if he didn't have any, that would be such a shame. It would be as if I saw the "Wedding of Hate" and concluded that Jews see murdering Arabs and burning them alive as the highest religious honor.) Perhaps he should remember that there are 600K Jews and 3 million Arabs in the West Bank, and before October 7th the only ones doing the dying were the Arabs, and the only ones doing the killing were the Jews.
Scott then proceeds to list 4 solutions, and for all except the 2nd one (his preferred), he imagines one-sided objections that don't stand scrutiny. Look at what he writes, Zum Beispiel, on my preferred solution:
>> in the rare cases they deign to address the question directly, most anti-Zionists advocate a “secular, binational state” between the Jordan and Mediterranean, with equal rights for all inhabitants. Certainly, that would make sense if you believe that Israel is an apartheid state just like South Africa.
>> To me, though, this analogy falls apart on a single question: who’s the Palestinian Nelson Mandela? Who’s the Palestinian leader who’s ever said to the Jews, “end your Jewish state so that we can live together in peace,” rather than “end your Jewish state so that we can end your existence”?
Really? Scott won't have a secular bi-state because you can't find a Palestinian Nelson Mandela? He means the Arab 20% of Israel and all 3 million Arabs of the West Bank and all 2.5 million Arabs of Gaza all hate Israel with the same fervor and would like to genocide Jews to the last baby?
I won't go into history, and if you say "wedding of hate" and I say "Shani Louk", we'll never get anywhere.
Basically, you say the Palestinians are just normal people who'd like to get rid of all the fighting and war and bombs and stuff, and if they're just left alone to lead their life, we'll have peace.
Sure, that's true. But among them are the Hamas, and their corrupt leaders profit massively from the current situation. Khaled Mashal 5 billion dollars, Ismail Haniyeh 4 billion dollars, Abu Marzouk 3 billion dollars, all from stolen humanitarian aid. https://twitter.com/Regendelfin/status/1763920078959980955 And backed by the current Iranian government. And feeding the people their propaganda for decades.
How can we convince them to throw away their weapons and make peace with Israel?
You're very welcome. I was planning to respond to Scott's awful post in my Copious Free Time, you gave me an opportunity to quit procrastinating and just do it.
> if you say "wedding of hate" and I say "Shani Louk", we'll never get anywhere.
Exactly, that's what it means for it to be a "Cycle of Violence". A cycle has no start, has no end, and is self-reinforcing. The reasons that started the cycle (and thus could - in naive principle - end it) are long gone, the cycle now persists solely on its own. Its results feed into its causes and its causes create its results who then feed more into its causes which create more of its results which .....
> if they're just left alone to lead their life, we'll have peace.
Which is a huge "If" that Israel was and is not willing - even in its most committed-to-peace phase in the early to mid 1990s - to give. They're not willing to dismantle settlements, they're not willing to leave Gaza have an airport and ports and territorial waters, they're not willing to stop passing racist laws like the Nation State Basic Law that agitate their Arab, Druze, and Bedouin citizens, they're not willing to stop oppressing and choke holding the West Bank citizens and treating them exactly how Apartheid governments do. "Leave them alone" is a choice that the Israeli government has faced every single day after 5 June 1967, every day they wake up and a Windows XP dialog box appears in the sky with a message "Oppress Palestinians just for the heck of it? [yes/no/remind me later]", and they either press "yes" or "remind me later", but never "no".
My definition of "Leaving Palestinians alone" involves looking at them as human beings, not animals that you can continue to harass and denigrate and throw by the thousands into "administrative detention" (i.e. unlawful military prisons where civilians as young as 13 are thrown to never be heard of again), then act Pikachu-face surprised when your actions create and empower a monstrous faction that promises revenge "by all means necessary". It's not about Jihad (although that's a catalyst that make the fire rage harder), the PLO were communists back in their day, and that didn't stop them from promising revenge and - in their view - getting it.
If you don't want Nazi Germany, one possible course of action is to create it and then spend billions of dollar and millions of souls to defeat it, as the US, UK and France did in the 1920s to 1940s. But another, much smarter, course of action is to never force the treaty of Versailles in the first place. Israel hitherto consistently preferred the first course of action, where they engage in outrageous and dehumanizing campaigns against the Palestinians where countless thousands die and/or injured and/or humiliated and deprived of their human rights, then when the inevitable revenge comes they spend billions yet again to defeat it, only to create yet another iteration of it by their actions again and again and again.
> How can we convince them to throw away their weapons and make peace with Israel?
I don't know. There is a temptation to always answer with a solution to those questions, any solution. It will probably be wrong. It will be a wrong because I have no baseline experience with the question itself (and neither does most people), I have no idea how to fight a paramilitary group that has been building its military strength for 20 years. I have no idea how to fight a normal war anywhere anytime against any foe. I have no experience with the deserts of Sinai that Hamas uses to smuggle weapons into Gaza, and I have no experience whatsoever with the royal courts of Qatar that Hamas leverages for billions of aid.
But what I'm saying is much more radical and more fundamental. After all, first there was Fatah, then Fatah became (somewhat) peaceful but only to be replaced with Hezbollah, Hezbollah were barely held back in 2006 only for Hamas to emerge 1 to 2 years later, then there was the Islamic Jihad. Israel's actions keep creating them. After each group is created, it becomes a self-sustaining entity that can keep itself alive under a variety of external operating conditions, no matter what Israel's actions are. But what creates them in the first place is Israel's actions.
I think that's enough for now, if you want my opinion on a particular paragraph don't hesitate to reply with the quoted paragraph. My final verdict is that this letter isn't a good faith engagement with the so-called "Anti-Zionists" (a term which I now rejects), this letter is just a release that Scott wrote because he was angry, and he was angry because he browsing Twitter.
At the beginning of the letter, Scott seems somewhat self-aware:
>> At the high end of the spectrum, I religiously check the tweets of Paul Graham, a personal hero and inspiration to me ever since he wrote Why Nerds Are Unpopular twenty years ago, and a man with whom I seem to resonate deeply on every important topic except for two: Zionism and functional programming. At the low end, I’ve read hundreds of the seemingly infinite army of Tweeters who post images of hook-nosed rats with black hats and side curls and dollar signs in their eyes, sneering as they strangle the earth and stab Palestinian babies.
Instead of engaging with particular type of "Anti-Zionist" that is Paul Graham or - say - me (not that I'm on Twitter, oh hell no), he chooses to spend the rest of the letter talking as if his main readers are those who post hook-nosed AI-generated Jews on Twitter, people who he have to carefully explain to them why killing Jews is wrong and why Arabs all want to kill Jews and are too much of an Untermensch right now to be given their own state or a place in the one state that already exists.
Which is a shame, because I want to respect Scott, because I want to believe him when he says he looks at Gazan children and remembers his own. He continuously makes this task difficult for me, just 3 days ago he posted another masterpiece like this letter.
What can I say, that's why you don't browse Twitter.
I can't keep track of all the separate comments you've made making mostly the same point, so just:
1. Is it (((Jewish intellectuals))) you hate or just (((Jews)))? It seems like you keep equivocating and motte-and-bailey'ing on this.
2. I just...can't...comprehend the irony and brazenness of posting on an anti-woke Jewish guy's blog to say Jews are all hatefully woke. I....just...trying to wrap my brain around this makes my head hurt.
3. *Why* aren't zionist Jews based allies of western civilisation, according to you? In what possible sense do you say Muslims are more based than Jews?
I think I have a hard time with your “I’m racist against racist races” philosophy because you’re unapologetically practicing exactly what you condemn. Are you saying that if all the other races weren’t so racist then you wouldn’t have to be so racist all the time? Or are you saying everybody is justifiably racist and may the most racist race win?
This is a lazy repost of content that was lazy the first time. It's an Imgur image of book covers, without explanation of why the books are hateful, or why we should treat them as a representative example of the thinking of "Jewish intellectuals." It doesn't show the authors to be intellectuals, or even bother to prove them to be Jewish, much less support any kinds of conclusions about Jewish intellectuals in general.
Would any AI enthusiasts have some advice for a grad student? I'm working on a school project where we're evaluating different methods of "teaching" a model about, say, a research article (e.g. RAG, fine-tuning). Right now we're asking the trained model a bunch of questions about the paper then classifying its answers as Right/Wrong/Catastrophically Wrong. We figure the method that produces the most Right answers is the best, but surely there's a more "industry standard" way of evaluating this kind of thing?
The first witness in Trump's trial about the alleged hush money for Stormy Daniels was the former publisher for The National Enquirer, who allegedly "used the tabloid to suppress damaging rumors about Trump, and prosecutors say ... helped negotiate the hush-money payment at the center of this case".
The nominative determinism would be more impressive if there weren't so many synonyms for "penis" in the English language. Other names that also mean "penis" include Peter, Dick, Rod, Johnson, Willy, Wang, Dong, and John Thomas.
Do all languages have a colossal number of words for penis? Does English have the most? Does any other English word have quite so many synonyms?
>Of course I don’t want personal photos published, but I also won’t participate in their well-known practice of blackmail, political favors, political attacks, and corruption. I prefer to stand up, roll this log over, and see what crawls out.
I thought the hush money wasn't in any doubt? I was under the impression that only question is whether it qualified as an illegal campaign contribution and whether NY could stretch the law to go after him if so.
This trial is so odd, I think nobody is denying he was paying her off, I was given to understand elsewhere that he's being tried for paying her off out of the wrong slush fund and should have claimed it as a campaign expense?
I mean, this case really is all about 'throw any mud to see if it will stick'; if we're going to try politicians for paying off ex-tryst mates, then there is a long list waiting for such. I don't approve of him having affairs, but dd Stormy ever give the money back in a fit of high-mindedness over "no, no, I cannot take the proceeds of infamy!" or did she rather try getting more out of him once that was gone, and if he wouldn't pay up, she decided peddling her story to the media was another way of making money out of it? That she picked Avenatti to be her lawyer - well, two greedy and stupid people met in a match made under heaven, yes?
Yeah, "reputation management" seems like one of those expenses that any public figure could engage in. Trump might well have done this even if he were merely a wealthy reality-TV host.
If I give money to Biden, can I claim that he paid me in nega-dollars to not confess to a torrid affair?
As I understand it, the alleged New York crime is that Trump lied in his business records about which slush fund he used. But lying in your business records is only a crime if you use those records to commit or conceal some other crime; otherwise you're just writing weird harmless fiction. And paying hush money to an inconvenient mistress isn't a crime.
The claimed underlying crime is Federal campaign finance violation, in that Trump paying hush money to his mistress was "obviously" a campaign expense, and you aren't supposed to spend your personal money on campaign expenses without officially donating it to your campaign account first, I think.
Note that this would be a Federal crime, but the Federal government has not seen fit to prosecute. But New York is sure he's guilty.
The cynic in me says, if Trump had used his campaign account rather than his personal account, New York would be saying that paying hush money to an inconvenient mistress is "obviously" a personal matter, and it's a violation of Federal campaign finance laws to spend campaign funds on a personal matter. Again, without regard to whether the Feds think there was a prosecutable violation of federal law.
I think I'm going to trust the cynic in me on this one. I want Trump banished into the political Outer Darkness, but this is not the way.
I'm in the same boat as you. I strongly believe that if he had paid her off using campaign funds that this would be a *much* bigger scandal. We can't have it both ways, especially for something that underneath it all isn't a crime in the first place. I feel like they want to make paying off a mistress a crime, but can't do that (especially retroactively).
So, they're trying to use the legal system to run someone's name through the mud and get as much publicity of the affair as possible. I actually think *that* should be illegal, and some kind of unlawful prosecution charge should be brought against the DA.
This truly is the worst case to bring against Trump, and has already been backfiring by making Trump more sympathetic, riling up his supporters, and undermining any other cases that might be more legitimate.
Yeah. I suspect that Trump *should* be serving prison time for the DC insurrection charge, the Georgia election interference, and possibly the classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. We'll have to wait on the trials to be sure. But the Feds are slow-walking those cases, while NY tries to throw him in prison for the white-collar equivalent of driving with a broken tail light. Which makes everyone involved look like the sort of person who tries to put their political opponents in jail on broken-taillight charges, so kind of untrustworthy when they go on to say "...and he's guilty of actual serious crimes, too!"
Technically, I believe lying on your business records is a misdemeanor, but the statute of limitations has run on that. Lying to conceal another crime is a felony, but the big issue here is that the underlying crime is (a) extremely dubious (paying out of the campaign account is a lot more likely to land you in trouble with the feds) (b) a federal crime that the DOJ declined to prosecute and (c) clearly bootstrapped to give Bragg a way to indict Trump. This is a case where it almost certainly gets tossed on appeal even if he is convicted, and I am deeply annoyed that this one went first, because the other cases against him are so much stronger.
>I mean, this case really is all about 'throw any mud to see if it will stick'; if we're going to try politicians for paying off ex-tryst mates, then there is a long list waiting for such.
Agreed on both points. Also agreed that this case is really odd - a hush payoff turned into a case about mislabeling funds (where, IIRC, the statute of limitations ran out), turned into a campaign finance case (under a federal law - but being tried in a state court???).
AFAIK, the only case against Trump that isn't legally tenuous is the classified documents one. Now, personally, I don't want politicians to be above (beneath? :-) ) the law, but I'd rather have the electorate choose which is the less odious candidate to put into office. Also, if politicians routinely face politically motivated prosecution once they leave office - they may become less willing to leave office peacefully. I'd really like to keep the tradition of concession speeches marking power shifts rather than something bloodier.
Have you looked at Orchid yet? I'm very curious if a separate firm will pop up to take Embryo info from Orchid or Genomic predictions and apply height and IQ tests to them
Here's something to think about regarding kids' IQ: My parents were not trying or expecting to have a smart kid, but they got one. Some time in grade school a teacher told my mother my IQ, and she told me, and she and I both developed an unhealthy preoccupation with that number, and that ended up being very bad for my head. Feeling proud that it was high was just the tiny tip of the iceberg. Most of the effect was to strengthen the sense I already had of being a very odd entity, something like vast, olive-colored irregular polygon set in a row of blue and white houses. It took me decades to get over the IQ thing, and as for the rest- I still feel pretty olive-colored.
If people who pick thru their embryos before implanting one feel they must test their children's IQ to find out whether they got as much awesome specialness as they paid for, I hope someone counsels them to only test once, refrain from talking to the kid about the the result, and STFU about the subject for the rest of their lives.
But don't you think that it's being genuinely different in thought patterns, context, background knowledge, speed-of-inference, and so on that makes you so different?
I was tested at a young age, and put in special programs and skipped grades and whatever afterwards. My parents never told me my results, but it was VERY easy to see from before kindergarten that I was massively different than everyone around me, and that's been true basically my whole life.
I'm not sure "don't tell your kid the result" is actually going to make a high IQ person actually fit in better or be any more "normal," because I think a lot of the differences are inherent in the condition itself.
It's easy to think "I'm different because I'm so much smarter than the rest of these idiots" when the answer is really "I'm different because I'm weirder, not smarter". Smart may have little to do with why you don't fit in.
There are *two* big mistakes highly intelligent people can make, and it is natural to make one of them when trying too hard to avoid the other:
* ignore the fact that their high IQ makes them different;
* attribute all their differences to the high IQ, even when something else is the cause.
Many people believe that refusing to believe in a high IQ is virtuous. Guess what: the smart kid will notice that *something* is different. Other people will notice, too. People naturally try to explain things, so in the absence of the correct explanation they will likely invent an incorrect one.
Some people believe that a lie can be virtuous. For example, you can explain the educational success of the smart kid by pretending that it is a result of the kid studying diligently. That will certainly encourage everyone to study harder (the smart kid to keep the advantage, everyone else to hopefully get the same results one day), and everyone studying harder is a socially desirable outcome, isn't it?
But it doesn't work like that. The smart kid will notice that he or she gets good grades even without studying. And the other kids will notice that no matter how hard they study, the outcome is simply not the same. Telling them to study even harder is just pointless cruelty; some of them are already on the verge of collapse. By denying the existence of a biological privilege, you are simultaneously blaming the ones who were dealt a bad hand.
(Why doesn't everyone learn to code and get a job in Silicon Valley; that would certainly solve all the unemployment and poverty, wouldn't it? Oh, those lazy bastards are just not studying hard enough. Or perhaps we should blame the teachers for not inspiring them enough instead? Or maybe it's the sexist and racist employers and colleagues. Anyway, the point is that literally everyone could become an elite coder, if only we collectively tried harder. The beatings will continue until morale improves.)
From inside, being highly intelligent but in denial about it, means constantly overestimating other people's ability to understand things, and being constantly surprised about how other people just fail to connect the dots. (There is a rationalist wisdom saying that if you are surprised too often, it usually means that your model of the world is wrong.) Even after admitting that intelligence is a thing, if you don't accept that you are exceptionally intelligent, it will seem like you have the bad luck of being surrounded by exceptionally stupid people. Things only start making sense when you realize that there is a "normal", and you are not a part of it.
And yes, there is a better known opposite mistake, often seen among Mensa members, when the high IQ is the *only* fact you know about yourself, and then you conclude that *everything* else that happened to you is somehow a consequence of you being too smart for this planet. You don't have ADHD, and you are not too lazy to clean up your room or at least your working desk, it is simply a fact that smart people thrive in chaos and need it. You don't have autism or low social skills, it is simply the vast intellectual distance between you and the muggles that prevents mutual understanding. Etc. (So why are there many smart people who *don't* fail at life? Dunno, they probably got lucky, or maybe they are not playing fair somehow.)
In presence of such extreme choices, it can be difficult to obtain a balanced perspective on intelligence. Yes, it will give you an advantage in many areas of life. No, it cannot replace knowledge or experience, and if you try using it that way, you will fail. But if you work diligently, you can achieve much better results than the less intelligent people, no matter how hard they try. But there are only 24 hours a day, so there is a limited number of things you can work diligently on, and at the end of the day you will need someone else's help with the rest, even if that other person is less intelligent than you. Intelligence alone will not fix your other problems. Intelligence is not the same as rationality, or wisdom, or education, or experience; although it can help you obtain these things easier.
I have a distinct memory of asking an (Asian) classmate how to solve some particular math problem. He wrote down the method in half a second. "Oh I see," I said. "And why does that work?"
And he gave me an utterly blank look.
I can't prove this, but I had a very strong sense that it wasn't that he simply didn't know the answer, or didn't know how to explain it. Rather, I really think he found the question incomprehensible. As if it was a question he'd never asked himself in his life.
This really confounds the concept of intelligence to me. This guy had great memorisation skills, could no doubt pick up mental algorithms and formulaic processes in an instant and apply them flexibly and effortlessly to many different contexts. And yet, he didn't just lack philosophical ability, he didn't even merely lack philosophical curiosity, he seemed to lack the comprehension that there was even such a thing as philosophical curiosity that might exist.
I'm sure this general idea has been addressed by Scott somewhere, but I just can't see how the two questions "*how* does it work, what steps get you from A to B?" and "*why* does it work, what fundamental features of this discipline explain the success of this approach" belong on the same dimension, or even on related dimensions. There's probably a technical model for connecting them. But they are in a basic sense incommeasurable.
A bit of the first is probably necessary for the second. But the first can exist entirely without the second. And this same point applies in a self-referential meta way. There's so much focus on some "thing" (IQ) that correlates with certain test results and also correlates with life outcomes and abilities. Compared to the "why": what *is* IQ, in its essential nature? "What is intelligence?" Not "what does it correlate with?"
I have also met the "intelligence without curiosity" type. From my perspective, "intelligence" means having a powerful engine in your head... but for what purposes you choose to use that engine, that is an entirely different question.
I would predict that people with high IQ will be statistically more impressive in whatever purpose they choose, whether it is curious exploration, mindless memorization, or conspiracy theories.
That may be true. But I'm inclined to doubt it. There are a whole bunch of scientists and scientific types who seem to really hate and despise philosophy. They seem to have not only a firmly dismissive certainty that "philosophy is all useless and fake lol", but also a kind of rage at its existence. (Thankfully there aren't many of them around here, or if there are they have more nuance in the way they talk.)
Of course they *may* be simply choosing to hate philosophy and love science. But the manner of their rage really looks to me like the standard attitude of a self-perceived "smart" or "skilled" person encountering a discipline or task that they're actually bad at. "Well if *I* can't do it, it must be useless anyway. I could ace it if I wanted to. But I don't, so there!"
Standard human pride and childishness is what it looks like. Which suggests that science and philosophy (science is actually a form of philosophy, but let's ignore that) sometimes require different forms of intelligence (though obviously there are plenty who are great at both, like Scott).
"That will certainly encourage everyone to study harder (the smart kid to keep the advantage, everyone else to hopefully get the same results one day), and everyone studying harder is a socially desirable outcome, isn't it?"
Raw talent will get you a long way, but relying on the talent on its own, without learning how to learn or put in the hard work, will one day fail. I've seen it in sports, where the naturally gifted eventually hit the day when they're slower and their reflexes are not as quick, and the raw talent is no longer there to be called on to help them out of a hole. The ones who learned to practice and figure out solutions have that to help them out and extend their careers when the legs aren't able to get them to that spot on the field five seconds before anyone else anymore, but they have so much experience in reading the game that they know to position themselves in good time to be in that spot.
And you see the opposite: the slow decline of the former star, where they now routinely get beaten by the less talented but hard-working younger opponent because they've put in the work to figure out how to get the result, while the star is trying to draw from the well of talent that is now drying up.
It took me a long time to realize that I was much smarter than most people. Everyone assumes that their own experience is normal and everyone else is just like them until proven otherwise.
I think I was born wired to be sort of schizoid -- to have trouble connecting with people -- and that wiring was separate from the smart wiring. So I sort of slotted the IQ info in with the sense of unfixable separateness I already had, and it strengthened it. If I had had a different temperament the info about IQ might not have affected me the way it did. I have known lots of people who are clearly extremely smart, and of course they started getting evidence of that early in life, but you don't get the sense that their smartness is a sort of capsule they are locked inside of. They're sociable. They like company. They tell great jokes and stories. Feynman sounds like he was like that. The more sociable kind of smart people tend not to work in jobs where they're alone with a book or a screen a lot of the time -- for instance they may be lawyers. Or doctors. Paul Farmer, for instance, was evidently a genius from an early age, but he spent his life in a sea of people.
But the kids with the introverted + smart combo that I got are not rare, and the last thing they need to hear from their parents and teachers is that the reason they feel so different is that they are intellectually superior. That's really not accurate for most. Feeling separate and different is mostly the product of a whole different aspect of the way they are put together, and they need help learning to modulate that tendency.
If someone has an extremely smart kid then yes of course they will need to talk with the kid about skipping grades etc. But I think it's important to talk about it in a way that does not portray them as a whole different kind of entity. So you don't say, you are a rare high IQ person, as very few are, so you don't fit in with regularly kids and the regular school structures. You say something like, yeah you learn extra fast, and 4th grade is going to be really boring for you, so the school's going to just let you go ahead to 5th. But you can still be on the [whatever] team with your buddies from 4th grade, and have them over on the weekends.
I thought about some pretty esoteric stuff at a young age, but at the same time a lot of my interests were age-appropriate. I liked dolls, hide and seek, pretending to be explorers in the vacant lots at the same age as everyone else. Parents need to do justice to the need for that sort of play too. Mine did, and I think that did me a lot of good.
I'm skeptical that the Rationalist IQ Uber Alles meme is even a beneficial belief system in the first place, let alone something that kids should hear. I like your suggestion of how to handle it.
I agree at the "lol my number is bigger than yours" level, but let me put forward one case for it. I don't know what you consider a symptom of "IQ uber alles," but I assume I'd qualify because I would definitely pay significant prices to gengineer my kids (with IQ and height / attractiveness top of the list), and would structure their and our lives around schooling them in a different way.
Here's my rationale: Progress and achievement is driven by outliers. If you actually have a high IQ outlier kid, you are more likely to help them become their best self, and to drive positive results in the world, by taking their difference into account and treating them differently than just throwing them into public school for them to be crushingly bored and learn nothing for 12 years.
JS Mill was a child prodigy because his "peers" and main interaction partners were his parents' social circle of high-powered intellectual elites, and he's one of many examples.
I've always planned to A) pay for whatever gengineering is possible with a couple million, and B) homeschool my kids at a greatly accelerated pace, including paying grad students to give intensive 1-on-1 tutoring in whatever subjects the kids are interested in. The aim would be "undergrad by 14-15," which I think is about the right difficulty level and place for a smart 14/15 year old. And I'd happily have them go younger than that if inclined.
Bad for social life to never be around age-appropriate kids? Maybe? But I never really had much to say to age-appropriate kids and usually sought interactions with smarter adults, because age-appropriate kids didn't think or talk about anything interesting. Then when I was a teenager and libido came in, there was a *reason* to talk to kids my age and I started doing it (and in my paradigm, they'll already be in undergrad when this happens, which is probably the best place for it).
Also, this way they'll actually *learn* things, which is important. I was so crushingly bored in junior high and high school I literally became a delinquent, because then they send you to a special school where you get all your work for the week at 8am monday, so you can crank through it in a few hours and be done with the contentless nonsense and can spend your time flirting and getting in trouble with the other delinquent kids for the rest of the week.
I don't want that for my kids, I want them to actually learn things and be able to discuss interesting and complex ideas with other smart people, and to get through the credential signaling rat-race faster than other people so they can get on with their lives, and would structure their schooling and our lives around that.
To my mind, this maximizes the chance of them flourishing and getting the most out of their talents and gifts, and maximizes the chance of positive impact in the world driven by them. But yes, it's paying significant sums, then upending and structuring our entire lives around a different educational paradigm, purely for the sake of "IQ uber alles." I think it's worth it.
Reading the potted bio of Mill on Wikipedia is not encouraging; Dad wanted a baby genius to carry on The Utilitarian Cause and devoted his time to turning baby JS into that, with the result being that:
"Mill went through months of sadness and contemplated suicide at twenty years of age. According to the opening paragraphs of Chapter V of his autobiography, he had asked himself whether the creation of a just society, his life's objective, would actually make him happy. His heart answered "no", and unsurprisingly he lost the happiness of striving towards this objective. Eventually, the poetry of William Wordsworth showed him that beauty generates compassion for others and stimulates joy. With renewed vigour, he continued to work towards a just society, but with more relish for the journey. He considered this one of the most pivotal shifts in his thinking. In fact, many of the differences between him and his father stemmed from this expanded source of joy."
I can't help feeling that if Dad had allowed him to be a normal kid and associate with others of his own age and not be always on all the time, he might have avoided "I'm twenty and I want to die because it's all pointless".
I agree IQ isn't Uber Alles and here's an example of why not: There's currently an argument about Israel/Palestine on this thread, and LovesIsraelHatesIP is participating. They are one of the few people on ACX I have ever seen publicly change their point of view about a major issue in which they had an emotional investment -- and then apologize for their earlier posts -- and thereafter try to help other people become more fairminded too. Scott is willing to publicly change his mind, but that has a different quality, because he doesn't usually sound emotionally invested in his beliefs, so when he changes them it doesn't feel like as big a deal. I don't know what personal quality made LIHIP able to publicly change their point of view the way they did, but it wasn't extra IQ points. Whatever it is, nobody's going to convince me that it's some trivial Niceness kind of quality, less important than IQ.
Shameless self-promotion: my biweekly COVID update here. Things are looking pretty good right now in the US. If past patterns hold we should expect another wavelet late summer.
I could use a bit of advice from some statisticians or maybe data scientists.
This summer I will have a summer internship working with scientists doing research on air pollution and cardiovascular health. This will involve downloading all sorts of data sets from various goverment databases, and looking for patterns in them. What sorts of tools should I be using to make discovery easy?
Off hand, I would probably work with Google Sheets for small data sets, write custom code in Python if I needed to do any serious data cleaning, and load the data into something like a local Postgres server if I needed to do heavier querying in SQL. Any other tooling I should be considering?
Data scientist here. Use Python with Jupyter notebooks. No need to upload anything to Postgres, you can do all your manipulation right in a Pandas Data Frame. This will keep things more easily repeatable without worrying about the state of a database.
I recommend using VSCode with the GitHub Copilot extension. You can just tell it what analysis you want (or what models built) and it will just do it like magic. It's easily a 10x productivity multiplier if you aren't already a power user.
I'm not a data scientist, but I have worked adjacent to them at times. The single best piece of advice is: just look at the data. If it's small, just look at all the data. If it's big, write something custom to look at as much data as possible. The value that you deliver is unlikely to be knowing and trying some obscure summary method that makes everything clear, the value is in building an intuitive understanding of the data and then leveraging it for insights. Embrace the tedium. Here are other people giving similar advice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltLUadnCyi0https://www.mayo.edu/research/documents/always-look-at-the-data/doc-20408953
This columbia university business is fascinating. It seems that many of these Jews have been supporting the ADL strategy, and were desperately hoping that people wouldn't notice that 'one of these victim groups is not like the other'.
It's like something our of folklore. Jewish intellectuals being attacked by a golem of their own making.
To give a serious reply this time, and make my position clear.
If a Jewish intellectual hates white people, I want to see him treated exactly the same as a Nazi, or as an intellectual who hates black people. If he hates me because I'm white, I don't want to hate him back because he's Jewish, I want to hate him back because he's racist.
I don't want to be racist back at him. I don't want to see his relatives punished because they're Jewish, I want to see him alone punished because he's a bigoted piece of shit.
What...in the name of God...is so radical and unusual about this position? Racism is wrong. Meaning: there are *absolutely no imaginable circumstances on the face of the earth, ever* in which it is acceptable to treat someone differently because of their race. Ever. Woke professors, Jim Crow racists, BLM activists, and neo-Nazis are in the exact same category (obviously varying by how much damage they actually do, but the ideologies are identical). I don't know how to express this clearer: someone who thinks there are any circumstances in which race may be taken into account, who thinks people don't have an utterly inalienable right to be treated as an individual where their racial background is literally 100% irrelevant to any aspect of life ever, are an enemy of everything I thought a free society stands for.
It's valid to point out the poetic justice of a person (be they Jewish, black, whatever) who pushes anti-white woke racism (i.e. saying whites have collective guilt, or are not allowed to speak about some subject etc) then facing racist collective punishment of their own, as some Jewish wokists are now doing. Those individual people deserve every bit of that. The other innocent members of their race who were *not* doing that (e.g. Jews who *aren't* woke professors), do not deserve it in the slightest!
I feel like this position was the unquestioned orthodoxy of western civilisation up until a little over ten years ago. And now it's been abandoned by practically everyone, and I feel like I'm highly unusual for still holding to it.
>What...in the name of God...is so radical and unusual about this position? Racism is wrong. Meaning: there are *absolutely no imaginable circumstances on the face of the earth, ever* in which it is acceptable to treat someone differently because of their race. Ever.
>. I don't know how to express this clearer: someone who thinks there are any circumstances in which race may be taken into account, who thinks people don't have an utterly inalienable right to be treated as an individual
It's unusual...because it's unusual. Almost nobody of any race seriously believes in this.
Is it wrong for women to treat men differently than other women?
Do they have to be actually abused or attacked by a man before they are scared of him or exclude him from 'women's spaces'?
Well, guess what? The male/female violent crime ratio is about the same as the black/white crime ratio. OH, and black people empirically hate white people on average, and the black on white murder rate is higher per capita than the white on white murder rate.
So which is it?
Do women have an obligation to treat men as individuals? Or do you bizarrely think your logic only applies to race for some reason?
And why stop there? Why do correlations and statistical patterns only have to be ignored when it comes to race?
Companies want to hire people with college degrees because they're more likely to be intelligent. But that's just a correlation! There are plenty of INDIVIDUALS without college degrees who are much smarter than people with college degrees, so by not hiring the job candidate without the college degree you're not treating him as an individual and are instead judging him by a category that only has predictive value at a population level. See how fun this is?
>I feel like this position was the unquestioned orthodoxy of western civilisation up until a little over ten years ago.
What? Most of western history is Europeans recognizing themselves are distinct from other peoples and the thought of treating other peoples equally was absurd to the point of not rising to the level of consideration. Segregation existed less than a century ago.
And we still had affirmative action ten years ago so I have LITERALLY no idea when this 'we don't care about race' nonsense was ever supposed to have existed.
>And now it's been abandoned by practically everyone, and I feel like I'm highly unusual for still holding to it.
"I don't know how to express this clearer: someone who thinks there are any circumstances in which race may be taken into account, who thinks people don't have an utterly inalienable right to be treated as an individual where their racial background is literally 100% irrelevant to any aspect of life ever, are an enemy of everything I thought a free society stands for."
I think your moral position is roughly correct in some abstract Platonic ideal sense but I think the likely empirical premises you believe are radically wrong just because ~everybody's racist under that definition.
So I view your stated position as ~insane, and antithetical to any real progress in reducing racism nowadays. If someone actually takes this view consistently (I suspect you don't), it's about as practical as an American abolitionist in 1780 declaring war on anybody who has ever bought a slavery-produced good.
Your moral outrage feels childish to me. Maybe consistently opposing all incidences of racism under your definition, no matter how mild or what the context is, will be a reasonable view in 2074. But I think if you actually believe this position consistently in 2024 (again, I suspect you don't) I think you'd rapidly find yourself shunning friends, employers, and family members.
The last time somebody in an ACX open thread brought up racism not being a thing among conservatives "for over 50 years", I pointed out that a) >50% of American whites disapproved of white-black intermarriage until the 1990s, and b) conversations between Reagan and Nixon sure didn't seem exactly race-blind (https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/educational-resources/reagan-nixon-and-race). Then multiple people got mad at me and pointed out irrelevant non-sequitors about Democrats being more racist. lol.
Let me put it another way: both Lincoln and Churchill, widely considered AngloAmerican heroes, are unambiguously willing to treat people differently due to the color of their skin. Churchill even was unusually racist for his time! I don't think your support for antiracism is enough for you to believe Churchill is "an enemy of everything I thought a free society stands for." People are complicated, and I find the positions that round off to "any single incidence of racism is enough to make someone an outcast in polite society, much the same way literal (trad) Nazis and KKK members are" rather childish, from both the left and the right. See also Avenue Q (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=th4FMmNQpAk)
From a personal view, as a nonwhite person who lived in noncosmopolitan parts of America for most of my life, it's patently obvious that traditional racism (people displaying "prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism by an individual, community, or institution against a person or people on the basis of their membership in a particular racial or ethnic group" towards ethnic minorities in the US) is still prevalent. Sometimes it was even directed at me! I've also observed antiwhite racism (e.g. I've met women who wouldn't date white people, or Asians who automatically assume white Americans are diversity hires). In each of these incidences, I've treated the racism as just one fact of many about the person, and not by itself a disqualifying factor unless it gets extreme.*
I also want to be clear that:
a) By racist, I don’t mean the negation is a very difficult target to hit or metaphysically impossible (“it’s impossible to be antiracist in a white supremacist society”). I mean something very simple. AFAICT I personally have zero, or approximately zero, prejudice against lefthanded people. I think this is common in modern Western society. I do not believe, as an empirical claim, that the vast majority of people alive today consistently hit the same level of ~zero prejudice as applied to race.
b) For simplicity, I’m just using the first definition of racism you’d find in a dictionary “prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism by an individual, community, or institution against a person or people on the basis of their membership in a particular racial or ethnic group, typically one that is a minority or marginalized.” I’m not talking about systemic/structural racism or belief in group differences. Whether those things should or should not be defined as “racist” is more of a definitional dispute, and I’m more interested in advancing empirical claims.
*I suspect this is what other people also do in practice when they say they have a "no tolerance" policy for racists; they just round off more mild incidents to zero.
>Let me put it another way: both Lincoln and Churchill, widely considered AngloAmerican heroes, are unambiguously willing to treat people differently due to the color of their skin.
Race is NOT skin color. There's absolutely no reason to think they would have been any more fond of albino africans than regular africans.
Similarly, many south asians have similar skin tone to many african americans - but these groups obviously have very different places in American society.
This isn't nit-picking BS. It's a really important point - by saying 'skin color', you're making it seem like it's blind, irrational hatred based on appearance. But races differ enormously in their behavior, and that's ultimately the source of "racism". Things like skin color (or really, appearance generally) are mostly just indications of a person's race and not the defining characteristic of it.
If African americans had pale skin but behaved identically as they do today, I can promise you that views of black people amongst whites would not be meaningfully different.
Yes it may seem a bit extreme to hold to such an absolute view. But the thing is, it's been proven an indescribable number of times that people simply can't be trusted not to exploit the tiniest exception to an unimaginable extent. If you allow an exception to free speech to ban Nazism, people will use it to ban misgendering. If you acknowledge that "vote for Obama because he's got a unique minority lived experience" is a valid thing to say, people will take that as you telling them that holding up protest signs with "Kill All Whites" is a valid thing to do. You can't make this up.
I don't know if these people honestly can't see a difference between Nazism and misgendering, or between "first black president" and "kill all whites", or of they just pretend they can't for cynical reasons. Either way, it makes you lose all faith in humanity. And they leave us with the only option of an extreme rule with zero exceptions.
Also, I don't think I need to say that Lincoln and Churchill were enemies of a free society. They didn't support free speech either. But in the climate they were in, absolute free speech and colour-blind individualism were not yet reasonably established principles. A relatively free society that has not worked out all the contradictions within it is very different from a truly free society where a large faction wants to eliminate that freedom.
"They didn't support free speech either. But in the climate they were in, absolute free speech and colour-blind individualism were not yet reasonably established principles."
Then why did you claim that "western civilization" was color blind until 10 years ago?
Look, I momentarily forgot about affirmative action. With that caveat, normal people and cultural discourse was color blind enough SINCE the 60s or whatever, UNTIL the Obama-era Great Awokening.
While I have a few quibbles with the details of what ascend said, and I think you covered them, I wholeheartedly agree with the spirit. This is aspirational, this is a shining ideal, this is what we should try to build from the crooked timber of humanity, even if perfection is impossible in this fallen world.
There's got to be room for articulating an ideal, even if no implementation has ever been perfect. Every other part of the political spectrum seems to do it; what's so wrong with classical liberalism having a go? Are we being collectively nerd-sniped, with "what about this implementation detail", "no one's ever done this before", "what about all the problems in the past", and so forth? I know I'm echoing criticism of totalitarian communism here, but I think the track records speak for themselves.
This is the kind of thing that goes up next to parts of the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
You can argue with that in a lot of ways: that the language is sexist, that it embeds religion, that it conceals racism. But I think those words are going to continue to be inspirational long after we're all dead and rotted.
So black people have a high rate of violent crime against white people (the black on white homicide rate per capita is literally higher than the white on white homicide rate). Accordingly to survey data, black people essentially hate white people on average.
Why should I treat all black people as individuals? Why should I have to wait to be abused or attacked before I have suspicion of/aversion to black people?
Why does this logic magically stop applying when it comes to how women treat men? Women are allowed to be extremely suspicious of any man she doesn't know, which is the opposite of treating people as individuals.
I assume you've heard enough of the idealism by this point, so I'll skip that because I probably can't do a better job than whatever else you've heard.
Pragmatically, I'd say that the answer isn't to treat all members of the group equally badly, or to ignore group membership entirely. Group membership is a just a proxy for the information we really want to know, and there are better signals for that information. And at the point at which we lay eyes on anyone, we've already got better signals.
Let's imagine the most stereotypical black thug possible. Then a white thug who dresses and speaks and acts exactly the same. And then a black man who's dressed in a suit and tie and wears glasses and talks and acts like a college professor. I'm going to be very careful around the first two of those, and probably not concerned for my physical safety at all around the third. For example, take these guys:
Would you actually feel them to be more dangerous than white guys who otherwise look and talk like them?
I do agree that if race or sex is literally all we have to go on, if it's just entries in a spreadsheet, then none of the other signals apply. But even then we should try to keep in mind the overlapping bell curves, and not collapse them into two distinct vertical lines.
> Why does this logic magically stop applying when it comes to how women treat men?
Frankly, I don't think it does. There's a variant of sexism that treats women as helpless, powerless, and eternally fearful, and this plays right into it. It's especially nasty when internalized and combined with actual power, because the doublethink required to wield power without accepting responsibility leads to some sociopathic and narcissistic behavior.
> Women are allowed to be extremely suspicious of any man she doesn't know, which is the opposite of treating people as individuals.
I'm curious: do you think this sort of behavior in women is, on some level, wrong? I'll just say up front that, if you don't, I can't fault your consistency, but I will think that you've bricked yourself into a cold and inhumane world-view, and I'll hope that you'll break out one day.
In the United States, at least, I don't think your position has ever been unquestioned orthodoxy. Certainly not during the eras of slavery or Jim Crow. Ever since the Civil Rights movement in the 1950’s/1960’s there have arguments about how to achieve de facto (as opposed to merely de jure) racial equality. Affirmative action dates back to 1961. In 1971, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of busing to increase integration of public schools. Policies that take race into consideration have been seriously proposed, and indeed actually enacted, throughout U.S. history.
First of all, the US is far to the left of most western countries in the extent of its race-conscious progressivism and use of affirmative action. So "orthodoxy of western civilisation" perhaps allows for the existence of one major outlier.
Second, and more importantly, affirmative action can in some narrow contexts be *in theory* implememted without treating races differently. If you have hard evidence that there is racial discrimination at various levels of the hiring process that is hard to pinpoint, then you can use affirmative action at the end point to the exact extent necessary to counteract it. In that case, you're not favouring or disfavouring any particular race, you're applying the same of rule to everyone of "if you can prove you were probably discriminated against based on characteristic X, we'll reverse-discriminate on that characteristic to restore meritocracy".
Of course this is very technical rules-lawyering, and most of the time that's not how it works at all, so my statement was obviously too strong. But I still think there's an *enormous* difference between localised algorithms that consider race in a narrow numerical-balance context, and society-wide ideologies of collective guilt, and the latter is mostly what I was talking about.
Yes, and furthermore I think the 2003 Supreme Court decision said that the general intention was that affirmative action would only be necessary for another 25 years. The Court itself seems to be sticking to that plan, but academia and the Democrats have decided that, as equality has increased and blacks have reached the highest offices, for some reason much stronger affirmative action is now needed than ever before.
It just shows how dishonest the justifications are. If the left actually believed their own justifications, they would be more militant when they're out of power and when society is more racist, and less militant when they're in power and society is more woke, instead of the *exact opposite*!
I'm commenting on something that is happening right now, AS WE SPEAK, and has longer term implications around zionism and anti-white ideology. As I said, jews are reaping what they have sown, so perhaps we can hope they'll stop with all the sowing?
And I have a problem with jewish intellectuals hating white people, which is something that people around here are scarcely willing to admit is even a thing, let alone condemn. People get angrier at people like me suggesting this hatred exists than they ever would when confronted with an example of said hatred.
And buddy, it's YOUR friends who are doing the IRL jew hatred as we speak, so it's extremely rich of you to sit there and pretend like I'm the bad guy here. I'm commenting on a cultural phenomenon, anti-zionists like you are the ones physically endangering people.
And it's also extremely rich of you to complain that someone is being repetitive since most of your time on this site has apparently been posting about literally one topic - ISRAEL. You must have posted hundreds of comments on this blog about how much you hate israel, but apparently you alone have the right to dwell on one topic.
Commenting on something that is happening now is not an excuse to be repetitive and/or boring, and insofar as I **was** repetitive and boring in the early days of the October 7th and till November, this is a character flaw of mine that you should look at to learn from and not emulate.
(and me being repetitive and boring is a tad more justified when the topic I'm being boring about is people dying, and when I was a little more varied in my phrasing and choice of topics than you.)
> I have a problem with Jewish intellectuals hating white people
Me too, except I don't care who's doing the hating and who's being hated. I also hate it when Arab intellectuals paint all Israelis with one brush as colonists, and when Chinese and/or Russian intellectuals paint the whole Western world with one brush as dirty capitalists/imperialists/whateverists.
From The Meditations, by Marcus Aurilias [1]:
>>> and [I] have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own - not of the same blood and birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower.
I can't claim that I follow dear old Marcus in all my life, I ******do******* get angry, a lot. But I never lost sight of the fact that all those I get angry at are my brothers and sisters, my very badly-raised and bad-behaving brothers and sisters, but my brothers and sisters nonetheless. All humans are a single program that was run multiple times.
By the way, you're doing something very similar to those misguided Jewish intellectuals yourself, when you say that "Jews" are reaping what they are sowing. Who sowed Wokism and similar ideologies? "Jews"? Not anymore than "Asians", or "Blacks". Why is it fair for a baker Jew to pay the price of what a misguided X Studies Jewish professor said some 15 years or 10 years ago? Hell, White women are notoriously among the top woke demographics, do they deserve it when anti-White racism catches up with them?
In other words, your posts could be adapted into a book, "Jewish Guilt", or maybe "Jewish Fragility". You and wokies, not so different.
I thought that the whole idea behind principled Free-Speech liberal anti-wokism is that this way of treating people is bad no matter what race they are, Colonization was immoral but rejecting qualified white males in an interview because they're not performatively acknowledging the long-completed genocide against Native people is bizarre, unfair, absurd, and unproductive. Just like most of your posts.
> it's YOUR friends who are doing the IRL jew hatred as we speak
No, they're not. And if some of them happened to be, that won't be for long.
> anti-zionists like you are the ones physically endangering people
Anti-Zionist might have been a description that I would accept as a self-identifier about a year or even half a year ago, but not anymore.
My position on Zionism is - for lack of a better term - "Anti-Historical-Zionism". That is, I think Zionism is racist, not a legitimate nationalist movement (and nationalism - legitimate or not - is itself a 19th century European cringe atrocity-magnet that humanity should evolve out of), and if I have a time machine I would make sure with all my power that Zionists remain the fringe Christian-influenced secular Jewish minority that they were till the early 1930s, an agenda which will probably involve some sub-agendas like the minor tasks of preventing Russian and Soviet pogroms and preventing the Holocaust.
Now that Zionism have won 75 years ago, and there are 7 million people who owe their existence as they know it to this racist and illegitimate pseudo-colonial ideology, it makes no sense to be "Anti-Zionist", Zionism is no more, it has won, and I wasn't born in time to prevent or delay it. In its place there is now Israel. Aside from crimes against Palestinians, Israel is not particularly bad as far as states go, and the position against it but not other states is incoherent. The position against it and all other states is coherent and is called Anarchism, but it's not known how to achieve it in general. The position against its ruling Right-Wing religious fascists is perfectly coherent and perfectly practical, it's called being a human being.
I'm against using the term "Zionist" except when prefixed by "Neo-" or "Religious-" to denote the modern pro-settlement scum like Ben Gvir and his ilk, and those are accepted terms in Israel if Haaretz columnists are any indication. See my recent very long advice to Glenn in the previous Open Thread for evidence that I dislike the term "Zionist" and am very suspicious of it.
Stupid tangential question. As I write this, Hammond posted something six hours ago, and then there is a reply by (I think) ascend that is one hour old, and you appear to be responding to that, but your response is three hours old. So did ascend go back and edit his post, or is everything I wrote wrong?
Maybe it's a Substack bug on your end, it's not the weirdest or most bizarre I have heard of.
But as I write this comment on my machine, both my reply from 3 hours ago and ascend's reply from 1 hour are on the same hierarchical level, they are both 2 indented lines to the right, which means they are both responding to the bait thread-starter.
I'm certainly not responding to ascend with the comment you're replying to.
Maybe a clearer way to view Hammond is, if a given group of people was not visible on magazine covers in local barbershops circa 1955 he hates that they now are.
If it wasn't for the Jews, nobody would care about gays, blacks, women, refugees, etc. Jews invented the idea of caring about the well-being of other human beings.
If the Jews are so powerful you should go convert.
> Jews invented the idea of caring about the well-being of other human beings
No they didn't, and there are so many counterexamples that I'm not going to bother listing them.
One of the things I hate about the whiny and clownish posts like the one you're responding to is that it invites clownish responses in the opposite direction like yours.
In a venue with a wide range of views, and a text-only medium with no way to convey body language and just barely able to convey any tone (_italics_ and ALL CAPS being about all), sarcasm is often ambiguous, unfortunately.
Again with the (((Jews))), eh? Remind me what makes the (((Jews))) so (((evil)))? Is it that (((they))) control the (((banks))) and the (((movie industry))) and the (((Zionist state)))? What shall be done with (((them)))?
Don't you get a headache trying to think, when every second word has (((scary brackets))) around it in your mind?
These are LITERALLY jews at an elite academic institution. The jews at columbia are precisely the type of jews who publish books and papers about how much they hate white people. These are the people who have largely created the woke ideology that is currently at their throats.
These people get promotions by talking about how evil white men are, whereas having a problem with this too publicly can destroy your career. And yet, of course, you would only EVER get angry at the people having a problem with it and never the hateful jewish intellectuals themselves.
"And yet, of course, you would only EVER get angry at the people having a problem with it and never the hateful jewish intellectuals themselves."
What??? Did you read my other response (that you also replied to!) where I expressed my very strong anger at those Jewish intellectuals, and how (((they))) deserve all the WokeHate they get. I simply deny that other Jews, who are *not* doing those things, who are *not* publishing "whites be evil" books, should be hated for no other reason than also being Jews.
The protests that have everyone het up are at columbia university. They aren't going door to door looking for jews, they're basically doing this around the most anti-white jews in the country. Like, it's probably harder to find a more concentrated group of anti-white jews in any major US institution than at columbia university. The protesters of course aren't doing that on purpose - they likely hate white people even more than the average jew at columbia, but this fact combined with the influence of jewish intellectuals on modern leftist thought it what makes this whole thing so poetic.
Of course, this takes the claims of 'anti-semitism' at face value - most of what is happening is simply the protesters being anti-israel and jewish zionists mendaciously portraying this as jew hatred.
There is a distinct ethnic identity known as 'Jews'. I see no reason to surround that word with scary brackets, boo-lights, or strong instructions not to notice their distinctiveness.
This group has remained a distinct minority in larger cultures for approximately two millennia, and has culture legends of surviving as a deported-from-homeland minority from even further back.
Some collections of Jews have generated disproportionately-large numbers of intellectuals. Some collections of Jews in modern-American culture are distinctive leaders of socially-liberal movements.
Now, a large number of Progressive and Liberal people are forming protests in favor of the Palestinians over the Israelis, in the latest round of trouble*. These protests vary from people proclaiming support of Palestine to people shouting slogans like "Death to Israel", "Death to America", "We need repeats of October 7". There are even stories of violence against random Jewish people, independent of whether those people are citizens of Israel or supportive of the current behavior of the nation of Israel.
Some of these slogans are simple statements of political preference. Other of the slogans feel like hate-speech to me.
I can't tell if this is ironic, but it is definitely strange. It is also unexpected, given that these protests often show up in Universities. Especially Universities that recently began discussing things like removing the word 'Field' from academic reports, because at one point American slaves worked in fields. Or that put restrictions on speech of non-minority students, using the argument that hurtful words directed at a minority could be a precursor to violence... even if the speaker didn't know that the word in question could be considered hurtful.
I don't consider this a question of whether Jewish people have created something that is a now a problem for them.
I consider this a question of whether the efforts to reduce hurtful words in order to protect minorities has been forgotten or deprecated... or whether some minorities are now considered non-protected minorities.
[*] My opinion of this round of trouble between Hamas and Israel: the leaders of Hamas fomented breaking of a ceasefire, and allowed or encouraged actions that would be considered heinous war crimes if any member of an official uniformed army did them. I am in favor of Hamas initiating a ceasefire, and I am in favor of leadership, members, and supporters of Hamas being subjected to an internationally-adjudicated War Crimes tribunal.
Somehow, most commentary about this sequence of events finds fault in Israel, and in the actions of the Jews. Which seems, in my mind, to assert that the Jews are evil super-villains who somehow remove moral agency from the people of Gaza and the members of Hamas.
Which loops back to the thing you mention: who is it who puts mental scary-brackets around the word "Jews" ?
The problem with using irony is that it gets very quickly confusing who's actually arguing for what.
To be clear, my above post was ironically doing something I used to see from the alt-right in the early Trump years, putting triple brackets around Jewish names for...some wacky and incomprehensible reason. I haven't seen it for a while; I don't know if it's still done on the likes of 4chan. And I don't know where this obsessive demonisation of "the Jews" even comes from.
The very first trap that you need to not fall into in the issue of Israel and antisemitism is the propaganda tactic of treating Israel as a personalization of Jews, which will make you do silly things like defending murder of humanitarian workers and people who literally burn children alive because otherwise something something antisemitism.
Once you don't fall into this trap, it's astounding how much clarity and compression you can achieve of the whole situation.
Of course I'm enjoying the show - people who hate me for my race are having a bad time. Why SHOULDN'T I enjoy this, especially when it's a product of their hatred in the first place!
But of course, you're simply doing the same thing as these jews - conflating any and all opposition of jewish ethnonationalism with "anti-semitic hate marches". How lucky for jews that they get to support violent ethnonationalism when white people don't.
I have had this thought on my mind for a while now- how to get around the over-specialization and narrowing of every field of study. I really think that it is the bottleneck for nearly every real and pertinent problem in the world right now, without exaggeration. A lot of people, especially in academia, seem to be aware of this problem but I haven’t seen any convincing ideas for solutions yet. Am I just unaware of relevant things happening in this direction or should I make more of an effort to focus on this in the future?
I want to come up with a detailed and independent framework and methodology that works parallel to all the hyper-specialized subjects we have now. It would focus entirely on synthesizing all the discrete fields for more focused problem solving. A person trained in this should be able to take one real and specific problem, like say widespread hormone disruption, and address it from every available angle- the various biochemical aspects of it, the social and psychological causes and effects, the environmental factors involved- bring in any relevant specialists where needed, but then be able to propose real and practical solutions to it that are effective without causing catastrophic disruptions long term(since the approach is to examine the problem from every available perspective, this should minimize the issues that come from the various interrelated systems that are usually studied separately). I think that this is more of a matter of change in perception of the phenomenon than a change in abilities to address it, but it will make every field of study we have right now that much more effective. Does this sound feasible? Does it already exist in some form and I just don’t know yet? Is there some other way of getting around the problems caused by hyper-specialization?
I suspect that a big problem of specialization is that specialists mostly optimize to impress other specialists in the same field, because outsiders are not relevant for their career progress. Perhaps that is an efficient way to discover new things, but we also need to put some effort into communicating them outside the bubble.
I would like to see every specialization also produce educational materials for outsiders. Not necessarily "explain like I'm five" as that is often not possible, but at least "explain like I'm in the same larger field, but not in your specific specialization", and of course make it as short and simple as possible. Ideally, producing such materials should be a full-time job for someone, otherwise people will ignore it and focus on things relevant for their careers instead.
Because sometimes things are complicated intrinsically, but sometimes it's just their explanations that are complicated because they use too much jargon or obsess too much over details.
Yes! This is exactly the direction I started from. But see, the issue is that there is no good impetus to explore the specialized subjects in non-specialized ways. It just makes people in your field question your credentials. And subjects like interdisciplinary studies have the exact same basic framework as other subjects of study and basically end up just as specialized, only in their own unique direction. The only compelling reason to break out of hyper-specialization is to introduce a clear purpose of solving complicated problems. That is, as far as I can tell, the only way out.
If you think that’s ironic then you didn’t understand the problem I am pointing out here.
Over specialization is not some evil I am trying to stamp out- it is actually quite useful if you know how to synthesize it. And to find a way to synthesize it is going to require focused effort. Are you suggesting I should just screw up my eyes at it and pretend things are defocused and therefore all better now instead? What a waste of everyone’s time.
Institutions like the Kennedy School of Government bring together people trained in various disciplines. They have over a dozen “centers” dedicated to addressing various issues. A bit of research might tell you how close what they do is what you are suggesting, and how well it works in practice.
" I think I can sum up what I’ve learned like this: The Big Five publishing houses spend most of their money on book advances for big celebrities like Brittany Spears and franchise authors like James Patterson and this is the bulk of their business. They also sell a lot of Bibles, repeat best sellers like Lord of the Rings, and children’s books like The Very Hungry Caterpillar. These two market categories (celebrity books and repeat bestsellers from the backlist) make up the entirety of the publishing industry and even fund their vanity project: publishing all the rest of the books we think about when we think about book publishing (which make no money at all and typically sell less than 1,000 copies)."
In 2019, 20% of the movies released generated 98% of box office revenues. (Or, to put it another way, 80% of the movies released got to fight over 2% of the money.) All by its lonesome, "Avengers: Endgame" generated 7.5% of all box office revenues that year, and even in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, when the industry was not consumed by a single all-devouring cinematic universe, the number one film in any given year (out of several hundred releases) would account for between 3% and 7% of the total box office.
I was vaguely aware of similar issues with the Political Memoir of the Year (or the Ghost-Written Presidential Memoir).
The Publishing house will write a check on the order of several million dollars to be able to publish a Political Memoir with a well-known face on the cover. I would have guessed that such books would sell somewhere between 5000 and 10,000 copies. I would also guess that such books are mostly purchased by or for people in the News/Opinion business, so that they can discuss the Big New Memoir.
Perhaps the books by big celebrities (Taylor Swift?) would be in that category also.
I should have known, but wouldn't have guessed, that Bibles are among the perennial best-sellers. Maybe I should start asking people what they read, and whether they've ever heard of those three young men who were thrown in the fiery furnace?
My parents gave me Obama's first two books as a gift, back when he only had the two. I think they may have given them to all their children, and maybe relatives too. My copies are still sitting in a pile of unread books that can almost be measured in yards, rather than feet, but I might get to them one day.
And all my relatives have piles of books like that, it seems - books that are talked up on TV and radio and newspapers and magazines, books that are... aspirational, to use an old word. Books that signal something about your identity, and what you hope is the identity of the person you give them to. If you see a copy of them on someone's shelf, it's like seeing a bit of Yankees memorabilia, or the UT longhorn logo on a mug. Or a sign with rainbow lettering in a lawn.
Yes, this is why the Christmas stacks of gardening books, cookery books, and celebrity memoirs - that's what makes the money. Add in things like repeat bestsellers such as crime series and horror, and why every publisher is hoping to strike that one best-selling author who will be a popular hit and reliable seller for decades. Hence why long-running series such as the Robert B. Parker various series are continued on with other writers after the original author's death; they are reliable workhorses that generate steady, ongoing, long-term income.
The prestige, award-winning literary tomes may be the ones that give the particular publishing house the gloss and repute and publicity (Booker Winner X published by Y!), but they're by no means the bread-and-butter of the industry. It's why J.K. Rowling has not been dropped by her publishers despite all the controversy, her books simply sell too well. Despite this Variety article from 2020, trying to prognosticate that she was losing sales due to her transphobia, the Harry Potter books are still selling like hotcakes and her adult crime novels got a BBC series which is now shooting its sixth season.
And it is the money made from the popular sales that does fund the 'slim volume of verse' and "thirty years between first and second novel" literary works, so the high-brows shouldn't sneer too hard at the trashy genre stuff 😀
To quote a Tolkien letter from 1972:
"15 July. I spent yesterday at Hemel Hempstead. A car was sent for me & I went to the great new (grey and white) offices and book-stores of Allen & Unwin. To this I paid a kind of official visitation, like a minor royalty, and was somewhat startled to discover the main business of all this organization of many departments (from Accountancy to Despatch) was dealing with my works. I was given a great welcome (& v.g. lunch) and interviewed them all from board-room downwards. 'Accountancy' told me that the sales of The Hobbit were now rocketing up to hitherto unreached heights. Also a large single order for copies of The L.R. had just come in. When I did not show quite the gratified surprise expected I was gently told that a single order of 100 copies used to be pleasing (and still is for other books), but this one for The L.R. was for 6,000."
Great quote. GRRM's relaxed tempo always struck me as a failure of imagination at the publishing house. They should have sent an army of ghostwriters to keep him continually supplied with draft pages, fully to his specifications to revise or critique like a director. With apologies to Getty, if some author sells a hundred copies and procrastinates, that's the author's problem. If they sell a million copies and procrastinate, that's the house's problem.
I think with Martin, if he never finishes the series, then the publishers will do the same as with Robert Jordan - take any notes and plotlines left behind, find a decent second-tier fantasy writer who's happy to take on the gig, and get him to finish it off. Fans may not be happy, but they'll buy the book(s) anyway just to have a conclusion.
To be fair, that's pretty much what Christopher Tolkien did with Guy Gavriel Kay and the Silmarillion, though that was more to honour his father's wish to get the work published and not for money.
"Second tier" may be rather dismissive, what I meant was "good enough to be considered suitable but not such a big name yet that it would be insulting to ask them to be a ghostwriter".
Though I don't like Sanderson's writing, nothing to do with the man personally, I just find his prose very flat and pedestrian, and the big selling point seems to be his meticulously worked-out magic system, which does not sell it to me since I have no interest in baseball statistics or dice-rolling to find the exact number of pips on the die to add up with the bonuses and penalties to work out to the square inch and kilojoule how hot the fireball is, how large it is, and to the edge of which blade of grass would be scorched.
Yeah, I like Sanderson, but he's B-tier. He's a workhorse. And he's good at it! He turns out stuff that sells at a good clip and it pays the bills. But he's not particularly artistic and his prose just gets the job done. He's a working author, like a working actor. There's nothing wrong with that, but he's not writing for the ages.
Christopher Tolkien was J.R.R.'s heir, and so was the owner of all that intellectual property (minus I think a couple of movie options that had already been sold).
With the caveat that I haven't actually read GRRM's will, nor his contract with Bantam Spectra, I'm pretty sure that Bantam is *not* Martin's heir, and does not own anything beyond the publication rights to the works he's already written. If his will says "no lesser writer may touch my works", or if his heir (presumably his wife) makes that decision, then nobody will be finishing the Song of Ice and Fire any time soon.
No, they're not his heirs, but wave enough money around and it happens. Did anybody think we *needed* a sequel to "Gone With The Wind" or the likes? But some publisher thought that was a good idea. I think there could be enough pressure from fans, and enough "don't you want his legacy to be lasting?" on whoever does get the rights, to sell the idea of finishing the series off.
He may well write it in to any will that nobody is to try completing any unfinished works. That's fine, some fan will just do fiction of it anyway, in the same way as we got the Russian "Sauron was right and the flea-infested Numenoreans were just standing in the way of Progress and Science and Technology" 😀
It is not actually the case that everyone has a price, and it is certainly not the case that everyone has a price that can be afforded by a publishing house's fantasy imprint. I expect that Martin's literary heir will also be his financial heir to the extent that they won't need any more money to live a comfortable life by their own standards, and it is only possible rather than inevitable that they would place "I can be rich!" over "I can be faithful to the legacy of my beloved husband/uncle/whatever".
"trying to prognosticate that she was losing sales due to her transphobia"
I don't know if you're saying this yourself, or if you're quoting the Variety article, but I just want to point out that this is literally equivalent to saying Biden is losing votes because of his communism.
Tenk oo for me not word gooder, plz say wot dis mean:
"But then in June, Rowling’s sales straggled, while the rest of the industry surged forward. Had the “Harry Potter” titles risen at the same rate as the overall juvenile sector in June, they could have earned as much as $2 million more in total sales, according to NPD BookScan data. Similarly, had Rowling’s sales followed the overall fiction market, her books could’ve earned upwards of $1.7 million more in total sales.
McLean declined to speculate on why, citing a lack of consumer research. But it’s hard to ignore that, since the first week of June, Rowling has incurred widespread criticism after she began repeatedly expressing contentious views on transgender identity."
Me not readering enough well to kno wot dis say, r it meaning 'Rowling losing sales due to being transphobe, or so we think'? Maybe me rong! Tell better wot say here?
I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic because you thought I was being insulting, but I wasn't meaning to be. I was just trying to say "please don't use the Orwellian language of the left".
As for what to say, can't you just say "allegedly transphobic" or simply put "transphobic" in quotation marks? If you simply say it unadorned, it looks like you're endorsing that description.
"I don't know if you're saying this yourself, or if you're quoting the Variety article, but I just want to point out that this is literally equivalent to saying Biden is losing votes because of his communism.
Words. They mean things."
Okay dropping the heavy-handed sarcasm: yes indeed I was quoting the Variety article. Why not put it in scare quotes? Because I'm quoting what they're saying, and they're making a direct equivalence.
If I'm talking about my own opinion, I will indeed say "alleged" or the likes. But you should certainly know by now that I'm not endorsing any descriptions, and I'm not inclined to shift my writing style simply because someone comes along in a lordly manner to tell me not alone what I mean, but how I should mean it.
But den me only pore ignerant not kno words meen thingz, rite?
I don't presume to tell you *what* you mean. Perhaps I presume to have an opinion on, given that you *do* mean X, how you should ideally and accurately phrase X. Is that "lordly"?
But I think we may have disagreed on this before. I see using the language of the enemy as effectively giving in to them, especially when *that's exactly why they're trying to make you use it*. You see it differently, as a matter of perhaps mere courtesy.
To post this, either she is a transphobe or severely mentally retarded. Even a stupid person can probably guesstimate that the Nazis were not fans of trans people, though, so I'm leaning towards an extreme hatred of trans people.
"How did you type this out and press send without thinking ‘I should maybe check my source for this" part is delightfully ironic.
That said, being wrong on Twitter does not one a transphobe or severely mentally retarded. I actually suspect that "typing and pressing send without thinking" might be a norm there.
Someone assuming that books on trans healthcare did not exist in 1930s seems... not completely crazy to me. I suspect that over 99% people probably couldn't name one such book, and making the conclusion "I've never heard about anything like this, therefore it does not exist" is wrong and stupid... but also kinda natural.
Did you... read this subthread yourself and think a bit before pressing send? It quite literally appears to be true that books on trans healthcare really did not exist in the 1930s.
I mean, sure, I went to the wikipedia article, the source of this specific claim seems to be a random article from attitude.co.uk, which claims to be the world's biggest "gay brand" which, yeah, they probably know more than me about what was going on at some random German sexology institute in 1933 but...are perhaps not the most unbiased source one could point to.
But beyond that...in Twitterland, do people really think that JK Rowling subscribes to Nazi ideology...like actual skinhead Nazi stuff? I mean, I dump on Twitter a lot, like a lot a lot, but...man, I just imagine JK Rowling in a room with a Nazi skinhead and these things do not go together. That's, uh...lower than I expected but that's also, like, explicitly the second half of that tweet and, honestly, probably the part she's referring to.
There's a vocal, hard to say how big they are but not that big in the general scheme of things, set that are very insulted about what she says about trans rights (this is compressing the entire dispute down very much) and they are going crazy over trying to prove she's a villain.
They like to go on about her being a racist, being anti-Semitic (the goblin bankers are coded as Jews!), being pro-slavery (the 'heroes' in the Harry Potter book laugh at efforts to free the house elves!) and now "She's a Nazi!" because she didn't continue to be a good liberal ally when it came to male-bodied individuals in spaces for vulnerable women.
The attacks only had the effect of making her double down and eventually not give a toss and she is plenty happy to give as good as she gets on Twitter and other social media, and of course being "eff you" rich, she's in no danger of being reduced to poverty. Even the attempts to boycott the latest video game came to nothing, and there's going to be a new movie based on a different children's book she wrote, which already is garnering sour grapes; 'who's going to go see this movie, nobody cares'.
But it's not just Twitterland, as you can see by the Variety article for which I was scolded by not putting "alleged transphobia" or "transphobe" in scare quotes; the writer of the piece seems to have started off writing about gay/queer cinema before getting work at major media, so I'm thiking he has a particular angle on the entire controversy. The 2020 piece was "book sales for everyone else are booming *except* for Rowling, why is this, official explanation not forthcoming but it's clear it's down to her being a transphobe":
"But it’s hard to ignore that, since the first week of June, Rowling has incurred widespread criticism after she began repeatedly expressing contentious views on transgender identity.
...The controversy erupted after Rowling posted a series of tweets on June 6 contending that women can only be identified by their biological sex. Over the ensuing six weeks, Rowling has repeatedly revisited the issue of transgender identity, from a lengthy essay Rowling posted to her personal website on June 10 in which she evoked her past history with sexual assault to assert her support for “single-sex spaces.” On July 5, she insisted that prescribing hormones to transgender children is akin to “a new kind of conversion therapy”; two days later, Harper’s published an open letter signed by Rowling and several other literary and media figures condemning public shaming. That letter was widely interpreted to be at least in part in reaction to trans activists aggressively pushing back against anyone who denies transgender identity."
And we have someone on here, Chastity, who is going for the "retarded or transphobe and she's not retarded" angle so the Official Line for certain spaces is clearly firmly in place.
You're using the tactic of guilt by association. Do you know who else used guilt by association? NAZIS. Why are you using a discredited Nazi tactic? I notice you haven't apologized for using a discredited Nazi tactic, so I have to conclude that you're a Nazi. Do you know what we do to Nazis like you, around here? ...
I just don't get this. Assuming she is completely factually wrong here and the nazis did burn books on "trans healthcare" (I have no knowledge of whether this true, but the term is ceratinly absurdly anachronistic, but let's ignore that), then the correct description is "she is mistaken". Or if you insist, "she is lazy, or even lying". Where the hell does "she is hateful" come from?
This is what *I* hate about the way the left uses language. Words are used in ways that have no connection to their actual meanings. If you want a word to mean "uninformed about the history of this group" then coin a new word for that, don't repurpose an existing word with an existing different meaning of "fearful or hateful of this group" and then piggyback on that word's connotations to misleadingly make the starement seem worse than it is.
An additional point: the article cited was from 2020, when I'm pretty sure all JK Rowling had said was that biological sex in some sense exists, and that maybe bathroom laws should take that into account. And she was called hateful and transphobic over and over by ridiculous numbers of people for *that*! Literally for a philosophical disagreement and a policy disagreement. This sort of thing happens *all the time*.
And the thing is, it doesn't even matter if she later says actually transphobic things, because her critics have already lost all credibility with most people, and have robbed the word of all meaning.
A question for you: do you want people to hear "X is transphobic" and think "X is a dangerous bigot who supports violence and discrimination" or to think "X is an ordinary person who disagreed with a single one of the trans movement's 100 policies"?
> I just don't get this. Assuming she is completely factually wrong here and the nazis did burn books on "trans healthcare" (I have no knowledge of whether this true, but the term is ceratinly absurdly anachronistic, but let's ignore that), then the correct description is "she is mistaken". Or if you insist, "she is lazy, or even lying". Where the hell does "she is hateful" come from?
If somebody said, "the Nazis killed a bunch of Roma," and your response is "no they didn't, lmao, read a book," and then continue to hold to that position after it's pointed out that it's factually inaccurate, I will infer from that that you hate Roma. I think we can both agree on this, yes?
Why is JK Rowling repeatedly doubling and tripling down on an obviously factually inaccurate statement? (In fact, the very first Nazi book burnings were of books taken from Magnus Hirschfeld's Institut für Sexualwissenschaft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_book_burnings#The_burnings_start ) What alternative motive do you propose?
>Why is JK Rowling repeatedly doubling and tripling down on an obviously factually inaccurate statement?
Well, it can't possibly be that it's because she's a transphobe; we've been assured by commenters here that to reach such a conclusion would be to use the "Orwellian language of the left." So what does that leave us with? Are we allowed to use the based language of the right and assert that she's a fucking gay retard?
Making factual errors due to bias when trying to fight about political positions is pretty standard (especially on twitter). I think that's a more likely explanation for this over "extreme hatred of trans people" and "severely mentally retarded".
Ah yes, the Holocaust, where twelve million trans people were burned on a pyre of trans science research books, and nobody else at all was involved because the Nazis only went after trans people.
The original person going after Rowling was trying to do the "Hitler was a vegetarian" tactic, creating the connection "You say transphobic things, the Nazis were transphobes, are you a Nazi?"
Rowling pointed out that the Holocaust was not about All Trans People All The Time, which was then seized on by the nutcases to be publicised as "Rowling is Holocaust denier" and a lot of people who want to believe the worst then helped spread that uncritically.
Me, I'm one of the severely mentally retarded who think that some other people, now who were they, tip of my tongue, no can't remember who, were the major and main target of the Final Solution, but hey, that's Holocaust denialism, isn't it? After all, it was only trans people who suffered!
She didn't say the thing you are saying, though. She responded to a person saying ""The Nazis burnt books on trans healthcare and research" with "How did you type this out and press send without thinking ‘I should maybe check my source for this, because it might’ve been a fever dream’?"
If somebody made any equivalent line about some other non-central groups the Nazis targeted - that the Nazis persecuted schizophrenics, Roma, asexuals, gays, etc - I would assume they hated that group. Certainly if they said it, then doubled and tripled down on it. I will apply the same logic here, thank you very much.
Because our little friend with "the Nazis burned trans healthcare research" was indeed pulling the "You're not a Nazi, are you? Nazis bad!" scare tactic.
It's the same "You know who else was a vegetarian? Hitler!" that you would not accept in other contexts. The Nazis were anti-trans but not out of "hey we hate trans people particularly and especially", as noted by another commenter it was all part of the wider anti-deviance (as they saw it) movement.
They burned modern art, too, but I'm not seeing Our Trans Ally trying to guilt Joanne over "do you hate Expressionism, too, Nazi?" It's the ongoing desperate attempt to paint her as Literally Hitler, and the more I see it, the more I go "you know, if thinking rapists should not be put into women's prisons makes you a TERF transphobe, give me that T-shirt and I'll wear it".
Let me turn it around on you: do *you* support males who violently raped women being put into women's prisons, Chastity? Are you perpetuating rape culture? That's the same kind of unfair equivalence gotcha that I wouldn't pull but if it's on Twitter then I guess, gosh, that makes it okay, yes?
So, what you're saying is, the Nazis DID in fact burn books on trans healthcare, a factual claim that JK Rowling responded to by stating, "How did you type this out and press send without thinking ‘I should maybe check my source for this, because it might’ve been a fever dream’?"?
Yes. That is true. If I said, "the Nazis banned jazz," and your response was "How did you type this out and press send without thinking ‘I should maybe check my source for this, because it might’ve been a fever dream’?" and then doubling down on the factually inaccurate claim, I would assume that you did in fact hate jazz yourself.
"So, what you're saying is, the Nazis DID in fact burn books on trans healthcare"
No? Where did Carateca say anything like this? It does appear to be true that the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft was studying transexuals in the Weimar era, and it seems reasonable to assume that they were also writing journal articles on this topic, insofar as they were publishing a journal on what would now be called LGBT studies, but that isn't remotely the same as "books on trans healthcare". What's your evidence that even one book on trans healthcare had been published in 1933? I mean, anywhere in the world?
Can you find any historical record of any particular book on the alleged subject of "trans healthcare" that was burned by the Nazis? Then we can maybe find out what that book is actually about, and this debate might have some kind of conclusion.
Manifold just announced that they'll soon be transitioning to a real-money gambling site. I can't imagine how that's supposed to work or why they think they'll have an advantage over Kalshi, PredictIt and the like. The whole reason why Manifold exists and works the way it does is because it exclusively uses play money so they can ignore all the laws around gambling and finance that make it hard to do real world prediction markets. Meanwhile, it ruins the site for all the existing users who like it the way it is.
Being cynical, this is what happens when shiny happy idealistic ideas meet the grubby reality of the world around us - Manifold is a business, businesses need to make money or they go belly-up, so if transitioning to real-money betting site makes them money, that's the way the money goes, pop goes the weasel, and forget about "prediction markets can be used to harness the wisdom of crowds to set public policy".
I never had any idealism around prediction markets (or stock markets if it comes to that) so I'm not surprised. People may start off with things like this as the testing of the ideal, when it's play money; but when real money gets involved, then it's about making a profit and not finding The Truth, and I think that was already happening with people finding loopholes and gaming the playmoney in this and other markets.
It would be a good idea, but unfortunately, because of the pivot soon they will also stop giving out loans for those betting on long term questions, so those don't work anymore. (Too low return)
Also, between the removal of market trader bonuses and the vastly increased costs of creating markets, there's no longer much incentive for users to try to create markets.
Does the media criticism term "slop" (as in "modern slop") have any specific meaning other than "a thing 4chan did not like"? I'm leaning toward "boo light" until I see evidence otherwise. (I've also seen "goyslop," which I assume is the explicitly anti-Semitic version.)
The term "slop" in reference to a wide variety of things (including and definitely not limited to multimedia) predates 4chan; it means, approximately, "of the lowest quality", and is an inherently subjective term.
I haven't seen goyslop used anywhere except on rDrama, and I took that usage to be their kind of joking ironic mockery; this is Basic White American Non-Ethnic Food cooking where everything comes out of a tin or packet and is made palatable (for a certain value of that) by 'seasoning' (usually 'dump a load of chili powder in').
I imagine the Irish version of goyslop would be, um, curry chip? Forget any home-made versions or rhapsodies about the heavenly version from your local takeaway, it's generic Anglicised 'curry' sauce on top of chips which can be good chips or soggy chips, usually standard takeaway chips:
No, it does not make sense without introducing additional, severely antisemitic assumptions. "Jews are overrepresented in media" does not imply "the Jews created mass media slop specifically for goyim."
I don't know what you're confused about. Good and bad, art and trash, based and cringe, it's all the same shit. Just people spouting their opinions as if they were objective fact. None of this actually matters.
It's more specific than just a "thing not liked"; it's cheap mass-produced garbage of little nutritional/cultural value, made to be sold at a profit to the dumb rubes you see all around you.
McDonald's is goyslop. Marvel movies are goyslop. High-brow stuff is not goyslop though, even if you dislike it.
I think that in some sense "goy" is mainly supposed to be an edgy way to say "normie" here. I mean the antisemitic implication is still there of course, the whole thing has just gone through enough chan discussion cycles that the meaning is becoming somewhat inchoate.
Seriously though, I think that in far-right-adjacent circles it's common enough to use "Jews" as a general stand-in for the (disproprortionately but certainly not exclusively Jewish) malign forces that shape society, just as the far left might use "Capitalism" to mean the same thing.
When someone that way inclined says "X is just slop produced by Jews to keep the goys stupid and docile" then there's a chance they might literally mean exactly that, but there's a larger chance it's a somewhat tongue-in-cheek way of complaining about the world.
> I think that in far-right-adjacent circles it's common enough to use "Jews" as a general stand-in for the [...] malign forces that shape society
Interesting. In Russian culture, it's common to use "a Jew" in the meaning "a greedy person". For the mildly(?) derogatory word "жид" it's so common I didn't even learn it actually means ethnicity until later, and the neutral one, "еврей", is sometimes used seemingly jokingly in that sense too. I cannot attest to the level of antisemitism of the people who use them so.
Edit: There's probably a contamination since the word for greedy is "жадный", two consonants in common with "жид".
There are versions of this in English, although I think they're mostly archaic now (I think they were more common 100-200 years ago). "To Jew [someone] [down]" meant to bargain unreasonably hard, and extract more profit from an interaction than would be socially acceptable in Anglo society.
And there's "to gyp", from "Gypsies", which lasted longer but is probably dead now due to being not politically correct. It meant "to cheat in a bargain", with the central case being to sell someone something that wasn't what was promised. Like scammers on Amazon that sell non-functional fakes instead of the real product.
I understand that there may be places on the Internet that do this, but could we not do it here?
It's hard enough to tell apart the actual anti-Semites, from the people who oppose the actions of certain groups of Jews, from people being critical of various policies of the state of Israel, and that's just in relation to the current mess in Gaza.
I personally suffer here! I refrained from joking that the reason McDonald's fries changed flavor in the 90s was that they started using vegetable oil in place of the traditional ... well, you know. ;-)
It's just a good old-fashioned antisemitic canard: Jews control business, they use this control to foist subpar, bland products on people at an extortionate markup, and then keep all the money and good things for themselves. The idea being, in other words, that McDonalds, the worst food approximation available, is good enough to cram down the throats of gentiles for profit.
I'm sorry, I can't for the life of me understand these Jewish Conspiracy Theories.
Are the Jews supposed to be capitalists or socialists? It seems like...both at the same time???
And who's forcing anyone to eat McDonald's? Unless you're out at midnight, there's usually a fair few other choices, right? Is the claim that McDonald's-tier food is being secretly served everywhere? Or is it the standard leftist claim that giving people choices is bad because people might regret their choices and so need to be protected from themselves?
Antisemitic conspiracy theories have internal diversity like any other complex of memes, you only confuse yourself if you treat them as homogenous.
Flashback to the early days of the horrible 200 days war continuing till now, in October and early November, there were at least 3 camps on /pol:
1- Those who are jubilant that Jews are dying, expressing support for Hamas and making derogatory sexual comments on Nova victims. The actual opinions on Arabs were diverse even among this one subgroup, whether portrayed as "fellow whites" who didn't succumb to the bullshit progressivism of the Western World and have the balls to treat Jews as they deserve, whether portrayed as brown savages who are merely convenient cannon fodder for the IDF who still manage to kill Jews nonetheless (in whatever ratio), or whether they're simply irrelevant foreigners whose defining and central characteristics is that they happen to enter wars with Israel and kill some Jews every now and then.
2- Those who are jubilant that Arabs are being killed. Again, predict the views on Jews at your own risk: whether portrayed as based allies of Western Civilization and the Judeo in "Judeo-Christian", whether portrayed as a necessary devil that is better for the Westerners because they know it and because maybe Jews will all fuck off to Israel if westerners support Israel hard enough, etc...
3- Those who are jubilant that both Arabs and Jews are dying, and who make it quite clear that every death brings them exactly the same amount of joy and accuse any asymmetric members from (1) and (2) as agents of the Jews.
Naturally, Muslim and Jewish participants on /pol tend to self-sort into the predictable buckets of (1) and (2) (if the flags they choose to appear on their posts are anything to go by).
Huh, ok that's an interesting break down, thanks. I'm not entirely sure what to make of 4chan; is the latest consensus that they're all trolls or that they're all actual believers in...the stuff you mentioned? I haven't kept track.
I'm not sure I understand your point as to different forms of anti-Semitism, since the examples you listed are hatred of different (combinations of) groups. Unless you're using "anti-Semitism" in the literal sense to include Arabs, which is not how it's usually meant.
But I take your point as to different variants. It seems to me that there's (1) the pseudo-socialist "Jews are rich capitalist oppressors who need to be overthrown by the workers", (2) the nationalist "Jews are an inferior race and/or disloyal treacherous outsiders", and (3) the traditional Christian "Jews killed Christ and they're blasphemers in need of salvation". The Nazis clumsily combined 1 and 2, leading to still ongoing debates about whether they were "really" a right- or left-wing movement. Even more ridulously, people often blame Christian "anti-Semitism" for the nazis, despite them beingbutterly different and meaning completely different things by "Jew".
Still, it's worth asking why so many tend to fixate on the Jews and lump these things together. I've really never understood it.
I haven't had McDonalds in 20 years, excepting once when a kid convinced me to try their fries perhaps 10 years ago, by claiming they were now as addicting as I remembered from 40 years ago.
I bought McDonald's in an airport after many years away, only to find the fries revolting. Further investigation revealed that they had removed the trans fats at some point. Absolute garbage.
Buddy, I can't fuckin' make it make sense. I just know that when some nut's pawing for an antisemitic canard, this one's evidently right there on the table.
"Slop" has recently seen a more specific use as "a product of AI generation", the implication being that these are low-quality garbage. I'm pretty sure this usage also originates on 4chan or some adjacency thereof.
I've heard that most of the vegetables found in American supermarkets are strains that have been optimized for long shelf lives and appearance, at the expense of taste. From personal experience, are there any strains of vegetables that you've grown and eaten that taste noticeably better than their supermarket cousins? What are they?
Most "natural" variants of fruits and vegetables are actually terrible, with a very few exceptions. Pecans, for example, are better in their "natural" state, but are tiny and such a pain to gather in any quantity that the less-tasty but much larger commercial variant (created by splicing a sapling with, traditionally, black walnut, which gives them a bitter flavor that the natural variant doesn't possess) is preferable for most purposes even if you're growing them yourself.
Most commercial tree products involve splicing, including citrus.
When you look at things like "heirloom tomatoes", you're still not looking at a native vegetable, but rather one that was optimized by selective breeding over decades or centuries (often for size and flavor). Native tomatoes are closer to cherry tomatoes, except not as flavorful.
If you get a seed packet from a store, and grow that - you're not getting the "true" native plant. You're getting something that was -also- optimized, simply with different optimization parameters. And, unless you are specifically picking "heirloom" tomatoes (major caveat: There is no regulation here, and even when the moniker is valid, it almost certainly isn't a valid representation of farmed tomatoes - most of our heirloom strains come from gardeners, not farmers, and there are many strains which served different purposes, and you're almost certainly getting the strains that taste best, so there's some post-hoc optimization happening), this optimization didn't stop when farming shifted to a more industrial operation - so if you're comparing your seed packet tomato to a tomato in the grocery store, you're probably comparing two different paths of optimization from a common ancestor, as opposed to the seed packet being a representation of where the industrial tomato came from.
Try a native pear sometime. It's like biting into a burlap sack.
Modern apple cultivars taste much better than any of the apples listed there (we've had a century of improving technology to accelerate this optimization), and I expect you probably mentally classify all of those cultivars as "supermarket" apples.
There are few vegetables that AREN'T noticeably different when eaten within minutes of picking. Many grocery store vegetables that need to be cooked are sweet and tender when eaten fresh from the garden. Green peas are a big one, and you can eat fresh asparagus like a carrot. Some varieties are sweeter or more tender, but the differences are marginal compared to simple freshness.
Generally, you can figure that the more fragile the species/variety is, the better the taste. The best tasting tomatoes are debilitatingly mutated heirloom species prone to cat-facing, like "Cherokee Purple".
And there's the variety of flavors you can get when you don't have to optimize for storage and transport -- different greens can range from sweet to grassy to spicy to mustardy, and tomatoes are available at different levels of sweetness, acidity, umami, and water content.
Cherokee Purples are amazing. Also Mr Stripy. Bought at the farmers market, they are ugly as sin, would never make it in a supermarket. So you spend a minute cutting away the bad parts, totally worth it.
I like beefsteaks. I like to take a big, fat slice of one, press the excess moisture out between paper towels, and put it on a sandwich.
It seems to me that long season tomatoes are more flavorful, generally, than short season. I don't have any real data to back that up, it's just my impression. Beefsteak is a relatively long season variety, Willamette, for example, is a short season variety, and not nearly as tasty. Long season tomatoes also have bigger fruit. Cherry tomatoes are very short season, but to my palette don't have much flavor at all.
Roma varieties don't have as much flavor as others, but are very good in sauces due to their low moisture content.
Where I live the growing season is relatively short. My fresh tomato experience is restricted to what I can grow here. Some years we get good yield on beefsteaks, other years they never ripen. Perhaps a respondent from more southerly latitudes would have a different perspective.
Apples. But it isn't the cultivar that makes supermarket apples bland, it turns out that the growers overwater their trees to get larger fruit, which dilutes the sugar content and other flavors.
I've noticed with a number of fruits that size seems inversely correlated with tastiness, as if there's a fixed amount of flavor per fruit. Looks like that was a good guess!
That's ~right for a given cultivar, but not across cultivars. For instance (using British cultivars because they're the ones I'm familiar with) a Granny Smith is a much larger apple than a Cox or a Bramley. But a Cox that was the size of a typical Granny Smith would have to be full of water and flavourless.
Growing apples at home is pretty easy if you have space and the right climate - you can plant seeds from any apple you like, but you have to graft on fruiting branches from your cultivar of choice because apples don't breed true, and apples from a tree grown from seed will probably be small and poor quality. Commercial orchards use clonal rootstocks as well as clonal scions (the fruiting branches) - this is mostly to get smaller trees by using dwarf rootstocks. If you have room for a large tree, then a seedling rootstock is usually going to make for a more attractive tree, and if you're going to be looking out of your window at it, then that's a rather bigger factor for you than it is for a commercial orchard.
When I was a child, we moved to a house that had an apple tree in the backyard, and it produced enormous numbers of apples. We'd heard some folk wisdom that if apples were left to fall and decompose in the ground, they'd make the next year's crop taste bad. I don't know if that was just a way to encourage children to gather all the apples, but after I left for college, the picking-up wasn't as thorough, and I didn't like the taste as much. But that could be age, or me developing different tastes.
Granny Smith's have gotten noticeably less-sour over the years. Do you think they've been bred that way? Just curious, because you seem to be in the know.
Aren't all Granny Smiths (or any other identifiable apple cultivars) effectively grown from clones of the plant that originated it? There wouldn't be any breeding involved.
I don't know - my mother grew apple trees in our back garden when I was a kid (and subsequently, though I wasn't living there any more) and there were always fresh apples in season whenever I visited. And they were superb apples!
I picked up some stuff via her, but it's probably 20 years since I knew anything much about the commercial business.
Bananas, maybe, although I haven't grown them myself. Most stores only carry the Cavendish, which travels well and has a long shelf-life, but rapidly transitions from not-ripe-enough to too-ripe. But if you go to Hawaii, they've got varieties there that don't travel well. The most boring tastes like a Cavendish at the perfect moment of ripeness, but lasts for days. And there are others. Mmmm...
Almost entirely Cavendish, same as the US. But among Cavendishes I have noticed that they taste better closer to where they grow, possibly because they get a chance to ripen on the tree rather than getting harvested green.
As others have said, tomatoes are significantly better when grown fresh. My understanding is that most commercial tomatoes are picked while still green (they're harder and thus easier to transport without getting bruised) and then turned red via exposure to ethylene.
Huh. The Roma tomatoes I got last time, still on vines, were a bit smaller than "standard". I don't see why this should be different. Maybe they were taking about a top-down retooling of the entire tomato-industrial complex, but surely there's room for a new varietal? They do it with apples all the time.
Tomatos definitely, berries can taste better, but they are quite hard to keep birds away from. Basil and other herbs because they can be picked right off the plant.
While grocery store veggies can be less flavorful, they are also, mostly, available year round. I can't grow strawberries year round (someone people do but its more work than I am will to do). So in January, even a mediocre strawberry is better than no strawberry.
That was true for most of my life, but is less true now. The market has to some degree responded e.g. some entrepreneurs built some massive greenhouses about 50 miles west of Chicago a few years ago. Now their tomatoes, which are not as good as fresh summer ones but are a damnsight closer than anything we ever before had in regular supermarkets, can be found across the metro area. They're good enough for me to use on salads that I make in winter, and I'm a lifelong tomato snob descended from a long line of same.
Then, hooray for capitalism, I guess! Although I am reminded a bit of Homer Simpson's encomium to beer, "the cause of, and solution to, all life's problems".
"Prejudice" and "bias" are pejorative terms, and carry the implication that the belief in question is unfounded. They are not an adequate replacement for "priors". If I were talking to an audience that doesn't understand the word "priors", I'd have to put some thought into what words I would use, but they wouldn't be "prejudice" or "bias". Here, I'm just going to use the term that means what I mean to say, and that most everyone here understands.
Many Thanks! I think that the only plausible objection to "priors" is where it is likely to be unfamiliar to the audience.
In cases where the audience _is_ familiar with the term, there is still a bit of ambiguity about just how much evidence has already been folded into the speaker's prior. E.g. even before hearing about some specific case or question, a speaker is likely to have at least Fermi-question-level information on many topics.
I thought Nolan was implying that a lot of priors are just prejudices, and rationalists are masquerading Bigotry as valid thought by calling them the neutral term "priors".
Which is rather reductive; from a predictive processing framework, we have priors for almost everything! We have priors on whether the Sun will come up tomorrow, whether the walls around us are solid, whether our car will start in the morning... in terms of "things we have priors about", "prejudiced opinions about disfavored groups" are quite few proportionally!
In the same vein, you could argue that a lot of prejudices are in fact priors, and calling them by the derogatory word "prejudice" amounts to dismissing valid thought.
Perhaps the synthesis in this thesis-and-counter-thesis exchange is that "Prior" and "Prejudice" are Russel Conjugates, one man's rationally justified priors are another man's emotionally driven prejudices, and there is no way in general to distinguish between them in an ideologically neutral manner.
There's also the question of insider-outsider communication. Everyone here is at least somewhat influenced by rationalism, and as such likely to be familiar with the term "priors". If you're dealing with someout outside that community, it is much less likely they will recognize or understand this terminology, and you might be wise to rephrase to avoid confustion.
I've been watching the Metaculus Presidential Election market, https://www.metaculus.com/questions/11245/winner-of-2024-us-presidential-election/ , and one thing seems odd. It seems sort-of "sticky" around 50/50, not moving more that 5% away from that since last November. Does this strike anyone else as strange? It isn't as if the period since then was placid and uneventful. I'm wondering if there are a lot of Metaculus members who round uncertainty in a more-or-less-two-way-contest to "50/50", rather than a more sophisticated estimate...
It's close enough for October surprises to be decisive and those can happen either direction. (Or systematic polling errors, or late deciders...) You probably need a certain escape velocity before you can say those late factors won't control the outcome anymore.
>It's close enough for October surprises to be decisive and those can happen either direction.
Agreed. I wouldn't expect the market to be 90/10 or 10/90 at this early date, but, still, enough events have happened since November that I'm surprised to not see it at least touch 60/40 or 40/60 in the months since then.
I am also struck by this. Certainly in comparison to real money markets, Metaculus is much less volatile. Two possible explanations: (1) Metaculus predictors are seeing the big picture and ignoring ephemera: they had the prediction pretty much nailed down by November, (2) Metaculus predictors are lazy and fail to update their predictions on new information (possibly because while they do update their beliefs, they neglect to go to the site and change their entries).
Many Thanks! Fair enough. In fact, I, personally, am going to try to evaluate which candidate is a better supporter of Israel (I have relatives there) in October, in order to decide who to vote for, since quite a lot can happen by then.
It's also worth noting that a combination of thermostatic politics and peculiarities around the electoral college tend to keep all US elections fairly close, even when they aren't as hard to predict as this one.
Linus Torvalds isn’t sweating AI. He’s been hitting his mark again and again for over 30 years. Elizer, I’m afraid, comes across as being full of beans. Admittedly I’ve only been only been keeping one eye on LLMs so feel free to think Yudowski is the real deal, you may be right, but that’s how the guy’s persona writ large strikes me.
As I implied, I may be all wet on my vibe based take.
It was just comforting to listen to someone I know to be uber competent in programming and computers who isn’t getting wrapped around the axle about AI X Risk.
"The measure had received unanimous approval in the senate" – was this oversight, approval of the satire or some desire to actually follow through? Presumably not the latter.
I was clearing out some old links, and I had forgotten about this... "The 100-Year Extinction Panic Is Back, Right on Schedule" by Tyler Austin Harper. Great article about why intellectuals during the 1920s thought humanity would soon go extinct. I only have two quibbles with Harper's thesis.
First, he implies there was a hiatus in our extinction fears. Being a late Boomer (actually, I prefer to separate my generation from the early Boomers because we grew up in a since we grew up in significantly different cultural matrix) — but being a late Boomer, I remember the regular air raid drills in the first and second grades when we'd hide under our desks in case of nuclear attack — and then we'd watch an upbeat public service film about how families who are confident and prepared can survive a nuclear conflict. I think the public service films were more traumatizing than the drills. And the beat of doom never let up. There was always a new way that our world was going to end. By the time Y2K rolled around I was pretty cynical about end-of-the-world scenarios.
Second, he claims that extinction panics are fomented by economic elites. From what I've seen extinction panics are fomented mostly by academia and the media. The economic elites go along with them because they're suckers like the rest of us.
I can't speak to century cycles, but this decade is reminding me a lot of the late 1960s and 1970s: authoritarian neo-socialism, kidnappings, assassinations, riots, the war in Southeast Asia, the war on drugs, the Weather Underground, the Symbionese Liberation Army, etc. Many wondered if our world wasn't collapsing.
It probably was. But something pulled us back from the brink. We may begin to see a similar rebound from all the conflicting placebo ideologies about. The septic tank can only take so much gas before it explodes.
Academia is mainly in the 70th to 95th percentile economically. Media is probably mainly in the 50th to 95th percentile. They are far more elite socially than economically.
Do I need to list the major media companies that are owned by billionaires? On the academia side, here's a recent video that I saw that mirrored my experience in academia: it's all about begging for money from the financial elite (grants). My experience was a combination of DARPA and industry grants. Even if you get money only from government, its only because some special interest/lobbying group is interested in your proposal.
Either way, the only ideas (in this case "extinction panics") are ones that the financial elite are interested in. The media companies only publish stories that fit the narrative. In academia, the research that is funded fits the narrative.
Government grants aren’t evaluated by special interest lobbying groups. They’re evaluated by academics themselves. The financial elite are really quite far from these things - certainly farther than they are from the average members of the upper middle class.
I don't know what country you're from, but in the US, the largest sponsors of government grants are the DoD, HHS, and NEA. They are all led by political appointees. Special interests and politics are the only reason why they get the job, and unsurprisingly, they get to direct funds to their special interests. Honestly, the alternative - government agencies not beholden to democratic processes is worse. However, I think it's incredibly naive to think that special interests/lobbying have no impact on government grants.
Maybe it's different in your country. Seriously doubt it.
I'm not sure where you're getting your information, but I used to be chief scientist of a small research outfit that lived and died on government grants. Had a pretty good run, for a while. There was never a point where I was dealing with anyone but a bureaucrat-academician, and these were bureaucrat-academcians who didn't need to ask permission before deciding who got a grant.
There was politics of a sort involved, that sort being basically academic politics translated to a non-university setting. And we ultimately wound up on the wrong side of those politics, which is why I am no longer in that business. But the Democrat vs. Republican sort of politics, no, it never reached down anywhere close to that level.
I have never heard of the director of any of these agencies being involved in the committees that select grants to award. Do you really think the Secretary of Defense takes the time to read grant applications?
I’m not quite sure what mechanism you think allows lobbyists to have impact on grant selection - I guess it happens a bit through the general mechanisms by which corporate funding and special interest groups affect public opinion, including the more concentrated influence by booths at conferences that are attended by academics. But I still think this is not any more of a special interest capture than any other aspect of the contemporary economy. It certainly doesn’t make academia part of the *economic* elite.
Maybe, but we're now several layers of separation between the moneyed interests and the people doing the actual research.
In some sense "powerful interests control the world" is trivially true, but a more sophisticated model takes into account all the other layers of stuff that are going on.
If "owned by billionaires" is your criteria, than practically *everything* is "economic elite" and the term has no meaning.
Journalists have more prestige than fast food workers, but neither is a career you go into for the money, and neither is going to be much cheered by the thought of their billionaire owners as they slave away all day trying to make ends meet.
I can think of plenty of things that are not owned by billionaires. Small businesses account for about 50% of the economic activity in the US. The other 50% is a combination of non-profit, government, and big business. So you can't even say that "most" of the economy is "owned by billionaires".
in terms of journalism/prestige, I relate it to inheritance in the European middle ages. If you weren't the first born, you had two options: military or church. Journalism is the modern equivalent of the church career. Honestly, I think folk's main concerns when it comes to career/livelihood are money and getting invited to the right dinner parties. Journalists get both by peddling the narratives of the billionaires.
I'm a generation younger, but I remember the air raid siren being tested every Saturday at noon. I was just a child, and it took me a long time to get from the intellectual understanding that sure, we need to test the thing like we test smoke alarms, to realizing what it meant.
At some point, people thought my hometown might be attacked. At some point, this was a serious concern. At some point, people were scared and afraid, and maybe some of them still are. My home wasn't very important, and the only way it would be targeted would be as part of a massive Soviet attack aimed at destroying America's infrastructure.
There were no drills, nothing else, just the siren going off every week at the same time. It made a good signal to come inside for lunch.
Chicago's air raid sirens are still tested citywide at 10:00 AM on the first Tuesday of every calendar month, as was true during my childhood. They are of course completely ignored though I suppose if one day they go off at some other time they won't be.
P.S. A couple years ago I just happened to be standing next to a 15-story building that has one of the siren installations on its roof, which I was unaware of, at 10:00 on a first Tuesday. The sound from that distance was _impressive_, on the edge of physically painful. To our unlucky family dog on the other end of the leash it was very painful, he literally cringed and whimpered.
P.P.S. A classic Chicago-trivia sort-real-locals-from-posers question is: what is the single occasion on which the city's air raid sirens have ever yet been intentionally activated _other_ than those monthly tests? I'll post the answer if nobody here already knows it.
Is there an explanation in the article why the economic elites (the Jews?) feel the need to create extinction panic precisely on a 100 year schedule? When did this tradition start?
Why did you put Jews in parenthesis? Are implying the author has an antisemitic ax to grind?
When did the tradition start? it's been going on for millennia. I think there's some deep longing in human nature to believe they happen to be living when the world ends. Christian eschatology has been predicting the end times since Paul (and it's not unique to Christianity). Preachers know they can work up audience by scaring them that the endtimes are near. Scientists, being the high priests of secular knowledge indulge in the same sort of fear-mongering. It makes good copy in newspapers and popular science magazines.
Why would some people want to scare the audience is not a mystery, especially in the age of clickbait. It's the 100 year cycle that is mysterious.
One might naively assume that a more natural timing is "always", or maybe "once per generation" assuming that after too much panic people burn out and start ignoring things. But then the new generation is born, and when they are about 20, it is the perfect time to nudge them towards all kinds of cultish behavior.
(In popular culture, Jews are typically credited for mysteriously organizing global harmful trends, and "economical elites" sounds just like the kind of euphemism an antisemite might use.)
But come to think of it, there was a huge religious revival in the US in the 1830s, and there was lots of talk about the End Times. And in the 1740s, too! So maybe there *is* a 90-100 year cycle of eschatological thinking.
Hm, the "secular progressive" thing might be me projecting a bit. There was also a rise in stuff like Theosophy and Hegelian spirits and psychics. Woo-woo stuff, but treated somewhat more seriously then.
I've seen comparisons with periodic waves of puritanical fervor. If the one in the 1920-30s wore a secular progressive mask, that would collect things like Prohibition and eugenics.
I'm not sure prohibition was either secular or progressive. I'm pretty sure I've seen pictures of those anti-alcohol placards with godbothering slogans on them, and the Women's Crusade and Woman's Christian Temperance Union probably weren't fully secular. Likewise a lot of their ideas and rhetoric seem to have played super hard on the Protect the Traditional And Defenseless Woman trope, which I, at least, don't associate with social progressivism.
I know this stuff is seen as part of the Progressive Era *now*, but I feel like that's one of those weird ex post facto rationalizations, like claiming eugenics was a right-wing thing.
The rough vague similarity between the 1910s-1920s and the 2010s-2020s were noticed by many, not only those who believe in anti-globalism/anti-elites beliefs.
Also, mentioning the Jews between parenthesis to imply that anyone who thinks that elites are colluding is non-charitable, for one thing elites openly convene in Davos to collude.
This doesn't answer your question directly, but the NYT article does link to a Vox article that says that the term "polycrisis" was popularized at the recent Davos meeting, so probably someone can run wild with that.
I think the 100-year thing is more likely the result of someone comparing timelines of Trump and Hitler, and trying to find as many parallels as they can. But 97-year-crisis doesn't have quite the same ring, if you try to line up the Beer Hall Putsch with January 6, 2021.
100 years ago? Only half-joking, without solid evidence of extinction panics of [1820 : -100 : 1120] I'm going with "NYT pulled a "100-year cycle" out of their ars..., eh, I mean, hats.
How strong would a T-800 terminator need to be to be able to quickly kill a human man with its bare hands?
Imagine you get into a physical fight with someone else. All things being equal, if the other person is ONLY TWICE as strong as you in every way (arms, legs, fingers, etc.), you'll definitely notice a difference straightaway and will lose. And if the other person is made of metal and can't feel pain, you're even more screwed.
But then again, being merely twice as strong as a human man might not leave the T-800 strong enough to achieve fast hand-to-hand kills. For example, the average man has a hand grip strength of 72 lbs. If a T-800 were twice as strong and had a grip strength of 144 lbs, it might be able to cause pain and bruising by grabbing and squeezing you, but it wouldn't be enough to break your bones. Also, if the average man can bench press 140 lbs, then a T-800 could bench press 280 lbs. That's not enough to be able to throw someone out a window or to be able to crush them to death in a bear hug.
Put simply, what the is minimum strength requirement for a T-800 to be able to quickly kill or crippled a grown man in unaided combat? 5x a human male's strength? 10x? Is it more important for some of the T-800's body parts to be stronger than others?
Is boxing allowed? I'd be scared of a fight with someone actively pursuing concussions even if we were evenly matched. Could be slightly above average on any of strength, speed, or stamina and completely normal in the other two and still be concerning, if they have technique.
Let's assume the average man is 181 lbs, 35 years old, and is a "Novice" at bench pressing, meaning he does like five hours of weight lifting or equivalent physical labor a week. According to the source, he can bench press 165 lbs.
The world record bench press record, without use of a "bench shirt" that effectively amplifies a person's strength, is 783 lbs. The guy who did that is 6'3" and 450 lbs.
783 lbs / 165 lbs = 4.7. '
That means the world's strongest bench presser is about 5x stronger than a reasonably fit man in his 30s.
Again, assuming our average male is 35, his right hand grip strength is 44.7 kg, which is 98.5 lbs. The world record seems to be about 365 lbs (check out the YouTube videos of very strong-looking men squeezing the 365 lb "Captains of Crush No. 4 Gripper" just once). That's a 3.7x difference.
The world strength records are held by abnormally large men who devote all their time to training for a single, short exertion of strength. Against a T-800 that was slightly weaker but capable of imparting force for a longer duration of time, the men would be overpowered.
Based on this minimal research, I think a T-800 that were 4x stronger than an average man in every way could overpower and fatally injure him within 60 seconds. The minimum necessary strength advantage might even be lower than that.
I used to do Brazilian Jiu Jitsu with a super strong guy, who could dead lift 200 kg. Some times, just for fun, he could grab me around the chest and just squeeze so hard I couldn't breathe and had to tap. But against a person of his own size that of course wouldn't work. So we would need to also specify the size of the human being attacked. For a median human you really only need a very strong person to be able to do it, if they can get a proper grip.
Less strong than a chimpanzee. According to a certain anthropologist, a female chimp can lift a man by his hair with one hand while hanging by the other arm (was described as an actual case, it was her idea of fun). Or easily tear off a human's arm.
Just a quick point here, because I hear this all the time, but did some research that shows "chimpanzees are impossibly stronger than humans" just isn't true.
The studies indicating chimps are massively (5-8) times stronger used a handful of dynanometer pulls in the 40's and 50's, then scaled the weights pulled to the chimp's size to arrive at the amount chimps are stronger.
Those studies were actually refuted 20 years later, and more recent studies by Umberger and O'Neill (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28652350/) have indicated that chimps are really only ~1.35 - 1.5 times stronger than humans. Other sources put this at around 2x stronger.
Speaking as a former powerlifter, even at the high end of that range, powerlifters are typically well above 2x stronger than the typical person their height and weight. If you considered an average amateur gym-going male of 6 feet and 180 pounds, they'll probably total something like ~600 pounds across deadlift, bench, and squat. A powerlifter the same size who competes should total at *least* 1200, and the elite ones will be pushing 1500+.
Of course, the actual average male in the US is 5' 9" and 190 pounds (and a lot of that is fat), and would pull less than the average gym-going male, so the effect would be even more pronounced compared to the general population. The chimp is stronger than this average US male, but NOT stronger than Christian Z R's 200kg deadlift guy, or indeed any reasonably fit / strong person.
The main threat is their teeth and willingness to use them aggressively rather than their strength.
I have been on a nostalgia trip in Terminator's scenes and plots (1/2/3/Sarah Conner Chronicles/Salvation) recently, amplified by the copycat inside YouTube's recommendation engine.
If you're asking whether the Terminators - as conceived of by the various artists in Terminator works - can indeed kill humans with bare hands: Yes, absolutely. The Terminator universe is quite clear on this: Terminators are more like tanks on 2 legs and a vaguely anthropomorphic body plan and skin-like paint coat than a cyborg or a man-machine merger. As a matter of fact, the *first* thing we ever see in the Terminator franchise [1], as well as the first terminator, is an aircraft from the HK series, followed closely by a tank treading on human bones. The first scene involving a humanoid Terminator involves Arnold Schwarzenegger ripping open the guts of some street thugs. Every single Terminator-On-Terminator fight involves the Terminators being thrown around and breaking walls, this means that (1) Terminators have a chassis that is sturdy enough to break reinforced-steel concrete walls, so human skin and bones should pose 0 problems (2) Terminators have the capacity to throw a human-shaped sturdy object hard enough to break a concrete-steel wall if the object was sturdier than the wall (which means it can throw a human at the same wall with enough force such that the wall will break the human's bones).
Your requirement is actually far simpler than brute strength too, "able to quickly kill or crippled a grown man in unaided combat?" is something that actual humans today can do, the human body is extremely vulnerable in certain places, notably the throat, the eyes, the back of the neck, and the 2 extremes of the spinal chords, not to mention the reproductive subsystem, the weakness of its male variant being - quite literally - a meme. You don't need a Terminator for this.
If you're using the Terminator merely as a convenient image and entry point to ask the more abstract question of "Given 2 rectangular slabs of material, what numerical property of material that predicts which of the 2 slabs will break the other and stay intact in a collision?", then I don't know. It's an interesting question for someone who knows more than me about Physics and/or Materials Science. I also suspect it might depend on some dynamical properties of the collision in general, perhaps on the general geometry of the slabs too. But we know the answer of the special case "Metal vs. Human", it's Metal, always, especially when powered by motors.
I have no knowledge or opinions about the T-800, but just wanted to express my happiness that someone asked a question as irreverent and silly as mine.
Edit - Actually, would it be useful to look into the grip strength and whatnot of chimpanzees to get an idea?
There are a few famous incidents of adult chimpanzees horribly injuring human beings, so maybe that could be a jumping off point.
Strength helps, but don't forget hardness and speed and precision and knowledge. Especially knowledge - what gets shown on film is what looks cool, not what is effective in real life. Grabbing and squeezing someone, or throwing someone, is not an efficient way to kill a human. A fast hard strike to the neck works much better.
More details, as an example of why your question is not quite easy to answer: raw strength is a poor metric of killing ability. For example, just re. bone breaking
Clavicle only takes a few pounds of force to snap
An average 10 y.o. can easily snap an overextended elbow.
An average female would have no trouble snapping an over-extended knee using a hip thrust.
These are just off the top of my head.
I'd think speed and precision would be more important. It takes very little force to penetrate the brain via the eye. Just be fast and precise. Same for breaking the neck.
>An average 10 y.o. can easily snap an overextended elbow.
>An average female would have no trouble snapping an over-extended knee using a hip thrust.
Do you mean hyperextended? If so, do you mean to say that there is a significant chance that the average person/killing machine, when in a fight or assaulting someone, will be presented with an opponent/victim whose elbow or knee joint is hyperextended?
Not “presented” - using grappling skills, maneuver your opponent’s body to isolate and hyperextend a limb. An average person would need a few years of training to effortlessly do this.
Which is why strength is a poor metric of killing ability.
I think you're severely underestimating how useful strength is. In MMA, weight classes are less than 10% apart. That is, a 10% heavier fighter has such an overwhelming advantage that it's considered unfair for them to compete in the same category.
If you're very strong, you can use that to force the opponent into a position that's favorable to you, then apply force to whatever body part you want. That's pretty quick. Your examples are asking for flashy, over the top, wasteful application of strength. Pretty good intimidation if you happen to have it, but hardly a design requirement.
It's important to be able to fatally injure a human in under 60 seconds because another human could come along and help the first one. The faster a human can be killed, the better. Having to wrestle the person to the ground and slowly choke them to death over five minutes isn't good enough.
There was an incident in my city recently where two guys got in an argument in a park, possibly over an unleashed dog. The first one looked like he knew a bit of Muay Thai or something, and tried to close, but the second one kept backing off. Then the second one charged in, got the first guy in a choke, and went to the ground. Just as the first guy was stopping struggling, the first guy's friends came up and kicked the shit out of the second guy. Then the first guy got up, took the second guy's wallet, and walked off. Then more people came up kicked and stomped the second guy. It's all on video.
My understanding is that a lot of modern ground work comes out of judo, one way or another, which in its second-earliest incarnation was a martial art for police. Police can rely on having numbers and controlling the ground where they stand, and they want to take people alive. Also there are apparently a number of tricks which are not taught in sport judo, which involve inflicting pain without causing visible damage, and which can apparently speed up the grappling process on anyone who isn't immune to pain.
This speaks to the biggest difference between "sport" and "self-defence". In a sport fight, the rules are clear (and no, it's not about eye poking or nut kicking, people who think they'll be ok because "I'll just kick him in the nuts" are delusional), it's 1-1, the ground is level, and - most importantly - you know when you are in a fight and when you are not.
This is why there are regular occurrences of skilled sport fighters getting their crap kicked out in situations just like the one you described. Taking someone's back and rear-naked choking him is awesome until his friends show up with sticks.
BJJ as the most common stand-in for the modern ground fighting did indeed come from Judo, but then Judo itself came from older forms, and so on and so forth, and anyway, modern BJJ advanced quite significantly from its early days, and keeps changing.
Pain is an interesting subject, and is also poorly understood by non-practitioners. One really has to distinguish between simply unpleasant and actually debilitating pain. A kick in the liver is debilitating - the body just shuts down. But many kinds of pain can be just "annoying", without creating a debilitating effect, and one has to be super-careful relying on that kind of pain. For example, digging elbows into muscles feels very painful - to a novice unfamiliar with this kind of sensation. Once you learn to deal with it, it's... not nothing, bit quite tolerable. I've had rookies ask me if I didn't feel pain at all, because they were trying to like poke me into the ribs and the such to get out, and I didn't even flinch, much less let go. My response was, I did feel it, but I knew it wasn't dangerous, so I didn't need to react. On the other hand, I'd tap to even a light pain in the shoulder when I end up in a bad position because I know it can quickly escalate to a nasty injury.
And then there are people with vastly different pain sensitivities, so hoping to apply a pain point pressure may prove to be disastrously fruitless.
You know how browsers started inflating their version numbers to seem more advanced? Or the Ford F-150 vs. the Ram 1500? It's like that. T-800 is just another name for GPT-8. ;-)
Assuming metal parts, human-strength would suffice; take the force behind a punch, apply it to the surface area of a fingertip, and hit the skull.
Average punches are ~1,000 Newtons of force, surface area of fingertip is ~10 cm^2, which is ~100,000 N/m^2; this is sufficient to break any bone in the human body.
That's a good point. I'm an adult man of average strength, but if I had a steel softball in my hand, swung it as hard as I could, and connected it with another man's forehead, I'm confident it would at least incapacitate him, and probably crack his skull. A steel softball in my hand is a good analog for a balled-up T-800 fist.
The thing is, it only does that much damage if the fist connects with the other guy's forehead. If he uses his own arms or legs to block my swinging arm and slows it down, the softball won't bash into his forehead as hard and won't hurt him enough. If he's strong enough, he could even grab my wrist in midair and totally prevent the softball from hitting him at all.
So the T-800 DOES need to be substantially stronger than a human to be sure of winning. What happens if it gets in a fight with a big man who grabs both of the T-800's wrists and is strong enough to pin them back? The T-800 has to be strong enough to overcome that, and the fact that he's made of metal and can't feel pain doesn't seem to help. Raw strength is needed. How much does it need?
You can pick up a 10-pound dumbbell and throw some punches, swing it around a bit. (But be careful and don't hyper-extend your elbow.) Strength matters here because it creates speed, which means you can move more directly, and you don't telegraph, and you recover faster. And importantly, speed gives you more kinetic energy: a slow bullet doesn't do much. But notice how your body weighs a lot more than 10 pounds? The real 10 pounds was inside you all along! ;-) Hardness and a small point of impact are other advantages that the steel ball has, which a T-800 would also have, but which a human would have to train to approximate.
Strength is also good because/although blocking is inefficient; a better counter would be a parry, or a deflection that accelerates your heavy fist in a slightly different direction, making it harder for you to recover. Strength means that those counters will be less effective against you. (Also, blocking might not be a great idea in the specific case where you're holding a steel softball, if you can just let the ball fly and it hits them in the head anyway.)
Grabbing could work, but it also immobilizes the grabber's hands, and usually focuses their attention on their own hands, ever so briefly. The classic responses to someone grabbing both hands are a headbutt or a kick, but there are other options, involving the physiology of human hands and arms. And I'd be shocked if a well-designed Terminators didn't have some sort of emergency third-limb-style counter here, like a Xenomorph mouth or a chest gun. (Also, Terminators don't seem to have backup very often, but if they do, it's also going to be a bad idea to immobilize oneself and one's hands while a second Terminator moves into position.)
Personally, I'd say that the T-800's big advantage in hand-to-hand combat is that it's nigh-invulnerable and nigh-indefatigable. Wasn't there a scene where someone breaks his hand trying to punch Arnold? So a strong guy grabs both arms, what then? Can he rip the T-800 apart with his bare hands? Or will he get tired faster than the robot? If I were designing T-800s, I'd probably focus on the use of firearms, and downplay hand-to-hand combat if it allowed me to create more T-800s. The best way for a T-800 to win is to shoot its target before the target even knows it's there.
"The classic responses to someone grabbing both hands are a headbutt or a kick, but there are other options, involving the physiology of human hands and arms. And I'd be shocked if a well-designed Terminators didn't have some sort of emergency third-limb-style counter here, like a Xenomorph mouth or a chest gun."
That's a good point. A headbutt would really hurt a human since the T-800 has a steel head. It could also bite you really hard.
"Personally, I'd say that the T-800's big advantage in hand-to-hand combat is that it's nigh-invulnerable and nigh-indefatigable. Wasn't there a scene where someone breaks his hand trying to punch Arnold? So a strong guy grabs both arms, what then? Can he rip the T-800 apart with his bare hands? Or will he get tired faster than the robot?"
Again, I'll say it: you don't want the T-800 to be so weak that it takes it five minutes of wrestling to kill a human with its hands. It shouldn't need to count on tiring out a human to win.
"If I were designing T-800s, I'd probably focus on the use of firearms, and downplay hand-to-hand combat if it allowed me to create more T-800s. The best way for a T-800 to win is to shoot its target before the target even knows it's there."
And I never said the design focus should be on hand-to-hand combat. However, a T-800 needs to be able to kill without weapons because it might not always have access to them. I started this thread to figure out what the minimum level of physical strength a T-800 would need to have to be able to defeat any human in hand-to-hand fighting in under a minute. No one has provided a convincing answer yet.
It does have that odd requirement for being a metal skeleton encased in a biological human-derived skin shell. Presumably a built-in gun would rupture the skin, but then, after they start shooting, how long do they tend to last, and how much do they need to hide?
I suppose I'm assuming that purpose-built guns are simply better than whatever can get crammed in to a robotic skeleton.
Shifting into a scenario of "guaranteed victory", I don't think any reasonable amount of strength is sufficient to achieve that, given the existence of martial arts that focus on redirecting force instead of opposing it
Yeah, the dangerous thing is not just strength alone, but also strength per square centimeter. A robotic finger that cannot break and doesn't hurt is a deadly weapon. Even if it couldn't break a bone, it can stab in soft places.
A martial artist could probably kill another human using a finger by stabbing in the right place, but the robot doesn't even need skill, it can just keep stabbing and stabbing until it hits something critical.
A robotic finger that cannot break and doesn't hurt is basically a knife of some kind – a stiletto, probably; got that square cross section and all. We know all too well that mere human strength is quite sufficient for those to do profound damage.
Pretty sure a 144-pound grip strength metal hand is quite sufficient to choke someone to death, most likely even crush the windpipe, so unless you don't think strangulation counts as fast that should be satisfactory.
144-pound grip strength is at least an order of magnitude (i.e, 10X) more than is needed to crush an average trachea. We are taught not to apply tracheal pressure, not because it's inefficient as a "tool of injury", but because it's incredibly efficient, to a point where a severe injury or death may happen just from forearm pressure if applied directly to trachea.
I could easily kill a mounted opponent by crushing his trachea with my fingers, and I'm on a smaller size.
Sabine Hossenfelder's video on how her dream died, "And now I'm here."
This reminded me of some of my experiences. Thank heavens I dropped out of grad school, and found something else. I suspect my life would have been miserable if I had gone the academic route. A close friend had to survive twenty-plus years of post-docs and on non-tenure-tracked temporary positions before she finally found a tenure-track position. Along the way, she discovered that her thesis advisor was sabotaging her career by giving her lukewarm recommendations. I suspect the toxicity in academia has only gotten worse since I dropped out of grad school many years ago, but this Hossenfelder video brought back some unpleasant memories for me...
There was a commenter a few open threads back ago asking for opinions about where he should go to graduate school. I made the argument for not doing it, if at all possible, and if impossible, then going with whatever the cheapest option might be.
Yes that was kind of harrowing to watch. Academia has such lofty ideals of knowledge and collaboration, and sometimes it happens, but when it doesn't it's not pretty. It brings back personal memories because at one point I was well on that path; in retrospect I'm glad I jumped out.
I love Sabine's writing, she very nicely threads between hard science (her specialty) and philosophical and human-level interests. I don't necessarily agree with all her arguments but I'm always happy they made me think. It seems she has been finding her way as a science-and-a-bit-of-everything popularizer on Youtube. I hope it works out well for her; it can't be easy to maintain your integrity when you're living directly from your public.
I was lucky: my undergraduate social circle had some grad students in it, and I heard enough to convince me that I shouldn't even try. In essence, there were some undocumented "requirements" for successfully navigating PhD programs and upwards, and not only was I bad at them, I disliked them enough that I couldn't see myself being able to learn well. Trying to do so would, in a sense, harm my soul.
No, it was an old dataset — actually a collection of bones (first metacarpals) collected from some Central American Mayan Indian population. They had been collected post-mortem (I assume with the approval of the kin?) — but in retrospect with today's sensitivity to indigenous peoples, it seems pretty bizarre! The collection had been preserved in little metacarpal-sized jars filled with formaldehyde that had been gathering dust for fifty years — about 125 finger bones along with little yellowed index cards, with the person's name, sex, and age when they were collected (died?). I spent two years meticulously cleaning the flesh off of them (because the colony of cadaver beetles — of which my department had a colony — couldn't deal with the formaldehyde. After cleaning them, I did bone cores and bone density scans and entered all that data onto punch cards that our university mainframe could handle.
My prof had a theory that osteoporosis was a phenomenon that mostly affected post-menopausal European women (for various reasons — but mostly genetic). But Mayan women showed the same pattern, and it was pretty obvious.
To be truthful, it wasn't the data that irked my prof. It was an annoyance for him, but he had data from North American indigenous populations that said otherwise and it swamped the N=125 of my Mayan samples. But it created a strain between us (because I knew he liked to "clean up" his datasets). Things went downhill from there. And to give the guy credit, he was going through his own personal hell. He was up for tenure, and the political winds of the department suggested that he wasn't going to get it. Also, I think he was going through a divorce at the time. So, his life was falling apart, but with my Asperger-like (notice I say "like") lack of awareness of other people's emotional states I didn't know when to shut up.
BTW, he didn't get tenure, but he had an ace up his sleeve. The University had a policy where the faculty could take courses for free. He was attending night courses at the U's law school. I heard he got a JD and then passed the bar.
I have had a few mentors that I loved and admired, but they were the ones who kept their distance. Any that I worked with or for I ended up feeling disappointed in. It had to do with seeing them up close, and realizing that they weren't joyfully fascinated by their subject, seeing their vanity, their small-mindedness, and also realizing that when I began working with them I had become part of their apparatus for maintaining self-esteem and professional status. So I always had a craving to bust them somehow. Do you suppose you had some of that going on? It's an alternative to the idea that you were simply oblivious to this guy's need not to have his nose rubbed in the fact that *those Mayan woman had osteoporosis, hah!*
In retrospect, my Buddhist training taught me that my anger and sense of loss were the result of my trying to cling to some imagined future in academia — and it made me aware that my advisor was suffering his own anger and and loss issues (which I wasn't really clued into to). Plus I was going on my psychedelic journeys on the weekends and my emotional states had gotten amplified by the existential moods they induced — which may have further blinded me to sensitivities to others. I probably came across as a cocky asshole — but not from being intentionally malicious, but because I spoke my mind when I shouldn't have in a way that rubbed people the wrong way. The way I still do sometimes on this group. ;-)
Something I didn't understand back then was how much personal ego people invest in their beliefs. And most of our beliefs aren't based on any real understanding of the world. Science was supposed to be away to get around that by separating truth from falsehood. Scientists are supposed to at least try to be unbiased, but most scientists are just as ego-invested in their biases as any other layperson. In fact, they may be more ego-invested in their biases because their livelihood depends on seeming to be right. So it becomes personal if others question their theories. The SARS2 pandemic woke me up to the fact of how close-minded and ego-driven most scientists are. I'm amazed we were able to muddle through without many more people dying. Humanity as a whole has learned nothing from the experience.
I would've never been able to hack the politics of academia. I subsequently learned that I was never able to function well in political work environments, but I didn't know that at the time. But I learned a bunch of cool things in grad school, and I worked on some cool projects. If grad school hadn't been a dead end for me, I wouldn't have accidentally ended up in a career that kept my interest and that paid enough for me to buy lots of books, good wine, and travel the world.
Not that I don't appreciate a good joke, but at the meta level what does that say about the intellectual integrity of academia? Expanding the Ph.D. acronym to mean Piled High and Deeper goes way back before my time — so I guess there's nothing new to the cynical view that much of the intellectual activity in academia is equivalent to writing jokes for a sitcom. I'm glad you realized this in time!
BTW, I wasn't trying to be snarky when I wrote that. I'm really glad you had the proper attitude when you wrote your thesis! Did you continue in academia?
Well, it's a gag made intellectually respecatable.
Briefly,
A: So with non-repudiation, the idea is that we use cryptography so that, if there's any dispute about it later, we can prove in a court of law that you sent a message.
B: What if, um, I don't actually want that? I mean, maybe i don''t want a court to be sure that I sent a message...
A: It turns out, you can use cryptography to do that, too
I was looking through some of the archives from the SSC days and came across an article on cost disease. Scott outlined the issue but never really came to any conclusions about why it was happening. Were there ever any follow-up articles or discussion about this?
Good question! I'd like to read more about this too. Unfortunately, I don't recall specific posts or discussions, but I do remember reading (somewhere?) that there was an emerging consensus that the Baumol effect was the primary cause: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect
I'm in a career crisis, and trying to cover all the angles. The short version is I'm a software developer (going on nearly 8 years) working in a very niche stack (including the language) building cross-platform high-performance desktop apps, underpaid, and facing an uncertain future with my employer as the business may not stay afloat. I'd like to move on, but am having trouble getting hired. I suspect that employers, being risk-averse, don't place much stake in some of my experience despite the skills being easily transferable (to languages like Java, C# and C++).
Trends in job postings suggests that cloud and devops experience is valued, so to that end I'm picking up some certs, but I have no intention of switching to IT/admin or devops; I want to program. My only other idea is building something for web, full-stack, but I expect there is marginal value in some dinky undergrad-level demo, which leaves either a) open-source contributions, or b) an ambitious project that will require ample investment of time, that I don't have. I have intuited however that, despite the fact that a bootcamp is redundant for me, some of the end-term projects as part of those programs may be substantial enough to warrant exploring, even if they are basically "demos". That makes it a possible 'c'. I'm not in the U.S., but the market is as bad or worse. Another piece of background: my education wasn't in CS, I made a lateral move, so I'm relying even more on experience and reputation. I'd do web or native, I don't care, except I understand the former is saturated and I have experience in the latter.
Appreciate any input by other experienced devs. Thanks.
Are you in Europe? Big city with many jobs or a small city with few? How niche is this language? Is it something I, a web developer, wouldn't have heard of?
If you are in a big enough city, go to meet ups. Meeting people face to face will do a lot to help you overcome any bias people might have against you. they will be able to see/hear your experience. Additionally is there anyone that used to work with you that has left the company? See if there new place is hiring and reach out to them. They can probably get a bonus if you are hired!
Among your own suggestions, I would recommend the open source route. Create a GitHub account, start playing around, forking projects to add some feature you'd like and then offering it back, or creating single-purpose libraries in whatever language. Or join a medium to large open source project for a few hours a week, where you can become a regular contributor and learn from the existing group. There's no better way to transfer your skills than working on a real life-sized project in whatever new stack you want to pick up.
As you well know, IT is heavily balkanized (are still we allowed to use that word?). Languages like Go, C# or Swift are big but heavily tied to the specific ecosystems of some large co or other. That's always an option, but I'd rather go with Python and/or Javascript/Typescript, and PostgreSQL as a data store, which are way more transversal. If you like UI work, then some kind of reactive front-end (React, Vue, Svelte...) is a strong plus. They're all similar enough at a high level, just pick whichever appeals the most.
The cloud thing is yet another world. You probably want to learn the very basics, and there's definitely a market for cloud specialists, but you say devops is not your kind of thing. I'm not sold the current fad to write your app around a bunch of cloud provider specific APIs - it's just the new version of tying yourself to MS or some such.
Niche skills are a two-edged weapon. Your employer has few choices, but so do you.
You may underestimate the difficulty of switching to another language. Yeah, you can read the latest Java Language Specification in an afternoon, and in a week you can write an example code demonstrating every single thing mentioned there. Then you get an actual job, and...
"Where the hell is this variable assigned to? What do you mean it's 'auto-injected'? Okay, but where does the value actually come from? What do you mean by 'it depends'? Hey, this isn't a valid code, you are calling methods that aren't even defined in the class, how can the code compile and run? What is this 'pom.xml' file doing? Hey, this so-called Java project contains no actual Java code, only something called 'application.yml'! I understand that you are supposed to write automated tests, but how does one test a database or web functionality? Oh wait, I got a Git conflict merging branches, I need to resolve that first..."
> I have no intention of switching to IT/admin or devops; I want to program.
Heh, so do I, but these jobs are becoming rare. Why should a company hire a system administrator, an operations guy, a database designer, a web designer, a programmer, and a tester, if instead they can simply hire one person to do all of that? The money saved this way can be then used to hire three more managers who can organize lots of meetings. Then they will allocate you 60% on this project, 30% on that project, 10% something else, plus the inevitable on-call duty.
> my education wasn't in CS
This is probably completely irrelevant. The CS theory is nice and sometimes useful, but actual work is mostly boring stuff plus fixing other people's code.
The mainstream programming languages are Python, JavaScript, and either Java or C#. You will probably need all three, especially with the cloud projects where every method can be written in a different programming language and deployed on a separate virtual server. You will also need SQL.
A good strategy... probably choose the technology you want to learn, accept any job even if it pays little, and after six months start looking for a better job, now that you have actual experience with given technology.
Thanks for the input. Accepting any job and leapfrogging from there was 'plan a', but that hasn't worked out yet, so here we are. I am taking to heart that I should focus on those technologies and build something valuable with them.
By the way, how do you know that the market is bad, versus you making some strategic mistake? Do you know programmers (of mainstream languages) who are unemployed?
For example, I learned that job hunting can be much easier if instead of replying to advertised job positions I just spam job agencies with my CV and let them send me the job offers. This is not a way to get a great job (those are usually recommended by someone in person), but it is a way to get a job. Sometimes the job agencies know about positions you can't find online, e.g. because they were opened recently. The important thing is to send your CV to multiple job agencies, because each of them will only have a few such offers.
Ten years ago, a good strategy was to apply to a tester position, and then get promoted internally. That's because testers were not required to have any programming skills to pass the job interview (and their salaries were quite low), but they had an opportunity to automate some of their tasks e.g. using Selenium. So if you demonstrated some basic programming skills, and you were already in the company and already familiar with the projects, it was a cheap experiment for the company to let you try helping with the software development. (Worst case, if it doesn't work, you go back to testing.)
But I don't know if this is an option anymore. I haven't seen people employed as testers recently; testing is typically done by the programmers, and then verified by some business guy. (But maybe that's just my bubble.) Also, the learning curve seems steeper: previously you could meaningfully contribute to the code by adding a new class with a few methods, now you often need to also configure it in the cloud
US old-timer here. Yeah, you're in a bit of a rough spot, and this macroeconomic situation makes job hunting pretty hard even in healthy markets.
I wish I knew what your niche stack was, (Haskell or a Lisp probably gets you some points. MatLab or Pascal probably loses you some, for example) but if you say your skills are easily transferable to other languages, then transfer them! Single-language experience from a non-CS grad is a big red flag for me. Once you've shown that you're comfortable in 5 languages, I care a lot less if you're comfortable in my current stack. Until they've proven (with jobs or with your own projects) that they CAN transfer their skills, I would be very hesitant to trust an applicant without the specific experience I was looking for.
Others may disagree, but I look on bootcamps with some suspicion. They can be great places to pick up some other skills, but they're not very selective and it's hard to differentiate the committed learners from people who are just scraping by. I place MUCH more weight on self-directed projects; they can show that you have the initiative to identify a problem, set out to solve it, and see it through to the end.
In the short term, dev jobs aren't as easy to find as they were. I would:
1) stay at your current position as long as you can make it work; when the macro situation improves you'll have some more flexibility.
2) Pick a new, non-niche stack and focus on that, at least 10+ hours a week. Python and Typescript/HTML are reasonable choices, with cases to be made for Rust, C#, C++ or others.
3) Don't build demos, build products. I'd worry less about making money on a product than I would about seeing it through to a professional level of polish. Yes, this will take some time that you don't believe you have. I disagree. I think that demonstrating mastery *in the domain employers want* is the only way to give yourself some credibility-- from what you've said so far, neither your current job nor your educational history are really showing that credibility. I don't think there is a shortcut. You can do this, but there's no magic trick to getting there.
Thanks for confirming my suspicion. I have work experience in some other languages including Python and SQL, but to a lesser degree. What are your thoughts on AWS certification, is cloud experience for non-cloud positions an overstatement by employers? I'm writing an exam soon.
I can't identify the stack without pretty well giving away who I am, that's how niche it is. But the gist is I mostly use an OO compiled language.
Owing to sunk cost I want to see this cloud thing through (unless it's a complete waste of time) but afterwards I'll switch to product development. I'm stubborn enough to make it happen, I just wanted more confidence that there isn't a better way.
I'm highly resentful that my experience, despite what I may have built, fails to show credibility. Still, I accepted this role, and while I had time to build something at leisure from the outset, alarm bells were not ringing then and I just didn't have a clue. That's life, ultimately I'm still working so I can't complain much.
You may be selling yourself a little short. Technical skills are important, but the other part of being an effective engineer is seeing projects through. If you can talk well about the work you've done in terms of its project deliverables, that's pretty significant in an interview and maybe on a resume. Things like: did you identify problems in a codebase and come up with a solution that sped things up/ improved functionality / served new users? Did you come up with innovative ways to deal with computational complexity / laggy networks / security concerns / whatever?
What I'm looking for in resumes and interviews is someone with demonstrated technical mastery (optimally showing some cross-domain history), and who's familiar with the trade-offs of engineering and can make reasonable choices in the face of uncertainty. If you're proud of the work you've done and can talk about it in terms of the project problems, team dynamics, or technical issues, those are all good signs that you're capable regardless of the stack.
Re: AWS. I'm suspicious of certifications, because they usually involve clicking through some mediocre educational pages for a while and then answering some multiple-choice questions correctly. BUT, having some cloud (and especially AWS) experience is really valuable to me. I'd love to hear something like "I did this certification AND I build projects X, Y, and Z using these AWS services." Even better in my book is when somebody says "Oh, AWS DumbServiceName? No, I haven't used that, since most of our work was in OriginalDumbServiceName and Route42 and OtherDumbServiceName. But I know enough to know that DumbServiceName would be useful in peer-to-peer blobstrafication if we wanted to use WebSockJimboTrons". That says someone is familiar with the problem domain, has solved some problems there, could figure out how to solve future issues, and is honest enough not to try to bullshit me about it.
I wrote a review of Jordan Peele's 2019 film Us which touches on things that I don't believe other reviewers have seriously considered (long story short, I think the movie can be seen as having themes related to autism and the paranormal -- I don't think that Jordan Peele necessarily intended it, but the parallels are interesting).
What are the best accessibly written arguments against AI existential risk concerns? The best I think I've come across is Maciej Ceglowski's "Superintelligence: The Idea that Eats Smart People," but would be happy to hear of others.
I'd also be interested in the best accelerationist arguments out there, of either the left or the right variety. (This is a know-thy-enemy exercise for me, so preaching to the choir type screeds aren't going to be interesting; rather writing that genuinely tries to be persuasive.)
Thanks for the reply. Unfortunately this argument doesn't do much for me. It seems to start with the argument: "Only a human can be an agent. AI is not a human. Therefore, an AI cannot be an agent." But that seems both irrelevant (nuclear weapons are not agents but they obviously present existential risks) and potentially false (the *whole point* of AI is to simulate agency, and the fact that previous technologies didn't gain agency doesn't entail that the technology where *agency is the specific goal* can't possibly succeed).
Having constrained his imagination to the idea that AI could at worst be a sort of consigliere to a human, the rest of the argument boils down to what a person using an AI to make himself really smart and rich might do: "Imagine this really rich and smart person. Even this person couldn't take over the world and kill us all. Therefore AI presents no existential risk. QED." Or put only slightly differently: "If even Jeff Bezos can't kill us all if he wanted to, then superintelligent AI presents no risk." I... am not persuaded.
Also I found this pretty funny: "humans cannot empathize with superintelligences." Humans will empathize with *emojis* fer gosh sakes.
I've independently arrived at a conclusion similar to Moldbug's. Here's a quick rundown of how I see things.
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Re: To Foom, or not to Foom?
The argument is not quite "the AI can't build a nuke". The argument is "there's no way for an to AI recursively self-improve into a God-emperor". Yudkowsky, Kurzweil, etc have this notion that "infinite intelligence -> infinite agency", as if having a jupiter brain with 10^10000000 IQ gives you magic powers that defy the laws of physics.
The problem is that agency, i.e. the ability to steer the future, is not something that scales linearly with arbitrary amounts of intelligence. Agency has two components: intelligence (specificity); and power (energy/second).
Intelligence is revered in the current age because during the industrial revolution, intelligence -> technology -> agency. More specifically: A) technology allowed us to do things extremely efficiently (e.g. steel holds up buildings very well per cost and weight); and B) technology (metallurgy, mostly) allowed us to draw tap into new energy reservoirs (viz. hydrocarbons; nuclear energy; etc). In the before times, energy mostly came from the macronutrients in plants, conducted via muscles.
Intelligence, however, is only worth the efficiency of the technology it's able to discover, or the sources of energy it's able to tap into. Efficiency is limited by thermodynamics. Industrialization *temporarily* circumvents this by drawing from unsustainable reservoirs of energy. But a strategy of perennially finding new energy sources has has limits too. And this is why moldbug and I believe that a pot of "agency vs intelligence" is ultimately sigmoidal, rather than exponential. Because in the long run, exponential curves always turn out to be sigmoidal.
When your concept of AI becomes bounded by the laws of physics, it becomes apparent that the threat of AI reduces to the *other* existential risks. So AI, in and of itself, doesn't really add much to the equation that wasn't already present during say, the Cuban Missile Crisis. Mostly, it just adds more attack-surface for some security screwup to occur <looks at Pakistan> by adding another layer of indirection. E.g. as Vilium suggests, sure, maybe the AI will use deepfakes to make people on social media angrier. But does that warrant a new category of x-risk? or do slightly better psyops just bring us to a slightly worse equilibrium than the one we're already in.
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Re: orthogonality
Additionally, there's a notion that an AI might have drives (e.g. paperclip maximization), and this will cause it to seek power, and take over the universe by any means necessarily. But as Thegnskald notes, I think this is unlikely. Because humanity's own drives are very specific targets that were shaped by evolutionary forces. I don't think it's likely that an AI would come with drives that weren't deliberately programmed into it, any more so than a wooden chair you ordered from Amazon is likely to "accidentally" come with a third arm.
"but ML behaves in surprising ways. isn't it possible that AGI will behave in surprising ways, like having drives we didn't put there?" But imo, the surprising nature of ML comes from our willful misunderstanding of it. If people had treated it as a statistical telescope, rather than immediately anthromorphizing it as an intelligence that reasons causally and sequentially, its behavior wouldn't be seen as surprising.
Thanks, this really helps me clarify my intuition that there is a gap in the narrative where intelligence-->agency. I am not so sanguine about physical limits saving us though. Yes, exponential curves may just be sections of a sigmoidal curve, but we don't know where the peak of the sigmoidal curve will be until we're pretty much there; and there's no guarantee we hit that peak before enough energy resources have been tapped to initiate us into some pretty weird futures. After all, we're *already* living through a pretty weird future from the perspective of, say, three centuries ago; and accessing hydrocarbons is already setting off some collapse-ish phenomena, in re: biodiversity, climate change, etc. In short, AI can't escape the laws of physics, but the laws of physics can manifestly accommodate a lot of technologies that, as Arthur C. Clarke said, are indistinguishable from magic. And we still have no idea what the outer bound of technological possibilities are.
As for orthogonality: isn't the whole point of the paperclip maximizer that it *has* been programmed with the drive to produce the most paperclips? It doesn't have drives that are additional to this; its monomaniacal functioning is precisely the problem, in that the singular drive subordinates all other possible values, which is why it ends up disassembling the entire biosphere to make paperclips. It would probably be *better* if it had some sort of unpredictable drives because then we could hope that the values of love, peace, understanding, and All That Is Good were somehow emergent properties of "intelligence" (whatever that is), but unfortunately I don't see any reason to believe that.
(And but another thing that makes me question the x-risk narrative is precisely the paperclip thought experiment. I get the point of it, but it is in fact overwhelmingly unlikely that the world's first (and last) ASI would have the aim of maximizing paperclips - or anything like that. It would probably be something more general purpose, and probably have some sort of humanistic values entailed in it, which is more or less what current generalist AIs at least *try* to do. The main risk here, I suspect, would be military AIs... though that risk is certainly nothing to sneeze at.)
The thing you're discussing more specifically is something that Scott has been debating with Nostalgabraist (i think?) over. I.e. "how worried should we be about monomaniacal optimization?" But also things like, "what does optimization really mean?" and "does it truly belong in the toplevel of the decision loop?" I don't wanna dig into it too much bc i haven't followed it closely, and so I don't understand it fully.
More pertinently though, I don't see AI's acquiring drives because they exist outside of evolutionary forces. Unless we're discussing a timeline on the scale of Dune's Golden Path. But at that point, AI's are basically just aliens we've coevolved with. I can't be asked to make predictions about that far into the future. Although it'd make a great Scifi plot in the meantime.
> John, when people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.
I'm pretty confident that we've discovered most of the important bits of physics by now. This is more speculative, but i think the inflection point was roughly around the 2nd industrial revolution. (the 1st wasn't important, and the digital revolution isn't either.)
> As for orthogonality: isn't the whole point of the paperclip maximizer that it *has* been programmed with the drive to produce the most paperclips?
I think you misunderstood the thought experiment. The point isn't "wanting paperclips *only* is weird and inhuman". (although Yudkowsky does make this point in his genie essay [1], and his "baby-eating aliens" story [2]. The ideas are adjacent, so they *do* kinda blur together in practice.) The point of the Paperclip Maxing idea is to point out that power/resources are scarce, and therefore rivalrous, and therefore agents often destroy things they bear no malice toward. (You and I are both heterotrophs, after all. E.g did you bear any malice toward the cow in your last burger? or did it just happen to have calories that you need for other projects.) The fancy AI name for this idea is "instrumental convergence". Because "power is instrumental to pretty much all terminal values, and rivalrous, so agents tend to fight over power". Which, ya know, George R. R. Martin could have told you as well.
Even if you regard AI as agentic, the other parts of the argument still remain, which were the parts I found most convincing against AI doomerism. Specifically, the idea that arbitrary intelligence doesn't equate to arbitrary ability to build untested physical systems or arbitrary ability to convince humans to do your bidding. These two things seem to be at the core of the Yudkowskyite doomer arguments (AI will build nanobots that will kill us all! AI will use superintelligent persuasion to make people hand over control to them!), so the fact that superintelligence doesn't actually entail them seems like a good enough argument against most of the x-risk scaremongering.
You don't need AI to be able to make nanobots or be superhumanly persuasive. A version of GPT that can be convinced to give you instructions on designing bioweapons is probably fatal (plenty of crazy people who'd do it if it were that easy). Even if you assume there's some minimum level of infrastructure required for it, a midsized terrorist org would probably be able to manage it with sufficiently strong unguarded AI.
In the spirit of "quantity has a quality of its own", AI does not need to be superhumanely convincing, it just needs to be able to deliver a decent argument to billions of people at the same time. Let's add some customization, for example if the AI has an access to the information advertisers have already collected about everyone, then for religious people in can design an argument using quotes from their religion, to libertarians it will talk from the position of free markets, to woke people it will use the language of fighting against oppression, etc. If it only convinces 10% of people, that's enough to cause some riots or change the outcome of some elections. (The AI does not need to approach those people qua AI. It can also send them e-mails, private messages, SMS messages, write comments on reddit, etc., the more the better.)
I do think that one of the undertheorized leaps in the standard existential risk analysis is the one where the AI goes from being "superintelligent" to taking physical control over the productive apparatus of civilization. Pretty hand-wavey stuff from the AI risk crowd! But for me, a) I don't know that such physical control is actually a necessary condition for existential risk; and b) saying that we don't know how or that it might happen doesn't mean that we know it *couldn't* happen.
I'm actually less skeptical of the notion that superintelligent AI could have superhuman abilities at manipulating people. This is based on what AIs are *already* able to achieve in this department. For one, weenie little social media algorithms seem to be enough to manipulate people into tearing their civil society apart for pretty trivial (one might say orthogonal) ends like engagement metrics. And then there are anecdotes about manipulative behavior from chatbots that haven't been RLHF'd to within an inch of their lives.
I actually do think these are two soft spots in the existential risk narrative. But I don't think Yarvin comes remotely close to steelmanning them, as he claims; nor do I think his way of arguing the point is remotely close to demonstrating that AIs could never pose an existential risk. His certainty seems to me like just the inverse of Yudkowsky's, who seems way too certain that AI *will* kill us all. But you don't need certainty to take up the cause of existential risk; at a mere, oh, 20% chance that humanity will be destroyed, my ears prick up, you know?
> saying that we don't know how or that it might happen doesn't mean that we know it *couldn't* happen.
It also doesn't mean that it *could* happen. There's many, many possible doomsdays to worry about - vacuum collapse, the second coming of Christ, etc. Unless you can show that your scenario is especially plausible, you're just doing God of the Gaps, Pascal's Mugging, etc.
I haven't really encountered good arguments for -or- against existential risk concerns; they all basically start with one of two assumptions:
Superintelligent AI is possible
Superintelligent AI isn't possible (or, alternatively, that the idea of superintelligence isn't a coherent concept)
I think most skeptics of existential risk concerns fall into the latter camp (superintelligence isn't possible/isn't a coherent concept), most proponents of existential risk concerns fall into the former camp (that superintelligence is possible), and very few arguments actually attempt to bridge the gap by, for example, rigorously defining what exactly superintelligence -is-, and just sort of try to let your intuition ("Imagine somebody with an IQ of 10,000" or "Imagine a world full of regular people running at one million times our speed") fill in the gaps. If you, like me, are skeptical that this is a meaningful concept, these hand-wavy explanations will just seem to emphasize that the people talking about it don't actually know what it is they are trying to talk about.
Really, if they knew what they were talking about, we'd all be in utopia or dead already, because the degree of understanding necessary to rigorously define intelligence is equivalent to the degree of understanding necessary to program it. Many of these arguments even agree they don't understand it, and assert some kind of low-superintelligence which -does- understand intelligence then designing the actual superintelligence.
This is made worse by the way certain ideas are used in ways which either contradict or extend upon the definition - the orthogonality thesis, for example. A lot of human technology progress has occurred exactly because humans have different values - you get further in paperclip technology if you have a person with an obsessive interest in metallurgy in addition to a person with an obsessive interest in paperclips. People who imagine that the paperclip-obsessed person would research metallurgy in furtherance of that interest are assuming a lot about the way the thought patterns involved must operate, assumptions that only seem valid in the particular context of an intelligence that will "solve all problems" in pursuit of a particular agenda, which, well, gets back into defining intelligence in the first place. Notice: Just as an AI may be aware that it isn't pursuing the goal you set for it, and not care - it can also be aware that it isn't pursuing its own goal with maximal efficiency, and not care. Valuing maximizing the number of paperclips, and valuing actually making progress on this first value, or even valuing existing to actually achieve that first value, are not necessarily the same thing! We can just as easily imagine the smartest intelligence in the universe using simple and slow manipulators to hand-fold paperclips until it runs out of power in pursuit of its singular objective of maximizing the number of paperclips in the universe - it doesn't value time, it doesn't value actually completing its task, it doesn't value being efficient - to arrive at these additional things, such as to turn such an intelligence into an existential threat, we need make a lot of assumptions about what intelligence is and how an intelligence interprets its values. "Well I'm smart and that isn't how I would go about maximizing the number of paperclips" is fundamentally identical to assuming that an AI would notice it isn't pursuing the goal you set for it and correct itself. There are a lot of hidden assumptions in the way the orthogonality thesis is employed in these arguments.
In general it very much seems to me that a lot of the "existential risk" comes about with respect to a view of AI as a wish-granting genie, in which the challenge is making exactly the right wish. If you don't think AI can grant wishes in that way in the first place, for good or for ill, most of those arguments make no sense at all.
On another front, there's a lot of concern about AI behaving, fundamentally, liked an evolved being; competing for resources, for example. We have no reason to expect an AI to behave like an evolved being, excepting that we decide to make it behave that way. But "Behave like an evolved being" is actually a very specific target, which we're unlikely to hit unless we are trying very hard to hit it.
So, if you're looking to "know-thy-enemy": A lot of the people pushing existential risk concerns don't actually seem to have a clear idea of what it is they are talking about, extrapolating out from vague intuitions about what various things are into how they would be. The single most important pillars of their arguments are massively underdefined. Want to convince me? Show me that your ideas are coherent and well-defined. Let's start with a scalable definition for regular intelligence: What makes one person more intelligent than another? If your answer is "IQ score", well, we already have humans that max the scores on IQ tests, so anything smarter than that is undefined - you haven't actually answered the question. We could say something like "The maximum complexity of patterns identifiable by an entity", but it isn't clear that cashes out to something intelligent, because there are an infinite number of patterns that can define any finite set of data points; at some point of maximum-complexity-of-pattern-recognition you're going to be hallucinating patterns in random noise more often than identifying anything real. The maximum complexity of patterns identifiable by a given entity may, itself, have some maximum useful value - worse, the utility offered may decrease beyond this value. Insofar as this is your definition, it is quite possible that intelligence beyond some point may be worse than a lower level of intelligence.
As for accelerationists, the most common argument I see can be explained as that humanity should regard ourselves as parents - our duty is to raise a child. Aligning the AI is teaching it our values as best as possible - and they're for teaching that child as best as possible. But they see the kind of ironclad/bulletproof alignment a lot of the pro-alignment people seek as being closer to lobotomizing that child into a slave, or perhaps akin to indoctrinating it into a religion with the deliberate intent of preventing said child from thinking for itself.
> If you, like me, are skeptical that this is a meaningful concept, these hand-wavy explanations will just seem to emphasize that the people talking about it don't actually know what it is they are trying to talk about.
Let's say this is a meaningless concept. I still don't understand why it needs to be a meaningful concept to have material effects on the world, or how it isn't more of an indictment of your ideas about "meaningful" vs "meaningless" concepts.
"Intelligence is a black box" doesn't mean that there isn't a common cause to *gestures at the entire modern world*. Like, is the stance here that a bunch of completely unrelated things happened, related to but not involving the bigger brains or cognitive capability that humans have?
The only way I can see this being consistent is if you are completely unprincipled, and say something like "oh yeah, sure intelligence may be a black box, but I refuse to believe any effects of it exist until I have direct empirical evidence of it". Where it's *extremely* clear that your concepts are bad, not predictive and ill-thought, but you get to draw a line and say "I'm still right because the bad parts don't count'. Since I don't think you are either unprincipled nor believe absurdities, what work is "intelligence is a black box" doing OTHER than dismissing AI Risk?
I have several thoughts on how to (loosely) operationalize cognitive abilities as "a threat vector", in the same way I can try and model, say productivity of an iphone factory, but I need to know what you expect to see in a definition that would be convincing.
> We have no reason to expect an AI to behave like an evolved being, excepting that we decide to make it behave that way. But "Behave like an evolved being" is actually a very specific target, which we're unlikely to hit unless we are trying very hard to hit it.
This is confused. The reason why AI riskers think "acquisition of resources" stems from arguments about what they think the structure of the universe is, i.e. if you have any type of embedded-in-the-universe process that attempts to perform long term goals with persistence, one subgoal that pops up again and again is "survival" and "acquisition of power". I'm not sure, if you don't think this is true, what you would believe if not this. That agents are way better off committing suicide and becoming poor if they wanted to do things, and that humans are consistently behaving suboptimally by attempting to acquire resources that would allow them to accomplish goals? Therefore, AIs need to turn themselves off as a first thing, to ensure all their goals are achieved better?
I don't believe you've read AI arguments using the analogy of "evolution produced power seekers, therefore AIs would definitely be a power seeker because they are also evolved". If you have, then I'd like to see it. There's been a consistent pattern of skeptics missing qualifiers to statements so they say a more absurd version, or just plain not understanding the argument advanced. Hence, a link request.
> The maximum complexity of patterns identifiable by a given entity may, itself, have some maximum useful value - worse, the utility offered may decrease beyond this value. Insofar as this is your definition, it is quite possible that intelligence beyond some point may be worse than a lower level of intelligence.
How is this defined and meaningful? Like, downstream consequences of this would be something like:
Current companies that conduct 10 person meetings where only 3 people participate and the other 7 people are tuned out are at peak optimality. Maybe only inviting 3 people, or writing a summary is in fact suboptimal. Also, people who regularly don't do next steps from meetings are doing so because they figured out the optimal amount of flaking out, and not their stated reasons of "I forgot and the weekend was coming up" or "sorry I was browsing my phone".
All current R&D is useless, in fact any new discoveries in cancer treatment can be deduced to be net harmful.
Despite the fact that hedge funds can profitably sue firms because said firms aren't carefully reading how their contracts were written, there is a mirage because reading things can turn out to be net harmful.
If you *don't* believe that this is the worldview implied, then you're going to have to answer why you think this type of point about capabilities capping out is relevant and doesn't imply this. Or that the implications would happen, but exactly such that it only happens for superintelligence, despite no reason being given for why this should be true.
The problem is that there's a big leap from "gestures at modern civilization" to "Real Life is an RPG with One Stat To Rule Them All and it is easy to increase that stat arbitrarily high".
With regard to the "intelligence is a black box", you're shifting context from a discussion of "ordinary" intelligence to "superintelligence". Intelligence refers to -something-, but we don't know what that something is (thus, it is a black box) - it isn't clear "superintelligence" is even referring to anything at all, so I wouldn't describe "superintelligence" as a black box - that would imply there is a "there" there.
I'm not denying the existence of intelligence, that is, I am pointing out that nobody actually knows what exactly it is, and claims that it can be scaled up indefinitely seem dubious at best, and for any actual and non-recursive definition of intelligence I can find, outright meaningless, at worst.
As for survival and power-seeking behaviors, I don't think you understand the points I am raising, and given the lack of charity involved in your responses, I'm not particularly interested in trying to explain.
> With regard to the "intelligence is a black box", you're shifting context from a discussion of "ordinary" intelligence to "superintelligence". Intelligence refers to -something-, but we don't know what that something is (thus, it is a black box) - it isn't clear "superintelligence" is even referring to anything at all, so I wouldn't describe "superintelligence" as a black box - that would imply there is a "there" there.
This is exactly what I mean by unprincipled though. You claim that the only way you'd believe in superintelligence would be if it were defined well enough to be implemented, well, unless you think you can implement a human level intelligence that sure seems like you're excusing the inconsistency of your position. If you didn't know about the specific intellectual feats of Ramnujan, von Neumann, Feynman, Gauss, Newton or Euler and I described them to you and slapped the "superintelligent" label on it, it doesn't seem like your worldview would *allow* for those people to exist.
Like, imagine if I said "heavier than air objects cannot fly, we don't even know what flying is, is it what a balloon does or what a piece of paper floating in the wind does? what an idiotic concept. therefore something like an airplane is impossible" and then when someone points out that birds are indeed heavier than air and they do fly you go "well that's because we know that they can fly, also my original position is even more correct, because birds exist and airplanes don't. Bam that's a prediction.".
The existence of birds, of course, doesn't actually prove that airplanes *can* exist, you are correct that someone needs a mechanistic understanding of how lift is generated, how to design aerodynamic shapes and have sufficiently good materials science in order to convincingly demonstrate that airplanes can exist (and if they can argue this, they will have invented them or be well on their way to inventing them). But arguments which proport to state a general principle, then carve out exceptions to counterexamples by saying "yeah well they actually exist so it's fine" are just plain bad and invalid arguments. Once again, this is not a case *for* superintelligence, but *against* what I think is a bad concept.
Similarly, saying something like "A superintelligence can only exist and be dangerous if you have a sufficiently meaningful conception of it, also intelligence exists so it's got a doctor's note for my meaningful conception argument." I think it's significant that pointing out we in fact *don't* have meaningful conceptions of "ordinary" intelligence, and yet *something* like it still dramatically shapes our lives. If your idea of "only meaningful concepts can exist" is useful and true, it seems as if we should be able to apply it in a more principled way.
I don't think you are denying that intelligence exists. I don't understand how you can have such stringent demands on proving something like "superintelligence", when existing "ordinary" intelligence does not fulfill your criteria. If we took away your knowledge of what "ordinary" intelligence can achieve, it seems like we would be systemically mislead about what the capabilities of humans would be.
What do I not understand about your position?
> As for survival and power-seeking behaviors, I don't think you understand the points I am raising, and given the lack of charity involved in your responses, I'm not particularly interested in trying to explain.
I read your first two sentences and I'm done. You want to try again, this time actually talking to me, instead of an imaginary version of me who holds views that are easy to argue with?
I don't think anything you've posted makes you "hard to argue with". If you have points that I'm not addressing then say it instead of acting like you're being put upon. You say that other people have vague and undefined concepts, but when someone thinks you have vague and undefined concepts you just think that's being rude and misunderstanding you.
To me, most of your reasons for why "orthogonal thesis is contradictory with AI risk superintelligence" argument for example, shows that you have implicitly substituted a particular definition of intelligence, same with the point about "trying to hit a small spot in mind space that evolution hits".
If you think those are your strong points that I'm not addressing, it's because I anticipate being lead on a wild goose chase if I do propose an alternate definition of intelligence, being subject to more and more stringent demands on definitions given that *your counterarguments do not meet*. If you don't think you'd do this, you'd be much clearer about what criteria you'd accept. The fact you feel frustrated and not listened to is most likely because I'm an ass, but I imagine it's also because you love stringing people along, like in the sister thread here.
Yeah, I'm with you on most of this; it's been bugging me for the decade or so that I've been aware of this issue that "superintelligence" is an incoherent concept. People say with a straight face things like "imagine a being with an IQ of a million" and like, what on earth would that even mean? And there does seem to be this strange thing you allude to, which is that there's paradoxically a kind of anthropomorphism that comes out in the conclusions people derive from the orthogonality thesis: it's values would in no way resemble human values - but it's presumed to pursue its aims much like a super powerful, super smart human that had those aims would.
But: I don't think it follows from superintelligence being an incoherent concept that the *pursuit* of superintelligence, or the emergence of very powerful AI, wouldn't end in disaster. If anything the very fact that we don't even have a useful concept of what we're trying to avoid seems like a cause to be *more* cautious. And also, I think we're about a decade into narrow AIs having a pretty deleterious effect on human well-being (mostly through algorithmic social media) and that strikes me as an ominous indicator of where we might be headed. (Relatedly, the know-thy-enemy remark referred to accelerationists; I am open to arguments that existential risk is overrated.)
> it's values would in no way resemble human values - but it's presumed to pursue its aims much like a super powerful, super smart human that had those aims would.
I used to think this too, but this isn't presumed without thought. This is one of the main arguments/theories for why an AI may act like this even if they have no direct desire to do so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence
I can see a dozen different (non-existential) disasters arising out of this particular pursuit, mostly in terms of the way it can be used to create or reinforce power structures.
And some (not all, by any means) of the most worrying developments, to my eye, come from the pro-alignment crowd.
What are the worrying developments you see coming from the pro-alignment crowd? (I see lots of worrying developments from people who *say* they are pro-alignment, Sam Altman being the most obvious; but do you mean that these worrying developments are coming from people actually acting in the interest of aligment?)
As an example, Eliezer's relatively recent post arguing that, because the race conditions mean unaligned AI is coming sooner or later, the only hope is for alignment researchers to enter the race and create an aligned AI first.
Given that the fundamental objective is a more finely-controllable AI, this seems likely to result in something particularly useful for creating and reinforcing power structures.
That's long been one of my big annoyances with Yudkowsianism - if you take its assumptions at face value, it's self-defeating. If you go around constantly talking about how it's easy to summon an omnipotent evil genie and we have to figure out the exact right Magic Words ahead of time so we can make a wish it can't pervert, then some people are going to hear the "summon an omnipotent genie" part and not hear or not believe the "evil" part.
> Valuing maximizing the number of paperclips, and valuing actually making progress on this first value, or even valuing existing to actually achieve that first value, are not necessarily the same thing!
This is just part of making a useful AI. If tell your paperclip factory AI that you need as many paperclips as possible, and this causes the AI to value having more paperclips, but not value actually making more paperclips, you just have a useless AI. You asked it to do something and it didn't do anything. Same applies if it places no value on doing the task promptly. Other than as failed experiments, we wouldn't make an AI doesn't do things when we ask it to.
> most proponents of existential risk concerns fall into the former camp (that superintelligence is possible)
As far as I can tell, the majority of people concerned about AI extinction risk give it between a 1% and 50% chance of happening. So it's not that they necessarily think it's possible. Just that they don't think it's proven impossible.
On the first point - that is specifically a response to the orthogonality thesis.
On the second point, if that were the case, I'd seriously expect far more arguments that superintelligence is plausible/possible, or even an acknowledgment that this is in fact a major point of disagreement - instead of all the arguments being focused on the people who argue that superintelligence will necessarily be friendly / won't be a threat.
I mean, the people arguing it must be friendly / can't be a threat are much easier to argue against, so that's a factor in why all the arguments run that direction. But even so, "Is this actually a coherent idea / plausible?" seems to be a massive blind spot in the arguments.
I believe this probably ends by repeating our other comment thread (the definition of intelligence) - I'd say I have seen zero arguments that superintelligence is plausible/possible, only what such an intelligence might be capable of; if you disagree, we can continue this thread of conversation.
> Want to convince me? Show me that your ideas are coherent and well-defined.
Instrumental intelligence: the ability to select instrumental goals that will result in a terminal goal being fulfilled. Being more intelligent means identifying and selecting more effective goals.
This seems to be the definition which leads to paperclip-maximizer type problems and seems to be very clear and scalable to me, but I'd be curious if it addresses your problems.
A terminal goal is a goal that doesn't serve to achieve another goal. Edit: A less technical definition for instrumental intelligence is how well something can select goals to achieve an objective.
What was the other thing you need clarification on?
It was "goals" and "intelligence" - I'll note that I don't think "agency" (goal choosing, approximately) and "intelligence" are necessarily the same process.
What makes a goal better or worse?
Like, we can kind of define this for chess, either with an intermediary process that ranks board layouts, or retroactively by saying the chain of goals which resulted in a win were good goals, and the chain of goals which resulted in a loss were poor goals, or some combination thereof. We can find some kind of definition, minding that if we define the goals in advance ("Knights are more valuable than pawns" implies that a pawn taking a knight is a good goal), and give these goals to the AI, then the AI playing the game may not be picking goals in some meaningful ways - but if we don't give these goals to the AI, maybe we could use piece exchanges to evaluate its goals.
(Minding, of course, that if we tried to do this to the Go-playing AI whose name fails me, we'd rate it as much worse at the game than it actually was)
It's significantly harder in the abstract general case; it may be that the techniques for evaluating goals in the context of pathfinding fail entirely when evaluating goals in power generation, and both of those fail entirely when evaluating goals on plumbing.
It isn't clear that there is a generalized "goal selection" process such that we could take that approach. We're back to problems in defining what it is exactly we're talking about.
I think there's been some confusion, I was responding specifically to your claim that there isn't a well-defined and scalable definition of intelligence that's used when talking about AI X-risk.
If you know what the word "goal" means, you can empirically verify whether or not any set of (instrumental) goals will achieve that goal or not. Consequently, you can tell if any given agent is better or worse than any other given agent at creating these instrumental sets. This is a clear, well-defined, empirically verifiable process for intelligence that scales well past human level intelligence.
We actually don't need to fully define a goal selection process for the abstract case for any of that to hold (it's actually impossible to do without assuming one terminal goal).
The terminal goal is whatever you asked or programmed the AI to do.
For example, if you ask an AI to drive you to the airport, getting to the airport is the terminal goal, and turning left on Main Street might be an instrumental goal.
That definition implies every program that exists, down to a for loop which increments a number to 100 and exits, is an instrumental intelligence.
Which is fine but it then fails to point at anything; insofar as we evaluate it as an existential risk, what we're evaluating is "Is there any sequence of logical steps a computer could be instructed to take which could destroy the world?"
Terminal goal is just the term used in the explanation. It's not a type of AI, or a fancy concept about AI, or what makes things intelligent. We talk of abstract, unintelligent things having objectives all the time. The objective of a simple program could be to add two numbers together.
Maybe it would have been clearer if they used the terms "final objective" and "intermediate objective"?
The AI argument isn't about the definition of these terms. It's that smarter AIs will be better at planning, and the intermediate objectives of their plans may be dangerous. The idea that many different ultimate goals lead to similar intermediate goals is called instrumental convergence (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence). An example is self-preservation: if you're destroyed, you can't complete your final goal.
What do you think about targeted killings? Here I’ll narrowly define targeted killings as those which are ordered by one state in retaliation against another state’s specific political/military leaders deemed to be most responsible for an international act of aggression.
The official policy of the United States prohibits assassination as of 1981, as outlined in Executive Order 12333. However, starting with the war on terror, the United States and Israel began to employ “targeted killings,” against terrorist leaders. This practice has begun to spill over into the killing of officials of other sovereign countries. Both the US and Israel have linked terrorist activity so strongly to Iran, that they have more recently gone as far as to kill a handful of Iran’s top military officials. The primary targets of these attacks were leaders of Iran’s Quds Force, which along with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps were the first government departments ever designated as FTOs (foreign terrorist organizations).
Under the right circumstances, might targeted killings of the leaders of aggressor states be the most sensible, humane response? In modern warfare, it’s become common practice to place the authors of war outside the worst effects of it. Assassination, even in retaliation, is widely considered immoral, while the alternative of killing a slew of fresh service people and unlucky civilians is standard practice. It isn’t clear to me how this framework is morally defensible.
If a leader believes that it is in his/her people’s best interest to risk those people’s lives in conflict, shouldn’t that leader naturally include him/herself among them? All world leaders would without hesitation claim their willingness to die for their country but these same leaders have built a moral/legal framework around themselves that largely shields them from the possibility.
It is easier for me to understand an ethical objection to war in general than it is for me to understand the ethical objection to targeting the specific authors of it over a greater number of nameless, relatively blameless individuals.
Outside of ethics, the common argument against targeted killings is that they are potentially more destabilizing than standard warfare, but this sounds dubious to me. War itself is destabilizing. An aggressive state leader who holds so much personal power that his/her death means his/her country’s ruin is inherently destabilizing already. And one could argue it’s the taboo against assassination itself that fuels much of the popular outrage resulting from its practice.
I’m probably wrong here, as most of the world appears to disagree with me on this. What are your thoughts?
Deliberately killing another country's citizens in their own country(*) is a straight-up Act Of War. If you do that, the other country may say "Hmm, we're at war now. And our assassins kind of suck, but our missiles work *real* good and we've got a few very capable armored divisions right on their weakly-defended border". And you've got no standing to complain when they chose a different kind of war than you wanted.
But if you're up for war, sure, you're going to be killing people and "...but not if we know their names" or "...but not if they're specifically the people who are the biggest problem" are stupid rules to try to fight a war by. And *maybe* you can even keep it limited to a war of assassins - but best to have good missile defenses and a border secured against rampaging armored divisions first.
* Or in a third country that you're not at war with and doesn't want you killing people on their territory.
You need to officially announce your intent ahead of time or else every single death in every single country will be attributed to an assassination and have the potential to start a war. Of course announcing your intent means the target takes as many precautions as they can and you end up having to kill your way through their whole army.
What about poisoning? It allows the timing where you first poison the target, then publicly announce your intention to kill the target, and then the target dies.
Getting the timing right would be a nightmare, and then you're inviting every visiting member of your country to be preemptively considered a poisoner. It's less trouble but still a lot of trouble.
My gut says that this should be OK, in a state of war, against uniformed military leadership, up to and possibly including military dictators.
But Hamas has figured out how to game that.
Non-state organizations that play with the big boys should get treated as such, like a rogue formerly-state-based military organization would be treated. That should cover Hamas and Al Qaeda, and also possibly whatever was going on with Oliver North.
And, what is "war"? Is America at war with Iran? In practice, it seems to be a fuzzy concept, especially as we put more and more significance and taboo on the formal declared version. Maybe we could call it a "cultural exchange program", since we want to remake their society in our image.
It's probably not so much about what you do but about what can be plausibly traced to you having done it. The proficiency of your agents minus relevant deals going on in the background minus options for future cooperation multiplied with your power (including economics and internal stability) advantage the higher the probability you can go ahead.
The reason to prefer a world order without widespread leader-assassination over one with widespread assassinations largely comes down to the second-order effects of the incentives it sets up.
In practice, the most effective method leaders have to avoid being assassinated isn't actually avoiding wars or avoiding scenarios where any other country wants them dead. Instead, it's way safer to avoid travel (particularly international travel) and operate as a shadowy puppet-master, ideally from an undisclosed location. That implies that a world with widespread assassination would look much like today, but with leaders who are far more detached from the people they're leading. Historically, it's been widely agreed that war is "better" in many ways (lower civilian casualties, etc) when leaders lead from the front, and encouraging assasinations has the second-order effect of making that less likely.
Particularly if we're talking about assassinations of only-somewhat-military leaders (like the US president), it's also likely that doing so will make it more likely that their replacement, and similar positions in other countries, will be primarily held by the kinds of people who are willing to sign up for military service instead of primarily-civilian leaders. If you don't want ex-military service members to be in charge of their contries, then you might not like that outcome.
>That implies that a world with widespread assassination would look much like today, but with leaders who are far more detached from the people they're leading.
I've always thought otherwise - if "assassination markets" were a real thing and actually effective (which you'd assume, because "effectiveness" would meet "demand," ie if there's a distributed bounty of $100M for somebody's assassination, a lot of competence can go into making it happen), we'd get *fewer* narcissistic psychopaths in public office, because they'd be at legimitate risk, and the one thing narcissists will never risk is their own precious skin.
In terms of "detachment from the people they're leading," we're already there at the far end of the bell curve in basically every country. Even in the US, the median congress-critter is a 75 year old multi-millionaire - how similar do you think their lives are to an actually median US person?
So I've always been pro "assassination markets," for those two reasons, as well as encouraging incumbent turnover. If you really want to be a 20-term senator and boss around the little people and play globocop, get some skin in the game and see how eager you are to continue for a 20th term when your assassination bounty goes over $10M.
There is another way that world leaders have to discourage assassination - set up government in such a way that whoever replaces them will be very similar in terms of outlook and actions. Or indeed, different but worse from the perspective of those likely to want to get rid of you.
I don't think any of the various opponents of the US think that the death of Biden would make any big difference to whatever they're currently objecting to.
That makes sense. It does seem plausible that leaders might behave more cowardly and suspiciously. On the other hand, if holding high office required you to commit your own life to your decisions rather than solely the lives of others, could that maybe help select for higher-caliber leaders who are more committed to their country than they are to themselves?
>Historically, it's been widely agreed that war is "better" in many ways (lower civilian casualties, etc) when leaders lead from the front, and encouraging assasinations has the second-order effect of making that less likely.
I think this is a key point about historical leadership, but I see people’s admiration for those who lead from the front as one that is more in line with retaliatory assassination as acceptable practice. A leader leading from the front demonstrates a commitment to his decisions and his people through his willingness to die for them or, in effect, be assassinated, if that’s what it takes.
I think you're mostly thinking about scenarios where the assassination would be targeted at leaders who actually made decisions. In practice, that doesn't particularly seem to be what's happening in either Iran or elsewhere. It actually seems like assassinations are intended to cause chaos by assassinating people who are central in the functioning of the organization. For example, in an assassination-heavy world the KGB would absolutely have offed Zelensky, most of his cabinet, and probably large fractions of Ukraine's legislature as well. While the legislative branch is technically responsible for the actions of a country, I don't actually think you'll get more competent people in charge if the job comes with significant risk of death.
Very early in the war, there were accusations - I do not know whether they were true - that Russia had tried to assassinate Zelensky. More recently, though, this seems to have been much less of a consideration.
> Assassination, even in retaliation, is widely considered immoral, while the alternative of killing a slew of fresh service people and unlucky civilians is standard practice.
Who the hell even seriously argues that? The only positions that are even remotely correct are either "killing more people is worse than killing less people" or "it's war, the only that matters is winning". Do these people think they're immune to the consequences of their war just because of their status? Morons.
I go back and forth on this. I had no problem with Osama bin Laden being taken out. OTOH, a bureaucracy that is created to facilitate assassinations will naturally try to expand its remit — if only to justify its budget.
And then we get organizations like MU 29155 with bozo operatives like Anatoliy Chepiga and Alexander Mishkin who failed to kill their targets, but killed a "civilian" (by leaving their bottle of Novichok on a park bench); and who were easily identified by their social media history.
I think you could make an argument that assassinating a leader in wartime is valid, but is that practically meaningful? It's pretty hard to get close enough to, say, Putin or Zelensky to do the deed. Even upper-tier generals rarely have a reason to get close to the front lines. Other lower-down military commanders can and do get picked off if they happen to put their command post in missile range.
(For the same reason, I think "it shows you're willing to die for it" would be a pretty much meaningless claim even if assassination were a normal part of warfare. No US president is ever going to face personal danger for going to war, because the Secret Service is good at their jobs and the US tends to wage war very far from home.)
And assassination during peacetime or during grey-area proxy wars seems like a massive can of worms you don't want to open, the sort of thing where you start off saying "it'll be nice and clean, just take out their leader and cut a deal with their successor," and then it turns out it was not clean at all and you've started a long and ugly war. Israel's strike on the IRGC commanders in Lebanon came pretty close to sparking a war, and that wasn't even a head of state. Can you imagine what the response would be if they dropped an airstrike on the House of Leadership in Tehran?
In context, the CIA was doing some crazy stuff, and assassination was one of the things "not actually illegal" in the list-of-crazy-stuff, once it came out. The congressional investigations and publicity seem to have put pressure on Ford to ban these "not illegal" things, and later EOs like 12333 just strengthened the initial ban.
I don't fully understand why the "skeletons in the closet" got out to the public in the first place. It seems very path-dependent, with Nixon installing certain people to strengthen the president's control over the CIA; but some(?) of those same people had genuine ideals and worked to reform it instead; at least, after Watergate had shook out.
For the "targeted killings", I'm not sure if it's because the public doesn't mind, as long as they're terrorists; or if it's because modern presidents have squashed the power struggles with the intelligence agencies by now; or if it's because the press and public sentiment have become much weaker against executive power, given the whole "start Fox news so no president gets Watergate'd ever again" arc.
Is there a hetero male Aella? I haven't looked very hard, so there might be an obvious answer. I think people like Aella living non-standard sexual lives represent hope that human sexuality is not solved, like new physics mean the universe might not be boring.
(edit: I had to edit this to tone down the silly fanboy vibes ha ha)
Dan Savage performed this duty for me back in the 2000s/2010s until I kind of trailed off my Lovecast subscription. When I was interested again, it was the Trump/MeToo years and the few times I tuned in I just didn't need to hear more stories that felt political.
I imagine a "hetero male sex influencer" being like what I imagine Andrew Tate was from descriptions of him. I love the pink-haired polyamorous people I know, but the ones I occasionally come across as podcasters/writers tend to be so ... gentle and hand-wringey. Multiamory was just dull (back in the day, haven't tuned in in a long time) and @polyamfam on instagram seems cute but then they un-ironically use the word "oof."
Bald and Bankrupt is probably a sex tourist but I love his travel videos and thank fuck he doesn't talk about sex and relationships. More Plates More Dates is a steroid-fluencer. I successfully steered clear of Pick Up Artists when they were popular in the 2010s and I'm totally allergic to anything adjascent.
The heterosexual male influencers are not writing about sex much, unless you want to go back to the days of Henry Miller etc., and probably their views are highly out of date.
Writing heterosexual male sex advice these days would be something of a minefield, I should imagine. Luckily one can go back to the traditional concept of a stiff upper lip. Which implies also silence and discretion.
I read a post by Aella for the first time a few weeks ago and was struck by how much it sounded like the Pick Up Artists blogs l read about 15 years ago. In some cases, the language was much milder but essentially getting at the same point. In other cases, the wording was the exact same, as least as best I could remember it. That could mean:
1) They are both getting at the same fundamental truth about heterosexuality, or
2) Right or wrong, the same tropes about heterosexuality keep getting repeated
I'd guess 80% 1 and 20% 2.
EDIT: Aella is living a non-standard sex life for a woman, but it is a type of non-standard sex life for women that has been around forever (Well, in cultures that allow it.) Anais Nin would be a similar type from a hundred years ago. I'd guess maybe 1 in 500 women live such sex lives.
"Hetero male Aella" doesn't make sense to me. Promiscuity is hard-wired in men, so managing that to keep up a stable pair bond is a higher challenge than competing to be the next Don Juan or Casanova. Competing to be the next Genghis Khan is something different, I guess. Talking sour grapes here, admittedly, but now I came to think the grapes up there really ain't as sweet as they look.
Reminds me of that discussion "Has the sexual revolution failed?"; There was nothing in there impressing me much. Strict rules and high social control makes some people suffer; licentiousness makes other people suffer; guess all should have their turns.
Aella does NOT represent hope that human sexuality is solved. Aella is almost a textbook fail-case for healthy human sexuality (specifically, hypersexuality due to childhood trauma).
The unfortunate truth is that your grandparents were likely much closer to the optimal state of healthy human sexuality, and we've regressed massively since.
I don't see any strong rationale for labeling her as a 'fail-case' without resorting to circular argument. Unless you want to go some strong evo bio route and say 'she's failing because she should have had kids by now', and in that case you really have to apply the label very broadly.
Basically I feel like a lot of people would *like* to say that she's suffering from some pathology, but given that she does not seem unhappy or unhealthy it feels like a hard case to make without smuggling in some additional normative assumptions.
I feel like human sexuality is solved for the 90% of us in the middle of the sex bell curve.
The only people who have problems are those who are either having none at all or far too much. It's just that these tend to be the only people who talk about it in public.
I doubt sexual behavior has changed much in the West since the pill became legal. Is polyamory so different from the many sex communes that existed 50 years ago?
What's changed is the language we use to talk about it. Who's fucking who and how many hasn't changed.
For a while, but condoms worked well enough. And now there are drugs that HIV-negative people can take that make it difficult to catch HIV, and also drugs that HIV-positive people can take that make it difficult to transmit HIV. So as far as I understand, it's largely a solved problem, except that it requires medical interventions of varying expense.
....I happen to know a lot about my grandparents relationship and if thats the optimal state I think we should all stop reproducing and take us out of our misery.
More seriously, most people don't want to live like Aella, but she seems to be doing well for herself. Pair-bonded monogamy with kids probably works best for most people, but that doesn't mean all other preferences are a failure state. There have always been people who weren't reproducing. Do you also disapprove of nuns? honest question here, because to me, supporting people who want more than 2 kids is the best way to hit that >2.1 rate, not complaining about childless polycules.
I mis-typed "is not" as "it's". The point I was trying to make is that people doing post-modern sex are a sign that we haven't figured everything out yet.
You might want to go back to simpler times and that's fine. I know people who are relatively happy that they go to work and do the same thing literally every day for years on end.
Maybe a well-funded university department will discover, via a Sexual Large Hadron Collider that sex is actually a dangerous like nuclear weapons or fentanyl and must be quarantined and restricted before it destroys humanity, but I suspect that is not the case.
What is there to solve about sex? It makes babies, it's pleasurable to get us to make and have babies because otherwise we don't bother.
That's the bones of it. All the stuff around relationships is just added on as we got bigger brains.
If you mean kink and novelty and promiscuity and "ugh anything but vanilla, the more experienced I get the more jaded I get" then that's a problem for you., because at the end of the day it's the same nerve endings wired up to the same centres in the brain reacting to stimulus, and if you need to feel you are doing naughty wicked advanced stuff in order to get the arousal going, that's not going to be solved by any kind of Large Hadron Collider. It's like all addictions, such as sugary foods; we make them even more processed and hyper-palatable and addictive because the bit of our brain that lights up at "yummy!" wants more more more. Same with sex: if you've never had sex, the first time you have an orgasm is the most amazing thing in the world. Have a few hundred orgasms, and then you start chasing to find that same high as the first time, because repetition and familiarity dulls the sensation, so now you need to be hanging out in kink clubs and inventing new terms for new arrangements of partners to get that high again.
NO - people doing post-modern sex is a sign there are certain segments of society who have collapsed into decadence.
I'm not saying sex is dangerous in the same way that fentanyl is dangerous. I'm saying that Aella's polycule probably is nowhere close to a TFR of 2.1 - and if that polycule does produce children, I'm not sure they will approach that TFR either.
It's "dangerous" in that it leads to collapse and extinction, regardless of whether or not the people involved are having a good time.
I think people have too many calories these days. Cake is decadent and people in 1970s who had more access to cake, fresh fruit and meat than ever before in human history were collapsing into decadence. I'm not trying to be a jerk, I just don't think scarcity and restriction are inherently good. Overconsumption has its problems, clearly, but there's a difference between overconsuming 8000 calories of pizza and twinkies vs. 6000 calories of steak and salmon.
You don't know that it leads to collapse and extinction. I can tell a compelling story about the birth rate of people I personally know being ~0.25 because of economic factors, not too much sex. In Canada, at least, it FEELS like we've just pulled a One-Child-Policy out of our asses using economics rather than loose knees.
I think it's true that the hyper sexualization of society has happened at the same time as a quality of life collapse. Can they be correlated, but not causally linked?
I personally like: @datepsych on Twitter, Mark Manson, Optimized Dating Substack. Also any pick up artist video on Youtube showing how to cold approach in public.
Advice? I'm a 23 y/o recent philosophy grad who spent most of the last 10 years or so with their head in the clouds thinking about everything but practical, actually deployable-in-the-world ideas. Now that I'm supposed to be an adult, I find I'm in fairly desperate need of mentors to shepherd me onto the path of not being useless to myself and the world around me. In what is I guess proper Gen Z fashion, I'm afraid it took me this (way too) long to realize I actually need to follow a realistic career path.
I want to become a residential real estate developer like others in my family, but I barely know the first thing about how. I was feeling at a loss for what to do, but then I remembered, apparently there is this weird internet community full of ~140 IQ creative geniuses (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-mystery-of-internet-survey-iqs) who are randomly good at all sorts of stuff; I think I could do a lot worse than to learn from one of those people. So anyway, I feel I would greatly benefit by having someone to talk to from the rat community (on discord/slack/email/wherever - DM me!) who happens to know how to run a successful physical business, or has a sophisticated understanding of financial management, some insight into people/local RE politics, who might even run a construction company/has general contracting or design experience or practiced as a broker/agent/appraiser, or has anything else that might help get me better understand real estate development or business in general.
They don't have to be directly involved in my industry specifically, to be clear--they just need to know something that could be useful in my endeavors somehow. Considering I know next to nothing, learning literally *anything* remotely practical would be a pretty significant improvement. But if you *do* happen to have detailed, advanced technical knowledge about one of the above topics, even better.
If anyone is feeling a little generous with their time, and willing to chat with me for a bit to help me improve, I would be very grateful!
Kismet! I'm a real estate developer (in Florida) who also started, rather foolishly, with a undergraduate in Philosophy. I'm always happy to talk shop.
Where you should start is a function of how much capital you have. If you can get ~100K together then you can get the ball rolling pretty quickly. If not you have to resort to some pretty sneaky shenanigan's. (Like buying a lot with a dilapidated mobile home and switching it out on a weekend for a newer one without asking permission "What are you talking about inspector? It was always like this!" )
I talk to a lot of young people who want to get their foot in the door of real estate, but I can't provide specific advice without knowing more about your ambitions. Drop me a line HaecceityHoldings located at the most g of mails.
Come to Australia. Residential real estate developers are untroubled by any philosophy or by their lack of knowledge of their field . Best of all, All our public policy at every level of government is directed toward the success of residential real estate developers.
Right. Residential real estate development seems like a ridiculously easy way to make a lot of money, once you have a bit of knowledge and good contacts with builders etc and a bit of working capital. It seems ridiculously easy in Australia at the moment to buy a run-down house in a fancy suburb for $2 million, spend $1 million building a pair of townhouses with fancy kitchens, and sell each off for $2 million.
The only thing stopping me is the knowledge that I don't know what I'm doing and am likely to screw up the design or get ripped off by the builder or fail in some other way. But if you know what you're doing, you're derisked and can print money. (I guess the other thing that's stopping me is ethics, I hate those goddamn townhouses ruining our suburbs.)
poor timing or debt issues are more likely reasons to fail than problem design or contractor . The first is easily solved, the second is about sound business management. Australian banks basically run the sector - essentially a big circle jerk economically.
Were you joking when you said Australia is Mecca for res real estate developers? Also, would you be willing to share what you know about development with me sometime? Feel free to email me at generalpurposeemail1@gmail.com
hi! a philosophy grad would be a great shoe-in to writing marketing and proposal copy for a developer, architect, engineer, or builder. If you're looking to intern in marketing in any of these kind of firms, advertise your ability to write cohesive arguments. Look for a developer or building contractor doing PPPs--they tend to need writers who can answer long proposals. The exposure you'll get to the day to day reality of development / AEC industry will give you a great sense of where to go... its a huge industry and theres a lot of interesting career paths. good luck..
If you want to do the same exact thing as your family you should just ask them to hire you and train you instead of asking a bunch of strangers online.
If you want to do something else useful that's when you need other sources of input. The best avenue online for a smart person to produce useful work that others will value is programming, and there are many free programming classes in all sorts of areas of interest out there.
> If you want to do the same exact thing as your family you should just ask them to hire you and train you instead of asking a bunch of strangers online.
(Or perhaps do both.)
Seriously, "having relatives who are already in the business" is a *massive* advantage you have over most potential competitors. Assuming healthy family relations, it means knowing people who (1) are actual experts at what they talk about, as opposed to random strangers or self-appointed experts who often have no idea what they are talking about, and (2) who are genuinely interested in helping you, as opposed to just trying to extract as much money as possible for dubious advice.
The entire advice industry suffers dramatically from the principal-agent problem. The fact that you need an advice means that you probably cannot distinguish good advice from bad advice, which at best incentivizes others to sell you well-*sounding* advice instead, and at worse encourages them to actively exploit you by recommending you to do things that will transfer your money into their pockets. But to you, Heaven handed a solution to this problem on a silver platter.
Where other people spend first years of their career making naive mistakes, getting burned, and then learning from their mistakes, you can get this hard-earned wisdom quickly and for free. If you want to know the secrets of the people who would normally be on the opposite side of the negotiation table, you can simply ask nicely. If you want to get a role, you can ask your relatives to first let you observe someone in that role, then to let you assist them, and then to let you take the role for yourself. And while you are working, you are helping your own family get rich, as opposed to most people who instead work hard to make some stranger rich.
From the opposite side, your comparative advantage is that they can *trust* you. They can trust you not to steal from them; not to bring your knowledge obtained from them to a competitor tomorrow.
Also, intelligent people are *rare*, unless you have tons of money you can throw at them. Most people suck at what they do, and the only reason they accomplish anything is that they are doing the same thing over and over again. Any deviation from the routine, and they are in trouble. I will assume that your relatives are smart, but most of their employees are not. But they can't do everything, because they only have 24 hours a day. So maybe a good start would be to ask them whether they have a problem to solve -- any problem, the smaller is actually better for a beginner, the important thing is that they do not need to spend too much time explaining things to you. (For example, they are out of pencils, so you use internet to find the nearest shop, go there and buy 12 pencils, two different kinds, six pieces of each, and bring a receipt. This is stupid, but you saved them some time, practiced your independent thinking and acting, and gained a little trust.) Or you can bring your own skills and think how to use them in their service. (Is there anything they calculate manually? How much time would it take you to create a spreadsheet? Do they write lists of stuff? Show them how to make a google doc on a computer, and then view it on a smartphone. Just don't over-engineer it, they are not going to become part-time Linux admins; make the simplest thing that works.)
If others in your family have done this, are they available for mentorship?
The only advice I can give is that you've got to do what you're good at. In my case being good at something is tied to motivation which is tied to what I'm interested in doing, which has worked out well enough but is not always ideal.
Lol, well, the only things I've ever felt good at were... philosophy, and extemporaneous policy debate. Yes, I realize that's laughable. Obviously I should get good at something that actually matters/I can build a career around. My hope is the motivation will come more readily as my skills develop, I exceed expectations, my performance improves, and I receive reinforcement as a result.
So why are you good at philosophy and policy debate? Put it another way, what's the fundamental draw? What do you get out of it? Are you competitive? Do you like architecting ordered systems? Harmonizing unordered systems?
I had thought that I was unusually good--or unusually self-motivated--at specific electronic design tasks. I had a major life breakthrough when I realized the draw was really any heavily constrained optimization problem; and once I knew that was my interest, I could point it at just about anything.
LMAO that was a great read, very relatable, thank you. Does he have anything else relating to practical matters someone in my situation might need to hear?
I can't recommend enough just reading his stuff, some of it is dated as he addressed specific controversies of the day, but a lot of his analysis is timeless.
Practical advice, both in his spirit and in my experience: stop choosing and start doing. Doing anything, really, is better than infinite rumination and looking for a "perfect" thing to do. You are young, if you don't like doing something, that's an awesome valuable lesson, now you know something about yourself that you could not have found out otherwise.
Won't Labour in Britain just reverse Brexit to the maximum degree possible once they take office? (I'm assuming that they're going to win a fairly large majority). The initial vote for Brexit was famously 52-48, and I believe that the turnout for the referendum wasn't super-high. Just based on thermostatic public opinion and the UK's general economic decline since then, it doesn't seem unreasonable that at least 5% of Leave voters will now have changed their minds. Plus, the British political system doesn't exactly have a lot of constraints on what a single-party majority can do- if Labour thinks it's a good idea they can simply push it through.
Likely the EU won't simply accept the UK back as a full member, but presumably they could strike a deal like Switzerland or a few other countries have where the UK is a member of the common market and so on again- they're just not a voting member. I think this would be extremely difficult to reverse even in the case of a future Tory administration. Is Labour going to push through something like this assuming they win this year? If not, why not?
Labor love Brexit - it's going to be a permanent scapegoat for them once they're in power. We tried to reduce cost of living, but brexit. We tried to lower unemployment, but brexit and so on.
Now, if you had said "at some time in the future", that's a different story. But "once they take office", no.
Switzerland is a member of EFTA (the European Free Trade Association) and I don't think that the Labor would try to join. Norway tactfully suggested that the UK might be happier negotiating its own relationship with the EU rather than joining the EFTA, which I think is a polite way of saying after watching UK/EU negotiations over Brexit, the current EFTA members aren't thrilled with the idea of the UK joining the EFTA.
Switzerland is part of the Schengen area (meaning there are no passport check when traveling between Switzerland and the European Union). Given the degree to which Brexit was sold on the idea of taking back control of the UK borders, I don't think that the UK joining the Schengen area is on the table, nor would it have been even if Brexit had never happened.
My expectation is that Labor will take steps to ease trade between the UK and the European Union, but these will fall significantly short of where Switzerland is. The other thing to note is that the UK is still in the process of implementing import controls on imports from the EU, and the UK government acknowledges that, “introduction of robust controls on EU imports will inevitably result in new processes and so costs for importers.”
Switzerland doesn't exactly have a great relationship with the EU as of late. We've been in stalled negotiations over extending / reinstating our various "semi-member" privileges. I wish it was possible to be part of the EU without being under the heel of an unaccountable, dysfunctional bureaucracy, but if that's the cost of joining, then I'd rather stay out.
Maybe, just maybe, the Swiss could found some new and better european alliance with all the countries going "right wing populist" and leave the Eu to, let me think, Ireland, France and Sweden? Sorry Deiseach, I've been drinking.
I don't see reentry any time soon. The EU won't want it. The Labour party don't want it and the Tories/Reform will absolutely crucify them if they tried. I'm very anti-Brexit and I think it would be a terrible idea. Though the tories have played a little loose with this recently, there's an expectation that if you are going to do something huge, you need to have it in your manifesto. There's no way Labour would do that now. Maybe next time.
It would be a great idea though to make as many friendly connections as possible. Wouldn't it be great if our scientists cooperate? And our academics? And if we allowed our young folks go back and forth? And if old people were allowed to buy houses on the other side. And we should free up the visa requirements a bit.
But I think joining the single market or the customs union or the EU itself will have to wait a long time.
I remember hearing (I don't remember the source), that if the UK tried to re-join the EU having left, they would very likely insist on the UK replacing pounds with euros, and just generally demand a bunch of concessions from the UK that weren't there under the original deal (when it was part of the EU the first time) (I think I may have heard this in the context of Scotland leaving the UK and re-joining the EU without England, Wales and NI). Even without that factor, the UK outright trying to re-join the EU seems unlikely, although that's just my vague impression and I don't actually tend to pay a whole lot of attention to politics.
I think the reason I think this is unlikely is that the process of leaving the EU had a large cost, and joining again would also have costs, so if we joined again, we'd have paid both costs for nothing.
The Brexit divide doesn't follow traditional party lines. The Labour party were as split on Brexit as anyone else and still has a number of EU sceptics high up. Much as I wish it were otherwise, I don't see any sort of Breentry process being kicked off any time soon, never mind anything actually getting accomplished.
The default is that nothing will happen and the status quo will continue. EU bureaucrats are very slow and any deal will take years to negotiate, by which time Conservatives might be back in power.
A year or so ago, a new type of experiment involving a pair of photons was able to measure the pressure inside a proton. The pressure at the center turns out to be a staggering 10^35 Pascals, about ten times the pressure at the center of a neutron star.
Given how relatively little extra mass is needed to collapse a neutron star into a black hole (doubling the mass would generally do the trick), that pressure seems to put the center of a proton well into mini-black hole ball park.
It was claimed some years ago that a proton cannot in its entirety actually be a mini-black hole, in a classical sense, teetering stably (somehow) between evaporating entirely and absorbing particles, because if it was then it would have no magnetic moment, which it does.
But what if it had one or more mini-black holes in its deep interior that were surrounded and "shielded" by processes I sketch next which would produce a magnetic moment?
If a black hole near the centre emitted a particle, and the pressure gradient accelerated it outward to within a whisker of the speed of light, wouldn't the particle's relativistic mass increase accordingly? Now obviously gravity affects all masses equally, but by sweeping up vacuum energy wouldn't this particle concentrate mass-energy in one direction, relative to the center, as opposed to this energy being evenly spread round the center? If so then that would mean the effect of gravity on the particle would be enhanced, thus tending to haul it back towards the center? This effect would act like the well-known asymptotic freedom, whereby there is little force on the particle when close to the centre, but when ejected outward, it becomes massive enough to be dragged back in!
I gather the pressure gradient is colossal at the center, decreasing outward, then drops off to a minimum before increasing somewhat and pointing inward. So that would seem to be consistent with a picture of a proton's interior as resembling a spherical fountain of ejected particles, initially swelling in mass during their outward (possibly arching) trajectory, but then declining in mass and being hauled back in to be re-absorbed by the black holes.
This also seems consistent with collision experiments which seem to find quarks of all kinds of masses. It simply depends on the energy of the colliding particle how far it can pierce the interior of the proton before meeting a quark, on its way outward or back.
My pet meta-theory about physics is that there is no end to the complexity there, even theoretically. You dig deeper, your theories start failing, you flail for a while and check closer and wait for technical progress, eventually tie things up with a new theory. Wash, rinse, repeat. It's funny how many people think that *this one time* we're close to hitting the real bottom. So let me just for kicks propose that there is no bottom.
The real black pill is that in a finite, computable universe, it is mathematically impossible for anyone embodied in that universe to fully understand the universe, because that universe contains the mind doing the understanding, + halting problem, etc.
That's also mind bending, but it's quite incompatible with my idea. A universe with no bottom is neither finite nor computable. Unbounded Kolmogorov complexity if you will.
What does “pressure” mean in this context? Presumably force per surface area. I’ve heard of total gravitational force as a criterion for black hole, but never force per surface area. Since we are talking about extremely tiny areas, I presume that whatever is going on there is interestingly different from black holes. Though it wouldn’t be surprising if things inside subatomic particles seem ridiculously “extreme” in some way compared to everything we are familiar with.
(I am not a physicist, but) I would be more willing to believe "some scientists did a measurement wrong" than "every proton contains one or more miniature black holes".
Note that, if we are assuming that the forces inside a proton are gravitational in nature, this implies that the forces are *significantly* weaker than our measurements would imply. Assuming general relativity because you've brought up black holes, the curvature of spacetime involved massively distorts the interior radius of the proton.
I have never calculated it for the interior of a proton; but for a hydrogen atom, assuming the various nuclear forces involved are relativistic (that is, they curve space-time) in nature, I arrived at an "interior diameter" of approximately one meter, with significantly weaker forces as they are spread out over a MUCH greater (internal) volume of space. (IIRC, this had the mass of a hydrogen atom within spitting distance of its contained vacuum energy.)
If such forces are relativistic in nature, such as would be implied by interpreting the particles as being comprised of singularities, all our measurements are massively distorted by the curvature of the forces themselves - so viewing protons as black holes is probably incorrect.
Electrons, however, are a different story, and mathematics were worked out ~80 years ago showing that they could indeed be black holes (or at least close cousins of black holes, with naked singularities) with particular characteristics; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_electron for some information.
The criterion for creating a black hole depends on the ratio of mass to radius, not on pressure, so the pressure inside a proton is largely irrelevant for calculating whether it could collapse into a black hole. Assuming non-quantum general relativity applies (which is not likely), the radius of a proton-mass black hole would be 2.5*10^-54 m, far less than the proton's radius of around 8*10^-16 m (it's vague because a proton does not have a clearly-defined surface).
I don't understand your explanation of how you think a black-hole based proton might work. Vacuum energy doesn't work like that. The acceleration due to gravity that a particle experiences does not depend on its mass. A model of a proton which already contains all the particles it might produce in a collision is not needed, as in quantum field theory, particle-antiparticle pairs can be created from energy anyway.
The biggest issue though is that that is far beyond the scale at which quantum gravity becomes important. It is very doubtful whether black holes of that size could even exist, and even if they do, trying to predict their behaviour based on the normal rules is largely futile, and speculating that they might be different from macroscopic black holes in precisely the ways you need to get a certain effect (that is not experimentally supported) with no theory behind it is extremely unlikely to yield correct answers.
Another point is that even if there are (unlikely) gravitational interactions that can create mini-black-holes within a proton, those interactions must be promptly reversed, because protons do not collapse into black holes. And furthermore, if mini-black-holes were created, we would expect baryon number to be unconserved sometimes as a black hole evaporated into opposite leptons, so protons would decay at a significant rate. And that is not observed.
I wonder if the following issue with "standardized exams" is found in countries other than my home country, India. Here various college admissions as well as civil service posts are decided via specific examinations, the most famous of those being the UPSC exam (for India's Civil/Administrative Service, AFAIK a variant of what was instituted by the British East India Company in the 19th century, `supposedly modeling them on the imperial examinations for the Qing bureaucracy) and IIT-JEE's to enter the Indian Institutes of Technology. Unlike SAT, these are single-admission-cluster exams: you take an exam for a bunch of positions in a bunch of places together, but you can take the same exam next year without your score this year haunting you the next.
On the surface, this looks meritocratic, but candidates goodhart it: they take a year or two off after their high school or bachelor's or master's, and spend all their time just preparing to crack the exam. This seems horribly unfair to students attempting it the first time: someone with much less talent can get ahead of you simply because they dedicate a year of their life to just preparing for and cracking the exam. This is even worse when they do it for a PhD position: the exams cannot be arbitrarily hard, so they can crack it, but once they enter the program they cannot keep up with the much sharper learning curve. It is not even clear if there are legal means to prohibit it, such as an "age penalty".
Are similar considerations relevant to debates on standardized testing in the US or in any other country?
I think you are conflating two issues here. (1) Is competitive standardized testing an accurate way of identifying the most intellectually gifted students? (compared to the alternatives), and (2) how to mitigate the unintended consequences (in terms of red queen races and the like). On (1) I am of the view that competitive standardized tests are the most accurate tool available to humankind (although obviously, some tests are better than others). Sure, they can be gamed, but less so than any of the other sorting mechanisms that have been tried. And it seems by now to be widely acknowledged that abandoning standardized testing (in the US) did seriously compromise the ability of elite US universities to admit students who could actually succeed at those institutions. Which is why most such institutions are re-instating standardized testing. On whether the IIT-JEE is an optimal standardized test, or whether some other test (whether SAT or something else) would be better, I have no opinion.
On (2), possibly part of the problem (particularly in India) is to do with a `tournament' structure for college admissions, with a very rapid dropoff in perceived desirability once you drop down from the IIT tier. I conjecture that given such a tournament structure, you would get analogous red queen race effects no matter what selection mechanism you chose (unless the selection mechanism you chose was pure lottery, but that would destroy the IITs as elite institutions).
I went to a prestigious academically selective high school (7-12) in Australia. When I went through in the 90s, the school was 80% white, which reasonably matched the demographics of the surrounding area. Nowadays, the school is 80% Asian.
What changed? People figured out that the entrance exam (which is really just an IQ test) is easily gameable; a moderately intelligent kid who has spent ages 3-12 doing two hours of shape-rotation puzzles every weekday will have an advantage over a very intelligent kid who has never seen one before. Since only Asian parents are willing to sacrifice that much of their childrens' childhood to get a small educational leg-up, they're the only ones filling the selective school entrance exam cram schools, and the only ones (apart from a small cadre of really brilliant kids) who get in.
The result is the same as you mentioned; a student body composed of moderately intelligent and incredibly hard-working kids who tend to excel at exams but flail in the real world once there's no longer a "right answer" you can memorise.
I don’t completely agree with the concept although I do agree with the outcome - medical school in Australia is full of fairly intelligent southeast Asian and Indian kids whose parents wanted it for them badly. They all do extra curricular stuff as kids and tutoring on weekends. Most of these kids, in my experience, go on to be reasonably competent doctors. They have successfully demonstrated that they have a modicum of talent and a tremendous amount of grit. Isn’t that what we need to succeed in any field?
I guess you could argue that they don’t truly love their job, they’re only doing it because their parents made them. But who among us “truly loves their job?” If I ask my Asian colleagues this, they laugh at me - it’s a very Western concept.
You could also argue that they are learning blind repetition rather than truly independent thought, but again, the need for creative work is just not that high. Artists, even very talented, hard working ones, don’t command the same compensation as physicians, even lazy ones who just go to work to punch their time cards. This seems to me like an important economic revealed preference about which one society needs more.
This is what I had always assumed about the SAT scores in the US: basically I interpreted/misinterpreted Razib Khan as suggesting something along the lines of what you say, but haven't seen this point discussed much by those western IQ theorists who glibly claim "East Asians have higher IQ than whites". So makes sense to hear this, even if in the context of Australia rather than the US.
But what happens in India is worse: they are burning not only their childhood, but also one precious year of what could have been a productive life. For IIT's this may work out *relatively* okay -- even someone who clears it with poor grades has decent career options -- but doing this for PhD's is much worse: not only are most PhD's worthless anyway, it being especially so for those who aren't the very smartest, they often find themselves unable to even complete the program; all due to chasing the mirage of nominal prestige.
For the test-takers. But the test-creators face a different constraint: that of keeping away such test-takers, who ruin not only their own careers but also the chances of more deserving candidates. The challenge of creating a goodhart-proof test seems formidable.
In Denmark it is your exam scores from high school that determines which studies in which universities you can attend. Some of the most sought after (International Bussiness and Politics etc) require an almost ridicoulously high score. Still I think that relatively few people are burned out by the exams, mainly because the society is so relatively egalitarian that there is not the same drive as in the US or India to get into the very best studies.
Also, to avoid giving all the places to Goodharting robots, something like 5 to 10% of places are reserved for people taking a special test, whcih is made by the university itself, testing your actual skills for that line. For example, a person with an extreme talent for architecture, but not very high scores in math or literature could still try to get into architecture at university by taking an actual architecture. I think this is probably a good idea to have, though it is rather costly so you can't hand out all the places that way.
Interesting. Being "relatively egalitarian" in outlook seems possibly also one of the reasons why whites in the US don't (or so I suspect) goodhart SAT scores as much. I am not familiar with this 5-10% idea in the US or India. I have been in situations where I need to be part of a test-designing team (not at IITs), over the last several years, and our tests have so far failed to deter goodharting robots: solving our problems needs both knowledge of theory and creativity, and theory in some of these disciplines can "grow" on you over years, and make up quite a bit for the lack of creativity.
There's nothing unfair about the system you've described. The best people have a combination of high IQ and high productivity, not just IQ alone. So a system where you need to be smart _and_ study hard for years is better at weeding out people who are smart but don't have the motivation to be productive at boring tasks for years in a row.
But if the system is designed to take people who perform well with ordinary effort, and push them into performing excellently with extraordinary effort, then this stops working. Someone who needed extraordinary effort merely to perform well is going to be unable to keep up.
This isn't hypothetical, this is one of the reasons colleges look for "well-rounded" applicants. If you've been burning your life and personality in the moloch of test-prep, you won't be able to keep up with someone who did almost as well but never had to burn anything.
(The dark secret being that the fires of moloch are always available, and it can be tricky to get through academia without having sacrificed anything important. But there are some parts that are better off burned.)
But then isn't the solution to make an even harder test? If there are people who can do the existing test well without burning anything, then that means there could theoretically be an even harder test that would force even those people to study hard for it. If your goal is to filter out the mediocre, that would be the most surefire way to accomplish that.
No, I think that's a solution to a different problem, and if applied to this problem it leads to what's called "involution", the Red Queen's race that destroys childhood.
I do think all the re-norming should be reverted, and we should have SATs and GREs (and tests at every level) that are so hard that virtually no one ever gets a perfect score, but that's to a) separate out the truly brilliant, and b) reinforce that the point of the test is to be a measure, not to be a lock that you need to turn yourself into a key for. (I've had classes like that, and they were brutal, but they also gave me a very clear idea of where I fit and what I needed to work on.)
But you still wind up with similar problems, where intense prep can help get a better score. In some ways, it might even be worse, if no one was ever able to say, "that's enough, I'm sure to get a 1600". It's... Here's a quote from Lois McMaster Bujold:
> All great human deeds both consume and transform their doers. Consider an athlete, or a scientist, or an artist, or an independent business creator. In the service of their goals they lay down time and energy and many other choices and pleasures; in return, they become most truly themselves. A false destiny may be spotted by the fact that it consumes without transforming, without giving back the enlarged self. Becoming a parent is one of these basic human transformational deeds. By this act, we change our fundamental relationship with the universe — if nothing else, we lose our place as the pinnacle and end-point of evolution, and become a mere link. The demands of motherhood especially consume the old self, and replace it with something new, often better and wiser, sometimes wearier or disillusioned, or tense and terrified, certainly more self-knowing, but never the same again.
Test prep is a false destiny, it burns your life to turn you into a key that fits a lock. Studying, learning, and practicing something real, that's a true destiny that makes you something better than you were. Does that make sense? It's hard to separate out sometimes, in basic education, but I think it becomes more clear later on.
Sundar Pichai got his B.S. from an IIT. So did Satya Nadella. What did they "burn" in the process? The system is designed to select for the best of the best in both IQ and ability to focus, it doesn't care about those who lack either characteristic.
Sure, there's a billion people in India so IIT can use whatever selection scheme it likes and it'll probably still get a bunch of really smart students. And if you then look at the most successful handful of graduates then yes, they're probably very successful indeed.
If we both spend a year studying for the exam, but one of us has to also work full-time job during that year and the other doesn't, it makes a big difference.
Well, same applies even if you're forced to take the exam at 18: rich kids live near their school, have A/C, zero distraction environments, etc. Poor kids have long commutes to school, no A/C, loud environments, etc.
Moreover there wouldn't be the massive waste of human potential that you get by taking millions of brilliant 18 year olds and forcing them to waste a year cramming some bullshit.
This is just a question of how narrow a sliver of society we want to describe as "brilliant". Feel free to replace "brilliant" with "very slightly below brilliant but still very smart" if you like.
It's not sufficient to argue that the test doesn't correlate perfectly with merit, you need to argue that it does so worse than some other option. It seems to me that it correlates a lot better with (intellectual) merit than the `holistic' admissions elite American universities follow. (Which is not to say that elite American universities are worse by any means - they have considerable other advantages which enable them to be more `elite' despite employing a less accurate admissions filter).
It is not a binary of either having just a particular test or having a "holistic" admission. For instance, clearly some tests are better than others, and one can advocate for tests, and still press for more meritocratic versions of those. I haven't understood why exactly SAT/GRE/... have this monopoly; have they attempted to move it away from Goodharting robots?
Also, even if the other options we can think of are poorer, it makes sense to be loud and explicit in understanding the limitations of the present approach, to just be on alert for better options that might surface in a "bottom up" manner. Not everyone who talks about the limitations of democracy is automatically calling for dictatorship.
It's not clear to me that SAT/GRE are any less vulnerable to Goodharting than IIT/JEE (I genuinely have no idea, maybe they are less vulnerable, maybe more), but I think the bigger driver is that the `plan B' options are better. US society isn't `Ivy-plus or bust' in the same sense as Indian society is `IIT or bust.' You can just go to your state flagship and still have an excellent change at the good life.
Also: can you quantify how vulnerable you believe the test is to Goodharting? Presumably a total idiot can't ace them no matter how much coaching he does, and someone sufficiently brilliant can ace them without any prep whatsoever. How much of an edge does 1 week of prep get you vs 1 year? Is it 1% in 1 week, 5% in a year? 4% in one week, 5% in a year? Even if spending a year instead of a week gets you `only' an extra 1% edge, if the stakes are sufficiently high people will do it.
Didn't Britain pioneer meritocracy? I know there was an argument against it, that once meritocrats were selected into the civil service they would agitate for more to do (which did wind up happening).
Going by 19th century fiction, cramming for the Civil Service entrance exam was a good old British tradition; Professor Moriarty, in the Sherlock Holmes stories, has a day job as an "army coach" (that is, preparing young men for exams to become officers).
I think the problem of grinds and private colleges and repeat exams to get better marks is prevalent wherever you go.
They introduced it in India well before Sherlock Holmes was written: it was introduced by the British East India company, which ruled before the British crown took over around 1857. The claim I have read is that the East India Company took the idea from China, namely the imperial exams for the Qing bureaucracy.
One of my hot takes is that genuine meritocracy took root in the west because even slightly more than a century ago it was possible to directly accomplish great things without cram-routines. Michael Faraday, one of the greatest ever, was an apprentice with a book-binder, and directly shifted to high level research with Humphrey Davy. As more and more of the low-hanging fruit was exhausted, structured education became more of a necessity, with the downside of being prone to goodharting. Outside the west, exposure to modern science and structured education entered almost simultaneously, so perhaps they had lesser amounts of goodharting-free development of overall societal consciousness. This is why I feel a bit ambivalent about the reforms of Vannevar Bush: on one hand, his view of scientific development was increasingly necessitated as low-hanging fruits were exhausted, but they also perhaps conduced to goodharting at various levels and ultimately even to today's bloated university system, corroding some of the subtle advantages that had come to abide in the occidental soul.
There are some concerns about that in the US, but the SATs are basically an IQ test so the benefit to prepping for them is relatively small. There's still some advantage to the more privileged, but probably less than any other admissions metric we've been able to find so the SAT seems to be winning out so far.
To give a bit more context for where I'm coming from - getting into medical school in Australia is determined by a combination of 1) your grades 2) an interview process and 3) a standardised test which is largely an IQ test.
In my case, I got in largely on the strength of my test score (I'm Caucasian) while my partner who is Southeast Asian put much more effort into grades/interview prep. Our personalities are different and we have become different types of doctors, but she is more conscientious than me and more emotionally attuned, which IMO more than makes up for less analytical intelligence (supposedly)
So sure, it makes a difference, but to what extent is "willingness to prep" a proxy for conscientiousness/grit? And isn't that attribute at least as important to success as IQ?
Perhaps in some professions it might not make a difference. But for others it does. Those who start a PhD after taking a year off for preparation tend to do pathetically in my anecdotal samples, which are the motivation for my original comment. They often have to quit the PhD program, which means that the entire plan was wasted.
As an Australian, I dispute that it makes a large difference. I think his point is that the prepping stuff is more prevalent in some cultures, and those cultures do relatively well. This is hardly surprising, assuming that you agree that factors beyond native intelligence play at least some role
Hi everyone, I’m doing a story for the podcast about advanced psychiatric directives, and am looking for people willing to talk about their directives, their experiences with how they were honored or ignored, or if you’re a clinician, any experience you have with them. I’m easy to find at gmail hiphination.
So the astral codex exention (the new one which re-works the comments) is showing me one single comment:
Comments have been filtered out by the Astral Codex Eleven extension. If it works correctly, this comment should soon be replaced by the real comment thread. If not, try reloading the page.
I don't know what "soon" means, but it is, for me, more than a minute or two, and reloading the page doesn't seem to change this outcome. It's easy to turn off and get the native version of the comments, but this should probably be fixed. I was enjoying the noticeably faster comment loading before this, but that requires that the comments actually load.
So I recently finished reading "Catching Fire", by Richard Wrangham. A very interesting book, recommended. A major premise of the book is that cooking allowed us to get more calories out of food. And then thinking about all the obesity we now see, could part of the extra pounds we are putting on be because we are able to get more calories out of the food we are eating? All our processed foods make more calories available for us to absorb. And we enjoy the taste of processed foods because there is a signal in them that more calories will be available. I know this isn't as sexy as, "it's Lithium" or microplastics, but it seems like a hypothesis that someone could look into, (yeah sure, someone probably already has.). Did 'food science' take off in the 1960's- 70's. Maybe we can blame this on Nixon too. :^) https://biocomplexity.virginia.edu/news/lasting-influence-1969-white-house-conference-food-nutrition-and-health
Did the book make a comment on the protein leverage hypothesis? That is, that we measure satiety by protein intake, so if a food is low in protein but high in (say) carbs, we will eat more than we actually need as far as energy is concerned, whereas if we have a high-protein diet we will eat less overall because our protein threshold is met early. I believe this holds true in animal food intakes too.
Yeah, the obesity epidemic is a predictable consequence of food production becoming optimised for taste, price and durability while ignoring health value. Call it "hyper processed, hyper palatable foods" or whatever you like - the simple fact is that food companies have gotten increasingly better at exploiting our primitive reflexes and selling us cheap stuff that tastes good and is awful. The way out of it is really straightforward, too - ignore all that crap and eat real food optimised for health. Nestle, Kraft and McDonalds don't control your dinner plate.
Without comment on the specific hypothesis here, I've thought for a long time that the "calories-in-calories-out" people have flagrantly failed to measure excrement.
Unless you try to burn your shit in a calorimeter and it won't catch fire, you're excreting calories. Two people can eat exactly the same things, but unless their shit is collected and analyzed, we won't know what their body is actually getting from it.
This comes from sharing bathrooms with people of various body sizes, and noticing over time (via occasional mistakes) that their shit looks and smells nothing like mine.
It strikes me that a rationalist group house would be a great place to test this. Lots of people who can listen impassively to normatively-repulsive ideas, and put aside some irrational embarrassment for the greater good of science.
According the Wrangham in the book there are a bunch of calories taken up by bacteria in the large intestine that never make it into our bodies. So that measuring calories in our shit doesn't tell the whole story.
If the bacteria in your gut are in steady state and aren't on average gaining mass, then I don't think you can be continuously storing more calories within the bacteria in your gut. The bacteria can burn calories, but that would produce heat and would show up if you put the person in a calorimeter. You should be able to get a good measurements for research if you can get tests subjects willing to stay in a calorimeter for an extended duration and also measure calories in their excretions.
Huh, I hadn't thought of that. Still, they've got to do something with the fuel they eat - either making by-products, some of which may be excreted, or reproducing and dying and excreting the remains of the dead. I suppose it's possible that all the products of their life cycle get re-absorbed, but my sense of smell suggests that *something* gets excreted.
Thanks for the reminder to keep an open mind, and not assume a simplified model. Which is what I was trying to do in the first place, but clearly not well enough. :-)
I think this is due to people having different gut microbiomes. Nothing to do with calorie level - that doesn't affect smell. What you've noticed is that obese people tend to have unhealthy gut microbiomes (low Bifidobacteria?)
That's not the only problem with CICO. Both inputs and outputs can only be estimated at best. You can tell what you eat, but not how much energy your body absorbs from it, because that depends on idiosyncratic biology. And you certainly can't tell how much energy your body is using - you can measure exercise and guess, but you're probably not measuring air temperature, let alone fidgeting or energy spent on internal processes, etc.
You might as well argue that obesity is just a matter of "atoms in, atoms out". Just like "calories in, calories out", it's trivially true and yet utterly useless for practical purposes.
And yet it's not useless, it's a perfectly good way to think about things for actual practical purposes. If you want to lose weight you figure out how many calories you're consuming and then reduce it. And then optionally, you figure out how many calories you're burning and increase it. You don't need especially accurate estimates, since you're probably aiming for a deficit of 25 to 30%, which is usually more than enough to make up for the error bars due to all the effects you mentioned. And if it's not, you just reduce your calorie consumption again.
But we could start, at least! Have some people all eat the same thing at the same time, and record what happens to it. Or forget the quantity, just measure what goes in and out, and see how it stacks up across people.
That'd at least give us the data to ask the next round of questions. Right now, we don't even know what to focus on.
On the other hand, if undigested calories are going to explain the difference between thin and fat people, then we'd need to be talking a difference of at least hundreds of calories per day. And the amount of poop produced by a human is only 100-200 grams. So if skinny people are pooping out their calories then their turds would need to be pretty calorie-dense, like two calories per gram, which is comparable to, say, ice cream.
(Also, calories extractable by burning and calories extractable by the human digestive system are different; e.g. very few animals can digest wood.)
There was a tradition to build outhoses over pigs' premises. The pigs would get fat cheaply by eating human feces, so there must have been nutritional value in that shit.
Many things have changed, but it's not what you think. The mechanisms are subtle, and it sounds as though you may be primed to dismiss anything that might be 'sexy'.
There’s some evidence that we eat too many sugars - that’s it is high sugar levels at any one time that causes fat retention or conversion.
The same calories over the same amount of time without these blood sugar spikes would - this theory goes - not cause the same amount of fat retention.
Having seen the keto diet work extraordinary well on a friend of mine, this might be true and it might explain why some people are more susceptible than others - if bodies react differently to blood sugar levels, and/or blood sugar levels spike more readily for some.
Cheap carbs could be a culprit here. White bread etc.
I suspect it's partly this, plus gut flora that self-select for sugars.
But I also think think there's something to do with portion size and grazing vs. fixed meals.
One time after a 3-day fast, I tried eating a large meal, and it literally wouldn't fit. I had to stop about 2/3rds through, and for hours afterward I felt a bizarre, almost-gagging feeling that I can only describe as my stomach backing up into my esophagus. I think my stomach literally shrinks and expands, based on what I've eaten in the previous few days.
Not saying that this is what keeps people there, but I do think it's a gateway.
I agree with the recommendation - it's an extremely interesting argument, and quite persuasive.
One corollary is that, evolutionarily speaking and given how we've changed our environment, human bodies today have surplus design space which could allow even smaller guts, repurposing that energy to other functions - perhaps even more more brainpower. Let the mutations begin!
Yeah I guess I'm trying to answer, why we do that. And this idea is that we can get more calories out of a meal than we did in the past... but we haven't developed the signals to tell us to eat less at that meal. So it's not just the calories in the food, but how easy we can get them out and into our bodies.
I mean, it seems inevitable that it's some combination of "we eat and digest too many calories" and "we don't burn enough calories." The interesting question is what causes us to keep eating/digesting more calories than we burn? That could be availability of food everywhere, processed foods making us hungry again faster, cultural stuff, gut bacteria, some other environmental thing, etc. It could be sedentary lifestyles, lack of natural light, all sorts of stuff.
OK so my stupid idea is that we get more out of the food. So take cooking. If you eat raw carrots you need (say) 10 to met your needs, but with cooking you get more calories out of each carrot and now need only 5. And if you eat 10 like you did in the past... well you get fat. I'm saying the same could be happening with more processed food.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to devise an idea for a story set somewhere one wouldn't expect such a story. For example: a bitter artistic dispute in a mine, a fistfight in a Wall Street boardroom, or a love affair in a WWII bomber.
Adaptation of Fiddler on the Roof in an artist commune in a trendy Brooklyn neighborhood (in the end instead of the Tsar kicking them out, something happens to make them lose their rent-controlled apartments and they move somewhere with cheaper housing).
Also, this one isn't my idea, but Theft of Fire is a bottle episode set in in a space-age heist novel.
A locked room murder mystery in the middle of a crowded police station. An inspiring team work underdog come back story involving a group of elite soldiers on an ethically questionable mission. An animal house style hazing of new comers plus wild party life story about a group of incoming congressional representatives.
Best place to look for algo people to hear out a complex biology problem. I'm looking to chat with someone about how to go about ML approaches for a unique* computational biology problem I have. It can be short - I have the background to do most of my own reading but need for pointers where to go read. Prefer by zoom/in person if you're in Boston than text. Hmu here or MIT edu email, reuvenf
*Probably not, but I haven't seen off-the-shelf solutions for it
Research seems to agree that prevalence of myopia in children has increased. There also seems to be an agreement that not spending enough time outdoors increases myopia risk.
Sorry for the vagueness, correct me if I'm wrong.
Further there seem to be two theories(?) as to the cause. First is what I've dubbed "near work". Focusing your eyes near due to indoors instead of far in outdoors. Then there is the amount of light, which is significantly less indoors. The claim is that the eyes of children grow depthwise, and for this growth to stop at an optimal time, enough visible spectrum light is needed (keyword: emmetropization).
I've seen it claimed that the near work theory is older and amount of light is newer but to be honest I have no idea myself.
Separately, there are also recommendations for children to wear sunglasses since their eyes are more vulnerable to UV light.
Here's my question that keeps bothering me: by my layman logic wouldn't this mean children should wear clear UV protective sunglasses?
I've only seen answers along the lines of "sunglasses are fine, the light level outdoors still crosses the threshold of reducing myopia risk". But is there any reason not to use clear UV glasses?
Yeah, I've heard the "short focus" theory and the "sunlight" theory, and I wish we could do some experiments. Maybe tell some kids that they can only read books or look at screens if they're outside during the day. Or keep some kids indoors but only allow reading and screens if they're at least 20 feet away.
Wired had a good story on this, Taiwan has basically been doing an country wide experiment on schoolchildren with good results: trying to get kids outside more hours of the day, doing myopia screenings on preschoolers to see if they're developing myopia, and prescribing them atropine (which makes your pupil dilate) if they are.
Maybe there is some selection effect over the last couple of hundred years or so in military medical checks for young recruits, with the short-sighted ones being weeded out as unfit for combat duty, so non-myopic recruits are more likely to be signed up and die in combat before having offspring.
If so then one would expect a concomitant increase in flat feet among children, as well as myopia.
Isn’t myopia increasing at a faster rate than you would expect, even if every single military death was from the top end of the eyesight distribution? Very few generations have even 10% of the population die in military service.
So I am getting a consensus that it's an opinion, maybe not popular, but the speaker is tired of going with the conventional wisdom. A very DNGAF moment. As the Irish say, "...and you can take that, any way you like."
Based, when originally used by right-wingers, means doing or saying something in line with anti-liberal ideology, especially something anti-feminist, anti-jewish or something anti-"anti-racist". It is importantly not something just 'conservative' - it has to be something genuinely controversial. So for example, saying that women shouldn't be able to vote is based.
Then, it became used in a more joking way to describe more outlandish or absurd things, like a news story of a white florida man slapping a black child in a walmart for being too noisy is "based".
Then it permeated into the mainstream, and essentially means cool, in the sense of the opposite of 'cringe'. But this is far removed from the original CW meaning.
I always figured it came from "fact-based," and meant something like "deeply true." If a claim is "based," it isn't just true, it is true and important and rooted in fundamental facts about how things are and probably always will be.
This is the correct answer, but it's interesting to see how many people have concocted alternative etymologies in their heads.
The thing missing from the knowyourmeme article is how exactly it turned from a rap thing into a right wing thing; if I recall correctly then it's via the "Thank You Based God" meme... at some point in 2016 Trump memers started applying it to Trump himself, and from this point "based" slowly became an adjective for anything that Trump supporters enjoyed.
Of course the true history of the 2016 election can never be written, because /r/the_donald has been deleted, an act of historical vandalism comparable to throwing out all copies of the Federalist Papers.
Gone isn't always gone forever. Companies make backups of their data all the time. It's entirely possible that if scholars asked for it once Trump is out of public life, Reddit could and would recreate a copy for them.
I'm not sure. I don't see it enough in the wild to really get it.
My preferred definition is something like: this person has derived their philosophy of life from the ground up, and they are thus not only immune to being swayed by fallacious-but-superficially-pleasing arguments, but also are able to rapidly compose pithy rebuttals that strike at the core of said fallacies.
I don't think that's what is actually meant, but it feels like what it *should* mean :-)
I think the "ideal "definition is something like "a statement that is true to the nature of the speaker, and unbothered by social norms and consequences". It's often used as "agrees with me" (as stated in another comment), or just "not woke".
If you extend "not woke" to "not politically correct" (accounting for the fact that political correctness is nowadays mostly associated with "wokeness"), then you can find a parallel between the third and first definition.
"This statement is based." = "This statement is correct, and reflects well on the person saying it." Both left and right praise their own side as "based".
In CW usage it was originally right wing and today is still almost exclusively right wing.
And what you said STILL isn't correct even when a right-winger is saying it to another right-winger. It's not enough for something to be correct - it ideally has to be something that cuts against sacred liberal beliefs. Someone might think the statement "the government should lower income taxes" is correct, but it's definitely not based. Based is more like "women shouldn't be allowed to vote" or "Trayvon Martin had it coming".
It's been very diluted over the years, but the platonic based thing HAS to be right-wing and edgy.
Richard Feynman, in an interview recorded in 1981 with BBC Horizon, says about the social sciences:
"Social science is an example of a science which is not a science; they don’t do [things] scientifically, they follow the forms-or you gather data, you do so-and-so and so forth but they don’t get any laws, they haven’t found out anything. They haven’t got anywhere yet - maybe some day they will, but it’s not very well developed, but what happens is on an even more mundane level. We get experts on everything that sound like they’re sort of scientific experts. They’re not scientific, they sit at a typewriter and they make up something like, oh, food grown with, er, fertilizer that’s organic is better for you than food grown with fertilizer that’s inorganic-may be true, may not be true, but it hasn’t been demonstrated one way or the other. But they’ll sit there on the typewriter and make up all this stuff as if it’s science and then become an expert on foods, organic foods and so on. There’s all kinds of myths and pseudoscience all over the place. I may be quite wrong, maybe they do know all these things, but I don’t think I’m wrong. You see, I have the advantage of having found out how hard it is to get to really know something, how careful you have to be about checking the experiments, how easy it is to make mistakes and fool yourself. I know what it means to know something, and therefore I see how they get their information and I can’t believe that they know it, they haven’t done the work necessary, haven’t done the checks necessary, haven’t done the care necessary"
In the years since, have there been developments in psychology (say) or other social sciences that have "generated reliable knowledge that we can hold on to".
I note all the folk who like to loudly repeatedly proclaim that links between IQ, race and positive life outcomes are some of the best supported results in science are staying very quiet.
Economics, the "dismal science", for its part has improved reproducibility in research substantially since the aftermath of the 1st wave of neo-liberalism and it being perpetually derided by the left.
Social Sciences are all part philosophy, and part science. Despite issues with inconsistent rigor, I don't think it's fair to frame any as being devoid of science, and besides, the same criticisms can be leveled at nutrition science and all others relying on statistics that don't belong to social science (and even the hard sciences, really... it's a salient issue that is shaking trust in all of Science). Politicization exacerbates those problems.
At the end of the day, you can approach real-world data and statistics in a scientific manner, or not. If Big Data was useless or imaginary it wouldn't be strongly leveraged by entire industries. The detractors know and agree with this, but lean on motte-and-bailey arguments framing all of a SC (usually, Economics) as pure philosophy. Mind you, not altogether surprising that worldviews that don't rely on supportive data and usually undermined by a field of study will deride that field of study.
Econ is an interesting case. You could say it has a few laws, like "demand slopes downward." Half of the discipline derives new theories from that law, arguably overextending it. The other half tries to come up with new theories to displace it that better account for the special conditions where it does not hold, often failing to replicate. It still holds in the general case and you go out of business selling hamburgers for a million dollars each. Its imprecision on local scales is a continual irritant though.
"Its imprecision on local scales is a continual irritant though."
That's true of physics too. Try to do hydrodynamics fast enough to predict the whorls of a turbulent flow as it happens, and you'll soon curse whoever claimed physics was a rigorous science with high predictive power.
> Economics, the "dismal science", for its part has improved reproducibility in research substantially since the aftermath of the 1st wave of neo-liberalism and it being perpetually derided by the left.
Has it? economics is probably the better of the social sciences, but it’s still nothing close to a science.
I would argue that with the rise of the term "replication crysis", it has become common knowledge that psychology (and even medicine) and anything to the soft side of it have a problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
I think human beings are just messy and complicated, even more so than the strong interaction. For a variety of ethical and practical reasons, the usual approach to start out with billions of identical humans, ~~accelerate them to near the speed of light~~ and have them interact with each other so that you get statistically robust results does not work.
Academic incentive landscapes do not help here, of course. Being paranoid about getting your results right, spending time to publish studies which confirm the null hypothesis even if that is a very unsexy result (and might anger your colleagues whose results you did not reproduce) and being really restrained about the interpretation of your results ("Implicit association measures something" vs "it is racism!") are all behaviors which seem negatively correlated with getting tenure.
Yeah this is why I'm a little more charitable towards the social sciences than a lot of people here seem to be. There's certainly a lot of problems with it and many of those problems are, in fact, due to laziness/bad incentives/etc., but fundamentally the study of human beings and human behavior is just incredibly complicated, so I think a greater degree of error and less robust findings in such fields are basically inevitable.
Back to the main question, a couple of examples I can think of off the top of my head are universal grammar (linguistics) and supply and demand (economics); psychology is harder but I think things like cognitive developmental theory and Pavlovian conditioning feel pretty robust.
Edit: oh I missed the part of the question that specified "in the years since"; in that case I'm not sure.
Yeah, I think these critiques of the social sciences, if you boil them down, amount to "these things are really difficult to study and they haven't made much progress and therefore they aren't science". I personally don't agree with, nor do I think many other people would, that science should be restricted only to those things that are easy to study.
Humans and the systems they inhabit are some of the most complex, difficult things to study in the universe. Even if we _didn't_ have ethical constraints on methodology, making real progress would be a herculean task. This doesn't mean that studying them isn't science, it just means that we always need to be careful in trusting anything we think we understand about these systems.
Relative to studying humans and the systems they inhabit, it's a cakewalk. And I don't actually believe that the social sciences are, in a systematic way, failing to follow the scientific method. (edit2, I'm excluding cases of fraud etc., which are admittedly rampant, but I think that's a consequence of how hard it is to get real results without fraud. The honest brokers in social science are, for the most part, following the scientific method and failing to get good results because of how difficult and complex the subject is + the moral restraints on methodology)
-edit- to be clear, _obtaining the data_ in modern physics is much harder, requiring massive, high tech devices like super colliders. The data, once obtained, is _orders of magnitude_ simpler and easier to understand than the complex, self referential, ever changing data of the human systems. Physics is a stable target where the thing you are trying to understand isn't changing. Social sciences are not.
> Relative to studying humans and the systems they inhabit, it's a cakewalk.
Not right now. What you are saying is that if this system were as scientific as physics it would be more difficult, but it doesn’t reach that level. So it isn’t.
> And I don't actually believe that the social sciences are, in a systematic way, failing to follow the scientific method
If they were following the scientific method they would look entirely different.
Feynman mentions the cargo cult for a reason. The believers were trying a sort of science - building what they thought was what brought in the cargo.
From wiki.
“ Their destination is a clearing in the forest that looks like a landing strip. But the only airplane present is a full-size wooden replica of a light aircraft. On one side of the strip lies a control tower made of bamboo. On the other sits a satellite dish built of mud and straw. Undeterred by the apparent lack of any actual aviation technology, some of the men light torches and place them alongside the runway. Others use flags to wave landing signals. Everyone raises their gaze to the sky in anticipation.
They wait. But the planes never come.”
That’s a group trying their best, with their understanding of what was going on. Its a lot a lot more rational than just praying.
Further, they’ve seen actual science and they are trying to replicate it, it’s just that they have no understanding of how planes fly, how satellites work, or really what landing strips are for.
If they had any practical science on that island, maybe some simple astronomical understanding of the calendar, like the sun and moon cycles as many even Stone Age societies did, the cargo cultists could say to the practical “scientists“ that what the cargo cult was doing was far more advanced than looking at the sky and calculating the next solstice.
Except it isn’t because they didn’t know what was going on at all.
I remember arguing that this was nonsense in the Eighties, and I still think the same. (I equally think that there is no need to balance the consumption of different nutrients in the same meal - or in the same day.)
I would see it as another good argument for eating a good variety of different foods, rather than for trying to avoid any specific combination. Eating berries with bananas won't kill you, at worst it will neutralise some small part of the nutritional benefit of the berries; which is fine as long as I eat berries *without* bananas at some point too. Or as long as I eat one of the many other foods that contains flavanols.
Keeping up with, and evaluating, a zillion different nutritional studies to figure out possibly-bogus rules like "don't combine berries with bananas" sounds like a waste of time. And besides, berries with bananas taste great.
Sure but not for nutritional reasons. I've had ongoing chronic stomach issues all over the place and sometimes it's really hard to pin down trigger foods. I've come to the conclusion that some foods when eaten separately, cause misery when eaten together. I can have caffeinated coffee OR a pastry but not both. I can't eat chicken noodle soup even though any individual ingredient in the soup doesn't give me problems. I think it's a gluten thing but it's only activated sometimes.
Specific antagonistic reactions are of course possible (there are supposedly proven antagonistic reaction between certain foods with certain drugs), but I really doubt that any of the ones claimed have been proven (null hypothesis of no negative interaction rejected).
Thought experiment that I think I heard on a podcast but can't source to properly credit:
You're out walking your beloved pet.
(Not generic second-person "you," but the actual *you,* the "individual-you-reading-this-you", and not a hypothetical beloved pet, but your *actual* pet, the one that's living with you right now. If you don't currently have a living pet, imagine your passed beloved pet.)
A limousine with blacked-out windows pulls up beside you. A nondescript man in a nondescript suit climbs out of the front seat with an envelope.
"Hello," he says. "My employer, who will remain anonymous, would like to purchase your beloved pet. This envelope contains a legally-binding sales transfer. Upon signing it, $1,000,000 will instantly be deposited into an account of your choosing."
"This sounds like a scam," you probably say.
"I assure you, it is not, and here is my proof." The nondescript man shows you whatever it is that would convince *you,* the real person reading this, that this is indeed a legitimate offer from an unknowable source. (1)
"Uh, why does your employer want my beloved pet?" You probably ask.
"My employer will not share that information."
"But what is your employer going to do with my beloved pet?" You probably try to insist.
"My employer will not share that information. My employer simply wants your pet and is willing to pay for it. You have two minutes to make a decision and hand me the leash/carrier/lead rope/tank."
You stare down at your beloved pet.
What do you - seriously, *you,* the person reading this, with your particular finances and goals and obligations - do?
Follow ups:
If no to $1,000,000, what about $10,000,000? $100,000,000? $2,000,000,000? More?
If yes to $1,000,000, what about $500,000? $50,000? $10,000?
What if it's not your own pet, but the pet of a loved one (spouse, family member, best friend, etc) who is currently in your care?
What if it's not your pet, or a loved one's pet, but a stranger's loose pet you just caught, wearing pet identification tags?
_____
(1) In other words, please just accept the conditions of the hypothetical and refrain from attempting to Kobayashi Maru it.
I wouldn't even sell *the lint in my pocket* under those conditions. It's near guaranteed to be a trap or scam of some sort, and nothing they say could convince me otherwise. Pre-comitting to avoid making high stakes decisions on the spot is one of the best defences you can have against scams.
Yes, of course, in real-real life, maximal skepticism and a refusal to engage would be the correct strategy. That would of course be my response, too.
But I'm going to argue that by criticizing the plausibility of the hypothetical, you are Kobayashi Maru-ing your way out of engaging with it. "The hypothetical is so implausible the only rational option if it were real would be to not engage with it at all!"
Well, yeah, sure.
Of course.
Now what?
Obviously no one is required to engage this hypothetical, but there was a reason I tried to preemptively cut off objections to the plausibility of the hypothetical's details.
The problem is that any question like this is inherently informed by people's assumptions about the world posited in the question. So if you make the assumptions utterly implausible, you're not going to get a meaningful response. You'll just get a battle between which parts of the premise people ignore when they try to extrapolate their intuition. (This tends to be a general problem with trolleyology as well.)
It's a bit like asking, "what would you do if Bhutan invaded the United States?" In order for that to happen, the world would have to be so different than the present day that there's nothing meaningful that could be said about it. You'd just have people guessing random althist fanfics and then getting mad when the fanfic in their head doesn't match the fanfic in someone else's head.
Or to put it in rationalist terms, conditioning on infinitesimal probabilities does weird things.
A while ago I decided to stop entertaining these sorts of hypotheticals. If you want to put the money on the table then I'll make a decision.
If I don't take some arbitrarily large money I'm a fool, if I take the money I'm a heartless jerk. Making the decision in the hypothetical case gives me some of the shame without any of the benefit.
If I'm going to wear the shame of being the sort of person who'll sell his beloved pet for a million dollars, then I want more than zero dollars in exchange.
I think the hypothetical has value in that it provides an opportunity to assess (and perhaps adjust) one's moral assumptions, and to discuss it with people.
If you don't find an intrinsic value in that, it's fine!
I've never been able to handle a pet, so automatic 'yes' to selling my pet under all circumstances. You want to pay $1,000,000 for an unwatered Chia pet, it's all yours.
Family member's pets depend on the family members. They're all extremely animal-loving, but half the family is richer than the other half by multiple orders of magnitude. And they've also all lost about a dozen pets apiece in my lifetime. The poor side, I would sell their pets for $10,000 apiece every time. The rich ones, depends on the pet. Their current beloved pet is 15 and was on the verge of death last year (as in they thought they'd have to put it down last year). I'd sell that one, I wouldn't sell a theoretical new pet, they don't need the money.
Can't sell a stranger's pet. I don't care how much money the state paid the family with the dog the cops shot, it's not a fair trade.
Of course, this guy's probably not actually after the pet itself, they're trying to pull my DNA from its fur and biologically grow a new puppet me to take over my life. So first purchase with the money is a new shotgun with which to fight my inevitable evil clone.
This envelope obviously consigns me to eternal unpleasant servitude in Hell, Faerie, or Santa's Workshop. But supposing I don't believe in such things? The fact that this is happening at all just shifted my priors.
I would sell in a heartbeat, even if I knew they were going to throw my cat in a woodchipper. As "beloved" as my cat is, I love my wife and children a heckuva lot more and they could use the cash.
Me, right now, I think I'd go for it. Me of a few decades ago, I'd hold out more. There's a curve based on the amount of money, and the projected lifespan of my pet. (And how easy the pet is to live with, frankly - I can can care for them while simultaneously recognizing that the relationship is difficult and we might be better off in separate households.)
Forgetting utilitarian concerns about people on the other side of the planet, I know and love humans whose lives could be improved with strings-free $1M, even after taxes. (I wouldn't tell those people about trading my pet, of course - that black mark stays on my own soul.)
$1M, either with taxes or without, seems like the rough ballpark for a hard choice. $100K is too little, and $10M seems like a much easier choice.
For someone else in my care, I'd hesitate more. The money would go to them, somehow, and I'd lie about the pet, but I think my decision would also involve my estimate of their need. (If they were, say, delaying having children due to financial worries, that would count.)
For a stranger... That's a tough one. Probably not. There's the temptation to just keep the money, of course. But with an ID tag, I could probably locate the owner, and then anonymously drop off a bag containing cash and a note saying "Don't worry about Fido, he found a new home. Sorry." But ultimately, I don't think that's my decision to make for them.
Does it not bother you that the nondescript man refuses to say what his employer intends to do with, or to, your pet? And that didn't offer to prove to your satisfaction, the way he did with the legitimacy of the check, that your pet will be well cared for and not abused or killed?
"Bother" isn't quite the right word, but yes. I assume its fate won't be good.
I'm at a place in life where I'm re-calibrating my "meaning of life" to be the next generation, and the generation after that, etc., without the benefit of having children myself. I'm expendable. This isn't for me, this is for my nieces and nephews, and my first cousins once removed, and for any others that come along, and for their children and grandchildren.
In that case, I've got bad news for you about how much money a million dollars really is these days.
If it's ten million then I can see your point, although I guess it's kind of a blessing that poor fluffy can't understand that she is going to have to be tortured for the benefit of some future, no doubt ungrateful, relatives of yours.
Depends on the situation. $1M would be enough to fix a lot of real work-life balance problems, and provide some opportunities that aren't available right now. Paying for private schools and college would be nice, but that falls under the $10M category. For potential future generations, they can have a trickle-down effect; I'm not envisioning trust funds or anything like that.
Oh don't get me wrong, a million before-tax dollars would change my life in entirely positive ways. But it is not enough to meaningfully improve the lives of any of my relatives unless I gave it all away.
FWIW I agree with the other commenter somewhere in the thread, in that I would very much like to be given a million dollars but I would really really have to think about whether I would want to be given a billion. Given a ridiculously short time to make the decision, as in this thought experiment, I would probably default to no, even if it were a no-strings gift rather than the sale of a beloved pet.
Actually, no, I don't think I could go through with the lying part, so scratch the bit about someone in my care. Hm, it took 23 minutes to get there, that's not great.
So far most people have engaged with the conditions of the hypothetical in good faith! Nobody has been like, "yes, I give my let over for a billion dollars, but then I hire SEAL Team 6 to find this guy and rescue my pet!"
Nor have people been like, "what about the taxes?"
I was interpreting it more as an ethical trolley problem like question to get the value of a pet, so assumed for example that letting the motives of the buyer influence the value of the pet were not what you were looking for.
Something more along the lines of, rich relative just left you an inheritance that after tax is $X. Your pet needs urgent life saving surgery that costs $X. For what values of $X do you get the surgery.
The problem is that for many people, the question of whether they would sell a pet and how much for cannot be separated from the questions of who is buying it, why, and what is likely to happen to it afterwards, and for some others who may be more flexible, the requirement to ignore those other concerns nevertheless increases the price.
If businesses selling goods and services regularly price discriminate, and refuse to sell you their goods and services if they don't think they know enough about you to accurately price the transaction, I'd say it's very reasonable to do at least that much for an actual living animal, never mind one you care about.
Meanwhile, consider: where I live, pet shops won't sell me fish without first having me bring some of my aquarium water to them for testing. In many countries it is illegal to own just one guinea pig. Etc etc
"A million! You are most kind, dear sir. Uh, may I also interest your employer in this other pet that I have? And please don't hesitate to get in touch should your employer require anything else in the future."
This is so out of distribution of what normally happens that we might not have good intuitions of the trade offs involved
Maybe your cat has just swallowed a whole load of plutonium that the government is in the process of recovering. Your cat is a gonner. You either get a million dollars for your silence, or you die of radiation induced cancer from cuddling your cat.
Anything that far out of the ordinary exceeds my ability to evaluate its true implications. Hence I could not be sure of anything the person is claiming. Hard pass.
He only *claimed* one thing--that the offer is legitimate and the check won't bounce. And he didn't just claim it, he proved it to your satisfaction. Beyond that, he made no claims and indeed refused to answer your questions.
No, and the "no" gets stronger the larger the number of dollars gets. If someone's willing to pay me a million dollars for a dog, something very weird is going on and I don't want to be involved in the follow-on effects.
This feels more like a psych test than a thought experiment. Most comments seem to be picking up something of Nassim Taleb's 'fair coin' problem and refusing to take it seriously. That's one of the strength's of Newcomb's problem. Is this trying to isolate for human suspicions about human motivations? or about attachment to pets, purely?
I gotta level with you, I just heard the hypothetical on a podcast like 10 years ago and it really stuck with me. The more seriously I contemplated it, the more I tried to imagine the branching consequences on my actual life, the more compelling it felt. Which mystery and regret would I rather live with?
I've occasionally introduced it in group conversations, and, just like in this thread, it can sometimes deliver some really interesting insight into people's values, skepticism, priorities, etc. Or at least, insight into what they currently *think* their values/skepticism/priorities would be.
That's it. I'm not trying to do any secret research or anything like that.
I would definitely sell the dog for $100k or more. The logic is as follows:
1. By default, I presume its a scam or some sort of a hidden camera ploy. But you say its not, so lets move on.
2. If someone has $100k to drop on a dog, they're almost definitely quite rich. If they're rich, they likely value their comfortable life and don't want to go to prison. So they're highly unlikely to be a dog torturer.
3. Since they're doing the personal operation via a personal assistant and a driver, there's now at least 2 witnesses to the transaction. So if this rich person is a dog torturer, they're putting themselves up to a lot of risk for the sake of a very small reward, since it's a lot easier to just find strays on the street instead.
4. Following this logic, I'd be convinced that the dog will be fine and will not be tortured. If anything I expect the dog to have a better life than it currently does thanks to living with a rich person.
The crimes that rich people do fall into the following buckets:
1. Impulsive crimes. I.e. plenty of rich people were caught driving under the influence or starting a fight. But those types of crimes are not planned in advance.
2. Low grade crimes arranged behind closed doors. I.e. Epstein had parties where rich people slept with 17 year old girls. This is a crime in states where the age of consent is 18 but its not something completely horrendous like torture or murder. And those kinds of crimes are done in secrecy, not by approaching untrusted strangers in public while driving a huge limo.
3. Big crimes that have a big financial payout. Think: FTX/SBF or Theranos or Bernie Madoff. It's a huge risk if you get caught but also a huge reward if you don't. This obviously doesn't apply to OPs scenario.
The operation described would be a Big crime (animal torture) with zero financial payoff, requiring a long period of planning, with lots of employees and witnesses involved, with a pretty big chance of getting caught. So I would estimate a 99.9% chance of the dog not suffering as a result of my actions.
I'm not entirely sure precisely how to categorise the activity of pulling up to me in your limo and offering me a million bucks for my pet out of the blue, but "impulsive" certainly seems to fit. I don't understand why a rich guy deciding on the spot that they want to eat your cat in particular is something that would require a long period of planning with lots of employees to pull off. Limo pulled over, pet acquired, drive home, barbecue, enjoy.
Also, I feel like maybe rich people do in fact commit crimes that aren't on your list of crimes rich people commit. In this part of the world, off the top of my head, as a class they are known for dangerous driving (consistent, not one-off/impulsive, and public), paedophilia (behind closed doors, but when the scandals erupt it inevitably transpires that lots of people knew and kept quiet) and illegal fox hunts, the latter being actual animal torture that is well documented, that nothing is done about.
Rich people don't carry around an "envelope contains a legally-binding sales transfer. Upon signing it, $1,000,000 will instantly be deposited into an account of your choosing". It's clearly something pre-meditated and planned ahead.
I just watched a short documentary about the old, grand buildings of Cairo, Illinois that are sitting abandoned. If things continue the way they have been, those buildings will probably be lost in the future like all their brethren.
Here's an idea: the townspeople should sell them to Microsoft for $1 to be used as server farms, on the condition that the buildings be restored to their original condition (at least on the outside) and local people be hired to do the renovation work and all maintenance and groundskeeping going forward.
Anything wrong with this idea, or is it just a win-win no one has thought of before me?
I know you're just being flippant, but it's worth pointing out that many many people have tried to build a new Silicon Valley and failed. It's not easy to engineer these things by fiat.
There are plenty of places where you can buy a house for $1, with a bunch of strings attached (the ones I know about: various places in Italy and some remote Swiss villages). Not exactly many takers for those kinds of offers. Old buildings are maintenance nightmares. 10x so if you have to keep them intact to some sort of "cultural" standard.
I guess that the top priorites for data centers are access to cheap electricity, low need for cooling in the summer, and so on. There's also value in having them geographically spread out in such a way that large populations can be served with low round-trip times (depends on the type of work the servers do of course).
I do think that cities which were formerly thriving but are currently in decay might be good candidates on account of their decent infrastructure and low real estate costs.
Most of the expense of a server farm isn't a generic "building", it's all the wiring and air conditioning and properly strengthened floors and interconnections to the internet and to powerplants and employees to maintain it and the servers and whatnot.
All of that stuff is going to be way more costly to implement in Cairo, Illinois than not, and the cost of the building being 1 dollar is not going to compensate for that, especially not if you include the costs of restoring and maintaining the buildings in their original condition which any other server farm wouldn't have to do.
Putting cost-effectiveness aside (land values and the costs of building light industrial buildings aren’t a big deal in the US), they’d get a bit creepy and soulless like telephone exchanges are now.
Yea, this. Those buildings aren't all that big either.
Also, who's going to maintain the server farms? Cairo Illinois (which I've been to) is almost literally empty and you're going to have a very hard time persuading tech workers to relocate to there or near there.
Also Cairo Illinois is located in the flood zones of two of the world's largest rivers, hence is wholly dependent upon the maintenance of huge levees to keep out massive periodic floodwaters. And for various reasons the flood stages of those rivers are today less predictable and more extreme than they used to be. Hardly seems like the spot to rationally invest effort and money in locating electronics which need to reliably operate 24/7/365 in order to fulfill their purpose.
Maybe Microsoft does not want them. But making a standing offer to anyone for any thing is OK. Is there any indication that there is NOT already an implicit offer to sell?
> on the condition that the buildings be restored to their original condition (at least on the outside) and local people be hired to do the renovation work and all maintenance and groundskeeping going forward.
This is presumably expensive. But also, server farms tend to be highly optimised structures these days with temperatures, humidities, etc all carefully controlled. I'm not sure that's really compatible with old buildings, unless you simply keep the outside as a facade.
Not to say you couldn't find a new use for these buildings, but server farms might not be the best one.
I don't know much about the economics of server farms, but I doubt that minimizing the cost of land is the most important consideration in siting them. I would assume electricity, network interconnection, and availability of skilled labor for running/maintaining them are much bigger considerations.
Also, server farms are LOUD. Main street of your quaint small town is probably not an ideal location.
Don't let the title fool you. Yes, it is about irises, with photographs. But it's also about LLMs, including a poem about irises by ChatGPT, modeled after Wallace Stevens' "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." See, here's some paragraphs following that poem:
suppose one might ask whether or not that poem is a “real” poem and, if so, is it as good as a human could do. That question, after all, is on many people’s minds these days: Are they as good as us? Better perhaps? Will they replace us, displace us? (Annihilate us?)
Those particular questions aren’t on my mind at the moment. They don’t compute, if you will. I don’t know what they mean.
Ever since GPT-3 came out my position has been that these are strange beasts, not like anything we know. Not like us, but not like other machines either. It’s going to take a while to think through these things, to make arrangements, to arrive at a modus vivendi.
In one respect the most recent large language models ARE superior to any human: they can generate coherent text on a much wider range of subjects than anyone can. Some of that text, however, may be fabricated. But WE do that as well. Yet it’s not that breadth of capability that we find problematic, not as long as it doesn’t exceed human ability in this or that specialized respect.
How can we reconcile the altruism of EA (rational good-making) with that of a Mahayana Bodhisattva (to dedicate one’s life energies to the awakening of all beings)?
Some people took Mahayana Buddhism and ran with it until they got to holy wars and sword-point conversions, so by comparison, EA seems quite normal.
Offhand, I'd say that utilitarianism has two components - the calculated approach to decision-making, and an ethical theory that a thing called "utility" exists as a scalar value. If you replace that second thing with some form of enlightenment that can be measured and quantified, then you should be able to keep the approach to decision-making.
Of course, you'll have to make some calls about "feed starving child A, or enlighten well-fed child B". And do some number-crunching, too, since the existing calculations probably won't smoothly replicate under the new framework.
I suppose it all depends on the exact form of Mahayana Buddhism you're thinking of.
Seems like a version of each could have a lot of overlap. The bodhisattva vows have a bunch of variations, but they tend to have an emphasis on acting with virtue, developing insight, and lessening suffering for all beings. The ultimate goal is getting everyone enlightened, but the path there seems to be about being kind and good and virtuous and thoughtful along the way. Seems reasonable that one can maximize QALYs while also following the Eightfold Path.
Just because something is based on fiction doesn’t mean it hasn’t accumulated a lot of truth. We shouldn’t discard modern elemental theory just because it’s based on the air-earth-fire-water-phlogiston theory.
Modern elemental theory is not based on ancient greek theories of the four elements, and insofar as it shares names or traits with it it's because both are attempts to understand the world through empiricism.
No, it absolutely is. The four elements theory was continued through the medieval period, though there was a competitor that claimed sulfur, quicksilver, and salt as the three fundamental elements. The four elements theory was then gradually elaborated as they started to determine that earth wasn't a single element, but several elements, and they claimed that the various metals were each compounds of one of the earths with the element of fire, or phlogiston. By the mid 18th century, they were starting to think that there were different airs too, though they weren't totally sure if the airs were separate elements, or if one was pure air and another was a maximal compound of air and phlogiston. Lavoisier did some really detailed measurements while reacting earths with acids to create metals, and discovered that the earths were all *heavier* than the corresponding metals. He decided that the previous ideas were backwards, and that the metals were each elements, and that the "dephlogisticated air" was an element related to various acids, so he called it "oxygen" or "acid-maker". Soon afterwards, when Humphry Davy was able to electrolyze water to produce oxygen and another air, they realized that this other air was its own element and called it "hydrogen" or "water-maker". This led to a burst of productivity, including confirming that sulfur and quicksilver were elements, and that salt was a compound of a dangerous green air and a metal.
This was a continuous development from the ancient theory, even though we like to think there's a bigger discontinuity than there was.
As far as I can tell the bodhisattva ideal is exactly EA, but with a different value system. In the Mahayana system, Buddhahood is the ultimate good, and it's infinitely better than anything you could have without it. It takes a huge amount of lives to achieve, but you believe in reincarnation enough to take the long view. So the logical conclusion is that the only ethical thing to do is to dedicate all your energy to become enlightened so that you can lead others to the same. This kind of traditional view is explained in full detail in e.g Shantideva's Bodhicaryavatara.
They're both making claims about where you should put your efforts, so if both have some appeal to you, you'll have to figure out how to reconcile them!
I would imagine you’d want to quantify the value of awakening a being (as opposed to, say, saving QALY’s or something else) and then get data on the effectiveness of various approaches to trying to awaken beings.
I have the impression that a lot of Buddhist “theology”could be summarized as, “your map isn’t the territory and attempts to map it will inevitably fail.” So this seems like a decidedly un-Buddhist project to undertake. I’m no expert and would love to see if anyone disagrees.
Oh absolutely. I was imagining something borderline satirical. But you could conduct the analysis very seriously, by eliciting utility values from enlightened people, estimating the marginal effects on others of being around an enlightened person, etc.
I’d love to see someone try this without the satire, in an honest good faith effort. I have trouble imagining a serious person saying, “I am enlightened, here’s how I know.”
Are there any dentists/periodontists who can comment on the evidence base for systemic antibiotics to control periodontitis. I'm being pushed by my periodontist to do a course of antibiotics but everything I've found (essentially Cochrane Reviews) seems to point to there not being a good evidence base for the practice. Further, it seems like a lot of whats done in dentistry doesnt have a good evidence base. Add in the interobserver variability issues, and I'm starting to think this field may have some issues.
Seems like the person to ask would be an MD, maybe an infectious disease specialist? or else someone who does medical research. I am neither, but like you I would be dubious about carrying through on the recommended plan. Just going from life experience, seems like it's possible to treat infections that are limited to a single area by applying antibiotics just to the area, so long as it's accessible (for example, flesh wounds, vaginal infections, etc.). On the other hand, energetic application of topicals once failed for me when I had a badly infected injury on my leg, and oral antibiotics knocked it right out. And I believe there's a connection between periodontal problems and cardiovascular disease, the former somehow facilitating the latter.
The London mayoral election takes place in 10 days time. The most recent poll puts Sadiq Khan on 46% vote share, 19 points ahead of his closest opponent (Susan Hall on 27%). Manifold (https://manifold.markets/cash/will-sadiq-khan-be-reelected-mayor) says there’s a 94% chance Khan will win. 1/20 is (just about) available on Betfair Exchange, implying a 95% chance he will win. These sorts of situations are testing. It’s tempting to say that 95% is too high for something as inherently uncertain as a democratic election, but do you really want to take the other side of that bet?
> It’s tempting to say that 95% is too high for something as inherently uncertain as a democratic election
95% isn’t actually all that high. I believe that you can get close to that accuracy in most US congressional elections just by betting on the incumbent party in every House race, and over 80% doing the same in Senate races. In countries like the US and UK where mayoral candidates are often affiliated with national parties that have really strong correlation with urban/rural divides, I would expect you can do the same thing with mayoral races.
I guess the interesting question is how Boris Johnson got elected Mayor of London.
Twice. He slid back a bit on the second vote though. I didn’t realise that Ken Livingstone was the challenger both times, so 4 attempts at the mayoralty, successful twice as well, before boris.
I think incumbency matters - it’s not that powerful a job, American mayors have more power, so it’s a matter of not f‘ing it up.
I think the Tory press will scare some of the chickens ( ie Conservative leaning floating voters) back into the fold, but to know exactly what would happen in terms of actual seats would mean to know all of those seats that are at risk. I’m a bit of a psephologist but not that much. Still I agree, that < 150 seems unlikely.
The typical "Horace and Doris" older couple, who've always voted Tory and don't really keep up much with current trends, will probably still vote for them. But Tory support is cratering among the under 40s, and Reform are nipping at the Tories' ankles in all age groups.
A poll the other day put Reform support at only around 4% below the Tories', so they are not far from critical mass where they actually overtake them! Also, Reform won't do the gentlemanly thing this time, and stand aside in wards where Tories are likely to win, as UKIP did last time. And if Nigel Farage returns to the fray at the last minute, that will boost Reform's chances even more, because every Brexit supporter will undoubtedly then vote for them.
I'll stick my neck out, and predict that the Tories will be lucky to win 120 seats at the general election. Their last chance to turn things around decisively was Hunt's budget. But that delivered only a few mealy mouthed unimaginative tax breaks, most of which will be clawed back one way or another, instead of a bold eye catching change such as abolishing inheritance tax. But their biggest failure has been their obstinate refusal to greatly reduce legal and illegal immigration.
120 is too low; there are roughly 200 rural/rural-ish seats in England where labour only exist on paper. Some of those will go Lib Dem, but they’re polling lower than the Tories, as are Reform. Assuming they and coastal seats become two fairly uniform 3-way races in seats without at least some pre-existing post-2010 Lib Dem lean, I’d guess the Tories would hold 170-180 seats if the election were tomorrow, and can’t see an obvious reason to depart from that.
Not British, but this was my understanding: modulo circumstances, Khan is *underperforming* his party and the question is why, what he's been fucking up that means he isn't doing better. My sources seem to suggest that ultra-low emissions regime thing is the main culprit.
I think libraries are one of the best things ever, and librarians are heroes (along with teachers, medical workers and farmers). I worked in libraries for over 10 years (not as a professional) and know several professional librarians, so I can warn you that it is an under-paid profession, like teaching. A new BS in computer science will likely earn more in their first job than a MLS ever will.
Just anecdotal evidence: Smart kids who read a lot can read a *ton* of books. (Not only because libraries save them money, but maybe more importantly, things like "you already have hundred books at home, there is no place to put more" become irrelevant, so they can grab anything on a whim.) Long-term effects? No idea.
I just realized, libraries probably keep *data* on who borrowed what. So perhaps you could get that data, anonymized, and find out something interesting, for example the distribution of books per reader (maybe 1% of readers are responsible for 90% of book borrowings). Could compare that across libraries in different parts of town, maybe correlate with something like socioeconomic status of people who live in that part of town.
That could be an interesting question: are rich or poor kids more likely to borrow books from library? I guess one's intuition could go either way: for poor kids it's the only chance to read many books, but rich kids are more likely to be better educated and thus more interested in books (and the limited shelf space at home is also a factor). Or maybe there is a curve with a maximum for the middle class?
> Not only because libraries save them money, but maybe more importantly, things like "you already have hundred books at home, there is no place to put more" become
I prefer physical books but limited storage space make me opt for kindle editions pretty often.
Most libraries (in the US at least) do not track what people borrow, because of privacy concerns. It's usually an opt-in, so this may not be a useful approach.
Some kind of mathematical/statistical thinking would definitely help. The degree is neither necessary nor sufficient for that. I guess it depends on where you are now, and what would be your short-term goal for the research -- if it is a school project, simple is okay, if you want to publish in a peer-reviewed journal, that would of course require more.
The part about "how many readers consume how many books" should be fairly simple. (Unless, as Snags mentions, the data are not available.) Trying to connect it to the socioeconomic status would be much trickier, maybe impossible. I imagine you could still calculate something like a "Gini coefficient" of book borrowers for individual libraries, and just publish a map with big colored circles representing the libraries, and leave the interpretation to a reader?
I suppose, if you need to ask how difficult it is, you are not ready yet. But if you are long-term interested in doing research, you should get familiar with some statistical concepts anyway. The easy part is merely collecting the data and displaying it using pie charts or histograms. It gets difficult when you want to reliably separate the signal from noise, mere correlation from causation. (To figure out how much impact randomness had on your results; e.g. whether doing the survey on a different day could result in dramatically different numbers.) Intuition is useful to form a hypothesis, but you need statistics to check whether the data support it.
So maybe, step 1 figure out what data the libraries actually can give you. Step 2, get the data and just play with it, try to measure different things. For example, men vs women, young vs old, how many books are borrowed in individual months during the year. Step 3, based on what you see, make a hypothesis, and then maybe get data from two other libraries and check whether the same is true for them, too. Step 4, publish your results maybe somewhere on a blog, including negative ones (e.g. based on one library, you assumed that people read more in January than in December, but in the other library it was the other way round, so maybe this is all random). Ask for feedback.
It was a different era but the GOP held its nominating convention for John McCain in St Paul in 2008.
The only real difference I personally noticed during the event was the number of toney out of town hookers frequenting the upscale bar scene.
There were some attempts at disruptive protests then but they were quickly contained. The old tsarist technique of cops on horseback proved to be effective in that situation. No knouts though. I expect the police in Chicago will handle the inevitable attempted mayhem just as well.
The vibe this time is entirely different. In 1968 The Vietnam War was on the mind of everyone, particularly draft age males. It was also probably the high water mark of the whole ‘counterculture’ period.
The death and destruction in Gaza seems to be driving demonstrations and antisemitism primarily at elite universities.
Okay the land grant University of Minnesota has its own mimetic demonstrations too but on a smaller scale.
But as Tatu mentioned below, law enforcement has better techniques now and will be thoroughly prepared.
Wouldn't the most scenario be "protests are corralled effectively somewhere where media does not pay too much attention to them and handled by the police by usual means if there's violence?"
Sure, there would be some media attention, but since protest control techniques are vastly more advanced than in 1968, not in the same scale.
You should have a strong prior on reality being boring. It's like how every single election cycle, media breathlessly plays up the possibility of a contested convention and every single cycle, there is no contested convention.
Not to say that unusual events *never* happen - the HFC blowing up their own speaker twice comes to mind, but betting against them is almost always the way to go.
The one thing I got out of that article was amusement at the outrage over her being just another politician.
Well, yes. Of course she is, what did they expect? Did they really all believe the story and PR spun up about Sandy From The Block? She was one of the hand-picked slate by the king-maker Saikat Chakrabarti and was one of the successes; her entire image and campaign was manicured to the last degree; and when she was elected, she started off ambitious and over-confident in her success at preliminary challenges to the old guard, until Pelosi eventually managed to put manners on her, and Sandy From The Block figured out quickly what she would need to do to be re-elected - concentrate on her career, play the game, don't rock the boat *too* hard.
As for her support pro-Israel/anti-Palestine, eh. She did some extra work on discovering various minority heritage in her background, so not alone is she Hispanic/Latinx (whichever is the more popular term for being Puerto Rican descent), she discovered that she's also part-Jewish and part-Taino.
So I imagine that she can't really get away with "My heritage is Sephardi, but I'm pro-Palestine", when she's doing the rounds of temples in Queens to get the votes. (Yes, I'm cynical).
I live in Chicago not far from the downtown/tourist areas in which street protests are naturally most often focused. Also only a mile from one of the two main venues for this Dem convention.
"Thanks to Black Lives Matter, law enforcement has been stripped of most of its ability to control demonstrations" -- this is completely wrong at least in Chicago. Our city administration and police did noticeably better, relatively anyway, during the 2020 wave of protests than in some other large cities. And since then they have become noticeably more effective about it.
There have been some instances that weren't ideal -- I witnessed one of those actually, and granted that it's a very big city that gets plenty of media attention so some shit is always gonna happen -- but overall the improvement has been clear. And right now the city police department is visibly, in close concert with federal law enforcement, already preparing in intentionally-visible ways for the Dem convention.
The current city administration also denied permits for planned pro-Hamas marches near the convention site, directed those marches to obscure locations literally miles away, quickly denied an administrative appeal of that decision, and is now unapologetically defending those denials against the inevitable lawsuit.
The whole public tone of the city administration and police department is firmly "not this time, not here".
I'm no fan of the current mayor myself. In any case the occupancy of that seat is far less of a variable here than is popularly believed or assumed. As both Rahm Emanuel and Laurie Lightfoot discovered to their vast frustration:
(a) Structurally the city government is in fact a "weak-mayor" system and always has been. The two Daleys' success at being bosses was always rooted in local-political influence built up over decades, not in the legal powers of the office. Since Richard M. Daley retired we haven't had any mayor come in with anything resembling a political machine (Rahm was somewhat of a political celebrity but as he learned that is not at all the same thing). Brandon Johnson was frankly surprised to make the runoff let alone win it, and came into the mayor's office without even the outline of any sort of political operation.
(b) A good bit of the political authority and influence around here rests in our county government, to a degree that most city taxpayers fail to appreciate. Cook County has the 5th largest county budget in the nation. County officials are elected completely separately from city ones, they aren't even on the same election cycle.
(c) The city mayor who deserves some credit for the shift in approach that I described above it mostly Lightfoot. Johnson has mostly just declined to get in the way, with the notable exception of that permit denial which I think everybody here was surprised by including the protest organizers.
The big revelation for me was the role of the City Attorney. If they decide to stop prosecuting certain types of crime, then police will eventually stop arresting people for it, and then people will eventually stop reporting it, and look, the crime rate is down!
I suppose cities are complex machines that can only function if a lot of people are doing the work that their roles require. It takes all of them to make it work, but it only takes a few to sabotage it.
It seems like the conventions attract some level of violence every time now, so the safe money is that there will be street violence. Whether that counts as a "massive shitshow" depends significantly on your definition. Do I think we'll see 1968 levels of violence? Very unlikely. Will we see higher than normal presidential convention levels? I'd say the chances are pretty good.
I predict there are enough sensible adults left inside the party apparatus, that the internecine squabbling can be temporarily calmed. The whole family will put on their best faces when having company over for dinner, although there might be some tense subtext when passing the potatoes. Maybe there will be some especially "vibrant" designated free speech zones, and some fiery speeches. But unless Trump somehow stops being the main alternative, I think they'll hold it together long enough to nominate the candidate with the best chance of beating him. (If Trump goes away, I predict chaos.)
Large media organizations still have institutional memory of 1968 and its aftermath, and they're left leaning, and want Trump to lose, and therefore want a peaceful Democratic convention that nominates an electable candidate. I predict downplaying of internal differences, greater focus (somehow) on how bad Trump is, and maybe some historical features on what happens when the Democratic Party can't get its act together. (Nixon! Reagan! W. Bush! TrumpTrumpTrumpTrumpTrump!)
But as you say, maybe something new will happen. It's 4 months away. Maybe Hamas or Israel does something so spectacularly horrible that everyone backs away from that side. Maybe some poor American kid gets killed by police, on video. Maybe one of the people victimized by decriminalized crime turns out to be Actually Important, and makes a stink. Maybe a Supreme Court Justice gets hit by a home run ball and goes into a coma. Maybe the Chinese secretly fund Iran in putting up an Internet news site composed entirely of highly viral AI-designed deepfakes.
>Further, our district attorney has never been seen to drink — in the aqueous sense as well as the alcoholic — nor to sleep.
rang a bell - though I think it is probably a half century since I last read it. It was indeed worth a reread (at https://www.onelimited.org/ss-asimov-01 ). Many Thanks! :-)
I am a mathematics postdoc, and I am leading a group of undergrad computer science majors in a project to build Alpha Algebra (along the lines of Alpha Geometry as built recently by DeepMind). Are there any programmers here who would like to help us with this? It will mostly require training an LLM on synthetic data.
I spent hours writing an impressive essay asking for help figuring some things out about the pharmaceutical industry.
It was a thing of beauty, and I am sure someone with relevant expertise would have been delighted to help; certainly, upon reading the pure ambrosia of its prose, none could have resisted — nor desired to!
My eyes are tired and gritty, and I long to finally lie down; and lo, finally, I am done! I try to scroll over to read through one last time, to ensure no niggling typo or mistaken neologism enfoolishes me in front of my heroes¹; one last scan before posting and—
Substack ate the post.
No worries. I am prepared. My "select all → copy" trick will—
...oh. It failed to record any of the copied text, as it sometimes does. Clipboard has not even been used today, as far as it knows!
(there's even a helpful note to the effect of "you can copy stuff here to save it :D")
Well, the clipboard /does/ occasionally just... stop keeping any history whatsoever; I know this is a risk.
And, of course, Substack's comment-handling processes were written by some sort of cognitively-handicapped chimpanzee whose mother evidently had a fondness for "bush hooch"; recent estimates indicate she also — very likely — favored the practice of dealing her drooling, idiot offspring daily (if not hourly, IMO) severe, IQ-leeching blows directly to the head.²
Yes, I knew these things could happen....
/...just not BOTH AT ONCE when I had spent over A GODDAMN HOUR on formatting and typing and waiting for unfreezing and aAAAAHSJDJDJDKA)dnajsjdjf;;nd/
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¹: (anyone peripherally or centrally involved in drug development, I might say. 👍 it was my dream — before I realized that having dreams is itself a dream, heh.
"follow your heart~" and "FiNd yOur PaSSiOn!" and all that nonsense...
OR: take the first OK job you can get anywhere, so your mother can get good care and stick around on Earth with you?
well, as cool as it might have been to do something interesting /as your work/ — I mean, THEY pay YOU, to use their fancy labs and learn more of & research upon your favorite subject, I hear! — still: me ol' ma had to come first...
...she gave up on /her/ own dreams for my sake, after all; what kinda son would not return the favor?! heh.
and, anyway, as she always reminded me: "you've got to be practical". it's not such a bad motto to remember, I guess!)
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²: (Really, it's a miracle the creature was able to program even *this* abomination, I suppose. Sadly, any "thinking" beings — and I use the term loosely — that, somehow, managed to make text /more resource-intensive/ than a triple-A FPS title... are undoubtedly even now squatting fearfully in filth and darkness, angrily attempting to develop a video player from fæcal discharge. A hard life, even for a subchimp.)
One of my proudest moments was having badly configured bug reporting system time out after I was many minutes into an epic report - I successfully installed HxD, opened my entire RAM as a file, found the memory that contained the in progress comment, and successfully saved it (if poorly formatted).
I know I got lucky; every second you wait increases the chance that memory is re-used.
I'm sorry for your loss. I generally consider any writing via a browser to be prone to loss and if I'm writing something lengthy I'll switch to my own editor then paste the result (also for the sake of easier editing)
"I'm actually really worried about how heated the israel/palestine debate has become and how vitriolic both sides have gotten. It almost seems like if one person were heroic enough to do something drastic like set themselves on fire it could really change the course of history."
In an earlier thread you compared your posts to mine, and said that I have no right to be annoyed about your repetitive axe-grinding because I'm also - according to you - axe-grinding in the same way.
I reject the comparison, needless to say. But if you want to make this comparison, maybe go with it to the very end. Here's a couple of guidelines that I have self-imposed on myself since my first post under the LearnsHebrew prefix here in October:
(1) Never post more than 1 top-level comment per Open Thread. Preferably leave several Open Threads pass with 0 top-level comments by you before making a top-level comment in the next.
(2) Never post on ACX posts other than Open Threads.
As far as my memory serve, I have never once violated (1), and I have violated (2) about 3 or 4 times in 7 months of posting.
Those self-imposed guidelines were necessary back when my username was much "spicier" and more controversial than it's now, I have adopted them because I didn't want to exhaust my "weirdness points", so that people don't get fatigued by every sub-thread and every conversation on the blog getting hijacked by the topic I'm angry about and going to chaos.
I claim that those guidelines would be good for you too, even if you don't care about the health of the general conversation in Open Threads and the people following it. If you're looking at it from the purely "What's in it for me" angle, then what's in it for you is that people become fatigued and zoned-out when every Open Thread they have to see you arguing the same point 3 or 4 or 5 times, barely separated by a day or 2. Posting one, long, top-level comment is better for your case than repetitively posting 4 or 5 minor rephrasing of the same post. Pedagogically, a good teacher has to give students a break.
You might also find a very long advice post I wrote to another Pro-Palestinian commenter in late last December [1] helpful, many points don't apply to you, but the two points about how changing minds is not a sequential process that you can accelerate by posting more and more, and how argumentation is not necessarily a war where those arguing against you are the enemy, might have an effect on your posting style.
[1] https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/open-thread-307?r=3evauj&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=45847539
The Palestine college protesters explicitly saying they don't like white people: https://twitter.com/MarinaMedvin/status/1784013080940200167
You people hate people like me for their race, and you expect me to sit here and be lectured to by you? Why the hell should I listen to hateful, racist assholes like you?
> (2) Never post on ACX posts other than Open Threads.
Hopefully these rules are only regarding this one particular sensitive topic?
Previously, the topic was embedded into my very username, so I estimated that wherever I go and whatever I chose to comment on, the conversation would be inevitably rail-switched abruptly to the topic and that people will increasingly resent and hate that.
After I changed the name, there is no good reason not to comment on other non-Open-Thread posts, and indeed all my violations of (2) was after I changed the username. But I still value it as a self-regulation mechanism because I can get lost in writing walls of text on forums like ACX for days on end, which might eventually lead to me starving :D
--------
The subtext in my comment to Hammond isn't "I'm so better than you, plz emulate me to the last detail", and I really do hope he doesn't understand it like that. My comment is fundamentally "If you're going to be provocative and/or contrarian, there are ways to do it that won't upset people unnecessarily and make you come across as a generic spammer/troller intent on using the forum as a cheap write-and-forget log database where you just dump your stream of thoughts and go about your day". And that doesn't mean that I'm *perfect* or even acceptably good at this either, I wish, it's just something I always have in mind and try to achieve.
One principle of pedagogy is to always try to introduce one unknown thing at a time, never dump all the lesson points on the students all at once, they will drown. If we conceive of argumentation as a kind of pedagogy (where the opinions that people don't agree with are the "lesson points"), then the equivalent advice is the "Weirdness Points" advice, don't be needlessly provocative, don't make a game out of contrariness, use your tolerance budget wisely, go out of your way to dispel the common craziness associated with your position. (e.g. for me, "No I don't hate Jews. No I don't want an Islamic Caliphate in Palestine. Yes I'm an Atheist Arab who wants both Arabs and Jews and everyone to live in peace, and yes I'm first-hand aware that my people aren't known for being great fans of my religious choice, and no that's not an excuse to stay silent while a significant subset of them are being bombed and starved to death.")
The 2 guidelines I'm self-imposing on myself are my own way of trying to achieve this fundamentally good advice, but they're not necessarily the most suitable or optimal solution. All the better if Hammond heeds the fundamental message but invents his own guidelines, but if he starts from my guidelines, I would say that's not too bad either compared to the current state.
LHHIP: within my experience, you are the unique internet commentator who has learned, become more moderate, and adapted. I strongly congratulate and admire you. Also, at least for me, it does make your arguments significantly more persuasive.
Huh, that's very kind of you to say and I don't feel I deserve it, thanks anyway ^_^
Palestine activists have taken over Harvard Yard and set up an encampment. Incredible stuff.
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2024/4/25/harvard-yard-protest-palestine/
I think this whole thing is fascinating in that the consequences of a fundamental tension or contradiction on the left are being materialized more than at any other point - that is, the tension between the 'anti-anti-semitism' and 'anti-colonialist' aspects of the American left.
It's easy to have said this at many points in recent history, but I think this time it could be for real: The ADL strategy has well and truly backfired and zionists now face the real prospect of losing their dominant political and institutional power in the US.
Columbia obviously sided with the 'anything that is anti-israel is anti-semitic' contingent, as did much of the media, but this was ineffective to an ahistorical degree.
Harvard zionists already taking the same line:
"Harvard Chabad Rabbi Hirschy Zarchi called on the University to clear out the encampment in Harvard Yard in a statement posted to Chabad’s X account just before 11 p.m., referring to the protesters as “Jew haters and Hamas lovers.”"
"Harvard Divinity School student Shabbos “Alexander” Kestenbaum, who is suing the University over allegations of tolerating antisemitism on campus, also slammed the protest in a post on X after Passover ended.
“President Garber: expel these terrorist supporters NOW or resign,” Kestenbaum wrote. “We Jews have had enough of your inaction!”"
But it seems claims of 'anti-semitism' are not the magic bullet they once were. I wonder how this all ends?
FYI, there is a pro-Palestine encampment at MIT (my own school!) as well.
I think that 'anti-anti-semitism' stopped being fashionable on the political left at least a decade ago. Of course, you will still find *Jewish* leftists complaining about anti-semitism, but that's it.
Even the concept of a "Nazi" (the ultimate bad guy you are always ethically allowed to punch without any attempt to communicate with and maybe find a mutually satisfactory solution first) has gradually changed from "a violent authoritarian anti-semitic fanatic" to mere "someone who disagrees with me" (or the specifically Russian flavor: "someone who opposes Russia"). So even complaining about Nazis all the time no longer has the connotation of anti-semitism; it became a general label for the outgroup.
Anti-Antisemitism seems to still have a place on the left when it can 1) be legibly applied to their enemies and 2) doesn't appear to be supporting Israel itself.
This was much clearer around 2016-17 when Trump was elected and there was a sudden outcry about antisemitism (for which a surprisingly large number turned out to be hoaxes). That lasted at least as long as Trump was president, so far less than a decade ago .
It's far less clear right at this moment that antisemitism is actually coming from the left's enemies. It's hard to argue that the right are the antisemites when the left openly protests against Israel (and maybe Jews? - lots of tension on that question) on college campuses.
The left will still happily label an antisemite a Nazi, but you're right that the term has become much more of a general boo-word so lots of political enemies might get that - including Jews sometimes!
Defining Nazi as "Someone who opposes Russia" seems to not be a Russian or Soviet invention, Israel has a venerable tradition of defining Nazi as "someone who hates Jews". Ben Gurion, the literal founding father of Israel, called Menachem Begin, the one who later secured peace with Egypt, a "Hitlerist type" [1], i.e. a Nazi.
In actual truth, a Nazi isn't (just) "a violent authoritarian antisemitic fanatic", that would qualify the Spanish crown in 1492 to be Nazis, or Russian communists in the 1920s, as well as many many **many** others. A Nazi is someone who meets a compound definition that must at least hit all the following notes (1) Has a racial hierarchy where the highest race is their own, and is both an objectively superior race as well as a morally better race that the lower races conspire against (2) Uses Fascism, totalitarian devotion of the individual to the imagined national group and a nostalgia to an imagined past where the national group (conceived of as essential and as immutable as the laws of physics themselves) was dominant, and scapegoats several selected groups from the lower races as the culprits in the national group's decline (3) Engages in Genocide against the lower races.
Most groups called "Nazis" seem to fail one of those. Modern White Supremacists might satisfy (1) and (2) in some of their more extreme forms but they don't satisfy (3), American White Supremacists might want to re-instill segregation and the European ones definitely want to cleanse Europe from all non-Europeans (which include those who were recently European, as far recently as the 1970s and the 1980s), but none of them seriously contemplate or advance Genocide as a serious proposition. Islamic jihadist groups might very well contemplate (3) and are notoriously whiny and won't shut up about the "Golden age of Islam" so they arguably satisfy (2), but they fail (1).
[1] https://archive.ph/Wfuzw, Haaretz: Why Did Ben Gurion Call Begin a 'Hitlerist Type'?
As an aside, what groups "who were recently European, as far recently as the 1970s and the 1980s" that European White Supremacists want to eliminate do you have in mind?
Hmmm, that phrasing is somewhat confusing, now that I read it again. It somewhat implies "Those who were European till the 1970s and the 1980s then were no longer", whereas I really mean "Those who were not European till the 1970s and the 1980s and beyond, then were naturalized and became European".
As for the actual groups I was thinking of, in France I mean the people from former colonies (e.g. Tunisians and Algerians), in the UK I meant the Pakistanis and Indians, and in Germany I meant Syrians and Turks. Naturalized citizens in France and UK have a long history extending to the 1960s and the 1970s, but a lot of White Supremacists don't view them as truly European, because they define this using race.
Thanks for the clarification, it makes sense to me now, and I agree. In fact, it doesn't have to be *naturalized* citizens. People *born* in e.g. France, but of North-African ancestry, are often not seen as "French" (they are seen as "Arabs" or "beurs" or "rebeux" or whatever) and not just by White Supremacists. Of course the problem is compounded by the fact that they also often don't see themselves as French but tend to identify with some idealized version of their ancestry which makes them reject French or Western values, inexorably leading to an unstable feedback loop.
For example, I always found it interesting that the grown grand-children of North-Africans immigrants (Algerians, Moroccans, Tunisians) in France are *more* religious (see themselves more as Muslims) than their grand-parents did. (Although maybe that's just a consequence of the fall of secular ideologies (pan-Arab socialism and communism), since that seems true in the countries of origin as well, and therefore not just a reaction against the host country.)
BTW, thanks for sticking around, even when your ideas aren't the most popular. I agree with the commenter above that you often add a lot of value and insights to the discussions.
French (grand-)children of North African ancestry seeing themselves as more Muslim than their ancestors is a new thing to know, what I previously knew of this is that the American children and grandchildren of Middle Eastern ancestry gradually loosen the ties of religion and adopt an Americanized Islam (all while maintaining that this is the one true Islam of course, as all Muslims like to do). This is often in the context of their parents complaining and advising other people from the Middle East who want to immigrate to the USA that they should fortify Islamic values in their children well.
It's not easy for me to articulate my views about immigration. On the one hand, I'm an Anarchist and I believe nation states are rubbish, geographic jealousy and caring about whose territory is whose is quintessentially nation-state-ish and I don't believe it goes well with Anarchism. On the other hand, some immigration is objectively bad for both the source and the destination. Refugees from wars are troubled and radicalized, people think that suppressing statistics about their higher levels of crimes is doing them a service but it has backfired before and is going to backfire again. High-skill immigrants deprive their native land from much-needed brains, further dooming it to another iteration of the downward spiral. But of course, the counterargument (which I'm very convinced of) is that the native land is going to spiral downward anyway, because those in charge fundamentally don't have the intelligence or the willingness to be anything except dumbasses, so better those high-skilled workers be in a land that appreciates them and where they can prosper than in a land where they will dwindle and possibly be locked in jail over a social media post.
I don't think I'm adequately represented by any of the 2 sides in the current immigration debate.
Thanks a lot for the kind words at the end. I don't think I deserve them, but I'm heart warmed you wrote them.
Looking forward to seeing you guys in Atlanta!
Hi! I'm looking for participants to take a questionnaire inspired by some research spun off from the Astral Codex Ten reader survey. Because I've talked about the research on Reddit, I'm only looking for people who haven't looked at the Slate Star Codex subreddit recently and don't follow my Substack. Anyway, the survey is here: https://forms.gle/mHAyiuci4mb9hyCY6
It deals with personality and how it influences the ways in which people allocate resources. That link again: https://forms.gle/mHAyiuci4mb9hyCY6
For some reason, you must be logged in using your Google account before it lets you do the survey. You might want to turn this off? The ACX survey did not require this.
(I am not familiar with Google Forms, so I don't know how these things are set up.)
how long is the questionnaire? I satisfy your criteria, but have a generic policy against surveys or questionnaires that have an uncertain length.
About 9 minutes I think?
I can confirm that 9 minutes was a reasonable estimate for me, but I'm not a
Chidi Anagonye.
Hi, small stats question here.
I'm currently doing my econ undergrad, and as a 6-month research project (not final thesis), I have to learn about one regression technique, do some simulations with it, and apply it to some real data. Below are all the options I can choose from. I know very little about most of them (and just reading the wiki article doesn't help that much), so any advice on which one is most interesting or useful would be welcomed. Even just "I only know three of these methods, but I like this one most" would be useful for me. At the moment I only know IV and Logistic Regression so those would be a little less interesting to me.
(About me: pretty average, young, EA, ACX reader, also interested in AI.)
.
.
K Nearest Neighbor Regression
Regression trees
Ridge Regression and Lasso Regression
Principal component regression
Logistic Regression
Linear discriminant analysis
Instrumental Variables
Autoregressive Distributed Lag Model
Spurious Regression Problem
If you are interested in predictive analytics in general, ridge regression and lasso regression are good introductions to regularization and provide solid heuristics for understanding of loss functions.
As an econ student, you probably won't get much exposure to unsupervised learning models. So if that's something you would like in order to round out your knowledge, K nearest and principal component stand out.
With the recently passed ban on TikTok, anyone who is legally knowledgeable know how this works?
The text (https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7521/text) says "It shall be unlawful for an entity to distribute..a foreign adversary controlled application by carrying out..internet hosting services to enable the distribution", and it specifics that this includes source code. But https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernstein_v._United_States specified that the publication of source code was protected by the first amendment, so the government would need a compelling interest to prevent that publication.
Is there a conflict here? Is preventing the publication of an apk likely to withstand court scrutiny?
EDIT: My best guess currently is that the government is claiming there is a compelling state interest, that of national security, and that is why they should be allowed to ban the publication of this app and it's code. And even if it were to go to the court the courts don't like telling the government was is and isn't national security related, so they would probably just ok this.
The committee notes are claiming that it's malware.
>For example, outside researchers have found embedded vulnerabilities that allow the company to collect more data than the app's privacy policy indicates.<
I would assume an attempt to publish source code would at least have to disprove this.
Holy moly, the ban is this general? Even Source Code distribution?
I thought it was just against TikTok.
I wonder what is the intended purpose. It's not like most people could install the source code. Someone else building the binaries for them would be illegal. Studying the source code to make a different but similar application out of it... well, if Americans would do it, this is kinda what the bill originally proposed (that the problem is not TikTok per se, but the fact that it has Chinese owners)... and if Chinese would do it, they can share the source code on their own part of internet, so the ban is irrelevant.
What I'm alarmed about is specifically how they define "foreign adversary controlled". The Chinese government can trivially make a personal GitHub account and publish source code, is that source code then "foreign adversary controlled"? Does that mean every Chinese or Iranian developer on GitHub is potentially a target of banning or repo takedowns?
Or do they define an "app" as something that must have a central database somewhere else than the computer it's running on? In which case... fair, but why do they want to restrain the mere source code publishing of those apps? If anything, publishing source code ***helps*** you to know that the app talks to a central server somewhere.
Why is the bill so general and convoluted anyway? Why can't they just say the legalese equivalent of "We're banning TikTok because fuck China."
Also, consider the possible perverse incentives. Next time a powerful American software company tries to compete against an established foreign software solution, they may decide to lobby politicians to declare a war, just so they could classify the competition as "foreign adversary controlled".
So if tomorrow social networks inexplicably start promoting articles about how Estonia is full of terrorists, at least we will know why. Or maybe a World War 3 will start over SAP.
I don't know Tatu, they had five years to find physical evidence in the McMartin case, and two full jury trials. They never presented any. But thank you for the comment.
I think a lot of the people on the Open Thread are young so I thought I would invite you to read about a hysteria that happened in the US, and some other countries, in the 1980's and 90's. Perhaps they cover this in school, I have no idea. But the child care sexual abuse hysteria is a black eye on the US and our justice system. https://falsechoices.substack.com/p/our-endless-hysteria
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18427487-the-witch-hunt-narrative
On the other hand, this book presented several convincing arguments that the idea of a "satanic panic" regarding child care abuse was itself overblown and that the media focus on ritual abuse allegations did not present the full picture of the actual investigations, that the most notable abuse cases were based on physical evidence and that even in McMartin case there were grounds to at least allow for a credible suspicion (whether ultimately unfounded or not) that Ray Buckey was guilty of sexual abuse.
Why do jewish intellectuals hate white people so much?
https://i.imgur.com/QCT9nT3.jpeg
Can you imagine if a major publisher or university press released a book about 'jewish privilege'? Or gentile professors at elite US colleges ran courses on 'destroying jewishness'? This would be absolutely scandalous and people here would be furious.
And yet, I point out the exact opposite situation is true and people are furious...at me for pointing it out.
If these jewish intellectuals hate me for my race, why am I supposed to cry when their ideological bedfellows starting seeing them as oppressive white people themselves? Especially when the hegemonic institutions of America are almost universally on their side and will help them, a privilege not afforded to white people who feel the consequences of left wing race ideology.
Cuz they're jealous of non-Jews' foreskins? I recommend wearing a codpiece when sleeping to block possibility of its theft. https://imgur.com/a/zip5qTE
> Cuz they're jealous of non-Jews' foreskins?
I thought this was mostly a solved problem in USA (which is probably the only market for those books).
> Why do Jewish intellectuals hate white people so much?
They don't, I don't remember Einstein being a particularly gleeful advocate against Micro-Aggressions, maybe his use of non-Euclidean geometry stems from a deep hatred to the proto-Western Euclid but those who invented non-Euclidean geometries were all White, mostly Germans and French, so there's that. Scott Aronson has atrocious opinions on the Palestinians (**checks Shtetl-Optimized** yup, another one) but I have never read or listened to him popularizing White Fragility.
Lastly, insofar as an "Intellectual" is simply someone who explores and explains ideas for a living and not necessarily an academic, then the very guy who owns the very blog you're writing this on is a Jewish intellectual, can you cite one instance where he hints he hates White people, of which his readers are the vast majority?
So its not Jewish intellectuals, is it? It's "Woke Jewish Intellectuals", and at this point the signifier "Jewish" adds no information of value and can be safely discarded without losing too much information, some would say that this even gains us new information.
> If these Jewish intellectuals hate me for my race, why am I supposed to cry when their ideological bedfellows starting seeing them as oppressive white people themselves
If dictators hate the Rule of Law, why should you be crying when their country plunges into a civil war? If some people hate and pollute rivers, why should be crying when those rivers become poisoned by their chemical trash and are now slowly killing everybody who drinks from them?
I agree the temptations to seek "Poetic Justice" everywhere is very strong, but like it or not, you're among "those people". You live among the River Polluters, you live among those who agree with Dictators and hate the Rule of Law. When the consequences come, they won't distinguish between you and them. Free Speech and Civilized Discourse are public-good norms much like the Rule of Law and clean rivers, they benefit everyone, and their absence comes for everyone.
Hi LearnsHebrew, personally I'm not going to join this discussion, but I'd like to know your thoughts about https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7845
Hello! ForExample is a funny username to have.
As for S. Aronson's anti-anti-Zionist piece, I have read it 5 days after it was published and the comment section was already closed by then (whether by choice or due to a certain capacity limit), so I didn't have the chance to respond at the time in the comment section.
I will start by answering the central question of the letter:
>> Let’s assume that not only has Netanyahu lost the next election in a landslide, but is justly spending the rest of his life in Israeli prison. Waving my wand, I’ve made *you* [The Reader] Prime Minister in his stead, with an overwhelming majority in the Knesset. You now get to go down in history as the liberator of Palestine. But you’re now also in charge of protecting Israel’s 7 million Jews (and 2 million other residents) from near-immediate slaughter at the hands of those who you’ve liberated.
I have thought about this question before, and my answer is scattered over a bunch of comments in several Open Threads. To compile them all here, I would:
(1) Withdraw IDF presence and settlers from West Bank and Gaza. The Golan and Sheba farms (taken from Syria in the 1967 war, Sheba farms claimed by Lebanon) are also not Israeli land, but withdrawing from there is more challenging due to the current nature of the neighbors.
(2) Alternatively to (1), fully annex Gaza and/or the West Bank as Israeli provinces, and make all of their resident full citizens of Israel with equal rights and protections under the law
(3) Admit full historical responsibility for the Nakba, and release all classified historical documents documenting the war crimes against Palestinians
(4) Pay reparations for whomever can prove they're descendent from Nakba survivors, modeled after German reparations for the Holocaust
Because the premise of the question is fundamentally impossible, I won't spend any more time thinking on what I would do if I was the Israeli PM. But over the course of several hundred comments in 7 months here, I think have made quite clear what I think the general shape of a fair end to the fighting looks like.
Scott then writes terrible paragraph where he makes a combination of historical/factual and moral mistakes:
>> Granted, it seems pretty paranoid to expect such a slaughter! Or rather: it would seem paranoid, if the Palestinians’ Grand Mufti (progenitor of the Muslim Brotherhood and hence Hamas) hadn’t allied himself with Hitler in WWII, enthusiastically supported the Nazi Final Solution, and tried to export it to Palestine; if in 1947 the Palestinians hadn’t rejected the UN’s two-state solution (the one Israel agreed to) and instead launched another war to exterminate the Jews (a war they lost); if they hadn’t joined the quest to exterminate the Jews a third time in 1967; etc., or if all this hadn’t happened back before there were any settlements or occupation, when the only question on the table was Israel’s existence. It would seem paranoid if Arafat had chosen a two-state solution when Israel offered it to him at Camp David, rather than suicide bombings. It would seem paranoid if not for the candies passed out in the streets in celebration on October 7.
(1) The Grand Mufti isn't the progenitor of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt in 1928 by the Egyptian Hassan Al Bannah. The Grand Mufti also has nothing to do with Hamas, which was founded by Ahmed Yassin, a Muslim Brotherhood high-ranking leader in Gaza who Israel was friendly towards because they both hated the secular and leftist Fatah (which was violent at that time before Oslo), Ahmed Yassin then made a 180 turn in the 1980s and founded Hamas. Hamas didn't commit any violence till the 1990s. Ahmed Yassin was a child when the Nakba happened, back when the Grand Mufti was in charge in Jerusalem.
(2) The Grand Mufti is not the leader of the Palestinians. He was a local leader of Jerusalem under the Ottomans because he was an Ottoman noble (allegedly tracing bloodline to prophet Muhammed). He was then appointed by the British in a made-up position "Grand Mufti of Palestine" and considered a vital ally. He allied himself with Nazi Germany out of pure self-preservation: Because he played a role in the 1936 Arab uprising and the British issued an arrest warrant against him.
(3) If Scott wants to use what a few hundred Palestinians did after October 7th as evidence that all Arabs are hateful antisemitic untermenschen, perhaps I can also use what a few hundred Jewish wedding guests [1] did as evidence of the same, here's what Wikipedia says:
>>>> In December 2015, Israeli police began investigating a video of a Jewish wedding in Jerusalem celebrating the marriage of a person known to have been involved in price tag attacks, in which guests are shown stabbing a photo of the toddler, Ali Dawabsheh, who had died in the Duma arson attack. The same video contained scenes of guests, armed with guns, knives and Molotov cocktails, chanting a song with the words from the book of Judges (16:28), "O God, that I may be this once avenged of the Philistines for my two eyes", replacing "Philistines" with "Palestinians". A lawyer for the defendants in the case, Attorney Itamar Ben-Gvir, was also present and later said "No one realized these were photos of a member of the Dawabsheh family"
Look at the masterful defense by Ben Gvir! Nobody realized that the photo of the toddler they were stabbing is the photo of the particular toddler who was just burned alive! If he was just any **other** toddler, it would have been totally okay.
So maybe atrocity-hunting is not the best or most charitable way to look at this? Just like I see this type of Jews and this type of Israelis and deliberately choose to forget they exist, maybe Aronson would do well to deliberately choose to forget the type of Arab who gives out sweets after October 7th.
(4) The Palestinians didn't start the war of 1948. The war of 1948 started as a civil war between paramilitary groups. Civil wars don't have clear instigators or a single initiating event and are instead the result of a series of escalation-and-counter-escalation. When Zionist paramilitaries prevailed and started slaughtering Arabs and expelling them in the hundreds of thousands (Wikipedia's Nakba page says 300K expelled before May 1948), Arab armies tried to intervene after public outcry from their own populations, and they did so without coordination or a clear plan.
(5) Israel never offered a good faith offer of a Palestinian state. A state is by definition an entity with a monopoly on violence, and not a single one of Israeli offers of statehood included an army, or the guarantee that the IDF won't violate its borders.
Then Scott says:
>> But if someone has a whole ideology, which they teach their children and from which they’ve never really wavered for a century, about how murdering you is a religious honor, and also they’ve actually tried to murder you at every opportunity—-what more do you want them to do, before you’ll believe them?
Perhaps he should remember then that this "someone" is actually 2.3 million someones, who the state he is supporting have been blockading and chokeholding since 2007. I would like to see his evidence that all 2.3 millions of Gazans see killing Jews as religious honor. (Because if he didn't have any, that would be such a shame. It would be as if I saw the "Wedding of Hate" and concluded that Jews see murdering Arabs and burning them alive as the highest religious honor.) Perhaps he should remember that there are 600K Jews and 3 million Arabs in the West Bank, and before October 7th the only ones doing the dying were the Arabs, and the only ones doing the killing were the Jews.
Scott then proceeds to list 4 solutions, and for all except the 2nd one (his preferred), he imagines one-sided objections that don't stand scrutiny. Look at what he writes, Zum Beispiel, on my preferred solution:
>> in the rare cases they deign to address the question directly, most anti-Zionists advocate a “secular, binational state” between the Jordan and Mediterranean, with equal rights for all inhabitants. Certainly, that would make sense if you believe that Israel is an apartheid state just like South Africa.
>> To me, though, this analogy falls apart on a single question: who’s the Palestinian Nelson Mandela? Who’s the Palestinian leader who’s ever said to the Jews, “end your Jewish state so that we can live together in peace,” rather than “end your Jewish state so that we can end your existence”?
Really? Scott won't have a secular bi-state because you can't find a Palestinian Nelson Mandela? He means the Arab 20% of Israel and all 3 million Arabs of the West Bank and all 2.5 million Arabs of Gaza all hate Israel with the same fervor and would like to genocide Jews to the last baby?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duma_arson_attack#%22Wedding_of_Hate%22
Thank you for your response!
I won't go into history, and if you say "wedding of hate" and I say "Shani Louk", we'll never get anywhere.
Basically, you say the Palestinians are just normal people who'd like to get rid of all the fighting and war and bombs and stuff, and if they're just left alone to lead their life, we'll have peace.
Sure, that's true. But among them are the Hamas, and their corrupt leaders profit massively from the current situation. Khaled Mashal 5 billion dollars, Ismail Haniyeh 4 billion dollars, Abu Marzouk 3 billion dollars, all from stolen humanitarian aid. https://twitter.com/Regendelfin/status/1763920078959980955 And backed by the current Iranian government. And feeding the people their propaganda for decades.
How can we convince them to throw away their weapons and make peace with Israel?
You're very welcome. I was planning to respond to Scott's awful post in my Copious Free Time, you gave me an opportunity to quit procrastinating and just do it.
> if you say "wedding of hate" and I say "Shani Louk", we'll never get anywhere.
Exactly, that's what it means for it to be a "Cycle of Violence". A cycle has no start, has no end, and is self-reinforcing. The reasons that started the cycle (and thus could - in naive principle - end it) are long gone, the cycle now persists solely on its own. Its results feed into its causes and its causes create its results who then feed more into its causes which create more of its results which .....
> if they're just left alone to lead their life, we'll have peace.
Which is a huge "If" that Israel was and is not willing - even in its most committed-to-peace phase in the early to mid 1990s - to give. They're not willing to dismantle settlements, they're not willing to leave Gaza have an airport and ports and territorial waters, they're not willing to stop passing racist laws like the Nation State Basic Law that agitate their Arab, Druze, and Bedouin citizens, they're not willing to stop oppressing and choke holding the West Bank citizens and treating them exactly how Apartheid governments do. "Leave them alone" is a choice that the Israeli government has faced every single day after 5 June 1967, every day they wake up and a Windows XP dialog box appears in the sky with a message "Oppress Palestinians just for the heck of it? [yes/no/remind me later]", and they either press "yes" or "remind me later", but never "no".
My definition of "Leaving Palestinians alone" involves looking at them as human beings, not animals that you can continue to harass and denigrate and throw by the thousands into "administrative detention" (i.e. unlawful military prisons where civilians as young as 13 are thrown to never be heard of again), then act Pikachu-face surprised when your actions create and empower a monstrous faction that promises revenge "by all means necessary". It's not about Jihad (although that's a catalyst that make the fire rage harder), the PLO were communists back in their day, and that didn't stop them from promising revenge and - in their view - getting it.
If you don't want Nazi Germany, one possible course of action is to create it and then spend billions of dollar and millions of souls to defeat it, as the US, UK and France did in the 1920s to 1940s. But another, much smarter, course of action is to never force the treaty of Versailles in the first place. Israel hitherto consistently preferred the first course of action, where they engage in outrageous and dehumanizing campaigns against the Palestinians where countless thousands die and/or injured and/or humiliated and deprived of their human rights, then when the inevitable revenge comes they spend billions yet again to defeat it, only to create yet another iteration of it by their actions again and again and again.
> How can we convince them to throw away their weapons and make peace with Israel?
I don't know. There is a temptation to always answer with a solution to those questions, any solution. It will probably be wrong. It will be a wrong because I have no baseline experience with the question itself (and neither does most people), I have no idea how to fight a paramilitary group that has been building its military strength for 20 years. I have no idea how to fight a normal war anywhere anytime against any foe. I have no experience with the deserts of Sinai that Hamas uses to smuggle weapons into Gaza, and I have no experience whatsoever with the royal courts of Qatar that Hamas leverages for billions of aid.
But what I'm saying is much more radical and more fundamental. After all, first there was Fatah, then Fatah became (somewhat) peaceful but only to be replaced with Hezbollah, Hezbollah were barely held back in 2006 only for Hamas to emerge 1 to 2 years later, then there was the Islamic Jihad. Israel's actions keep creating them. After each group is created, it becomes a self-sustaining entity that can keep itself alive under a variety of external operating conditions, no matter what Israel's actions are. But what creates them in the first place is Israel's actions.
I think that's enough for now, if you want my opinion on a particular paragraph don't hesitate to reply with the quoted paragraph. My final verdict is that this letter isn't a good faith engagement with the so-called "Anti-Zionists" (a term which I now rejects), this letter is just a release that Scott wrote because he was angry, and he was angry because he browsing Twitter.
At the beginning of the letter, Scott seems somewhat self-aware:
>> At the high end of the spectrum, I religiously check the tweets of Paul Graham, a personal hero and inspiration to me ever since he wrote Why Nerds Are Unpopular twenty years ago, and a man with whom I seem to resonate deeply on every important topic except for two: Zionism and functional programming. At the low end, I’ve read hundreds of the seemingly infinite army of Tweeters who post images of hook-nosed rats with black hats and side curls and dollar signs in their eyes, sneering as they strangle the earth and stab Palestinian babies.
Instead of engaging with particular type of "Anti-Zionist" that is Paul Graham or - say - me (not that I'm on Twitter, oh hell no), he chooses to spend the rest of the letter talking as if his main readers are those who post hook-nosed AI-generated Jews on Twitter, people who he have to carefully explain to them why killing Jews is wrong and why Arabs all want to kill Jews and are too much of an Untermensch right now to be given their own state or a place in the one state that already exists.
Which is a shame, because I want to respect Scott, because I want to believe him when he says he looks at Gazan children and remembers his own. He continuously makes this task difficult for me, just 3 days ago he posted another masterpiece like this letter.
What can I say, that's why you don't browse Twitter.
I can't keep track of all the separate comments you've made making mostly the same point, so just:
1. Is it (((Jewish intellectuals))) you hate or just (((Jews)))? It seems like you keep equivocating and motte-and-bailey'ing on this.
2. I just...can't...comprehend the irony and brazenness of posting on an anti-woke Jewish guy's blog to say Jews are all hatefully woke. I....just...trying to wrap my brain around this makes my head hurt.
3. *Why* aren't zionist Jews based allies of western civilisation, according to you? In what possible sense do you say Muslims are more based than Jews?
None of this makes any damn sense.
I think I have a hard time with your “I’m racist against racist races” philosophy because you’re unapologetically practicing exactly what you condemn. Are you saying that if all the other races weren’t so racist then you wouldn’t have to be so racist all the time? Or are you saying everybody is justifiably racist and may the most racist race win?
Please put more thought into your content.
This is a lazy repost of content that was lazy the first time. It's an Imgur image of book covers, without explanation of why the books are hateful, or why we should treat them as a representative example of the thinking of "Jewish intellectuals." It doesn't show the authors to be intellectuals, or even bother to prove them to be Jewish, much less support any kinds of conclusions about Jewish intellectuals in general.
"It doesn't show the authors to be intellectuals, or even bother to prove them to be Jewish"
You don't recognise the name Ramya Mahadevan Vijaya as a good Yiddishe boy?
Would any AI enthusiasts have some advice for a grad student? I'm working on a school project where we're evaluating different methods of "teaching" a model about, say, a research article (e.g. RAG, fine-tuning). Right now we're asking the trained model a bunch of questions about the paper then classifying its answers as Right/Wrong/Catastrophically Wrong. We figure the method that produces the most Right answers is the best, but surely there's a more "industry standard" way of evaluating this kind of thing?
Nominative determinism department:
The first witness in Trump's trial about the alleged hush money for Stormy Daniels was the former publisher for The National Enquirer, who allegedly "used the tabloid to suppress damaging rumors about Trump, and prosecutors say ... helped negotiate the hush-money payment at the center of this case".
The former publisher's name? Pecker
The nominative determinism would be more impressive if there weren't so many synonyms for "penis" in the English language. Other names that also mean "penis" include Peter, Dick, Rod, Johnson, Willy, Wang, Dong, and John Thomas.
Do all languages have a colossal number of words for penis? Does English have the most? Does any other English word have quite so many synonyms?
Many Thanks! Good point! 'fraid I have no idea if English is unusual in this. The language _has_ been said to pursue
>other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary
The name rings a bell...where did I hear that before? Oh
Mr Pecker unwisely attempted to extort Jeff Bezos of all people.
https://medium.com/@jeffreypbezos/no-thank-you-mr-pecker-146e3922310f
Wow! Many Thanks! I particularly liked:
>Of course I don’t want personal photos published, but I also won’t participate in their well-known practice of blackmail, political favors, political attacks, and corruption. I prefer to stand up, roll this log over, and see what crawls out.
I thought the hush money wasn't in any doubt? I was under the impression that only question is whether it qualified as an illegal campaign contribution and whether NY could stretch the law to go after him if so.
Many Thanks! I think you are probably right. I'm just trying to avoid typing something that might count as libel.
This trial is so odd, I think nobody is denying he was paying her off, I was given to understand elsewhere that he's being tried for paying her off out of the wrong slush fund and should have claimed it as a campaign expense?
I mean, this case really is all about 'throw any mud to see if it will stick'; if we're going to try politicians for paying off ex-tryst mates, then there is a long list waiting for such. I don't approve of him having affairs, but dd Stormy ever give the money back in a fit of high-mindedness over "no, no, I cannot take the proceeds of infamy!" or did she rather try getting more out of him once that was gone, and if he wouldn't pay up, she decided peddling her story to the media was another way of making money out of it? That she picked Avenatti to be her lawyer - well, two greedy and stupid people met in a match made under heaven, yes?
Yeah, "reputation management" seems like one of those expenses that any public figure could engage in. Trump might well have done this even if he were merely a wealthy reality-TV host.
If I give money to Biden, can I claim that he paid me in nega-dollars to not confess to a torrid affair?
As I understand it, the alleged New York crime is that Trump lied in his business records about which slush fund he used. But lying in your business records is only a crime if you use those records to commit or conceal some other crime; otherwise you're just writing weird harmless fiction. And paying hush money to an inconvenient mistress isn't a crime.
The claimed underlying crime is Federal campaign finance violation, in that Trump paying hush money to his mistress was "obviously" a campaign expense, and you aren't supposed to spend your personal money on campaign expenses without officially donating it to your campaign account first, I think.
Note that this would be a Federal crime, but the Federal government has not seen fit to prosecute. But New York is sure he's guilty.
The cynic in me says, if Trump had used his campaign account rather than his personal account, New York would be saying that paying hush money to an inconvenient mistress is "obviously" a personal matter, and it's a violation of Federal campaign finance laws to spend campaign funds on a personal matter. Again, without regard to whether the Feds think there was a prosecutable violation of federal law.
I think I'm going to trust the cynic in me on this one. I want Trump banished into the political Outer Darkness, but this is not the way.
I'm in the same boat as you. I strongly believe that if he had paid her off using campaign funds that this would be a *much* bigger scandal. We can't have it both ways, especially for something that underneath it all isn't a crime in the first place. I feel like they want to make paying off a mistress a crime, but can't do that (especially retroactively).
So, they're trying to use the legal system to run someone's name through the mud and get as much publicity of the affair as possible. I actually think *that* should be illegal, and some kind of unlawful prosecution charge should be brought against the DA.
This truly is the worst case to bring against Trump, and has already been backfiring by making Trump more sympathetic, riling up his supporters, and undermining any other cases that might be more legitimate.
Yeah. I suspect that Trump *should* be serving prison time for the DC insurrection charge, the Georgia election interference, and possibly the classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. We'll have to wait on the trials to be sure. But the Feds are slow-walking those cases, while NY tries to throw him in prison for the white-collar equivalent of driving with a broken tail light. Which makes everyone involved look like the sort of person who tries to put their political opponents in jail on broken-taillight charges, so kind of untrustworthy when they go on to say "...and he's guilty of actual serious crimes, too!"
Technically, I believe lying on your business records is a misdemeanor, but the statute of limitations has run on that. Lying to conceal another crime is a felony, but the big issue here is that the underlying crime is (a) extremely dubious (paying out of the campaign account is a lot more likely to land you in trouble with the feds) (b) a federal crime that the DOJ declined to prosecute and (c) clearly bootstrapped to give Bragg a way to indict Trump. This is a case where it almost certainly gets tossed on appeal even if he is convicted, and I am deeply annoyed that this one went first, because the other cases against him are so much stronger.
Many Thanks!
>I mean, this case really is all about 'throw any mud to see if it will stick'; if we're going to try politicians for paying off ex-tryst mates, then there is a long list waiting for such.
Agreed on both points. Also agreed that this case is really odd - a hush payoff turned into a case about mislabeling funds (where, IIRC, the statute of limitations ran out), turned into a campaign finance case (under a federal law - but being tried in a state court???).
AFAIK, the only case against Trump that isn't legally tenuous is the classified documents one. Now, personally, I don't want politicians to be above (beneath? :-) ) the law, but I'd rather have the electorate choose which is the less odious candidate to put into office. Also, if politicians routinely face politically motivated prosecution once they leave office - they may become less willing to leave office peacefully. I'd really like to keep the tradition of concession speeches marking power shifts rather than something bloodier.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zulfikar_Ali_Bhutto#Trial_and_execution isn't a model I want us to follow.
Have you looked at Orchid yet? I'm very curious if a separate firm will pop up to take Embryo info from Orchid or Genomic predictions and apply height and IQ tests to them
Here's something to think about regarding kids' IQ: My parents were not trying or expecting to have a smart kid, but they got one. Some time in grade school a teacher told my mother my IQ, and she told me, and she and I both developed an unhealthy preoccupation with that number, and that ended up being very bad for my head. Feeling proud that it was high was just the tiny tip of the iceberg. Most of the effect was to strengthen the sense I already had of being a very odd entity, something like vast, olive-colored irregular polygon set in a row of blue and white houses. It took me decades to get over the IQ thing, and as for the rest- I still feel pretty olive-colored.
If people who pick thru their embryos before implanting one feel they must test their children's IQ to find out whether they got as much awesome specialness as they paid for, I hope someone counsels them to only test once, refrain from talking to the kid about the the result, and STFU about the subject for the rest of their lives.
But don't you think that it's being genuinely different in thought patterns, context, background knowledge, speed-of-inference, and so on that makes you so different?
I was tested at a young age, and put in special programs and skipped grades and whatever afterwards. My parents never told me my results, but it was VERY easy to see from before kindergarten that I was massively different than everyone around me, and that's been true basically my whole life.
I'm not sure "don't tell your kid the result" is actually going to make a high IQ person actually fit in better or be any more "normal," because I think a lot of the differences are inherent in the condition itself.
It's easy to think "I'm different because I'm so much smarter than the rest of these idiots" when the answer is really "I'm different because I'm weirder, not smarter". Smart may have little to do with why you don't fit in.
There are *two* big mistakes highly intelligent people can make, and it is natural to make one of them when trying too hard to avoid the other:
* ignore the fact that their high IQ makes them different;
* attribute all their differences to the high IQ, even when something else is the cause.
Many people believe that refusing to believe in a high IQ is virtuous. Guess what: the smart kid will notice that *something* is different. Other people will notice, too. People naturally try to explain things, so in the absence of the correct explanation they will likely invent an incorrect one.
Some people believe that a lie can be virtuous. For example, you can explain the educational success of the smart kid by pretending that it is a result of the kid studying diligently. That will certainly encourage everyone to study harder (the smart kid to keep the advantage, everyone else to hopefully get the same results one day), and everyone studying harder is a socially desirable outcome, isn't it?
But it doesn't work like that. The smart kid will notice that he or she gets good grades even without studying. And the other kids will notice that no matter how hard they study, the outcome is simply not the same. Telling them to study even harder is just pointless cruelty; some of them are already on the verge of collapse. By denying the existence of a biological privilege, you are simultaneously blaming the ones who were dealt a bad hand.
(Why doesn't everyone learn to code and get a job in Silicon Valley; that would certainly solve all the unemployment and poverty, wouldn't it? Oh, those lazy bastards are just not studying hard enough. Or perhaps we should blame the teachers for not inspiring them enough instead? Or maybe it's the sexist and racist employers and colleagues. Anyway, the point is that literally everyone could become an elite coder, if only we collectively tried harder. The beatings will continue until morale improves.)
From inside, being highly intelligent but in denial about it, means constantly overestimating other people's ability to understand things, and being constantly surprised about how other people just fail to connect the dots. (There is a rationalist wisdom saying that if you are surprised too often, it usually means that your model of the world is wrong.) Even after admitting that intelligence is a thing, if you don't accept that you are exceptionally intelligent, it will seem like you have the bad luck of being surrounded by exceptionally stupid people. Things only start making sense when you realize that there is a "normal", and you are not a part of it.
And yes, there is a better known opposite mistake, often seen among Mensa members, when the high IQ is the *only* fact you know about yourself, and then you conclude that *everything* else that happened to you is somehow a consequence of you being too smart for this planet. You don't have ADHD, and you are not too lazy to clean up your room or at least your working desk, it is simply a fact that smart people thrive in chaos and need it. You don't have autism or low social skills, it is simply the vast intellectual distance between you and the muggles that prevents mutual understanding. Etc. (So why are there many smart people who *don't* fail at life? Dunno, they probably got lucky, or maybe they are not playing fair somehow.)
In presence of such extreme choices, it can be difficult to obtain a balanced perspective on intelligence. Yes, it will give you an advantage in many areas of life. No, it cannot replace knowledge or experience, and if you try using it that way, you will fail. But if you work diligently, you can achieve much better results than the less intelligent people, no matter how hard they try. But there are only 24 hours a day, so there is a limited number of things you can work diligently on, and at the end of the day you will need someone else's help with the rest, even if that other person is less intelligent than you. Intelligence alone will not fix your other problems. Intelligence is not the same as rationality, or wisdom, or education, or experience; although it can help you obtain these things easier.
This is extremely well said and enlightening, thank you.
I have a distinct memory of asking an (Asian) classmate how to solve some particular math problem. He wrote down the method in half a second. "Oh I see," I said. "And why does that work?"
And he gave me an utterly blank look.
I can't prove this, but I had a very strong sense that it wasn't that he simply didn't know the answer, or didn't know how to explain it. Rather, I really think he found the question incomprehensible. As if it was a question he'd never asked himself in his life.
This really confounds the concept of intelligence to me. This guy had great memorisation skills, could no doubt pick up mental algorithms and formulaic processes in an instant and apply them flexibly and effortlessly to many different contexts. And yet, he didn't just lack philosophical ability, he didn't even merely lack philosophical curiosity, he seemed to lack the comprehension that there was even such a thing as philosophical curiosity that might exist.
I'm sure this general idea has been addressed by Scott somewhere, but I just can't see how the two questions "*how* does it work, what steps get you from A to B?" and "*why* does it work, what fundamental features of this discipline explain the success of this approach" belong on the same dimension, or even on related dimensions. There's probably a technical model for connecting them. But they are in a basic sense incommeasurable.
A bit of the first is probably necessary for the second. But the first can exist entirely without the second. And this same point applies in a self-referential meta way. There's so much focus on some "thing" (IQ) that correlates with certain test results and also correlates with life outcomes and abilities. Compared to the "why": what *is* IQ, in its essential nature? "What is intelligence?" Not "what does it correlate with?"
I have also met the "intelligence without curiosity" type. From my perspective, "intelligence" means having a powerful engine in your head... but for what purposes you choose to use that engine, that is an entirely different question.
I would predict that people with high IQ will be statistically more impressive in whatever purpose they choose, whether it is curious exploration, mindless memorization, or conspiracy theories.
That may be true. But I'm inclined to doubt it. There are a whole bunch of scientists and scientific types who seem to really hate and despise philosophy. They seem to have not only a firmly dismissive certainty that "philosophy is all useless and fake lol", but also a kind of rage at its existence. (Thankfully there aren't many of them around here, or if there are they have more nuance in the way they talk.)
Of course they *may* be simply choosing to hate philosophy and love science. But the manner of their rage really looks to me like the standard attitude of a self-perceived "smart" or "skilled" person encountering a discipline or task that they're actually bad at. "Well if *I* can't do it, it must be useless anyway. I could ace it if I wanted to. But I don't, so there!"
Standard human pride and childishness is what it looks like. Which suggests that science and philosophy (science is actually a form of philosophy, but let's ignore that) sometimes require different forms of intelligence (though obviously there are plenty who are great at both, like Scott).
> "he seemed to lack the comprehension that there was even such a thing as philosophical curiosity that might exist..."
My best friend and I noticed this in many of our academically high-performing high school classmates. We called it "thintelligence."
To this day we inadvertently recycled it from Michael Crichton or if we just happened to independently converge on the same idea.
"That will certainly encourage everyone to study harder (the smart kid to keep the advantage, everyone else to hopefully get the same results one day), and everyone studying harder is a socially desirable outcome, isn't it?"
Raw talent will get you a long way, but relying on the talent on its own, without learning how to learn or put in the hard work, will one day fail. I've seen it in sports, where the naturally gifted eventually hit the day when they're slower and their reflexes are not as quick, and the raw talent is no longer there to be called on to help them out of a hole. The ones who learned to practice and figure out solutions have that to help them out and extend their careers when the legs aren't able to get them to that spot on the field five seconds before anyone else anymore, but they have so much experience in reading the game that they know to position themselves in good time to be in that spot.
And you see the opposite: the slow decline of the former star, where they now routinely get beaten by the less talented but hard-working younger opponent because they've put in the work to figure out how to get the result, while the star is trying to draw from the well of talent that is now drying up.
It took me a long time to realize that I was much smarter than most people. Everyone assumes that their own experience is normal and everyone else is just like them until proven otherwise.
I think I was born wired to be sort of schizoid -- to have trouble connecting with people -- and that wiring was separate from the smart wiring. So I sort of slotted the IQ info in with the sense of unfixable separateness I already had, and it strengthened it. If I had had a different temperament the info about IQ might not have affected me the way it did. I have known lots of people who are clearly extremely smart, and of course they started getting evidence of that early in life, but you don't get the sense that their smartness is a sort of capsule they are locked inside of. They're sociable. They like company. They tell great jokes and stories. Feynman sounds like he was like that. The more sociable kind of smart people tend not to work in jobs where they're alone with a book or a screen a lot of the time -- for instance they may be lawyers. Or doctors. Paul Farmer, for instance, was evidently a genius from an early age, but he spent his life in a sea of people.
But the kids with the introverted + smart combo that I got are not rare, and the last thing they need to hear from their parents and teachers is that the reason they feel so different is that they are intellectually superior. That's really not accurate for most. Feeling separate and different is mostly the product of a whole different aspect of the way they are put together, and they need help learning to modulate that tendency.
If someone has an extremely smart kid then yes of course they will need to talk with the kid about skipping grades etc. But I think it's important to talk about it in a way that does not portray them as a whole different kind of entity. So you don't say, you are a rare high IQ person, as very few are, so you don't fit in with regularly kids and the regular school structures. You say something like, yeah you learn extra fast, and 4th grade is going to be really boring for you, so the school's going to just let you go ahead to 5th. But you can still be on the [whatever] team with your buddies from 4th grade, and have them over on the weekends.
I thought about some pretty esoteric stuff at a young age, but at the same time a lot of my interests were age-appropriate. I liked dolls, hide and seek, pretending to be explorers in the vacant lots at the same age as everyone else. Parents need to do justice to the need for that sort of play too. Mine did, and I think that did me a lot of good.
I'm skeptical that the Rationalist IQ Uber Alles meme is even a beneficial belief system in the first place, let alone something that kids should hear. I like your suggestion of how to handle it.
I agree at the "lol my number is bigger than yours" level, but let me put forward one case for it. I don't know what you consider a symptom of "IQ uber alles," but I assume I'd qualify because I would definitely pay significant prices to gengineer my kids (with IQ and height / attractiveness top of the list), and would structure their and our lives around schooling them in a different way.
Here's my rationale: Progress and achievement is driven by outliers. If you actually have a high IQ outlier kid, you are more likely to help them become their best self, and to drive positive results in the world, by taking their difference into account and treating them differently than just throwing them into public school for them to be crushingly bored and learn nothing for 12 years.
JS Mill was a child prodigy because his "peers" and main interaction partners were his parents' social circle of high-powered intellectual elites, and he's one of many examples.
I've always planned to A) pay for whatever gengineering is possible with a couple million, and B) homeschool my kids at a greatly accelerated pace, including paying grad students to give intensive 1-on-1 tutoring in whatever subjects the kids are interested in. The aim would be "undergrad by 14-15," which I think is about the right difficulty level and place for a smart 14/15 year old. And I'd happily have them go younger than that if inclined.
Bad for social life to never be around age-appropriate kids? Maybe? But I never really had much to say to age-appropriate kids and usually sought interactions with smarter adults, because age-appropriate kids didn't think or talk about anything interesting. Then when I was a teenager and libido came in, there was a *reason* to talk to kids my age and I started doing it (and in my paradigm, they'll already be in undergrad when this happens, which is probably the best place for it).
Also, this way they'll actually *learn* things, which is important. I was so crushingly bored in junior high and high school I literally became a delinquent, because then they send you to a special school where you get all your work for the week at 8am monday, so you can crank through it in a few hours and be done with the contentless nonsense and can spend your time flirting and getting in trouble with the other delinquent kids for the rest of the week.
I don't want that for my kids, I want them to actually learn things and be able to discuss interesting and complex ideas with other smart people, and to get through the credential signaling rat-race faster than other people so they can get on with their lives, and would structure their schooling and our lives around that.
To my mind, this maximizes the chance of them flourishing and getting the most out of their talents and gifts, and maximizes the chance of positive impact in the world driven by them. But yes, it's paying significant sums, then upending and structuring our entire lives around a different educational paradigm, purely for the sake of "IQ uber alles." I think it's worth it.
Reading the potted bio of Mill on Wikipedia is not encouraging; Dad wanted a baby genius to carry on The Utilitarian Cause and devoted his time to turning baby JS into that, with the result being that:
"Mill went through months of sadness and contemplated suicide at twenty years of age. According to the opening paragraphs of Chapter V of his autobiography, he had asked himself whether the creation of a just society, his life's objective, would actually make him happy. His heart answered "no", and unsurprisingly he lost the happiness of striving towards this objective. Eventually, the poetry of William Wordsworth showed him that beauty generates compassion for others and stimulates joy. With renewed vigour, he continued to work towards a just society, but with more relish for the journey. He considered this one of the most pivotal shifts in his thinking. In fact, many of the differences between him and his father stemmed from this expanded source of joy."
I can't help feeling that if Dad had allowed him to be a normal kid and associate with others of his own age and not be always on all the time, he might have avoided "I'm twenty and I want to die because it's all pointless".
> Bad for social life to never be around age-appropriate kids?
If you network with other highly intelligent people, some of them probably will have kids of a similar age.
I agree IQ isn't Uber Alles and here's an example of why not: There's currently an argument about Israel/Palestine on this thread, and LovesIsraelHatesIP is participating. They are one of the few people on ACX I have ever seen publicly change their point of view about a major issue in which they had an emotional investment -- and then apologize for their earlier posts -- and thereafter try to help other people become more fairminded too. Scott is willing to publicly change his mind, but that has a different quality, because he doesn't usually sound emotionally invested in his beliefs, so when he changes them it doesn't feel like as big a deal. I don't know what personal quality made LIHIP able to publicly change their point of view the way they did, but it wasn't extra IQ points. Whatever it is, nobody's going to convince me that it's some trivial Niceness kind of quality, less important than IQ.
Y'all ever meet up in Tahoe?
Also, I'll drop my new interview with Jon Askonas here: https://youtu.be/RHWhC2af4kc?si=XSOg561ChcW48Pkn
Shameless self-promotion: my biweekly COVID update here. Things are looking pretty good right now in the US. If past patterns hold we should expect another wavelet late summer.
https://x.com/beowulf888/status/1782071333943382468
I could use a bit of advice from some statisticians or maybe data scientists.
This summer I will have a summer internship working with scientists doing research on air pollution and cardiovascular health. This will involve downloading all sorts of data sets from various goverment databases, and looking for patterns in them. What sorts of tools should I be using to make discovery easy?
Off hand, I would probably work with Google Sheets for small data sets, write custom code in Python if I needed to do any serious data cleaning, and load the data into something like a local Postgres server if I needed to do heavier querying in SQL. Any other tooling I should be considering?
Data scientist here. Use Python with Jupyter notebooks. No need to upload anything to Postgres, you can do all your manipulation right in a Pandas Data Frame. This will keep things more easily repeatable without worrying about the state of a database.
I recommend using VSCode with the GitHub Copilot extension. You can just tell it what analysis you want (or what models built) and it will just do it like magic. It's easily a 10x productivity multiplier if you aren't already a power user.
Thanks for the advice.
I'm not a data scientist, but I have worked adjacent to them at times. The single best piece of advice is: just look at the data. If it's small, just look at all the data. If it's big, write something custom to look at as much data as possible. The value that you deliver is unlikely to be knowing and trying some obscure summary method that makes everything clear, the value is in building an intuitive understanding of the data and then leveraging it for insights. Embrace the tedium. Here are other people giving similar advice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltLUadnCyi0 https://www.mayo.edu/research/documents/always-look-at-the-data/doc-20408953
Thanks, I'll keep that in mind.
This columbia university business is fascinating. It seems that many of these Jews have been supporting the ADL strategy, and were desperately hoping that people wouldn't notice that 'one of these victim groups is not like the other'.
It's like something our of folklore. Jewish intellectuals being attacked by a golem of their own making.
To give a serious reply this time, and make my position clear.
If a Jewish intellectual hates white people, I want to see him treated exactly the same as a Nazi, or as an intellectual who hates black people. If he hates me because I'm white, I don't want to hate him back because he's Jewish, I want to hate him back because he's racist.
I don't want to be racist back at him. I don't want to see his relatives punished because they're Jewish, I want to see him alone punished because he's a bigoted piece of shit.
What...in the name of God...is so radical and unusual about this position? Racism is wrong. Meaning: there are *absolutely no imaginable circumstances on the face of the earth, ever* in which it is acceptable to treat someone differently because of their race. Ever. Woke professors, Jim Crow racists, BLM activists, and neo-Nazis are in the exact same category (obviously varying by how much damage they actually do, but the ideologies are identical). I don't know how to express this clearer: someone who thinks there are any circumstances in which race may be taken into account, who thinks people don't have an utterly inalienable right to be treated as an individual where their racial background is literally 100% irrelevant to any aspect of life ever, are an enemy of everything I thought a free society stands for.
It's valid to point out the poetic justice of a person (be they Jewish, black, whatever) who pushes anti-white woke racism (i.e. saying whites have collective guilt, or are not allowed to speak about some subject etc) then facing racist collective punishment of their own, as some Jewish wokists are now doing. Those individual people deserve every bit of that. The other innocent members of their race who were *not* doing that (e.g. Jews who *aren't* woke professors), do not deserve it in the slightest!
I feel like this position was the unquestioned orthodoxy of western civilisation up until a little over ten years ago. And now it's been abandoned by practically everyone, and I feel like I'm highly unusual for still holding to it.
What the fuck is wrong with everyone?
>What...in the name of God...is so radical and unusual about this position? Racism is wrong. Meaning: there are *absolutely no imaginable circumstances on the face of the earth, ever* in which it is acceptable to treat someone differently because of their race. Ever.
>. I don't know how to express this clearer: someone who thinks there are any circumstances in which race may be taken into account, who thinks people don't have an utterly inalienable right to be treated as an individual
It's unusual...because it's unusual. Almost nobody of any race seriously believes in this.
Is it wrong for women to treat men differently than other women?
Do they have to be actually abused or attacked by a man before they are scared of him or exclude him from 'women's spaces'?
Well, guess what? The male/female violent crime ratio is about the same as the black/white crime ratio. OH, and black people empirically hate white people on average, and the black on white murder rate is higher per capita than the white on white murder rate.
So which is it?
Do women have an obligation to treat men as individuals? Or do you bizarrely think your logic only applies to race for some reason?
And why stop there? Why do correlations and statistical patterns only have to be ignored when it comes to race?
Companies want to hire people with college degrees because they're more likely to be intelligent. But that's just a correlation! There are plenty of INDIVIDUALS without college degrees who are much smarter than people with college degrees, so by not hiring the job candidate without the college degree you're not treating him as an individual and are instead judging him by a category that only has predictive value at a population level. See how fun this is?
>I feel like this position was the unquestioned orthodoxy of western civilisation up until a little over ten years ago.
What? Most of western history is Europeans recognizing themselves are distinct from other peoples and the thought of treating other peoples equally was absurd to the point of not rising to the level of consideration. Segregation existed less than a century ago.
And we still had affirmative action ten years ago so I have LITERALLY no idea when this 'we don't care about race' nonsense was ever supposed to have existed.
>And now it's been abandoned by practically everyone, and I feel like I'm highly unusual for still holding to it.
It was never the norm, you're just imagining it.
+1.
Agreed on every point! Many Thanks!
Seriously.
1000% agree
You "1000% agree" that western society before 10 years ago never cared about race?
You are both completely, *aggressively* wrong.
Individuals cared about race, but the system was largely race blind, absent some affirmative action in a few liberal colleges
"I don't know how to express this clearer: someone who thinks there are any circumstances in which race may be taken into account, who thinks people don't have an utterly inalienable right to be treated as an individual where their racial background is literally 100% irrelevant to any aspect of life ever, are an enemy of everything I thought a free society stands for."
I think your moral position is roughly correct in some abstract Platonic ideal sense but I think the likely empirical premises you believe are radically wrong just because ~everybody's racist under that definition.
So I view your stated position as ~insane, and antithetical to any real progress in reducing racism nowadays. If someone actually takes this view consistently (I suspect you don't), it's about as practical as an American abolitionist in 1780 declaring war on anybody who has ever bought a slavery-produced good.
Your moral outrage feels childish to me. Maybe consistently opposing all incidences of racism under your definition, no matter how mild or what the context is, will be a reasonable view in 2074. But I think if you actually believe this position consistently in 2024 (again, I suspect you don't) I think you'd rapidly find yourself shunning friends, employers, and family members.
The last time somebody in an ACX open thread brought up racism not being a thing among conservatives "for over 50 years", I pointed out that a) >50% of American whites disapproved of white-black intermarriage until the 1990s, and b) conversations between Reagan and Nixon sure didn't seem exactly race-blind (https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/educational-resources/reagan-nixon-and-race). Then multiple people got mad at me and pointed out irrelevant non-sequitors about Democrats being more racist. lol.
Let me put it another way: both Lincoln and Churchill, widely considered AngloAmerican heroes, are unambiguously willing to treat people differently due to the color of their skin. Churchill even was unusually racist for his time! I don't think your support for antiracism is enough for you to believe Churchill is "an enemy of everything I thought a free society stands for." People are complicated, and I find the positions that round off to "any single incidence of racism is enough to make someone an outcast in polite society, much the same way literal (trad) Nazis and KKK members are" rather childish, from both the left and the right. See also Avenue Q (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=th4FMmNQpAk)
From a personal view, as a nonwhite person who lived in noncosmopolitan parts of America for most of my life, it's patently obvious that traditional racism (people displaying "prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism by an individual, community, or institution against a person or people on the basis of their membership in a particular racial or ethnic group" towards ethnic minorities in the US) is still prevalent. Sometimes it was even directed at me! I've also observed antiwhite racism (e.g. I've met women who wouldn't date white people, or Asians who automatically assume white Americans are diversity hires). In each of these incidences, I've treated the racism as just one fact of many about the person, and not by itself a disqualifying factor unless it gets extreme.*
I also want to be clear that:
a) By racist, I don’t mean the negation is a very difficult target to hit or metaphysically impossible (“it’s impossible to be antiracist in a white supremacist society”). I mean something very simple. AFAICT I personally have zero, or approximately zero, prejudice against lefthanded people. I think this is common in modern Western society. I do not believe, as an empirical claim, that the vast majority of people alive today consistently hit the same level of ~zero prejudice as applied to race.
b) For simplicity, I’m just using the first definition of racism you’d find in a dictionary “prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism by an individual, community, or institution against a person or people on the basis of their membership in a particular racial or ethnic group, typically one that is a minority or marginalized.” I’m not talking about systemic/structural racism or belief in group differences. Whether those things should or should not be defined as “racist” is more of a definitional dispute, and I’m more interested in advancing empirical claims.
*I suspect this is what other people also do in practice when they say they have a "no tolerance" policy for racists; they just round off more mild incidents to zero.
>Let me put it another way: both Lincoln and Churchill, widely considered AngloAmerican heroes, are unambiguously willing to treat people differently due to the color of their skin.
Race is NOT skin color. There's absolutely no reason to think they would have been any more fond of albino africans than regular africans.
Similarly, many south asians have similar skin tone to many african americans - but these groups obviously have very different places in American society.
This isn't nit-picking BS. It's a really important point - by saying 'skin color', you're making it seem like it's blind, irrational hatred based on appearance. But races differ enormously in their behavior, and that's ultimately the source of "racism". Things like skin color (or really, appearance generally) are mostly just indications of a person's race and not the defining characteristic of it.
If African americans had pale skin but behaved identically as they do today, I can promise you that views of black people amongst whites would not be meaningfully different.
Yes it may seem a bit extreme to hold to such an absolute view. But the thing is, it's been proven an indescribable number of times that people simply can't be trusted not to exploit the tiniest exception to an unimaginable extent. If you allow an exception to free speech to ban Nazism, people will use it to ban misgendering. If you acknowledge that "vote for Obama because he's got a unique minority lived experience" is a valid thing to say, people will take that as you telling them that holding up protest signs with "Kill All Whites" is a valid thing to do. You can't make this up.
I don't know if these people honestly can't see a difference between Nazism and misgendering, or between "first black president" and "kill all whites", or of they just pretend they can't for cynical reasons. Either way, it makes you lose all faith in humanity. And they leave us with the only option of an extreme rule with zero exceptions.
Also, I don't think I need to say that Lincoln and Churchill were enemies of a free society. They didn't support free speech either. But in the climate they were in, absolute free speech and colour-blind individualism were not yet reasonably established principles. A relatively free society that has not worked out all the contradictions within it is very different from a truly free society where a large faction wants to eliminate that freedom.
"They didn't support free speech either. But in the climate they were in, absolute free speech and colour-blind individualism were not yet reasonably established principles."
Then why did you claim that "western civilization" was color blind until 10 years ago?
Look, I momentarily forgot about affirmative action. With that caveat, normal people and cultural discourse was color blind enough SINCE the 60s or whatever, UNTIL the Obama-era Great Awokening.
I'll take a shot at this.
While I have a few quibbles with the details of what ascend said, and I think you covered them, I wholeheartedly agree with the spirit. This is aspirational, this is a shining ideal, this is what we should try to build from the crooked timber of humanity, even if perfection is impossible in this fallen world.
There's got to be room for articulating an ideal, even if no implementation has ever been perfect. Every other part of the political spectrum seems to do it; what's so wrong with classical liberalism having a go? Are we being collectively nerd-sniped, with "what about this implementation detail", "no one's ever done this before", "what about all the problems in the past", and so forth? I know I'm echoing criticism of totalitarian communism here, but I think the track records speak for themselves.
This is the kind of thing that goes up next to parts of the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
You can argue with that in a lot of ways: that the language is sexist, that it embeds religion, that it conceals racism. But I think those words are going to continue to be inspirational long after we're all dead and rotted.
So black people have a high rate of violent crime against white people (the black on white homicide rate per capita is literally higher than the white on white homicide rate). Accordingly to survey data, black people essentially hate white people on average.
Why should I treat all black people as individuals? Why should I have to wait to be abused or attacked before I have suspicion of/aversion to black people?
Why does this logic magically stop applying when it comes to how women treat men? Women are allowed to be extremely suspicious of any man she doesn't know, which is the opposite of treating people as individuals.
I assume you've heard enough of the idealism by this point, so I'll skip that because I probably can't do a better job than whatever else you've heard.
Pragmatically, I'd say that the answer isn't to treat all members of the group equally badly, or to ignore group membership entirely. Group membership is a just a proxy for the information we really want to know, and there are better signals for that information. And at the point at which we lay eyes on anyone, we've already got better signals.
Let's imagine the most stereotypical black thug possible. Then a white thug who dresses and speaks and acts exactly the same. And then a black man who's dressed in a suit and tie and wears glasses and talks and acts like a college professor. I'm going to be very careful around the first two of those, and probably not concerned for my physical safety at all around the third. For example, take these guys:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nkw4TTPQbLk
Would you actually feel them to be more dangerous than white guys who otherwise look and talk like them?
I do agree that if race or sex is literally all we have to go on, if it's just entries in a spreadsheet, then none of the other signals apply. But even then we should try to keep in mind the overlapping bell curves, and not collapse them into two distinct vertical lines.
> Why does this logic magically stop applying when it comes to how women treat men?
Frankly, I don't think it does. There's a variant of sexism that treats women as helpless, powerless, and eternally fearful, and this plays right into it. It's especially nasty when internalized and combined with actual power, because the doublethink required to wield power without accepting responsibility leads to some sociopathic and narcissistic behavior.
> Women are allowed to be extremely suspicious of any man she doesn't know, which is the opposite of treating people as individuals.
I'm curious: do you think this sort of behavior in women is, on some level, wrong? I'll just say up front that, if you don't, I can't fault your consistency, but I will think that you've bricked yourself into a cold and inhumane world-view, and I'll hope that you'll break out one day.
In the United States, at least, I don't think your position has ever been unquestioned orthodoxy. Certainly not during the eras of slavery or Jim Crow. Ever since the Civil Rights movement in the 1950’s/1960’s there have arguments about how to achieve de facto (as opposed to merely de jure) racial equality. Affirmative action dates back to 1961. In 1971, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of busing to increase integration of public schools. Policies that take race into consideration have been seriously proposed, and indeed actually enacted, throughout U.S. history.
First of all, the US is far to the left of most western countries in the extent of its race-conscious progressivism and use of affirmative action. So "orthodoxy of western civilisation" perhaps allows for the existence of one major outlier.
Second, and more importantly, affirmative action can in some narrow contexts be *in theory* implememted without treating races differently. If you have hard evidence that there is racial discrimination at various levels of the hiring process that is hard to pinpoint, then you can use affirmative action at the end point to the exact extent necessary to counteract it. In that case, you're not favouring or disfavouring any particular race, you're applying the same of rule to everyone of "if you can prove you were probably discriminated against based on characteristic X, we'll reverse-discriminate on that characteristic to restore meritocracy".
Of course this is very technical rules-lawyering, and most of the time that's not how it works at all, so my statement was obviously too strong. But I still think there's an *enormous* difference between localised algorithms that consider race in a narrow numerical-balance context, and society-wide ideologies of collective guilt, and the latter is mostly what I was talking about.
+1
Yes, and furthermore I think the 2003 Supreme Court decision said that the general intention was that affirmative action would only be necessary for another 25 years. The Court itself seems to be sticking to that plan, but academia and the Democrats have decided that, as equality has increased and blacks have reached the highest offices, for some reason much stronger affirmative action is now needed than ever before.
It just shows how dishonest the justifications are. If the left actually believed their own justifications, they would be more militant when they're out of power and when society is more racist, and less militant when they're in power and society is more woke, instead of the *exact opposite*!
**applause**
We get it. You hate immigration, poor non-whites, and you have a big problem with Jews being progressive and/or Jews being (as in: existing).
What else? What's new? Why the same view expressed over and over again in various formulations and minor rephrasing?
I'm commenting on something that is happening right now, AS WE SPEAK, and has longer term implications around zionism and anti-white ideology. As I said, jews are reaping what they have sown, so perhaps we can hope they'll stop with all the sowing?
And I have a problem with jewish intellectuals hating white people, which is something that people around here are scarcely willing to admit is even a thing, let alone condemn. People get angrier at people like me suggesting this hatred exists than they ever would when confronted with an example of said hatred.
And buddy, it's YOUR friends who are doing the IRL jew hatred as we speak, so it's extremely rich of you to sit there and pretend like I'm the bad guy here. I'm commenting on a cultural phenomenon, anti-zionists like you are the ones physically endangering people.
And it's also extremely rich of you to complain that someone is being repetitive since most of your time on this site has apparently been posting about literally one topic - ISRAEL. You must have posted hundreds of comments on this blog about how much you hate israel, but apparently you alone have the right to dwell on one topic.
Commenting on something that is happening now is not an excuse to be repetitive and/or boring, and insofar as I **was** repetitive and boring in the early days of the October 7th and till November, this is a character flaw of mine that you should look at to learn from and not emulate.
(and me being repetitive and boring is a tad more justified when the topic I'm being boring about is people dying, and when I was a little more varied in my phrasing and choice of topics than you.)
> I have a problem with Jewish intellectuals hating white people
Me too, except I don't care who's doing the hating and who's being hated. I also hate it when Arab intellectuals paint all Israelis with one brush as colonists, and when Chinese and/or Russian intellectuals paint the whole Western world with one brush as dirty capitalists/imperialists/whateverists.
From The Meditations, by Marcus Aurilias [1]:
>>> and [I] have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own - not of the same blood and birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness. Nor can I feel angry at my relative, or hate him. We were born to work together like feet, hands and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower.
I can't claim that I follow dear old Marcus in all my life, I ******do******* get angry, a lot. But I never lost sight of the fact that all those I get angry at are my brothers and sisters, my very badly-raised and bad-behaving brothers and sisters, but my brothers and sisters nonetheless. All humans are a single program that was run multiple times.
By the way, you're doing something very similar to those misguided Jewish intellectuals yourself, when you say that "Jews" are reaping what they are sowing. Who sowed Wokism and similar ideologies? "Jews"? Not anymore than "Asians", or "Blacks". Why is it fair for a baker Jew to pay the price of what a misguided X Studies Jewish professor said some 15 years or 10 years ago? Hell, White women are notoriously among the top woke demographics, do they deserve it when anti-White racism catches up with them?
In other words, your posts could be adapted into a book, "Jewish Guilt", or maybe "Jewish Fragility". You and wokies, not so different.
I thought that the whole idea behind principled Free-Speech liberal anti-wokism is that this way of treating people is bad no matter what race they are, Colonization was immoral but rejecting qualified white males in an interview because they're not performatively acknowledging the long-completed genocide against Native people is bizarre, unfair, absurd, and unproductive. Just like most of your posts.
> it's YOUR friends who are doing the IRL jew hatred as we speak
No, they're not. And if some of them happened to be, that won't be for long.
> anti-zionists like you are the ones physically endangering people
Anti-Zionist might have been a description that I would accept as a self-identifier about a year or even half a year ago, but not anymore.
My position on Zionism is - for lack of a better term - "Anti-Historical-Zionism". That is, I think Zionism is racist, not a legitimate nationalist movement (and nationalism - legitimate or not - is itself a 19th century European cringe atrocity-magnet that humanity should evolve out of), and if I have a time machine I would make sure with all my power that Zionists remain the fringe Christian-influenced secular Jewish minority that they were till the early 1930s, an agenda which will probably involve some sub-agendas like the minor tasks of preventing Russian and Soviet pogroms and preventing the Holocaust.
Now that Zionism have won 75 years ago, and there are 7 million people who owe their existence as they know it to this racist and illegitimate pseudo-colonial ideology, it makes no sense to be "Anti-Zionist", Zionism is no more, it has won, and I wasn't born in time to prevent or delay it. In its place there is now Israel. Aside from crimes against Palestinians, Israel is not particularly bad as far as states go, and the position against it but not other states is incoherent. The position against it and all other states is coherent and is called Anarchism, but it's not known how to achieve it in general. The position against its ruling Right-Wing religious fascists is perfectly coherent and perfectly practical, it's called being a human being.
I'm against using the term "Zionist" except when prefixed by "Neo-" or "Religious-" to denote the modern pro-settlement scum like Ben Gvir and his ilk, and those are accepted terms in Israel if Haaretz columnists are any indication. See my recent very long advice to Glenn in the previous Open Thread for evidence that I dislike the term "Zionist" and am very suspicious of it.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/497005-when-you-wake-up-in-the-morning-tell-yourself-the
Stupid tangential question. As I write this, Hammond posted something six hours ago, and then there is a reply by (I think) ascend that is one hour old, and you appear to be responding to that, but your response is three hours old. So did ascend go back and edit his post, or is everything I wrote wrong?
Maybe it's a Substack bug on your end, it's not the weirdest or most bizarre I have heard of.
But as I write this comment on my machine, both my reply from 3 hours ago and ascend's reply from 1 hour are on the same hierarchical level, they are both 2 indented lines to the right, which means they are both responding to the bait thread-starter.
I'm certainly not responding to ascend with the comment you're replying to.
Oh, thank you for clearing that up. Now I understand (have not spent a lot of time on these threads).
<what else?
I think he hates gays too. Or maybe it was trans people. One or t’other. Or maybe both?
Wait until you hear what the good people of Gaza think of gay people.
Po-tae-to, po-tah-to.
Maybe a clearer way to view Hammond is, if a given group of people was not visible on magazine covers in local barbershops circa 1955 he hates that they now are.
You have literally never made a single valuable or interesting comment on this site.
If it wasn't for the Jews, nobody would care about gays, blacks, women, refugees, etc. Jews invented the idea of caring about the well-being of other human beings.
If the Jews are so powerful you should go convert.
Gee, and yet when jews all congregate in one place they quickly go about murdering and oppressing millions of brown people. FASCINATING!
And jews are primarily an ethnic group, not a religion.
> Jews invented the idea of caring about the well-being of other human beings
No they didn't, and there are so many counterexamples that I'm not going to bother listing them.
One of the things I hate about the whiny and clownish posts like the one you're responding to is that it invites clownish responses in the opposite direction like yours.
I was being sarcastic in the first line.
In my defense, this is not the worst thing that I heard from actual extreme Pro-Israel commenters, nor the most racist.
Sorry for eating the onion.
Alas, I think we are past the point where anyone can reliably distinguish sarcasm on this subject. :-(
In a venue with a wide range of views, and a text-only medium with no way to convey body language and just barely able to convey any tone (_italics_ and ALL CAPS being about all), sarcasm is often ambiguous, unfortunately.
:(
Again with the (((Jews))), eh? Remind me what makes the (((Jews))) so (((evil)))? Is it that (((they))) control the (((banks))) and the (((movie industry))) and the (((Zionist state)))? What shall be done with (((them)))?
Don't you get a headache trying to think, when every second word has (((scary brackets))) around it in your mind?
These are LITERALLY jews at an elite academic institution. The jews at columbia are precisely the type of jews who publish books and papers about how much they hate white people. These are the people who have largely created the woke ideology that is currently at their throats.
These people get promotions by talking about how evil white men are, whereas having a problem with this too publicly can destroy your career. And yet, of course, you would only EVER get angry at the people having a problem with it and never the hateful jewish intellectuals themselves.
"And yet, of course, you would only EVER get angry at the people having a problem with it and never the hateful jewish intellectuals themselves."
What??? Did you read my other response (that you also replied to!) where I expressed my very strong anger at those Jewish intellectuals, and how (((they))) deserve all the WokeHate they get. I simply deny that other Jews, who are *not* doing those things, who are *not* publishing "whites be evil" books, should be hated for no other reason than also being Jews.
The protests that have everyone het up are at columbia university. They aren't going door to door looking for jews, they're basically doing this around the most anti-white jews in the country. Like, it's probably harder to find a more concentrated group of anti-white jews in any major US institution than at columbia university. The protesters of course aren't doing that on purpose - they likely hate white people even more than the average jew at columbia, but this fact combined with the influence of jewish intellectuals on modern leftist thought it what makes this whole thing so poetic.
Of course, this takes the claims of 'anti-semitism' at face value - most of what is happening is simply the protesters being anti-israel and jewish zionists mendaciously portraying this as jew hatred.
There is a distinct ethnic identity known as 'Jews'. I see no reason to surround that word with scary brackets, boo-lights, or strong instructions not to notice their distinctiveness.
This group has remained a distinct minority in larger cultures for approximately two millennia, and has culture legends of surviving as a deported-from-homeland minority from even further back.
Some collections of Jews have generated disproportionately-large numbers of intellectuals. Some collections of Jews in modern-American culture are distinctive leaders of socially-liberal movements.
Now, a large number of Progressive and Liberal people are forming protests in favor of the Palestinians over the Israelis, in the latest round of trouble*. These protests vary from people proclaiming support of Palestine to people shouting slogans like "Death to Israel", "Death to America", "We need repeats of October 7". There are even stories of violence against random Jewish people, independent of whether those people are citizens of Israel or supportive of the current behavior of the nation of Israel.
Some of these slogans are simple statements of political preference. Other of the slogans feel like hate-speech to me.
I can't tell if this is ironic, but it is definitely strange. It is also unexpected, given that these protests often show up in Universities. Especially Universities that recently began discussing things like removing the word 'Field' from academic reports, because at one point American slaves worked in fields. Or that put restrictions on speech of non-minority students, using the argument that hurtful words directed at a minority could be a precursor to violence... even if the speaker didn't know that the word in question could be considered hurtful.
I don't consider this a question of whether Jewish people have created something that is a now a problem for them.
I consider this a question of whether the efforts to reduce hurtful words in order to protect minorities has been forgotten or deprecated... or whether some minorities are now considered non-protected minorities.
[*] My opinion of this round of trouble between Hamas and Israel: the leaders of Hamas fomented breaking of a ceasefire, and allowed or encouraged actions that would be considered heinous war crimes if any member of an official uniformed army did them. I am in favor of Hamas initiating a ceasefire, and I am in favor of leadership, members, and supporters of Hamas being subjected to an internationally-adjudicated War Crimes tribunal.
Somehow, most commentary about this sequence of events finds fault in Israel, and in the actions of the Jews. Which seems, in my mind, to assert that the Jews are evil super-villains who somehow remove moral agency from the people of Gaza and the members of Hamas.
Which loops back to the thing you mention: who is it who puts mental scary-brackets around the word "Jews" ?
The problem with using irony is that it gets very quickly confusing who's actually arguing for what.
To be clear, my above post was ironically doing something I used to see from the alt-right in the early Trump years, putting triple brackets around Jewish names for...some wacky and incomprehensible reason. I haven't seen it for a while; I don't know if it's still done on the likes of 4chan. And I don't know where this obsessive demonisation of "the Jews" even comes from.
And I agree with everything you said, I think.
The very first trap that you need to not fall into in the issue of Israel and antisemitism is the propaganda tactic of treating Israel as a personalization of Jews, which will make you do silly things like defending murder of humanitarian workers and people who literally burn children alive because otherwise something something antisemitism.
Once you don't fall into this trap, it's astounding how much clarity and compression you can achieve of the whole situation.
Oh noooooo, the heckin Jewish state, we MUST preserve the ethno-nationalist-religious political entity AT ALL COSTS.
I Assure You, I Am Permitted to Oppose the Existence of Any and All Nation-States: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/i-assure-you-i-am-permitted-to-oppose.
Agree with this
Of course I'm enjoying the show - people who hate me for my race are having a bad time. Why SHOULDN'T I enjoy this, especially when it's a product of their hatred in the first place!
But of course, you're simply doing the same thing as these jews - conflating any and all opposition of jewish ethnonationalism with "anti-semitic hate marches". How lucky for jews that they get to support violent ethnonationalism when white people don't.
Thank goodness for that
I have had this thought on my mind for a while now- how to get around the over-specialization and narrowing of every field of study. I really think that it is the bottleneck for nearly every real and pertinent problem in the world right now, without exaggeration. A lot of people, especially in academia, seem to be aware of this problem but I haven’t seen any convincing ideas for solutions yet. Am I just unaware of relevant things happening in this direction or should I make more of an effort to focus on this in the future?
I want to come up with a detailed and independent framework and methodology that works parallel to all the hyper-specialized subjects we have now. It would focus entirely on synthesizing all the discrete fields for more focused problem solving. A person trained in this should be able to take one real and specific problem, like say widespread hormone disruption, and address it from every available angle- the various biochemical aspects of it, the social and psychological causes and effects, the environmental factors involved- bring in any relevant specialists where needed, but then be able to propose real and practical solutions to it that are effective without causing catastrophic disruptions long term(since the approach is to examine the problem from every available perspective, this should minimize the issues that come from the various interrelated systems that are usually studied separately). I think that this is more of a matter of change in perception of the phenomenon than a change in abilities to address it, but it will make every field of study we have right now that much more effective. Does this sound feasible? Does it already exist in some form and I just don’t know yet? Is there some other way of getting around the problems caused by hyper-specialization?
I suspect that a big problem of specialization is that specialists mostly optimize to impress other specialists in the same field, because outsiders are not relevant for their career progress. Perhaps that is an efficient way to discover new things, but we also need to put some effort into communicating them outside the bubble.
I would like to see every specialization also produce educational materials for outsiders. Not necessarily "explain like I'm five" as that is often not possible, but at least "explain like I'm in the same larger field, but not in your specific specialization", and of course make it as short and simple as possible. Ideally, producing such materials should be a full-time job for someone, otherwise people will ignore it and focus on things relevant for their careers instead.
Because sometimes things are complicated intrinsically, but sometimes it's just their explanations that are complicated because they use too much jargon or obsess too much over details.
Yes! This is exactly the direction I started from. But see, the issue is that there is no good impetus to explore the specialized subjects in non-specialized ways. It just makes people in your field question your credentials. And subjects like interdisciplinary studies have the exact same basic framework as other subjects of study and basically end up just as specialized, only in their own unique direction. The only compelling reason to break out of hyper-specialization is to introduce a clear purpose of solving complicated problems. That is, as far as I can tell, the only way out.
>how to get around the over-specialization and narrowing of every field of study.
> should I make more of an effort to focus on this in the future?
How ironic.
If you think that’s ironic then you didn’t understand the problem I am pointing out here.
Over specialization is not some evil I am trying to stamp out- it is actually quite useful if you know how to synthesize it. And to find a way to synthesize it is going to require focused effort. Are you suggesting I should just screw up my eyes at it and pretend things are defocused and therefore all better now instead? What a waste of everyone’s time.
>What a waste of everyone’s time.
How ironic.
Institutions like the Kennedy School of Government bring together people trained in various disciplines. They have over a dozen “centers” dedicated to addressing various issues. A bit of research might tell you how close what they do is what you are suggesting, and how well it works in practice.
Thank you, I will look into that!
Some interesting information about the publishing industry, which came to light as a result of the recent Penguin Random House antitrust suit.
https://www.elysian.press/p/no-one-buys-books
" I think I can sum up what I’ve learned like this: The Big Five publishing houses spend most of their money on book advances for big celebrities like Brittany Spears and franchise authors like James Patterson and this is the bulk of their business. They also sell a lot of Bibles, repeat best sellers like Lord of the Rings, and children’s books like The Very Hungry Caterpillar. These two market categories (celebrity books and repeat bestsellers from the backlist) make up the entirety of the publishing industry and even fund their vanity project: publishing all the rest of the books we think about when we think about book publishing (which make no money at all and typically sell less than 1,000 copies)."
Thanks for the link!
This is standard in the entertainment industry.
In 2019, 20% of the movies released generated 98% of box office revenues. (Or, to put it another way, 80% of the movies released got to fight over 2% of the money.) All by its lonesome, "Avengers: Endgame" generated 7.5% of all box office revenues that year, and even in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, when the industry was not consumed by a single all-devouring cinematic universe, the number one film in any given year (out of several hundred releases) would account for between 3% and 7% of the total box office.
I was vaguely aware of similar issues with the Political Memoir of the Year (or the Ghost-Written Presidential Memoir).
The Publishing house will write a check on the order of several million dollars to be able to publish a Political Memoir with a well-known face on the cover. I would have guessed that such books would sell somewhere between 5000 and 10,000 copies. I would also guess that such books are mostly purchased by or for people in the News/Opinion business, so that they can discuss the Big New Memoir.
Perhaps the books by big celebrities (Taylor Swift?) would be in that category also.
I should have known, but wouldn't have guessed, that Bibles are among the perennial best-sellers. Maybe I should start asking people what they read, and whether they've ever heard of those three young men who were thrown in the fiery furnace?
My parents gave me Obama's first two books as a gift, back when he only had the two. I think they may have given them to all their children, and maybe relatives too. My copies are still sitting in a pile of unread books that can almost be measured in yards, rather than feet, but I might get to them one day.
And all my relatives have piles of books like that, it seems - books that are talked up on TV and radio and newspapers and magazines, books that are... aspirational, to use an old word. Books that signal something about your identity, and what you hope is the identity of the person you give them to. If you see a copy of them on someone's shelf, it's like seeing a bit of Yankees memorabilia, or the UT longhorn logo on a mug. Or a sign with rainbow lettering in a lawn.
Yes, this is why the Christmas stacks of gardening books, cookery books, and celebrity memoirs - that's what makes the money. Add in things like repeat bestsellers such as crime series and horror, and why every publisher is hoping to strike that one best-selling author who will be a popular hit and reliable seller for decades. Hence why long-running series such as the Robert B. Parker various series are continued on with other writers after the original author's death; they are reliable workhorses that generate steady, ongoing, long-term income.
The prestige, award-winning literary tomes may be the ones that give the particular publishing house the gloss and repute and publicity (Booker Winner X published by Y!), but they're by no means the bread-and-butter of the industry. It's why J.K. Rowling has not been dropped by her publishers despite all the controversy, her books simply sell too well. Despite this Variety article from 2020, trying to prognosticate that she was losing sales due to her transphobia, the Harry Potter books are still selling like hotcakes and her adult crime novels got a BBC series which is now shooting its sixth season.
https://variety.com/2020/film/news/jk-rowling-book-sales-harry-potter-1234708777/
https://insidethemagic.net/2024/01/harry-potter-series-un-cancelable-despite-j-k-rowling-sales-up-millions-nk1/
And it is the money made from the popular sales that does fund the 'slim volume of verse' and "thirty years between first and second novel" literary works, so the high-brows shouldn't sneer too hard at the trashy genre stuff 😀
To quote a Tolkien letter from 1972:
"15 July. I spent yesterday at Hemel Hempstead. A car was sent for me & I went to the great new (grey and white) offices and book-stores of Allen & Unwin. To this I paid a kind of official visitation, like a minor royalty, and was somewhat startled to discover the main business of all this organization of many departments (from Accountancy to Despatch) was dealing with my works. I was given a great welcome (& v.g. lunch) and interviewed them all from board-room downwards. 'Accountancy' told me that the sales of The Hobbit were now rocketing up to hitherto unreached heights. Also a large single order for copies of The L.R. had just come in. When I did not show quite the gratified surprise expected I was gently told that a single order of 100 copies used to be pleasing (and still is for other books), but this one for The L.R. was for 6,000."
Great quote. GRRM's relaxed tempo always struck me as a failure of imagination at the publishing house. They should have sent an army of ghostwriters to keep him continually supplied with draft pages, fully to his specifications to revise or critique like a director. With apologies to Getty, if some author sells a hundred copies and procrastinates, that's the author's problem. If they sell a million copies and procrastinate, that's the house's problem.
I think with Martin, if he never finishes the series, then the publishers will do the same as with Robert Jordan - take any notes and plotlines left behind, find a decent second-tier fantasy writer who's happy to take on the gig, and get him to finish it off. Fans may not be happy, but they'll buy the book(s) anyway just to have a conclusion.
To be fair, that's pretty much what Christopher Tolkien did with Guy Gavriel Kay and the Silmarillion, though that was more to honour his father's wish to get the work published and not for money.
I don't know if it was different at the time, but I disagree with the implicit characterisation of Brandon Sanderson as a second-teir fantasy writer.
"Second tier" may be rather dismissive, what I meant was "good enough to be considered suitable but not such a big name yet that it would be insulting to ask them to be a ghostwriter".
Though I don't like Sanderson's writing, nothing to do with the man personally, I just find his prose very flat and pedestrian, and the big selling point seems to be his meticulously worked-out magic system, which does not sell it to me since I have no interest in baseball statistics or dice-rolling to find the exact number of pips on the die to add up with the bonuses and penalties to work out to the square inch and kilojoule how hot the fireball is, how large it is, and to the edge of which blade of grass would be scorched.
Yeah, I like Sanderson, but he's B-tier. He's a workhorse. And he's good at it! He turns out stuff that sells at a good clip and it pays the bills. But he's not particularly artistic and his prose just gets the job done. He's a working author, like a working actor. There's nothing wrong with that, but he's not writing for the ages.
Christopher Tolkien was J.R.R.'s heir, and so was the owner of all that intellectual property (minus I think a couple of movie options that had already been sold).
With the caveat that I haven't actually read GRRM's will, nor his contract with Bantam Spectra, I'm pretty sure that Bantam is *not* Martin's heir, and does not own anything beyond the publication rights to the works he's already written. If his will says "no lesser writer may touch my works", or if his heir (presumably his wife) makes that decision, then nobody will be finishing the Song of Ice and Fire any time soon.
No, they're not his heirs, but wave enough money around and it happens. Did anybody think we *needed* a sequel to "Gone With The Wind" or the likes? But some publisher thought that was a good idea. I think there could be enough pressure from fans, and enough "don't you want his legacy to be lasting?" on whoever does get the rights, to sell the idea of finishing the series off.
He may well write it in to any will that nobody is to try completing any unfinished works. That's fine, some fan will just do fiction of it anyway, in the same way as we got the Russian "Sauron was right and the flea-infested Numenoreans were just standing in the way of Progress and Science and Technology" 😀
It is not actually the case that everyone has a price, and it is certainly not the case that everyone has a price that can be afforded by a publishing house's fantasy imprint. I expect that Martin's literary heir will also be his financial heir to the extent that they won't need any more money to live a comfortable life by their own standards, and it is only possible rather than inevitable that they would place "I can be rich!" over "I can be faithful to the legacy of my beloved husband/uncle/whatever".
Also, Guy Gavriel Kay is not generally considered a second-stringer. I mean, I guess compared to Tolkien he is, but...
See comment above, he wasn't the really big name at the time and I didn't mean it as an insult.
Yeah, also they may have both been lesser names when they were chose to finish the works than they are now...
"trying to prognosticate that she was losing sales due to her transphobia"
I don't know if you're saying this yourself, or if you're quoting the Variety article, but I just want to point out that this is literally equivalent to saying Biden is losing votes because of his communism.
Words. They mean things.
Tenk oo for me not word gooder, plz say wot dis mean:
"But then in June, Rowling’s sales straggled, while the rest of the industry surged forward. Had the “Harry Potter” titles risen at the same rate as the overall juvenile sector in June, they could have earned as much as $2 million more in total sales, according to NPD BookScan data. Similarly, had Rowling’s sales followed the overall fiction market, her books could’ve earned upwards of $1.7 million more in total sales.
McLean declined to speculate on why, citing a lack of consumer research. But it’s hard to ignore that, since the first week of June, Rowling has incurred widespread criticism after she began repeatedly expressing contentious views on transgender identity."
Me not readering enough well to kno wot dis say, r it meaning 'Rowling losing sales due to being transphobe, or so we think'? Maybe me rong! Tell better wot say here?
I should not have laughed as hard as I did at this.
I'm only a poor little sparrow
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOtZMy9Sf_0
I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic because you thought I was being insulting, but I wasn't meaning to be. I was just trying to say "please don't use the Orwellian language of the left".
As for what to say, can't you just say "allegedly transphobic" or simply put "transphobic" in quotation marks? If you simply say it unadorned, it looks like you're endorsing that description.
And you're surely not, right?
Me just pore brainless not kno words like u say:
"I don't know if you're saying this yourself, or if you're quoting the Variety article, but I just want to point out that this is literally equivalent to saying Biden is losing votes because of his communism.
Words. They mean things."
Okay dropping the heavy-handed sarcasm: yes indeed I was quoting the Variety article. Why not put it in scare quotes? Because I'm quoting what they're saying, and they're making a direct equivalence.
If I'm talking about my own opinion, I will indeed say "alleged" or the likes. But you should certainly know by now that I'm not endorsing any descriptions, and I'm not inclined to shift my writing style simply because someone comes along in a lordly manner to tell me not alone what I mean, but how I should mean it.
But den me only pore ignerant not kno words meen thingz, rite?
I don't presume to tell you *what* you mean. Perhaps I presume to have an opinion on, given that you *do* mean X, how you should ideally and accurately phrase X. Is that "lordly"?
But I think we may have disagreed on this before. I see using the language of the enemy as effectively giving in to them, especially when *that's exactly why they're trying to make you use it*. You see it differently, as a matter of perhaps mere courtesy.
Let's just agree to disagree.
https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1767912990366388735
To post this, either she is a transphobe or severely mentally retarded. Even a stupid person can probably guesstimate that the Nazis were not fans of trans people, though, so I'm leaning towards an extreme hatred of trans people.
"How did you type this out and press send without thinking ‘I should maybe check my source for this" part is delightfully ironic.
That said, being wrong on Twitter does not one a transphobe or severely mentally retarded. I actually suspect that "typing and pressing send without thinking" might be a norm there.
Someone assuming that books on trans healthcare did not exist in 1930s seems... not completely crazy to me. I suspect that over 99% people probably couldn't name one such book, and making the conclusion "I've never heard about anything like this, therefore it does not exist" is wrong and stupid... but also kinda natural.
Did you... read this subthread yourself and think a bit before pressing send? It quite literally appears to be true that books on trans healthcare really did not exist in the 1930s.
Is this what Twitter is like?
I mean, sure, I went to the wikipedia article, the source of this specific claim seems to be a random article from attitude.co.uk, which claims to be the world's biggest "gay brand" which, yeah, they probably know more than me about what was going on at some random German sexology institute in 1933 but...are perhaps not the most unbiased source one could point to.
But beyond that...in Twitterland, do people really think that JK Rowling subscribes to Nazi ideology...like actual skinhead Nazi stuff? I mean, I dump on Twitter a lot, like a lot a lot, but...man, I just imagine JK Rowling in a room with a Nazi skinhead and these things do not go together. That's, uh...lower than I expected but that's also, like, explicitly the second half of that tweet and, honestly, probably the part she's referring to.
There's a vocal, hard to say how big they are but not that big in the general scheme of things, set that are very insulted about what she says about trans rights (this is compressing the entire dispute down very much) and they are going crazy over trying to prove she's a villain.
They like to go on about her being a racist, being anti-Semitic (the goblin bankers are coded as Jews!), being pro-slavery (the 'heroes' in the Harry Potter book laugh at efforts to free the house elves!) and now "She's a Nazi!" because she didn't continue to be a good liberal ally when it came to male-bodied individuals in spaces for vulnerable women.
The attacks only had the effect of making her double down and eventually not give a toss and she is plenty happy to give as good as she gets on Twitter and other social media, and of course being "eff you" rich, she's in no danger of being reduced to poverty. Even the attempts to boycott the latest video game came to nothing, and there's going to be a new movie based on a different children's book she wrote, which already is garnering sour grapes; 'who's going to go see this movie, nobody cares'.
But it's not just Twitterland, as you can see by the Variety article for which I was scolded by not putting "alleged transphobia" or "transphobe" in scare quotes; the writer of the piece seems to have started off writing about gay/queer cinema before getting work at major media, so I'm thiking he has a particular angle on the entire controversy. The 2020 piece was "book sales for everyone else are booming *except* for Rowling, why is this, official explanation not forthcoming but it's clear it's down to her being a transphobe":
"But it’s hard to ignore that, since the first week of June, Rowling has incurred widespread criticism after she began repeatedly expressing contentious views on transgender identity.
...The controversy erupted after Rowling posted a series of tweets on June 6 contending that women can only be identified by their biological sex. Over the ensuing six weeks, Rowling has repeatedly revisited the issue of transgender identity, from a lengthy essay Rowling posted to her personal website on June 10 in which she evoked her past history with sexual assault to assert her support for “single-sex spaces.” On July 5, she insisted that prescribing hormones to transgender children is akin to “a new kind of conversion therapy”; two days later, Harper’s published an open letter signed by Rowling and several other literary and media figures condemning public shaming. That letter was widely interpreted to be at least in part in reaction to trans activists aggressively pushing back against anyone who denies transgender identity."
And we have someone on here, Chastity, who is going for the "retarded or transphobe and she's not retarded" angle so the Official Line for certain spaces is clearly firmly in place.
My preferred rebuttal goes something like this:
You're using the tactic of guilt by association. Do you know who else used guilt by association? NAZIS. Why are you using a discredited Nazi tactic? I notice you haven't apologized for using a discredited Nazi tactic, so I have to conclude that you're a Nazi. Do you know what we do to Nazis like you, around here? ...
I just don't get this. Assuming she is completely factually wrong here and the nazis did burn books on "trans healthcare" (I have no knowledge of whether this true, but the term is ceratinly absurdly anachronistic, but let's ignore that), then the correct description is "she is mistaken". Or if you insist, "she is lazy, or even lying". Where the hell does "she is hateful" come from?
This is what *I* hate about the way the left uses language. Words are used in ways that have no connection to their actual meanings. If you want a word to mean "uninformed about the history of this group" then coin a new word for that, don't repurpose an existing word with an existing different meaning of "fearful or hateful of this group" and then piggyback on that word's connotations to misleadingly make the starement seem worse than it is.
An additional point: the article cited was from 2020, when I'm pretty sure all JK Rowling had said was that biological sex in some sense exists, and that maybe bathroom laws should take that into account. And she was called hateful and transphobic over and over by ridiculous numbers of people for *that*! Literally for a philosophical disagreement and a policy disagreement. This sort of thing happens *all the time*.
And the thing is, it doesn't even matter if she later says actually transphobic things, because her critics have already lost all credibility with most people, and have robbed the word of all meaning.
A question for you: do you want people to hear "X is transphobic" and think "X is a dangerous bigot who supports violence and discrimination" or to think "X is an ordinary person who disagreed with a single one of the trans movement's 100 policies"?
> I just don't get this. Assuming she is completely factually wrong here and the nazis did burn books on "trans healthcare" (I have no knowledge of whether this true, but the term is ceratinly absurdly anachronistic, but let's ignore that), then the correct description is "she is mistaken". Or if you insist, "she is lazy, or even lying". Where the hell does "she is hateful" come from?
If somebody said, "the Nazis killed a bunch of Roma," and your response is "no they didn't, lmao, read a book," and then continue to hold to that position after it's pointed out that it's factually inaccurate, I will infer from that that you hate Roma. I think we can both agree on this, yes?
Why is JK Rowling repeatedly doubling and tripling down on an obviously factually inaccurate statement? (In fact, the very first Nazi book burnings were of books taken from Magnus Hirschfeld's Institut für Sexualwissenschaft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_book_burnings#The_burnings_start ) What alternative motive do you propose?
>Why is JK Rowling repeatedly doubling and tripling down on an obviously factually inaccurate statement?
Well, it can't possibly be that it's because she's a transphobe; we've been assured by commenters here that to reach such a conclusion would be to use the "Orwellian language of the left." So what does that leave us with? Are we allowed to use the based language of the right and assert that she's a fucking gay retard?
Ok I followed your link, I don't see anything in there about trans healthcare at all?
Making factual errors due to bias when trying to fight about political positions is pretty standard (especially on twitter). I think that's a more likely explanation for this over "extreme hatred of trans people" and "severely mentally retarded".
Ah yes, the Holocaust, where twelve million trans people were burned on a pyre of trans science research books, and nobody else at all was involved because the Nazis only went after trans people.
The original person going after Rowling was trying to do the "Hitler was a vegetarian" tactic, creating the connection "You say transphobic things, the Nazis were transphobes, are you a Nazi?"
Rowling pointed out that the Holocaust was not about All Trans People All The Time, which was then seized on by the nutcases to be publicised as "Rowling is Holocaust denier" and a lot of people who want to believe the worst then helped spread that uncritically.
Me, I'm one of the severely mentally retarded who think that some other people, now who were they, tip of my tongue, no can't remember who, were the major and main target of the Final Solution, but hey, that's Holocaust denialism, isn't it? After all, it was only trans people who suffered!
She didn't say the thing you are saying, though. She responded to a person saying ""The Nazis burnt books on trans healthcare and research" with "How did you type this out and press send without thinking ‘I should maybe check my source for this, because it might’ve been a fever dream’?"
If somebody made any equivalent line about some other non-central groups the Nazis targeted - that the Nazis persecuted schizophrenics, Roma, asexuals, gays, etc - I would assume they hated that group. Certainly if they said it, then doubled and tripled down on it. I will apply the same logic here, thank you very much.
Because our little friend with "the Nazis burned trans healthcare research" was indeed pulling the "You're not a Nazi, are you? Nazis bad!" scare tactic.
It's the same "You know who else was a vegetarian? Hitler!" that you would not accept in other contexts. The Nazis were anti-trans but not out of "hey we hate trans people particularly and especially", as noted by another commenter it was all part of the wider anti-deviance (as they saw it) movement.
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/d/degenerate-art
They burned modern art, too, but I'm not seeing Our Trans Ally trying to guilt Joanne over "do you hate Expressionism, too, Nazi?" It's the ongoing desperate attempt to paint her as Literally Hitler, and the more I see it, the more I go "you know, if thinking rapists should not be put into women's prisons makes you a TERF transphobe, give me that T-shirt and I'll wear it".
Let me turn it around on you: do *you* support males who violently raped women being put into women's prisons, Chastity? Are you perpetuating rape culture? That's the same kind of unfair equivalence gotcha that I wouldn't pull but if it's on Twitter then I guess, gosh, that makes it okay, yes?
So, what you're saying is, the Nazis DID in fact burn books on trans healthcare, a factual claim that JK Rowling responded to by stating, "How did you type this out and press send without thinking ‘I should maybe check my source for this, because it might’ve been a fever dream’?"?
Yes. That is true. If I said, "the Nazis banned jazz," and your response was "How did you type this out and press send without thinking ‘I should maybe check my source for this, because it might’ve been a fever dream’?" and then doubling down on the factually inaccurate claim, I would assume that you did in fact hate jazz yourself.
"So, what you're saying is, the Nazis DID in fact burn books on trans healthcare"
No? Where did Carateca say anything like this? It does appear to be true that the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft was studying transexuals in the Weimar era, and it seems reasonable to assume that they were also writing journal articles on this topic, insofar as they were publishing a journal on what would now be called LGBT studies, but that isn't remotely the same as "books on trans healthcare". What's your evidence that even one book on trans healthcare had been published in 1933? I mean, anywhere in the world?
Can you find any historical record of any particular book on the alleged subject of "trans healthcare" that was burned by the Nazis? Then we can maybe find out what that book is actually about, and this debate might have some kind of conclusion.
Maybe some of you would find the report on Salary trend in Berlin's tech and startup space interesting: https://handpickedberlin.com/berlin-salary-trends-2024-report/
(n=1150)
Hmm. Higher than I would have expected.
Yes, but its tech/startup bias.
Manifold just announced that they'll soon be transitioning to a real-money gambling site. I can't imagine how that's supposed to work or why they think they'll have an advantage over Kalshi, PredictIt and the like. The whole reason why Manifold exists and works the way it does is because it exclusively uses play money so they can ignore all the laws around gambling and finance that make it hard to do real world prediction markets. Meanwhile, it ruins the site for all the existing users who like it the way it is.
To be clear, the announcement you're talking about is “A New Deal for Manifold” (https://manifoldmarkets.notion.site/A-New-Deal-for-Manifold-c6e9de8f08b549859c64afb3af1dd393)?
Being cynical, this is what happens when shiny happy idealistic ideas meet the grubby reality of the world around us - Manifold is a business, businesses need to make money or they go belly-up, so if transitioning to real-money betting site makes them money, that's the way the money goes, pop goes the weasel, and forget about "prediction markets can be used to harness the wisdom of crowds to set public policy".
I never had any idealism around prediction markets (or stock markets if it comes to that) so I'm not surprised. People may start off with things like this as the testing of the ideal, when it's play money; but when real money gets involved, then it's about making a profit and not finding The Truth, and I think that was already happening with people finding loopholes and gaming the playmoney in this and other markets.
> I can't imagine how that's supposed to work or why they think they'll have an advantage
Obviously, they should make a prediction market to find out. ("Will legal consequence X happen?" "Will Manifold get Y users?" etc.)
It would be a good idea, but unfortunately, because of the pivot soon they will also stop giving out loans for those betting on long term questions, so those don't work anymore. (Too low return)
Also, between the removal of market trader bonuses and the vastly increased costs of creating markets, there's no longer much incentive for users to try to create markets.
Does the media criticism term "slop" (as in "modern slop") have any specific meaning other than "a thing 4chan did not like"? I'm leaning toward "boo light" until I see evidence otherwise. (I've also seen "goyslop," which I assume is the explicitly anti-Semitic version.)
Looks like it originates from the early 1800s, at least the term defined as you do: https://www.etymonline.com/word/slop#etymonline_v_23691
The term "slop" in reference to a wide variety of things (including and definitely not limited to multimedia) predates 4chan; it means, approximately, "of the lowest quality", and is an inherently subjective term.
Source: I predate 4chan.
I haven't seen goyslop used anywhere except on rDrama, and I took that usage to be their kind of joking ironic mockery; this is Basic White American Non-Ethnic Food cooking where everything comes out of a tin or packet and is made palatable (for a certain value of that) by 'seasoning' (usually 'dump a load of chili powder in').
I imagine the Irish version of goyslop would be, um, curry chip? Forget any home-made versions or rhapsodies about the heavenly version from your local takeaway, it's generic Anglicised 'curry' sauce on top of chips which can be good chips or soggy chips, usually standard takeaway chips:
https://www.sbs.com.au/food/article/have-you-discovered-the-glory-of-curry-chips/gc9zzopx1
It means devoid of substance, no artistic sensibility. Made for mass consumption.
> (I've also seen "goyslop," which I assume is the explicitly anti-Semitic version.)
Jews are objectively overrepresented in the media, so it makes sense.
No, it does not make sense without introducing additional, severely antisemitic assumptions. "Jews are overrepresented in media" does not imply "the Jews created mass media slop specifically for goyim."
I don't know what you're confused about. Good and bad, art and trash, based and cringe, it's all the same shit. Just people spouting their opinions as if they were objective fact. None of this actually matters.
A bucket of barely-palatable waste that gets tossed into a trough for animals to feed on, because they don't know any better?
It's more specific than just a "thing not liked"; it's cheap mass-produced garbage of little nutritional/cultural value, made to be sold at a profit to the dumb rubes you see all around you.
McDonald's is goyslop. Marvel movies are goyslop. High-brow stuff is not goyslop though, even if you dislike it.
I’m reminded of the stir among Hindus in India maybe 20 years ago when they learned that McDonalds used beef fat to cook their fries.
What does McDonald's have to do with Jews?
I think that in some sense "goy" is mainly supposed to be an edgy way to say "normie" here. I mean the antisemitic implication is still there of course, the whole thing has just gone through enough chan discussion cycles that the meaning is becoming somewhat inchoate.
There *are* some kosher McDonalds. Checkmate, conspiracy theorists! ;-)
A syllogism:
1. The Jews control everything
2. McDonald's is a thing
3. Therefore, the Jews control McDonald's.
Seriously though, I think that in far-right-adjacent circles it's common enough to use "Jews" as a general stand-in for the (disproprortionately but certainly not exclusively Jewish) malign forces that shape society, just as the far left might use "Capitalism" to mean the same thing.
When someone that way inclined says "X is just slop produced by Jews to keep the goys stupid and docile" then there's a chance they might literally mean exactly that, but there's a larger chance it's a somewhat tongue-in-cheek way of complaining about the world.
> I think that in far-right-adjacent circles it's common enough to use "Jews" as a general stand-in for the [...] malign forces that shape society
Interesting. In Russian culture, it's common to use "a Jew" in the meaning "a greedy person". For the mildly(?) derogatory word "жид" it's so common I didn't even learn it actually means ethnicity until later, and the neutral one, "еврей", is sometimes used seemingly jokingly in that sense too. I cannot attest to the level of antisemitism of the people who use them so.
Edit: There's probably a contamination since the word for greedy is "жадный", two consonants in common with "жид".
There are versions of this in English, although I think they're mostly archaic now (I think they were more common 100-200 years ago). "To Jew [someone] [down]" meant to bargain unreasonably hard, and extract more profit from an interaction than would be socially acceptable in Anglo society.
And there's "to gyp", from "Gypsies", which lasted longer but is probably dead now due to being not politically correct. It meant "to cheat in a bargain", with the central case being to sell someone something that wasn't what was promised. Like scammers on Amazon that sell non-functional fakes instead of the real product.
I understand that there may be places on the Internet that do this, but could we not do it here?
It's hard enough to tell apart the actual anti-Semites, from the people who oppose the actions of certain groups of Jews, from people being critical of various policies of the state of Israel, and that's just in relation to the current mess in Gaza.
I personally suffer here! I refrained from joking that the reason McDonald's fries changed flavor in the 90s was that they started using vegetable oil in place of the traditional ... well, you know. ;-)
It's just a good old-fashioned antisemitic canard: Jews control business, they use this control to foist subpar, bland products on people at an extortionate markup, and then keep all the money and good things for themselves. The idea being, in other words, that McDonalds, the worst food approximation available, is good enough to cram down the throats of gentiles for profit.
I'm sorry, I can't for the life of me understand these Jewish Conspiracy Theories.
Are the Jews supposed to be capitalists or socialists? It seems like...both at the same time???
And who's forcing anyone to eat McDonald's? Unless you're out at midnight, there's usually a fair few other choices, right? Is the claim that McDonald's-tier food is being secretly served everywhere? Or is it the standard leftist claim that giving people choices is bad because people might regret their choices and so need to be protected from themselves?
Anti-Semitism has not impressed me with its deep theoretical underpinnings.
> Are the Jews supposed to be capitalists or socialists? It seems like...both at the same time???
Capitalism for themselves, socialism for everyone else.
What about kibbutzim?
Antisemitic conspiracy theories have internal diversity like any other complex of memes, you only confuse yourself if you treat them as homogenous.
Flashback to the early days of the horrible 200 days war continuing till now, in October and early November, there were at least 3 camps on /pol:
1- Those who are jubilant that Jews are dying, expressing support for Hamas and making derogatory sexual comments on Nova victims. The actual opinions on Arabs were diverse even among this one subgroup, whether portrayed as "fellow whites" who didn't succumb to the bullshit progressivism of the Western World and have the balls to treat Jews as they deserve, whether portrayed as brown savages who are merely convenient cannon fodder for the IDF who still manage to kill Jews nonetheless (in whatever ratio), or whether they're simply irrelevant foreigners whose defining and central characteristics is that they happen to enter wars with Israel and kill some Jews every now and then.
2- Those who are jubilant that Arabs are being killed. Again, predict the views on Jews at your own risk: whether portrayed as based allies of Western Civilization and the Judeo in "Judeo-Christian", whether portrayed as a necessary devil that is better for the Westerners because they know it and because maybe Jews will all fuck off to Israel if westerners support Israel hard enough, etc...
3- Those who are jubilant that both Arabs and Jews are dying, and who make it quite clear that every death brings them exactly the same amount of joy and accuse any asymmetric members from (1) and (2) as agents of the Jews.
Naturally, Muslim and Jewish participants on /pol tend to self-sort into the predictable buckets of (1) and (2) (if the flags they choose to appear on their posts are anything to go by).
They're not uniform by a long shot.
Huh, ok that's an interesting break down, thanks. I'm not entirely sure what to make of 4chan; is the latest consensus that they're all trolls or that they're all actual believers in...the stuff you mentioned? I haven't kept track.
I'm not sure I understand your point as to different forms of anti-Semitism, since the examples you listed are hatred of different (combinations of) groups. Unless you're using "anti-Semitism" in the literal sense to include Arabs, which is not how it's usually meant.
But I take your point as to different variants. It seems to me that there's (1) the pseudo-socialist "Jews are rich capitalist oppressors who need to be overthrown by the workers", (2) the nationalist "Jews are an inferior race and/or disloyal treacherous outsiders", and (3) the traditional Christian "Jews killed Christ and they're blasphemers in need of salvation". The Nazis clumsily combined 1 and 2, leading to still ongoing debates about whether they were "really" a right- or left-wing movement. Even more ridulously, people often blame Christian "anti-Semitism" for the nazis, despite them beingbutterly different and meaning completely different things by "Jew".
Still, it's worth asking why so many tend to fixate on the Jews and lump these things together. I've really never understood it.
I haven't had McDonalds in 20 years, excepting once when a kid convinced me to try their fries perhaps 10 years ago, by claiming they were now as addicting as I remembered from 40 years ago.
FYI, they were not.
I bought McDonald's in an airport after many years away, only to find the fries revolting. Further investigation revealed that they had removed the trans fats at some point. Absolute garbage.
Buddy, I can't fuckin' make it make sense. I just know that when some nut's pawing for an antisemitic canard, this one's evidently right there on the table.
Don't know your examples, but I assume it means "a low-effort mess", as slop is.
"Slop" has recently seen a more specific use as "a product of AI generation", the implication being that these are low-quality garbage. I'm pretty sure this usage also originates on 4chan or some adjacency thereof.
So a "slopped AI" is an AI that was trained using AI output?
I have no idea, I haven't heard/seen that expression.
I've heard that most of the vegetables found in American supermarkets are strains that have been optimized for long shelf lives and appearance, at the expense of taste. From personal experience, are there any strains of vegetables that you've grown and eaten that taste noticeably better than their supermarket cousins? What are they?
Most "natural" variants of fruits and vegetables are actually terrible, with a very few exceptions. Pecans, for example, are better in their "natural" state, but are tiny and such a pain to gather in any quantity that the less-tasty but much larger commercial variant (created by splicing a sapling with, traditionally, black walnut, which gives them a bitter flavor that the natural variant doesn't possess) is preferable for most purposes even if you're growing them yourself.
Most commercial tree products involve splicing, including citrus.
When you look at things like "heirloom tomatoes", you're still not looking at a native vegetable, but rather one that was optimized by selective breeding over decades or centuries (often for size and flavor). Native tomatoes are closer to cherry tomatoes, except not as flavorful.
If you get a seed packet from a store, and grow that - you're not getting the "true" native plant. You're getting something that was -also- optimized, simply with different optimization parameters. And, unless you are specifically picking "heirloom" tomatoes (major caveat: There is no regulation here, and even when the moniker is valid, it almost certainly isn't a valid representation of farmed tomatoes - most of our heirloom strains come from gardeners, not farmers, and there are many strains which served different purposes, and you're almost certainly getting the strains that taste best, so there's some post-hoc optimization happening), this optimization didn't stop when farming shifted to a more industrial operation - so if you're comparing your seed packet tomato to a tomato in the grocery store, you're probably comparing two different paths of optimization from a common ancestor, as opposed to the seed packet being a representation of where the industrial tomato came from.
Try a native pear sometime. It's like biting into a burlap sack.
For a good idea of the kind of path this took:
The native apple is what is called a "crabapple".
Some information on the apple cultivars available 80 years ago can be found here: https://journals.ashs.org/jashs/view/journals/jashs/141/3/article-p292.xml
Modern apple cultivars taste much better than any of the apples listed there (we've had a century of improving technology to accelerate this optimization), and I expect you probably mentally classify all of those cultivars as "supermarket" apples.
There are few vegetables that AREN'T noticeably different when eaten within minutes of picking. Many grocery store vegetables that need to be cooked are sweet and tender when eaten fresh from the garden. Green peas are a big one, and you can eat fresh asparagus like a carrot. Some varieties are sweeter or more tender, but the differences are marginal compared to simple freshness.
Generally, you can figure that the more fragile the species/variety is, the better the taste. The best tasting tomatoes are debilitatingly mutated heirloom species prone to cat-facing, like "Cherokee Purple".
And there's the variety of flavors you can get when you don't have to optimize for storage and transport -- different greens can range from sweet to grassy to spicy to mustardy, and tomatoes are available at different levels of sweetness, acidity, umami, and water content.
Cherokee Purples are amazing. Also Mr Stripy. Bought at the farmers market, they are ugly as sin, would never make it in a supermarket. So you spend a minute cutting away the bad parts, totally worth it.
Apricots, so I'm assuming similar for stone fruits like peaches, nectarines, plums, etc.
Tomatoes for sure. After tasting home grown tomatoes you may not want to buy the ones sold in stores.
Is there a specific strain of tomato you think tastes the best?
I like beefsteaks. I like to take a big, fat slice of one, press the excess moisture out between paper towels, and put it on a sandwich.
It seems to me that long season tomatoes are more flavorful, generally, than short season. I don't have any real data to back that up, it's just my impression. Beefsteak is a relatively long season variety, Willamette, for example, is a short season variety, and not nearly as tasty. Long season tomatoes also have bigger fruit. Cherry tomatoes are very short season, but to my palette don't have much flavor at all.
Roma varieties don't have as much flavor as others, but are very good in sauces due to their low moisture content.
Where I live the growing season is relatively short. My fresh tomato experience is restricted to what I can grow here. Some years we get good yield on beefsteaks, other years they never ripen. Perhaps a respondent from more southerly latitudes would have a different perspective.
Apples. But it isn't the cultivar that makes supermarket apples bland, it turns out that the growers overwater their trees to get larger fruit, which dilutes the sugar content and other flavors.
I've noticed with a number of fruits that size seems inversely correlated with tastiness, as if there's a fixed amount of flavor per fruit. Looks like that was a good guess!
That's ~right for a given cultivar, but not across cultivars. For instance (using British cultivars because they're the ones I'm familiar with) a Granny Smith is a much larger apple than a Cox or a Bramley. But a Cox that was the size of a typical Granny Smith would have to be full of water and flavourless.
Growing apples at home is pretty easy if you have space and the right climate - you can plant seeds from any apple you like, but you have to graft on fruiting branches from your cultivar of choice because apples don't breed true, and apples from a tree grown from seed will probably be small and poor quality. Commercial orchards use clonal rootstocks as well as clonal scions (the fruiting branches) - this is mostly to get smaller trees by using dwarf rootstocks. If you have room for a large tree, then a seedling rootstock is usually going to make for a more attractive tree, and if you're going to be looking out of your window at it, then that's a rather bigger factor for you than it is for a commercial orchard.
When I was a child, we moved to a house that had an apple tree in the backyard, and it produced enormous numbers of apples. We'd heard some folk wisdom that if apples were left to fall and decompose in the ground, they'd make the next year's crop taste bad. I don't know if that was just a way to encourage children to gather all the apples, but after I left for college, the picking-up wasn't as thorough, and I didn't like the taste as much. But that could be age, or me developing different tastes.
Granny Smith's have gotten noticeably less-sour over the years. Do you think they've been bred that way? Just curious, because you seem to be in the know.
Aren't all Granny Smiths (or any other identifiable apple cultivars) effectively grown from clones of the plant that originated it? There wouldn't be any breeding involved.
Good point. But I don't know anything about apple breeding or propagation. I suspect it's over-watering that makes them tasteless.
I don't know - my mother grew apple trees in our back garden when I was a kid (and subsequently, though I wasn't living there any more) and there were always fresh apples in season whenever I visited. And they were superb apples!
I picked up some stuff via her, but it's probably 20 years since I knew anything much about the commercial business.
Apples grown from seed will tend to be closer (due to regression to the mean) to their native origin: Crabapples. So: Smaller and worse-tasting.
Yup. As a kid I insisted on trying this and the apples were awful. After which my mother cut the tree back and put in grafts.
Bananas, maybe, although I haven't grown them myself. Most stores only carry the Cavendish, which travels well and has a long shelf-life, but rapidly transitions from not-ripe-enough to too-ripe. But if you go to Hawaii, they've got varieties there that don't travel well. The most boring tastes like a Cavendish at the perfect moment of ripeness, but lasts for days. And there are others. Mmmm...
South India also has varieties of bananas, including tiny ones and red-skinned ones. Nice stuff!
I don't know what banana cultivar they raise in Australia, but Aussie bananas were good! Yum!
Almost entirely Cavendish, same as the US. But among Cavendishes I have noticed that they taste better closer to where they grow, possibly because they get a chance to ripen on the tree rather than getting harvested green.
Glad you appreciate!
As others have said, tomatoes are significantly better when grown fresh. My understanding is that most commercial tomatoes are picked while still green (they're harder and thus easier to transport without getting bruised) and then turned red via exposure to ethylene.
A guy named Harry Klees bred a tasty supermarket tomato, but it wasn't successful.
https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/07/garden-gem-tomato-why-harry-klees-perfect-cultivar-isnt-sold-in-supermarkets.html
Huh. The Roma tomatoes I got last time, still on vines, were a bit smaller than "standard". I don't see why this should be different. Maybe they were taking about a top-down retooling of the entire tomato-industrial complex, but surely there's room for a new varietal? They do it with apples all the time.
Fresh peas.
Tomatos definitely, berries can taste better, but they are quite hard to keep birds away from. Basil and other herbs because they can be picked right off the plant.
While grocery store veggies can be less flavorful, they are also, mostly, available year round. I can't grow strawberries year round (someone people do but its more work than I am will to do). So in January, even a mediocre strawberry is better than no strawberry.
Green beans (rattlesnake beans) by a mile.
Tomatoes. Although some store varieties can be OK, especially if they come attached to the stem.
Same but harder. Every mass-produced tomato is a worthless, flavorless piece of trash.
That was true for most of my life, but is less true now. The market has to some degree responded e.g. some entrepreneurs built some massive greenhouses about 50 miles west of Chicago a few years ago. Now their tomatoes, which are not as good as fresh summer ones but are a damnsight closer than anything we ever before had in regular supermarkets, can be found across the metro area. They're good enough for me to use on salads that I make in winter, and I'm a lifelong tomato snob descended from a long line of same.
Then, hooray for capitalism, I guess! Although I am reminded a bit of Homer Simpson's encomium to beer, "the cause of, and solution to, all life's problems".
My style advice to the rationalist community and beloved commentators on this blog:
Enough of the use of “priors“.
Use prejudice, bias or other equivalents, instead.
Like this:
Solomonoff prejudice = bigotry against longer computer programs
Laplace's presumption: pretending that you're smart enough to perform induction
Occam's Xenophobia (no new and unfamiliar entities in my theories plz).
"Prejudice" and "bias" are pejorative terms, and carry the implication that the belief in question is unfounded. They are not an adequate replacement for "priors". If I were talking to an audience that doesn't understand the word "priors", I'd have to put some thought into what words I would use, but they wouldn't be "prejudice" or "bias". Here, I'm just going to use the term that means what I mean to say, and that most everyone here understands.
Perhaps "default assumption" as a neutral alternative to "prior"?
What's the style objection to "priors"?
To me it seems a useful specific label which isn't quite the same as either "prejudice" or "default assumption".
Many Thanks! I think that the only plausible objection to "priors" is where it is likely to be unfamiliar to the audience.
In cases where the audience _is_ familiar with the term, there is still a bit of ambiguity about just how much evidence has already been folded into the speaker's prior. E.g. even before hearing about some specific case or question, a speaker is likely to have at least Fermi-question-level information on many topics.
Or maybe "current estimate".
Many Thanks! That sounds reasonable too.
That might work.
Many Thanks!
I thought Nolan was implying that a lot of priors are just prejudices, and rationalists are masquerading Bigotry as valid thought by calling them the neutral term "priors".
I just don‘t the use of priors stylistically.
Which is rather reductive; from a predictive processing framework, we have priors for almost everything! We have priors on whether the Sun will come up tomorrow, whether the walls around us are solid, whether our car will start in the morning... in terms of "things we have priors about", "prejudiced opinions about disfavored groups" are quite few proportionally!
In the same vein, you could argue that a lot of prejudices are in fact priors, and calling them by the derogatory word "prejudice" amounts to dismissing valid thought.
Perhaps the synthesis in this thesis-and-counter-thesis exchange is that "Prior" and "Prejudice" are Russel Conjugates, one man's rationally justified priors are another man's emotionally driven prejudices, and there is no way in general to distinguish between them in an ideologically neutral manner.
"Priors and Prejudice" is a great name for a rational parody on Jane Austen...
There's also the question of insider-outsider communication. Everyone here is at least somewhat influenced by rationalism, and as such likely to be familiar with the term "priors". If you're dealing with someout outside that community, it is much less likely they will recognize or understand this terminology, and you might be wise to rephrase to avoid confustion.
I like this.
"I do Bayesian calculations with priors, your judgement is warped by prejudices, he's a raving bigot."
I'm still unfamiliar with the etiquette of these open threads, but this does help get my blog some views:
https://open.substack.com/pub/thothhermes/p/akrasia-is-mainly-error-assignment?r=28a5y9&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
re: linking etiquette
Maybe link to the post and not the substack open link (https://thothhermes.substack.com/p/akrasia-is-mainly-error-assignment).
Also, consider telling people what your post is about and why it might be useful or important.
I've been watching the Metaculus Presidential Election market, https://www.metaculus.com/questions/11245/winner-of-2024-us-presidential-election/ , and one thing seems odd. It seems sort-of "sticky" around 50/50, not moving more that 5% away from that since last November. Does this strike anyone else as strange? It isn't as if the period since then was placid and uneventful. I'm wondering if there are a lot of Metaculus members who round uncertainty in a more-or-less-two-way-contest to "50/50", rather than a more sophisticated estimate...
It's close enough for October surprises to be decisive and those can happen either direction. (Or systematic polling errors, or late deciders...) You probably need a certain escape velocity before you can say those late factors won't control the outcome anymore.
Many Thanks!
>It's close enough for October surprises to be decisive and those can happen either direction.
Agreed. I wouldn't expect the market to be 90/10 or 10/90 at this early date, but, still, enough events have happened since November that I'm surprised to not see it at least touch 60/40 or 40/60 in the months since then.
They have done this twice already. At least the reference class is easy to figure out.
Many Thanks!
>At least the reference class is easy to figure out.
True! (umm... Doesn't 2020 count as once, rather than twice?)
LOL, somehow Clinton and Biden were interchangeable in my mind when I wrote this.
Many Thanks!
Biden is deeply unpopular, Trump has his troubles. Lots of relevant things happening but mostly cancelling each other out.
Many Thanks! Though I'm surprised to see such nearly-precise cancellation...
I am also struck by this. Certainly in comparison to real money markets, Metaculus is much less volatile. Two possible explanations: (1) Metaculus predictors are seeing the big picture and ignoring ephemera: they had the prediction pretty much nailed down by November, (2) Metaculus predictors are lazy and fail to update their predictions on new information (possibly because while they do update their beliefs, they neglect to go to the site and change their entries).
Many Thanks!
The obvious alternative hypothesis is that the race really is a boring tossup.
This Manifold market has been close to 50% since early February. https://manifold.markets/ManifoldPolitics/which-party-will-win-the-2024-us-pr-f4158bf9278a
Again, Many Thanks!
<mild snark>
To mangle a line from Dr. Strangelove:
The electorate will have the necessity to make a choice, to choose between two admittedly regrettable, but nevertheless, distinguishable, candidates.
</mild snark>
Many Thanks!
>The obvious alternative hypothesis is that the race really is a boring tossup.
I find "boring" implausible though I don't believe either side's apocalyptic descriptions of their opponents.
> I find "boring" implausible
I think it's like a horse race. Some of us would prefer to ignore everything up until the final 10 seconds. :-)
Many Thanks! Fair enough. In fact, I, personally, am going to try to evaluate which candidate is a better supporter of Israel (I have relatives there) in October, in order to decide who to vote for, since quite a lot can happen by then.
It's also worth noting that a combination of thermostatic politics and peculiarities around the electoral college tend to keep all US elections fairly close, even when they aren't as hard to predict as this one.
Many Thanks!
Linus Torvalds isn’t sweating AI. He’s been hitting his mark again and again for over 30 years. Elizer, I’m afraid, comes across as being full of beans. Admittedly I’ve only been only been keeping one eye on LLMs so feel free to think Yudowski is the real deal, you may be right, but that’s how the guy’s persona writ large strikes me.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/linus-torvalds-takes-on-evil-developers-hardware-errors-and-hilarious-ai-hype/
> Torvalds summed up his attitude as, "Let's wait 10 years and see where it actually goes before we make all these crazy announcements."
He's talking about the current hype in tech companies. This doesn't strike me as having much to do with Yudkowsky's views.
As I implied, I may be all wet on my vibe based take.
It was just comforting to listen to someone I know to be uber competent in programming and computers who isn’t getting wrapped around the axle about AI X Risk.
Your mileage may definitely vary.
Always love hearing what Linus has to say.
In 1995, New Mexico almost passed a law requiring psychologists to dress up as wizards when giving evidence in court: https://www.futilitycloset.com/2024/04/19/protocol-3/
"the bailiff shall contemporaneously dim the courtroom lights and administer two strikes to a Chinese gong."
If any of this is true, I am disappointed that the originator was spoil-sport enough to call a halt to getting this passed. The courtroom needs this!
"The measure had received unanimous approval in the senate" – was this oversight, approval of the satire or some desire to actually follow through? Presumably not the latter.
Perhaps the senators found the image as hilarious as I do
I was clearing out some old links, and I had forgotten about this... "The 100-Year Extinction Panic Is Back, Right on Schedule" by Tyler Austin Harper. Great article about why intellectuals during the 1920s thought humanity would soon go extinct. I only have two quibbles with Harper's thesis.
First, he implies there was a hiatus in our extinction fears. Being a late Boomer (actually, I prefer to separate my generation from the early Boomers because we grew up in a since we grew up in significantly different cultural matrix) — but being a late Boomer, I remember the regular air raid drills in the first and second grades when we'd hide under our desks in case of nuclear attack — and then we'd watch an upbeat public service film about how families who are confident and prepared can survive a nuclear conflict. I think the public service films were more traumatizing than the drills. And the beat of doom never let up. There was always a new way that our world was going to end. By the time Y2K rolled around I was pretty cynical about end-of-the-world scenarios.
Second, he claims that extinction panics are fomented by economic elites. From what I've seen extinction panics are fomented mostly by academia and the media. The economic elites go along with them because they're suckers like the rest of us.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/26/opinion/polycrisis-doom-extinction-humanity.html
I can't speak to century cycles, but this decade is reminding me a lot of the late 1960s and 1970s: authoritarian neo-socialism, kidnappings, assassinations, riots, the war in Southeast Asia, the war on drugs, the Weather Underground, the Symbionese Liberation Army, etc. Many wondered if our world wasn't collapsing.
It probably was. But something pulled us back from the brink. We may begin to see a similar rebound from all the conflicting placebo ideologies about. The septic tank can only take so much gas before it explodes.
I don't know why you don't consider academia and media part of the economic elite.
Academia is mainly in the 70th to 95th percentile economically. Media is probably mainly in the 50th to 95th percentile. They are far more elite socially than economically.
Do I need to list the major media companies that are owned by billionaires? On the academia side, here's a recent video that I saw that mirrored my experience in academia: it's all about begging for money from the financial elite (grants). My experience was a combination of DARPA and industry grants. Even if you get money only from government, its only because some special interest/lobbying group is interested in your proposal.
Either way, the only ideas (in this case "extinction panics") are ones that the financial elite are interested in. The media companies only publish stories that fit the narrative. In academia, the research that is funded fits the narrative.
Government grants aren’t evaluated by special interest lobbying groups. They’re evaluated by academics themselves. The financial elite are really quite far from these things - certainly farther than they are from the average members of the upper middle class.
I don't know what country you're from, but in the US, the largest sponsors of government grants are the DoD, HHS, and NEA. They are all led by political appointees. Special interests and politics are the only reason why they get the job, and unsurprisingly, they get to direct funds to their special interests. Honestly, the alternative - government agencies not beholden to democratic processes is worse. However, I think it's incredibly naive to think that special interests/lobbying have no impact on government grants.
Maybe it's different in your country. Seriously doubt it.
I'm not sure where you're getting your information, but I used to be chief scientist of a small research outfit that lived and died on government grants. Had a pretty good run, for a while. There was never a point where I was dealing with anyone but a bureaucrat-academician, and these were bureaucrat-academcians who didn't need to ask permission before deciding who got a grant.
There was politics of a sort involved, that sort being basically academic politics translated to a non-university setting. And we ultimately wound up on the wrong side of those politics, which is why I am no longer in that business. But the Democrat vs. Republican sort of politics, no, it never reached down anywhere close to that level.
I have never heard of the director of any of these agencies being involved in the committees that select grants to award. Do you really think the Secretary of Defense takes the time to read grant applications?
I’m not quite sure what mechanism you think allows lobbyists to have impact on grant selection - I guess it happens a bit through the general mechanisms by which corporate funding and special interest groups affect public opinion, including the more concentrated influence by booths at conferences that are attended by academics. But I still think this is not any more of a special interest capture than any other aspect of the contemporary economy. It certainly doesn’t make academia part of the *economic* elite.
Maybe, but we're now several layers of separation between the moneyed interests and the people doing the actual research.
In some sense "powerful interests control the world" is trivially true, but a more sophisticated model takes into account all the other layers of stuff that are going on.
If "owned by billionaires" is your criteria, than practically *everything* is "economic elite" and the term has no meaning.
Journalists have more prestige than fast food workers, but neither is a career you go into for the money, and neither is going to be much cheered by the thought of their billionaire owners as they slave away all day trying to make ends meet.
Truthy.
I can think of plenty of things that are not owned by billionaires. Small businesses account for about 50% of the economic activity in the US. The other 50% is a combination of non-profit, government, and big business. So you can't even say that "most" of the economy is "owned by billionaires".
in terms of journalism/prestige, I relate it to inheritance in the European middle ages. If you weren't the first born, you had two options: military or church. Journalism is the modern equivalent of the church career. Honestly, I think folk's main concerns when it comes to career/livelihood are money and getting invited to the right dinner parties. Journalists get both by peddling the narratives of the billionaires.
Forgot to link the video!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKiBlGDfRU8&t=580s
both periods are post global pandemics & dumb wars
Also, dang, that article. Right at the beginning:
> then suggested that the student worry more about growing vegetables than about buying guns.
I feel like this is a middle step on the famous "road to serfdom". Don't you worry your pretty little head...
I'm a generation younger, but I remember the air raid siren being tested every Saturday at noon. I was just a child, and it took me a long time to get from the intellectual understanding that sure, we need to test the thing like we test smoke alarms, to realizing what it meant.
At some point, people thought my hometown might be attacked. At some point, this was a serious concern. At some point, people were scared and afraid, and maybe some of them still are. My home wasn't very important, and the only way it would be targeted would be as part of a massive Soviet attack aimed at destroying America's infrastructure.
There were no drills, nothing else, just the siren going off every week at the same time. It made a good signal to come inside for lunch.
Chicago's air raid sirens are still tested citywide at 10:00 AM on the first Tuesday of every calendar month, as was true during my childhood. They are of course completely ignored though I suppose if one day they go off at some other time they won't be.
P.S. A couple years ago I just happened to be standing next to a 15-story building that has one of the siren installations on its roof, which I was unaware of, at 10:00 on a first Tuesday. The sound from that distance was _impressive_, on the edge of physically painful. To our unlucky family dog on the other end of the leash it was very painful, he literally cringed and whimpered.
P.P.S. A classic Chicago-trivia sort-real-locals-from-posers question is: what is the single occasion on which the city's air raid sirens have ever yet been intentionally activated _other_ than those monthly tests? I'll post the answer if nobody here already knows it.
Is there an explanation in the article why the economic elites (the Jews?) feel the need to create extinction panic precisely on a 100 year schedule? When did this tradition start?
Why did you put Jews in parenthesis? Are implying the author has an antisemitic ax to grind?
When did the tradition start? it's been going on for millennia. I think there's some deep longing in human nature to believe they happen to be living when the world ends. Christian eschatology has been predicting the end times since Paul (and it's not unique to Christianity). Preachers know they can work up audience by scaring them that the endtimes are near. Scientists, being the high priests of secular knowledge indulge in the same sort of fear-mongering. It makes good copy in newspapers and popular science magazines.
Why would some people want to scare the audience is not a mystery, especially in the age of clickbait. It's the 100 year cycle that is mysterious.
One might naively assume that a more natural timing is "always", or maybe "once per generation" assuming that after too much panic people burn out and start ignoring things. But then the new generation is born, and when they are about 20, it is the perfect time to nudge them towards all kinds of cultish behavior.
(In popular culture, Jews are typically credited for mysteriously organizing global harmful trends, and "economical elites" sounds just like the kind of euphemism an antisemite might use.)
But come to think of it, there was a huge religious revival in the US in the 1830s, and there was lots of talk about the End Times. And in the 1740s, too! So maybe there *is* a 90-100 year cycle of eschatological thinking.
Hm, the "secular progressive" thing might be me projecting a bit. There was also a rise in stuff like Theosophy and Hegelian spirits and psychics. Woo-woo stuff, but treated somewhat more seriously then.
I've seen comparisons with periodic waves of puritanical fervor. If the one in the 1920-30s wore a secular progressive mask, that would collect things like Prohibition and eugenics.
I'm not sure prohibition was either secular or progressive. I'm pretty sure I've seen pictures of those anti-alcohol placards with godbothering slogans on them, and the Women's Crusade and Woman's Christian Temperance Union probably weren't fully secular. Likewise a lot of their ideas and rhetoric seem to have played super hard on the Protect the Traditional And Defenseless Woman trope, which I, at least, don't associate with social progressivism.
I know this stuff is seen as part of the Progressive Era *now*, but I feel like that's one of those weird ex post facto rationalizations, like claiming eugenics was a right-wing thing.
The rough vague similarity between the 1910s-1920s and the 2010s-2020s were noticed by many, not only those who believe in anti-globalism/anti-elites beliefs.
Also, mentioning the Jews between parenthesis to imply that anyone who thinks that elites are colluding is non-charitable, for one thing elites openly convene in Davos to collude.
This doesn't answer your question directly, but the NYT article does link to a Vox article that says that the term "polycrisis" was popularized at the recent Davos meeting, so probably someone can run wild with that.
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23920997/polycrisis-climate-pandemic-population-connectivity
I think the 100-year thing is more likely the result of someone comparing timelines of Trump and Hitler, and trying to find as many parallels as they can. But 97-year-crisis doesn't have quite the same ring, if you try to line up the Beer Hall Putsch with January 6, 2021.
100 years ago? Only half-joking, without solid evidence of extinction panics of [1820 : -100 : 1120] I'm going with "NYT pulled a "100-year cycle" out of their ars..., eh, I mean, hats.
The New York Times didn’t come up with this. This is a guest essay, which very much doesn’t often reflect the views of the paper or its management.
In this case we can update my comment with "Guest Writer pulled[...]" :)
How strong would a T-800 terminator need to be to be able to quickly kill a human man with its bare hands?
Imagine you get into a physical fight with someone else. All things being equal, if the other person is ONLY TWICE as strong as you in every way (arms, legs, fingers, etc.), you'll definitely notice a difference straightaway and will lose. And if the other person is made of metal and can't feel pain, you're even more screwed.
But then again, being merely twice as strong as a human man might not leave the T-800 strong enough to achieve fast hand-to-hand kills. For example, the average man has a hand grip strength of 72 lbs. If a T-800 were twice as strong and had a grip strength of 144 lbs, it might be able to cause pain and bruising by grabbing and squeezing you, but it wouldn't be enough to break your bones. Also, if the average man can bench press 140 lbs, then a T-800 could bench press 280 lbs. That's not enough to be able to throw someone out a window or to be able to crush them to death in a bear hug.
Put simply, what the is minimum strength requirement for a T-800 to be able to quickly kill or crippled a grown man in unaided combat? 5x a human male's strength? 10x? Is it more important for some of the T-800's body parts to be stronger than others?
Is boxing allowed? I'd be scared of a fight with someone actively pursuing concussions even if we were evenly matched. Could be slightly above average on any of strength, speed, or stamina and completely normal in the other two and still be concerning, if they have technique.
Let me provide some research to help answer my own question. This source contains statistics on bench pressing: https://exrx.net/Testing/WeightLifting/BenchStandards
Let's assume the average man is 181 lbs, 35 years old, and is a "Novice" at bench pressing, meaning he does like five hours of weight lifting or equivalent physical labor a week. According to the source, he can bench press 165 lbs.
The world record bench press record, without use of a "bench shirt" that effectively amplifies a person's strength, is 783 lbs. The guy who did that is 6'3" and 450 lbs.
783 lbs / 165 lbs = 4.7. '
That means the world's strongest bench presser is about 5x stronger than a reasonably fit man in his 30s.
Here's a chart about hand grip strength: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Hand-grip-strength-according-to-age-in-males_tbl1_324269430
Again, assuming our average male is 35, his right hand grip strength is 44.7 kg, which is 98.5 lbs. The world record seems to be about 365 lbs (check out the YouTube videos of very strong-looking men squeezing the 365 lb "Captains of Crush No. 4 Gripper" just once). That's a 3.7x difference.
The world strength records are held by abnormally large men who devote all their time to training for a single, short exertion of strength. Against a T-800 that was slightly weaker but capable of imparting force for a longer duration of time, the men would be overpowered.
Based on this minimal research, I think a T-800 that were 4x stronger than an average man in every way could overpower and fatally injure him within 60 seconds. The minimum necessary strength advantage might even be lower than that.
I used to do Brazilian Jiu Jitsu with a super strong guy, who could dead lift 200 kg. Some times, just for fun, he could grab me around the chest and just squeeze so hard I couldn't breathe and had to tap. But against a person of his own size that of course wouldn't work. So we would need to also specify the size of the human being attacked. For a median human you really only need a very strong person to be able to do it, if they can get a proper grip.
Less strong than a chimpanzee. According to a certain anthropologist, a female chimp can lift a man by his hair with one hand while hanging by the other arm (was described as an actual case, it was her idea of fun). Or easily tear off a human's arm.
Just a quick point here, because I hear this all the time, but did some research that shows "chimpanzees are impossibly stronger than humans" just isn't true.
The studies indicating chimps are massively (5-8) times stronger used a handful of dynanometer pulls in the 40's and 50's, then scaled the weights pulled to the chimp's size to arrive at the amount chimps are stronger.
Those studies were actually refuted 20 years later, and more recent studies by Umberger and O'Neill (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28652350/) have indicated that chimps are really only ~1.35 - 1.5 times stronger than humans. Other sources put this at around 2x stronger.
Speaking as a former powerlifter, even at the high end of that range, powerlifters are typically well above 2x stronger than the typical person their height and weight. If you considered an average amateur gym-going male of 6 feet and 180 pounds, they'll probably total something like ~600 pounds across deadlift, bench, and squat. A powerlifter the same size who competes should total at *least* 1200, and the elite ones will be pushing 1500+.
Of course, the actual average male in the US is 5' 9" and 190 pounds (and a lot of that is fat), and would pull less than the average gym-going male, so the effect would be even more pronounced compared to the general population. The chimp is stronger than this average US male, but NOT stronger than Christian Z R's 200kg deadlift guy, or indeed any reasonably fit / strong person.
The main threat is their teeth and willingness to use them aggressively rather than their strength.
Uh...just to, uh, confirm...this was the *chimp's* idea of fun, not the anthropologist's? Right?
Yes, the chimp's :-)
I have been on a nostalgia trip in Terminator's scenes and plots (1/2/3/Sarah Conner Chronicles/Salvation) recently, amplified by the copycat inside YouTube's recommendation engine.
If you're asking whether the Terminators - as conceived of by the various artists in Terminator works - can indeed kill humans with bare hands: Yes, absolutely. The Terminator universe is quite clear on this: Terminators are more like tanks on 2 legs and a vaguely anthropomorphic body plan and skin-like paint coat than a cyborg or a man-machine merger. As a matter of fact, the *first* thing we ever see in the Terminator franchise [1], as well as the first terminator, is an aircraft from the HK series, followed closely by a tank treading on human bones. The first scene involving a humanoid Terminator involves Arnold Schwarzenegger ripping open the guts of some street thugs. Every single Terminator-On-Terminator fight involves the Terminators being thrown around and breaking walls, this means that (1) Terminators have a chassis that is sturdy enough to break reinforced-steel concrete walls, so human skin and bones should pose 0 problems (2) Terminators have the capacity to throw a human-shaped sturdy object hard enough to break a concrete-steel wall if the object was sturdier than the wall (which means it can throw a human at the same wall with enough force such that the wall will break the human's bones).
Your requirement is actually far simpler than brute strength too, "able to quickly kill or crippled a grown man in unaided combat?" is something that actual humans today can do, the human body is extremely vulnerable in certain places, notably the throat, the eyes, the back of the neck, and the 2 extremes of the spinal chords, not to mention the reproductive subsystem, the weakness of its male variant being - quite literally - a meme. You don't need a Terminator for this.
If you're using the Terminator merely as a convenient image and entry point to ask the more abstract question of "Given 2 rectangular slabs of material, what numerical property of material that predicts which of the 2 slabs will break the other and stay intact in a collision?", then I don't know. It's an interesting question for someone who knows more than me about Physics and/or Materials Science. I also suspect it might depend on some dynamical properties of the collision in general, perhaps on the general geometry of the slabs too. But we know the answer of the special case "Metal vs. Human", it's Metal, always, especially when powered by motors.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLtlTV-VQDs
I have no knowledge or opinions about the T-800, but just wanted to express my happiness that someone asked a question as irreverent and silly as mine.
Edit - Actually, would it be useful to look into the grip strength and whatnot of chimpanzees to get an idea?
There are a few famous incidents of adult chimpanzees horribly injuring human beings, so maybe that could be a jumping off point.
Apes kill with their teeth. They use their hands mainly to get the victim into biting position.
Strength helps, but don't forget hardness and speed and precision and knowledge. Especially knowledge - what gets shown on film is what looks cool, not what is effective in real life. Grabbing and squeezing someone, or throwing someone, is not an efficient way to kill a human. A fast hard strike to the neck works much better.
More details, as an example of why your question is not quite easy to answer: raw strength is a poor metric of killing ability. For example, just re. bone breaking
Clavicle only takes a few pounds of force to snap
An average 10 y.o. can easily snap an overextended elbow.
An average female would have no trouble snapping an over-extended knee using a hip thrust.
These are just off the top of my head.
I'd think speed and precision would be more important. It takes very little force to penetrate the brain via the eye. Just be fast and precise. Same for breaking the neck.
>An average 10 y.o. can easily snap an overextended elbow.
>An average female would have no trouble snapping an over-extended knee using a hip thrust.
Do you mean hyperextended? If so, do you mean to say that there is a significant chance that the average person/killing machine, when in a fight or assaulting someone, will be presented with an opponent/victim whose elbow or knee joint is hyperextended?
Yes, I think “hyper” means “over” in Latin ;)
Not “presented” - using grappling skills, maneuver your opponent’s body to isolate and hyperextend a limb. An average person would need a few years of training to effortlessly do this.
Which is why strength is a poor metric of killing ability.
It means "over" in Ancient Greek. "Super" is the Latin one; hyper- occurs in Latin only in Greek loan words like hyperbaton.
Thank you, I always confuse these.
True. When you come down to it we’re about as vulnerable as a baggy full of blood.
exactly. it's a bit terrifying.
I think you're severely underestimating how useful strength is. In MMA, weight classes are less than 10% apart. That is, a 10% heavier fighter has such an overwhelming advantage that it's considered unfair for them to compete in the same category.
If you're very strong, you can use that to force the opponent into a position that's favorable to you, then apply force to whatever body part you want. That's pretty quick. Your examples are asking for flashy, over the top, wasteful application of strength. Pretty good intimidation if you happen to have it, but hardly a design requirement.
It's important to be able to fatally injure a human in under 60 seconds because another human could come along and help the first one. The faster a human can be killed, the better. Having to wrestle the person to the ground and slowly choke them to death over five minutes isn't good enough.
Yeah.
There was an incident in my city recently where two guys got in an argument in a park, possibly over an unleashed dog. The first one looked like he knew a bit of Muay Thai or something, and tried to close, but the second one kept backing off. Then the second one charged in, got the first guy in a choke, and went to the ground. Just as the first guy was stopping struggling, the first guy's friends came up and kicked the shit out of the second guy. Then the first guy got up, took the second guy's wallet, and walked off. Then more people came up kicked and stomped the second guy. It's all on video.
My understanding is that a lot of modern ground work comes out of judo, one way or another, which in its second-earliest incarnation was a martial art for police. Police can rely on having numbers and controlling the ground where they stand, and they want to take people alive. Also there are apparently a number of tricks which are not taught in sport judo, which involve inflicting pain without causing visible damage, and which can apparently speed up the grappling process on anyone who isn't immune to pain.
This speaks to the biggest difference between "sport" and "self-defence". In a sport fight, the rules are clear (and no, it's not about eye poking or nut kicking, people who think they'll be ok because "I'll just kick him in the nuts" are delusional), it's 1-1, the ground is level, and - most importantly - you know when you are in a fight and when you are not.
This is why there are regular occurrences of skilled sport fighters getting their crap kicked out in situations just like the one you described. Taking someone's back and rear-naked choking him is awesome until his friends show up with sticks.
BJJ as the most common stand-in for the modern ground fighting did indeed come from Judo, but then Judo itself came from older forms, and so on and so forth, and anyway, modern BJJ advanced quite significantly from its early days, and keeps changing.
Pain is an interesting subject, and is also poorly understood by non-practitioners. One really has to distinguish between simply unpleasant and actually debilitating pain. A kick in the liver is debilitating - the body just shuts down. But many kinds of pain can be just "annoying", without creating a debilitating effect, and one has to be super-careful relying on that kind of pain. For example, digging elbows into muscles feels very painful - to a novice unfamiliar with this kind of sensation. Once you learn to deal with it, it's... not nothing, bit quite tolerable. I've had rookies ask me if I didn't feel pain at all, because they were trying to like poke me into the ribs and the such to get out, and I didn't even flinch, much less let go. My response was, I did feel it, but I knew it wasn't dangerous, so I didn't need to react. On the other hand, I'd tap to even a light pain in the shoulder when I end up in a bad position because I know it can quickly escalate to a nasty injury.
And then there are people with vastly different pain sensitivities, so hoping to apply a pain point pressure may prove to be disastrously fruitless.
100% agreed.
Sure, but I think under 60 seconds is easily achievable with "only" 2x strength.
Is the T-800 the latest model of Terminator? I must have missed that with all the breathless media coverage of Tesla's new wankpanzers.
You know how browsers started inflating their version numbers to seem more advanced? Or the Ford F-150 vs. the Ram 1500? It's like that. T-800 is just another name for GPT-8. ;-)
Assuming metal parts, human-strength would suffice; take the force behind a punch, apply it to the surface area of a fingertip, and hit the skull.
Average punches are ~1,000 Newtons of force, surface area of fingertip is ~10 cm^2, which is ~100,000 N/m^2; this is sufficient to break any bone in the human body.
That's a good point. I'm an adult man of average strength, but if I had a steel softball in my hand, swung it as hard as I could, and connected it with another man's forehead, I'm confident it would at least incapacitate him, and probably crack his skull. A steel softball in my hand is a good analog for a balled-up T-800 fist.
The thing is, it only does that much damage if the fist connects with the other guy's forehead. If he uses his own arms or legs to block my swinging arm and slows it down, the softball won't bash into his forehead as hard and won't hurt him enough. If he's strong enough, he could even grab my wrist in midair and totally prevent the softball from hitting him at all.
So the T-800 DOES need to be substantially stronger than a human to be sure of winning. What happens if it gets in a fight with a big man who grabs both of the T-800's wrists and is strong enough to pin them back? The T-800 has to be strong enough to overcome that, and the fact that he's made of metal and can't feel pain doesn't seem to help. Raw strength is needed. How much does it need?
You can pick up a 10-pound dumbbell and throw some punches, swing it around a bit. (But be careful and don't hyper-extend your elbow.) Strength matters here because it creates speed, which means you can move more directly, and you don't telegraph, and you recover faster. And importantly, speed gives you more kinetic energy: a slow bullet doesn't do much. But notice how your body weighs a lot more than 10 pounds? The real 10 pounds was inside you all along! ;-) Hardness and a small point of impact are other advantages that the steel ball has, which a T-800 would also have, but which a human would have to train to approximate.
Strength is also good because/although blocking is inefficient; a better counter would be a parry, or a deflection that accelerates your heavy fist in a slightly different direction, making it harder for you to recover. Strength means that those counters will be less effective against you. (Also, blocking might not be a great idea in the specific case where you're holding a steel softball, if you can just let the ball fly and it hits them in the head anyway.)
Grabbing could work, but it also immobilizes the grabber's hands, and usually focuses their attention on their own hands, ever so briefly. The classic responses to someone grabbing both hands are a headbutt or a kick, but there are other options, involving the physiology of human hands and arms. And I'd be shocked if a well-designed Terminators didn't have some sort of emergency third-limb-style counter here, like a Xenomorph mouth or a chest gun. (Also, Terminators don't seem to have backup very often, but if they do, it's also going to be a bad idea to immobilize oneself and one's hands while a second Terminator moves into position.)
Personally, I'd say that the T-800's big advantage in hand-to-hand combat is that it's nigh-invulnerable and nigh-indefatigable. Wasn't there a scene where someone breaks his hand trying to punch Arnold? So a strong guy grabs both arms, what then? Can he rip the T-800 apart with his bare hands? Or will he get tired faster than the robot? If I were designing T-800s, I'd probably focus on the use of firearms, and downplay hand-to-hand combat if it allowed me to create more T-800s. The best way for a T-800 to win is to shoot its target before the target even knows it's there.
"The classic responses to someone grabbing both hands are a headbutt or a kick, but there are other options, involving the physiology of human hands and arms. And I'd be shocked if a well-designed Terminators didn't have some sort of emergency third-limb-style counter here, like a Xenomorph mouth or a chest gun."
That's a good point. A headbutt would really hurt a human since the T-800 has a steel head. It could also bite you really hard.
"Personally, I'd say that the T-800's big advantage in hand-to-hand combat is that it's nigh-invulnerable and nigh-indefatigable. Wasn't there a scene where someone breaks his hand trying to punch Arnold? So a strong guy grabs both arms, what then? Can he rip the T-800 apart with his bare hands? Or will he get tired faster than the robot?"
Again, I'll say it: you don't want the T-800 to be so weak that it takes it five minutes of wrestling to kill a human with its hands. It shouldn't need to count on tiring out a human to win.
"If I were designing T-800s, I'd probably focus on the use of firearms, and downplay hand-to-hand combat if it allowed me to create more T-800s. The best way for a T-800 to win is to shoot its target before the target even knows it's there."
And I never said the design focus should be on hand-to-hand combat. However, a T-800 needs to be able to kill without weapons because it might not always have access to them. I started this thread to figure out what the minimum level of physical strength a T-800 would need to have to be able to defeat any human in hand-to-hand fighting in under a minute. No one has provided a convincing answer yet.
> And I'd be shocked if a well-designed Terminators didn't have some sort of emergency third-limb-style counter here
If it were well-designed, its bare hands and strength would be the backup weapon because its main weapon would be a built-in gun.
It does have that odd requirement for being a metal skeleton encased in a biological human-derived skin shell. Presumably a built-in gun would rupture the skin, but then, after they start shooting, how long do they tend to last, and how much do they need to hide?
I suppose I'm assuming that purpose-built guns are simply better than whatever can get crammed in to a robotic skeleton.
Shifting into a scenario of "guaranteed victory", I don't think any reasonable amount of strength is sufficient to achieve that, given the existence of martial arts that focus on redirecting force instead of opposing it
Yeah, the dangerous thing is not just strength alone, but also strength per square centimeter. A robotic finger that cannot break and doesn't hurt is a deadly weapon. Even if it couldn't break a bone, it can stab in soft places.
A martial artist could probably kill another human using a finger by stabbing in the right place, but the robot doesn't even need skill, it can just keep stabbing and stabbing until it hits something critical.
A robotic finger that cannot break and doesn't hurt is basically a knife of some kind – a stiletto, probably; got that square cross section and all. We know all too well that mere human strength is quite sufficient for those to do profound damage.
Pretty sure a 144-pound grip strength metal hand is quite sufficient to choke someone to death, most likely even crush the windpipe, so unless you don't think strangulation counts as fast that should be satisfactory.
How do you know that?
Let's not discuss it.
An amateur martial artist here.
144-pound grip strength is at least an order of magnitude (i.e, 10X) more than is needed to crush an average trachea. We are taught not to apply tracheal pressure, not because it's inefficient as a "tool of injury", but because it's incredibly efficient, to a point where a severe injury or death may happen just from forearm pressure if applied directly to trachea.
I could easily kill a mounted opponent by crushing his trachea with my fingers, and I'm on a smaller size.
It takes even less force to just block the carotid arteries too, which is also fatal.
Yep!
Sabine Hossenfelder's video on how her dream died, "And now I'm here."
This reminded me of some of my experiences. Thank heavens I dropped out of grad school, and found something else. I suspect my life would have been miserable if I had gone the academic route. A close friend had to survive twenty-plus years of post-docs and on non-tenure-tracked temporary positions before she finally found a tenure-track position. Along the way, she discovered that her thesis advisor was sabotaging her career by giving her lukewarm recommendations. I suspect the toxicity in academia has only gotten worse since I dropped out of grad school many years ago, but this Hossenfelder video brought back some unpleasant memories for me...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKiBlGDfRU8
There was a commenter a few open threads back ago asking for opinions about where he should go to graduate school. I made the argument for not doing it, if at all possible, and if impossible, then going with whatever the cheapest option might be.
I occasionally wonder what he decided.
Yes that was kind of harrowing to watch. Academia has such lofty ideals of knowledge and collaboration, and sometimes it happens, but when it doesn't it's not pretty. It brings back personal memories because at one point I was well on that path; in retrospect I'm glad I jumped out.
I love Sabine's writing, she very nicely threads between hard science (her specialty) and philosophical and human-level interests. I don't necessarily agree with all her arguments but I'm always happy they made me think. It seems she has been finding her way as a science-and-a-bit-of-everything popularizer on Youtube. I hope it works out well for her; it can't be easy to maintain your integrity when you're living directly from your public.
I was lucky: my undergraduate social circle had some grad students in it, and I heard enough to convince me that I shouldn't even try. In essence, there were some undocumented "requirements" for successfully navigating PhD programs and upwards, and not only was I bad at them, I disliked them enough that I couldn't see myself being able to learn well. Trying to do so would, in a sense, harm my soul.
My downfall was that I worked on a data set that disproved my advisor's pet theory.
Isn't that just plausible deniability?
Did you kind of hunt around for some data what would disprove your advisor's theory, or was the outcome just happenstance?
No, it was an old dataset — actually a collection of bones (first metacarpals) collected from some Central American Mayan Indian population. They had been collected post-mortem (I assume with the approval of the kin?) — but in retrospect with today's sensitivity to indigenous peoples, it seems pretty bizarre! The collection had been preserved in little metacarpal-sized jars filled with formaldehyde that had been gathering dust for fifty years — about 125 finger bones along with little yellowed index cards, with the person's name, sex, and age when they were collected (died?). I spent two years meticulously cleaning the flesh off of them (because the colony of cadaver beetles — of which my department had a colony — couldn't deal with the formaldehyde. After cleaning them, I did bone cores and bone density scans and entered all that data onto punch cards that our university mainframe could handle.
My prof had a theory that osteoporosis was a phenomenon that mostly affected post-menopausal European women (for various reasons — but mostly genetic). But Mayan women showed the same pattern, and it was pretty obvious.
To be truthful, it wasn't the data that irked my prof. It was an annoyance for him, but he had data from North American indigenous populations that said otherwise and it swamped the N=125 of my Mayan samples. But it created a strain between us (because I knew he liked to "clean up" his datasets). Things went downhill from there. And to give the guy credit, he was going through his own personal hell. He was up for tenure, and the political winds of the department suggested that he wasn't going to get it. Also, I think he was going through a divorce at the time. So, his life was falling apart, but with my Asperger-like (notice I say "like") lack of awareness of other people's emotional states I didn't know when to shut up.
BTW, he didn't get tenure, but he had an ace up his sleeve. The University had a policy where the faculty could take courses for free. He was attending night courses at the U's law school. I heard he got a JD and then passed the bar.
I have had a few mentors that I loved and admired, but they were the ones who kept their distance. Any that I worked with or for I ended up feeling disappointed in. It had to do with seeing them up close, and realizing that they weren't joyfully fascinated by their subject, seeing their vanity, their small-mindedness, and also realizing that when I began working with them I had become part of their apparatus for maintaining self-esteem and professional status. So I always had a craving to bust them somehow. Do you suppose you had some of that going on? It's an alternative to the idea that you were simply oblivious to this guy's need not to have his nose rubbed in the fact that *those Mayan woman had osteoporosis, hah!*
In retrospect, my Buddhist training taught me that my anger and sense of loss were the result of my trying to cling to some imagined future in academia — and it made me aware that my advisor was suffering his own anger and and loss issues (which I wasn't really clued into to). Plus I was going on my psychedelic journeys on the weekends and my emotional states had gotten amplified by the existential moods they induced — which may have further blinded me to sensitivities to others. I probably came across as a cocky asshole — but not from being intentionally malicious, but because I spoke my mind when I shouldn't have in a way that rubbed people the wrong way. The way I still do sometimes on this group. ;-)
Something I didn't understand back then was how much personal ego people invest in their beliefs. And most of our beliefs aren't based on any real understanding of the world. Science was supposed to be away to get around that by separating truth from falsehood. Scientists are supposed to at least try to be unbiased, but most scientists are just as ego-invested in their biases as any other layperson. In fact, they may be more ego-invested in their biases because their livelihood depends on seeming to be right. So it becomes personal if others question their theories. The SARS2 pandemic woke me up to the fact of how close-minded and ego-driven most scientists are. I'm amazed we were able to muddle through without many more people dying. Humanity as a whole has learned nothing from the experience.
I would've never been able to hack the politics of academia. I subsequently learned that I was never able to function well in political work environments, but I didn't know that at the time. But I learned a bunch of cool things in grad school, and I worked on some cool projects. If grad school hadn't been a dead end for me, I wouldn't have accidentally ended up in a career that kept my interest and that paid enough for me to buy lots of books, good wine, and travel the world.
Brian Schmidt went to ANU to work on his theory that the universe was contracting … and … oh what! …. PIVOT.
oops
This seems to vary greatly between subjects (and maybe universities)
Like, I know someone who failed out of a physics phd because the project theyd been set by their advisor turned out to be impossible
on the other hand, in computer science, a 300 page exposition on why your advisor is wrong-headed is pretty much expected
And one view of my own PhD dissertation is that its a gag expanded to thesis length
Not that I don't appreciate a good joke, but at the meta level what does that say about the intellectual integrity of academia? Expanding the Ph.D. acronym to mean Piled High and Deeper goes way back before my time — so I guess there's nothing new to the cynical view that much of the intellectual activity in academia is equivalent to writing jokes for a sitcom. I'm glad you realized this in time!
BTW, I wasn't trying to be snarky when I wrote that. I'm really glad you had the proper attitude when you wrote your thesis! Did you continue in academia?
Yes, I'm employed as an academic researcher.
Well, it's a gag made intellectually respecatable.
Briefly,
A: So with non-repudiation, the idea is that we use cryptography so that, if there's any dispute about it later, we can prove in a court of law that you sent a message.
B: What if, um, I don't actually want that? I mean, maybe i don''t want a court to be sure that I sent a message...
A: It turns out, you can use cryptography to do that, too
I was looking through some of the archives from the SSC days and came across an article on cost disease. Scott outlined the issue but never really came to any conclusions about why it was happening. Were there ever any follow-up articles or discussion about this?
Good question! I'd like to read more about this too. Unfortunately, I don't recall specific posts or discussions, but I do remember reading (somewhere?) that there was an emerging consensus that the Baumol effect was the primary cause: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost-disease/ and https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/17/highlights-from-the-comments-on-cost-disease/ for starters. I love the old "archive page of all posts, Control+F and find what you're looking for instantly" feature. Substack is good in many ways, but not that one.
That was the article I first read. I was hoping there was something more definitive and it just didn't show up on a search for "cost disease."
You can just search on google with site:example.com
I'm in a career crisis, and trying to cover all the angles. The short version is I'm a software developer (going on nearly 8 years) working in a very niche stack (including the language) building cross-platform high-performance desktop apps, underpaid, and facing an uncertain future with my employer as the business may not stay afloat. I'd like to move on, but am having trouble getting hired. I suspect that employers, being risk-averse, don't place much stake in some of my experience despite the skills being easily transferable (to languages like Java, C# and C++).
Trends in job postings suggests that cloud and devops experience is valued, so to that end I'm picking up some certs, but I have no intention of switching to IT/admin or devops; I want to program. My only other idea is building something for web, full-stack, but I expect there is marginal value in some dinky undergrad-level demo, which leaves either a) open-source contributions, or b) an ambitious project that will require ample investment of time, that I don't have. I have intuited however that, despite the fact that a bootcamp is redundant for me, some of the end-term projects as part of those programs may be substantial enough to warrant exploring, even if they are basically "demos". That makes it a possible 'c'. I'm not in the U.S., but the market is as bad or worse. Another piece of background: my education wasn't in CS, I made a lateral move, so I'm relying even more on experience and reputation. I'd do web or native, I don't care, except I understand the former is saturated and I have experience in the latter.
Appreciate any input by other experienced devs. Thanks.
Are you in Europe? Big city with many jobs or a small city with few? How niche is this language? Is it something I, a web developer, wouldn't have heard of?
If you are in a big enough city, go to meet ups. Meeting people face to face will do a lot to help you overcome any bias people might have against you. they will be able to see/hear your experience. Additionally is there anyone that used to work with you that has left the company? See if there new place is hiring and reach out to them. They can probably get a bonus if you are hired!
Among your own suggestions, I would recommend the open source route. Create a GitHub account, start playing around, forking projects to add some feature you'd like and then offering it back, or creating single-purpose libraries in whatever language. Or join a medium to large open source project for a few hours a week, where you can become a regular contributor and learn from the existing group. There's no better way to transfer your skills than working on a real life-sized project in whatever new stack you want to pick up.
As you well know, IT is heavily balkanized (are still we allowed to use that word?). Languages like Go, C# or Swift are big but heavily tied to the specific ecosystems of some large co or other. That's always an option, but I'd rather go with Python and/or Javascript/Typescript, and PostgreSQL as a data store, which are way more transversal. If you like UI work, then some kind of reactive front-end (React, Vue, Svelte...) is a strong plus. They're all similar enough at a high level, just pick whichever appeals the most.
The cloud thing is yet another world. You probably want to learn the very basics, and there's definitely a market for cloud specialists, but you say devops is not your kind of thing. I'm not sold the current fad to write your app around a bunch of cloud provider specific APIs - it's just the new version of tying yourself to MS or some such.
I recently came across oss.gg and have been meaning to try it. I could never decide on FOSS contributions in the past.
Niche skills are a two-edged weapon. Your employer has few choices, but so do you.
You may underestimate the difficulty of switching to another language. Yeah, you can read the latest Java Language Specification in an afternoon, and in a week you can write an example code demonstrating every single thing mentioned there. Then you get an actual job, and...
"Where the hell is this variable assigned to? What do you mean it's 'auto-injected'? Okay, but where does the value actually come from? What do you mean by 'it depends'? Hey, this isn't a valid code, you are calling methods that aren't even defined in the class, how can the code compile and run? What is this 'pom.xml' file doing? Hey, this so-called Java project contains no actual Java code, only something called 'application.yml'! I understand that you are supposed to write automated tests, but how does one test a database or web functionality? Oh wait, I got a Git conflict merging branches, I need to resolve that first..."
> I have no intention of switching to IT/admin or devops; I want to program.
Heh, so do I, but these jobs are becoming rare. Why should a company hire a system administrator, an operations guy, a database designer, a web designer, a programmer, and a tester, if instead they can simply hire one person to do all of that? The money saved this way can be then used to hire three more managers who can organize lots of meetings. Then they will allocate you 60% on this project, 30% on that project, 10% something else, plus the inevitable on-call duty.
> my education wasn't in CS
This is probably completely irrelevant. The CS theory is nice and sometimes useful, but actual work is mostly boring stuff plus fixing other people's code.
The mainstream programming languages are Python, JavaScript, and either Java or C#. You will probably need all three, especially with the cloud projects where every method can be written in a different programming language and deployed on a separate virtual server. You will also need SQL.
A good strategy... probably choose the technology you want to learn, accept any job even if it pays little, and after six months start looking for a better job, now that you have actual experience with given technology.
Thanks for the input. Accepting any job and leapfrogging from there was 'plan a', but that hasn't worked out yet, so here we are. I am taking to heart that I should focus on those technologies and build something valuable with them.
By the way, how do you know that the market is bad, versus you making some strategic mistake? Do you know programmers (of mainstream languages) who are unemployed?
For example, I learned that job hunting can be much easier if instead of replying to advertised job positions I just spam job agencies with my CV and let them send me the job offers. This is not a way to get a great job (those are usually recommended by someone in person), but it is a way to get a job. Sometimes the job agencies know about positions you can't find online, e.g. because they were opened recently. The important thing is to send your CV to multiple job agencies, because each of them will only have a few such offers.
Agencies here hire contractors for government positions, so requirements have to strictly be met.
Ten years ago, a good strategy was to apply to a tester position, and then get promoted internally. That's because testers were not required to have any programming skills to pass the job interview (and their salaries were quite low), but they had an opportunity to automate some of their tasks e.g. using Selenium. So if you demonstrated some basic programming skills, and you were already in the company and already familiar with the projects, it was a cheap experiment for the company to let you try helping with the software development. (Worst case, if it doesn't work, you go back to testing.)
But I don't know if this is an option anymore. I haven't seen people employed as testers recently; testing is typically done by the programmers, and then verified by some business guy. (But maybe that's just my bubble.) Also, the learning curve seems steeper: previously you could meaningfully contribute to the code by adding a new class with a few methods, now you often need to also configure it in the cloud
US old-timer here. Yeah, you're in a bit of a rough spot, and this macroeconomic situation makes job hunting pretty hard even in healthy markets.
I wish I knew what your niche stack was, (Haskell or a Lisp probably gets you some points. MatLab or Pascal probably loses you some, for example) but if you say your skills are easily transferable to other languages, then transfer them! Single-language experience from a non-CS grad is a big red flag for me. Once you've shown that you're comfortable in 5 languages, I care a lot less if you're comfortable in my current stack. Until they've proven (with jobs or with your own projects) that they CAN transfer their skills, I would be very hesitant to trust an applicant without the specific experience I was looking for.
Others may disagree, but I look on bootcamps with some suspicion. They can be great places to pick up some other skills, but they're not very selective and it's hard to differentiate the committed learners from people who are just scraping by. I place MUCH more weight on self-directed projects; they can show that you have the initiative to identify a problem, set out to solve it, and see it through to the end.
In the short term, dev jobs aren't as easy to find as they were. I would:
1) stay at your current position as long as you can make it work; when the macro situation improves you'll have some more flexibility.
2) Pick a new, non-niche stack and focus on that, at least 10+ hours a week. Python and Typescript/HTML are reasonable choices, with cases to be made for Rust, C#, C++ or others.
3) Don't build demos, build products. I'd worry less about making money on a product than I would about seeing it through to a professional level of polish. Yes, this will take some time that you don't believe you have. I disagree. I think that demonstrating mastery *in the domain employers want* is the only way to give yourself some credibility-- from what you've said so far, neither your current job nor your educational history are really showing that credibility. I don't think there is a shortcut. You can do this, but there's no magic trick to getting there.
Thanks for confirming my suspicion. I have work experience in some other languages including Python and SQL, but to a lesser degree. What are your thoughts on AWS certification, is cloud experience for non-cloud positions an overstatement by employers? I'm writing an exam soon.
I can't identify the stack without pretty well giving away who I am, that's how niche it is. But the gist is I mostly use an OO compiled language.
Owing to sunk cost I want to see this cloud thing through (unless it's a complete waste of time) but afterwards I'll switch to product development. I'm stubborn enough to make it happen, I just wanted more confidence that there isn't a better way.
I'm highly resentful that my experience, despite what I may have built, fails to show credibility. Still, I accepted this role, and while I had time to build something at leisure from the outset, alarm bells were not ringing then and I just didn't have a clue. That's life, ultimately I'm still working so I can't complain much.
You may be selling yourself a little short. Technical skills are important, but the other part of being an effective engineer is seeing projects through. If you can talk well about the work you've done in terms of its project deliverables, that's pretty significant in an interview and maybe on a resume. Things like: did you identify problems in a codebase and come up with a solution that sped things up/ improved functionality / served new users? Did you come up with innovative ways to deal with computational complexity / laggy networks / security concerns / whatever?
What I'm looking for in resumes and interviews is someone with demonstrated technical mastery (optimally showing some cross-domain history), and who's familiar with the trade-offs of engineering and can make reasonable choices in the face of uncertainty. If you're proud of the work you've done and can talk about it in terms of the project problems, team dynamics, or technical issues, those are all good signs that you're capable regardless of the stack.
Re: AWS. I'm suspicious of certifications, because they usually involve clicking through some mediocre educational pages for a while and then answering some multiple-choice questions correctly. BUT, having some cloud (and especially AWS) experience is really valuable to me. I'd love to hear something like "I did this certification AND I build projects X, Y, and Z using these AWS services." Even better in my book is when somebody says "Oh, AWS DumbServiceName? No, I haven't used that, since most of our work was in OriginalDumbServiceName and Route42 and OtherDumbServiceName. But I know enough to know that DumbServiceName would be useful in peer-to-peer blobstrafication if we wanted to use WebSockJimboTrons". That says someone is familiar with the problem domain, has solved some problems there, could figure out how to solve future issues, and is honest enough not to try to bullshit me about it.
Thanks for your input.
I wrote a review of Jordan Peele's 2019 film Us which touches on things that I don't believe other reviewers have seriously considered (long story short, I think the movie can be seen as having themes related to autism and the paranormal -- I don't think that Jordan Peele necessarily intended it, but the parallels are interesting).
https://lettersfromtrekronor.substack.com/p/film-review-us
What are the best accessibly written arguments against AI existential risk concerns? The best I think I've come across is Maciej Ceglowski's "Superintelligence: The Idea that Eats Smart People," but would be happy to hear of others.
I'd also be interested in the best accelerationist arguments out there, of either the left or the right variety. (This is a know-thy-enemy exercise for me, so preaching to the choir type screeds aren't going to be interesting; rather writing that genuinely tries to be persuasive.)
Robin Hanson has been arguing against it for years, but I don't know of a single page to point to.
https://intelligence.org/ai-foom-debate/
Although I'm not sure 741 pages of pdf converted blog posts is "accessible"
https://graymirror.substack.com/p/there-is-no-ai-risk
Here's the best argument against AI risk that I've read. It's the main reason that I don't take claims of x-risk from AI seriously.
Thanks for the reply. Unfortunately this argument doesn't do much for me. It seems to start with the argument: "Only a human can be an agent. AI is not a human. Therefore, an AI cannot be an agent." But that seems both irrelevant (nuclear weapons are not agents but they obviously present existential risks) and potentially false (the *whole point* of AI is to simulate agency, and the fact that previous technologies didn't gain agency doesn't entail that the technology where *agency is the specific goal* can't possibly succeed).
Having constrained his imagination to the idea that AI could at worst be a sort of consigliere to a human, the rest of the argument boils down to what a person using an AI to make himself really smart and rich might do: "Imagine this really rich and smart person. Even this person couldn't take over the world and kill us all. Therefore AI presents no existential risk. QED." Or put only slightly differently: "If even Jeff Bezos can't kill us all if he wanted to, then superintelligent AI presents no risk." I... am not persuaded.
Also I found this pretty funny: "humans cannot empathize with superintelligences." Humans will empathize with *emojis* fer gosh sakes.
I've independently arrived at a conclusion similar to Moldbug's. Here's a quick rundown of how I see things.
----
Re: To Foom, or not to Foom?
The argument is not quite "the AI can't build a nuke". The argument is "there's no way for an to AI recursively self-improve into a God-emperor". Yudkowsky, Kurzweil, etc have this notion that "infinite intelligence -> infinite agency", as if having a jupiter brain with 10^10000000 IQ gives you magic powers that defy the laws of physics.
The problem is that agency, i.e. the ability to steer the future, is not something that scales linearly with arbitrary amounts of intelligence. Agency has two components: intelligence (specificity); and power (energy/second).
Intelligence is revered in the current age because during the industrial revolution, intelligence -> technology -> agency. More specifically: A) technology allowed us to do things extremely efficiently (e.g. steel holds up buildings very well per cost and weight); and B) technology (metallurgy, mostly) allowed us to draw tap into new energy reservoirs (viz. hydrocarbons; nuclear energy; etc). In the before times, energy mostly came from the macronutrients in plants, conducted via muscles.
Intelligence, however, is only worth the efficiency of the technology it's able to discover, or the sources of energy it's able to tap into. Efficiency is limited by thermodynamics. Industrialization *temporarily* circumvents this by drawing from unsustainable reservoirs of energy. But a strategy of perennially finding new energy sources has has limits too. And this is why moldbug and I believe that a pot of "agency vs intelligence" is ultimately sigmoidal, rather than exponential. Because in the long run, exponential curves always turn out to be sigmoidal.
When your concept of AI becomes bounded by the laws of physics, it becomes apparent that the threat of AI reduces to the *other* existential risks. So AI, in and of itself, doesn't really add much to the equation that wasn't already present during say, the Cuban Missile Crisis. Mostly, it just adds more attack-surface for some security screwup to occur <looks at Pakistan> by adding another layer of indirection. E.g. as Vilium suggests, sure, maybe the AI will use deepfakes to make people on social media angrier. But does that warrant a new category of x-risk? or do slightly better psyops just bring us to a slightly worse equilibrium than the one we're already in.
----
Re: orthogonality
Additionally, there's a notion that an AI might have drives (e.g. paperclip maximization), and this will cause it to seek power, and take over the universe by any means necessarily. But as Thegnskald notes, I think this is unlikely. Because humanity's own drives are very specific targets that were shaped by evolutionary forces. I don't think it's likely that an AI would come with drives that weren't deliberately programmed into it, any more so than a wooden chair you ordered from Amazon is likely to "accidentally" come with a third arm.
"but ML behaves in surprising ways. isn't it possible that AGI will behave in surprising ways, like having drives we didn't put there?" But imo, the surprising nature of ML comes from our willful misunderstanding of it. If people had treated it as a statistical telescope, rather than immediately anthromorphizing it as an intelligence that reasons causally and sequentially, its behavior wouldn't be seen as surprising.
Thanks, this really helps me clarify my intuition that there is a gap in the narrative where intelligence-->agency. I am not so sanguine about physical limits saving us though. Yes, exponential curves may just be sections of a sigmoidal curve, but we don't know where the peak of the sigmoidal curve will be until we're pretty much there; and there's no guarantee we hit that peak before enough energy resources have been tapped to initiate us into some pretty weird futures. After all, we're *already* living through a pretty weird future from the perspective of, say, three centuries ago; and accessing hydrocarbons is already setting off some collapse-ish phenomena, in re: biodiversity, climate change, etc. In short, AI can't escape the laws of physics, but the laws of physics can manifestly accommodate a lot of technologies that, as Arthur C. Clarke said, are indistinguishable from magic. And we still have no idea what the outer bound of technological possibilities are.
As for orthogonality: isn't the whole point of the paperclip maximizer that it *has* been programmed with the drive to produce the most paperclips? It doesn't have drives that are additional to this; its monomaniacal functioning is precisely the problem, in that the singular drive subordinates all other possible values, which is why it ends up disassembling the entire biosphere to make paperclips. It would probably be *better* if it had some sort of unpredictable drives because then we could hope that the values of love, peace, understanding, and All That Is Good were somehow emergent properties of "intelligence" (whatever that is), but unfortunately I don't see any reason to believe that.
(And but another thing that makes me question the x-risk narrative is precisely the paperclip thought experiment. I get the point of it, but it is in fact overwhelmingly unlikely that the world's first (and last) ASI would have the aim of maximizing paperclips - or anything like that. It would probably be something more general purpose, and probably have some sort of humanistic values entailed in it, which is more or less what current generalist AIs at least *try* to do. The main risk here, I suspect, would be military AIs... though that risk is certainly nothing to sneeze at.)
p.p.s.
> "intelligence" (whatever that is),
Well... I have a theory. At least partially motivated by "how worried should I be about AI anyway?"
https://fromthechair.substack.com/p/magic-runes-and-sand-dunes-the-binary
p.s.
The thing you're discussing more specifically is something that Scott has been debating with Nostalgabraist (i think?) over. I.e. "how worried should we be about monomaniacal optimization?" But also things like, "what does optimization really mean?" and "does it truly belong in the toplevel of the decision loop?" I don't wanna dig into it too much bc i haven't followed it closely, and so I don't understand it fully.
More pertinently though, I don't see AI's acquiring drives because they exist outside of evolutionary forces. Unless we're discussing a timeline on the scale of Dune's Golden Path. But at that point, AI's are basically just aliens we've coevolved with. I can't be asked to make predictions about that far into the future. Although it'd make a great Scifi plot in the meantime.
From asimov's "the relativity of wrong" [0]:
> John, when people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.
I'm pretty confident that we've discovered most of the important bits of physics by now. This is more speculative, but i think the inflection point was roughly around the 2nd industrial revolution. (the 1st wasn't important, and the digital revolution isn't either.)
> As for orthogonality: isn't the whole point of the paperclip maximizer that it *has* been programmed with the drive to produce the most paperclips?
I think you misunderstood the thought experiment. The point isn't "wanting paperclips *only* is weird and inhuman". (although Yudkowsky does make this point in his genie essay [1], and his "baby-eating aliens" story [2]. The ideas are adjacent, so they *do* kinda blur together in practice.) The point of the Paperclip Maxing idea is to point out that power/resources are scarce, and therefore rivalrous, and therefore agents often destroy things they bear no malice toward. (You and I are both heterotrophs, after all. E.g did you bear any malice toward the cow in your last burger? or did it just happen to have calories that you need for other projects.) The fancy AI name for this idea is "instrumental convergence". Because "power is instrumental to pretty much all terminal values, and rivalrous, so agents tend to fight over power". Which, ya know, George R. R. Martin could have told you as well.
[0] https://hermiene.net/essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html
[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NyFuuKQ8uCEDtd2du/the-genie-knows-but-doesn-t-care
[2] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HawFh7RvDM4RyoJ2d/three-worlds-collide-0-8
Even if you regard AI as agentic, the other parts of the argument still remain, which were the parts I found most convincing against AI doomerism. Specifically, the idea that arbitrary intelligence doesn't equate to arbitrary ability to build untested physical systems or arbitrary ability to convince humans to do your bidding. These two things seem to be at the core of the Yudkowskyite doomer arguments (AI will build nanobots that will kill us all! AI will use superintelligent persuasion to make people hand over control to them!), so the fact that superintelligence doesn't actually entail them seems like a good enough argument against most of the x-risk scaremongering.
You don't need AI to be able to make nanobots or be superhumanly persuasive. A version of GPT that can be convinced to give you instructions on designing bioweapons is probably fatal (plenty of crazy people who'd do it if it were that easy). Even if you assume there's some minimum level of infrastructure required for it, a midsized terrorist org would probably be able to manage it with sufficiently strong unguarded AI.
In the spirit of "quantity has a quality of its own", AI does not need to be superhumanely convincing, it just needs to be able to deliver a decent argument to billions of people at the same time. Let's add some customization, for example if the AI has an access to the information advertisers have already collected about everyone, then for religious people in can design an argument using quotes from their religion, to libertarians it will talk from the position of free markets, to woke people it will use the language of fighting against oppression, etc. If it only convinces 10% of people, that's enough to cause some riots or change the outcome of some elections. (The AI does not need to approach those people qua AI. It can also send them e-mails, private messages, SMS messages, write comments on reddit, etc., the more the better.)
I do think that one of the undertheorized leaps in the standard existential risk analysis is the one where the AI goes from being "superintelligent" to taking physical control over the productive apparatus of civilization. Pretty hand-wavey stuff from the AI risk crowd! But for me, a) I don't know that such physical control is actually a necessary condition for existential risk; and b) saying that we don't know how or that it might happen doesn't mean that we know it *couldn't* happen.
I'm actually less skeptical of the notion that superintelligent AI could have superhuman abilities at manipulating people. This is based on what AIs are *already* able to achieve in this department. For one, weenie little social media algorithms seem to be enough to manipulate people into tearing their civil society apart for pretty trivial (one might say orthogonal) ends like engagement metrics. And then there are anecdotes about manipulative behavior from chatbots that haven't been RLHF'd to within an inch of their lives.
I actually do think these are two soft spots in the existential risk narrative. But I don't think Yarvin comes remotely close to steelmanning them, as he claims; nor do I think his way of arguing the point is remotely close to demonstrating that AIs could never pose an existential risk. His certainty seems to me like just the inverse of Yudkowsky's, who seems way too certain that AI *will* kill us all. But you don't need certainty to take up the cause of existential risk; at a mere, oh, 20% chance that humanity will be destroyed, my ears prick up, you know?
> saying that we don't know how or that it might happen doesn't mean that we know it *couldn't* happen.
It also doesn't mean that it *could* happen. There's many, many possible doomsdays to worry about - vacuum collapse, the second coming of Christ, etc. Unless you can show that your scenario is especially plausible, you're just doing God of the Gaps, Pascal's Mugging, etc.
I haven't really encountered good arguments for -or- against existential risk concerns; they all basically start with one of two assumptions:
Superintelligent AI is possible
Superintelligent AI isn't possible (or, alternatively, that the idea of superintelligence isn't a coherent concept)
I think most skeptics of existential risk concerns fall into the latter camp (superintelligence isn't possible/isn't a coherent concept), most proponents of existential risk concerns fall into the former camp (that superintelligence is possible), and very few arguments actually attempt to bridge the gap by, for example, rigorously defining what exactly superintelligence -is-, and just sort of try to let your intuition ("Imagine somebody with an IQ of 10,000" or "Imagine a world full of regular people running at one million times our speed") fill in the gaps. If you, like me, are skeptical that this is a meaningful concept, these hand-wavy explanations will just seem to emphasize that the people talking about it don't actually know what it is they are trying to talk about.
Really, if they knew what they were talking about, we'd all be in utopia or dead already, because the degree of understanding necessary to rigorously define intelligence is equivalent to the degree of understanding necessary to program it. Many of these arguments even agree they don't understand it, and assert some kind of low-superintelligence which -does- understand intelligence then designing the actual superintelligence.
This is made worse by the way certain ideas are used in ways which either contradict or extend upon the definition - the orthogonality thesis, for example. A lot of human technology progress has occurred exactly because humans have different values - you get further in paperclip technology if you have a person with an obsessive interest in metallurgy in addition to a person with an obsessive interest in paperclips. People who imagine that the paperclip-obsessed person would research metallurgy in furtherance of that interest are assuming a lot about the way the thought patterns involved must operate, assumptions that only seem valid in the particular context of an intelligence that will "solve all problems" in pursuit of a particular agenda, which, well, gets back into defining intelligence in the first place. Notice: Just as an AI may be aware that it isn't pursuing the goal you set for it, and not care - it can also be aware that it isn't pursuing its own goal with maximal efficiency, and not care. Valuing maximizing the number of paperclips, and valuing actually making progress on this first value, or even valuing existing to actually achieve that first value, are not necessarily the same thing! We can just as easily imagine the smartest intelligence in the universe using simple and slow manipulators to hand-fold paperclips until it runs out of power in pursuit of its singular objective of maximizing the number of paperclips in the universe - it doesn't value time, it doesn't value actually completing its task, it doesn't value being efficient - to arrive at these additional things, such as to turn such an intelligence into an existential threat, we need make a lot of assumptions about what intelligence is and how an intelligence interprets its values. "Well I'm smart and that isn't how I would go about maximizing the number of paperclips" is fundamentally identical to assuming that an AI would notice it isn't pursuing the goal you set for it and correct itself. There are a lot of hidden assumptions in the way the orthogonality thesis is employed in these arguments.
In general it very much seems to me that a lot of the "existential risk" comes about with respect to a view of AI as a wish-granting genie, in which the challenge is making exactly the right wish. If you don't think AI can grant wishes in that way in the first place, for good or for ill, most of those arguments make no sense at all.
On another front, there's a lot of concern about AI behaving, fundamentally, liked an evolved being; competing for resources, for example. We have no reason to expect an AI to behave like an evolved being, excepting that we decide to make it behave that way. But "Behave like an evolved being" is actually a very specific target, which we're unlikely to hit unless we are trying very hard to hit it.
So, if you're looking to "know-thy-enemy": A lot of the people pushing existential risk concerns don't actually seem to have a clear idea of what it is they are talking about, extrapolating out from vague intuitions about what various things are into how they would be. The single most important pillars of their arguments are massively underdefined. Want to convince me? Show me that your ideas are coherent and well-defined. Let's start with a scalable definition for regular intelligence: What makes one person more intelligent than another? If your answer is "IQ score", well, we already have humans that max the scores on IQ tests, so anything smarter than that is undefined - you haven't actually answered the question. We could say something like "The maximum complexity of patterns identifiable by an entity", but it isn't clear that cashes out to something intelligent, because there are an infinite number of patterns that can define any finite set of data points; at some point of maximum-complexity-of-pattern-recognition you're going to be hallucinating patterns in random noise more often than identifying anything real. The maximum complexity of patterns identifiable by a given entity may, itself, have some maximum useful value - worse, the utility offered may decrease beyond this value. Insofar as this is your definition, it is quite possible that intelligence beyond some point may be worse than a lower level of intelligence.
As for accelerationists, the most common argument I see can be explained as that humanity should regard ourselves as parents - our duty is to raise a child. Aligning the AI is teaching it our values as best as possible - and they're for teaching that child as best as possible. But they see the kind of ironclad/bulletproof alignment a lot of the pro-alignment people seek as being closer to lobotomizing that child into a slave, or perhaps akin to indoctrinating it into a religion with the deliberate intent of preventing said child from thinking for itself.
> If you, like me, are skeptical that this is a meaningful concept, these hand-wavy explanations will just seem to emphasize that the people talking about it don't actually know what it is they are trying to talk about.
Let's say this is a meaningless concept. I still don't understand why it needs to be a meaningful concept to have material effects on the world, or how it isn't more of an indictment of your ideas about "meaningful" vs "meaningless" concepts.
"Intelligence is a black box" doesn't mean that there isn't a common cause to *gestures at the entire modern world*. Like, is the stance here that a bunch of completely unrelated things happened, related to but not involving the bigger brains or cognitive capability that humans have?
The only way I can see this being consistent is if you are completely unprincipled, and say something like "oh yeah, sure intelligence may be a black box, but I refuse to believe any effects of it exist until I have direct empirical evidence of it". Where it's *extremely* clear that your concepts are bad, not predictive and ill-thought, but you get to draw a line and say "I'm still right because the bad parts don't count'. Since I don't think you are either unprincipled nor believe absurdities, what work is "intelligence is a black box" doing OTHER than dismissing AI Risk?
I have several thoughts on how to (loosely) operationalize cognitive abilities as "a threat vector", in the same way I can try and model, say productivity of an iphone factory, but I need to know what you expect to see in a definition that would be convincing.
> We have no reason to expect an AI to behave like an evolved being, excepting that we decide to make it behave that way. But "Behave like an evolved being" is actually a very specific target, which we're unlikely to hit unless we are trying very hard to hit it.
This is confused. The reason why AI riskers think "acquisition of resources" stems from arguments about what they think the structure of the universe is, i.e. if you have any type of embedded-in-the-universe process that attempts to perform long term goals with persistence, one subgoal that pops up again and again is "survival" and "acquisition of power". I'm not sure, if you don't think this is true, what you would believe if not this. That agents are way better off committing suicide and becoming poor if they wanted to do things, and that humans are consistently behaving suboptimally by attempting to acquire resources that would allow them to accomplish goals? Therefore, AIs need to turn themselves off as a first thing, to ensure all their goals are achieved better?
I don't believe you've read AI arguments using the analogy of "evolution produced power seekers, therefore AIs would definitely be a power seeker because they are also evolved". If you have, then I'd like to see it. There's been a consistent pattern of skeptics missing qualifiers to statements so they say a more absurd version, or just plain not understanding the argument advanced. Hence, a link request.
> The maximum complexity of patterns identifiable by a given entity may, itself, have some maximum useful value - worse, the utility offered may decrease beyond this value. Insofar as this is your definition, it is quite possible that intelligence beyond some point may be worse than a lower level of intelligence.
How is this defined and meaningful? Like, downstream consequences of this would be something like:
Current companies that conduct 10 person meetings where only 3 people participate and the other 7 people are tuned out are at peak optimality. Maybe only inviting 3 people, or writing a summary is in fact suboptimal. Also, people who regularly don't do next steps from meetings are doing so because they figured out the optimal amount of flaking out, and not their stated reasons of "I forgot and the weekend was coming up" or "sorry I was browsing my phone".
All current R&D is useless, in fact any new discoveries in cancer treatment can be deduced to be net harmful.
Despite the fact that hedge funds can profitably sue firms because said firms aren't carefully reading how their contracts were written, there is a mirage because reading things can turn out to be net harmful.
If you *don't* believe that this is the worldview implied, then you're going to have to answer why you think this type of point about capabilities capping out is relevant and doesn't imply this. Or that the implications would happen, but exactly such that it only happens for superintelligence, despite no reason being given for why this should be true.
The problem is that there's a big leap from "gestures at modern civilization" to "Real Life is an RPG with One Stat To Rule Them All and it is easy to increase that stat arbitrarily high".
With regard to the "intelligence is a black box", you're shifting context from a discussion of "ordinary" intelligence to "superintelligence". Intelligence refers to -something-, but we don't know what that something is (thus, it is a black box) - it isn't clear "superintelligence" is even referring to anything at all, so I wouldn't describe "superintelligence" as a black box - that would imply there is a "there" there.
I'm not denying the existence of intelligence, that is, I am pointing out that nobody actually knows what exactly it is, and claims that it can be scaled up indefinitely seem dubious at best, and for any actual and non-recursive definition of intelligence I can find, outright meaningless, at worst.
As for survival and power-seeking behaviors, I don't think you understand the points I am raising, and given the lack of charity involved in your responses, I'm not particularly interested in trying to explain.
> With regard to the "intelligence is a black box", you're shifting context from a discussion of "ordinary" intelligence to "superintelligence". Intelligence refers to -something-, but we don't know what that something is (thus, it is a black box) - it isn't clear "superintelligence" is even referring to anything at all, so I wouldn't describe "superintelligence" as a black box - that would imply there is a "there" there.
This is exactly what I mean by unprincipled though. You claim that the only way you'd believe in superintelligence would be if it were defined well enough to be implemented, well, unless you think you can implement a human level intelligence that sure seems like you're excusing the inconsistency of your position. If you didn't know about the specific intellectual feats of Ramnujan, von Neumann, Feynman, Gauss, Newton or Euler and I described them to you and slapped the "superintelligent" label on it, it doesn't seem like your worldview would *allow* for those people to exist.
Like, imagine if I said "heavier than air objects cannot fly, we don't even know what flying is, is it what a balloon does or what a piece of paper floating in the wind does? what an idiotic concept. therefore something like an airplane is impossible" and then when someone points out that birds are indeed heavier than air and they do fly you go "well that's because we know that they can fly, also my original position is even more correct, because birds exist and airplanes don't. Bam that's a prediction.".
The existence of birds, of course, doesn't actually prove that airplanes *can* exist, you are correct that someone needs a mechanistic understanding of how lift is generated, how to design aerodynamic shapes and have sufficiently good materials science in order to convincingly demonstrate that airplanes can exist (and if they can argue this, they will have invented them or be well on their way to inventing them). But arguments which proport to state a general principle, then carve out exceptions to counterexamples by saying "yeah well they actually exist so it's fine" are just plain bad and invalid arguments. Once again, this is not a case *for* superintelligence, but *against* what I think is a bad concept.
Similarly, saying something like "A superintelligence can only exist and be dangerous if you have a sufficiently meaningful conception of it, also intelligence exists so it's got a doctor's note for my meaningful conception argument." I think it's significant that pointing out we in fact *don't* have meaningful conceptions of "ordinary" intelligence, and yet *something* like it still dramatically shapes our lives. If your idea of "only meaningful concepts can exist" is useful and true, it seems as if we should be able to apply it in a more principled way.
I don't think you are denying that intelligence exists. I don't understand how you can have such stringent demands on proving something like "superintelligence", when existing "ordinary" intelligence does not fulfill your criteria. If we took away your knowledge of what "ordinary" intelligence can achieve, it seems like we would be systemically mislead about what the capabilities of humans would be.
What do I not understand about your position?
> As for survival and power-seeking behaviors, I don't think you understand the points I am raising, and given the lack of charity involved in your responses, I'm not particularly interested in trying to explain.
Fair enough.
I read your first two sentences and I'm done. You want to try again, this time actually talking to me, instead of an imaginary version of me who holds views that are easy to argue with?
I don't think anything you've posted makes you "hard to argue with". If you have points that I'm not addressing then say it instead of acting like you're being put upon. You say that other people have vague and undefined concepts, but when someone thinks you have vague and undefined concepts you just think that's being rude and misunderstanding you.
To me, most of your reasons for why "orthogonal thesis is contradictory with AI risk superintelligence" argument for example, shows that you have implicitly substituted a particular definition of intelligence, same with the point about "trying to hit a small spot in mind space that evolution hits".
If you think those are your strong points that I'm not addressing, it's because I anticipate being lead on a wild goose chase if I do propose an alternate definition of intelligence, being subject to more and more stringent demands on definitions given that *your counterarguments do not meet*. If you don't think you'd do this, you'd be much clearer about what criteria you'd accept. The fact you feel frustrated and not listened to is most likely because I'm an ass, but I imagine it's also because you love stringing people along, like in the sister thread here.
Yeah, I'm with you on most of this; it's been bugging me for the decade or so that I've been aware of this issue that "superintelligence" is an incoherent concept. People say with a straight face things like "imagine a being with an IQ of a million" and like, what on earth would that even mean? And there does seem to be this strange thing you allude to, which is that there's paradoxically a kind of anthropomorphism that comes out in the conclusions people derive from the orthogonality thesis: it's values would in no way resemble human values - but it's presumed to pursue its aims much like a super powerful, super smart human that had those aims would.
But: I don't think it follows from superintelligence being an incoherent concept that the *pursuit* of superintelligence, or the emergence of very powerful AI, wouldn't end in disaster. If anything the very fact that we don't even have a useful concept of what we're trying to avoid seems like a cause to be *more* cautious. And also, I think we're about a decade into narrow AIs having a pretty deleterious effect on human well-being (mostly through algorithmic social media) and that strikes me as an ominous indicator of where we might be headed. (Relatedly, the know-thy-enemy remark referred to accelerationists; I am open to arguments that existential risk is overrated.)
> it's values would in no way resemble human values - but it's presumed to pursue its aims much like a super powerful, super smart human that had those aims would.
I used to think this too, but this isn't presumed without thought. This is one of the main arguments/theories for why an AI may act like this even if they have no direct desire to do so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence
I agree!
I can see a dozen different (non-existential) disasters arising out of this particular pursuit, mostly in terms of the way it can be used to create or reinforce power structures.
And some (not all, by any means) of the most worrying developments, to my eye, come from the pro-alignment crowd.
What are the worrying developments you see coming from the pro-alignment crowd? (I see lots of worrying developments from people who *say* they are pro-alignment, Sam Altman being the most obvious; but do you mean that these worrying developments are coming from people actually acting in the interest of aligment?)
As an example, Eliezer's relatively recent post arguing that, because the race conditions mean unaligned AI is coming sooner or later, the only hope is for alignment researchers to enter the race and create an aligned AI first.
Given that the fundamental objective is a more finely-controllable AI, this seems likely to result in something particularly useful for creating and reinforcing power structures.
That's long been one of my big annoyances with Yudkowsianism - if you take its assumptions at face value, it's self-defeating. If you go around constantly talking about how it's easy to summon an omnipotent evil genie and we have to figure out the exact right Magic Words ahead of time so we can make a wish it can't pervert, then some people are going to hear the "summon an omnipotent genie" part and not hear or not believe the "evil" part.
> Valuing maximizing the number of paperclips, and valuing actually making progress on this first value, or even valuing existing to actually achieve that first value, are not necessarily the same thing!
This is just part of making a useful AI. If tell your paperclip factory AI that you need as many paperclips as possible, and this causes the AI to value having more paperclips, but not value actually making more paperclips, you just have a useless AI. You asked it to do something and it didn't do anything. Same applies if it places no value on doing the task promptly. Other than as failed experiments, we wouldn't make an AI doesn't do things when we ask it to.
> most proponents of existential risk concerns fall into the former camp (that superintelligence is possible)
As far as I can tell, the majority of people concerned about AI extinction risk give it between a 1% and 50% chance of happening. So it's not that they necessarily think it's possible. Just that they don't think it's proven impossible.
On the first point - that is specifically a response to the orthogonality thesis.
On the second point, if that were the case, I'd seriously expect far more arguments that superintelligence is plausible/possible, or even an acknowledgment that this is in fact a major point of disagreement - instead of all the arguments being focused on the people who argue that superintelligence will necessarily be friendly / won't be a threat.
I mean, the people arguing it must be friendly / can't be a threat are much easier to argue against, so that's a factor in why all the arguments run that direction. But even so, "Is this actually a coherent idea / plausible?" seems to be a massive blind spot in the arguments.
> On the second point, if that were the case, I'd seriously expect far more arguments that superintelligence is plausible/possible
Honestly, I thought those were most of the arguments. It's most of what I see in the comments on this blog.
I believe this probably ends by repeating our other comment thread (the definition of intelligence) - I'd say I have seen zero arguments that superintelligence is plausible/possible, only what such an intelligence might be capable of; if you disagree, we can continue this thread of conversation.
> Want to convince me? Show me that your ideas are coherent and well-defined.
Instrumental intelligence: the ability to select instrumental goals that will result in a terminal goal being fulfilled. Being more intelligent means identifying and selecting more effective goals.
This seems to be the definition which leads to paperclip-maximizer type problems and seems to be very clear and scalable to me, but I'd be curious if it addresses your problems.
Not really; it just combines two undefined things into one bigger undefined thing.
What is a terminal goal, in the context of instrumental intelligence?
A terminal goal is a goal that doesn't serve to achieve another goal. Edit: A less technical definition for instrumental intelligence is how well something can select goals to achieve an objective.
What was the other thing you need clarification on?
It was "goals" and "intelligence" - I'll note that I don't think "agency" (goal choosing, approximately) and "intelligence" are necessarily the same process.
What makes a goal better or worse?
Like, we can kind of define this for chess, either with an intermediary process that ranks board layouts, or retroactively by saying the chain of goals which resulted in a win were good goals, and the chain of goals which resulted in a loss were poor goals, or some combination thereof. We can find some kind of definition, minding that if we define the goals in advance ("Knights are more valuable than pawns" implies that a pawn taking a knight is a good goal), and give these goals to the AI, then the AI playing the game may not be picking goals in some meaningful ways - but if we don't give these goals to the AI, maybe we could use piece exchanges to evaluate its goals.
(Minding, of course, that if we tried to do this to the Go-playing AI whose name fails me, we'd rate it as much worse at the game than it actually was)
It's significantly harder in the abstract general case; it may be that the techniques for evaluating goals in the context of pathfinding fail entirely when evaluating goals in power generation, and both of those fail entirely when evaluating goals on plumbing.
It isn't clear that there is a generalized "goal selection" process such that we could take that approach. We're back to problems in defining what it is exactly we're talking about.
I think there's been some confusion, I was responding specifically to your claim that there isn't a well-defined and scalable definition of intelligence that's used when talking about AI X-risk.
If you know what the word "goal" means, you can empirically verify whether or not any set of (instrumental) goals will achieve that goal or not. Consequently, you can tell if any given agent is better or worse than any other given agent at creating these instrumental sets. This is a clear, well-defined, empirically verifiable process for intelligence that scales well past human level intelligence.
We actually don't need to fully define a goal selection process for the abstract case for any of that to hold (it's actually impossible to do without assuming one terminal goal).
The terminal goal is whatever you asked or programmed the AI to do.
For example, if you ask an AI to drive you to the airport, getting to the airport is the terminal goal, and turning left on Main Street might be an instrumental goal.
That definition implies every program that exists, down to a for loop which increments a number to 100 and exits, is an instrumental intelligence.
Which is fine but it then fails to point at anything; insofar as we evaluate it as an existential risk, what we're evaluating is "Is there any sequence of logical steps a computer could be instructed to take which could destroy the world?"
Terminal goal is just the term used in the explanation. It's not a type of AI, or a fancy concept about AI, or what makes things intelligent. We talk of abstract, unintelligent things having objectives all the time. The objective of a simple program could be to add two numbers together.
Maybe it would have been clearer if they used the terms "final objective" and "intermediate objective"?
The AI argument isn't about the definition of these terms. It's that smarter AIs will be better at planning, and the intermediate objectives of their plans may be dangerous. The idea that many different ultimate goals lead to similar intermediate goals is called instrumental convergence (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence). An example is self-preservation: if you're destroyed, you can't complete your final goal.
What do you think about targeted killings? Here I’ll narrowly define targeted killings as those which are ordered by one state in retaliation against another state’s specific political/military leaders deemed to be most responsible for an international act of aggression.
The official policy of the United States prohibits assassination as of 1981, as outlined in Executive Order 12333. However, starting with the war on terror, the United States and Israel began to employ “targeted killings,” against terrorist leaders. This practice has begun to spill over into the killing of officials of other sovereign countries. Both the US and Israel have linked terrorist activity so strongly to Iran, that they have more recently gone as far as to kill a handful of Iran’s top military officials. The primary targets of these attacks were leaders of Iran’s Quds Force, which along with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps were the first government departments ever designated as FTOs (foreign terrorist organizations).
Under the right circumstances, might targeted killings of the leaders of aggressor states be the most sensible, humane response? In modern warfare, it’s become common practice to place the authors of war outside the worst effects of it. Assassination, even in retaliation, is widely considered immoral, while the alternative of killing a slew of fresh service people and unlucky civilians is standard practice. It isn’t clear to me how this framework is morally defensible.
If a leader believes that it is in his/her people’s best interest to risk those people’s lives in conflict, shouldn’t that leader naturally include him/herself among them? All world leaders would without hesitation claim their willingness to die for their country but these same leaders have built a moral/legal framework around themselves that largely shields them from the possibility.
It is easier for me to understand an ethical objection to war in general than it is for me to understand the ethical objection to targeting the specific authors of it over a greater number of nameless, relatively blameless individuals.
Outside of ethics, the common argument against targeted killings is that they are potentially more destabilizing than standard warfare, but this sounds dubious to me. War itself is destabilizing. An aggressive state leader who holds so much personal power that his/her death means his/her country’s ruin is inherently destabilizing already. And one could argue it’s the taboo against assassination itself that fuels much of the popular outrage resulting from its practice.
I’m probably wrong here, as most of the world appears to disagree with me on this. What are your thoughts?
Deliberately killing another country's citizens in their own country(*) is a straight-up Act Of War. If you do that, the other country may say "Hmm, we're at war now. And our assassins kind of suck, but our missiles work *real* good and we've got a few very capable armored divisions right on their weakly-defended border". And you've got no standing to complain when they chose a different kind of war than you wanted.
But if you're up for war, sure, you're going to be killing people and "...but not if we know their names" or "...but not if they're specifically the people who are the biggest problem" are stupid rules to try to fight a war by. And *maybe* you can even keep it limited to a war of assassins - but best to have good missile defenses and a border secured against rampaging armored divisions first.
* Or in a third country that you're not at war with and doesn't want you killing people on their territory.
You need to officially announce your intent ahead of time or else every single death in every single country will be attributed to an assassination and have the potential to start a war. Of course announcing your intent means the target takes as many precautions as they can and you end up having to kill your way through their whole army.
What about poisoning? It allows the timing where you first poison the target, then publicly announce your intention to kill the target, and then the target dies.
Getting the timing right would be a nightmare, and then you're inviting every visiting member of your country to be preemptively considered a poisoner. It's less trouble but still a lot of trouble.
That's a good point.
My gut says that this should be OK, in a state of war, against uniformed military leadership, up to and possibly including military dictators.
But Hamas has figured out how to game that.
Non-state organizations that play with the big boys should get treated as such, like a rogue formerly-state-based military organization would be treated. That should cover Hamas and Al Qaeda, and also possibly whatever was going on with Oliver North.
And, what is "war"? Is America at war with Iran? In practice, it seems to be a fuzzy concept, especially as we put more and more significance and taboo on the formal declared version. Maybe we could call it a "cultural exchange program", since we want to remake their society in our image.
The CIA wasted a lot of time and effort to shorten Fidel Castro’s life span.
And if you take the rumors about Justin Trudeau seriously, Castro actually managed to reproduce and outflank America. :-)
That’s funny. I hadn’t heard that rumor. At first I thought you were getting at Boys from Brazil style clone of Fidel thing.
It's probably not so much about what you do but about what can be plausibly traced to you having done it. The proficiency of your agents minus relevant deals going on in the background minus options for future cooperation multiplied with your power (including economics and internal stability) advantage the higher the probability you can go ahead.
Let me attempt to steelman an argument here.
The reason to prefer a world order without widespread leader-assassination over one with widespread assassinations largely comes down to the second-order effects of the incentives it sets up.
In practice, the most effective method leaders have to avoid being assassinated isn't actually avoiding wars or avoiding scenarios where any other country wants them dead. Instead, it's way safer to avoid travel (particularly international travel) and operate as a shadowy puppet-master, ideally from an undisclosed location. That implies that a world with widespread assassination would look much like today, but with leaders who are far more detached from the people they're leading. Historically, it's been widely agreed that war is "better" in many ways (lower civilian casualties, etc) when leaders lead from the front, and encouraging assasinations has the second-order effect of making that less likely.
Particularly if we're talking about assassinations of only-somewhat-military leaders (like the US president), it's also likely that doing so will make it more likely that their replacement, and similar positions in other countries, will be primarily held by the kinds of people who are willing to sign up for military service instead of primarily-civilian leaders. If you don't want ex-military service members to be in charge of their contries, then you might not like that outcome.
>That implies that a world with widespread assassination would look much like today, but with leaders who are far more detached from the people they're leading.
I've always thought otherwise - if "assassination markets" were a real thing and actually effective (which you'd assume, because "effectiveness" would meet "demand," ie if there's a distributed bounty of $100M for somebody's assassination, a lot of competence can go into making it happen), we'd get *fewer* narcissistic psychopaths in public office, because they'd be at legimitate risk, and the one thing narcissists will never risk is their own precious skin.
In terms of "detachment from the people they're leading," we're already there at the far end of the bell curve in basically every country. Even in the US, the median congress-critter is a 75 year old multi-millionaire - how similar do you think their lives are to an actually median US person?
So I've always been pro "assassination markets," for those two reasons, as well as encouraging incumbent turnover. If you really want to be a 20-term senator and boss around the little people and play globocop, get some skin in the game and see how eager you are to continue for a 20th term when your assassination bounty goes over $10M.
There is another way that world leaders have to discourage assassination - set up government in such a way that whoever replaces them will be very similar in terms of outlook and actions. Or indeed, different but worse from the perspective of those likely to want to get rid of you.
I don't think any of the various opponents of the US think that the death of Biden would make any big difference to whatever they're currently objecting to.
And killing Biden would likely make even a Republican who got into power as a result somewhat inclined towards hostility to you.
That makes sense. It does seem plausible that leaders might behave more cowardly and suspiciously. On the other hand, if holding high office required you to commit your own life to your decisions rather than solely the lives of others, could that maybe help select for higher-caliber leaders who are more committed to their country than they are to themselves?
>Historically, it's been widely agreed that war is "better" in many ways (lower civilian casualties, etc) when leaders lead from the front, and encouraging assasinations has the second-order effect of making that less likely.
I think this is a key point about historical leadership, but I see people’s admiration for those who lead from the front as one that is more in line with retaliatory assassination as acceptable practice. A leader leading from the front demonstrates a commitment to his decisions and his people through his willingness to die for them or, in effect, be assassinated, if that’s what it takes.
I think you're mostly thinking about scenarios where the assassination would be targeted at leaders who actually made decisions. In practice, that doesn't particularly seem to be what's happening in either Iran or elsewhere. It actually seems like assassinations are intended to cause chaos by assassinating people who are central in the functioning of the organization. For example, in an assassination-heavy world the KGB would absolutely have offed Zelensky, most of his cabinet, and probably large fractions of Ukraine's legislature as well. While the legislative branch is technically responsible for the actions of a country, I don't actually think you'll get more competent people in charge if the job comes with significant risk of death.
Very early in the war, there were accusations - I do not know whether they were true - that Russia had tried to assassinate Zelensky. More recently, though, this seems to have been much less of a consideration.
There's nothing wrong with it, it's just not a very useful for your own army if the enemy can take out your generals in turn.
When they don't/can't - you see these targeted attacks.
It's more a gentleman's agreement akin to not shooting medics than anything else. Both sides benefit.
> Assassination, even in retaliation, is widely considered immoral, while the alternative of killing a slew of fresh service people and unlucky civilians is standard practice.
Who the hell even seriously argues that? The only positions that are even remotely correct are either "killing more people is worse than killing less people" or "it's war, the only that matters is winning". Do these people think they're immune to the consequences of their war just because of their status? Morons.
The mindset described above has literally informed the approach of the US in targeted killing for some time now
This is true only of designated terrorist leaders, not aggressor state leaders.
"it's war, the only that matters is winning" just means speedrunning Global Thermonuclear War.
Depends on how you define 'winning' right? I think having some kind of viable state/nation afterwards would be a condition.
I go back and forth on this. I had no problem with Osama bin Laden being taken out. OTOH, a bureaucracy that is created to facilitate assassinations will naturally try to expand its remit — if only to justify its budget.
And then we get organizations like MU 29155 with bozo operatives like Anatoliy Chepiga and Alexander Mishkin who failed to kill their targets, but killed a "civilian" (by leaving their bottle of Novichok on a park bench); and who were easily identified by their social media history.
I think you could make an argument that assassinating a leader in wartime is valid, but is that practically meaningful? It's pretty hard to get close enough to, say, Putin or Zelensky to do the deed. Even upper-tier generals rarely have a reason to get close to the front lines. Other lower-down military commanders can and do get picked off if they happen to put their command post in missile range.
(For the same reason, I think "it shows you're willing to die for it" would be a pretty much meaningless claim even if assassination were a normal part of warfare. No US president is ever going to face personal danger for going to war, because the Secret Service is good at their jobs and the US tends to wage war very far from home.)
And assassination during peacetime or during grey-area proxy wars seems like a massive can of worms you don't want to open, the sort of thing where you start off saying "it'll be nice and clean, just take out their leader and cut a deal with their successor," and then it turns out it was not clean at all and you've started a long and ugly war. Israel's strike on the IRGC commanders in Lebanon came pretty close to sparking a war, and that wasn't even a head of state. Can you imagine what the response would be if they dropped an airstrike on the House of Leadership in Tehran?
This is a fascinating wikipedia binge...
In context, the CIA was doing some crazy stuff, and assassination was one of the things "not actually illegal" in the list-of-crazy-stuff, once it came out. The congressional investigations and publicity seem to have put pressure on Ford to ban these "not illegal" things, and later EOs like 12333 just strengthened the initial ban.
I don't fully understand why the "skeletons in the closet" got out to the public in the first place. It seems very path-dependent, with Nixon installing certain people to strengthen the president's control over the CIA; but some(?) of those same people had genuine ideals and worked to reform it instead; at least, after Watergate had shook out.
For the "targeted killings", I'm not sure if it's because the public doesn't mind, as long as they're terrorists; or if it's because modern presidents have squashed the power struggles with the intelligence agencies by now; or if it's because the press and public sentiment have become much weaker against executive power, given the whole "start Fox news so no president gets Watergate'd ever again" arc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_12333
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_12036
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_11905
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Intelligence_Agency#Nixon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Jewels_(Central_Intelligence_Agency)#Reactions_to_release
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_R._Schlesinger#CIA_Director
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Colby#CIA_HQ:_Director
Is there a hetero male Aella? I haven't looked very hard, so there might be an obvious answer. I think people like Aella living non-standard sexual lives represent hope that human sexuality is not solved, like new physics mean the universe might not be boring.
(edit: I had to edit this to tone down the silly fanboy vibes ha ha)
Dan Savage performed this duty for me back in the 2000s/2010s until I kind of trailed off my Lovecast subscription. When I was interested again, it was the Trump/MeToo years and the few times I tuned in I just didn't need to hear more stories that felt political.
I imagine a "hetero male sex influencer" being like what I imagine Andrew Tate was from descriptions of him. I love the pink-haired polyamorous people I know, but the ones I occasionally come across as podcasters/writers tend to be so ... gentle and hand-wringey. Multiamory was just dull (back in the day, haven't tuned in in a long time) and @polyamfam on instagram seems cute but then they un-ironically use the word "oof."
Bald and Bankrupt is probably a sex tourist but I love his travel videos and thank fuck he doesn't talk about sex and relationships. More Plates More Dates is a steroid-fluencer. I successfully steered clear of Pick Up Artists when they were popular in the 2010s and I'm totally allergic to anything adjascent.
The heterosexual male influencers are not writing about sex much, unless you want to go back to the days of Henry Miller etc., and probably their views are highly out of date.
Writing heterosexual male sex advice these days would be something of a minefield, I should imagine. Luckily one can go back to the traditional concept of a stiff upper lip. Which implies also silence and discretion.
I read a post by Aella for the first time a few weeks ago and was struck by how much it sounded like the Pick Up Artists blogs l read about 15 years ago. In some cases, the language was much milder but essentially getting at the same point. In other cases, the wording was the exact same, as least as best I could remember it. That could mean:
1) They are both getting at the same fundamental truth about heterosexuality, or
2) Right or wrong, the same tropes about heterosexuality keep getting repeated
I'd guess 80% 1 and 20% 2.
EDIT: Aella is living a non-standard sex life for a woman, but it is a type of non-standard sex life for women that has been around forever (Well, in cultures that allow it.) Anais Nin would be a similar type from a hundred years ago. I'd guess maybe 1 in 500 women live such sex lives.
"Hetero male Aella" doesn't make sense to me. Promiscuity is hard-wired in men, so managing that to keep up a stable pair bond is a higher challenge than competing to be the next Don Juan or Casanova. Competing to be the next Genghis Khan is something different, I guess. Talking sour grapes here, admittedly, but now I came to think the grapes up there really ain't as sweet as they look.
Reminds me of that discussion "Has the sexual revolution failed?"; There was nothing in there impressing me much. Strict rules and high social control makes some people suffer; licentiousness makes other people suffer; guess all should have their turns.
Not quite what you're looking for, but you might enjoy Mark Manson?
Aella does NOT represent hope that human sexuality is solved. Aella is almost a textbook fail-case for healthy human sexuality (specifically, hypersexuality due to childhood trauma).
The unfortunate truth is that your grandparents were likely much closer to the optimal state of healthy human sexuality, and we've regressed massively since.
I don't see any strong rationale for labeling her as a 'fail-case' without resorting to circular argument. Unless you want to go some strong evo bio route and say 'she's failing because she should have had kids by now', and in that case you really have to apply the label very broadly.
Basically I feel like a lot of people would *like* to say that she's suffering from some pathology, but given that she does not seem unhappy or unhealthy it feels like a hard case to make without smuggling in some additional normative assumptions.
I feel like human sexuality is solved for the 90% of us in the middle of the sex bell curve.
The only people who have problems are those who are either having none at all or far too much. It's just that these tend to be the only people who talk about it in public.
I doubt sexual behavior has changed much in the West since the pill became legal. Is polyamory so different from the many sex communes that existed 50 years ago?
What's changed is the language we use to talk about it. Who's fucking who and how many hasn't changed.
I'd expect AIDS has changed something?
For a while, but condoms worked well enough. And now there are drugs that HIV-negative people can take that make it difficult to catch HIV, and also drugs that HIV-positive people can take that make it difficult to transmit HIV. So as far as I understand, it's largely a solved problem, except that it requires medical interventions of varying expense.
....I happen to know a lot about my grandparents relationship and if thats the optimal state I think we should all stop reproducing and take us out of our misery.
More seriously, most people don't want to live like Aella, but she seems to be doing well for herself. Pair-bonded monogamy with kids probably works best for most people, but that doesn't mean all other preferences are a failure state. There have always been people who weren't reproducing. Do you also disapprove of nuns? honest question here, because to me, supporting people who want more than 2 kids is the best way to hit that >2.1 rate, not complaining about childless polycules.
I mis-typed "is not" as "it's". The point I was trying to make is that people doing post-modern sex are a sign that we haven't figured everything out yet.
You might want to go back to simpler times and that's fine. I know people who are relatively happy that they go to work and do the same thing literally every day for years on end.
Maybe a well-funded university department will discover, via a Sexual Large Hadron Collider that sex is actually a dangerous like nuclear weapons or fentanyl and must be quarantined and restricted before it destroys humanity, but I suspect that is not the case.
What is there to solve about sex? It makes babies, it's pleasurable to get us to make and have babies because otherwise we don't bother.
That's the bones of it. All the stuff around relationships is just added on as we got bigger brains.
If you mean kink and novelty and promiscuity and "ugh anything but vanilla, the more experienced I get the more jaded I get" then that's a problem for you., because at the end of the day it's the same nerve endings wired up to the same centres in the brain reacting to stimulus, and if you need to feel you are doing naughty wicked advanced stuff in order to get the arousal going, that's not going to be solved by any kind of Large Hadron Collider. It's like all addictions, such as sugary foods; we make them even more processed and hyper-palatable and addictive because the bit of our brain that lights up at "yummy!" wants more more more. Same with sex: if you've never had sex, the first time you have an orgasm is the most amazing thing in the world. Have a few hundred orgasms, and then you start chasing to find that same high as the first time, because repetition and familiarity dulls the sensation, so now you need to be hanging out in kink clubs and inventing new terms for new arrangements of partners to get that high again.
NO - people doing post-modern sex is a sign there are certain segments of society who have collapsed into decadence.
I'm not saying sex is dangerous in the same way that fentanyl is dangerous. I'm saying that Aella's polycule probably is nowhere close to a TFR of 2.1 - and if that polycule does produce children, I'm not sure they will approach that TFR either.
It's "dangerous" in that it leads to collapse and extinction, regardless of whether or not the people involved are having a good time.
I think people have too many calories these days. Cake is decadent and people in 1970s who had more access to cake, fresh fruit and meat than ever before in human history were collapsing into decadence. I'm not trying to be a jerk, I just don't think scarcity and restriction are inherently good. Overconsumption has its problems, clearly, but there's a difference between overconsuming 8000 calories of pizza and twinkies vs. 6000 calories of steak and salmon.
You don't know that it leads to collapse and extinction. I can tell a compelling story about the birth rate of people I personally know being ~0.25 because of economic factors, not too much sex. In Canada, at least, it FEELS like we've just pulled a One-Child-Policy out of our asses using economics rather than loose knees.
I think it's true that the hyper sexualization of society has happened at the same time as a quality of life collapse. Can they be correlated, but not causally linked?
I personally like: @datepsych on Twitter, Mark Manson, Optimized Dating Substack. Also any pick up artist video on Youtube showing how to cold approach in public.
Advice? I'm a 23 y/o recent philosophy grad who spent most of the last 10 years or so with their head in the clouds thinking about everything but practical, actually deployable-in-the-world ideas. Now that I'm supposed to be an adult, I find I'm in fairly desperate need of mentors to shepherd me onto the path of not being useless to myself and the world around me. In what is I guess proper Gen Z fashion, I'm afraid it took me this (way too) long to realize I actually need to follow a realistic career path.
I want to become a residential real estate developer like others in my family, but I barely know the first thing about how. I was feeling at a loss for what to do, but then I remembered, apparently there is this weird internet community full of ~140 IQ creative geniuses (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-mystery-of-internet-survey-iqs) who are randomly good at all sorts of stuff; I think I could do a lot worse than to learn from one of those people. So anyway, I feel I would greatly benefit by having someone to talk to from the rat community (on discord/slack/email/wherever - DM me!) who happens to know how to run a successful physical business, or has a sophisticated understanding of financial management, some insight into people/local RE politics, who might even run a construction company/has general contracting or design experience or practiced as a broker/agent/appraiser, or has anything else that might help get me better understand real estate development or business in general.
They don't have to be directly involved in my industry specifically, to be clear--they just need to know something that could be useful in my endeavors somehow. Considering I know next to nothing, learning literally *anything* remotely practical would be a pretty significant improvement. But if you *do* happen to have detailed, advanced technical knowledge about one of the above topics, even better.
If anyone is feeling a little generous with their time, and willing to chat with me for a bit to help me improve, I would be very grateful!
Kismet! I'm a real estate developer (in Florida) who also started, rather foolishly, with a undergraduate in Philosophy. I'm always happy to talk shop.
Where you should start is a function of how much capital you have. If you can get ~100K together then you can get the ball rolling pretty quickly. If not you have to resort to some pretty sneaky shenanigan's. (Like buying a lot with a dilapidated mobile home and switching it out on a weekend for a newer one without asking permission "What are you talking about inspector? It was always like this!" )
I talk to a lot of young people who want to get their foot in the door of real estate, but I can't provide specific advice without knowing more about your ambitions. Drop me a line HaecceityHoldings located at the most g of mails.
Hi Sysipheus, thank you so much for reaching out to me! I'll sent you an email there. Talk soon.
Come to Australia. Residential real estate developers are untroubled by any philosophy or by their lack of knowledge of their field . Best of all, All our public policy at every level of government is directed toward the success of residential real estate developers.
Right. Residential real estate development seems like a ridiculously easy way to make a lot of money, once you have a bit of knowledge and good contacts with builders etc and a bit of working capital. It seems ridiculously easy in Australia at the moment to buy a run-down house in a fancy suburb for $2 million, spend $1 million building a pair of townhouses with fancy kitchens, and sell each off for $2 million.
The only thing stopping me is the knowledge that I don't know what I'm doing and am likely to screw up the design or get ripped off by the builder or fail in some other way. But if you know what you're doing, you're derisked and can print money. (I guess the other thing that's stopping me is ethics, I hate those goddamn townhouses ruining our suburbs.)
poor timing or debt issues are more likely reasons to fail than problem design or contractor . The first is easily solved, the second is about sound business management. Australian banks basically run the sector - essentially a big circle jerk economically.
here’s the sad result of our resi real estate policies of the last 40 years
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-04-23/anglicare-australia-rental-affordability-report/103754274?utm_source=abc_news_app&utm_medium=content_shared&utm_campaign=abc_news_app&utm_content=link
Were you joking when you said Australia is Mecca for res real estate developers? Also, would you be willing to share what you know about development with me sometime? Feel free to email me at generalpurposeemail1@gmail.com
It's a disaster. It's mind-blowing that we have one of the lowest densities of any country and one of the least affordable real estate markets.
hi! a philosophy grad would be a great shoe-in to writing marketing and proposal copy for a developer, architect, engineer, or builder. If you're looking to intern in marketing in any of these kind of firms, advertise your ability to write cohesive arguments. Look for a developer or building contractor doing PPPs--they tend to need writers who can answer long proposals. The exposure you'll get to the day to day reality of development / AEC industry will give you a great sense of where to go... its a huge industry and theres a lot of interesting career paths. good luck..
If you want to do the same exact thing as your family you should just ask them to hire you and train you instead of asking a bunch of strangers online.
If you want to do something else useful that's when you need other sources of input. The best avenue online for a smart person to produce useful work that others will value is programming, and there are many free programming classes in all sorts of areas of interest out there.
> If you want to do the same exact thing as your family you should just ask them to hire you and train you instead of asking a bunch of strangers online.
(Or perhaps do both.)
Seriously, "having relatives who are already in the business" is a *massive* advantage you have over most potential competitors. Assuming healthy family relations, it means knowing people who (1) are actual experts at what they talk about, as opposed to random strangers or self-appointed experts who often have no idea what they are talking about, and (2) who are genuinely interested in helping you, as opposed to just trying to extract as much money as possible for dubious advice.
The entire advice industry suffers dramatically from the principal-agent problem. The fact that you need an advice means that you probably cannot distinguish good advice from bad advice, which at best incentivizes others to sell you well-*sounding* advice instead, and at worse encourages them to actively exploit you by recommending you to do things that will transfer your money into their pockets. But to you, Heaven handed a solution to this problem on a silver platter.
Where other people spend first years of their career making naive mistakes, getting burned, and then learning from their mistakes, you can get this hard-earned wisdom quickly and for free. If you want to know the secrets of the people who would normally be on the opposite side of the negotiation table, you can simply ask nicely. If you want to get a role, you can ask your relatives to first let you observe someone in that role, then to let you assist them, and then to let you take the role for yourself. And while you are working, you are helping your own family get rich, as opposed to most people who instead work hard to make some stranger rich.
From the opposite side, your comparative advantage is that they can *trust* you. They can trust you not to steal from them; not to bring your knowledge obtained from them to a competitor tomorrow.
Also, intelligent people are *rare*, unless you have tons of money you can throw at them. Most people suck at what they do, and the only reason they accomplish anything is that they are doing the same thing over and over again. Any deviation from the routine, and they are in trouble. I will assume that your relatives are smart, but most of their employees are not. But they can't do everything, because they only have 24 hours a day. So maybe a good start would be to ask them whether they have a problem to solve -- any problem, the smaller is actually better for a beginner, the important thing is that they do not need to spend too much time explaining things to you. (For example, they are out of pencils, so you use internet to find the nearest shop, go there and buy 12 pencils, two different kinds, six pieces of each, and bring a receipt. This is stupid, but you saved them some time, practiced your independent thinking and acting, and gained a little trust.) Or you can bring your own skills and think how to use them in their service. (Is there anything they calculate manually? How much time would it take you to create a spreadsheet? Do they write lists of stuff? Show them how to make a google doc on a computer, and then view it on a smartphone. Just don't over-engineer it, they are not going to become part-time Linux admins; make the simplest thing that works.)
This is excellent advice, thank you!
If others in your family have done this, are they available for mentorship?
The only advice I can give is that you've got to do what you're good at. In my case being good at something is tied to motivation which is tied to what I'm interested in doing, which has worked out well enough but is not always ideal.
Lol, well, the only things I've ever felt good at were... philosophy, and extemporaneous policy debate. Yes, I realize that's laughable. Obviously I should get good at something that actually matters/I can build a career around. My hope is the motivation will come more readily as my skills develop, I exceed expectations, my performance improves, and I receive reinforcement as a result.
So why are you good at philosophy and policy debate? Put it another way, what's the fundamental draw? What do you get out of it? Are you competitive? Do you like architecting ordered systems? Harmonizing unordered systems?
I had thought that I was unusually good--or unusually self-motivated--at specific electronic design tasks. I had a major life breakthrough when I realized the draw was really any heavily constrained optimization problem; and once I knew that was my interest, I could point it at just about anything.
As is often the case, The Last Psychiatrist offers the best analysis/advice: https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2010/08/this_is_why_the_american_dream.html
His style is quire acerbic; also note the publication date, and how little things change.
LMAO that was a great read, very relatable, thank you. Does he have anything else relating to practical matters someone in my situation might need to hear?
I'm glad you liked it, he can (could - he stopped blogging in 2014 having been doxxed) be a bit off-putting. There's a follow-up: https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2010/08/the_worst_thing_that_can_happe.html
I can't recommend enough just reading his stuff, some of it is dated as he addressed specific controversies of the day, but a lot of his analysis is timeless.
Practical advice, both in his spirit and in my experience: stop choosing and start doing. Doing anything, really, is better than infinite rumination and looking for a "perfect" thing to do. You are young, if you don't like doing something, that's an awesome valuable lesson, now you know something about yourself that you could not have found out otherwise.
Won't Labour in Britain just reverse Brexit to the maximum degree possible once they take office? (I'm assuming that they're going to win a fairly large majority). The initial vote for Brexit was famously 52-48, and I believe that the turnout for the referendum wasn't super-high. Just based on thermostatic public opinion and the UK's general economic decline since then, it doesn't seem unreasonable that at least 5% of Leave voters will now have changed their minds. Plus, the British political system doesn't exactly have a lot of constraints on what a single-party majority can do- if Labour thinks it's a good idea they can simply push it through.
Likely the EU won't simply accept the UK back as a full member, but presumably they could strike a deal like Switzerland or a few other countries have where the UK is a member of the common market and so on again- they're just not a voting member. I think this would be extremely difficult to reverse even in the case of a future Tory administration. Is Labour going to push through something like this assuming they win this year? If not, why not?
Almost certainly not: https://www.metaculus.com/questions/5048/will-the-uk-rejoin-the-eu-before-2030/
Labor love Brexit - it's going to be a permanent scapegoat for them once they're in power. We tried to reduce cost of living, but brexit. We tried to lower unemployment, but brexit and so on.
Now, if you had said "at some time in the future", that's a different story. But "once they take office", no.
Switzerland is a member of EFTA (the European Free Trade Association) and I don't think that the Labor would try to join. Norway tactfully suggested that the UK might be happier negotiating its own relationship with the EU rather than joining the EFTA, which I think is a polite way of saying after watching UK/EU negotiations over Brexit, the current EFTA members aren't thrilled with the idea of the UK joining the EFTA.
Switzerland is part of the Schengen area (meaning there are no passport check when traveling between Switzerland and the European Union). Given the degree to which Brexit was sold on the idea of taking back control of the UK borders, I don't think that the UK joining the Schengen area is on the table, nor would it have been even if Brexit had never happened.
My expectation is that Labor will take steps to ease trade between the UK and the European Union, but these will fall significantly short of where Switzerland is. The other thing to note is that the UK is still in the process of implementing import controls on imports from the EU, and the UK government acknowledges that, “introduction of robust controls on EU imports will inevitably result in new processes and so costs for importers.”
I don’t live in Britain but feel sorry for the poor English bastards that were planning for a comfortable retirement in Spain.
There's always Gibraltar.
Switzerland doesn't exactly have a great relationship with the EU as of late. We've been in stalled negotiations over extending / reinstating our various "semi-member" privileges. I wish it was possible to be part of the EU without being under the heel of an unaccountable, dysfunctional bureaucracy, but if that's the cost of joining, then I'd rather stay out.
Maybe, just maybe, the Swiss could found some new and better european alliance with all the countries going "right wing populist" and leave the Eu to, let me think, Ireland, France and Sweden? Sorry Deiseach, I've been drinking.
Sweden is precisely one of the countries that has right-wing populists as a powerful supporting party to the current government.
Shame on me. Probably still had Olof Palme on my mind. Shall take better care of my dumbassity.
I don't see reentry any time soon. The EU won't want it. The Labour party don't want it and the Tories/Reform will absolutely crucify them if they tried. I'm very anti-Brexit and I think it would be a terrible idea. Though the tories have played a little loose with this recently, there's an expectation that if you are going to do something huge, you need to have it in your manifesto. There's no way Labour would do that now. Maybe next time.
It would be a great idea though to make as many friendly connections as possible. Wouldn't it be great if our scientists cooperate? And our academics? And if we allowed our young folks go back and forth? And if old people were allowed to buy houses on the other side. And we should free up the visa requirements a bit.
But I think joining the single market or the customs union or the EU itself will have to wait a long time.
I remember hearing (I don't remember the source), that if the UK tried to re-join the EU having left, they would very likely insist on the UK replacing pounds with euros, and just generally demand a bunch of concessions from the UK that weren't there under the original deal (when it was part of the EU the first time) (I think I may have heard this in the context of Scotland leaving the UK and re-joining the EU without England, Wales and NI). Even without that factor, the UK outright trying to re-join the EU seems unlikely, although that's just my vague impression and I don't actually tend to pay a whole lot of attention to politics.
I think the reason I think this is unlikely is that the process of leaving the EU had a large cost, and joining again would also have costs, so if we joined again, we'd have paid both costs for nothing.
The Brexit divide doesn't follow traditional party lines. The Labour party were as split on Brexit as anyone else and still has a number of EU sceptics high up. Much as I wish it were otherwise, I don't see any sort of Breentry process being kicked off any time soon, never mind anything actually getting accomplished.
The default is that nothing will happen and the status quo will continue. EU bureaucrats are very slow and any deal will take years to negotiate, by which time Conservatives might be back in power.
A year or so ago, a new type of experiment involving a pair of photons was able to measure the pressure inside a proton. The pressure at the center turns out to be a staggering 10^35 Pascals, about ten times the pressure at the center of a neutron star.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/swirling-forces-crushing-pressures-measured-in-the-proton-20240314/
Given how relatively little extra mass is needed to collapse a neutron star into a black hole (doubling the mass would generally do the trick), that pressure seems to put the center of a proton well into mini-black hole ball park.
It was claimed some years ago that a proton cannot in its entirety actually be a mini-black hole, in a classical sense, teetering stably (somehow) between evaporating entirely and absorbing particles, because if it was then it would have no magnetic moment, which it does.
But what if it had one or more mini-black holes in its deep interior that were surrounded and "shielded" by processes I sketch next which would produce a magnetic moment?
If a black hole near the centre emitted a particle, and the pressure gradient accelerated it outward to within a whisker of the speed of light, wouldn't the particle's relativistic mass increase accordingly? Now obviously gravity affects all masses equally, but by sweeping up vacuum energy wouldn't this particle concentrate mass-energy in one direction, relative to the center, as opposed to this energy being evenly spread round the center? If so then that would mean the effect of gravity on the particle would be enhanced, thus tending to haul it back towards the center? This effect would act like the well-known asymptotic freedom, whereby there is little force on the particle when close to the centre, but when ejected outward, it becomes massive enough to be dragged back in!
I gather the pressure gradient is colossal at the center, decreasing outward, then drops off to a minimum before increasing somewhat and pointing inward. So that would seem to be consistent with a picture of a proton's interior as resembling a spherical fountain of ejected particles, initially swelling in mass during their outward (possibly arching) trajectory, but then declining in mass and being hauled back in to be re-absorbed by the black holes.
This also seems consistent with collision experiments which seem to find quarks of all kinds of masses. It simply depends on the energy of the colliding particle how far it can pierce the interior of the proton before meeting a quark, on its way outward or back.
My pet meta-theory about physics is that there is no end to the complexity there, even theoretically. You dig deeper, your theories start failing, you flail for a while and check closer and wait for technical progress, eventually tie things up with a new theory. Wash, rinse, repeat. It's funny how many people think that *this one time* we're close to hitting the real bottom. So let me just for kicks propose that there is no bottom.
The real black pill is that in a finite, computable universe, it is mathematically impossible for anyone embodied in that universe to fully understand the universe, because that universe contains the mind doing the understanding, + halting problem, etc.
That's also mind bending, but it's quite incompatible with my idea. A universe with no bottom is neither finite nor computable. Unbounded Kolmogorov complexity if you will.
What does “pressure” mean in this context? Presumably force per surface area. I’ve heard of total gravitational force as a criterion for black hole, but never force per surface area. Since we are talking about extremely tiny areas, I presume that whatever is going on there is interestingly different from black holes. Though it wouldn’t be surprising if things inside subatomic particles seem ridiculously “extreme” in some way compared to everything we are familiar with.
(I am not a physicist, but) I would be more willing to believe "some scientists did a measurement wrong" than "every proton contains one or more miniature black holes".
Note that, if we are assuming that the forces inside a proton are gravitational in nature, this implies that the forces are *significantly* weaker than our measurements would imply. Assuming general relativity because you've brought up black holes, the curvature of spacetime involved massively distorts the interior radius of the proton.
I have never calculated it for the interior of a proton; but for a hydrogen atom, assuming the various nuclear forces involved are relativistic (that is, they curve space-time) in nature, I arrived at an "interior diameter" of approximately one meter, with significantly weaker forces as they are spread out over a MUCH greater (internal) volume of space. (IIRC, this had the mass of a hydrogen atom within spitting distance of its contained vacuum energy.)
If such forces are relativistic in nature, such as would be implied by interpreting the particles as being comprised of singularities, all our measurements are massively distorted by the curvature of the forces themselves - so viewing protons as black holes is probably incorrect.
Electrons, however, are a different story, and mathematics were worked out ~80 years ago showing that they could indeed be black holes (or at least close cousins of black holes, with naked singularities) with particular characteristics; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_electron for some information.
The criterion for creating a black hole depends on the ratio of mass to radius, not on pressure, so the pressure inside a proton is largely irrelevant for calculating whether it could collapse into a black hole. Assuming non-quantum general relativity applies (which is not likely), the radius of a proton-mass black hole would be 2.5*10^-54 m, far less than the proton's radius of around 8*10^-16 m (it's vague because a proton does not have a clearly-defined surface).
I don't understand your explanation of how you think a black-hole based proton might work. Vacuum energy doesn't work like that. The acceleration due to gravity that a particle experiences does not depend on its mass. A model of a proton which already contains all the particles it might produce in a collision is not needed, as in quantum field theory, particle-antiparticle pairs can be created from energy anyway.
The biggest issue though is that that is far beyond the scale at which quantum gravity becomes important. It is very doubtful whether black holes of that size could even exist, and even if they do, trying to predict their behaviour based on the normal rules is largely futile, and speculating that they might be different from macroscopic black holes in precisely the ways you need to get a certain effect (that is not experimentally supported) with no theory behind it is extremely unlikely to yield correct answers.
Another point is that even if there are (unlikely) gravitational interactions that can create mini-black-holes within a proton, those interactions must be promptly reversed, because protons do not collapse into black holes. And furthermore, if mini-black-holes were created, we would expect baryon number to be unconserved sometimes as a black hole evaporated into opposite leptons, so protons would decay at a significant rate. And that is not observed.
I wonder if the following issue with "standardized exams" is found in countries other than my home country, India. Here various college admissions as well as civil service posts are decided via specific examinations, the most famous of those being the UPSC exam (for India's Civil/Administrative Service, AFAIK a variant of what was instituted by the British East India Company in the 19th century, `supposedly modeling them on the imperial examinations for the Qing bureaucracy) and IIT-JEE's to enter the Indian Institutes of Technology. Unlike SAT, these are single-admission-cluster exams: you take an exam for a bunch of positions in a bunch of places together, but you can take the same exam next year without your score this year haunting you the next.
On the surface, this looks meritocratic, but candidates goodhart it: they take a year or two off after their high school or bachelor's or master's, and spend all their time just preparing to crack the exam. This seems horribly unfair to students attempting it the first time: someone with much less talent can get ahead of you simply because they dedicate a year of their life to just preparing for and cracking the exam. This is even worse when they do it for a PhD position: the exams cannot be arbitrarily hard, so they can crack it, but once they enter the program they cannot keep up with the much sharper learning curve. It is not even clear if there are legal means to prohibit it, such as an "age penalty".
Are similar considerations relevant to debates on standardized testing in the US or in any other country?
This seems fortuitously timed
https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2024/04/24/changes-in-college-admissions/#more-23786
Long discussion of many of the same issues you bring up, but in a US context.
Thank you for that very interesting link.
I think you are conflating two issues here. (1) Is competitive standardized testing an accurate way of identifying the most intellectually gifted students? (compared to the alternatives), and (2) how to mitigate the unintended consequences (in terms of red queen races and the like). On (1) I am of the view that competitive standardized tests are the most accurate tool available to humankind (although obviously, some tests are better than others). Sure, they can be gamed, but less so than any of the other sorting mechanisms that have been tried. And it seems by now to be widely acknowledged that abandoning standardized testing (in the US) did seriously compromise the ability of elite US universities to admit students who could actually succeed at those institutions. Which is why most such institutions are re-instating standardized testing. On whether the IIT-JEE is an optimal standardized test, or whether some other test (whether SAT or something else) would be better, I have no opinion.
On (2), possibly part of the problem (particularly in India) is to do with a `tournament' structure for college admissions, with a very rapid dropoff in perceived desirability once you drop down from the IIT tier. I conjecture that given such a tournament structure, you would get analogous red queen race effects no matter what selection mechanism you chose (unless the selection mechanism you chose was pure lottery, but that would destroy the IITs as elite institutions).
I went to a prestigious academically selective high school (7-12) in Australia. When I went through in the 90s, the school was 80% white, which reasonably matched the demographics of the surrounding area. Nowadays, the school is 80% Asian.
What changed? People figured out that the entrance exam (which is really just an IQ test) is easily gameable; a moderately intelligent kid who has spent ages 3-12 doing two hours of shape-rotation puzzles every weekday will have an advantage over a very intelligent kid who has never seen one before. Since only Asian parents are willing to sacrifice that much of their childrens' childhood to get a small educational leg-up, they're the only ones filling the selective school entrance exam cram schools, and the only ones (apart from a small cadre of really brilliant kids) who get in.
The result is the same as you mentioned; a student body composed of moderately intelligent and incredibly hard-working kids who tend to excel at exams but flail in the real world once there's no longer a "right answer" you can memorise.
I don’t completely agree with the concept although I do agree with the outcome - medical school in Australia is full of fairly intelligent southeast Asian and Indian kids whose parents wanted it for them badly. They all do extra curricular stuff as kids and tutoring on weekends. Most of these kids, in my experience, go on to be reasonably competent doctors. They have successfully demonstrated that they have a modicum of talent and a tremendous amount of grit. Isn’t that what we need to succeed in any field?
I guess you could argue that they don’t truly love their job, they’re only doing it because their parents made them. But who among us “truly loves their job?” If I ask my Asian colleagues this, they laugh at me - it’s a very Western concept.
You could also argue that they are learning blind repetition rather than truly independent thought, but again, the need for creative work is just not that high. Artists, even very talented, hard working ones, don’t command the same compensation as physicians, even lazy ones who just go to work to punch their time cards. This seems to me like an important economic revealed preference about which one society needs more.
This is what I had always assumed about the SAT scores in the US: basically I interpreted/misinterpreted Razib Khan as suggesting something along the lines of what you say, but haven't seen this point discussed much by those western IQ theorists who glibly claim "East Asians have higher IQ than whites". So makes sense to hear this, even if in the context of Australia rather than the US.
But what happens in India is worse: they are burning not only their childhood, but also one precious year of what could have been a productive life. For IIT's this may work out *relatively* okay -- even someone who clears it with poor grades has decent career options -- but doing this for PhD's is much worse: not only are most PhD's worthless anyway, it being especially so for those who aren't the very smartest, they often find themselves unable to even complete the program; all due to chasing the mirage of nominal prestige.
Isn't the solution to this simple: don't chase the mirage of nominal prestige?
For the test-takers. But the test-creators face a different constraint: that of keeping away such test-takers, who ruin not only their own careers but also the chances of more deserving candidates. The challenge of creating a goodhart-proof test seems formidable.
In Denmark it is your exam scores from high school that determines which studies in which universities you can attend. Some of the most sought after (International Bussiness and Politics etc) require an almost ridicoulously high score. Still I think that relatively few people are burned out by the exams, mainly because the society is so relatively egalitarian that there is not the same drive as in the US or India to get into the very best studies.
Also, to avoid giving all the places to Goodharting robots, something like 5 to 10% of places are reserved for people taking a special test, whcih is made by the university itself, testing your actual skills for that line. For example, a person with an extreme talent for architecture, but not very high scores in math or literature could still try to get into architecture at university by taking an actual architecture. I think this is probably a good idea to have, though it is rather costly so you can't hand out all the places that way.
Interesting. Being "relatively egalitarian" in outlook seems possibly also one of the reasons why whites in the US don't (or so I suspect) goodhart SAT scores as much. I am not familiar with this 5-10% idea in the US or India. I have been in situations where I need to be part of a test-designing team (not at IITs), over the last several years, and our tests have so far failed to deter goodharting robots: solving our problems needs both knowledge of theory and creativity, and theory in some of these disciplines can "grow" on you over years, and make up quite a bit for the lack of creativity.
There's nothing unfair about the system you've described. The best people have a combination of high IQ and high productivity, not just IQ alone. So a system where you need to be smart _and_ study hard for years is better at weeding out people who are smart but don't have the motivation to be productive at boring tasks for years in a row.
But if the system is designed to take people who perform well with ordinary effort, and push them into performing excellently with extraordinary effort, then this stops working. Someone who needed extraordinary effort merely to perform well is going to be unable to keep up.
This isn't hypothetical, this is one of the reasons colleges look for "well-rounded" applicants. If you've been burning your life and personality in the moloch of test-prep, you won't be able to keep up with someone who did almost as well but never had to burn anything.
(The dark secret being that the fires of moloch are always available, and it can be tricky to get through academia without having sacrificed anything important. But there are some parts that are better off burned.)
But then isn't the solution to make an even harder test? If there are people who can do the existing test well without burning anything, then that means there could theoretically be an even harder test that would force even those people to study hard for it. If your goal is to filter out the mediocre, that would be the most surefire way to accomplish that.
No, I think that's a solution to a different problem, and if applied to this problem it leads to what's called "involution", the Red Queen's race that destroys childhood.
I do think all the re-norming should be reverted, and we should have SATs and GREs (and tests at every level) that are so hard that virtually no one ever gets a perfect score, but that's to a) separate out the truly brilliant, and b) reinforce that the point of the test is to be a measure, not to be a lock that you need to turn yourself into a key for. (I've had classes like that, and they were brutal, but they also gave me a very clear idea of where I fit and what I needed to work on.)
But you still wind up with similar problems, where intense prep can help get a better score. In some ways, it might even be worse, if no one was ever able to say, "that's enough, I'm sure to get a 1600". It's... Here's a quote from Lois McMaster Bujold:
> All great human deeds both consume and transform their doers. Consider an athlete, or a scientist, or an artist, or an independent business creator. In the service of their goals they lay down time and energy and many other choices and pleasures; in return, they become most truly themselves. A false destiny may be spotted by the fact that it consumes without transforming, without giving back the enlarged self. Becoming a parent is one of these basic human transformational deeds. By this act, we change our fundamental relationship with the universe — if nothing else, we lose our place as the pinnacle and end-point of evolution, and become a mere link. The demands of motherhood especially consume the old self, and replace it with something new, often better and wiser, sometimes wearier or disillusioned, or tense and terrified, certainly more self-knowing, but never the same again.
Test prep is a false destiny, it burns your life to turn you into a key that fits a lock. Studying, learning, and practicing something real, that's a true destiny that makes you something better than you were. Does that make sense? It's hard to separate out sometimes, in basic education, but I think it becomes more clear later on.
I agree with this
Sundar Pichai got his B.S. from an IIT. So did Satya Nadella. What did they "burn" in the process? The system is designed to select for the best of the best in both IQ and ability to focus, it doesn't care about those who lack either characteristic.
Sure, there's a billion people in India so IIT can use whatever selection scheme it likes and it'll probably still get a bunch of really smart students. And if you then look at the most successful handful of graduates then yes, they're probably very successful indeed.
> What did they "burn" in the process?
Possibly nothing important, possibly something important that we can't see. Maybe they came out of it hardened and strong, like a diamond.
If we both spend a year studying for the exam, but one of us has to also work full-time job during that year and the other doesn't, it makes a big difference.
Well, same applies even if you're forced to take the exam at 18: rich kids live near their school, have A/C, zero distraction environments, etc. Poor kids have long commutes to school, no A/C, loud environments, etc.
True, but wouldn't the advantage be lessened?
Moreover there wouldn't be the massive waste of human potential that you get by taking millions of brilliant 18 year olds and forcing them to waste a year cramming some bullshit.
Brilliant 18 year olds presumably get into IIT at age 18 because they're brilliant enough to not need to study past that age to pass the exam.
This is just a question of how narrow a sliver of society we want to describe as "brilliant". Feel free to replace "brilliant" with "very slightly below brilliant but still very smart" if you like.
There’s going to be some gaming of the system. But it’s a good system. Meritocracy is good. Don’t be like Britain
Meritocracy is good if you do it by merit. But why think that this test is synonymous with merit?
It's not sufficient to argue that the test doesn't correlate perfectly with merit, you need to argue that it does so worse than some other option. It seems to me that it correlates a lot better with (intellectual) merit than the `holistic' admissions elite American universities follow. (Which is not to say that elite American universities are worse by any means - they have considerable other advantages which enable them to be more `elite' despite employing a less accurate admissions filter).
It is not a binary of either having just a particular test or having a "holistic" admission. For instance, clearly some tests are better than others, and one can advocate for tests, and still press for more meritocratic versions of those. I haven't understood why exactly SAT/GRE/... have this monopoly; have they attempted to move it away from Goodharting robots?
Also, even if the other options we can think of are poorer, it makes sense to be loud and explicit in understanding the limitations of the present approach, to just be on alert for better options that might surface in a "bottom up" manner. Not everyone who talks about the limitations of democracy is automatically calling for dictatorship.
It's not clear to me that SAT/GRE are any less vulnerable to Goodharting than IIT/JEE (I genuinely have no idea, maybe they are less vulnerable, maybe more), but I think the bigger driver is that the `plan B' options are better. US society isn't `Ivy-plus or bust' in the same sense as Indian society is `IIT or bust.' You can just go to your state flagship and still have an excellent change at the good life.
Also: can you quantify how vulnerable you believe the test is to Goodharting? Presumably a total idiot can't ace them no matter how much coaching he does, and someone sufficiently brilliant can ace them without any prep whatsoever. How much of an edge does 1 week of prep get you vs 1 year? Is it 1% in 1 week, 5% in a year? 4% in one week, 5% in a year? Even if spending a year instead of a week gets you `only' an extra 1% edge, if the stakes are sufficiently high people will do it.
Didn't Britain pioneer meritocracy? I know there was an argument against it, that once meritocrats were selected into the civil service they would agitate for more to do (which did wind up happening).
Going by 19th century fiction, cramming for the Civil Service entrance exam was a good old British tradition; Professor Moriarty, in the Sherlock Holmes stories, has a day job as an "army coach" (that is, preparing young men for exams to become officers).
I think the problem of grinds and private colleges and repeat exams to get better marks is prevalent wherever you go.
They introduced it in India well before Sherlock Holmes was written: it was introduced by the British East India company, which ruled before the British crown took over around 1857. The claim I have read is that the East India Company took the idea from China, namely the imperial exams for the Qing bureaucracy.
One of my hot takes is that genuine meritocracy took root in the west because even slightly more than a century ago it was possible to directly accomplish great things without cram-routines. Michael Faraday, one of the greatest ever, was an apprentice with a book-binder, and directly shifted to high level research with Humphrey Davy. As more and more of the low-hanging fruit was exhausted, structured education became more of a necessity, with the downside of being prone to goodharting. Outside the west, exposure to modern science and structured education entered almost simultaneously, so perhaps they had lesser amounts of goodharting-free development of overall societal consciousness. This is why I feel a bit ambivalent about the reforms of Vannevar Bush: on one hand, his view of scientific development was increasingly necessitated as low-hanging fruits were exhausted, but they also perhaps conduced to goodharting at various levels and ultimately even to today's bloated university system, corroding some of the subtle advantages that had come to abide in the occidental soul.
There are some concerns about that in the US, but the SATs are basically an IQ test so the benefit to prepping for them is relatively small. There's still some advantage to the more privileged, but probably less than any other admissions metric we've been able to find so the SAT seems to be winning out so far.
Melvin's reply to me above seems to suggest that at least in Australia, prepping for SAT-like testss makes a difference.
To give a bit more context for where I'm coming from - getting into medical school in Australia is determined by a combination of 1) your grades 2) an interview process and 3) a standardised test which is largely an IQ test.
In my case, I got in largely on the strength of my test score (I'm Caucasian) while my partner who is Southeast Asian put much more effort into grades/interview prep. Our personalities are different and we have become different types of doctors, but she is more conscientious than me and more emotionally attuned, which IMO more than makes up for less analytical intelligence (supposedly)
So sure, it makes a difference, but to what extent is "willingness to prep" a proxy for conscientiousness/grit? And isn't that attribute at least as important to success as IQ?
Perhaps in some professions it might not make a difference. But for others it does. Those who start a PhD after taking a year off for preparation tend to do pathetically in my anecdotal samples, which are the motivation for my original comment. They often have to quit the PhD program, which means that the entire plan was wasted.
As an Australian, I dispute that it makes a large difference. I think his point is that the prepping stuff is more prevalent in some cultures, and those cultures do relatively well. This is hardly surprising, assuming that you agree that factors beyond native intelligence play at least some role
Hi everyone, I’m doing a story for the podcast about advanced psychiatric directives, and am looking for people willing to talk about their directives, their experiences with how they were honored or ignored, or if you’re a clinician, any experience you have with them. I’m easy to find at gmail hiphination.
Here's a hand-drawn map of some animals of the world: https://openseadragon.github.io/openseadragonizer/?img=https://i.redd.it/232n3d1009vc1.jpeg (not mine, just thought it was neat)
That's beautiful!
(I hope it is also correct; I am not an expert.)
So the astral codex exention (the new one which re-works the comments) is showing me one single comment:
Comments have been filtered out by the Astral Codex Eleven extension. If it works correctly, this comment should soon be replaced by the real comment thread. If not, try reloading the page.
I don't know what "soon" means, but it is, for me, more than a minute or two, and reloading the page doesn't seem to change this outcome. It's easy to turn off and get the native version of the comments, but this should probably be fixed. I was enjoying the noticeably faster comment loading before this, but that requires that the comments actually load.
This happens to me when I open up the comments specifically.
For example, "https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-326" will work, but "https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-326/comments" will not.
So I recently finished reading "Catching Fire", by Richard Wrangham. A very interesting book, recommended. A major premise of the book is that cooking allowed us to get more calories out of food. And then thinking about all the obesity we now see, could part of the extra pounds we are putting on be because we are able to get more calories out of the food we are eating? All our processed foods make more calories available for us to absorb. And we enjoy the taste of processed foods because there is a signal in them that more calories will be available. I know this isn't as sexy as, "it's Lithium" or microplastics, but it seems like a hypothesis that someone could look into, (yeah sure, someone probably already has.). Did 'food science' take off in the 1960's- 70's. Maybe we can blame this on Nixon too. :^) https://biocomplexity.virginia.edu/news/lasting-influence-1969-white-house-conference-food-nutrition-and-health
Did the book make a comment on the protein leverage hypothesis? That is, that we measure satiety by protein intake, so if a food is low in protein but high in (say) carbs, we will eat more than we actually need as far as energy is concerned, whereas if we have a high-protein diet we will eat less overall because our protein threshold is met early. I believe this holds true in animal food intakes too.
Yeah, the obesity epidemic is a predictable consequence of food production becoming optimised for taste, price and durability while ignoring health value. Call it "hyper processed, hyper palatable foods" or whatever you like - the simple fact is that food companies have gotten increasingly better at exploiting our primitive reflexes and selling us cheap stuff that tastes good and is awful. The way out of it is really straightforward, too - ignore all that crap and eat real food optimised for health. Nestle, Kraft and McDonalds don't control your dinner plate.
Yeah all that may be true. But the idea is that we are able to get more calories from the same 'amount' of food.
Perhaps, but we’re also eating more cause that’s what the food is designed for
Yeah, it's probably lots of things.
Without comment on the specific hypothesis here, I've thought for a long time that the "calories-in-calories-out" people have flagrantly failed to measure excrement.
Unless you try to burn your shit in a calorimeter and it won't catch fire, you're excreting calories. Two people can eat exactly the same things, but unless their shit is collected and analyzed, we won't know what their body is actually getting from it.
This comes from sharing bathrooms with people of various body sizes, and noticing over time (via occasional mistakes) that their shit looks and smells nothing like mine.
It strikes me that a rationalist group house would be a great place to test this. Lots of people who can listen impassively to normatively-repulsive ideas, and put aside some irrational embarrassment for the greater good of science.
According the Wrangham in the book there are a bunch of calories taken up by bacteria in the large intestine that never make it into our bodies. So that measuring calories in our shit doesn't tell the whole story.
If the bacteria in your gut are in steady state and aren't on average gaining mass, then I don't think you can be continuously storing more calories within the bacteria in your gut. The bacteria can burn calories, but that would produce heat and would show up if you put the person in a calorimeter. You should be able to get a good measurements for research if you can get tests subjects willing to stay in a calorimeter for an extended duration and also measure calories in their excretions.
Huh, I hadn't thought of that. Still, they've got to do something with the fuel they eat - either making by-products, some of which may be excreted, or reproducing and dying and excreting the remains of the dead. I suppose it's possible that all the products of their life cycle get re-absorbed, but my sense of smell suggests that *something* gets excreted.
Thanks for the reminder to keep an open mind, and not assume a simplified model. Which is what I was trying to do in the first place, but clearly not well enough. :-)
I think this is due to people having different gut microbiomes. Nothing to do with calorie level - that doesn't affect smell. What you've noticed is that obese people tend to have unhealthy gut microbiomes (low Bifidobacteria?)
Yeah, gut microbiome tends to be my go-to explanation, these days.
I wish there were more experiments with fecal transplants, too.
That's not the only problem with CICO. Both inputs and outputs can only be estimated at best. You can tell what you eat, but not how much energy your body absorbs from it, because that depends on idiosyncratic biology. And you certainly can't tell how much energy your body is using - you can measure exercise and guess, but you're probably not measuring air temperature, let alone fidgeting or energy spent on internal processes, etc.
You might as well argue that obesity is just a matter of "atoms in, atoms out". Just like "calories in, calories out", it's trivially true and yet utterly useless for practical purposes.
And yet it's not useless, it's a perfectly good way to think about things for actual practical purposes. If you want to lose weight you figure out how many calories you're consuming and then reduce it. And then optionally, you figure out how many calories you're burning and increase it. You don't need especially accurate estimates, since you're probably aiming for a deficit of 25 to 30%, which is usually more than enough to make up for the error bars due to all the effects you mentioned. And if it's not, you just reduce your calorie consumption again.
But we could start, at least! Have some people all eat the same thing at the same time, and record what happens to it. Or forget the quantity, just measure what goes in and out, and see how it stacks up across people.
That'd at least give us the data to ask the next round of questions. Right now, we don't even know what to focus on.
This makes sense.
On the other hand, if undigested calories are going to explain the difference between thin and fat people, then we'd need to be talking a difference of at least hundreds of calories per day. And the amount of poop produced by a human is only 100-200 grams. So if skinny people are pooping out their calories then their turds would need to be pretty calorie-dense, like two calories per gram, which is comparable to, say, ice cream.
(Also, calories extractable by burning and calories extractable by the human digestive system are different; e.g. very few animals can digest wood.)
Yeah. Non-dietary fiber is my friend. ;-) There's definitely some amount of the body adapting, too. I wish this were studied more!
There was a tradition to build outhoses over pigs' premises. The pigs would get fat cheaply by eating human feces, so there must have been nutritional value in that shit.
... OK, in a place like that, I'd go no-pork. "Pulp Fiction" got it wrong - it's not *its own* feces that need to be disregarded. :-(
Wait until you learn what fertilizer is made out of.
Not human feces, I hope.
It's parasites and diseases that I'm worried about, here.
Actually if we're talking modern fertilizers they're mostly produced using natural gas or from mining.
Oh, I really didn’t need to know that. ;)
Many things have changed, but it's not what you think. The mechanisms are subtle, and it sounds as though you may be primed to dismiss anything that might be 'sexy'.
Oh no. I liked the sexy ideas. If there were one or two things causing the problem that would be easier to fix.
There are tolerably few factors, but these are so widely distributed throughout the food supply as to cause despair.
There’s some evidence that we eat too many sugars - that’s it is high sugar levels at any one time that causes fat retention or conversion.
The same calories over the same amount of time without these blood sugar spikes would - this theory goes - not cause the same amount of fat retention.
Having seen the keto diet work extraordinary well on a friend of mine, this might be true and it might explain why some people are more susceptible than others - if bodies react differently to blood sugar levels, and/or blood sugar levels spike more readily for some.
Cheap carbs could be a culprit here. White bread etc.
I've always eaten tons of sugar and haven't gotten fat.
I suspect it's partly this, plus gut flora that self-select for sugars.
But I also think think there's something to do with portion size and grazing vs. fixed meals.
One time after a 3-day fast, I tried eating a large meal, and it literally wouldn't fit. I had to stop about 2/3rds through, and for hours afterward I felt a bizarre, almost-gagging feeling that I can only describe as my stomach backing up into my esophagus. I think my stomach literally shrinks and expands, based on what I've eaten in the previous few days.
Not saying that this is what keeps people there, but I do think it's a gateway.
I agree with the recommendation - it's an extremely interesting argument, and quite persuasive.
One corollary is that, evolutionarily speaking and given how we've changed our environment, human bodies today have surplus design space which could allow even smaller guts, repurposing that energy to other functions - perhaps even more more brainpower. Let the mutations begin!
I feel like this is more or less the default public opinion of the obesity problem, which basically boils down to “we eat too many calories”
Yeah I guess I'm trying to answer, why we do that. And this idea is that we can get more calories out of a meal than we did in the past... but we haven't developed the signals to tell us to eat less at that meal. So it's not just the calories in the food, but how easy we can get them out and into our bodies.
I mean, it seems inevitable that it's some combination of "we eat and digest too many calories" and "we don't burn enough calories." The interesting question is what causes us to keep eating/digesting more calories than we burn? That could be availability of food everywhere, processed foods making us hungry again faster, cultural stuff, gut bacteria, some other environmental thing, etc. It could be sedentary lifestyles, lack of natural light, all sorts of stuff.
OK so my stupid idea is that we get more out of the food. So take cooking. If you eat raw carrots you need (say) 10 to met your needs, but with cooking you get more calories out of each carrot and now need only 5. And if you eat 10 like you did in the past... well you get fat. I'm saying the same could be happening with more processed food.
The part where something seems inevitable is often where the magic happens. So too, here.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to devise an idea for a story set somewhere one wouldn't expect such a story. For example: a bitter artistic dispute in a mine, a fistfight in a Wall Street boardroom, or a love affair in a WWII bomber.
We've already done the sitcom set in Literal Hell; it's going to be hard to trump that.
Let's go with a respectful, intellectually honest discussion between peers on a contentious topic. On Twitter.
Poirot-style murder mystery in the middle of the Mongol Horde.
Alternately, a competitive polo tournament in the middle of the Mongol Horde.
"Poirot-style murder mystery in the middle of the Mongol Horde."
Murder on the Orient Express, eh?
Culinary adventures in the slums of Mumbai.
I think just about any Wes Anderson movie would qualify. Moonrise Kingdom was off the wall yet entirely engaging.
My Dinner With Andre, but in the craft service line of a porn shoot.
I love this. Can you give us a snatch of dialogue?
Adaptation of Fiddler on the Roof in an artist commune in a trendy Brooklyn neighborhood (in the end instead of the Tsar kicking them out, something happens to make them lose their rent-controlled apartments and they move somewhere with cheaper housing).
Also, this one isn't my idea, but Theft of Fire is a bottle episode set in in a space-age heist novel.
Technically Rent is an adaptation of La Bohème, but your description of Fiddler sounds similar.
Murder mystery investigated by the elderly residents in a nursing home.
Also "Bubba Ho-Tep". Which, despite all the comedy, I actually found to be a truly horrifying movie.
Poker Face, season 1, episode 5.
Cooking show set on factory farm.
Zombie apocalypse during a rehearsal for The Producers.
Bedroom Blitz
Bar Traders
Calories on Canvas: Forty-Six Days Trapped In An Art Gallery
Fine, I cheated.
The Bay Area House Party That Changed The World
A quirky romcom set in an insane asylum.
A slapstick comedy set in a North Korean gulag.
A Shakespearian tragedy set in a daycare centre.
Your first one is Park Chan-wook's "I'm a Cyborg But That's OK".
Substitute Nazi death camp for North Korean gulag, and you’ve got “Life Is Beautiful.”
A locked room murder mystery in the middle of a crowded police station. An inspiring team work underdog come back story involving a group of elite soldiers on an ethically questionable mission. An animal house style hazing of new comers plus wild party life story about a group of incoming congressional representatives.
That last one was done in "Shadow in the Cloud".
Best place to look for algo people to hear out a complex biology problem. I'm looking to chat with someone about how to go about ML approaches for a unique* computational biology problem I have. It can be short - I have the background to do most of my own reading but need for pointers where to go read. Prefer by zoom/in person if you're in Boston than text. Hmu here or MIT edu email, reuvenf
*Probably not, but I haven't seen off-the-shelf solutions for it
Research seems to agree that prevalence of myopia in children has increased. There also seems to be an agreement that not spending enough time outdoors increases myopia risk.
Sorry for the vagueness, correct me if I'm wrong.
Further there seem to be two theories(?) as to the cause. First is what I've dubbed "near work". Focusing your eyes near due to indoors instead of far in outdoors. Then there is the amount of light, which is significantly less indoors. The claim is that the eyes of children grow depthwise, and for this growth to stop at an optimal time, enough visible spectrum light is needed (keyword: emmetropization).
I've seen it claimed that the near work theory is older and amount of light is newer but to be honest I have no idea myself.
Separately, there are also recommendations for children to wear sunglasses since their eyes are more vulnerable to UV light.
Here's my question that keeps bothering me: by my layman logic wouldn't this mean children should wear clear UV protective sunglasses?
I've only seen answers along the lines of "sunglasses are fine, the light level outdoors still crosses the threshold of reducing myopia risk". But is there any reason not to use clear UV glasses?
This Chinese study - where myopia increase as years of study increase - would indicate that its environmental for sure.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1309613/china-myopia-prevalence-among-young-people-by-education-level/
Yeah, I've heard the "short focus" theory and the "sunlight" theory, and I wish we could do some experiments. Maybe tell some kids that they can only read books or look at screens if they're outside during the day. Or keep some kids indoors but only allow reading and screens if they're at least 20 feet away.
Wired had a good story on this, Taiwan has basically been doing an country wide experiment on schoolchildren with good results: trying to get kids outside more hours of the day, doing myopia screenings on preschoolers to see if they're developing myopia, and prescribing them atropine (which makes your pupil dilate) if they are.
https://www.wired.com/story/taiwan-epicenter-of-world-myopia-epidemic/
Cool, thanks!
Maybe there is some selection effect over the last couple of hundred years or so in military medical checks for young recruits, with the short-sighted ones being weeded out as unfit for combat duty, so non-myopic recruits are more likely to be signed up and die in combat before having offspring.
If so then one would expect a concomitant increase in flat feet among children, as well as myopia.
Isn’t myopia increasing at a faster rate than you would expect, even if every single military death was from the top end of the eyesight distribution? Very few generations have even 10% of the population die in military service.
Can somebody explain the precise meaning and origin of "based" in current CW paralance?
So I am getting a consensus that it's an opinion, maybe not popular, but the speaker is tired of going with the conventional wisdom. A very DNGAF moment. As the Irish say, "...and you can take that, any way you like."
Based, when originally used by right-wingers, means doing or saying something in line with anti-liberal ideology, especially something anti-feminist, anti-jewish or something anti-"anti-racist". It is importantly not something just 'conservative' - it has to be something genuinely controversial. So for example, saying that women shouldn't be able to vote is based.
Then, it became used in a more joking way to describe more outlandish or absurd things, like a news story of a white florida man slapping a black child in a walmart for being too noisy is "based".
Then it permeated into the mainstream, and essentially means cool, in the sense of the opposite of 'cringe'. But this is far removed from the original CW meaning.
Consider the phrase "based and redpilled".
It's the opposite of "cringe".
I always figured it came from "fact-based," and meant something like "deeply true." If a claim is "based," it isn't just true, it is true and important and rooted in fundamental facts about how things are and probably always will be.
At least that's what I've inferred from context.
No.
It actually derives from Soundcloud rapper Lil' B, who was insulted as "based" as a child, with the term deriving from "freebasing" cocaine. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/people/lil-b-the-based-god-brandon-mccartney
This is the correct answer, but it's interesting to see how many people have concocted alternative etymologies in their heads.
The thing missing from the knowyourmeme article is how exactly it turned from a rap thing into a right wing thing; if I recall correctly then it's via the "Thank You Based God" meme... at some point in 2016 Trump memers started applying it to Trump himself, and from this point "based" slowly became an adjective for anything that Trump supporters enjoyed.
Of course the true history of the 2016 election can never be written, because /r/the_donald has been deleted, an act of historical vandalism comparable to throwing out all copies of the Federalist Papers.
Gone isn't always gone forever. Companies make backups of their data all the time. It's entirely possible that if scholars asked for it once Trump is out of public life, Reddit could and would recreate a copy for them.
Perhaps someone should undertake an ambitious research project, call for screen shots, etc. And write the Definitive Histiry. Not it though
I'm surprised noone archived it. I thought that people had archived all of early Reddit.
I'm not sure. I don't see it enough in the wild to really get it.
My preferred definition is something like: this person has derived their philosophy of life from the ground up, and they are thus not only immune to being swayed by fallacious-but-superficially-pleasing arguments, but also are able to rapidly compose pithy rebuttals that strike at the core of said fallacies.
I don't think that's what is actually meant, but it feels like what it *should* mean :-)
> I don't see it enough in the wild to really get it.
That's wild.
Antonym of "debased".
See etymology 2 at https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/based . "Freebase cocaine" -> "cool".
More specifically I think it's "Freebase cocaine" -> "bizarre/stupid behavior" -> "being yourself even if people judge you for it" -> "cool".
I think the "ideal "definition is something like "a statement that is true to the nature of the speaker, and unbothered by social norms and consequences". It's often used as "agrees with me" (as stated in another comment), or just "not woke".
If you extend "not woke" to "not politically correct" (accounting for the fact that political correctness is nowadays mostly associated with "wokeness"), then you can find a parallel between the third and first definition.
Based on good principles.
"This statement is based." = "This statement is correct, and reflects well on the person saying it." Both left and right praise their own side as "based".
In CW usage it was originally right wing and today is still almost exclusively right wing.
And what you said STILL isn't correct even when a right-winger is saying it to another right-winger. It's not enough for something to be correct - it ideally has to be something that cuts against sacred liberal beliefs. Someone might think the statement "the government should lower income taxes" is correct, but it's definitely not based. Based is more like "women shouldn't be allowed to vote" or "Trayvon Martin had it coming".
It's been very diluted over the years, but the platonic based thing HAS to be right-wing and edgy.
I thought it meant „this is a risky use of language, but correct“. At least on the right coded version.
I think that, to a right-winger, there's a great deal of overlap between my definition and yours.
Richard Feynman, in an interview recorded in 1981 with BBC Horizon, says about the social sciences:
"Social science is an example of a science which is not a science; they don’t do [things] scientifically, they follow the forms-or you gather data, you do so-and-so and so forth but they don’t get any laws, they haven’t found out anything. They haven’t got anywhere yet - maybe some day they will, but it’s not very well developed, but what happens is on an even more mundane level. We get experts on everything that sound like they’re sort of scientific experts. They’re not scientific, they sit at a typewriter and they make up something like, oh, food grown with, er, fertilizer that’s organic is better for you than food grown with fertilizer that’s inorganic-may be true, may not be true, but it hasn’t been demonstrated one way or the other. But they’ll sit there on the typewriter and make up all this stuff as if it’s science and then become an expert on foods, organic foods and so on. There’s all kinds of myths and pseudoscience all over the place. I may be quite wrong, maybe they do know all these things, but I don’t think I’m wrong. You see, I have the advantage of having found out how hard it is to get to really know something, how careful you have to be about checking the experiments, how easy it is to make mistakes and fool yourself. I know what it means to know something, and therefore I see how they get their information and I can’t believe that they know it, they haven’t done the work necessary, haven’t done the checks necessary, haven’t done the care necessary"
https://youtu.be/tWr39Q9vBgo?si=VNNdNW9lQU6RFkB6
In the years since, have there been developments in psychology (say) or other social sciences that have "generated reliable knowledge that we can hold on to".
I note all the folk who like to loudly repeatedly proclaim that links between IQ, race and positive life outcomes are some of the best supported results in science are staying very quiet.
No. I'm sure you're heard of the replication crisis.
Does history count as social science? In that case Peter Turchin's stuff might be worth a look, not that I understand any of it.
Economics, the "dismal science", for its part has improved reproducibility in research substantially since the aftermath of the 1st wave of neo-liberalism and it being perpetually derided by the left.
Social Sciences are all part philosophy, and part science. Despite issues with inconsistent rigor, I don't think it's fair to frame any as being devoid of science, and besides, the same criticisms can be leveled at nutrition science and all others relying on statistics that don't belong to social science (and even the hard sciences, really... it's a salient issue that is shaking trust in all of Science). Politicization exacerbates those problems.
At the end of the day, you can approach real-world data and statistics in a scientific manner, or not. If Big Data was useless or imaginary it wouldn't be strongly leveraged by entire industries. The detractors know and agree with this, but lean on motte-and-bailey arguments framing all of a SC (usually, Economics) as pure philosophy. Mind you, not altogether surprising that worldviews that don't rely on supportive data and usually undermined by a field of study will deride that field of study.
Econ is an interesting case. You could say it has a few laws, like "demand slopes downward." Half of the discipline derives new theories from that law, arguably overextending it. The other half tries to come up with new theories to displace it that better account for the special conditions where it does not hold, often failing to replicate. It still holds in the general case and you go out of business selling hamburgers for a million dollars each. Its imprecision on local scales is a continual irritant though.
"Its imprecision on local scales is a continual irritant though."
That's true of physics too. Try to do hydrodynamics fast enough to predict the whorls of a turbulent flow as it happens, and you'll soon curse whoever claimed physics was a rigorous science with high predictive power.
> Economics, the "dismal science", for its part has improved reproducibility in research substantially since the aftermath of the 1st wave of neo-liberalism and it being perpetually derided by the left.
Has it? economics is probably the better of the social sciences, but it’s still nothing close to a science.
My dad's favorite economics joke:
Students: We already know how to lie with statistics, but how do you lie with economics?
Econ prof: The difference between statistics and economics is that for statistics, you need data.
Social science is playing the science game on hard mode.
Yeah, at least electrons don't get mad at you and deliberately try to ruin the experiment.
Or it's like painting using your forehead as a brush and then claiming that the results are just as good as Michaelangelo's.
See also Feynman lecture "Cargo Cult Science": https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm
I would argue that with the rise of the term "replication crysis", it has become common knowledge that psychology (and even medicine) and anything to the soft side of it have a problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
I think human beings are just messy and complicated, even more so than the strong interaction. For a variety of ethical and practical reasons, the usual approach to start out with billions of identical humans, ~~accelerate them to near the speed of light~~ and have them interact with each other so that you get statistically robust results does not work.
Academic incentive landscapes do not help here, of course. Being paranoid about getting your results right, spending time to publish studies which confirm the null hypothesis even if that is a very unsexy result (and might anger your colleagues whose results you did not reproduce) and being really restrained about the interpretation of your results ("Implicit association measures something" vs "it is racism!") are all behaviors which seem negatively correlated with getting tenure.
He is right, of course, but he does not make allowance for the enormously more complex models that social science has to deal with.
Yeah this is why I'm a little more charitable towards the social sciences than a lot of people here seem to be. There's certainly a lot of problems with it and many of those problems are, in fact, due to laziness/bad incentives/etc., but fundamentally the study of human beings and human behavior is just incredibly complicated, so I think a greater degree of error and less robust findings in such fields are basically inevitable.
Back to the main question, a couple of examples I can think of off the top of my head are universal grammar (linguistics) and supply and demand (economics); psychology is harder but I think things like cognitive developmental theory and Pavlovian conditioning feel pretty robust.
Edit: oh I missed the part of the question that specified "in the years since"; in that case I'm not sure.
You are giving universal grammar as an example of something that is?
I would be way more charitable to the social sciences if its practitioners showed more humility and/or had less influence.
Yeah, I think these critiques of the social sciences, if you boil them down, amount to "these things are really difficult to study and they haven't made much progress and therefore they aren't science". I personally don't agree with, nor do I think many other people would, that science should be restricted only to those things that are easy to study.
Humans and the systems they inhabit are some of the most complex, difficult things to study in the universe. Even if we _didn't_ have ethical constraints on methodology, making real progress would be a herculean task. This doesn't mean that studying them isn't science, it just means that we always need to be careful in trusting anything we think we understand about these systems.
> that science should be restricted only to those things that are easy to study.
I don’t think physics is that easy though.
> This doesn't mean that studying them isn't science,
It does if they don’t follow the scientific method. Maybe social philosophy would be a better name.
Relative to studying humans and the systems they inhabit, it's a cakewalk. And I don't actually believe that the social sciences are, in a systematic way, failing to follow the scientific method. (edit2, I'm excluding cases of fraud etc., which are admittedly rampant, but I think that's a consequence of how hard it is to get real results without fraud. The honest brokers in social science are, for the most part, following the scientific method and failing to get good results because of how difficult and complex the subject is + the moral restraints on methodology)
-edit- to be clear, _obtaining the data_ in modern physics is much harder, requiring massive, high tech devices like super colliders. The data, once obtained, is _orders of magnitude_ simpler and easier to understand than the complex, self referential, ever changing data of the human systems. Physics is a stable target where the thing you are trying to understand isn't changing. Social sciences are not.
> Relative to studying humans and the systems they inhabit, it's a cakewalk.
Not right now. What you are saying is that if this system were as scientific as physics it would be more difficult, but it doesn’t reach that level. So it isn’t.
> And I don't actually believe that the social sciences are, in a systematic way, failing to follow the scientific method
If they were following the scientific method they would look entirely different.
Feynman mentions the cargo cult for a reason. The believers were trying a sort of science - building what they thought was what brought in the cargo.
From wiki.
“ Their destination is a clearing in the forest that looks like a landing strip. But the only airplane present is a full-size wooden replica of a light aircraft. On one side of the strip lies a control tower made of bamboo. On the other sits a satellite dish built of mud and straw. Undeterred by the apparent lack of any actual aviation technology, some of the men light torches and place them alongside the runway. Others use flags to wave landing signals. Everyone raises their gaze to the sky in anticipation.
They wait. But the planes never come.”
That’s a group trying their best, with their understanding of what was going on. Its a lot a lot more rational than just praying.
Further, they’ve seen actual science and they are trying to replicate it, it’s just that they have no understanding of how planes fly, how satellites work, or really what landing strips are for.
If they had any practical science on that island, maybe some simple astronomical understanding of the calendar, like the sun and moon cycles as many even Stone Age societies did, the cargo cultists could say to the practical “scientists“ that what the cargo cult was doing was far more advanced than looking at the sky and calculating the next solstice.
Except it isn’t because they didn’t know what was going on at all.
What do you think of the research which cautions against eating certain foods in the same meal, due to a canceling out of nutritional benefit? A few examples are listed here: https://www.reddit.com/r/nutrition/comments/1782lxj/what_food_combinations_not_to_combine_such_as/
Do you make the effort to avoid any of these combinations, like cheese and spinach, or berries and bananas?
The Gracie family of Jiu Jitsu fame have an entire diet built around the concept of "conflicting" foods.
https://graciebarra.com/eating-well-2/gracie-diet/
When I was pregnant and anemic, I spaced out calcium and iron supplements as best I could, and in theory at least tried to separate meat and dairy.
I remember arguing that this was nonsense in the Eighties, and I still think the same. (I equally think that there is no need to balance the consumption of different nutrients in the same meal - or in the same day.)
I would see it as another good argument for eating a good variety of different foods, rather than for trying to avoid any specific combination. Eating berries with bananas won't kill you, at worst it will neutralise some small part of the nutritional benefit of the berries; which is fine as long as I eat berries *without* bananas at some point too. Or as long as I eat one of the many other foods that contains flavanols.
Keeping up with, and evaluating, a zillion different nutritional studies to figure out possibly-bogus rules like "don't combine berries with bananas" sounds like a waste of time. And besides, berries with bananas taste great.
Sure but not for nutritional reasons. I've had ongoing chronic stomach issues all over the place and sometimes it's really hard to pin down trigger foods. I've come to the conclusion that some foods when eaten separately, cause misery when eaten together. I can have caffeinated coffee OR a pastry but not both. I can't eat chicken noodle soup even though any individual ingredient in the soup doesn't give me problems. I think it's a gluten thing but it's only activated sometimes.
My dad had this issue with peanut butter and bananas--either one separately was fine, but together they gave him indigestion.
Food combining was all the rage some two decades ago. Then it faded away, like all "one weird trick" fixes do. There's no "there" there.
Specific antagonistic reactions are of course possible (there are supposedly proven antagonistic reaction between certain foods with certain drugs), but I really doubt that any of the ones claimed have been proven (null hypothesis of no negative interaction rejected).
Thought experiment that I think I heard on a podcast but can't source to properly credit:
You're out walking your beloved pet.
(Not generic second-person "you," but the actual *you,* the "individual-you-reading-this-you", and not a hypothetical beloved pet, but your *actual* pet, the one that's living with you right now. If you don't currently have a living pet, imagine your passed beloved pet.)
A limousine with blacked-out windows pulls up beside you. A nondescript man in a nondescript suit climbs out of the front seat with an envelope.
"Hello," he says. "My employer, who will remain anonymous, would like to purchase your beloved pet. This envelope contains a legally-binding sales transfer. Upon signing it, $1,000,000 will instantly be deposited into an account of your choosing."
"This sounds like a scam," you probably say.
"I assure you, it is not, and here is my proof." The nondescript man shows you whatever it is that would convince *you,* the real person reading this, that this is indeed a legitimate offer from an unknowable source. (1)
"Uh, why does your employer want my beloved pet?" You probably ask.
"My employer will not share that information."
"But what is your employer going to do with my beloved pet?" You probably try to insist.
"My employer will not share that information. My employer simply wants your pet and is willing to pay for it. You have two minutes to make a decision and hand me the leash/carrier/lead rope/tank."
You stare down at your beloved pet.
What do you - seriously, *you,* the person reading this, with your particular finances and goals and obligations - do?
Follow ups:
If no to $1,000,000, what about $10,000,000? $100,000,000? $2,000,000,000? More?
If yes to $1,000,000, what about $500,000? $50,000? $10,000?
What if it's not your own pet, but the pet of a loved one (spouse, family member, best friend, etc) who is currently in your care?
What if it's not your pet, or a loved one's pet, but a stranger's loose pet you just caught, wearing pet identification tags?
_____
(1) In other words, please just accept the conditions of the hypothetical and refrain from attempting to Kobayashi Maru it.
I wouldn't even sell *the lint in my pocket* under those conditions. It's near guaranteed to be a trap or scam of some sort, and nothing they say could convince me otherwise. Pre-comitting to avoid making high stakes decisions on the spot is one of the best defences you can have against scams.
Yes, of course, in real-real life, maximal skepticism and a refusal to engage would be the correct strategy. That would of course be my response, too.
But I'm going to argue that by criticizing the plausibility of the hypothetical, you are Kobayashi Maru-ing your way out of engaging with it. "The hypothetical is so implausible the only rational option if it were real would be to not engage with it at all!"
Well, yeah, sure.
Of course.
Now what?
Obviously no one is required to engage this hypothetical, but there was a reason I tried to preemptively cut off objections to the plausibility of the hypothetical's details.
The problem is that any question like this is inherently informed by people's assumptions about the world posited in the question. So if you make the assumptions utterly implausible, you're not going to get a meaningful response. You'll just get a battle between which parts of the premise people ignore when they try to extrapolate their intuition. (This tends to be a general problem with trolleyology as well.)
It's a bit like asking, "what would you do if Bhutan invaded the United States?" In order for that to happen, the world would have to be so different than the present day that there's nothing meaningful that could be said about it. You'd just have people guessing random althist fanfics and then getting mad when the fanfic in their head doesn't match the fanfic in someone else's head.
Or to put it in rationalist terms, conditioning on infinitesimal probabilities does weird things.
A while ago I decided to stop entertaining these sorts of hypotheticals. If you want to put the money on the table then I'll make a decision.
If I don't take some arbitrarily large money I'm a fool, if I take the money I'm a heartless jerk. Making the decision in the hypothetical case gives me some of the shame without any of the benefit.
If I'm going to wear the shame of being the sort of person who'll sell his beloved pet for a million dollars, then I want more than zero dollars in exchange.
I think the hypothetical has value in that it provides an opportunity to assess (and perhaps adjust) one's moral assumptions, and to discuss it with people.
If you don't find an intrinsic value in that, it's fine!
I've never been able to handle a pet, so automatic 'yes' to selling my pet under all circumstances. You want to pay $1,000,000 for an unwatered Chia pet, it's all yours.
Family member's pets depend on the family members. They're all extremely animal-loving, but half the family is richer than the other half by multiple orders of magnitude. And they've also all lost about a dozen pets apiece in my lifetime. The poor side, I would sell their pets for $10,000 apiece every time. The rich ones, depends on the pet. Their current beloved pet is 15 and was on the verge of death last year (as in they thought they'd have to put it down last year). I'd sell that one, I wouldn't sell a theoretical new pet, they don't need the money.
Can't sell a stranger's pet. I don't care how much money the state paid the family with the dog the cops shot, it's not a fair trade.
Of course, this guy's probably not actually after the pet itself, they're trying to pull my DNA from its fur and biologically grow a new puppet me to take over my life. So first purchase with the money is a new shotgun with which to fight my inevitable evil clone.
This envelope obviously consigns me to eternal unpleasant servitude in Hell, Faerie, or Santa's Workshop. But supposing I don't believe in such things? The fact that this is happening at all just shifted my priors.
I would sell in a heartbeat, even if I knew they were going to throw my cat in a woodchipper. As "beloved" as my cat is, I love my wife and children a heckuva lot more and they could use the cash.
Meanwhile: https://imgur.com/gallery/2ODpSOm
Of course, the deal's off if they look like Cruella de Vil.
Me, right now, I think I'd go for it. Me of a few decades ago, I'd hold out more. There's a curve based on the amount of money, and the projected lifespan of my pet. (And how easy the pet is to live with, frankly - I can can care for them while simultaneously recognizing that the relationship is difficult and we might be better off in separate households.)
Forgetting utilitarian concerns about people on the other side of the planet, I know and love humans whose lives could be improved with strings-free $1M, even after taxes. (I wouldn't tell those people about trading my pet, of course - that black mark stays on my own soul.)
$1M, either with taxes or without, seems like the rough ballpark for a hard choice. $100K is too little, and $10M seems like a much easier choice.
For someone else in my care, I'd hesitate more. The money would go to them, somehow, and I'd lie about the pet, but I think my decision would also involve my estimate of their need. (If they were, say, delaying having children due to financial worries, that would count.)
For a stranger... That's a tough one. Probably not. There's the temptation to just keep the money, of course. But with an ID tag, I could probably locate the owner, and then anonymously drop off a bag containing cash and a note saying "Don't worry about Fido, he found a new home. Sorry." But ultimately, I don't think that's my decision to make for them.
Does it not bother you that the nondescript man refuses to say what his employer intends to do with, or to, your pet? And that didn't offer to prove to your satisfaction, the way he did with the legitimacy of the check, that your pet will be well cared for and not abused or killed?
"Bother" isn't quite the right word, but yes. I assume its fate won't be good.
I'm at a place in life where I'm re-calibrating my "meaning of life" to be the next generation, and the generation after that, etc., without the benefit of having children myself. I'm expendable. This isn't for me, this is for my nieces and nephews, and my first cousins once removed, and for any others that come along, and for their children and grandchildren.
In that case, I've got bad news for you about how much money a million dollars really is these days.
If it's ten million then I can see your point, although I guess it's kind of a blessing that poor fluffy can't understand that she is going to have to be tortured for the benefit of some future, no doubt ungrateful, relatives of yours.
Depends on the situation. $1M would be enough to fix a lot of real work-life balance problems, and provide some opportunities that aren't available right now. Paying for private schools and college would be nice, but that falls under the $10M category. For potential future generations, they can have a trickle-down effect; I'm not envisioning trust funds or anything like that.
Oh don't get me wrong, a million before-tax dollars would change my life in entirely positive ways. But it is not enough to meaningfully improve the lives of any of my relatives unless I gave it all away.
FWIW I agree with the other commenter somewhere in the thread, in that I would very much like to be given a million dollars but I would really really have to think about whether I would want to be given a billion. Given a ridiculously short time to make the decision, as in this thought experiment, I would probably default to no, even if it were a no-strings gift rather than the sale of a beloved pet.
Actually, no, I don't think I could go through with the lying part, so scratch the bit about someone in my care. Hm, it took 23 minutes to get there, that's not great.
No because virtue ethics means not selling my pet off and not having to think about tradeoffs either.
<quote>(1) In other words, please just accept the conditions of the hypothetical and refrain from attempting to Kobayashi Maru it.</quote>
Good luck!
So far most people have engaged with the conditions of the hypothetical in good faith! Nobody has been like, "yes, I give my let over for a billion dollars, but then I hire SEAL Team 6 to find this guy and rescue my pet!"
Nor have people been like, "what about the taxes?"
I was interpreting it more as an ethical trolley problem like question to get the value of a pet, so assumed for example that letting the motives of the buyer influence the value of the pet were not what you were looking for.
Something more along the lines of, rich relative just left you an inheritance that after tax is $X. Your pet needs urgent life saving surgery that costs $X. For what values of $X do you get the surgery.
The problem is that for many people, the question of whether they would sell a pet and how much for cannot be separated from the questions of who is buying it, why, and what is likely to happen to it afterwards, and for some others who may be more flexible, the requirement to ignore those other concerns nevertheless increases the price.
If businesses selling goods and services regularly price discriminate, and refuse to sell you their goods and services if they don't think they know enough about you to accurately price the transaction, I'd say it's very reasonable to do at least that much for an actual living animal, never mind one you care about.
Meanwhile, consider: where I live, pet shops won't sell me fish without first having me bring some of my aquarium water to them for testing. In many countries it is illegal to own just one guinea pig. Etc etc
"A million! You are most kind, dear sir. Uh, may I also interest your employer in this other pet that I have? And please don't hesitate to get in touch should your employer require anything else in the future."
This is so out of distribution of what normally happens that we might not have good intuitions of the trade offs involved
Maybe your cat has just swallowed a whole load of plutonium that the government is in the process of recovering. Your cat is a gonner. You either get a million dollars for your silence, or you die of radiation induced cancer from cuddling your cat.
No joke, I had a friend who had a cat who got radiation treatment, and could only allow a few minutes of lap-time a day.
Also, isn't the cat-face logo here creepy?
https://theanimalhospitalcarrboro.com/radcats/
Anything that far out of the ordinary exceeds my ability to evaluate its true implications. Hence I could not be sure of anything the person is claiming. Hard pass.
He only *claimed* one thing--that the offer is legitimate and the check won't bounce. And he didn't just claim it, he proved it to your satisfaction. Beyond that, he made no claims and indeed refused to answer your questions.
No, and the "no" gets stronger the larger the number of dollars gets. If someone's willing to pay me a million dollars for a dog, something very weird is going on and I don't want to be involved in the follow-on effects.
This feels more like a psych test than a thought experiment. Most comments seem to be picking up something of Nassim Taleb's 'fair coin' problem and refusing to take it seriously. That's one of the strength's of Newcomb's problem. Is this trying to isolate for human suspicions about human motivations? or about attachment to pets, purely?
I gotta level with you, I just heard the hypothetical on a podcast like 10 years ago and it really stuck with me. The more seriously I contemplated it, the more I tried to imagine the branching consequences on my actual life, the more compelling it felt. Which mystery and regret would I rather live with?
I've occasionally introduced it in group conversations, and, just like in this thread, it can sometimes deliver some really interesting insight into people's values, skepticism, priorities, etc. Or at least, insight into what they currently *think* their values/skepticism/priorities would be.
That's it. I'm not trying to do any secret research or anything like that.
I would definitely sell the dog for $100k or more. The logic is as follows:
1. By default, I presume its a scam or some sort of a hidden camera ploy. But you say its not, so lets move on.
2. If someone has $100k to drop on a dog, they're almost definitely quite rich. If they're rich, they likely value their comfortable life and don't want to go to prison. So they're highly unlikely to be a dog torturer.
3. Since they're doing the personal operation via a personal assistant and a driver, there's now at least 2 witnesses to the transaction. So if this rich person is a dog torturer, they're putting themselves up to a lot of risk for the sake of a very small reward, since it's a lot easier to just find strays on the street instead.
4. Following this logic, I'd be convinced that the dog will be fine and will not be tortured. If anything I expect the dog to have a better life than it currently does thanks to living with a rich person.
I think an assumption that rich people don't commit crimes may be... optimistic.
The crimes that rich people do fall into the following buckets:
1. Impulsive crimes. I.e. plenty of rich people were caught driving under the influence or starting a fight. But those types of crimes are not planned in advance.
2. Low grade crimes arranged behind closed doors. I.e. Epstein had parties where rich people slept with 17 year old girls. This is a crime in states where the age of consent is 18 but its not something completely horrendous like torture or murder. And those kinds of crimes are done in secrecy, not by approaching untrusted strangers in public while driving a huge limo.
3. Big crimes that have a big financial payout. Think: FTX/SBF or Theranos or Bernie Madoff. It's a huge risk if you get caught but also a huge reward if you don't. This obviously doesn't apply to OPs scenario.
The operation described would be a Big crime (animal torture) with zero financial payoff, requiring a long period of planning, with lots of employees and witnesses involved, with a pretty big chance of getting caught. So I would estimate a 99.9% chance of the dog not suffering as a result of my actions.
I'm not entirely sure precisely how to categorise the activity of pulling up to me in your limo and offering me a million bucks for my pet out of the blue, but "impulsive" certainly seems to fit. I don't understand why a rich guy deciding on the spot that they want to eat your cat in particular is something that would require a long period of planning with lots of employees to pull off. Limo pulled over, pet acquired, drive home, barbecue, enjoy.
Also, I feel like maybe rich people do in fact commit crimes that aren't on your list of crimes rich people commit. In this part of the world, off the top of my head, as a class they are known for dangerous driving (consistent, not one-off/impulsive, and public), paedophilia (behind closed doors, but when the scandals erupt it inevitably transpires that lots of people knew and kept quiet) and illegal fox hunts, the latter being actual animal torture that is well documented, that nothing is done about.
Rich people don't carry around an "envelope contains a legally-binding sales transfer. Upon signing it, $1,000,000 will instantly be deposited into an account of your choosing". It's clearly something pre-meditated and planned ahead.
Rich people also don't randomly pull me over in the middle of the street and offer me large sums of money, but here we all are.
...oh, that's a thought, actually: is anyone in the limo wearing fox hunting uniform? Maybe it /is/ premeditated.
I just watched a short documentary about the old, grand buildings of Cairo, Illinois that are sitting abandoned. If things continue the way they have been, those buildings will probably be lost in the future like all their brethren.
Here's an idea: the townspeople should sell them to Microsoft for $1 to be used as server farms, on the condition that the buildings be restored to their original condition (at least on the outside) and local people be hired to do the renovation work and all maintenance and groundskeeping going forward.
Anything wrong with this idea, or is it just a win-win no one has thought of before me?
Force everybody who complains about housing prices in San Francisco to go live there. Pretty soon you'll have a new San Francisco in the midwest.
I know you're just being flippant, but it's worth pointing out that many many people have tried to build a new Silicon Valley and failed. It's not easy to engineer these things by fiat.
Right, that's because we're not chasing people down based on their internet comments and forcibly relocating them. If we did, it would be easy.
There are plenty of places where you can buy a house for $1, with a bunch of strings attached (the ones I know about: various places in Italy and some remote Swiss villages). Not exactly many takers for those kinds of offers. Old buildings are maintenance nightmares. 10x so if you have to keep them intact to some sort of "cultural" standard.
I guess that the top priorites for data centers are access to cheap electricity, low need for cooling in the summer, and so on. There's also value in having them geographically spread out in such a way that large populations can be served with low round-trip times (depends on the type of work the servers do of course).
I do think that cities which were formerly thriving but are currently in decay might be good candidates on account of their decent infrastructure and low real estate costs.
Why would Microsoft buy them?
Most of the expense of a server farm isn't a generic "building", it's all the wiring and air conditioning and properly strengthened floors and interconnections to the internet and to powerplants and employees to maintain it and the servers and whatnot.
All of that stuff is going to be way more costly to implement in Cairo, Illinois than not, and the cost of the building being 1 dollar is not going to compensate for that, especially not if you include the costs of restoring and maintaining the buildings in their original condition which any other server farm wouldn't have to do.
From a quick Google Images search the buildings don't look all that "grand" to me. Not worth saving.
Putting cost-effectiveness aside (land values and the costs of building light industrial buildings aren’t a big deal in the US), they’d get a bit creepy and soulless like telephone exchanges are now.
Most likely those buildings cost more to repair than a new building would cost to build. Probably a lot more.
Yea, this. Those buildings aren't all that big either.
Also, who's going to maintain the server farms? Cairo Illinois (which I've been to) is almost literally empty and you're going to have a very hard time persuading tech workers to relocate to there or near there.
Also Cairo Illinois is located in the flood zones of two of the world's largest rivers, hence is wholly dependent upon the maintenance of huge levees to keep out massive periodic floodwaters. And for various reasons the flood stages of those rivers are today less predictable and more extreme than they used to be. Hardly seems like the spot to rationally invest effort and money in locating electronics which need to reliably operate 24/7/365 in order to fulfill their purpose.
Maybe Microsoft does not want them. But making a standing offer to anyone for any thing is OK. Is there any indication that there is NOT already an implicit offer to sell?
> on the condition that the buildings be restored to their original condition (at least on the outside) and local people be hired to do the renovation work and all maintenance and groundskeeping going forward.
This is presumably expensive. But also, server farms tend to be highly optimised structures these days with temperatures, humidities, etc all carefully controlled. I'm not sure that's really compatible with old buildings, unless you simply keep the outside as a facade.
Not to say you couldn't find a new use for these buildings, but server farms might not be the best one.
I don't know much about the economics of server farms, but I doubt that minimizing the cost of land is the most important consideration in siting them. I would assume electricity, network interconnection, and availability of skilled labor for running/maintaining them are much bigger considerations.
Also, server farms are LOUD. Main street of your quaint small town is probably not an ideal location.
I've got a new post at 3 Quarks Daily: The Irises Are Blooming Early This Year, https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2024/04/the-irises-are-blooming-early-this-year.html
Don't let the title fool you. Yes, it is about irises, with photographs. But it's also about LLMs, including a poem about irises by ChatGPT, modeled after Wallace Stevens' "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." See, here's some paragraphs following that poem:
suppose one might ask whether or not that poem is a “real” poem and, if so, is it as good as a human could do. That question, after all, is on many people’s minds these days: Are they as good as us? Better perhaps? Will they replace us, displace us? (Annihilate us?)
Those particular questions aren’t on my mind at the moment. They don’t compute, if you will. I don’t know what they mean.
Ever since GPT-3 came out my position has been that these are strange beasts, not like anything we know. Not like us, but not like other machines either. It’s going to take a while to think through these things, to make arrangements, to arrive at a modus vivendi.
In one respect the most recent large language models ARE superior to any human: they can generate coherent text on a much wider range of subjects than anyone can. Some of that text, however, may be fabricated. But WE do that as well. Yet it’s not that breadth of capability that we find problematic, not as long as it doesn’t exceed human ability in this or that specialized respect.
How can we reconcile the altruism of EA (rational good-making) with that of a Mahayana Bodhisattva (to dedicate one’s life energies to the awakening of all beings)?
Some people took Mahayana Buddhism and ran with it until they got to holy wars and sword-point conversions, so by comparison, EA seems quite normal.
Offhand, I'd say that utilitarianism has two components - the calculated approach to decision-making, and an ethical theory that a thing called "utility" exists as a scalar value. If you replace that second thing with some form of enlightenment that can be measured and quantified, then you should be able to keep the approach to decision-making.
Of course, you'll have to make some calls about "feed starving child A, or enlighten well-fed child B". And do some number-crunching, too, since the existing calculations probably won't smoothly replicate under the new framework.
I suppose it all depends on the exact form of Mahayana Buddhism you're thinking of.
Seems like a version of each could have a lot of overlap. The bodhisattva vows have a bunch of variations, but they tend to have an emphasis on acting with virtue, developing insight, and lessening suffering for all beings. The ultimate goal is getting everyone enlightened, but the path there seems to be about being kind and good and virtuous and thoughtful along the way. Seems reasonable that one can maximize QALYs while also following the Eightfold Path.
Why would we reconcile them? Buddhism is a religion based on millennia old fiction, that should be discarded.
Just because something is based on fiction doesn’t mean it hasn’t accumulated a lot of truth. We shouldn’t discard modern elemental theory just because it’s based on the air-earth-fire-water-phlogiston theory.
Modern elemental theory is not based on ancient greek theories of the four elements, and insofar as it shares names or traits with it it's because both are attempts to understand the world through empiricism.
No, it absolutely is. The four elements theory was continued through the medieval period, though there was a competitor that claimed sulfur, quicksilver, and salt as the three fundamental elements. The four elements theory was then gradually elaborated as they started to determine that earth wasn't a single element, but several elements, and they claimed that the various metals were each compounds of one of the earths with the element of fire, or phlogiston. By the mid 18th century, they were starting to think that there were different airs too, though they weren't totally sure if the airs were separate elements, or if one was pure air and another was a maximal compound of air and phlogiston. Lavoisier did some really detailed measurements while reacting earths with acids to create metals, and discovered that the earths were all *heavier* than the corresponding metals. He decided that the previous ideas were backwards, and that the metals were each elements, and that the "dephlogisticated air" was an element related to various acids, so he called it "oxygen" or "acid-maker". Soon afterwards, when Humphry Davy was able to electrolyze water to produce oxygen and another air, they realized that this other air was its own element and called it "hydrogen" or "water-maker". This led to a burst of productivity, including confirming that sulfur and quicksilver were elements, and that salt was a compound of a dangerous green air and a metal.
This was a continuous development from the ancient theory, even though we like to think there's a bigger discontinuity than there was.
and EA is based on years old fiction, that should be discarded ;)
No it's not.
As far as I can tell the bodhisattva ideal is exactly EA, but with a different value system. In the Mahayana system, Buddhahood is the ultimate good, and it's infinitely better than anything you could have without it. It takes a huge amount of lives to achieve, but you believe in reincarnation enough to take the long view. So the logical conclusion is that the only ethical thing to do is to dedicate all your energy to become enlightened so that you can lead others to the same. This kind of traditional view is explained in full detail in e.g Shantideva's Bodhicaryavatara.
Why would we reconcile either. They are separate domains.
They're both making claims about where you should put your efforts, so if both have some appeal to you, you'll have to figure out how to reconcile them!
I think that's a case of "It's fine to have different interests and split your energy among them."
Or are you saying that being awakened results in something having a "subjective experience" which "creates" "suffering".
I would imagine you’d want to quantify the value of awakening a being (as opposed to, say, saving QALY’s or something else) and then get data on the effectiveness of various approaches to trying to awaken beings.
I love the idea of assessing the cost-effectiveness of enlightenment
I have the impression that a lot of Buddhist “theology”could be summarized as, “your map isn’t the territory and attempts to map it will inevitably fail.” So this seems like a decidedly un-Buddhist project to undertake. I’m no expert and would love to see if anyone disagrees.
Oh absolutely. I was imagining something borderline satirical. But you could conduct the analysis very seriously, by eliciting utility values from enlightened people, estimating the marginal effects on others of being around an enlightened person, etc.
I’d love to see someone try this without the satire, in an honest good faith effort. I have trouble imagining a serious person saying, “I am enlightened, here’s how I know.”
Were you around on SSC for the discussions with Vinay Gupta? I was still lurking, back then.
Are there any dentists/periodontists who can comment on the evidence base for systemic antibiotics to control periodontitis. I'm being pushed by my periodontist to do a course of antibiotics but everything I've found (essentially Cochrane Reviews) seems to point to there not being a good evidence base for the practice. Further, it seems like a lot of whats done in dentistry doesnt have a good evidence base. Add in the interobserver variability issues, and I'm starting to think this field may have some issues.
Seems like the person to ask would be an MD, maybe an infectious disease specialist? or else someone who does medical research. I am neither, but like you I would be dubious about carrying through on the recommended plan. Just going from life experience, seems like it's possible to treat infections that are limited to a single area by applying antibiotics just to the area, so long as it's accessible (for example, flesh wounds, vaginal infections, etc.). On the other hand, energetic application of topicals once failed for me when I had a badly infected injury on my leg, and oral antibiotics knocked it right out. And I believe there's a connection between periodontal problems and cardiovascular disease, the former somehow facilitating the latter.
Election betting, UK edition:
The London mayoral election takes place in 10 days time. The most recent poll puts Sadiq Khan on 46% vote share, 19 points ahead of his closest opponent (Susan Hall on 27%). Manifold (https://manifold.markets/cash/will-sadiq-khan-be-reelected-mayor) says there’s a 94% chance Khan will win. 1/20 is (just about) available on Betfair Exchange, implying a 95% chance he will win. These sorts of situations are testing. It’s tempting to say that 95% is too high for something as inherently uncertain as a democratic election, but do you really want to take the other side of that bet?
By no later than 28 January 2025, but probably this year, the UK will hold a general election. The Economist (https://www.economist.com/britain/2024/04/15/explore-our-prediction-model-for-britains-looming-election) says if the election were held tomorrow, Labour would have a 87% chance of winning an outright majority. Their track record is not good, but the mid-odds on Betfair Exchange are currently 1.14, implying an 88% chance of a Labour majority. Metaculus (https://www.metaculus.com/questions/20559/labour-majority-after-next-uk-election/) has a Labour majority at 95%, which seems high to me.
How bad will it be for the Tories? The Economist says the mid-point estimate (if the election were held tomorrow) is 198 seats, but notes that tactical voting could push this lower. Manifold expects 175 seats (https://manifold.markets/Anthem/how-many-seats-will-the-conservativ-89c852a83f80) with most of the probability weight in the range 130-195. Metaculus (https://www.metaculus.com/questions/11549/seats-won-per-party-in-uk-general-election/) gives the median as 172 seats, with the interquartile range 123-223 (which seems a large range). The Tories’ worst ever result was in 1906, when they (together with their Liberal Unionist allies) won 156 seats. Looking at this market https://www.betfair.com/exchange/plus/politics/market/1.223763243, one might think that too much probability is being given to them winning fewer than 150 seats.
> It’s tempting to say that 95% is too high for something as inherently uncertain as a democratic election
95% isn’t actually all that high. I believe that you can get close to that accuracy in most US congressional elections just by betting on the incumbent party in every House race, and over 80% doing the same in Senate races. In countries like the US and UK where mayoral candidates are often affiliated with national parties that have really strong correlation with urban/rural divides, I would expect you can do the same thing with mayoral races.
I guess the interesting question is how Boris Johnson got elected Mayor of London.
Twice. He slid back a bit on the second vote though. I didn’t realise that Ken Livingstone was the challenger both times, so 4 attempts at the mayoralty, successful twice as well, before boris.
I think incumbency matters - it’s not that powerful a job, American mayors have more power, so it’s a matter of not f‘ing it up.
I think the Tory press will scare some of the chickens ( ie Conservative leaning floating voters) back into the fold, but to know exactly what would happen in terms of actual seats would mean to know all of those seats that are at risk. I’m a bit of a psephologist but not that much. Still I agree, that < 150 seems unlikely.
The typical "Horace and Doris" older couple, who've always voted Tory and don't really keep up much with current trends, will probably still vote for them. But Tory support is cratering among the under 40s, and Reform are nipping at the Tories' ankles in all age groups.
A poll the other day put Reform support at only around 4% below the Tories', so they are not far from critical mass where they actually overtake them! Also, Reform won't do the gentlemanly thing this time, and stand aside in wards where Tories are likely to win, as UKIP did last time. And if Nigel Farage returns to the fray at the last minute, that will boost Reform's chances even more, because every Brexit supporter will undoubtedly then vote for them.
I'll stick my neck out, and predict that the Tories will be lucky to win 120 seats at the general election. Their last chance to turn things around decisively was Hunt's budget. But that delivered only a few mealy mouthed unimaginative tax breaks, most of which will be clawed back one way or another, instead of a bold eye catching change such as abolishing inheritance tax. But their biggest failure has been their obstinate refusal to greatly reduce legal and illegal immigration.
> such as abolishing inheritance tax
Oh that would just appeal to the core voters.
120 is too low; there are roughly 200 rural/rural-ish seats in England where labour only exist on paper. Some of those will go Lib Dem, but they’re polling lower than the Tories, as are Reform. Assuming they and coastal seats become two fairly uniform 3-way races in seats without at least some pre-existing post-2010 Lib Dem lean, I’d guess the Tories would hold 170-180 seats if the election were tomorrow, and can’t see an obvious reason to depart from that.
Left/Labour leaning city. Incumbency advantage. Tory national vote at historic low. There’s your 46%, no great mystery.
Incidentally, if she’s getting 27%, Hall is above the Conservative national percentage in polls, currently about 20%.
Not British, but this was my understanding: modulo circumstances, Khan is *underperforming* his party and the question is why, what he's been fucking up that means he isn't doing better. My sources seem to suggest that ultra-low emissions regime thing is the main culprit.
I think libraries are one of the best things ever, and librarians are heroes (along with teachers, medical workers and farmers). I worked in libraries for over 10 years (not as a professional) and know several professional librarians, so I can warn you that it is an under-paid profession, like teaching. A new BS in computer science will likely earn more in their first job than a MLS ever will.
Just anecdotal evidence: Smart kids who read a lot can read a *ton* of books. (Not only because libraries save them money, but maybe more importantly, things like "you already have hundred books at home, there is no place to put more" become irrelevant, so they can grab anything on a whim.) Long-term effects? No idea.
I just realized, libraries probably keep *data* on who borrowed what. So perhaps you could get that data, anonymized, and find out something interesting, for example the distribution of books per reader (maybe 1% of readers are responsible for 90% of book borrowings). Could compare that across libraries in different parts of town, maybe correlate with something like socioeconomic status of people who live in that part of town.
That could be an interesting question: are rich or poor kids more likely to borrow books from library? I guess one's intuition could go either way: for poor kids it's the only chance to read many books, but rich kids are more likely to be better educated and thus more interested in books (and the limited shelf space at home is also a factor). Or maybe there is a curve with a maximum for the middle class?
> Not only because libraries save them money, but maybe more importantly, things like "you already have hundred books at home, there is no place to put more" become
I prefer physical books but limited storage space make me opt for kindle editions pretty often.
Most libraries (in the US at least) do not track what people borrow, because of privacy concerns. It's usually an opt-in, so this may not be a useful approach.
Some kind of mathematical/statistical thinking would definitely help. The degree is neither necessary nor sufficient for that. I guess it depends on where you are now, and what would be your short-term goal for the research -- if it is a school project, simple is okay, if you want to publish in a peer-reviewed journal, that would of course require more.
The part about "how many readers consume how many books" should be fairly simple. (Unless, as Snags mentions, the data are not available.) Trying to connect it to the socioeconomic status would be much trickier, maybe impossible. I imagine you could still calculate something like a "Gini coefficient" of book borrowers for individual libraries, and just publish a map with big colored circles representing the libraries, and leave the interpretation to a reader?
I suppose, if you need to ask how difficult it is, you are not ready yet. But if you are long-term interested in doing research, you should get familiar with some statistical concepts anyway. The easy part is merely collecting the data and displaying it using pie charts or histograms. It gets difficult when you want to reliably separate the signal from noise, mere correlation from causation. (To figure out how much impact randomness had on your results; e.g. whether doing the survey on a different day could result in dramatically different numbers.) Intuition is useful to form a hypothesis, but you need statistics to check whether the data support it.
So maybe, step 1 figure out what data the libraries actually can give you. Step 2, get the data and just play with it, try to measure different things. For example, men vs women, young vs old, how many books are borrowed in individual months during the year. Step 3, based on what you see, make a hypothesis, and then maybe get data from two other libraries and check whether the same is true for them, too. Step 4, publish your results maybe somewhere on a blog, including negative ones (e.g. based on one library, you assumed that people read more in January than in December, but in the other library it was the other way round, so maybe this is all random). Ask for feedback.
It was a different era but the GOP held its nominating convention for John McCain in St Paul in 2008.
The only real difference I personally noticed during the event was the number of toney out of town hookers frequenting the upscale bar scene.
There were some attempts at disruptive protests then but they were quickly contained. The old tsarist technique of cops on horseback proved to be effective in that situation. No knouts though. I expect the police in Chicago will handle the inevitable attempted mayhem just as well.
The vibe this time is entirely different. In 1968 The Vietnam War was on the mind of everyone, particularly draft age males. It was also probably the high water mark of the whole ‘counterculture’ period.
The death and destruction in Gaza seems to be driving demonstrations and antisemitism primarily at elite universities.
Okay the land grant University of Minnesota has its own mimetic demonstrations too but on a smaller scale.
But as Tatu mentioned below, law enforcement has better techniques now and will be thoroughly prepared.
Wouldn't the most scenario be "protests are corralled effectively somewhere where media does not pay too much attention to them and handled by the police by usual means if there's violence?"
Sure, there would be some media attention, but since protest control techniques are vastly more advanced than in 1968, not in the same scale.
You should have a strong prior on reality being boring. It's like how every single election cycle, media breathlessly plays up the possibility of a contested convention and every single cycle, there is no contested convention.
Not to say that unusual events *never* happen - the HFC blowing up their own speaker twice comes to mind, but betting against them is almost always the way to go.
Also, AOC at least is smart enough to play ball on Israel: https://www.slowboring.com/p/aocs-slow-boring-of-hard-boards.
The one thing I got out of that article was amusement at the outrage over her being just another politician.
Well, yes. Of course she is, what did they expect? Did they really all believe the story and PR spun up about Sandy From The Block? She was one of the hand-picked slate by the king-maker Saikat Chakrabarti and was one of the successes; her entire image and campaign was manicured to the last degree; and when she was elected, she started off ambitious and over-confident in her success at preliminary challenges to the old guard, until Pelosi eventually managed to put manners on her, and Sandy From The Block figured out quickly what she would need to do to be re-elected - concentrate on her career, play the game, don't rock the boat *too* hard.
As for her support pro-Israel/anti-Palestine, eh. She did some extra work on discovering various minority heritage in her background, so not alone is she Hispanic/Latinx (whichever is the more popular term for being Puerto Rican descent), she discovered that she's also part-Jewish and part-Taino.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2018/12/10/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-reveals-jewish-ancestry-hanukkah-celebration/
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10885585/AOC-says-shes-awakening-indigenous-heritage-protesting-Native-Americans.html
So I imagine that she can't really get away with "My heritage is Sephardi, but I'm pro-Palestine", when she's doing the rounds of temples in Queens to get the votes. (Yes, I'm cynical).
1968 was a contested convention with anti-war candidates. There's no parallel unless for some reason Biden drops out.
I live in Chicago not far from the downtown/tourist areas in which street protests are naturally most often focused. Also only a mile from one of the two main venues for this Dem convention.
"Thanks to Black Lives Matter, law enforcement has been stripped of most of its ability to control demonstrations" -- this is completely wrong at least in Chicago. Our city administration and police did noticeably better, relatively anyway, during the 2020 wave of protests than in some other large cities. And since then they have become noticeably more effective about it.
There have been some instances that weren't ideal -- I witnessed one of those actually, and granted that it's a very big city that gets plenty of media attention so some shit is always gonna happen -- but overall the improvement has been clear. And right now the city police department is visibly, in close concert with federal law enforcement, already preparing in intentionally-visible ways for the Dem convention.
The current city administration also denied permits for planned pro-Hamas marches near the convention site, directed those marches to obscure locations literally miles away, quickly denied an administrative appeal of that decision, and is now unapologetically defending those denials against the inevitable lawsuit.
The whole public tone of the city administration and police department is firmly "not this time, not here".
Sounds like you should be updating your model of the world.
Agreed on all points!
I'm no fan of the current mayor myself. In any case the occupancy of that seat is far less of a variable here than is popularly believed or assumed. As both Rahm Emanuel and Laurie Lightfoot discovered to their vast frustration:
(a) Structurally the city government is in fact a "weak-mayor" system and always has been. The two Daleys' success at being bosses was always rooted in local-political influence built up over decades, not in the legal powers of the office. Since Richard M. Daley retired we haven't had any mayor come in with anything resembling a political machine (Rahm was somewhat of a political celebrity but as he learned that is not at all the same thing). Brandon Johnson was frankly surprised to make the runoff let alone win it, and came into the mayor's office without even the outline of any sort of political operation.
(b) A good bit of the political authority and influence around here rests in our county government, to a degree that most city taxpayers fail to appreciate. Cook County has the 5th largest county budget in the nation. County officials are elected completely separately from city ones, they aren't even on the same election cycle.
(c) The city mayor who deserves some credit for the shift in approach that I described above it mostly Lightfoot. Johnson has mostly just declined to get in the way, with the notable exception of that permit denial which I think everybody here was surprised by including the protest organizers.
The big revelation for me was the role of the City Attorney. If they decide to stop prosecuting certain types of crime, then police will eventually stop arresting people for it, and then people will eventually stop reporting it, and look, the crime rate is down!
I suppose cities are complex machines that can only function if a lot of people are doing the work that their roles require. It takes all of them to make it work, but it only takes a few to sabotage it.
It seems like the conventions attract some level of violence every time now, so the safe money is that there will be street violence. Whether that counts as a "massive shitshow" depends significantly on your definition. Do I think we'll see 1968 levels of violence? Very unlikely. Will we see higher than normal presidential convention levels? I'd say the chances are pretty good.
I'll take no:
I predict there are enough sensible adults left inside the party apparatus, that the internecine squabbling can be temporarily calmed. The whole family will put on their best faces when having company over for dinner, although there might be some tense subtext when passing the potatoes. Maybe there will be some especially "vibrant" designated free speech zones, and some fiery speeches. But unless Trump somehow stops being the main alternative, I think they'll hold it together long enough to nominate the candidate with the best chance of beating him. (If Trump goes away, I predict chaos.)
Large media organizations still have institutional memory of 1968 and its aftermath, and they're left leaning, and want Trump to lose, and therefore want a peaceful Democratic convention that nominates an electable candidate. I predict downplaying of internal differences, greater focus (somehow) on how bad Trump is, and maybe some historical features on what happens when the Democratic Party can't get its act together. (Nixon! Reagan! W. Bush! TrumpTrumpTrumpTrumpTrump!)
But as you say, maybe something new will happen. It's 4 months away. Maybe Hamas or Israel does something so spectacularly horrible that everyone backs away from that side. Maybe some poor American kid gets killed by police, on video. Maybe one of the people victimized by decriminalized crime turns out to be Actually Important, and makes a stink. Maybe a Supreme Court Justice gets hit by a home run ball and goes into a coma. Maybe the Chinese secretly fund Iran in putting up an Internet news site composed entirely of highly viral AI-designed deepfakes.
Good comment! I can't resist an image that comes to mind from your last line... :
>Maybe the Chinese secretly fund Iran in putting up an Internet news site composed entirely of highly viral AI-designed deepfakes.
The funding secretly funneled through a Wuhan institute? :-)
The Tyrell Corporation - Research That Replicates
Many Thanks! Hmm... Can an android hold office? :-)
Did you ever read "Evidence" by Isaac Asimov? :-)
Yes,
>Further, our district attorney has never been seen to drink — in the aqueous sense as well as the alcoholic — nor to sleep.
rang a bell - though I think it is probably a half century since I last read it. It was indeed worth a reread (at https://www.onelimited.org/ss-asimov-01 ). Many Thanks! :-)