I wrote up my thoughts on Minicircle as a recipient of the therapy, having it turned on, and then turned off (and soon turned on again), and a friend of both Max & the minicircle team who thinks highly of them all: https://x.com/patrissimo/status/1794493623947403750
I just went through the fiction portion of my library and separated the books I've read from the books I haven't read. I ended up with almost exactly the same number in each category. It turns out I have far more unread books than I expected.
More on the protest drama on US campuses. Both pro- and anti-demonstration parents — as well as parents who've paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for their kid's education — are all hopping mad at college presidents and administrators (paywalled WSJ article below) You'd think that universities would have developed a playbook for demonstrations by now. I thought they were pretty common, but Kevin Drum says otherwise — and the cops are usually called when the demonstrators occupy buildings (second link)...
I think Kevin Drum's examples are almost irrelevant, and that the primary point of comparison is going to be BLM from 4 years ago. Not just because these are young people with no perspective, but also because we all seem to be losing our collective memory and developing the attention span of gnats.
On the left, I think it's a matter of not having the administration look the other way and treat them with kid gloves, the way that happened 4 years ago. They expected to play by the same unwritten set of rules as back then, and are squawking loudly as they find out that they no longer have privilege. Alternatively, compare to the paradigmatic case of an upper-middle class black man from a good neighborhood who never had a problem with police, but then gets pulled over while driving through a bad neighborhood, and is treated like a resident of the bad neighborhood. "Galvanizing" might be the word. It's going to be interesting to see whether this generation of leftists will develop a distrust of "official" power structures, now that they've viscerally experienced how their interests are not always the same.
On the right, I think a lot of people had been used to never succeeding, and are now emboldened to push for everything that they saw the other side get. Sadly, it seems that a bunch of them are abandoning free speech principles and embracing "who, whom", but that appears to be the normal state of humanity. :-(
And I think the universities are stuck, because they alternate between claiming to enforce the rules as written (as when testifying before Congress) and relaxing the rules for their favorite sides, and now they're being forced to make choices while under the public eye. I'm surprised that more aren't acting like Northwestern, or simply tolerating the protests as is ("as are"?). That probably means my mental model of university administrators was inaccurate.
Oh my. Nvidia should start naming its chips after tulip varietals. "In a presentation earlier this month, the venture-capital firm Sequoia estimated that the AI industry spent $50 billion on the Nvidia chips used to train advanced AI models last year, but brought in only $3 billion in revenue." *
OC ACXLW Sat May 4 The Hipster Effect and AI Self-Alignment
Hello Folks! We are excited to announce the 64th Orange County ACX/LW meetup, happening this Saturday and most Saturdays after that.
Host: Michael Michalchik Email: michaelmichalchik@gmail.com (For questions or requests) Location: 1970 Port Laurent Place (949) 375-2045 Date: Saturday, May 4 2024 Time 2 pm
Conversation Starters:
The Hipster Effect: Why Anti-Conformists Always End Up Looking the Same: A study examines how the desire to be different can paradoxically lead to conformity among anti-conformists. Using a mathematical model, the author shows how, under certain conditions, efforts by individuals to oppose the mainstream result in a synchronized and homogeneous population.
Questions for discussion: a) How might the "hipster effect" described in the paper relate to other examples of emergent synchronization in complex systems, such as financial markets or neuronal networks? b) The paper discusses several conditions that give rise to the hipster effect, such as a preference for non-conformity and the presence of delay in recognizing trends. What other social or psychological factors might contribute to this phenomenon? c) Can insights from the study of the hipster effect be applied to understanding political polarization and the dynamics of contrarian movements? What strategies might help maintain diversity of opinions in these contexts?
Self-Regulating Artificial General Intelligence: This paper examines the "paperclip apocalypse" concern that a superintelligent AI, even one with a seemingly innocuous goal, could pose an existential threat by monopolizing resources. The author argues that, under certain assumptions about recursive self-improvement, an AI may refrain from enabling the development of more powerful "offspring" AIs to avoid the same control problem that humans face with AIs.
Questions for discussion: a) The paper assumes that an AI can only self-improve by employing specialist "offspring" AIs with targeted goals. How plausible is this assumption, and what implications would a more integrated model of AI self-improvement have for the argument? b) The author suggests that the key to controlling potential negative impacts of AI is to limit their ability to appropriate resources. What legal, economic, or technical mechanisms might be used to enforce such limitations? c) If advanced AIs are indeed "self-regulating" in the manner described, what are the potential benefits and risks of relying on this property as a safety measure? How might we verify and validate an AI's self-regulation capabilities?
Walk & Talk: We usually have an hour-long walk and talk after the meeting starts. Two mini-malls with hot takeout food are readily accessible nearby. Search for Gelson's or Pavilions in the zip code 92660. Share a Surprise: Tell the group about something unexpected that changed your perspective on the universe. Future Direction Ideas: Contribute ideas for the group's future direction, including topics, meeting types, activities, etc.
Ah, the glories of the modern world where AI makes our lives so much easier, by automating our work it reduces workload, makes us more productive, and means we get more money *and* leisure time!
If you're an email scammer, that is 😀
An old, rarely-used,. and we *know* it's compromised work email address got the usual "pay up or else" blackmail attempt (as an aside, if I was ever tempted to use Bitcoin or other crypto, the fact that it's mainly touted by these scummy little extortionists would put me right off; goodness, whyever do ordinary people think Decentralised Blockchain Libertarian No Mo' Fiat is criminal trash?)
But this one is keeping up with the times:
"You've heard that the Internet is a dangerous place, infested with malicious links and hackers like me?
Of course, you've heard, but what's the point in it if you are so dismissive of your internet security and don't care what websites you visit?
Times have changed. You read about AI, judging by your browser history, and still didn't understand anything?
Technologies have stepped far forward, and now hackers like me use artificial intelligence.
Thanks to it, I can get not only access to your webcam and record your fun with highly controversial video (I recorded it also, but now that's not the point), but also to all your devices and not only yours.
And I saved a special sauce for this dish. I went further and sent malicious links to all your contacts from your account."
Needless to say, nobody was engaging in naughty no-no fun with this account, but that of course doesn't stop these criminals. Though I almost admire the sheer brass neck of the sign-off:
"Hasta La Vista, Baby!
P.S. Almost forgot. Finally learn what incognito tabs, two-factor authentication, and the TOR browser are, for God's sake!"
*This* is the real safety risk AI proponents should be worrying about - that it gets the same tainted reputation as crypto due to scammers and scandals like this.
When magic AI performs the magic trick of producing magic money from nowhere, and I'll get pie in the sky when I die.
Some people are going to get rich out of AI, the guys sitting on the boards of the companies getting places on the new AI advisory committee for the US government. Not you and not me, though.
I kinda think Marx was about 150 years too early. Assuming AGI doesn't kill us all, collective ownership seems like the only ethical way to handle a magic wealth fountain.
Someone still has to decide who gets to tell the AI to build them a beautiful Malibu beach house or San Francisco luxury apartment, and tell the AI killbots to keep the hoi polloi out. All the nice dachas in the old Soviet Union, and their North Korean equivalents today, are "collectively owned", but some people are more collective than others.
Yes, it's a problem. Humanity has a bad track-record of deciding how to make collective decisions. The market can't handle this. And turning the decisions over to the AIs brings in another set of risks.
Ethics and making money have little to do with one another. Everyone is jumping aboard the gravy train as early as they can (see Sam Altman) because whoever gets there first and gets established as "you license your AI from this company" is going to be the one with their mouth to the spigot of the money fountain. They all know it, that's why principles are going out the window in the pursuit of "Us, pick us! Us first!"
Collective ownership can go whistle for itself, it's what makes the shareholders (who are often large institutions so they have the power) happy. See recent story about our telecoms provider Eir (long story, they used to be government owned way back but have been privatised and sold on several times since):
"The first thing they need to do, according to Michael Killeen of the CX Academy, is stop focusing on shareholders' needs over customer needs.
"When we look at the bottom five performing brands in our CX table, they are brands known to be fixated with shareholder value, while the top ten companies are genuinely committed to helping their customers every day."
He believes a customer focused approach is the reason why credit unions have come first in the CX report each year over the past 9 years.
The second thing the telco sector needs to do is to focus on existing customers rather than continually chasing more new customers.
"Unfortunately, this is linked to the shareholder issue, as the drive for new customer is partially driven by stock exchange valuations that place a higher value on annual figures for new customer acquisition rather than the longevity of existing customers who stay with brands over the years," Mr Killeen said."
Stock market that sets your share price, which is how your company lives or dies, doesn't care that you are lovey-dovey with your workers and collective ownership and worker representation on the board; it cares about "line go up?". If you're giving away shares of the profit to everyone, why would an investor sink their capital into your company? Return the value only to the shareholders, and maximise that value, and you get investment. More investment, more growth. More growth, the economy thrives.
Not *you* the ordinary guy, necessarily, the *economy*. That's the measure.
I think the whole AI bubble is going to burst soon. We won't have to worry about the extinction of humanity. Instead, we're going to see the bottom drop of NVIDIA and the companies in its tech ecosystem similar to the Dot Com bust.
I don't believe in post-scarcity (I mean, we're already living in post-scarcity if you like to look at it, since the mantra about 'ordinary people are richer than ever and can live better than a mediaeval emperor' often gets trotted out) or dystopia or utopia.
Basically "more of the same, only in new configurations".
NB. I don't know how they calculated the GINI coefficient of pre-industrialized societies. Maybe they explain somewhere in the report, though. I just skimmed it.
In terms of PPP, heck yes, there's no way I could buy a smartphone even 50 years ago, not with all the wealth in the world. Not that it would have been useful without cell networks and the Internet, but the level of functionality was barely even imaginable.
Globally, averaging all 8 billion of us now, vs. the ~0.8 billion around 1774, probably, maybe? It depends a lot on China and India.
I guess I'm a bit late for this Open Thread, but let's try anyway.
Is there anyone expert on nuclear energy who has an opinion on this company https://www.newcleo.com/ and their reactor design? As a scientist working in another field the website seems a bit too oriented towards marketing than explaining the science...
Their plan is to have a reactor ready for sale in 2031, and I suspect we just have to wait and see whether they can overcome the engineering challenges required to make that happen. They plan to generate the fuel used by their reactors, which is another project that could run into problems.
In addition to the technical issues, there are also political challenges to deploying nuclear power. They need to convince regulators that their product is safe, and then convince power companies to buy in quantity in order to achieve the economies of scale they predict will occur. Perhaps this won’t be much of an issue; by 2031 concerns about global warming may overwhelm the concerns that the public has traditionally had about nuclear power.
Late to the party again, but hopefully a few of you find this. My second Long Forum post is up, summarising the most nourishing and thought provoking long form content that I stumbled upon over the previous month. Lots of biology, economics and culture to feast upon.
Any group can become more successful on average by simply removing all the below-average members. Few groups jump at the chance. Some groups, like the Jews, have no choice.
Being part of any group has certain advantages and certain disadvantages relative to being a part of certain other groups. There are certainly privileges idiosyncratic to being Jewish, there's also disadvantages.
In terms of why they are more successful than most other groups, a combination of (statistically) higher intelligence and ingroup bias which leads them to receive preferential treatment from other members of the same group.
I don't think he's a troll, I think he's intelligently probing the concept of "privilege" as it is used in current-year discourse.
I think it might be done more effectively on another forum where people have less pre-existing skepticism to the "privilege" idea. But he'd be banned immediately on those sorts of forums, so maybe this is the most reasonable forum.
Do you feel that's broadly true of the many, many provocative throwaway comments he makes on multiple topics on every Open Thread? He's a troll even if, just this once, he made you think about something.
And you don't feed trolls. If they happen to be talking about something you want to discuss, there will be other opportunities to have that discussion.
I dunno man. I'd never noticed this particular commenter before this thread, so I searched for all his comments in the thread and didn't think they were particularly bad.
Nah, drinking children’s blood is old fashioned. Today’s Jews prefer to extort money and power from the rest of us using their invisible giant space lasers.
I recommend those who object to his presence --- I am one of them --report every single comment he makes. Anyone who is a paid subscriber might want to raise the issue on a hidden thread, too.
Later edit: Ascend objected to my calling for people to report every comment,
and I agree that's not fair. So I'm amending my call: IF Hammond makes a claim with no reasoning or data to back it up, or backed up by a link to junk data, AND you think the comment is grounds for banning, THEN I hope you will take the trouble to report him. Scott does eventually respond to reports, though with a huge lag time.
I strongly disagree with "report every single comment he makes". This is the sort of toxic harrassment that ruins so much of the internet. Report the comments you have a problem with, not the ones you don't because you don't like who made them.
(For what it's worth, I don't object to his presence, though I understand why others might. I think he's got a single-issue obsession, but it's one that doesn't have much coverage here (or anywhere) while being something a fair number of people actually believe: I'd rather their beliefs be out in the open and subject to scrutiny rather than being driven into underground secrecy. And also, his top-level comments are usually lazy, but unlike say the bunch of pro-hamas trolls that Scott banned in January, he actually engages with replies to some extent.)
You're right, it's not reasonable to put out a call for people to report every comment he makes, and I'll go back and modify mine. On the other hand, many of his comments are reportable, because he making broad claims about sensitive matters either with no data or reasoning to support them, or with weak and inaccurate data. His linked evidence for his repeated question "why do Jews hate whites" is a screen shot of 20 books by authors with Jewish names with titles that could be taken as broadly critical of whites. This is non-evidence. First of all, you could probably find 20 books or 20 books by people with Chinese names criticizing US parenting. You can start with Tiger Mom. Is that evidence that Chinese-Americans Fucking Hate White Parents? And I looked up 3 of the books inHammond's screen shot out of curiosity and they don't support the case that the authors hate gentiles. One with "white trash" in the title was about poor whites as an unfairly ignored group. One book was a series of interviews about with small children from well-off white families about black people, investigating their early attitudes and ideas about blacks and how they evolve. It did not sound like an angry, accusatory book. And there was no mention in the reviews I read of Jews. It seems entirely possible that there were Jewish kids among those interviewed in the study. Saying the interviews were with white kids would not imply to most people that none were Jewish. I checked another of Hammond's links in earlier This Group Sux posts and it was nearly as weak. Others who have checked some of his links have stated here that they do not say what he claims they do.
I don't object at all to discussions here of the topics and issues Hammond raises. But he is a terrible representative of the point of view he speaks from.
So I will modify my post to say that I personally will report every future Hammond post where he's backing up his points with junk evidence, and that I hope any who shares my view them takes the trouble to report them.
Yes. We usually have one a week, though sometimes Scott instead puts up a subscribers'-only post. Seems like it's been several weeks now since we had one. I think probably Scott's just distracted by parenting 2 infants and has lost track of how long it's been since we had one.
I think a main driver of your loss of readership must be substrack's abysmal interface. The website is ridiculously slow (particularly on mobile where it is almost unusable).
I can imagine many people dont want to subscribe with the website being so poor (as I assume many of the reader friendly versions of this lack all subscriber content).
I don't understand why substack is so crap. They don't seem to provide much to you, other than presumably handling payment and providing this objectively terrible website, and presumably they take a large cut of payment.
Compared to your old website, or hacker news it is just night and day.
Does anyone here subscribe to "Blocked and Reported"? It looks like they have open threads that reach about 3,000 comments. I'd be interested to hear if the problems we have are the same there, or whether it's the special modifications that Substack made for Scott.
The like button being hidden is one, I believe Scott mentioned some other things were being created for just him, but I don't remember what and I don't think I read what they could have been.
Delivering a few megabytes of text (at most) is really not a difficult engineering problem. It boggles my mind how substack manages to be so egregiously inefficient at this.
yeah, my engagement with the site plummeted since substack. I remain subscribed only out of appreciation since SSC, and wanting to support a voice like Scott's; but I do loathe the change.
Huh, I have a crappy old Moto smartphone which chokes on some apps but likes Substack's just fine. (Since the apps it doesn't like are for things I value less than Substack this has seemed like a net plus.)
For me Substack is worse as a web page than I am used to while browsing via this 1gig fiber broadband feed wired directly into a gamer-caliber desktop PC. It acts as if it's caching, poorly, which there is zero reason for it to be doing. I literally get a smoother Substack response on that half-dead Moto.
It was very fitting that when the comment of section broke and kicked me back to the start, yours was the first comment I saw. Even typing in this textbox somehow manages to be laggy.
I have 32 GB of RAM, and a full astralcodexten page refreshes at the speed of a heavily-laden three-legged donkey toiling up a steep mountain pass! But then I am based in the UK, so maybe it is the trans-Atlantic hop that takes much of the time.
Does anyone know of any real life success stories about companies using feature engineering to increase customer contact rates? Preferably something with a news article in a mainstream source. I’m trying to convince some people to dump real time weather reporting and longitude information into a bunch of tables.
More like “train a model that when the weather is this temperature and the forecast is sunny, rainy, etc” it has this average impact on customer connection rate.
A request for a Latin translation. I've always like the phrase "Strong like bull, smart like tractor," and I think it would be a good motto. Can someone translate this into Latin for me? (I used Google Translate which gave "Fortis velut taurus, sagax velut tractor," which doesn't seem right.
Using Google translate, I tried something along the lines of "Bull's strength, chariot's dexterity" (bearing in mind the Romans didn't have tractors). I think that preserves the sense of what you wish the saying to convey.
The result was "Fortitudo tauri, Dexteritas currus", which is slightly more pithy without those two "veluts". Whether the word "currus" is appropriate, I leave you to decide.
I'd go with "Potentia tauri, sapientia tractoris." "Power of a bull, wisdom of a tractor." Tractoris is a fake word but you're not going to get a real one. There is tractator but that has other implications. You could also go with "potentia tauri, sapientia aratoris" which means "strength of a bull, wisdom of a plough puller." But a plough puller could be a person instead of a machine.
I dropped the like because the Germanic languages' use of simile doesn't have an exact match in Latin. Velut is the proper translation for 'like' because medieval Latin speaking Germans/English/etc would use it that way. But it doesn't sound like actual Classical Latin. I switched out fortis (which does mean strength) for potentia because I think it sounds better with sapientia. Sagax means perceptive more than smart, from sagire meaning to perceive. There isn't a good word for smart in Latin. You have to choose some kind of intelligence and sapientia is wisdom or skill. Which is presumably what tractors don't have.
I'll get the ball rolling - maybe (tam) potens quam taurus; (tam) prudens quam tractor? I'm stretching to get the original alliteration to work. Also I'm keeping in tractor with the modern meaning because it keeps the punchline.
Your original phrase has a bit of Latin-like pithiness to it, by removing two "a"s without changing the meaning. It might be nice to keep that, by getting it down to 4 words?
"Tractor" is already a Latin word, it's based on the verb "to pull". We'l have to wait for an actual Latin scholar to tell us whether that's actually the correct word ending for "thing that pulls" or whether it's a weird half-English half-Latin hybrid but I'm sure there's a proper Latin version.
The Vatican has put out Latin dictionaries with new Latin words for the modern world. I don't have one, and don't know if they have "tractor", but worst comes to worst, we could just take an equivalent classical Greek word and use that as the basis for a new Latin word.
The movie is about what would it be like if there was a civil war in the United States today and not as much about contemporary politics. It’s also very much a “war is bad” narrative.
So what are the two (or more) sides fighting over? Pineapple on pizza? If you're going to have a civil war, you have to have a *reason* for fighting one, and differences between the sides. The differences don't have to be huge, but they must be there, else why fight at all?
From over the pond, the most likely casus belli for a US civil war today would appear be a desire of some southern states, such as California or Texas, to secede from the Union and become independent.
I've no idea how likely that is in the foreseeable future, given how many recent immigrants in those states have left their home countries to settle in the US, so most would presumably wish to keep it thay way. But if it did ever happen, I can't imagine the Federal Government or the US Army taking it lying down.
Yeah, the problem is that the only reason anyone in Texas wants to secede is that they're afraid the rest of the country will be dominated by Californians, and the only reason anyone in California wants to secede is that they're afraid the rest of the country will be dominated by Texans. So there's no plausible way to get *both* Texas and California to secede - one one goes, the other just says "Good; I guess the United States of America belongs to people like us now".
The other problem is, our "states" haven't had the functionality of sovereign polities in over a century. They're critically dependent on the Federal Government for too many things, and don't have the skills or resources to take on those responsibilities on short notice, so they'd basically collapse if they tried to secede without the Feds holding their hand all the way. And I *think* most of them know that.
Right, but if they covered the political aspect it would be 100% preachy leftist tirade. I haven't seen the movie but I'm pretty sure avoiding politics is a much better choice.
Are there any good live radio stations these days, specifically in the NYC area? By good, I mean interesting (not sports, NPR, shows with a GOP or Democrat axe to grind). I love listening to the radio as a medium but am often disappointed with the content of it.
Another solid station. Gives a good injection of wall-street perspective occasionally. And when something really big is going down in the country, they often have good live coverage without wacky hot takes. Just a bit too blood pressure-raising to listen to frequently. —- A plus is that their 1130 AM transmission is rather powerful… can pick it up here in Sussex County.
I fondly remember jamming out to JM in the AM waiting for the middle school bus, and I now (20 yrs later!) occasionally listen to Clay Pidge’s Wake and Bake on the way to work. The music is not always… how do I say, something I understand, but the Pidge is so into it that it makes me listen a bit closer.
A Demon-Haunted Land by Monica Black examines the phenomenon in Germany just after WWII, of a massive upswing in the number and prominence of witch trials and faith healers. Black makes a convincing case for mass hallucination and witch hysteria as a symptom of, and method of working out, societal trauma.
There was also a big upsurge in spiritualism and seances etc after WW1. I seem to recall Arthur Conan Doyle in the 1920s firmly believing that fairies existed, and making rather a fool of himself using photos he claimed were genuine to promote his spiritualist beliefs.
> Most strikingly, scores of people accused their neighbors of witchcraft, and found themselves in turn hauled into court on charges of defamation, assault, and even murder.
So rather than people being put on trial for witchcraft, people were put on trial for defamation, which is not the same thing and would happen in any modern secular court system depending on defamation standards. If saying "A shot B dead" without proof is illegal, saying "A killed B with a hex" (without proof, obviously) is likely also to be illegal.
As a German, I never have heard about this before. I suppose it could have happened, if you were living under Nazi propaganda for most of your adult life and suddenly that world view falls apart because you are soundly defeated by people you thought to be your inferiors, then you might start to question everything and end up in all kinds of strange epistemic places.
On the other hand, I am not sure that guilt about being complicit in the Shoa has much to do with it. The standard position of the perpetrator generation was denial. Almost nobody wanted to talk about it ca. 1945. It was up to the next generation to start talking about what horrors the Germans had committed, and establish the Erinnerungskultur. Still, I guess that the median German in 1945 might have been aware of claims of the SS committing mass murder and perhaps might also have felt that these claims were likely true, but it was very much not talked about.
The book remarks extensively on the "not talking about it" thing and makes a pretty reasonable case for the drastic uprise in disability (and subsequent faith healing) and witchcraft accusations as being a sort of spiritual outlet for a sublimated guilt.
"We don't talk about what we saw the doctor do to our neighbor in 1943, because at the time we were all complicit... but now every time I look at him I get a bad feeling... he might be a witch." And "I never, ever think about how I turned in my Jewish best friend's mother to the SS when she came to us for help, but for some reason now whenever I try to leave my house my legs don't work. But I've heard there's a guy who talks to god who can help people like me by asking god's forgiveness."
I couldn't find one with a quick search, but I believe there was also a great outpouring of New Age / alternative healing stuff in collapse-era Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia.
"Not talked about" and "not felt about" are two very different things. Indeed, adopting a strategy of not talking about something, and trying to make it socially costly for others to talk about it, is very often a coping response to feeling very bad (maybe guilty, maybe just traumatized) about something.
So I hardly think that "the standard position of the perpetrator generation was denial" shows that they didn't feel guilty about their complicity or inaction.
Apples and oranges is putting it very, very, very mildly. The persecution, dehumanization and murder of Jews took place both inside and outside of Germany, and was carried out on a massive scale right in front of the German populace. It's also a little odd to compare such a thing to an invasion, which, however misguided or reckless and ultimately disastrous it may have been, was an act of warfare at least theoretically directed against an enemy nation's military and leadership.
I think you're missing the point. If I didn't do X, why would I feel guilty about X? Whether X took place on the Moon or inside my house, whether it's an invasion or mass murder, why would I feel guilty about something I didn't do?
From my understanding, this will be mostly applied to statements of facts. If you can't convince the pubic about the falsehood of a factual claim, putting the issuer of the claim on trial instead will just make them look like a victim on top.
Trump voters don't vote for him because they believe that every word out of his mouth is the literal truth.
Also, I will be watching how uniformly this is enforced towards mainstream politicians who use false claims as an applause light. If every time some politician claims that something disproportionally affects women and is factually proven wrong, will they go to jail for it?
Re follistatin gene therapy. Follistatin plays an Important role in reproduction. Yet, I’ve heard nothing about the impact of this therapy on fertility. Are people aware of this relationship? Anybody studying it?
It's definitely the case that a lot of drugstores (I'm in Philadelphia) have a good bit of their merchandise in locked glass cases-- you have to get a staff member to get something out if you want to buy it. I don't *think* skin lotion is one of the items locked away.
First I heard that stuff way being stolen in quantity by organized groups to be sold on ebay. This didn't seem crazy to me. but I never checked for what was on ebay.
Then I heard there was no evidence of organized groups stealing at scale.
Then I heard this was a conspiracy by the drug store chains to have an excuse for closing locations, though I don't know why they'd go to the expense when they can just close stores.
The food isn't locked down. CVS carries a lot of shelf stable food which presumably could be resold. The original claim wasn't about desperate people stealing, it was about a few people willing to steal a lot, and a larger number people looking for bargains.
In California, there is ample evidence of organized retail theft, and of increased individual shoplifting.
I have read credible arguments from, among others, business/finance blogger Wolf Richter that drugstore chains have been using the (incontrovertibly real) increase in retail theft as an excuse to close stores that they would have closed anyway for the usual reasons: general cost-cutting plus a rational response to the fact that brick-and-mortar drug chains are getting murdered by online pharmacies. (Why do they need an excuse? Because when drugstore chains close pharmacies there is inevitably an outcry from the affected communities accusing them of heartlessly removing a vital lifeline for the poor and elderly, etc., which damages the brand.)
But of course, *sigh*, this is a culture war issue. So if you're a drooling commie SJW, you are required to pretend that the marked increase in retail theft is all in our imaginations, and that retailers of all kinds have invested real shareholder money into thick glass cases, additional security guards, separate health & beauty sections with a separate cash register and theft detectors, and so on, as an elaborate show to make marginalized people look bad. And if you're a perfectly rational Bayesian prior updater, you're required to pretend that every CVS is a constant war zone, picked clean of goods at all times, and that it's unthinkable for corporations to lie or fudge the truth about their reasons for closing stores. So here we are.
I explained why a corporation in the business of running brick-and-mortar pharmacies would feel the need to offer an excuse. it's hardly "deranged" to suppose that such a company might do so. Such companies quite commonly do so (whether the excuses offered are truthful or not is irrelevant, of course). Indeed, to suggest that public-facing corporations do not offer justifications to the public for their potentially unpopular decisions is...well, in an effort to turn down the temperature here I'll just say that it's a bit out of touch with the easily observable actions of many, many corporations taking many, many unpopular actions over the years--especially grocery stores or pharmacies closing locations.
The reason I commented in the first place is because Walgreens in particular publicly claimed that it was closing stores in San Francisco due to shoplifting.. Whether or not that was the real reason, it is incontrovertible that that corporation--which demonstrably exists and is traded on the NASDAQ--publicly offered an excuse for its closing of specific stores rather than simply closing them without comment.
>Of course a company will say why it's closing a store
OK, we're making progress: we're at least back into a model of reality where companies do, contra your first comment, actually quite frequently offer public justifications for actions such as store closings.
>What's deranged
That's a strong term, and you've used it twice now. Is it particularly important to you that your interpretation of the facts before you (including the ones that I've had to bring to your attention) in this case be the correct one?
> is to insist that somehow saying "we are closing this store because it is unprofitable" would be so risky to their brand image
You've already walked back your earlier assertion that corporations are too based and alpha to deign to justify their decisions about store closings to the public. Now that you agree that sometimes they do...did you think they do it because they like the sounds of their own voices? Almost by definition, if a company feels compelled to give excuses to the public for a controversial decision, they do so because they wish to mitigate damage to the image of their brand.
>that instead they'd be willing to lie to shareholders and the government about the reason.
Shareholders? The government? The cases I have in mind haven't involved anything other than statements to the media or press releases, and I don't believe I ever implied otherwise.
Now, earlier I had to nudge you toward a model of reality in which companies occasionally feel compelled to justify their decisions to the public. I hope I don't have to do the same for a model of the world in which the content of press releases or statements to the media are 1) at least somewhat frequently inaccurate and, generally, 2) able to be made without substantial risk of prosecution for violating laws concerning disclosures to shareholders or perjury.
To be clear, I don't have enough data before me to form a strong opinion about whether Walgreens in particular or retailers in general are being honest about their reasons for closing stores. I was simply calling people's attention to an argument I've seen made in favor of "no, at least some of them aren't." It may be the case that that argument is wrong, but it's hardly "deranged" to suggest that any company anywhere might be dishonest in its public statements.
In my city it appears be both organized groups and individuals, and the individuals both stealing for personal use and for redistribution, almost certainly resale or trade in kind. I hadn't heard about eBay, but it wouldn't surprise me if there were some more sophisticated groups trying to exploit law-enforcement-inefficiencies to make a profit. I wouldn't say that it's "desperate people", necessarily. If I had to guess, I'd say it's some of the more daring or entrepreneurial addicts who pull off the big hauls, and the rest are just targets of opportunity. Most of the homeless cohort is pretty desperate as is, and the most desperate ones are usually too weak and tired and beaten-down to try this sort of thing.
Basic food is available in a number of ways, and can be cheap, so I'm not surprised that it's not locked up. Things like powdered laundry detergent have been targets, and are apparently used for black market resale to non-homeless people. I suppose this category involves factors like "stores well", "everyone needs it", "compact value", and so forth (but big boxes of powdered detergent, seriously?). Maybe people are less willing to by stolen food off the black market, but are willing to buy stolen cleaning products? I did talk to someone in my local grocery store who said that the directives for which products to seal up are handed down from corporate, so there's probably a good bit of inefficiency in that response. Just because it's sealed up, doesn't mean that anyone in my state was stealing it.
Premium ice cream was a target for a while; I'm told because it's the perfect food for when coming down off of fentanyl.
Various far-left people and groups keep shifting arguments for why this isn't happening or isn't bad, and I can't keep up with what the current nonsense is. I've even heard that it's a deliberate policy of turning left-wing neighborhoods into food deserts. A consistent theme is that this is all covered by insurance so the corporations aren't actually harmed, which of course has a few enormous things wrong with it. (At least it's not usually by the same people who claim that it's morally praiseworth to harm giant corporations.) Most, I think they just want some vaguely clever response that they can repeat loudly and righteously so they look good on camera.
Seems to be Culture Warring; there are plenty of online videos of (alleged) organised shoplifting in San Francisco (and I presume other cities) where gangs just stroll in, strip the shelves, and run back out to the waiting get-away car.
This produces a lot of heat but not much light in the comments, where you can imagine the sides line up on (1) this is the fault of the crazy Democrat local government and (2) this isn't happening and if it is it's a conspiracy by the MAGA set and if it's not it's down to poverty and lack of opportunity that poor black people are being forced to steal necessary items.
One side is "Gangs run riot, stores have to lock goods behind glass, eventually stores decide to shut down, then the bleeding-hearts go 'why is nobody willing to open a drugstore in this area that badly needs one? it must be racism!'" and the other side is, as quoted, "it's a conspiracy to close down stores by the evil capitalist chains".
What the true facts about level of thieving are, God alone knows, I don't think we'll find them from online discussion of the problem.
A decade ago I worked for a drug store (CVS) in what is probably one of the highest income towns in America (far from the bay area or any or any other major metropolitan area). During the year or so I was working there, we got a call from... another store? district manager? that several stores had just been hit by "organized crime" (their words), who had just grabbed a bunch of makeup (the best ratio of profit margins to weight for both scalpers and the store) and walked out. We got sent pictures, and the shift supervisor sat in waiting; sure enough they walked in, grabbed a bunch, and walked out.
I got a comment on FB from a drug store person that there's a lot being stolen and resold at flea markets, which would be a lot harder to track than reselling on ebay. I don't think I've been seeing drug store stuff at flea markets, but I don't go to a lot of flea markets.
CVS and Target can close any store they want, for any reason or none. They don't need to make up an excuse.
The 2020 media environment in the US was really amazing in how it got almost all prestige media outlets in lockstep wrt the acceptable way to talk about things. This was the world of "Fiery, but peaceful, protests" and NPR running a positive piece on a book titled "In Defense of Looting" book. (I didn't read it; the interviewer and author seemed to be literally defending looting during riots as a good thing, but maybe if I read the book I'd have a more nuanced view of it.) I think a lot of this has stuck around, with a lot of media outlets basically seeing any CW-aligned question as not being about what statements are true or false, but rather about what facts would be good for the side they've decided are the good guys.
Long term, I wonder if that will be the last nail in the coffin of prestige media sources. Lying about stuff people see with their own eyes *really* destroys your credibilty fast.
"Myth vs. Reality: Trends in Retail Theft: Despite spikes in some cities, crime data doesn’t show a nationwide increase in shoplifting and other forms of retail theft."
"...Violent crime has declined nationally since jumping in 2020, but trends in retail theft are more difficult to assess, in part because of varying data collection and theft reporting methods. That said, the available crime data and industry figures cut against claims of a national increase in retail theft, despite notable spikes in some cities."
That crime data is almost certainly problematic. Several of the most hard-hit jurisdictions have prosecutors who refuse to prosecute shoplifting, meaning that police stop arresting shoplifters, meaning that stores stop reporting shoplifters. Meaning that it doesn't show up in the crime statistics. (Filing a criminal report can take a bit of work, and stores are understaffed as is.)
Not to mention that there are increasing numbers of people who are ideologically opposed to calling the police for almost anything. If you call the police on a shoplifter, and they actually find the person, and the person resists arrest and is shot, what then? How sure are you that the cops even found the right person? "Snitches get stitches" (the bizarro world version of "me too").
But at least bounded distrust still holds; when they say:
> Contrary to media accounts, reported incidents declined over the same period in San Francisco (down 5 percent)
We can have a decent idea of what's going on there. And they do mention this anecdote:
> Changes in how theft is reported may also influence crime counts and, by extension, perceptions of trends in retail theft. In one particularly dramatic case, a Target store in San Francisco reported 154 shoplifting incidents in September 2021 —10 times more than the preceding month — due to a “new reporting system” that made it easier for the store to document incidents with the police. The increase was so large that it skewed citywide data, making it look as if monthly shoplifting counts had doubled across San Francisco. Reporting discrepancies this sensational are likely rare. But smaller swings in the data may be more common.
But if the data is bad, then the proper conclusion is that we don't know whether shoplifting is increasing or not. I can imagine that there are just as many prosecutors who go out of their way to prosecute crimes like shoplifting, and therefore the police go out of their way to find them, or "creatively generate" incidents. I also imagine there are equal numbers of people who are ideologically committed to suppressing people in poor urban areas, for example by generating more arrests. So, on a theoretical level, it's a wash either way.
The article I linked to claims that despite spikes is some cities (which are therefore real) overall retail theft hasn't increased nationwide. And if, as you say, the change is due to a change in reporting procedures, then there isn't a real increase there either.
Any crime is too much, but it isn't really increasing, is the point.
> But if the data is bad, then the proper conclusion is that we don't know whether shoplifting is increasing or not.
I basically agree. We have a number of individual reports that it is, but no solid data. I'm going with the reports (including my own eyes), but that's my choice.
I don't think your "wash" analysis is quite right, though. There's a lot of reasons why it might be down in many places but up in a few particular cities. The key is that those cities lean left, and elect officials who lean left, and drag their police into superficially acting left, and most especially who provide the sort of homeless services that encourage people to travel hundreds of miles. (Not to mention that a left-leaning population is going to be more welcoming.)
The upshot is that I think these factors mean that the greatest increases are going to be located in the places least likely to report them.
> Any crime is too much,
This is largely irrelevant to the discussion, but have you heard the phrase "the optimal amount of X is not zero"?
"The increase was so large that it skewed citywide data, making it look as if monthly shoplifting counts had doubled across San Francisco"
I like how the 'real' explanation for this, which is supposed to reassure us all about the level of crime, is that "no, there weren't more thefts, there were more *reported* thefts, so they really were robbing this much all along!"
My city had some "renter protection" laws during covid that I think drove rental housing prices up. One made it hard to evict people, and another required owners to accept the first qualified applicant. I think there were also restrictions on the types of allowable qualifications. The result seems to have severely damaged the rental market.
I went to see Civil War to a small local movie theater with friends yesterday. It was mostly a confusing experience.
Spoilers, not rot13:ing them because there's not really that much to spoil here:
I knew that the movie would try to present an "second American civil war" without trying to get too political - a befuddling decision itself - but the movie doesn't really commit to any narrative.
Is the WF justified in rebelling against the authoritarian president? Maybe? They vaguely indicate that the president is bad (he's on a third term!), but the loyalist forces are not shown doing anything particularly bad (unless you count that fed riot cops are tetchy in a situation where a suicide bomber might strike at any moment), and all the war crimes are committed by WF or the presumably WF-affliated Hawaiian shirt irregulars who execute surrendered uniformed troops. But since there's no weight to either side it's not really a "war is hell, both sides are bad" thing either.
Are they trying to portray Wagner Moura's character as someone who is doing a toxic masculinity? Maybe? Is it bad that the one community has decided to go on conducting life as normal expect with snipers on roofs? Maybe? The clearest narrative ark is the Kirsten Dunst character being on a suicide run after "losing her faith in journalism" (lol) and, in the end, willing her photography mojo to Cailee Spaeny figuratively through the lens of a camera, but since we've established that photojournalism is basically useless for anything besides taking cool photos and seeking thrills, we should we care?
The only scene with actual tension is the one with Jesse Plemons and his racist militia, and that's partly because Jesse Plemons is a great actor (some said during Breaking Bad that Jesse Plemons is a dollar store Matt Damon, I argue that eventually we'll see Matt Damon properly as a dollar store Jesse Plemons), but also in large part because these guys at least seem to hold an actual ideology and be actually doing things that happen in actual civil wars, ie. running a death squad on ethnic/religious basis. I've seen some indicate that the whole rest of the movie is basically a long intro and outro to the Jesse Plemons scene.
It was probably a good idea for them to make a war movie about reporters. Since many journalists are a obsessed with the idea of their social relevance, getting 5 stars in magazines doesn't seem particularly hard, especially since I don't think the movie was advertised as concentrating as heavily on journalism as it was.
2.5/5, 2 for some cool shots and for not being too long (though you could have easily cropped out half a hour by cutting back on some early stuff and the unnecessarily long DC fight scene) and 0.5 extra for the Jesse Plemons scene.
No, I looked at my comment before posting and concluded that it doesn't really include something that would count as a "spoiler" in the sense that it reveals a major plot twist in advance, namely since there aren't major plot twists or secrets to be spoiled as such.
All the reviews by people who went to see it have been "This is rubbish", so I don't think that there is much danger of spoilers. The general tenor has been in agreement with Tatu; there is no plot as such, just Photojournalist Angsty Lady and her merry band driving around the country.
You can't even extract "Orange Man Bad" as the 'point' of the movie, because nobody is given any sort of reason or set of demands for what they're doing. They just all divided up and started shooting.
I kept thinking about how this would still provide a good setting for a CRPG (why are there comparatively few CRPGs situated in a present-day-style wartime setting?), and it struck me that the plot, such as it was, was almost literally a CRPG plot already.
We start with the tutorial (water riot) where we get a refresher on how to use action points, take photos, communicate, even transfer an item to a party member. Then, at the hotel, the main quest (or maybe a big DLC quest?) starts and the party is assembled.
An early random encounter demonstrates that one party member is low on the levels or maybe has the wrong skillset, and the narrative has told us that the main quest's final encounter is dicey, so the party decides to grind side quests for EXP. They even visit a literal shop and a literal rest site.
During one of the side quests the party encounters an enemy (Plemons) that's a bit too high for their current levels, so in addition to two temp party members who were probably hardcoded to be killed anyway, they lose one of the main party members. After this, they find out that the main quest's time limit has run out and they're locked out of the best ending. However, the story graciously lets them go through the final battle for a secondary ending.
Alex Garland has apparently served as a video game writer as well, so I guess it sticks.
I haven't seen the movie, but I get the impression is that the point is wars happen because the two sides are willing to use ordinary people as a background.
Maybe the point is that photojournalism (and war coverage in general) isn't this big deal about recording and revealing truth, it's just about making journalists feel they're important when they drop into conflict hotspots and snap their little photos and then zoom out again?
That the real point of it all is "Man, this will win me a Pulitzer!" so they don't know and don't care about what is going on, about what A and B are fighting each other, it's all the same to them what the ostensible reason for the conflict is, they're just interested in the cool images they can get?
Like, they sort of hint that the Nick Offerman President character might be influenced by Trump, but he's not, really. His mannerism are not particularly Trumpish; he holds some speeches where he mentions the flag and God and such, but those would be more normie-Republican coded, and he could even be a Democrat. Completely anodyne, a waste of an actor.
I saw that in clips and my reaction was "They're trying to say 'this is Trump' without saying 'this is Trump'. but even worse, they're conflating 'normie-Republican' (as you say) with 'MAGA redhat loon Jan 6th coup democracy dies!!!!' in order to paint all Republicans as 'they're all like that, it doesn't matter who gets elected, any Republican is Trump-lite'" and that was so dumb and betrayed a lack of understanding of what is going on. Clearly we are supposed to just know by innate instinct who the Good Guys are and that naturally they vote Democrat 🙄
Yeah, but the WF rebels aren't really particularly Democratic-coded either. The only thing hinting into that direction is that they are vaguely alluded to being allied to "Portland Maoists", but in another scene, there are probably-WF-affliated militiamen wearing boogaloo boys Hawaiian shirts. A thematic mess.
Have culture wars online died down in general, or is it just that this place is much less culture war-y than SSC? It just occurred to me that I haven't seen a lot of angry online CW disputes over the past couple years. Plenty of arguments about the ME of course, but that's over a war-war not an argument about bathrooms or whatever. I thought once we got back into an election year that the CW heat would start to burn again, but that doesn't seem to have happened. Is it over?
Funnily enough I've also seen the claim that the culture war is over made on Tumblr, but with more of a smug implication that it's over because the SJW/woke side won.
This place is a lot less heated because The Rightful Caliph does not put up with any of that, so we are on our (semi-)best behaviour.
If/when I really get into Culture War stuff, I do it on other sites (and regularly tussle with the mods of those). On here I try to remember my party manners 😀
I think the ME is taking up the energy. I think most of us are here for interesting discussions with intelligent people, and are not so much invested in waging the culture war. It's satisfying to snark about my outgroup, but I try to keep it down to avoid polluting the environment too much.
And, at least for me, most other issues have settled down. I know roughly where I stand, and am willing to talk about it with reasonable people, several levels inside a comment chain, or preferably in a hidden thread. Current events might warrant a bit of discussion. But most of the time, I'm not interested in charging headlong into the melee and using Smite Evil on a bunch of monsters that I can tell from sight are racially Always Evil.
SSC forked into DSL and ACX; with some overlap but not much compared to the total ACX commentariat. DSL I think got most of the "right wing" posters, and most of the culture war because it had enough combatants for such. ACX seems much more consistently blue-grey, to use the old SSC language, which makes it more congenial but - aside from Scott's posts - less broadly interesting.
Funny, because from my point of view, this place seem to lean right, probably because it leans skeptic, and skeptic lends itself to "small c conservatism" in many ways. It also seems to lean "Libertarian", which is more right than left, at least in the US.
According to the latest survey, almost 65% of the audience identifies as either liberal or social-democratic, against just over 30% identifying as either conservative or libertarian. (2024 poll, "Political Affiliation") Also, Democrats outnumber Republicans by 32% to 8%. (2024 poll, "American Parties")
You may be used to an environment where liberal politics are the overwhelming consensus, which isn't the case here. That would explain why this place seems to lean right, while actually being well left of center compared to the American population.
It's probably to the right of the median for young, urban, college-educated Americans, and thus to the right of any definition of "center" that comes by way of the US mainstream media(*). And to the right of most of Europe. But it's to the left of SSC, definitely to the left of DSL, and I think to the left of American society as a whole. SSC was unique, and wonderful. ACX on its best days can maybe equal that, but it's bigger and it can make Scott a decent living, which is not a trivial consideration.
*ETA: Or to the right of the consensus of most not-explicitly-right-wing parts of the internet.
"It's probably to the right of the median for young, urban, college-educated Americans"
Well, I'm only one for three there, so my own perception of this place remains unexplained. Also, I have never cared what most people on the internet think about anything, and I'm not starting now.
Slate Star Codex, the blog Scott Alexander ran before ACX. And Data Secrets Lox, a forum created by and for the SSC commentariat as a new home, when SSC went away and it wasn't clear if or when Scott would have a new forum of his own.
You may be able to discern an anagrammatic theme in the naming.
Speaking of culture war, there is also themotte.org which took over the periodic culture war threads after some people on the internet became annoyed with opinions in the SSC CW threads and decided to go after SSC because of them.
What Nancy and NotA said. DSL also had a first-mover advantage, being set up by SSC refugees in the immediate aftermath of the SSC shutdown, while it took a while for Scott and Substack to get everything arranged for ACX.
That initially gave DSL a good spectrum of commenters, which combined with a good comment interface made for a decent forum. That might have continued for many years if ACX had never happened; instead we got the fork.
I first learned about it in Naval Gazing, yet another SSC-spawned blog (free of culture warfare, but heavy on naval warfare). But there was a lot of general outreach, trying to find all the SSC regulars and let them know.
I also learned about it on Naval Gazing. Prior to SSC going down I was a long time lurker...DSL was great for a while, but it's been getting steadily less interesting as it undergoes evaporative cooling.
Yeah, I clicked the link, read a few threads, and was reminded why I am not a regular reader.
The comment interface is way faster, but I think tree structure is better than linear; it is easier to see who responds to whom. But the noise-to-signal ratio feels worse; it is almost like the average internet debate for smart people.
I think that tree vs. linear isn't an obvious choice, and it's bet to make it a convenient option. I think the Tor linear structure was fine, and Reactor wrecked it by making it tree, though I admit putting replies in a tiny font made it worse.
I think this is basically correct. My assumption is that the culture war will be properly over once it's uncontroversial to admit that culture warring was something the left did, contrary to their shrilly strident narrative that it was the right that was waging a culture war against all of their objectively correct positions that had all been status quo forever anyway.
I think the idea that the Culture Wars are over is wildly optimistic. Everything seems to be polarized these days--opinions are as deeply divided as ever, and regardless of who wins in November, none of it is going away.
I'm not saying it *is* over, I'm saying you will know it is by that token, when it happens. *Right now* you'd have better luck getting an average leftist to catch a squirrel with his bare hands and flay it alive than to admit this.
The people on the Left that I know are pretty convinced that the Right started it all, way back in the 1980's with the Moral Majority. The creation of Fox News was another milestone they would point to.
But I'm not saying one side or the other is more culpable with respect to cultural propaganda, quite the opposite.
Uh, metoo was blatantly obviously a retarded lynch mob mass hysteria that led to exactly, precisely nothing good whatsoever, so I doubt we'll be able to see eye to eye on prediction probabilities :-D
No, it was pretty close, and could have gone either way. My read at the time was that it was Clinton's election to lose, and she did.
It's different now--everyone has heard the arguments on both sides ad nauseum. It's all about a very small number of swing voters right now, and they haven't engaged yet.
Has anyone seen accounts by the children of wealthy parents who were busted a few years ago for using various frauds to get their kids admitted to college? I'll take interviews, articles, anything where these kids tell the story and its consequences from their point of view.
I haven't seen anything like that, but I think I can imagine what they would tell you off the record -- all rich kids pay for school admissions, it's just that there are proper channels that are more expensive, and side channels that are relatively less expensive (still very expensive though) but sometimes blow up... which is what happened now.
The thing that makes most people outraged is *not* the thing that makes it a crime. Most people are outraged that rich kids can pay for school admissions... but this is actually business as usual, this is exactly how the system is designed to work, this is how those schools got most of their wealth. The actual crime was that some families tried to get a discount by paying a wrong person instead... and unlike those who did the same thing in previous years successfully, these were unlucky and got caught.
*
Note that I am *not* defending those families: they did the thing that many people consider immoral, and on top of that, they also tried to cheat to get it cheaper. But the public outrage is actively misdirected by journalists here -- what people are outraged about is the ability to "pay to win" in a supposedly meritocratic educational system, but what the targets are selected for is "paying less than they were supposed to". They are punished for trying to cheat the people who are organizing the immoral thing, not for participating in the immoral thing per se. If this type of crime is successfully discouraged, it will not result in more fairness, but in the existing unfairness being more profitable. People participating in the outrage blindly are actually helping the thing they are outraged about.
Part of the cheating to get in situation might be that people have a reasonable sense that a good bit of admissions are arbitrary. Why is being good at an unusual but respectable sport an advantage? This is silly. Why not cheat?
"All rich kids" is I think misleading. Starting with, what's your definition of "rich"? Because the normal price for admission by generous above-board donation to the school, for any elite university, is now in the eight-figure range. Billionaires will probably pay that without hesitation; hectomillionaires might do it after thinking about it, but garden-variety multimillionaires and celebrities are priced out of that market.
And I'm skeptical that there's really that much public outrage about the handful of billionaires' kids, particularly when they are actually pumping tens of millions of dollars into the school. Things like legacy admissions are much more common, just as unearned, and don't have an obvious up side to the other students or parents, so those seem to generate more heat.
Paying half a million to a "fixer" to get in through the back door is also unearned, also does nothing for the rest of the students, and is just plain sleazy but in a novel and interesting way that people will pay attention to.
The morality of not stealing luxury cars and big-screen TVs is for the poor, or relatively poor, because the rich will simply buy the things.
Buying a thing from its rightful owner, at a mutually agreeable price, is not immoral. Not even if you're rich, and no matter how many people would rather the rightful owner not offer that thing for sale. Bribing one of the employees of the rightful owner to open the back door and let you pilfer the warehouse, is theft and is immoral. Even if you're poor, and no matter how much you really really really want the thing that rich people can afford and you cannot.
Someone will no doubt want to bring up the alleged nobility of a starving peasant stealing a loaf of bread from an uncaring Scrooge, but we're talking about a ticket to USC for someone who didn't bother to pay attention in high school, blocking that same opportunity for someone who actually earned it.
I know about the many ways rich families pay for admission, or pay for things that make admission more likely (tutors, SAT prep etc.) But I recently met someone whose family paid in quite a direct way for admission to a prestigious university, and is profoundly affected by the knowledge. Know someone else who, like maybe 30% of kids at their prep school, got a diagnosis of ADHD from a neurologist, which qualified them to have 50% more time to take the SAT. That person also is very disturbed by the feeling that they're an imposter. It's Imposter Syndrome, but with some reality basis -- though in fact both people are quite smart, as evidenced by their college performance and later achievements.
Viliam, these 2 people would definitely *not* tell you off the record that it's no big deal because everybody wealthy does some version of what their families did.
I agree. The person feels awful. On the other hand, the original testing was done when he was 15 or so, and nobody said outright, "we're going to just pay a doc to say you have a disability, then you'll get 50% longer on the SAT, OK son?" He was doing badly in school (mainly because he wasn't trying) so taking him for neuropsych testing wasn't a ridiculous thing to do. And at the time he had the testing he did not know about the hidden advantages of getting labelled as someone with ADHD or severe test anxiety, just thought his parents were making too big a deal of his not being an achievatron. It's easy to hate on the kids who have parents who do this kind of shit, and to imagine they are fully on board and think it's fine, but the 2 examples I've seen so far of these kids have really been harmed by the "help" their parents gave them.
Parents are supposed to do these things in a way that their children won't find out, until maybe much later, so they can believe they won in a meritocratic competition.
If you want your kids to win at life, "unfair advantages" + "clear conscience" is the right combination for producing success, optimism, and self-esteem.
There is a similar thing with the state universities here that doesn't involve money.*
The investigating media back when we had more of that did a deep dive into college and law school admissions at Big State U's. They found pattern of a lot of "exceptions" that were found to be paired with letters written on the lucky person's behalf, by legislators. The letters were anti-correlated with e.g. LSAT scores.
These tended to be the nieces and nephews and friends' kids of the politicians.
It was very well-documented, but didn't amount to anything. This is not the sort of privilege anybody in power is inclined to deprive themselves of. You get a true bipartisan spirit on that!
And too, it didn't neatly fit the narrative of privilege. The majority of the recipients of the unmerited acceptances were from the "poorest" part of the state.
*Of course it did invove money, because legislators award money to the universities to some degree.
Also the tax fraud part of it. Families involved in this scam didn't just "pay money to try to get Timmy into a better school," the guy running the scam had a fraudulent 501c3 that scam participants "donated" to as payment for his services. They then went back at the end of the year and tried to deduct the donation as charitable when they filed their taxes. That's why it got to the level of criminal charges against many of the participants - they didn't just want to cheat to get their kids better college admissions, they committed fraud so that they could deduct the cost of that cheating from their taxes as a charitable donation.
My understanding is that there was bribery involved, too. I pay off the underwater basketweaving coach of Prestige U to say he wants my kid for the underwater basketweaving team, take some pictures of my kid in a swimming pool with a snorkel, weaving a basket, and then he gets in. I don't think you'd actually get a criminal fraud charge if you just helped your kid lie about extracurriculars in his application.
To a first approximation, the crime wasn't buying their kids' way into prestigious colleges--you can do that by making a big enough donation. The crime was buying their kids' spots at the prestigious colleges from scalpers instead of from the university.
I thought it was such a strange thing to risk. There are so many colleges - who cares which one your kid goes to? If she's a girl mostly interested in fashion and her own looks, as seemed to be the case with the celebrity ones - she will be more likely to stay the course at a lesser school anyway. This is what "marketing" majors are for. I don't know if these Hollywood people are sensitive about their own intelligence, so that to admit your kid is no genius (or no athlete?) would be too hard? But it's not like anyone would be fooled in that way. Or care.
What a bizarre final parenting lesson to teach your kid.
In the case you're probably thinking of, note that neither parent ever graduated from college themselves, but managed to work their way into elite society in ways that many would consider shallow and superficial. From some of the comments I've seen, they were rather insecure about that and wanted to make sure their children had all the educational advantages they didn't, while becoming Properly Elite in a way that a BA from Cal State Northridge really doesn't facilitate.
If you've never been to college, you might not be well equipped to determine which universities do or do not offer a solid education. And if you're also rich, you'll probably want to err on the side of caution with your own kids.
Yes. I just suspect that most people who are outraged wouldn't agree with a statement "they should have paid the full price of 'pay to win' instead" (in which case they wouldn't be required to lie about sport teams). And yet, if the parents did so, the outrage wouldn't be aimed at them now.
I have a question for those concerned about extinction risk: if intelligent life were discovered elsewhere in the universe, would that make you less worried about it because intelligent life would survive even if humans went extinct? Contrariwise, if it were somehow proven that no other intelligent life exists, would that make you more concerned?
There are x-risks which only affect our rock here and then there are x-risks which affect our light cone.
For the former part, I think there would some solace in the fact that someone else will try to get some utility of all that previously mostly pointless universe.
For the latter, I would consider an extinction which also proceeds to transform the rest of the galaxy into paperclips to be much worse. (I would still update the odds for great filters, though.)
No and no. I feel a bond with the beings on my planet, especially the ones of my species, and especially especially for certain members of my species. It's not because they're intelligent life, it's because they're all sweet embraceable you's. I'm not exactly a fan of intelligent life, and in my dark moods I think it's unfortunate that even the forms of it on our planet exist. New beings are wired to start life with such joy and excitement, and so many then go on to lives of entrapment, lethal boredom, or pain. And then they die in pain.
I dunno Moon Moth. It's imaginable that we make it better for people. But for animals? They eat each other. And there is no hospice for them, no morphine. Their deaths must be terrible, panting alone in the bushes. I know most people don't think about this, but it forces itself into my mind.
That's the hope of the glorious AI-run transhumanist future, though. We didn't find God so we build one instead, who can track the fall of every sparrow. Or something. Maybe build a simulation where nothing ever *really* suffers, and upload everything into it. Maybe there's just a little suffering-counter in the corner of our vision, with the current level and the lifetime total, and an odd but harmless situation so we don't accidentally set fire to ourselves.
I do think of it, sometimes. I'll spare you an example from last year. But also think about it sometimes when I play with cats, and they catch the toy in their mouth, bring it down with their weight on top, and do the little headshake to snap its neck. But the cats are cute, too.
Depends on how similar that life is to us. If it's similar enough to be comprehensible to us then yes, it genuinely would make me feel better (both in itself and in that its discovery implies better odds of survival for us in several ways).
"Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us." -- Bill Waterson, of Calvin and Hobbes
This is not just you, but I am so tired, so goddamn tired, of the habitual undercutting of species self-respect for humans. It may have had an intent to prevent grandiosity, but I believe it's become a thing in itself, and not healthy.
That’s what someone says when they want you to set your sights a little lower, to make your goals a little less lofty. “Only human”. It’s supposed to be a reminder that, when you get down to it, we are basically chimps who traded a little less hair for a little more brain. “Only human” means: you’re limited. You’re fragile. You are flawed. And all that is true – but that doesn’t preclude greatness.
You, and I, are human.
When evolution created us as weird chimps to hunt and gather on the African Savannah, we said “how about we thrive on every corner of every continent instead?” And when evolution looked at us skeptically and said “um…even the really cold parts? Like, there’s this whole Scandinavian region you are really not cut out for” we said “ESPECIALLY the really cold parts, and when we get there we’re going to invent IKEA because frankly these rocks are uncomfortable”, at which point evolution presumably threw up its hands and left the weird insane chimps to it.
We are the humans! We are the ones who write, who speak, who invent! We are the strange chimps who always found a way to thrive, on every corner of this ridiculous planet, no matter what it threw at us!
We are the humans! We are the ones who saw a poisonous tree, thought “that looks delicious”, turned it into almonds, and now we pour it in our coffee for breakfast! We are the humans, and we have it in ourselves to care, and love, and protect all of our people! We are perhaps uniquely endowed with the ability to go beyond what drives evolution instilled in us, to love and care and protect for its own sake.
We are the humans! We figured out what the stars are made of! We’ve peered into distant galaxies! We’ve mapped the echoes of the very beginning of the universe! We figured out what EVERYTHING is made out of, and now we take the fundamental building blocks of everything and SPLIT THEM APART to make energy. Like that! (said as a light turns on) We are the humans, and after spreading to every corner of this planet, we looked up and said “yeah, that looks good.” We are the humans, and if you want to do a full headcount you’re going to need to go into orbit. We are the humans, built to run on the Savannah, but now you can find our footprints on the moon.
We are the humans. We’re the reason you don’t see Smallpox around anymore. It got a bad case of us. Oh, and by the way, we’re not done. You know polio? It killed or paralyzed five hundred thousand of us in 1950. But humans noticed, and humans said “FUCK NO”, and inch by inch we’ve fought back, from half a million each year to just THIRTY-FOUR cases of polio in the wild in 2016. This year? Only SIXTEEN. Polio is at the gates of oblivion, and we have a message: Give smallpox our regards.
Next time someone says that you’re only human, forget the “only”! You are one of THE humans! The truth-seekers, the peacemakers, the atom-splitters, the moon-walkers, the artists, the dreamers, the lovers and protectors – The rebels who defy the world they were made for, who never stop dreaming and working for a better tomorrow.
We are not done. We have countless problems left to solve, many of them self-made. But we are the humans, and we don’t give up, and we have come this far, and as long as even one of us is still breathing, we fight – because we are ONLY HUMAN.
That's a somewhat different point. I take "only human" to have different meanings. It can mean don't be too ambitious, or as you say, don't be ambitious at all.
For example, I used to believe I ought to be able to come up with arguments which would convince people immediately. This was simply a wrong ambition, and I'm glad I gave it up.
On the other hand, I can be amazed that I had such a crazy ambition, and that gets into not acknowledging that part of being human is sometimes getting things wrong.
I think there's a difference between "have modest ambitious" and "your species is fundamentally disgusting".
Maybe it's a rational response to the observation that the species keeps trying over and over to come up with ways to make itself miserable if not destroy itself.
The thing is, the human race isn't close to ideally competent. It also has remarkable achievements and isn't reliably self-destructive. I feel like too much emotional weight is getting put on the negative side.
No one is perfect. If one cannot laugh at oneself, one is in a sorry state indeed. I think that includes laughing at one's species. Laughing does not mean one's species is always laughable. The highs do not cancel the lows, nor the lows the highs.
Anyone know where I can chat about a relative's stomach ulcer (caused by H. Pylori bacteria) diagnosis via endoscopy? I looked at Reddit but the discussions seemed somewhat useless on this subject.
If someone here knows the answers, my questions are :
1. What is the typical treatment i.e. what cocktail of antibiotics? Other dogs and donts with it, like diet? Is it true you have to avoid spicy food?
2. How do you tell if you're cured? Are there tests other than endoscopy? I see a lot in Amazon but no clue if they're any good.
Had an ulcer diagnosis years ago, H. Pylori. Funny thing, I don't remember having an endoscopy... Was it diagnosed from poop? Sorry, really can't recall anymore.
Anyway, the symptoms were mild, but persistent; a kind of stomach pain that was just... different from anything else I felt before.
You would probably remember the endoscopy. You have to swallow the device -- the camera? -- on the end of the tube, before they can feed the rest of the tube down, & you have to be awake for that. It feels like swallowing a set of car keys. After that they give you IV Versed which either blisses you out or just knocks you out, but swallowing those keys is definitely memorable.
I'm going to have an endoscopy on Thursday, never had one before. Thanks for telling me about the car keys, but I'm still going to refuse sedation if I can - have to hang around being observed for 4 hours afterward, then have someone babysit me for 24 hours? All for the sake of a 15-30 min procedure? Forget that, they can just give me topical anaesthetic for my throat and I'll practice my "swallow bunch of keys" skills!
It's actually nowhere near as bad as swallowing a bunch of car keys!
As I recall, it did not actually hurt -- the problem was more that I thought it was going to, & was also afraid that it was going to get stuck in my throat. It did not get stuck, and swallowing was weird and uncomfortable but not, as I said, actually painful. Also, I've had a thing about swallowing pills & stuff all my life -- have a fear that they'll get stuck in my throat. It was pretty bad when I was a kid, but I have now overridden the urge not to swallow a handful of pills so many times that it's greatly weakened. But I think the remnant of that old phobia probably made swallowing the damn thing harder for me than for most. Anyhow, hope you get good news & useful info from the procedure.
And about staying at the doctor's for 4 hrs and then being observed for the next 24: I have disregarded that several times after procedures that knocked me out, and just announced that I was leaving. They can't actually make you stay. What they'll do to cover their asses is have you sign a form saying you're leaving against medical advice. In the US the med they give you is intravenous Versed, which is in the same family as Valium. It is *extremely* pleasant. Knocks out all anxiety, and gives you a lovely feeling of blissful wellbeing. But it wears off very quickly once they stop the IV, and you feel like your usual alert and anxious self again. I do think it would be a bad idea to drive after the procedure, but getting a ride home once I felt awake and able to walk normally has always worked out fine for me. I suppose there's a small risk that the procedure itself did some damage and they're monitoring for signs of internal bleeding, but the chances of that sort of damage seem quite small, and if it had happened you'd probably have pain or vomit blood or something.
I've done the "leaving against medical advice" a couple of times before, and they were *extremely* pissed-off about it. But I did it because "I've been here for 36 hours, you've done Sweet Fanny Adams for the problem I came in with, and I need to go to work and I might as well be home in my own bed as in this crappy overflow ward".
I am obese, which is one reason; anaesthesiologists hate sedating fat patients https://www.asahq.org/madeforthismoment/preparing-for-surgery/risks/obesity/ so I decided since it's a minor procedure and there's no good reason to get sedation (apart from "yes I'd like to have a happy daze going on") and put up with the bitching from the anesthesiologist (I had one elective procedure cancelled because the anaesthesiologist refused to do it) before, during and afterwards, I might as well put on my brave face and tell them "It will not be required". Avoiding discomfort not worth the hassle of the consultant and the knock-out guy arguing beforehand over "I'm not doing this" and delaying the procedure that I just want to get done and over with as fast as possible so I can get home and get on with things.
Oh, I see the complication. Well, it may be that anesthesiologists are not concerned about Versed the way they are about general anesthesia, where they use true knock-out drugs. Versed gives what's called "waking sedation. " Lots of people who had Versed have dim memories of the procedure after, and you're also able to respond while full of Versed to things like "could you turn your head a little?" But I'm sure you're up to doing this without drugs if that's called for.
Ouch, no, definitely would have remembered that! I have had a lung endoscopy many years ago, but of course no swallowing devices was involved for that one. They did knock me out quite hard for it though, I only remember being wheeled in, and then waking up and sitting in there for a few hours, waiting for the swallow reflex to coming back.
I am not an expert, but my understanding is that something like 90% of ulcers turn out to be caused by that bacterial species, and can be cured with antibiotics.
I had an ulcer diagnosed by endoscopy, and my only treatment was to take omeprazole (reduces stomach acid) for --- I'm not sure how long, I think something like a couple of months. That cured me, or at least caused all my symptoms to go away. If 2 mos. on the medication had not given the ulcer enough time to heal I would have known, because the ulcer caused a burning sensation that was different from regular heartburn. It's nos 10+ years later and I have not had a recurrence. I don't think my ulcer was a very large or severe one, and treatment may differ depending on had bad an ulcer you have, its location, etc. I'd recommend looking on Up to Date, a continuously updated online manual for doctors. I believe you can subscribe for a day or a week at a time. That will tell you what the standard treatment is, what are the indications for non-standard treatments, and what steps are needed to tell whether the ulcer has healed.
1. One small ulcer plus moderate inflammation in stomach.
2. Moderate amount of H pylori bacteria detected.
Treatment recommended is Omeprazole plus 2 antibiotics (clarithromycin 500 3x a day plus Metronidazole 500 2x a day).
Note : The standard treatment according to Google search is Clarithromycin plus Amoxicillin but he remembers being allergic to Penicillin as a child so they're not doing that).
The hook with these endless articles is anthropomorphizing animals by playing with semantics. If we suggest insects are conscious, that renders consciousness as unremarkable as sentience, with "awareness of internal existence" not referring to cerebral self reflection and understanding abstract concepts, but some banality. It kicks the can down the road to come up with other redundant terms for what distinguishes the human experience from animals.
As far as reader squabbling is concerned, which is mostly about our relationship with animals, consciousness is a red herring anyway. Skip to what you want to say.
“Inspired by recent research findings that describe complex cognitive behaviors in these and other animals, the document represents a new consensus and suggests that researchers may have overestimated the degree of neural complexity required for consciousness.”
Who decided complex cognitive behaviors indicate greater consciousness? People in apparent comas who cannot respond at all to the outside world sometimes indicate post-coma that they were acutely aware of what was going on around them. And I guess this means people with high IQ scores are capable of greater joy and suffering than the rest of us.
The confusion around this subject is startling. Why don’t we start with the one way we know of to temporarily and relatively safely separate a person from consciousness (general anesthesia), and try to determine what kind of neurological activity is necessarily present for consciousness to persist? This wouldn’t be remotely conclusive but it would at least be a scientific first step. Are people with high IQs (those that display more complex cognitive behaviors) more difficult to sedate? As far as I can tell, no data suggests this.
I'm a lot more inclined to believe in octopus intelligence than in bee intelligence.
The phrase "could only be described as play" would be assuming the conclusion, if it didn't require a giant leap to actually get from there to the conclusion. Also I notice that the title boldly states "have consciousness" but the text hedges with "a realistic possiblity". It's bad on purpose to make us click. And then talks about the Cambridge Declaration.
I'll again hold out and say that I have yet to hear a decent description of "consciousness", and until I do I hold it in about the same regard as I do the ancient Egyptian divisions of the soul.
Octopus opening a jar. If I had never seen a screw top lid before I think it would have taken me nearly this long to figure it out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kuAiuXezIU
They are quite smart. I feel sorry for them, since they usually have a solitary life, although maybe they wouldn't be equipped to feel what we feel, and maybe they have their own deep octopus feelings that we know not of.
Bees seem a nice simple example of how intelligent things need not be conscious. It seems equally a stretch both to deny that a hive is intelligent and to suppose it is conscious.
"I'll again hold out and say that I have yet to hear a decent description of "consciousness", and until I do I hold it in about the same regard as I do the ancient Egyptian divisions of the soul."
I think that's actually quite easy if you define it functionally, it's just that you're forced to be far more inclusive than most people want. To the point where you have to believe that the vast majority of total pleasure and suffering are being experienced by microscopic animals, and you have very good reasons to expect that many plants and single celled organisms also have consciousness (which in my view doesn't have to entail anything beyond the kind of rudimentary learning that even many plants and protists do).
I think consciousness is just the internal state which causes something to respond to stimuli, and actively seek or avoid it. I don't think it makes sense to say that a nematode that responds to avoid a given negative stimuli (and can even learn to avoid neutral stimuli it learns to associate with that) isn't suffering, yet try to say that a (insert the least intelligent animal you think has qualia) which behaves analogously *is* suffering.
I do appreciate the attempt to come up with a useful definition, but, to be an annoying rationalist about it, why would you choose the word "consciousness" for this? It seems bound to create confusion when combined with the many colloquial uses of consciousness.
Personally, I tend to call this sort of thing "sentient". Things that pursue pleasure and flee pain, and that have some sort of memory and ability to change actions in the future based on past experience. Anything capable of "suffering", from a certain sort of Buddhist perspective. I'm not sure if being able to "learn" is really part of it, but it seems inseparable given the limitations of our bio neural nets.
I actually think a lot of good would come from people being more coherent in how they talk about this subject!
I think my usage of consciousness captures the most important aspect of the term which refers to whether there's something that it's subjectively "like" to be a given mind.
Sure people lump in a lot of other cognitive traits in with consciousness usually, *but I think that doing this is bad* and pretty reliably leads to equivocation and sloppy thinking. For instance it leads people to have confused models that predict an organisms capacity to suffer based on irrelevant cognitive factors which there is no logical reason to expect should matter.
I think trying to define consciousness to include all the different cognitive traits people may intuitively want to include leads to people drawing a category which is ultimately arbitrary and doesn't "cleave reality at the joints" as it were.
I believe this is actually very important in many areas especially ethics, and this particular bad categorization leads many otherwise clever rationalists to believe really dumb things. For instance I remember Yudkowski saying some silly stuff about not thinking animals experience suffering (while insisting that people who think otherwise are confused). So I worry that being confused about this subject may literally contribute to existential AGI risk.
So please help me spread the word about the subject!
Since I constantly see people talking about ethics in ways which make no sense if they're considering the qualia of microscopic organisms. I personally care about moral agency, not the capacity to feel suffering, but I think people who care more about suffering as a moral principle really ought to know about this. Since when you consider microbe and plant suffering it makes it much harder and more technologically involved to try to minimize the suffering caused by your consumption choices. Plus if this knowledge becomes more widespread then it will lead to people writing complex utilitarian analysis which consider microbes that I'm sure I will find very entertaining to read (plus they may be useful for some of of my fictional worldbuilding :p)
The capacity for rudimentary learning is an integral aspect here. A normal thermostat doesn’t display this because that would be needlessly complex for its purpose. Even microbes are after all far more complex in their behavior than a thermostat.
Though I do think a lot of neural networks are probably conscious. So you could make a conscious learning thermostat, and in some contrived circumstances that might be useful.
>Being conscious is a bit more than just reacting to stimulus. The thermometer isn’t conscious.
As I said in my comment you do also require some learning to say something's probably conscious, but the variety of organisms that can display classical conditioning is extremely broad. I found an interesting paper that mentions various reasons you might expect that consciousness is actually a conserved trait predating multicellularity (since that seems more parsimonious than convergent evolution): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5413897/
It's not 100% clear in context what point your short story is supposed to make. However if the red dot is supposed to be an analogy for consciousness, then I think it only really works if you define consciousness in the sort of confused way which I complain about above.
Sort of the big feature of my model of consciousness is that it's completely functional. There's nothing spooky or nebulous about consciousness within my model, it's just the internal state which responds to stimuli through changes in its internal state that lead to the behavioral changes we call learning. Of course consciousness within this model is so incredibly simple that virtually anything which displays classical conditioning is probably conscious.
I grew up in a family where nobody killed insects -- not because of any religious or ethical belief, but just because it made all of us feel bad to do it. We lived in a tropical climate and the typical cockroach was an inch and a half long, and when I turned on the shower sometimes a big meaty spider came rushing up out of the drain. I'd call my father and he'd come catch the big bug in question in a cup or a paper bag and throw it out the window. I didn't even know that was unusual until middle school. Did we think they were conscious? Well, seems like there are degrees of consciousness. They're definitely more conscious than clothespins or the cucumber in the fridge. They run to avoid capture. Seems likely they feel pain when crushed -- since pain is a simple, effective mechanism for teaching animals not to do things that harm them. If you were designing a cockroach, would you just not bother with pain? Or is there some other way you could reduce its odds of destroying itself by walking into flames or whatever? I still catch bugs and throw them out the window. Seems better to err on the side of kindness, and it's really not more trouble than stepping on the thing then cleaning your shoe and the floor.
I always catch insects and throw them out the window. Except I swat any houseflies (don't get many, and if they get to the window first that's fine). Spiders can stay unless they look like they belong in the garden - and I move any hibernating butterflies to somewhere cool.
Houseflies are impossible to catch. Trick for getting them to fly out window: Close door to room, turn off lights, draw shades on every window but one, and open that one, including the screen. If the open window is the brightest spot in the room the flies will go straight toward it and out.
I would do that for bluebottles (carrion flies) because they have a use in nature. [Also if a mouse or something larger died in the walls, you won't get just one at a time.] And they are very enthusiastic about sunlight anyway, they want to fly out and find more corpses.
Houseflies do not get the full benefit of my pacific ways.
At one point, I had an infestation of grain moths-- small pale brown moths with a bit of iridescence. They eat grain and they're a problem if you store any. The right solution is bug-bombing, but at on point I was dealing with them by killing them by clapping them between my hands.
I was also doing meditation, and when I killed one immediately after meditation, I felt a huge jolt. I didn't end up respecting all life, I was just left with a question about what happened, and I still have no idea.
It was something I never want to experience again. People who meditate don't necessarily avoid killing-- is there a way to be less vulnerable? Might I have killed a moth with an unusually large soul? I have no idea.
Some Japanese soldiers in WW2 were Buddhists, they might have useful advice on how to be a meditator who is okay with killing. I think it probably involved some "not my karma -- I am just following orders" kind of thinking.
I generally try to avoid killing insects, but I make an exception for mosquitoes, moths (the kind that tries getting in my food), and ticks, because they are the ones who try to attack my body or property, so from certain perspective it's self-defense.
Tibet had armies until the Chinese conquered them. There were special Vajrayana rituals to cleanse the soldiers of their karma if they had to kill (there used to be a website that described the rituals, but I can't find it now). Also, a lot of Tibetan Buddhists are not vegetarians. As one lama told me (and I paraphrase), "There's not much except grass above 10,000 feet."
I think consciousness is a spectrum - insects and spiders seem to have some sort of internal life, although very limited, and are able to display difference in preference and personality. A lizard seems to have more going on, and a cow yet more. There are also differences that cut across this sort of general gradient - the average jumping spider, for instance, seems to have more going on cognitively than a goldfish does.
So on the basis of simple kindness, and of respect for another creature's existence that I'd wish to be respected in my own, I try to be as gentle as possible.
Just take that to it's logical conclusion (which unfortunately I've never seen anyone else do) and your logic here should extend far beyond just insects, or even just animals. Since having an internal state that avoid negative stimuli and seeks positive stimuli is something that many if not most organisms have a use for.
After all being able to show basic learning by associating a neutral stimuli with a negative stimuli seems to be present in so many different organisms that it could well be a conserved trait that predates multicellularity: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5413897/
I have taken it to its logical conclusion and contemplated that. The paramecia, etc. Tiny shrimp infants in our drinking water. Little sprouting things. I get it.
Oops. I replied to a different sub-thread with that link and I cut and pasted in there by mistake. Correcting the original post. Also correct link is here...
The logic of "bees are playing with things just for fun and therefore they must have consciousness" makes no sense. The argument hangs on this fun "not being connected with mating or survival". But when humans have fun it is a safe to bet that it has something to do with mating or survival, so if bees are different from humans in this way, it's odd to conclude that this difference implies a similarity.
It's cool to know that bees play, though. The scientists should try harder to figure out what it has to do with mating or survival.
OK, I'll bite. what does having fun as a human have to do with mating or survival? I suppose when you're young, doing something fun introduces you to potential sexual partners. I could see that going out clubbing or playing Twister (or better yet playing Strip Twister!) could be fun that leads to mating outcomes. But organized sports? Most sports are segregated by sex, so they don't seem to have much direct impact on mating. And they may have a negative impact on survival (certainly you're more likely to be injured playing sports than not playing sports). Rock climbing, white water rafting, parachuting, all come to mind as ways to have fun that are potentially contra-survival.
My thesis is that any typical behavior by a species has to do with mating and or survival. Survival here includes survival of your children or other close relatives. Part of why I am not a rationalist is that I don't think humans are good at figuring out which parts of our behavior are productive and which aren't.
Play/having fun obviously can serve a role in skill development and status seeking. Plenty of it may seem worthless, but I doubt that is true. Or at least no more worthless than any risk taking behavior.
I think playing may have helped survival in humans on relevant time scales (i.e. in hunter-gatherers or similar) by:
-Teaching members of a group to work together, important if you are to work as a hunting party or similar.
-Learning and exploring important skills for survival. For example hide and seek could teach you to hide from predators or stalk prey. Many games/sports teach important motoric skills and so on.
-Finding new inventions that may be important to survival by playing with what is available. For example finding new ways to use a tool or trap etc.
This is pure speculation on my part, but I'm sure more rigerous threatment of the subject exist among anthropologist etc.
Although I can't think of any references right now, what you've said jibes with what mainstream anthropologists and ethologists have posited.
Unlike many on this list, I'm not enamored of the theory that geniuses have moved civilization forward. I believe that ordinary humans working together have contributed to the bulk of our engineering and scientific progress. And in immature humans, I think games are key to learning cooperation and controlled competition in groups.
I agree. Every time people here talk about how selecting for intelligent embryos will improve the world, I say I think the world would benefit more from increasing the number of highly empathic people. Nobody even bothers to argue with me, they just ignore the idea. Does anyone really think the Israel/Palestine situation would get better if the leaders involved each had 10 extra IQ points? Even on here, with lots of smart people, I have seen someone in an Israel/Palestine argument change their mind about something exactly once.
>I say I think the world would benefit more from increasing the number of highly empathic people
I still continue to be skeptical. Most empathy is local. I interact with a tiny handful of people on a typical day. I try to make the day of the grocery store cashier that I interact with a bit better rather than a bit worse, but this is a tiny effect.
So sounds like genetic contribution is there, but not large. But you could probably get something more hereditary if you threw in a coupla related and desirable traits, prob. correlated with empathy, such as low propensity for violence & rage (you sound like you'd qualify for that trait). The thing about empathy is that I don't think it gives the person high on the trait an evolutionary advantage the way intelligence does. But I think having more empathic, even-tempered people in a group will give the *group* an evolutionary advantage.
Does anyone have a strong skeptical view (or analysis) of reincarnation parapsychology? I'm specifically referring to the work of Ian Stevenson, James Tucker, and James Matlock.
The evidence for reincarnated souls (from cases of the reincarnation type) seems much stronger than that for extraterrestrial UFOs, for example, but gets a tiny fraction of the interest. I struggle to find a plausible explanation for some of these cases taken in aggregate that doesn't pose at least some problem for materalism.
I think that the gist of the matter is that aliens do not imply new physics, while reincarnation requires the state of one brain to be preserved and then reapplied to another brain, and all of that occurring naturally using some particle which would have to be frequent enough to do the job while also being elusive enough that we have not detected it yet.
Put simply, say I require one unit of evidence that someone is an alien.
Then I might require ten units for the claim that they are able to teleport people like in Star Trek, and 100 units of evidence that they can transmit information at faster than light speed.
Reincarnation as a natural process would require our world to be so that teleportation of brain contents happens naturally without us being able to detect it. Let us say that this involves another factor of 1000 of evidence over the transporter device.
In fact, most of my probability mass for reincarnation is that it would be another intelligence (aliens, simulators) intentionally to mess with us, rather than a phenomenon which occurs naturally like the microwave background or tooth decay.
Why don't aliens require new physics? We don't have physics that would allow spacecraft to reach relativistic speeds. We don't have the physics that would allow wwarp drives, wormhole travel, or any FTL travel. Unless aliens are very very long-lived or have some sort of hibernation technology, crossing interstellar space would be a challenge under physics as we know it.
But if the Block Universe Hypothesis is correct that would allow for precognition, and some other forms of ESP. Likewise panpsychism isn't ruled out by contemporary physics (but it's probably unfalsifiable).
>We don't have physics that would allow spacecraft to reach relativistic speeds
Is this true? I believe it would require a lot of energy to accelerate a space ship to relativistic speeds (a large fraction of the speed of light), but would it require new physics?
As I understand it relativity says that from the frame of reference of the space ship, travel can be arbitrarily fast - it is from an outside frame of reference that the space ship will approach but not exceed the speed of light?
(Very possible that I'm wrong about that last part)
Not endorsing theories of aliens visiting earth, just interested in space travel in general.
IANAP, but E=MC^2 says that the mass of an object under acceleration will increase in a quadratic curve (sorry, I may be using the wrong math term) as the acceleration increases. And it would require a similar increasing curve of energy consumption to keep it accelerating. Anyway, speedswhere the relativistic passing of time would be slow enough to make it feasible to cross stellar distances in a human lifespan would require sources of energy we don't have at our disposal under our current physics. And if we figured out how to hibernate or to be put into a stassis for some long period of time, a slowboat would require more fuel than would be practical. A Bussard ramjet could theoretically collect enough interstellar hydrogen to give an interstellar vehicle a limitless supply of fuel, but that would require magnetic monopoles (and if I remember my popular science that I read a couple of decades ago magnetic monopoles would require supersymmetry to be true — and tests at CERN seem to have falsified supersymmetry).
Wormholes? Right now, they're mathematical abstractions that haven't been proven to exist. And how do you create a wormhole with the physics and energies we have at our disposal? And we probably can't access the energies that could create a wormhole.
Warp drives? We don't have a mechanism to create a localized warp bubble in space-time. And again, even if we did, we probably can't access the energies that could create to create such a thing.
The objects that were filmed darting around those Navy jets seemed to be inertialess. If they were physical objects, the aliens that created them would have to have had some way to remove mass from Baryons. If the our pion-condensate theory of mass is true (and I don't think it's even falsifiable at the energies we can access) then the aliens have some way to mess with the behavior of quarks without destroying the matter that's composed of those quarks.
I am not a physicist, though. And some of what I'm telling you I may be garbled. But, bottom line, interstellar travel would require us to access energies that are beyond our capability unless we make a some breakthrough in physics.
The Voyager probes will eventually reach other solar systems. Okay, they don't have any delta-v to decelerate, but in general we have the tech to escape Sol's gravity.
It is right that the travel times will be a bit on the long side, but a million years would probably suffice (Bring a book.)
> We don't have physics that would allow spacecraft to reach relativistic speeds
I would argue that we don't have the engineering to do that.
Standard proton fusion works like this:
4 H-1 --> He-4 + 26MeV
The (mostly nonrelativistic) velocity of the Helium nucleus would be sqrt(2E/m)=sqrt(2*26MeV/4000MeV), roughly.
So if you use proton fusion and exhaust the helium, that would get you to an exhaust velocity on the order of 0.1c . Put that into the rocket equation and build a space ship in which 90% of the mass is fuel, and you get a delta v of 0.2c without any new physics required. Enough to visit another star in a human life time. Just because humankind has been struggling with getting fusion energy to become viable for a few generations there is no reason to assume that we (or some aliens) might not solve it in a few more generations.
This is a good answer, and indeed your last paragraph is part of the actual response of materialists ("more likely to be alien teenagers than actual reincarnation, so even if you had a perfect CORT it wouldn't be a knockdown argument for dualism"). I think it's really wrong, though. Materialist priors are just way too high on materialism when there is still a lot that's not understood about consciousness. Willingness to believe in alien pranksters or faster-than-light travel is, in my view, rooted in a erroneous preference for tech-coded stuff. Science fiction is considered more plausible than other sorts of fiction, regardless of the evidence for each.
Ideas like "there is a soul, comprised of material we don't understand that travels between bodies in a way we don't understand" is way more intellectual parsimonious than "there are aliens on mars messing with us by frying 4-year old heads with prank rays to make us believe in reincarnation." Physics aside, this always felt like common sense to me.
I'm not sure if you're being intentionally uncharitable or just haven't understood my comment. I didn't say any scientists believe in FTL, or that FTL being impossible is a reason to believe in reincarnation.
quiet_NaN argued that reincarnation is ex-ante 1000x less likely than FTL information transmission. He further argued that, if they exists at all, memories of past lives is more likely to come from aliens messing with us than actual reincarnated souls. I disagree with both, and think there's a resistance to the reincarnation explanation because it's less science-coded than FTL travel or alien pranksters.
How is it ex-ante less likely than FTL travel? FTL travel is just as much a pseudoscientific hypothesis as reincarnation. OTOH some recent meta-analysis of precognition studies shows that there's a statistically significant effect that people can pick up information from the future. If time isn't sequential then all sorts of information flows are possible. And ultimately, reincarnation is a type of information transfer. Of course, this meta-study also implies it's possible to have information transfer at FTL speeds. So alien possession of human consciousness is not ruled out in that scenario.
As a youngster, I believed I was an alien intelligence sent here to collect as much data about humans and this planet as I could, before I die and they uploaded it. I still don't feel very human. Humans as species puzzle me greatly. ;-)
> FTL travel is just as much a pseudoscientific hypothesis as reincarnation.
From the numbers I originally stated, I think my priors were p(reincarnation)=p(FTL)/100.
FTL+special relativity breaks causality, which feels unlikely. Physics would still be salvageable, though.
OTOH, naturally occurring (no alien pranksters) reincarnation would require a mechanism such as souls which become unlinked from the brain at death and float invisibly around until they find another brain.
Scientists have looked at nerve cells and they appear to work through ordinary chemistry. We might not understand how huge numbers of such have to be wired to make a brain, but we have had some success with building artificial neural networks recently. If souls are real we basically deal with an antagonistically designed universe, the kind where God put dinosaur bones into the rocks to test our faith in Young Earth Creationism.
The bit about children spontaneously recounting a past life around the age of 4, I’ve seen this in one of my own children. Stories about “when I was a grownup”. Seems like a variation on the imaginary friend mixed with some archetype of incarnation. That is, I think this is a real psychological phenomenon but our understanding of the mind and especially the archetypical realms is limited. No non-physical spooky stuff required to explain.
Because I've shared my past life memories with others, people have opened up with me. I had an acquaintance who worked in a daycare/nursery school, and she would ask kids who they were before they were born. Some, but not all, gave her specific answers with some interesting details. Most of our memories of our early years get overwritten by or around age four. My stepson was older than four when I heard her tell me this. So I never got to ask him about who he was in his past life. But knowing about that memory loss, I monitored his memories from ages three onward. He loved the woman who ran his daycare. He'd talk about her all the time after we picked him up from daycare. I thought she was a pill, but he'd go on and on about how Mrs <name withheld> played games or read to him. We moved him over to a nursery school when he turned four. I made a point of asking him about how Mrs <name withheld>. He remembered her quite clearly until about age four and half, when over a two-week period he forgot about her. He had no memories of her after that. I thought that was pretty amazing. The mind of children seems to go through a massive memory purge around age four.
IMO, reincarnation would imply some sort of non-physical layer to reality, which contains souls (and maybe other things) and allows them to persist through time and attach to different living creatures over time.
There's various beliefs that posit such a layer, including the belief that we're all in a simulation (anyone ever used code that doesn't initialize its data structures properly?), but I don't happen to hold any of them at the moment.
These currents generate fluctuating electromagnetic fields
These fields propagate outward into space
They will continue to propagate forever.
Now, the strength of these fields is vanishingly small, but greater than 0. So everything that makes me "me" will exist in this universe long after I'm dead.
Unfortunately, we understand electromagnetism and the quanta of the EM field which we call photons rather well. While admittedly not having done the math, I think that human brain is terrible at broadcasting its inner state on the EM spectrum. Aside from the fact that a lot of bands will be promptly be reabsorbed by by the surrounding brain matter, one important fact is that two axons running a micrometer apart can have vastly different functions. In a toy model, one might encode "elephant" and the other might encode "cheese". To tell apart if you have been thinking of elephants or cheese, one would have to resolve that, which means that the wave length of the photons would have to be smaller than a micrometer, so we are talking about near infra-red, almost visible. Given that my head looks rather intransparent to me, I don't think that many photons in that band will make it through the rest of my brain and my skull.
My best skeptical argument: The idea that one's essential self can inhabit a different body at a different era in history, while having no memory of the earlier life (or a most a few weird wisps of memory) is just incoherent. What even *is* a self, then? The original body (and most of us experience our body as an important aspect of ourselves) is gone. In our new incarnation we don't speak the language we spoke in the old one, have the skills that we learned, the prejudices and preferences and habits, the friends, the family, etc. All that is gone. And, most important, we don't have the store of life memories we were accumulating up until death in our earlier incarnation. What then *is* a self if it's independent of the body, the attitudes, the info, the skills, the preferences, the attachments and the memories someone has? If I knew that in 2162 "I" would be reincarnated as a farmer on a rehabbed, well oxygenated Mars it wouldn't make me feel a bit less distressed that my present life will end in death. So "I" come back as a male farmer and don't remember or care about any of the things I do right now? Well then, good luck to that guy but he ain't me.
I think this is a really modern conception of the self. Compatibilism began as a way to rescue free will (and the self) from materialism.
I don’t find it persuasive. Right now I have many properties—love Japanese food and my family, hate spiders, can read at an advanced level, experience yellow, do division. If you took those things away from me, either by a series of unfortunate accidents or brainwashing techniques or whatever, it would still be *me* experiencing qualia.
The reincarnation hypothesis is totally coherent. Your consciousness survives without any (many) memories of your past lives. It just implies modern materialism, especially parts like functionalism, is wrong, and compatibilism becomes more of a hazy, woo-adjacent belief that isn’t necessary to explain the self.
>If I took away your memories it wouldn’t you experiencing anything at all. It would be effectively a new person, with a blank slate.
Is this then true also for a marginal change? In the same sense I'm not the same person as myself 20 years ago, 1 year ago, 1 second ago or 1 tick of whatever is the smallest unit of my brain state. So this is really a question of what the definition of self is - and the way we normally use it, it can't really be about our memories.
>If I took away your memories it wouldn’t you experiencing anything at all.
Do you believe amnesiacs are different people than they were before their amnesia? I would describe an amnesiac as a person who has forgotten memories, not an entirely new person.
I didn't say reincarnation was "proven". But I disagree that you'd have to explain how the consciousness transfer itself happens for reincarnation to be a very likely outcome. For example, if your 3 year old child (raised in rural Nebraska) said: "In a past life, I was a samurai named ____ in year 1305, with a wife named X and two sons named Y and Z. I was buried in Q specific cemetery in Japan. I also remember semifluent Japanese," I posit you would reasonably conclude that they were probably reincarnated, without knowing exactly how the consciousness transfer works.
Well, the focus in this case would be on the odd reports of things like memories or languages of some past person appearing in young children. Philosophical questions about actual persistence or continuity of identity are a separate concern. In other words there could be a phenomenon here even if it doesn't actually qualify as 'reincarnation' or what have you.
That's the issue I have with my memories of other lives. They could as easily be artifacts of my imagination. But I also realize that most of my memories from this life involve a lot of voluntary and involuntary embellishments. But because I cannot separate the embellishments from the original elements of my memories I regard all my memories with skepticism. But I cherish them even if they're false, because I still have learned from them, and I act in accordance with the entire memory corpus available to me. The only spooky event I had was meeting my wife from my past life. She admitted the connection but was very disturbed that I described some events in her past life memories. Not enough detail to pin down who we were, though. And just the act of talking about memories with each other may have distorted our memories of the memories...
They are totally falsifiable, and many have been falsified! The modern way these cases are treated is to preregister as many "early" memories as possible, and match them against actual people. If you can't find a match to the overwhelming majority of the memories, in my mind the case is not evidence of reincarnation.
Then falsify my past-life memories, please. ;-) If they're real, I was never anyone famous enough to get into recorded history. And they don't provide enough detail for me to get names and dates out of them. If they're false, they seem just as real as my supposedly real memories — which, when I examine them, are at best imperfect recordings of selected events in my life. The only reason I give *some* of my current life's memories some credence is because of all the dated documents that come along with modern living. But if I talk to family members about the details of events we experienced together, I see that either I've misremembered a lot, or my relatives have misremembered. I suspect both.
What about those experiences changed your mind? This sentiment always really confused me because while I can imagine evidence I could experience on drugs that would convince me of this, I've never actually heard of the experiences that people had being at all like what it would take to convince me.
I've taken plenty of both lsd and shrooms (including very high dosages) and never had a religious sort of experience, but I also can't imagine ever being convinced by any experience that I couldn't check the veracity of in some way after the fact (like say getting information about the outside world you couldn't possibly have known).
So, reality for you is consensus-based? There may be something to that. But remember Western materialism is a relatively new consensus-based phenomenon. I hope you don't get put down in the Amazon rainforest and have to deal with the consensual reality experienced by some Amazonian tribes. I forget which anthropologist it was who after a few years of living with his hosts started to see the spirit beings his hosts saw — even though he wasn't on psychotropic substances.
Anyway, I had a couple of episodes of psychokinesis while on magic mushrooms. Both witnessed by other people (who were also tripping, unfortunately). But even if was a hallucination, one would need to explain why it was a shared hallucination.
I had a rough time with a malicious entity that acted like a poltergeist that followed me home after a trip and that scared the shit out of me, after I had (presumably) come down from the trip. It seemed to feed on my fear. Luckily I had some knowledge of the theory of sympathetic magic (from my undergrad courses in Anthropology), and I was able to get rid of it.
I've communed with the non-human consciousness of trees (you can watch the lectures of the botanist Stefano Mancuso if you want some independent support that trees exhibit a type of consciousness).
Many times while tripping I was in a state which I called "the groove", in which all sorts of weird synchronicities occurred. But I had had some "magical" experiences before I started tripping — though psychedelics may have opened the gateways for other experiences that happened during my post-tripping life.
I need to write up my "magical" memoirs. I've written a few chapters, but I've had some very wild paranormal experiences — not just on psychedelic drugs. But I don't require you to believe me. I experienced what I experienced.
The consensus aspect of my view is purely pragmatic and I can absolutely imagine experimental evidence which would be able to convince me, even in a scenario where I was the only person around. If anything I'm always going to rank certain kinds of recorded evidence as far more important than corroborating eyewitness evidence.
What's important is just that I'm not entirely relying upon me and others minds being reliable in ways that seem impossible to square with all the psychological research I've seen about the unreliability of eyewitnesses.
> But even if was a hallucination, one would need to explain why it was a shared hallucination.
The sticking point for me has always been that the various psychological explanations for these sort of poorly controlled observations are ultimately much more plausible to me than them being real, given what I would consider to be an extremely suspicious lack of corroborating evidence which I should expect to exist. There's also aspects of most of these experiences that make me tend to think they're a-priori unlikely, since I would predict a-priori that if they were real there would be both more consistency between people's experiences, as well as observable evidence that can be checked later like I said before.
I definitely "want to believe" compared to most materialists, but it's hard to get your hopes up about any tests you may wish to run, when you know that other people must have already performed such tests (given how these phenomena aren't reported as being *that* rare based on the anecdotes I've heard). It very hard to imagine how it could plausibly be the case that I would be the first person to accurately record the supernatural, unless it's an extremely rare localized phenomenon or something.
I've heard people mention analogous similar sorts of experiences to the psychokinesis you mention, but it just seems really implausible to me that with everyone carrying around camera phones, we still don't have good video of these phenomena.
There's certainly plenty of excuses for why these sort of supernatural phenomena seem allergic to reliable recording devices, but I've never heard one that didn't seem like a really ad hoc justification for the lack of expected evidence.
>I've communed with the non-human consciousness of trees (you can watch the lectures of the botanist Stefano Mancuso if you want some independent support that trees exhibit a type of consciousness).
I absolutely agree trees are conscious, but I don't really know what it would mean to meaningfully "commune" with an organism that doesn't have a theory of mind, and so can't even comprehend that other minds exist. Though we may not disagree here, given what you said before about not being sure that your reincarnation memories literally happened to you given your level of enlightenment.
That being said I still have a tiny glimmer of hope, enough to be interested in proposing experiments. So if you think you have means of communicating with spiritual entities with any level of reliability let me know, as there's a lot of questions I'd propose you should ask (like say mathematical proofs such as large novel prime factorizations).
The trouble is a lot of paranormal experiences are so transitory and random that it's hard to falsify them. But to your point, I no longer regard my memory as reliable, and I no longer trust my qualia as being reliable. After all we're not directly perceiving reality, we're seeing an edited version of reality through nervous systems that evolved in response to a specific set of ecological pressures. A cat or a bat almost certainly perceive the world differently from us. Moreover, our qualia are filtering out a lot of extraneous data, and for the data that gets past our filters, our mind categorizes and interprets it almost instantaneously. The reality that we perceive is not necessarily the reality out there.
No. The furthest back they go would probably be the New Kingdom of Egypt, and they're all human (some female, but predominantly male for the past thousand years). As a Buddhist, I was told that I could be reincarnated as anything. But that's not my experience of my past-life memories. I asked a Gelug lama about this. He laughed and assured me that they were all false memories. He explained that only advanced Bodhisattvas can have memories of their past lives, but (if I understood him correctly) that's more because of the omniscience that advanced Bodhisattvahood (i.e Bhumi level 10 and above, IIRC) gives to sentient beings — and not because of actual memories.
Still, they're there in my consciousness. Illusion/delusion or not they affect the way I look at the world — and that's the ultimate function of memory, isn't it?
Some. As a young kid (age five? age six?), I had lots of dreams about being in ancient Egypt. But I was also aware of ancient Egypt because my folks had lots of coffee table books about ancient Egypt. So I was aware I was in ancient Egypt in my dreams. I may have had memories of other places and times, but I wasn't aware of their setting because I didn't have the historical knowledge to identify their settings.
Sure, my active imagination may have been influenced by those coffee table books full of pictures of ancient Egypt, but my folks had similar books about ancient Rome, Greece, the Holy Land, Mesopotamia, and Meso-American civilizations. I didn't have dreams about those places.
It wasn't until I was older that I had dreams and waking memories of other places and times — but I could recognize them because I had the historical and anthropological knowledge to recognize their context. All these memories are patchy, though. More like quick flashes of moving scenes — sometimes with other people — who might be speaking to me, but I can't understand their words (which makes a weird sort of sense if we assume that language is associated with the brain our mind stream happens to inhabit in a particular life).
I get the impression that I hung around ancient Egypt for many generations, though I may have bounced up to Minoan Crete a couple of times (or I was a trader who plied the Med, because I have vivid images of being on boats at on the sea) — but by the time Ptolemy took over, I had moved on to other places. There's a big gap in my past life memories from about the 4th Century BCE until about 4th of 5th centuries CE. I may have them, but because I can't place them in the context of time or culture, I don't recognize them. But they pick up again in Central Asia. I was a Buddhist monk or some sort of Buddhist scholar or philosopher in a few of those lives. Lots of images of scrolls with flowing script on them. Pleasant cities in lush valleys with dry mountains all around. Then I moved further to the Northeast. I was a Mongol in one of those lives who made a journey to a Buddhist monastery in the highlands (Tibet?). Images of the endless Steppes and riding horses across them. Then I lingered a while with the tribes that lived in the boreal forests of Siberia. I was doing shamanic things. Then I bounced over to Central and Eastern Europe in the 16th Century CE. Lots of dreams and waking memories of crowded cities with multistory buildings along rivers. And stuffy rooms full of cloth. I get the impression I was a cloth merchant of some sort in one of those lives. But I was living middle-class style lives, and there were books, so I was educated in those lives. There was a woman who seemed to be reincarnating along with me as my wife/mother/sister. There's a city in Poland (whose name escapes me at the moment) with a squared moat around it. I saw the picture of it, and I was shocked at how familiar it looked. I had the certainty that I lived in a house overlooking that moat.
As a kid of five or six, I had an irrational fear of the police. I was outside a local department store with my mom, when a police officer started talking to us in a friendly way (he may have been flirting with my mother who was a beautiful woman). He squatted down to talk to me at my level. He was just trying to be friendly, but I started screaming, "Don't let him kill me! Don't let him take me away!" My mom had to hustle me away because I freaking out. It wasn't until I was older that I realized that I had memories from WWII and the Holocaust. Men in uniforms beat me. And I died in a concentration camp. I am one of a cohort of people born between the mid-1950s and early 1960s that has traumatic memories of WWII. The former wife in my last life who I mentioned above was born the same year I was this time around and she remembered strikingly similar scenes as I did in her memory. It turns out there's a large group of Jews born in the same period that have memories of the Holocaust. I'm a goy, but I have them too. I was a scholar in my past life, who was reborn in a family of scholars — but safely in New England and not Europe! It's not just Jews. I have a Filipino friend, born around 1960, who has memories of having her legs crushed under the treads of a Japanese tank.
Of course, with the advent of cable TV, through the Hitler Channel (err, the History Channel) we've all been exposed to images of the violence of WWII. So I'm perfectly willing to admit these violent memories could just be due to suggestion. But I don't really believe that explanation.
If it isn't 'reincarnation' in some continuity-of-identity sense and is just some bizarre crosstalk of human memory it would obviously still be profoundly interesting despite not being evidence for the existence of a disembodied self.
I think most reincarnation theorists would say the former, but for me I am much more concerned with verifying the phenomenon itself. It seems like a huge deal if even one individual has ever been reincarnated!
>It seems like a huge deal if even one individual has ever been reincarnated!
Hmm... I'm not sure if this is true, depending on the flavor of the "huge deal".
For the sake of discussion, if were a case where someone was reincarnated with full memories (avoiding the discussion, as Eremolalos said, about what it even _means_ to be reincarnated _without_ memories), it would certainly force us to drastically revisit how we think memories work. In that sense, it certainly _would_ be a big deal.
For any ordinary person, though, if reincarnation happened, but happened less than one time in a billion, and everyone else winds up vanishing forever, as current understanding of the brain suggests, why should much change for ordinary people (that is, people who are not neuroscientists or possibly artificial neural network engineers)? Unless there is some reason to think that it can be tweaked to happen regularly, why would one isolated case matter to John Q. Public?
Aren't aliens also incompatible with most organized religions?
I personally found the case of James Leininger (especially the skeptical correspondence between Michael Sudduth and Matlock on the matter) to be so compelling that I think it's either a case of past life memories or overt fraud with the middle ground "odd coincidences" possibility less likely than both. I'd say the same with Kemal Atasoy, although there's less publicly available material to go on. Finally, it's very remarkable that the common features of Ian Stevenson's original 20 cases suggestive of reincarnation keep coming up in new cases: memories between ages 2-6, commonly related to violent deaths, occasionally with related birthmarks, that later fade away over time.
> Aren't aliens also incompatible with most organized religions?
C.S. Lewis wrote some sci-fi on this premise. "Out of the Silent Planet" tells of a Verne/Wells-esque trip to Mars, which is inhabited by three unFallen species. If you like the genre of "first contact with aliens who are subtly Very Different", you should definitely read it. Among its virtues is that it's short.
It wouldn't even necessarily contradict Young Earth Creationism either. If God made us 6,000 years ago, he could have made the aliens 6,000 years ago too.
What's the motivational reason for wanting to be reincarnated? All I got out of reincarnations was a bunch of fuzzy memories and people giving me funny looks if I talk about it. I didn't even get a frigging t-shirt!
The whole raison d'être for Buddhism is to get us out of the cycle of rebirth. Of course, if you view life as suffering that's a good motivation not to be reborn to suffer again and again. At least Christians get to go to heaven with alabaster buildings, manicured lawns, and angels singing hosannas. Muslims (at least male Muslims) get to go to a paradise heaven with lots wine and houri at their beck and call. (Question: are there male houri for the women?)
Let me tell you, reincarnation is not what's its cracked up to be. At best it's like only being able to remember a piece of an interesting dream. Give me nirvana, or give me death!
My son watched Gladiator last year and now he’s trying to restore the Roman Empire. Help!
I don’t usually turn to internet forums for advice but after the insanity of the past year, I’ll try anything. Last summer, my son Mark was a typical, albeit shy, fourteen year old. But that changed after he watched Gladiator with my husband. I was apprehensive about him watching an R rated movie but my husband assured me it was fine. Anyways, they never really spent that much time together so I relented. Mark loved it. He watched that movie every single day that summer. There was something magical about its characters and story that spoke to Mark and gave him romantic ideas about what Rome meant. His excitement was infectious. I hadn’t seen it in years and so for his birthday, I gave him an illustrated history book about Rome and from that point on, he was enthralled.
Mark read that book cover to cover to such an extent that he practically had it memorized. But that wasn’t enough and he wanted more. He read Wikipedia articles about Rome. He listened to podcasts about Rome. He watched youtube videos about Rome. Rome all day and Rome all night. Mark went to the library and went through the history section vigorously. The librarians loved him. They weren’t used to teenagers being so excited about reading. Every day that summer he went to the library and spent the entire day soaking up Rome. Once school started, he would go to the library after school. When he came home, he would tell us all kinds of “fun facts” about Rome. Did you know the city had a million inhabitants? Did you know that Ancient Rome traded with China? Did you know that the Roman Empire didn’t fall until 1453? My son did and he needed to make sure everyone knew. I was starting to get sick of Rome but what are you going to do? At least he was getting out of the house, and there are certainly worse hobbies your kid can have. He continued doing this for a few months and it was fine. But then it went from a hobby to an obsession.
Mark’s father indulged him in these flights of fancy by buying him Roman armor for Christmas. He read about military drills that Roman legionaries would do and imitated them. He looked ridiculous marching around our neighborhood. Worse, he insisted on wearing sandals in near freezing weather. We fought every day over it until his dad did some research and learned that Romans wore more practical shoes in colder places like Germany. But even though we fixed that problem, there was a less lethal but still enormous problem of what to do when Mark went back to school after the break. I was really worried about him going back to school. He was losing touch with reality at this point and wanted to emulate Roman generals and emperors by wearing his armor at school. I told Mark that he looked ridiculous and all the kids would make fun of him. He said that this is what he wanted to do, and I was always telling him to be more outgoing and stop caring what others thought. That was certainly not what I meant! But against my better judgement, I relented and, true to his word, he went full Roman. What happened next was weirder than I could have imagined.
On his first day back, Mark went to school and just like I said, his classmates mocked him. Everyone laughed at how stupid he looked. But Mark wasn’t bothered. “They’ll come around” he proclaimed confidently, as if it wasn’t an insane thing to say. But to my astonishment, he was right. At first, the boys mocked him. They marched around and pretended to follow his orders. But apparently they enjoyed it so much that their mockery turned in to sincerity. There was something about his confidence they found magnetic, and the girls latched themselves on to him as well. They wanted to be the Cleopatra to his Julius Caesar.(I tried telling him things turned out badly for both of them, but naturally he ignored that.) Mark became the most popular kid in school but just like his adopted namesake, he had bigger ambitions.
Mark made videos that he uploaded to Youtube. At first, it was simply educational videos but then it morphed into something bigger. In one of his videos, he made an offhand comment about restoring the Roman Empire and it went viral on social media. His video channel exploded in popularity. He kept making more videos about his plans and how he intended to achieve them. He received donations from others to make these dreams a reality. Mark promised that once the “campaigning season”(summer break) began, he would go ahead with his plans and got thousands of supporters willing to go with him. I couldn’t believe it but he literally wanted to sail to Italy and announce himself as emperor, believing they would simply let him.
As summer approached, Mark prepared for this expedition. He recruited all the boys from his high school and received money from all over the world. I asked him how he planned to invade an entire country with nothing but a few thousand schoolboys and he assured me no one would stand against him. He referenced battles from Julius Caesar’s time. I emphatically repeated that he was not Julius Caesar and he smirked and said “not yet”. Some of his subscribers lent him their own private boats and even though they weren’t the “triremes” my son wanted, he found them acceptable. Then, they got some kitchen knives as swords and cobbled together “armor” from whatever metal things they could find. I told him he couldn’t do it. He didn’t listen. My husband half heartedly said he couldn’t do it. Mark said it was his destiny. After some prodding, I got the principal to say he would be expelled for going. He talked about receiving a vision from “Mars” that said he had been blessed by the gods, and that it would be an insult not to go through with it. I took him to a therapist to cure his mental illness but she ended up agreeing with him. What was happening? I forbade him from going. I pleaded with him. I even suggested building a “New Rome” here. He wouldn’t have it. There was only one way to restore the glory of Rome and he was the one to do it. Mark left this morning. I tried to physically force him to stop but his friends simply prevented me from doing so. He plans to embark in the next few days.
Despite my pleas, there is nothing I have done that will stop him from going through with this disaster. At best, his plan would end with him humiliated for the rest of his life and at worst, he could end up dead. Has everyone lost it? Not only do his friends support him but so does everyone in his life. When pressed on why, they say there is just “something about him.” They can’t explain what that “something” is, but they all agree he has it, even the authorities. Neither the cops nor the government officials I talked to have any interest in keeping him here. Has everyone lost their mind? I tried everything I could to prevent this insanity, but nothing is working so in my desperation I turn to random people on the internet. What should I do?
IMO, more specificity about the details would enhance the verisimilitude. Rather than "an illustrated history book about Rome," choose an actual title or two from Osprey's catalogue. Once he starts going through the library's collections — what does Mark think about Mary Beard? What does he think about Gibbon? Rather having him "watch youtube videos about Rome," have him work his way through Scipio Martianus' channel, start speaking in Latin, and perhaps develop strong views about classical vs. ecclesiastical pronunciation. (It might also be worth giving "Gladiator" a rewatch, since one of its central premises was that the Empire was a Bad Thing and needed to be abolished in favor of a restored Republic. What does Mark think about that idea?)
Mark's motivations and thinking could also be made more psychologically plausible. If he knows that the Roman Empire "didn't fall until 1453," he knows that the Roman Empire doesn't need to be in Rome, so why exactly does he think he can't he build one "here"? (Presumably "here" is somewhere in the US, but again more specificity might be better. You might write "here in Michigan," "here in Oregon," or "here in New Jersey": which of these best fits your intended aesthetic effect?)
I wanted to go more detailed about Rome but I don’t think it would work story-wise. Mark may care about Latin pronunciation but his mom certainly wouldn’t and she’s the one telling the story.
For me, it was the opposite: the mom's lack of interest in her son's developing obsession struck me as unrealistic and immersion-breaking. It didn't feel like a character portrait of a mother uninterested in the details of her son's life, it felt like a story written by an author uninterested in those details. If Brandon is aiming for the former, I think the characterization needs to be established more forcefully.
I might be barking up the wrong tree (and I am *very bad* at literary subtexts, I literally thought Animal Farm was a story about some animals) but is this supposed to be an allegory for the existence of trans people?
For what it's worth, I assumed this was a real post -- but after a couple of paragraphs, while still thinking it was a real post, I felt sure the person was lying. I can't put my finger on why. I think one thing was that in a real post the writer would have spent more time early on talking about their point of view, explaining what kind of help they wanted, and just *venting*. Something like, "there's a crazy situation in my house. My son seems to have developed an obsession or maybe a delusion, and my husband isn't taking it seriously. I'd like to know whether anybody here has gone through something similar, and if so how you handled it. . . ." And maybe that voice would break through now and then later in the narrative. "WTF, right? And even the *teachers* don't seem that bothered. I feel as though I'm in Invasion of the body Snatchers and all the other adults have been replaced by emotionless aliens."
Also, I just am not able to believe that when the son went to school in armor the other kids turned around so quick. That just wouldn't happen. If you want people to believe the story, I think you need to come up with a more plausible explanation of how the kids became the son's followers. Like maybe he stood up to the bully substitute -- or won the basketball game for his school while in armor -- or demonstrated astonishing skill with whatever the weapons of his era were.
Not sure what to make of this. It’s definitely not supposed to be a plausible explanation about how it could happen. It’s a silly story about a kid who becomes this Ferris Bueller-esque figure who gets this done through sheer charisma even though it’s ridiculous.
I too thought it was real, but started having doubts at "They marched around and pretended to follow his orders. But apparently they enjoyed it so much that their mockery turned in to sincerity." They enjoyed following his orders? I wanted more explanation, and read further, but didn't get it.
In Greek mythology, the children of Kronos are Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades, Poseidon, and Zeus, in that order. The youngest are most powerful, and the oldest are least powerful. What's up with that?
Well, it's part of the story that Zeus is the youngest, so that position is fixed. (Others have told the story here)
For the rest, I just assume that they were sorted into females and males, because if you make up an order, that is the easiest grouping. That already explains like 90% of the signal you are relying on, because it is up to taste whether Poseidon is really stronger than Hades, or Demeter stronger than Hestia.
Although birth order effects usually favour the eldest child, most papers on birth order effects do not take into account fathers who eat their children.
The children of Kronos and Rhea, as you may recall, were all swallowed by their father immediately after birth, with the exception of Zeus. Once Zeus was fully grown he forced his father to regurgitate all his siblings. So the older children are less powerful, proportional to the time they spent in Cronos's digestive system.
One can assume that being slowly digested inside a Titan's gullet over a period of decades or centuries slowly saps whatever potential you might have originally had, a bit like public school.
>Although birth order effects usually favour the eldest child, most papers on birth order effects do not take into account fathers who eat their children.
LOL!
And getting a double-blinded RCT past the IRB takes forever...
The Greeks understood that age both makes you stronger (e.g., 18 year olds are stronger than 8 year olds) and weaker (18 year olds are stronger than 80 year olds). For people, they believed generally that people were getting worse and worse with time. Humanity, as a whole, was decaying.
For the gods, this makes very little sense. Humans age, die, and are replaced by a new generation which can be weaker than the generation that it replaced.
For gods, they don't age. They don't die naturally. If they're going to be replaced by a new generation, the only way that makes sense is if that new generation is stronger than the generation it is replacing.
Partly it's the demands of the story: Kronos replicates Ouranos' offense by killing his own children (they get better), so it has to be the youngest child that overthrows his father and establishes the new order. It was the same in the previous generation, since Kronos was the youngest of the Titans, and avenged the death (they got better) of the giants and the hundred-handed by killing Ouranos. I would also note that the ancient Greeks did not necessarily practice primogeniture: customs varied a good deal. As to the actual order, I'm inclined to say it's poetic license. You're going to end with Zeus, why not set up a nice order? Though I'm a bit wary of saying definitely that we consider, say, Demeter less 'powerful' than Hera.
Yeah, assignation of power levels is a bit suspect. Hestia may simply have had a more concentrated focus, and we all know what happened when Demeter got upset about Persephone...
She does in the Aeneid, though it's at least partially because Zeus/Jove raised up a Trojan:
"Fearful of that, the daughter of Saturn, the old war in her remembrance that she fought at Troy for her beloved Argos long ago,—nor had the springs of her anger nor the bitterness of her vexation yet gone out of mind: deep stored in her soul lies the judgment of Paris, the insult of her slighted beauty, the hated race and the dignities of ravished Ganymede; fired with this also, she tossed all over ocean the Trojan remnant left of the Greek host and merciless Achilles, and held them afar from Latium; and many a year were they wandering driven of fate around all the seas. Such work was it to found the Roman people."
I've been wondering if there are certain abnormal social behaviors that consistently develop in youths who learned to communicate through chat?
When I was 14-17 I would periodically, for prolonged periods of time, spend maybe 8 hours a day on average in "spaces" where communication was text based - messenger, World of Warcraft, omegle and skype especially - and if books and diaries are a space of communication, then that as well. I read. Read, wrote and typed.
My mornings with my family were mostly silent - i left my mom, dad and brother to do the talking. In school I would listen in class, give answers to the teacher, and spend the breaks playing alone or with others, but mostly in silence; after school I struggled to think of things to say, while it astounded me that the other kids could have so much to say (eventually I had the revelation that the other kids werent speaking to share information; they were just creating fun) ... at dinner i would leave the speaking to my family again, and after dinner i would do homework or read... you get the picture. When i became a teen I would get more verbose, but not in person; in text, online... VERY verbose, haha. Its embarrassing to look back at.
Anyway...
I'm asking because I know I communicate abnormally when I speak. I have been told by so many people that when they met me they thought I spoke in a bizarre fashion that was hard to comprehend but at the same time beautifully clear. And I am dying to pinpoint what it is. None of them have been able to articulate exactly what it was. I don't think it's autism. I might be autistic too, but I don't think that accounts for it. I think there's something else wrong with me and I am dying to find out what it is so that I may seek out someone who' s the same.
Were any of you chronically online when you were teens? and were you practically mute when you were "offline", but verbose when online? And do you have unusual ways of speaking now? Have you become good at talking, or will you always feel more natural when typing?
Please, I want to fix my communication so bad. I don't want to my style to be called weird. It's so estranging. Thank you
I'll second Nancy's "talking like writing" as a major cause. When encountering people in real life after meeting them initially online, I've gotten the comment "huh, you actually talk like that" several times. It's never bothered me so unfortunately I don't have any advice for fixing it.
I do think it's a result of being too online at a critical period and, prior to and in addition to that, reading a lot of old books. I was extremely shy as a child (a word which here means sub-20) and didn't talk much, so it probably is a result of not developing the same cues as most people to distinguish written vs spoken English.
Not a result of autism per se, but I would bet it is strongly correlated with high-functioning autism and similar traits, in that grey area where people sometimes self-diagnose.
I don't want to spam post thank you's, so I'll just type one here. Thank you. I'm still not really sure about much, but thanks to you the uncertainty is easier to bear.
What makes you think autism cannot be the cause? People say it’s pretty common in autistic people, to see exactly the pattern of behaviours displayed both by you and the other people who responded (and, erm.., by me, as well, to an extent). On the other hand, I agree that this seems fixable by practice and meeting more people. And I’m really sorry to hear that it makes life difficult for you.
Can you pinpoint whether it is your selection of words, or rather your way of pronouncing them?
When I was a teenager, I could rather easily speak in the fashion of someone else. Like, I could imitate someone's speaking style, to the point that it would freak people out who know both me and the other person. By speaking style I don't mean the choice of word, I rather mean intonation, lengths of vowels, where to raise and lower the voice, stuff like that. And I used these styles permanently, like I met some guy at some youth camps and used his style for the next one or two years.
If your abnormal speaking is about pronunciation and sound, then perhaps this is something you might try. Pick some person to study, either some acquaintance or some actor, imitate their style of speaking, and make this your permanent style.
I brought it up because it resonates with Firstname's point 3 below. When I sing a song, then I imitate it one-to-one, including accent and everything. I think I just put this to the extreme as a teenager.
About myself: I was (and still am) much more on the text side than on the speech side, though not as extreme as you. I don't think that anyone has told me that I speak in a bizarre fashion, but some people told me that my voice is notable. As a kid/teenager I was in a theater group, and trained my voice quite heavily on this very clear style that you need if you want to be understood be an audience, so that may be an explanation. (Very clear pronunciation, a voice that is not necessarily loud but carries far, a little bit like singing.) And I am also pretty far in the autism spectrum.
Your post resonated with me so much that I made an account just to reply.
Disclaimer: I am definitely on the autism spectrum myself so take anything I say about "normal conversation" with a grain of salt.
I don't think I exactly fit the description you're looking for of someone who learned to communicate through text-based means first, but I decided to reply because of the following:
1. A random stranger at an ACX meetup recently told me I had a completely unique voice unlike anything they had ever heard.
2. People often tell me I "don't have an accent", and when pressed, they'll clarify with something along the lines of "well, you definitely sound American but sometimes it's like you're trying to enunciate every phoneme of every syllable." This is in spite of having grown up in the American south, where most of the people around me most definitely *did* have an accent.
3. When singing along to my favorite songs (alone of course -- I would never do this in the presence of even my best friends), I find it much more satisfying to imitate the singer's accent as much as I can than to just sing in whatever my "normal" accent is. This works even if the song is in another language, and has therefore caused a noticeable improvement in my ability to pronounce certain sounds that don't exist in English, such as a Japanese style "r" where your tongue hits the bottom of your mouth (I believe the official term is "voiced alveolar tap").
4. Growing up, people definitely noticed (and occasionally clued me in) that I only ever talked to my closest friends and family, or answered direct questions from teachers or other students in an academic context. I never engaged in small talk or even getting to know classmates sincerely because I didn't see any value in it. Every time I tried my brain was fighting against it the whole time; I just fundamentally didn't want to socialize and that was the end of it. Again, people around me were confused by this behavior since I could be very articulate in non-small talk situations.
5. For the exact same reasons I hated small talk, I never made any social media accounts, even though literally everybody I knew was signing up for Facebook at the very least. Thus, I wasn't "chronically online" by the modern definition, but I did spend a *lot* of time lurking on the internet, mostly Wikipedia at first but later on stumbled across various news websites, forums, and blogs, eventually leading me here. So I may not have "learned to communicate" online but my worldview is very skewed by the way internet people speak.
6. I also spent an utterly ridiculous amount of time as a kid watching movies from the 70s-90s (with a few 2000s movies sprinkled in), so it's very possible that influenced my "accent" more than in-person interactions did.
7. My brain goes into a state of existential panic whenever I hear a recording of myself speaking. I know most people express discomfort at the sound of their own voice, but I swear, it's dialed up to 11 for me. To give a (very) rough approximation, when I speak, what I imagine it sounds like is similar to Kyle MacLachlan (Agent Cooper from Twin Peaks) but what I hear in recordings is much closer to Jon Heder (Napoleon Dynamite). This difference is so jarring that I lose all focus and motivation for whatever I was doing immediately and have to speak at length to "recover the illusion".
So in conclusion, yeah, I'm not quite the sort of person you were looking for a response from, but I think I can give you some advice, and it may be a bit hard to hear: give up on sounding "normal". In my experience, it's not even remotely feasible. What *is* possible is being confident in the way you express yourself. Start thinking of your "beautifully clear" voice as an asset rather than a liability. If you just focus on communicating precisely what you wish to communicate, people will appreciate that, even if they think something about the way you speak sounds strange. I have found myself in numerous circumstances wherein precise articulation narrowly saved me from misunderstandings the average person might have been caught off guard by. It took an embarrassingly long time for me to realize this, but I prefer it this way. I'd rather have maximal control over what I say than sound "natural" and "easy to talk to".
Again, take all this with a grain of salt. I'm not really the advice-giving type, and I'm already going way outside my comfort zone to interact with a stranger on the internet. Hope this helps (and sorry for being verbose... I have trouble with brevity).
I meant to not spam post thank yous, and I've already posted one, but I have to thank you for bothering to make a profile and type this out. It's very endearing and relatable :) I'll just keep talking how I do, then. Keep being me, as some would say. Who cares if the message is delivered in an unusual manner if the message gets through, right?
People didn't evolve to communicate through chatrooms. They evolved to communicate through natural speech, so it makes that you would feel awkward about it. It's like learning a new language when you aren't a child. You'll have odd ticks and sound funny. If you want to be like everyone else, you have to just immerse yourself in social situations with others and speak out loud with other people more.
I'm too old to have been in your precise situation, but I was socially isolated in grade school, which led to me struggling with interpersonal interaction in college. I got better, though, but not before someone told me that they thought I sounded like what an angel would sound like. To this day, I am unsure what they meant, but I think it might have something to do with speaking in literary register and enunciating, since I had spent more time reading than talking. I think it might be something like what I hear when I listen to the recordings of Scott reading Unsong. (Give it a listen?)
I'd suggest practice would help, one way or the other. Maybe you'll always be a little different, but it probably won't hurt to find some friendly people and try to imitate what they do.
Does Mutually Assured Destruction make sense? MAD is supposed to act as a deterrent, but say that it has failed for whatever reason, Russia has launched its entire nuclear arsenal at the US, and this is sure to annihilate nearly the entire US population. The US president, in his bunker, now has to decide whether to retaliate. If he strictly follows the MAD principle, he should retaliate, reducing Russia to rubble. However, the entire point of MAD was to prevent America from being destroyed in the first place. Now that this will happen anyways, is there really a point to killing more than 100 million additional people? Perhaps the really important thing now is the continued survival of humanity. Maybe the US president in office at the time has a taste for vengeance and will retaliate anyways. But I believe most presidents would refrain for humanitarian reasons, perhaps contenting themselves with strikes on the Kremlin or at most Moscow. Now, if the Russian president knew this in advance, then he would realize that MAD is not a credible threat. If he values American lives much less than the American president values Russian lives (plausible), it is plausible that he will then go ahead and nuke America. In game theory parlance, this would be a subgame perfect Nash equilibrium.
Obviously I have made some assumptions above, but it's not clear to me that they are any less realistic than the standard ones leading to MAD. If one wanted to get back to MAD, Americans could elect more bloodthirsty/impulsive leaders, who would not hesitate to retaliate. However, this would have the unfortunate side effect of increasing the probability that the same leader initiates a nuclear first-strike, or gets involved in bloody conventional wars. An easier way would be to advertise that we are going to use MAD, regardless of whether we will. Perhaps the fact that we all learn about MAD in schools is just an elaborate facade constructed for precisely this purpose. A third way would be to implement an automatic missile detection and retaliation system, the downside being catastrophe due to false positives. None of these seems foolproof.
First off, MAD doesn't involve killing a hundred million Russians, because there are barely a hundred million Russians to kill and nuclear war is <<<100% efficient at killing. And the continued survival of humanity is not at risk from nuclear war. At this point, if Biden and Putin and Xi got together and said, "how could we kill off the human race with our current nuclear arsenals", then the lynch mob hunting them down in the aftermath would number many billions. And they'd have rebuilt industrial civilization in a century or so.
We are going to kill tens of millions of Russians in the hypothetical case of a Russian nuclear sneak attack on the United States, and reduce Russia to a thing that won't be an industrial nation for at least a generation, for three very strong reasons.
First, there will be at least a hundred million Americans who survived the war, probably a couple hundred million. Who will be busy trying to rebuild the United States of America, and that process would be greatly hindered by e.g. the Russian army invading North America. So, we're going to arrange for Russia to not be able to do that.
Second, there are over seven billion people who are neither Americans nor Russians, some of whom will die in the war but most will not. It would not be good for those people to live in a world ruled by the sort of tyrant who launches massive nuclear sneak attacks to get his way - particularly since he'll still have some of his nuclear weapons and all of his nuclear weapons factories. So, as a public service, we're going to destroy that tyrant and the nation that facilitated his brand of tyranny.
Third, after a Russian nuclear sneak attack killing many tens of millions of Americans, the surviving Americans with their own nuclear weapons are going to really, really, really hate the Russians. Hate is not a design defect in humanity; it exists for a reason, and your hypothetical is a central example of such. But even if it were a defect, it's one we aren't going to fix and it will guide our behavior.
As Mr. Doolittle says, not in the United States. Note in particular that the US has both an enormous surplus in agricultural productivity, producing I think 3-4x as much food as needed for its current population, and an even larger excess in overall shipping and logistics capability. Supply chain disruptions won't cut through those margins.
At least in the United States. Nations that depend on US food exports, might go hungry.
Do you really think the supply chain is going to survive a massive nuclear attack? Most of the stuff - ports, truck depots, warehouses, fuel depots - is going to be destroyed or badly damaged. The power network is going to be badly damaged. Without electricity you can't pump gas in modern stations. You can't fuel up the agricultural vehicles you need to harvest food or take animals to be slaughtered. You won't have the trucks you need, even if you had the gas. Within days of the attack you will have millions of injured and hungry people fleeing cities desperate for food and water. Any kind of order is going to be impossible to maintain. And shipping? Are you serious? Do you really think the major ports are going to survive? And even if they did, are you going to have the capability to load and unload them, to transport goods around, to coordinate the incoming and outgoing ships?
Yes, I'm serious. I thought it would have been pretty clear from the style and content of my previous posts that I am serious. Your question and tone strike me as argumentative posturing, and as rather insulting so please go away.
In the meantime, addressing just one of your frankly ridiculous points, do you seriously believe that a trucker trying to deliver a truckload of food to his home town is going to look at a service station and say, "Oh Noes! It is Absatively Unpossible to pump fuel without electricity!", and sit down and cry while his neighbors starve? Because I'm pretty sure he'll be back on the road in a few hours, by any of half a dozen obvious methods.
As for the rest of your objections, and the new ones you come up with, no, I'm done with you. If you want you can imagine you've won a great victory by annoying me to the point where I won't debate you any further.
Nuking farmland is very inefficient and would take far more nukes than exist. I did an analysis for a thread a few months ago and every nuke on the planet would only destroy a small percent of the US.
Some, maybe even a lot by most standards, of people will die due to broken logistics networks, but not 10s of millions.
How do you think the food gets from the farms to the people? The logistics networks are absolutely vital to prevent mass starvation. Within two or three days of an all out nuclear war a lot of people are going to experience real hunger for the first time in their lives. When that happens anarchy will not be far away. Sure the farms will be there, but food is not ready on order, without fuel distribution farmers won't be able to harvest most of it, and without reliable electricity they won't be able to keep it from rotting.
If the Russians used most of their nukes to hit farming-related infrastructure, that's a possibility. But then they would be leaving the major infrastructure and big cities in place for lack of enough nukes, which means maintaining overall stability and rebuilding the destroyed infrastructure faster.
Crops are harvested once or twice a year, so we've got many months of food (from the US alone, let alone imports from places not destroyed) in which to work out temporarily solutions. With satellite communications we would still be in contact with each other and coordinate food and other vital logistics.
Think more Shaun of the Dead (temporary issues that seem overwhelming but aren't) than Dawn of the Dead.
There's quite a bit of industry in Central and South America, Australia, and India, and none of those places are likely to be major targets in a nuclear war. Are the Chileans, Mexicans, Indians, and Australians going to forget how to operate power plants or factories because the US and Russia and China nuked each other into famine and mass death?
Economists call that the time inconsistency problem. It comes up in monetary policy. Sargent won an econ nobel for it.
I don't share your view on how US presidents would react. Sparing a belligerent nation right after they've launched an enormous attack on you is atypical.
"Now that this will happen anyways, is there really a point to killing more than 100 million additional people?"
Yes, there is. If Russia destroys America with nukes, it would be by far the most evil country that has ever existed. For the sake of wiping out an unspeakably evil country from the world, for the sake of America's honor, and for the sake of proving to all of posterity the horror of nuclear war, the American president MUST utterly annihilate Russia.
"But I believe most presidents would refrain for humanitarian reasons, perhaps contenting themselves with strikes on the Kremlin or at most Moscow."
Any president who thinks like that is not a president I will ever support.
but yes, there's no foolproof way to secure your future when the keys to your future ultimately lie in someone else's hands. The reason for the equilibrium of the Prisoner's Dilemma being (D, D) is mostly because of the assumptions that: A) the other guy has more control of your destiny than you do; and B) both of your incentives are misaligned.
When you think about it, MAD is actually borrowed from what Haidt would call "cultures of honor" (which is still practiced in the 'hood). I.e. protecting your reputation (for being vengeful) is more important than life itself. So I imagine it's at least somewhat effective.
(I have a confession to make. I actually meant two-boxer. because MAD and one-boxing embraces precommitment, whereas two-boxing rejects precommitment.
You're questioning MAD while trying to have your cake and eat it too, which is a two-boxer thing to do. But I always get the names "one-box" and "two-box" confused. because at first glance, my brain thinks "one-box" implies "take box A", whereas "two-box" implies "take box B". Which does not reflect the actual thought experiment.)
Stalin was a real person, Omega is not. MAD doesn't require retroactive causality, it just requires me to want to kill you after you decide to kill me.
fair enough. I just wanted to introduce a precommitment angle to the discussion.
(I even sympathize a bit, because I've always found omega's perfect omniscence a little hard to imagine. Which is weird because I don't have that issue with laplace's demon.)
Fair enough. I can see why you would think that. I suppose for me both decisions come down to a certain kind of deontological ethics, instead. I am not "meant" to take both boxes so I don't. And I "shouldn't" harm innocent civilians so I won't. It's true that I then no longer reap the benefits of MAD, but I'm questioning the efficacy of MAD in the first place, so I don't think it's necessarily inconsistent.
Interesting! Different policies have different trade-offs, after all. They are lossy compressions, by nature. In the past, I've questioned MAD too. Although my line of thought diverges a bit. I.e. "On one hand, MAD is suppose to deter. But on the other hand, civilians are generally innocent. But on the first hand, isn't the point of democracy to make civilians responsible for policy? hmm..."
I've read that Harry Truman, upon learning of the Manhattan Project, reacted with abject horror that (paraphrasing from memory): "this isn't a weapon for killing soldiers, this is a weapon for killing women and children". And that Gorbachev refused to press the Big Red Button even during training simulations <glares at Ender Wiggin>. So your pacifism certainly has other proponents. (Although Truman did decide to use the bombs anyway...)
----
Anyway. It sounds like you're trying to look for a better solution than deterrence.
A while ago, Apxhard had an interesting comment about how society runs on consensus mechanisms, and that these mechanisms are necessarily ordered in a hierarchy by cost. Which includes coinflips, the justice system, etc. (And now blockchains!) Deterrence is advertisement, and advertisement can only do so much. It gets a lot of attention because it's the penultimate consensus mechanism. The ultimate being actual warfare. It's the ultima ratio regum. The final argument. The last resort. The BATNA. But alas, still not a guarantee that you'll get what you want. And that's just the nature of politics. If it doesn't work out, you're kinda SoL.
The difference between honor culture vs. MAD isn't the efficacy, it's the stakes. At some point, I think we just have to make peace with the possibility of nuclear annihilation. (And if that doesn't horrify you enough, I vaguely recall from "Shadow of the Giant" an explanation by Bean as to why the logic of space-warfare naturally entails a First Strike nuclear doctrine.)
I guess what im trying to say is: if you want to avoid becoming irradiated, instead of pondering MAD you should perhaps work on alternative consensus mechanisms. I hear some of them are going to the moon. :^)
I think our instinct for vengeance is an evolved solution to this game theoretic problem. (It's imperfect and has side effects, like every other product of evolution.)
I think this is basically Kavka's Toxin Paradox - while nuking the other guy gains no profit, *intending* to nuke the other guy is necessary for deterrence to work. But how can you say you "intend" to do something if you don't actually do it when the time comes?
>A third way would be to implement an automatic missile detection and retaliation system, the downside being catastrophe due to false positives.
This is what Russia's "perimeter"/"dead hand" system is supposedly meant to do. (Although the fear was more of decapitation strikes than of the president being unwilling to push the button.)
A practical reason to retaliate is to leave the world without a country willing to start nuclear war. Where "the world" is whatever is left of US (quite a lot, actually) plus the other 90% of the world population you forgot about :) They'd much prefer to live in a world where starting a nuclear war is a bad proposition.
Just imagine how unstable the world would be in your scenario if US didn't retaliate. Everybody would be with their finger on the launch button, or already pressing it preemtively.
This is the little-realized altruistic aspect of vengeance. You sacrifice yourself to remove a threat to the greater population. Remember the gom jabbar test in the beginning of "Dune"?
Let's say it's 2010 and a major Hollywood producer rapes you. It's over, it's done, you won't ever be alone with him again, and you can try to recover and move on with your life. Do you call him out and seek justice? It'll turn your own life into a media circus, and destroy whatever of it you have left, and at the end it's just two people's words against each other, and maybe nothing will come of it. Maybe your career will be over, maybe other people will refuse to be alone in a room with you out of fear of false accusations. Is it worth it? How would you feel if you knew that he did this many times before, and none of his other victims said or did anything, thus passively letting him continue to rape people, now including you? Are you willing to allow him to continue doing this to other people in the future?
How badly would you, personally, have to be hurt, before you decided that revenge was appropriate? There's no police. No outside authority. No one is coming to help you. You're all alone, you and the button.
Maybe if they did it to your loved ones, instead of you? What's the worst thing that you can imagine? You can't save them. They're as good as dead already. And you've only got a limited time to act.
Would you describe someone who decides upon revenge as bloodthirsty or impulsive?
I am certain that I would not take revenge if it implied millions of innocent people also had to die, regardless of how much pain had been caused to me, personally. I think the desire for revenge is natural, but it shouldn't always be acted upon. I think it's tough to put game theory aside, as the reason why we have the impulse in the first place is due to (evolutionary) game theory. If I recall correctly, in "The Selfish Gene", Richard Dawkins demonstrates that a "Tit for Tat" strategy, of (1) not initiating aggression, (2) retaliating immediately and proportionately for wrongdoing, (3) forgiving the initial aggression afterwards, tends to do quite well in a population. It thus makes sense that vengeance evolved and would be a useful deterrent in many situations; it's e.g. why I support the criminal justice system. It's just not necessarily a good guide to situations that never occurred in the ancestral environment of evolutionary adaptedness. Making life-or-death decisions for millions of people is one of those cases. Governments ought to be far more circumspect about retaliation than individuals would.
But if (a) your opponent knows you won't take revenge, and (b) your opponent has no moral scruples, you're opening yourself to an attack. I think both sides during the Cold War assumed that the other side had no moral scruples. Under that assessment, it makes sense to create a deadman's switch situation (and retaliatory systems were made to be as automatic as possible to prevent someone like you who had moral scruples from interfering when the retaliation was put into motion).
As someone once said, deserve's got nothing to do with it. You kill millions of people to also kill a few guys who will predictably cause the world many more millions of lives' worth of assorted grief if they go on. And the reason they would be able to do that, is that most of the millions of people you're contemplating killing would predictably work long hours to facilitate the schemes of the malevolent few, so "innocent bystander" only gets you so far.
A non-human shield doesn't deliberately do anything, it just gets used by the person being shielded. However, the term "hostage" is typically used for involuntary human shields so that might be a better term.
Game theorists and foreign policy interests were all well aware of these points, and the US and the Soviet Union tried the two strategies you name: Nixon intentionally cultivated an image of instability and aggressive unpredictability(“a mad dog”) so that Soviet officials would be afraid to do anything, and the Soviets advertised an automatic nuclear response system (which never actually existed) in order to discourage the US from launching a preemptive strike
This should be expanded to a full conspiracy theory. Maybe nukes actually do not exist at all. USA and Soviet Union just made them up, to discourage a possible third party from trying to interfere with their mutual conflict. Japan basically agreed to pretend to be nuked to save face (capitulation to an enemy with practically godlike weapons is less shameful that capitulation to a merely stronger enemy). In the meanwhile, a few more countries decided to call their bluff by declaring that they have nukes, too. If nukes were real, obviously Ukraine would have never given them up.
Calling the bluff is a really cool idea. But I also like the idea of it being like Star Trek TNG's first contact story, where once a country gets close enough to discovering that nukes don't exist, we have to bring them in on the secret, which is why we try to prevent other countries from getting that far. Maybe these can be combined somehow.
Thanks, you bring up some interesting points. I do agree with you that most Americans, especially those who grew up during the Cold War, would like a president who would be willing to vengefully nuke the enemy. I think all past presidents would have been capable of doing it; I'm just not sure whether e.g. Obama or Clinton would have actually ended up doing it when faced with the decision. I also think Bernie Sanders wouldn't have been capable of it if elected-- it's true that a majority of Americans think he's too pacifistic, but that may change over the next few decades.
I have this silly though experiment that I can't figure out. I only asked the GPT 3.5 about it and it argues that it should work, but I can't really trust that. I've also asked this question on reddit some ten years ago but the only answer that I got didn't really read the experiment setup and thought both magnets would be on at the same time.
So we have two electromagnets, A and B, set up to oppose each other, the magnets are placed at a distance and their fields are strong enough to exert a force on each other from that distance. Both magnets are fixed on a mobile platform, something like this:
A ............. B
------------
O...........O
(A and B are the electromagnets, the O O are the wheels of the platform, the dots are there cause the spaces between A and B, and between the O's got gobbled up when posting this)
Next the chain of events:
- both magnets A and B start by being off
- magnet A is turned on, magnet B is still off
- magnet A is turned off right as the electromagnetic field it generates leaves it, so long before its field reaches B (which if off when A is fired)
- just before the field from A reaches B, magnet B is turned on only long enough for the field from A to pass through it and have the fields interact, magnet B is turned off right after that, so long before its field reaches A (which is off and would still be off when the field from B passes through it)
- after the filed from B (now off) passes A (which is still off), repeat
Now, reasoning naively, the mobile platform should move towards the right, but this looks like a non inertial drive, which is impossible, so I must be missing out on why this shouldn't work, likely related to how electromagnetic momentum works, can anyone explain why this doesn't work?
If I replace A with a cannon and B with a really sturdy wall it's clear that the platform would jerk towards the left and then right, basically going nowhere, but magnetic fields are not really cannonballs so I'm at a loss here.
Nice, thanks. I think I googled it when I first asked this (on a throwaway cause I thought it was a stupid question) but I didn't think of doing so now, just asked GPT, so thank you for finding this.
Still, I'm surprised by the answer. I guess I thought it was impossible cause otherwise I'd expect seeing space vehicles with a nuclear reactor and some magnets strapped to itself without the need to eject mass at one end to propel itself, but now that this seems to work I image we don't have that cause the process would be massively inefficient or something like that. Hm, get one question answered, and another one pops up, thanks again.
Edit: had a comment that disappeared which argued that I misinterpreted the stackexchange post, and I read "Bottom line: Yes, there is a net push of the magnet(s)" as there being a resulting motion, even though the sentence continues saying that both momentums balance each other, so I'm at a loss on how to interpret the meaning of a net push, and I'm still confused.
My interpretation of that StackExchange answer is that the magnets will move, but not reactionlessly. It's a photon drive - electromagnetic waves go one way, magnets go the other way.
Photon drives don't have "reaction mass" per se, but the energy of the photons comes from the mass of your reactor, so there's no free lunch. They're basically just very, very weak rockets with a more compact fuel tank.
There has been some regulatory activity about AI in both the EU and the USA recently. I'm curious about whether the calls for it are in good faith, in particular which is larger:
People who are actually worried about near-term (job losses, deepfakes) issues citing existential issues
or
People who are actually worried about existential issues citing near-term (job losses, deepfakes) issues
I'm also of the alien-feeling persuasion. But I find the intellectual jousting to be very entertaining and addicting. But because I'm on a different wavelength from most of the people on this group, I don't feel like I could establish close friendships with most of the people here. I went to one meetup and I felt like an outsider there.
However, I feel like I'm on a similar wavelength to you, Moon Moth. I feel like you're simpatico enough that I could hang with you. That's not an invitation to connect, though. Just an observation. ;-)
As in the old political litmus test, I'd gladly have a beer with you. :-)
I've felt like outsiders at all the handful of meetups I've been to, but there's usually people there that I can have good conversations with, and now even some that I recognize, and say "hi" to, and who express regret that we didn't share a conversation this time around.
It's like the way I feel about science fiction fandom-- I don't like everyone, but it's a good place to find friends. I think I feel more at home than you two.
I'm very sorry it's like that for you, but you're pointing at something important-- that feeling at home is a mixture of how you're treated and how you feel about how you're treated.
I read an interesting anthropology piece which claimed that most of early human civilization was founded on murder. Assume that human desire is largely mimetic, i.e. people want things because other people want them (not including things biologically required for survival like food). If people want the same things but there are not enough resources for everyone, there will inevitably be conflict. All of this is pretty basic, but the next bit is the interesting part.
People are struggling as they all try to acquire a limited amount of resources. There just isn't enough to go around, so they start getting angry. Suddenly the tension reaches a boiling point and someone stabs Billy the sheepherder to death. Afterwards, the community doesn't get divided, but quite the opposite. They all agree that the real issue was Billy. He was cursed by the gods, or practicing occult magic, or maybe nobody really liked him. It wasn't that someone killed Billy to take his sheep or his wife or his land. And so everyone goes back to their daily lives, all of their angst gone for a time, until the next murder inevitably occurs down the line.
I have some doubts about this, especially because a lot of early legal development had to do with regulating blood feuds. This suggests that in fact everyone was not fine with Billy being stabbed, and maybe Billy's uncle was going to stab someone back. Fortunately the author makes it easy for us here by claiming that the coming of Christianity upended the entire murder conflict resolution paradigm. As Christians venerate victims and protecting the weak while making murder a taboo, it was no longer socially acceptable to blame societal outcasts for everything.
My question for the ACX commentariat is, does anyone know the historical background here? If the author is right, there should be a dramatic difference in murder rates between pagan Rome and Christian Rome, or early Christian societies and other societies.
It's horseshit. Pagan Viking society had a massively regulated wergild system and converting to Christianity and being told they just should not murder each other period upended it, AFAIK. Just for one example.
As a split-the-difference sort of person, I wonder whether relief-after-scapegoating is a thing that happens, but not a driving force for structuring societies.
Why a limited amount of resources? If the solution to hitting a limit is to stagnate and start infighting, eventually they'll be conquered by people who innovated and/or decided to expand.
I'd need some sources to take that argument seriously. As someone with an undergrad anthro degree, that doesn't sound like a theory an anthropologist would make. Cultural anthropologists study human cooperation. Archeologists also study human cultures from their cultural artifacts, but they've mostly bought into the theories of social cooperation (as do I). Although physical anthropologists posited the "killer ape" theory of human evolution, that went out the window when Jane Goodall witnessed chimps killing chimps.
This sounds more like an argument that an ethologist would make.
Dunno where you get that without getting the source, but what you're discussion is straight René Girard. My impression is that he was a powerful but quirky thinker; the effects he wrote about probably do happen, but I don't think they're quite as ubiquitous or they explain nearly as much as he claimed.
Legal Systems Very Different from Ours by David Friedman may be of interest to you. It's about how societies found various ways to deal with Billy being stabbed.
I'd also add that most of the murder was done between tribes, where we de-humanize the opponent. So we can still keep most empathy for the tribe members.
If people didn't like Billy to begin with, they might decide he had it coming. But if a society always blames the victim, it is functionally a society that is completely ok with its members killing each other, and that society is going to wipe itself out. Even among chimps a killer has to worry about what the victim's friends will do.
Yeah, someone in that society would figure out that if victims always get blamed, clearly the thing to do is to do unto others before they do unto you.
Japan did not allow anybody to murder anybody else. They allowed certain people to murder certain other people. The upper classes survived because murdering them wasn't allowed, and the lower classes survived because there were too many of them for the murderers to get everyone.
I didn't comment on it at the time but I really wished Scott had reviewed Violence and Sacred instead. I saw Satan Fall Like Lightning feels more like a summary of Girard's ideas for people already convinced than a real attempt at convincing skeptics.
I wasn't aware of this one. Clearly the anthropologist was heavily influenced by Girard, the single victim process is exactly what he describes. He also goes on a lot about how woke is kind of a secular heresy of Christianity with exaltation of victimhood. I'm still interested in comparing murder rates in Roman society pre/post-Christianity, if that data even exists. Scott didn't go into any quantitative analysis (not knocking him for this, I don't know if it can even be done in a meaningful way.)
Sounds like a good question for David Friedman. The economist/libertarian/medieval-hobbyist who wrote a book called "legal systems very different than ours". He was a regular, before Scott aborted SSC.
Let's go further back in history and look at apes. Actually, let's just look at apes today instead. They seem to kill each other even without accumulating resources.
I'm slowly reading a translation of Water Margin 水浒传, a Chinese novel written in the Ming dynasty and set in the twelfth century. It is essentially equivalent to the stories of Robin Hood, a heroic epic in prose telling the stories of various admirable outlaws who are oppressed in different ways by malevolent government officials.
The most prominent feature of the text, to me, is the lack of sanitization. Robin Hood stories went through a period of heavy bowdlerization and the product of that period is what modern people tend to be familiar with, but the earliest texts preserve a very clear-eyed view of what being a 14th-century highwayman meant.
The Chinese literary record is much better preserved than the medieval British oral record, and this didn't happen to Water Margin. It's pretty common for the heroes to do things that you probably wouldn't expect of a villain in a modern story.
But recently something else in the text struck me.
At this point in the story, one of our protagonists is visiting a friend, the military governor of a particular city. There is a separate civil governor, and the two governors do not get along. They have a power struggle, and the narrator tells us this:
> But not for nothing was Liu Gao a scholar. His mind was deep and devious, and he was full of schemes.
He goes on to completely anticipate and thwart the military side's plan.
Today there are many people who will happily tell you with a straight face that someone doing well on difficult tests tells you nothing but that the examinee can do well on tests. This seems to have been too implausible for the audience of a pretty openly anti-elitist set of stories in 15th-century China.
(As the civil governor, Liu Gao will have been appointed to his post after scoring highly on the civil service examinations. The text is correct to equate "civil governor" with "scholar".)
The Water Margin was definitely sanitized and changed. Famously so. There's a whole series of chapters that got added where they repent their crimes and all that. (Also, it's set in the 12th century.)
Anyway, these genius type characters are an East Asian literary archetype. It's not specifically scholars or government officials. Zhuge Liang or Sun Bin were not scholar-officials. Sun Bin was famously bad at politics. So was Yi Sunshin. Yi actually failed his exam at least once (and I believe a few times). And I think Sun and Zhuge never took them. They might still be called scholars or gentleman or so on because they were clearly intelligent. But in many cases they would be more admired for going against politics than living within it.
These are strategists. But you can see it equally with purely civil governors. Their names are just less common because war's dramatic. The idea is not "officials are smart and good" or that passing a test makes you worthy. In fact the opposite was a more common lesson. Stories of corrupt officials are more common than honest ones. The idea is that highly intelligent people exude a kind of charisma, insight, and strength through the power of their mind. And in some stories this crosses over into them being able to do literal magic.
This seems disconnected enough from my comment that I wonder if you meant to reply to someone else in the thread?
But in particular:
> The idea is not "officials are smart and good" or that passing a test makes you worthy. In fact the opposite was a more common lesson. Stories of corrupt officials are more common than honest ones.
There appears to be no implication in Water Margin that corrupt officials are worse than the other kind. Song Jiang is introduced to us as a minor court [legal court, not imperial court] official who is up to his eyeballs in corruption.
The idea that corrupt officials are no better or worse than other kinds is not the impression I'd gotten. And the fact there's 108 bandits at Mount Liang along with the other demonic connections would seem to imply some moral content.
>He goes on to completely anticipate and thwart the military side's plan.
I've been obsessed with this trope in eastern stories for years! Other examples include:
~ In "Hero (2016)" the protagonist steps up to the emperor and the first thing the emperor says is "I see you're here to kill me." There's no foreshadowing, just an infallible intuitive jump.
~In "The Three Body Problem (2008)" a character is debating covering an antagonist with a sniper rifle and is chastised with "She's sharp as a tack, She'll know," as if it's physically possible to tell if someone is pointing a rifle at you from hundreds of yards away.
~In "Shogun (2024)" as outlined recently by Freddie debour. ( I know it's not eastern, but they're leaning pretty heavily on eastern tropes)
Is this a product of the culture's hierarchy raising their leaders to supernatural heights? Is there a specific name for the phenomena of elevating natural intelligence/intuition to supernatural perception? Is this related to the crash of Korean Air Flight 801?!?
"There's no foreshadowing, just an infallible intuitive jump."
This isn't true at all – I think you may just not be familiar with wuxia tropes, or else you missed this one. The Emperor, like ourselves, can tell the titular Hero is there to kill him because of the candles. The Hero's killing intent or battle aura causes him to emanate qi toward the Emperor, causing the flames to flutter away from the Hero and toward the Emperor. It's by this token that he and we can deduce the Hero's plan, it's not an intuitive jump but physical observation.
See, in Shogun, what Freddie complained about was actually something I enjoyed. Hell yes, give me a (barely) fiction(alized) Great Man in Toranaga, a guy who actually is smart and competent and succeeds on those merits! After seeing the "subversion" of greatness fall flat on its face in the case of Napoleon, where it just made Napoleon a petty small-minded guy who occasionally succeeded in a battle almost despite himself, it certainly made for more enjoyable media.
Is it realistic? Are the Great Men infallible? (and even Toranaga isn't infallible - as Freddie's commenters point out, he didn't foresee his half-brother's betrayal, or the earthquake that devastated his forces!) Who cares, it's fiction. Whatever works.
It's not entirely fiction. Toranaga is based on Tokugawa Ieyasu, a real historical character and the founder of the Tokugawa shogunate, and the whole story leads up to the (real) battle of Sekigahara.
Yes, that's why I said (barely) fiction(alized), not just "fiction". It's still fiction in the sense that it doesn't just directly recount history with the names changed.
I wrote more about it below, but I think it's a result of the imperial examinations. In a similar way, I think the modern rationalist movement owes a lot to Arthur Conan Doyle's "Sherlock Holmes" stories. Both want to believe that sufficient intelligence allows superhuman feats.
The Judge Dee (or Di) stories might be an archetype for this. I haven't read them, so I'm recommending them here by reputation. I believe that Di is a judge noted for investigatory prowess, with a significant impact on modern Chinese pop culture.
The plot point that I highlighted in my initial comment isn't a good example of this. Supernatural deductive powers aren't required.
You probably live in a bubble of similarly smart people. In medieval China, with quite worse living conditions and 8 centuries of Flynn effect missing, being able to be a scholar probably put you a couple of standard deviations above the mean, in a world with a median in the 80s. Quite a few "cunning plots" become possible in these conditions.
Wow! You're talking about the culture that invented gunpowder, rockets, the compass, paper, moveable type printing, woodblock printing, paper money, blast furnaces, the wheelbarrow, row-crop farming, seed drills, and possibly kites. Tell me again about the low IQ of medieval Chinese?
It wasn't until the 17th Century that Europe began to outpace China in economic productivity. And after listening to the lectures up on Hanging with History (https://www.buzzsprout.com/955531) it's hard not to view the Industrial Revolution as an accident — where all the right components came together in Great Britain in the right mix — i.e. economic incentives that promoted new innovations, low government censorship that allowed a relatively free exchange of philosophical thought), the right kind of iron ore, the right kind of coal, the existential threat of invasion (from the French under Napoleon).
If it helps I don't have a better opinion on the average IQ in Europe at the same time. We know that there's little you can do to raise IQ, but there's a lot of things you can do to decrease it - most of them quality of life things. In pre-industrial societies you have almost all of them stacked up. Even the Flynn effect is probably just living conditions catching up and bringing us close to the max potential.
I'm probably a bit biased toward this way of thinking because I live in a country with major economic emigration and constant brain drain over the last 35 years. It's a lot easier here to think in terms of "you can't develop this industry because the limiting factor is how many competent people you can attract".
It's crazy to view the Industrial Revolution as an accident. Western Europe had a lot going on those last couple centuries and the Industrial Revolution was the culmination of it.
That was my opinion, too. But after listening to Hanging With History I changed my mind. Granted that Great Britain couldn't have had the Industrial Revolution outside the European context. But it couldn't have happened anywhere else in Europe, except Great Britain, because of all sorts of different inhibiting issues in the other nation-states of continental Europe.
I read The Great Divergence a couple years ago where he makes that claim and I didn’t find it persuasive at all. Europe was innovating militarily, economically, technologically and intellectually for hundreds of years before 1800. The Industrial Revolution was baked in well before it happened.
What if the story had been sanitized in a different way? Instead of adding things like "he humbly prayed and God told him the optimal course of action", it would be "he scored highly on his civil service examinations and was very smart so he thought of the optimal course of action".
That is, who would be sanitizing it, and what was their public justification for holding power?
I think stories will, by one means or another, tend to suit the beliefs of their transmitters and audiences.
In the case of this story, those would be highly educated members of imperial China. Of course they would want stories that celebrate incredible personal feats of intellectual prowess. There's a tendency in Chinese history and literature to downplay the contributions of millions and millions of people, and attribute it all to a stroke of genius on the part of one singularly brilliant man. (It's almost enough to make me Maoist.)
Whereas when the Grimm Brothers were revising their tales, they made alterations to suit their more wealthy, urban, educated audience. Changing mothers to stepmothers, changing being eaten to being swallowed whole (and later rescued), tacking on a paragraph-long happy ending, justified by an act of prayer inserted earlier. That sort of stuff.
I still don't understand your first comment. I observed that Water Margin failed to be sanitized to accord with modern sensibilities. I don't know how to answer "what if it had been sanitized in a different way?". The comparison might be to the sanitization that I observed had happened, of the Robin Hood legends, but that sanitization involves giving Robin Hood nobler motives and toning down his thieving, murderous behavior. (Generally removing the murderous behavior outright.)
The novelization of Water Margin probably was written by a member of the educated class. It is much less clear that that was the intended audience. The stories are mostly not original to the novel and can be traced back through popular plays, and before then (and simultaneously) they would have been part of the oral tradition.
The book has not so far done any celebrating of incredible personal feats of intellectual prowess. Journey to the West doesn't do that either, though I think there is a certain amount of lionization of Zhuge Liang in Romance of the Three Kingdoms. The closest match I know of for that description is the Judge Dee stories, which, like Romance of the Three Kingdoms, I haven't read. But I don't think it's a general theme in Chinese literature any more than Sherlock Holmes is a general theme of British literature rather than one guy who appears in several popular books.
You might note that, as I observed in my reply to Deiseach, the educated class is not portrayed _at all_ favorably in Water Margin. If you want a story written by the elite for the elite, look for Dream of the Red Chamber.
What I meant was, we here today expect that things like Rogin Hood and the Grimm Brothers will have passed through a cultural filter and will have been altered in certain ways, to conform to standards and to help set standards. We can predict that certain things will have been removed, and we can guess that other things have been added. Pre-modern Chinese literature is going to pass through a different cultural filter. So we today reading it will see things that would have been sanitized out of Robin Hood and the Grimm Brothers, and we also may have a harder time seeing things that were added, because we don't automatically recognize the pattern. Does that make sense?
And I may be overreacting a bit. That "superhuman omnicompetent smart guy" trope is something that specifically bugs me, and even more so when found in Chinese literature, so I'm probably oversensitive to even its milder incarnations.
And OK, yeah, Journey to the West doesn't hit that trope directly, but the Monkey King is just so over the top... Fun, yes, but...
> Today there are many people who will happily tell you with a straight face that someone doing well on difficult tests tells you nothing but that the examinee can do well on tests. This seems to have been too implausible for the audience of a pretty openly anti-elitist set of stories in 15th-century China.
If you're anti-elite, you might question the scholarship of the elites. Or you might just reject the notion that scholarship is good.
The text doesn't seem to take too high a view of intelligence; the mark of being a scholar is to be devious and scheming after all your learning has taught you how to plot and connive 😀
I presume "it" is straight up telling us that he is a scholar, a deep thinker, devious, and excellent at planning, not your retrospective that we should have known all this from the fact that he did well on civil service tests. If that was what we should have inferred, then there wouldn't be a need to tell us explicitly that *this* civil servant is intelligent, and in any case, it wouldn't explain any difference between him and the other civil governor, who I presume would have done similarly on the same tests.
But I haven't read this, and only know about it what you posted.
The other governor is military; they're chosen differently.
The English here explicitly relates the deep, devious, scheming mind to the fact that the civil governor is a scholar. I can't speak for the Chinese directly, but I see no real reason to doubt that it does the same.
From all this killing the pavilion was swimming in blood, bodies could be seen lying everywhere in the flickering light of the candles. Wu Song said to himself: "It had to be all or nothing; kill a hundred, you can only die for it once." Sword at the ready, he went downstairs.
"What's all the hullaballoo upstairs?" the General's wife was inquiring as Wu Song rushed in. At this monstrous sight she shrieked: "Who are you?"
But Wu Song's sword was already flying. It caught her square in the forehead and she fell with a shriek right there in front of the pavilion. Wu Song held her down but when he tried to cut off her head the sword wouldn't cut. Baffled, he saw by the light of the moon that the blade was completely blunted. "So that's why I couldn't get her head off," he thought.
He slipped out of the back door to get his halberd again and threw away the blunt sword. Then he turned and went back to the tower. A lamp could be seen approaching. It turned out to be the singing girl, Yulan, the one he'd had the trouble with before. She was accompanied by two children. When the light of her lamp fell on the General's wife where she lay dead on the floor, Yulan screamed: "Merciful Heaven!" Wu Song raised his halberd and ran her through the heart. He also killed the children, a single thrust to each. He went to the central hall, bolted the main door and returned. He found two or three more young girls and stabbed them to death too.
"Now at last," he said, "my heart is eased. Now it's time to stop." He threw away his halberd, went out of the side-door, took from his shirt-front the drinking vessels he had squashed and put them in the sack he had left in the stable, tying it on his waist. And off he strode, halberd in hand. Reaching the city wall, he thought: "If I wait for the gates to open I'll be caught. Surely the best thing to do is to climb the wall now, while it's dark, and clear off." So he leapt up onto the wall.
>He also killed the children, a single thrust to each. He went to the central hall, bolted the main door and returned. He found two or three more young girls and stabbed them to death too.
Wu Song also stops at an inn where, as he is already aware by reputation, the owners drug and butcher some of their guests to feed to the others. When he suspects that he has been given human meat, he provokes a fight with the proprietress (for reasons unclear to me, this translation calls her "the Ogress"; her Chinese epithet is clearly "the Tigress") and is about to kill her when her husband, the Gardener, arrives and recognizes Wu Song. After this the three of them are good friends.
This is a major exception to the general rule that you can tell the difference between heroes and villains; I don't really see any redeeming qualities in the treatment of this couple, but they're heroes anyway.
On a tangent, incapacitating drugs used to spike drinks are a significant plot element in the novel. I had thought of these as a fairly modern technology. What kind of stuff was available in the 12th-16th centuries?
>This is a major exception to the general rule that you can tell the difference between heroes and villains; I don't really see any redeeming qualities in the treatment of this couple, but they're heroes anyway.
Hmm... Interesting question - maybe in the literary tradition of the time the distinction between heroes and villains was some other parameter, clear to readers then, but different from what we use now???
>On a tangent, incapacitating drugs used to spike drinks are a significant plot element in the novel. I had thought of these as a fairly modern technology. What kind of stuff was available in the 12th-16th centuries?
Good question! I assume opium was available, but I thought that it (and most alkaloids) has a bitter taste. Chloral hydrate is one of the earliest synthetic sedatives, but it only goes back to 1832 (Justus von Liebig) AFAIK.
Is anyone still taking seriously the extremely optimistic hopes Yudkowsky described in the Sequences for what rationality might make people capable of, and treating that as a goal they're working towards? Is he?
I think the problem with rationalism is that it does not take into account a lot of the non-rational factors that push people in the direction of making and believing bad arguments: anger and desire to win, need to signal affiliation with valued others, self-esteem benefits of loathing an outgroup, etc. There are not many people for whom the desire to keep their thinking up to a certain standard of fairness and correctness is a powerful motivation all by itself. The people it's sufficient motivation for tend to be pretty non-social, and unusually attracted to rules and systems.
EY was quite clear that he considered his rationality a half-made art, comparable to knowing how to punch without knowing how to kick.
I don't think that half-version of rationality does that much (except get us interested in completing it). I also think the full version of it might be incomplete because it will contain things challenging to the punch's half-perspective. It is precisely because of how different it is that this missing half of the art adds so much that the first half is missing.
I do have hopes that there exists a version of self-improvement and societal improvement that can enjoy runaway success and rapidly improve us as a species. Our dialectic has worked blindly so far, but if we turn it back on itself and hone it to an edge, we will quickly become capable of jumping ahead of the schedule of insights as it looks right now.
So instead of trying to answer questions, I propose a short period of focusing on getting better at answering questions by intentionally designing dialectic infrastructure and technology; why bother trying to see through the fog to the dim light far away, when the fog will be gone and the light right up close as soon as we make our dialectic recursively self-improving?
Thanks for that interesting link. I am curious about one of your comments,
“ I think a history of the idea of procrastination would be very interesting. I get the impression that ancient peoples had very confused beliefs around it. I don't feel like there is some corpus of ancient anti-procrastination techniques from which TAPs are conspicuously missing, but why not? And premodern people seem weirdly productive compared to moderns in a lot of ways.”
Interesting survey, I think I can see what it's trying to get at (and reading the linked Substack inclines me towards that) but I don't want to speculate until the results are in.
The one thing I'd say is the compulsory "gimme your email address"; the email I use to sign in with Google is (1) a different one to the email I use for other purposes, such as subscribing to this Substack and (2) not my real name anyway.
I think forcing people to use the Google sign-in email may result in "By the way, this is not my normal email and you won't be able to contact me with this one", so maybe an option for either "don't have to sign in to take this survey" or a place to give an alternate email address might be helpful?
I will definitely be waiting to see the results and already have a "yeah, but" response in mind to what I think the conclusions will be 😀
Ran across this yesterday, and it feels like the kind of thing I would read in an ACX links digest:
The Phantom Time Conspiracy “claims that the period from 614 A.D. to 911 A.D. was fabricated during the Middle Ages to place Otto the Third in the year 1000 and legitimize his claim over the Holy Roman Empire. The entire Carolingian period is thereby fake and we actually live in the year 1727.”
Much like the moon landing conspiracies can be answered by "so how did they get the Soviet Union to agree that the Americans won the space race?", the obvious question for this one is "so, how did they get all the countries outside the HRE to agree to the new fake calendar?"
This reminds me of Scott's coffeepocalypse post from earlier this week.
Upon hearing about this theory I find myself immediately dismissing it, not after carefully weighing up any of the evidence of its proponents, but simply because it pattern-matches to a whole lot of other wacky theories which have turned out to be wrong.
This is what the AI Doom doubters who engage with the argument at the level of "oh yeah, people said that about coffee too" are doing. It might be frustrating if you're an insider who has had his head deep in the weeds of the argument for years, but it's what most people do most of the time about most things; I haven't got time to entertain wacky theories about the future or the past so I'll just wave them away (and hope that someone else better qualified will engage with the actual substance of the argument).
Sounds like Fomenko's "New Chronology". It's a really cool theory that sounds like something you'd see in a sci-fi novel, either due to time travel shenanigans or due to planetary-scale memory loss or due to civilizational collapse on a colony.
Once in a few years I get bored enough to click on SneerClub. Today I was shocked to see it... dead?
Apparently, 10 months ago they decided to commit a collective sudoku, because the Reddit admins told them to... uhm, actually I can't even figure what exactly it was that they told them. The goodbye message just quotes a very unspecific message from Reddit admins, saying "please take steps to begin that process" and "we will reach out soon with information on what next steps will take place", which SneerClub interprets as "being told to bend the knee or to die", and chooses to die.
I suppose that explanation makes way more sense for someone in the loop. I just feel a vague discomfort about the news that even bullies feel unsafe on Reddit these days. Then again, how many people still use Reddit? I also suspect that this might all be just an excuse, and the true reason is that the moderators of SneerClub simply got tired after a decade of doing the same pointless thing over and over again, and decided to move on, but for the purpose of feeling better about themselves, they decided to rebrand their retirement as heroically sacrificing their lives on the altar of... something.
They mention that the new rules on Reddit would allow big subs to take over small ones, by having many members subscribe to the small sub and then voting for new moderators. Is this actually true? If yes, it seems like a lot of fun going to happen. (Also, if true, I can imagine a way more efficient form of protest: ten people - or one person with nine sockpuppets - taking over hundreds of subs having less than ten subscribers and replacing their homepage with a protest message. The fact that this didn't already happen makes me suspect the information might not be entirely true.)
Tried to find out more. In other posts they say they are actually protesting against API changes. That only makes me more confused. So is this about the API changes, or the fear that Scott will send thousand cultists who will vote out the existing mods and establish Scott as the only legitimate authority on hating Scott? Also, isn't it a bit ironic that you spend a decade mocking people for their worries about coming technological change, and then you get hysterical about how the coming technological change will make you unable to continue your life as usual? At least the rationalists are losing their sleep over the idea that an AI might exterminate humanity, rather than that it might make loading Reddit pages a bit slower.
Ah, seems like the have a new website, where 80% of posts are made by David Gerard. Okay guys, I wish you a nice API and not too many subscribers! I will check your website again in ten years.
A lot of small lefty political sites relocated to greener pastures - and mostly starved there, I would assume. Slightly annoying if you liked to click on them from time to time, I guess, but no great loss to the world. Most of the sites I go to, related to games, software, books etc. seem largely unchanged, though probably the APIcalypse did some damage. I don't know what if anything it did to large political sites as I don't go there or to the front page. Haven't been on SSC much lately but that looks about the same as before.
10 months ago is exactly the timing of widespread protests against the API pricing changes. SneerClub wasn't the only small subreddit that closed down and then never opened back up. Nothing about this is specific to them, closing permanently was a plausible outcome for any small sub with cantankerous mods during those protests. Nothing to see here.
> They mention that the new rules on Reddit would allow big subs to take over small ones, by having many members subscribe to the small sub and then voting for new moderators. Is this actually true?
No. The Reddit subreddit democracy thing is 1) probably not going to happen and 2) even if it did could not be used to remove SneerClub moderators in the way they're describing.
That's not what I mean. What I mean is that Reddit (the company) has no interest in allowing large subreddits to take over small subreddits in this manner. Reddit's goal is to cater to many different niches, and this would reduce the number of niches.
I wondered if it might be like The Motte, which decided to jump before it was pushed, and your concluding sentences make it seem that way - instead of whatever changes Reddit might demand (which probably would be hollowing-out the entire sub-reddit), they decided to pack up the caravan and move on to pastures new.
To explain a joke, it was some spammer account that posted dozens of messages like "LW is shit" with links to the (old) SneerClub website. This happened a few years ago, and somehow it escaped the moderators's attention (probably because he only commented on old debates). I accidentally found it in google results when looking for SneerClub.
As far as reddit clones go, that one is actually nice and fast and neat and well designed. Or maybe it just helps that it's not constantly under DDOS like .win and voat.
Has anyone studied or thought about whether aphantasia would negatively affect IQ tests due to the tests reliance on visual pattern recognition questions? I can solve those questions but I find them so unintuitive— I have to use my hands and turn my head to try to figure out the pattern. My wife claims she can see the next tile in her minds eye. She can confabulate shapes in her mind quickly to validate her prediction.
I think this reflects that "aphantasia" doesn't describe a literal inability to mind's-eye visualize but a difference in answering questions/identfying and describing one's internal experience. Anecdotally, a lot of aphantasia descriptions are weirdly Barnum-y for something that should in theory be super distinct.
(Whether matrix reasoning type stuff is "visuospatial" is a different question. In theory, it isn't. In practice, everyone looks at it and goes "ah, that's visuospatial".)
It's not super distinct because there is a continuum - people with imagination have radically different capabilities and uses of it.
Those papers are really interesting, thanks for the link!
e.g. Personally I have decent (not amazing) spatial imagination - relative positions of things, so would do fine in rotating tasks. But I have very little colour or texture, and extremely low detail of images. So I'd do perfectly well at the tasks in the papers, even though I've very weak phantasic abilities.
I think the reason those papers don't find meaningful impacts is because the tasks are relatively straightforward, and there are multiple ways to do such tasks. Also often the task might be done elsewhere in the brain and merely presented consciously to phantasics via visual circuity.
We know for sure it isn't a Barnum-y fake from MRI scans (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8186241/) and that it isn't just varying description of inernal experience from Descriptive Experience Sampling (which is a very thorough method - any questions you have about it, Hurlburt will have gone into in various books)
My visual working memory is non existent, compared to something like remembering a complex software program. I find it hard to translate shapes, positions, movement, to a symbolic system in my head. My wife who is an artist never has to go through that step. It’s just so much more effortful than doing math or coding.
I have Aphantasia and an education correlated with having a very high IQ (both on the verbal and math side). I find the Raven's Progressive Matrices absurdly hard and have wondered if this reflects my being genuinely less intelligent than I think or a bias in IQ testing caused by my Aphantasia.
I have (as far as I can tell) an excellent ability to form mental images, and Raven's Progressive Matrices were a delight to do.
Working memory tests, on the other hand, I do miserably at. Though I don't think it's related, other than the fact that if I have to keep a large number in my working memory I tend to imagine it written down.
I looked back at "I can tolerate anything except the outgroup" and Russell Brand was seen as the go to example if the most absurd partisan Blue Tribe person, how times have changed.
The "everyone is Blue Tribe until they're accused of sexual harassment" adage seems to hold true. There is of course also an intermediate stage in all this, in which said person weakly defends free speech against blue tribe extremists.
In this case I think it's more "Everyone gets accused of sexual harassment once they stop being reliably Blue Tribe".
Same thing that happened to Bill Cosby -- everyone knew about the rape but for some reason nobody cared, until he started saying things about how young black men should really pull up their pants instead of blaming others. (This isn't a conspiracy theory, check the Hannibal Burress section on Cosby's wikipedia page, the rape allegations were deliberately resurfaced as a response to his comments about black people.)
In Brand's case, he started making remarks about vaccines and bam, suddenly everyone remembers he's a creepy druggie pervert. I have to at least respect Brand for having his own stupid opinions rather than following the path of least resistance though.
I wrote up my thoughts on Minicircle as a recipient of the therapy, having it turned on, and then turned off (and soon turned on again), and a friend of both Max & the minicircle team who thinks highly of them all: https://x.com/patrissimo/status/1794493623947403750
I just went through the fiction portion of my library and separated the books I've read from the books I haven't read. I ended up with almost exactly the same number in each category. It turns out I have far more unread books than I expected.
More on the protest drama on US campuses. Both pro- and anti-demonstration parents — as well as parents who've paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for their kid's education — are all hopping mad at college presidents and administrators (paywalled WSJ article below) You'd think that universities would have developed a playbook for demonstrations by now. I thought they were pretty common, but Kevin Drum says otherwise — and the cops are usually called when the demonstrators occupy buildings (second link)...
https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/college-protests-parents-angry-e93bb2ef?mod=hp_lead_pos7
https://jabberwocking.com/when-you-occupy-university-buildings-cops-are-called/
I think Kevin Drum's examples are almost irrelevant, and that the primary point of comparison is going to be BLM from 4 years ago. Not just because these are young people with no perspective, but also because we all seem to be losing our collective memory and developing the attention span of gnats.
On the left, I think it's a matter of not having the administration look the other way and treat them with kid gloves, the way that happened 4 years ago. They expected to play by the same unwritten set of rules as back then, and are squawking loudly as they find out that they no longer have privilege. Alternatively, compare to the paradigmatic case of an upper-middle class black man from a good neighborhood who never had a problem with police, but then gets pulled over while driving through a bad neighborhood, and is treated like a resident of the bad neighborhood. "Galvanizing" might be the word. It's going to be interesting to see whether this generation of leftists will develop a distrust of "official" power structures, now that they've viscerally experienced how their interests are not always the same.
On the right, I think a lot of people had been used to never succeeding, and are now emboldened to push for everything that they saw the other side get. Sadly, it seems that a bunch of them are abandoning free speech principles and embracing "who, whom", but that appears to be the normal state of humanity. :-(
And I think the universities are stuck, because they alternate between claiming to enforce the rules as written (as when testifying before Congress) and relaxing the rules for their favorite sides, and now they're being forced to make choices while under the public eye. I'm surprised that more aren't acting like Northwestern, or simply tolerating the protests as is ("as are"?). That probably means my mental model of university administrators was inaccurate.
This comment applies just as well in the context of homeless encampments as it does in the context of protestor encampments.
Oh my. Nvidia should start naming its chips after tulip varietals. "In a presentation earlier this month, the venture-capital firm Sequoia estimated that the AI industry spent $50 billion on the Nvidia chips used to train advanced AI models last year, but brought in only $3 billion in revenue." *
* From behind the WSJ paywall: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/a-peter-thiel-backed-ai-startup-cognition-labs-seeks-2-billion-valuation-998fa39d
Could you use a little highly intellectual distraction from one thing or another?
If my reaction is typical, it's impossible to think about anything else while trying to understand the section about Hegel.
Why Marx was not a cabalist.
The Communist Manifesto considered as classic Gothic fiction. Vampires and specters and all that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n48uX6jjGlY&ab_channel=ESOTERICA
I just watched that. Brilliant!
Anyone else enjoying the new Velma? Can't wait for season 3!
No one ever jokes on the internet, Hammond.
OC ACXLW Sat May 4 The Hipster Effect and AI Self-Alignment
Hello Folks! We are excited to announce the 64th Orange County ACX/LW meetup, happening this Saturday and most Saturdays after that.
Host: Michael Michalchik Email: michaelmichalchik@gmail.com (For questions or requests) Location: 1970 Port Laurent Place (949) 375-2045 Date: Saturday, May 4 2024 Time 2 pm
Conversation Starters:
The Hipster Effect: Why Anti-Conformists Always End Up Looking the Same: A study examines how the desire to be different can paradoxically lead to conformity among anti-conformists. Using a mathematical model, the author shows how, under certain conditions, efforts by individuals to oppose the mainstream result in a synchronized and homogeneous population.
Text and audio link: https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/02/28/136854/the-hipster-effect-why-anti-conformists-always-end-up-looking-the-same/ Full paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1410.8001
Questions for discussion: a) How might the "hipster effect" described in the paper relate to other examples of emergent synchronization in complex systems, such as financial markets or neuronal networks? b) The paper discusses several conditions that give rise to the hipster effect, such as a preference for non-conformity and the presence of delay in recognizing trends. What other social or psychological factors might contribute to this phenomenon? c) Can insights from the study of the hipster effect be applied to understanding political polarization and the dynamics of contrarian movements? What strategies might help maintain diversity of opinions in these contexts?
Self-Regulating Artificial General Intelligence: This paper examines the "paperclip apocalypse" concern that a superintelligent AI, even one with a seemingly innocuous goal, could pose an existential threat by monopolizing resources. The author argues that, under certain assumptions about recursive self-improvement, an AI may refrain from enabling the development of more powerful "offspring" AIs to avoid the same control problem that humans face with AIs.
Text link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1k0wulhBo0syW9n-qNqcFE_gYgh_L54TH/view?usp=sharing
Questions for discussion: a) The paper assumes that an AI can only self-improve by employing specialist "offspring" AIs with targeted goals. How plausible is this assumption, and what implications would a more integrated model of AI self-improvement have for the argument? b) The author suggests that the key to controlling potential negative impacts of AI is to limit their ability to appropriate resources. What legal, economic, or technical mechanisms might be used to enforce such limitations? c) If advanced AIs are indeed "self-regulating" in the manner described, what are the potential benefits and risks of relying on this property as a safety measure? How might we verify and validate an AI's self-regulation capabilities?
Walk & Talk: We usually have an hour-long walk and talk after the meeting starts. Two mini-malls with hot takeout food are readily accessible nearby. Search for Gelson's or Pavilions in the zip code 92660. Share a Surprise: Tell the group about something unexpected that changed your perspective on the universe. Future Direction Ideas: Contribute ideas for the group's future direction, including topics, meeting types, activities, etc.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gp-Ejbr3O2ZCVwXwaKXxZJ7tX2snVxOwZ8hpZo-MjuM/edit?usp=sharing
Ah, the glories of the modern world where AI makes our lives so much easier, by automating our work it reduces workload, makes us more productive, and means we get more money *and* leisure time!
If you're an email scammer, that is 😀
An old, rarely-used,. and we *know* it's compromised work email address got the usual "pay up or else" blackmail attempt (as an aside, if I was ever tempted to use Bitcoin or other crypto, the fact that it's mainly touted by these scummy little extortionists would put me right off; goodness, whyever do ordinary people think Decentralised Blockchain Libertarian No Mo' Fiat is criminal trash?)
But this one is keeping up with the times:
"You've heard that the Internet is a dangerous place, infested with malicious links and hackers like me?
Of course, you've heard, but what's the point in it if you are so dismissive of your internet security and don't care what websites you visit?
Times have changed. You read about AI, judging by your browser history, and still didn't understand anything?
Technologies have stepped far forward, and now hackers like me use artificial intelligence.
Thanks to it, I can get not only access to your webcam and record your fun with highly controversial video (I recorded it also, but now that's not the point), but also to all your devices and not only yours.
And I saved a special sauce for this dish. I went further and sent malicious links to all your contacts from your account."
Needless to say, nobody was engaging in naughty no-no fun with this account, but that of course doesn't stop these criminals. Though I almost admire the sheer brass neck of the sign-off:
"Hasta La Vista, Baby!
P.S. Almost forgot. Finally learn what incognito tabs, two-factor authentication, and the TOR browser are, for God's sake!"
*This* is the real safety risk AI proponents should be worrying about - that it gets the same tainted reputation as crypto due to scammers and scandals like this.
When magic AI performs the magic trick of producing magic money from nowhere, and I'll get pie in the sky when I die.
Some people are going to get rich out of AI, the guys sitting on the boards of the companies getting places on the new AI advisory committee for the US government. Not you and not me, though.
I kinda think Marx was about 150 years too early. Assuming AGI doesn't kill us all, collective ownership seems like the only ethical way to handle a magic wealth fountain.
Someone still has to decide who gets to tell the AI to build them a beautiful Malibu beach house or San Francisco luxury apartment, and tell the AI killbots to keep the hoi polloi out. All the nice dachas in the old Soviet Union, and their North Korean equivalents today, are "collectively owned", but some people are more collective than others.
Yes, it's a problem. Humanity has a bad track-record of deciding how to make collective decisions. The market can't handle this. And turning the decisions over to the AIs brings in another set of risks.
Ethics and making money have little to do with one another. Everyone is jumping aboard the gravy train as early as they can (see Sam Altman) because whoever gets there first and gets established as "you license your AI from this company" is going to be the one with their mouth to the spigot of the money fountain. They all know it, that's why principles are going out the window in the pursuit of "Us, pick us! Us first!"
Collective ownership can go whistle for itself, it's what makes the shareholders (who are often large institutions so they have the power) happy. See recent story about our telecoms provider Eir (long story, they used to be government owned way back but have been privatised and sold on several times since):
https://www.rte.ie/news/business/2024/0420/1444575-what-companies-can-learn-from-customer-complaints/
"The first thing they need to do, according to Michael Killeen of the CX Academy, is stop focusing on shareholders' needs over customer needs.
"When we look at the bottom five performing brands in our CX table, they are brands known to be fixated with shareholder value, while the top ten companies are genuinely committed to helping their customers every day."
He believes a customer focused approach is the reason why credit unions have come first in the CX report each year over the past 9 years.
The second thing the telco sector needs to do is to focus on existing customers rather than continually chasing more new customers.
"Unfortunately, this is linked to the shareholder issue, as the drive for new customer is partially driven by stock exchange valuations that place a higher value on annual figures for new customer acquisition rather than the longevity of existing customers who stay with brands over the years," Mr Killeen said."
Stock market that sets your share price, which is how your company lives or dies, doesn't care that you are lovey-dovey with your workers and collective ownership and worker representation on the board; it cares about "line go up?". If you're giving away shares of the profit to everyone, why would an investor sink their capital into your company? Return the value only to the shareholders, and maximise that value, and you get investment. More investment, more growth. More growth, the economy thrives.
Not *you* the ordinary guy, necessarily, the *economy*. That's the measure.
Conveniently for me, I can maintain an ironic detachment, because I'm a Doomer. :-)
I think the whole AI bubble is going to burst soon. We won't have to worry about the extinction of humanity. Instead, we're going to see the bottom drop of NVIDIA and the companies in its tech ecosystem similar to the Dot Com bust.
I don't believe in post-scarcity (I mean, we're already living in post-scarcity if you like to look at it, since the mantra about 'ordinary people are richer than ever and can live better than a mediaeval emperor' often gets trotted out) or dystopia or utopia.
Basically "more of the same, only in new configurations".
Are average people richer than they were 250 years ago? If so, why?
https://cepr.shorthandstories.com/history-poverty/
NB. I don't know how they calculated the GINI coefficient of pre-industrialized societies. Maybe they explain somewhere in the report, though. I just skimmed it.
In terms of PPP, heck yes, there's no way I could buy a smartphone even 50 years ago, not with all the wealth in the world. Not that it would have been useful without cell networks and the Internet, but the level of functionality was barely even imaginable.
Globally, averaging all 8 billion of us now, vs. the ~0.8 billion around 1774, probably, maybe? It depends a lot on China and India.
I guess I'm a bit late for this Open Thread, but let's try anyway.
Is there anyone expert on nuclear energy who has an opinion on this company https://www.newcleo.com/ and their reactor design? As a scientist working in another field the website seems a bit too oriented towards marketing than explaining the science...
Here is a brief overview of the LFR design (which they are using) along with some links to papers on the topic: https://www.gen-4.org/gif/jcms/c_9358/lfr
Their plan is to have a reactor ready for sale in 2031, and I suspect we just have to wait and see whether they can overcome the engineering challenges required to make that happen. They plan to generate the fuel used by their reactors, which is another project that could run into problems.
In addition to the technical issues, there are also political challenges to deploying nuclear power. They need to convince regulators that their product is safe, and then convince power companies to buy in quantity in order to achieve the economies of scale they predict will occur. Perhaps this won’t be much of an issue; by 2031 concerns about global warming may overwhelm the concerns that the public has traditionally had about nuclear power.
Late to the party again, but hopefully a few of you find this. My second Long Forum post is up, summarising the most nourishing and thought provoking long form content that I stumbled upon over the previous month. Lots of biology, economics and culture to feast upon.
https://open.substack.com/pub/haldanebdoyle/p/the-long-forum-april-2024?r=f45kp&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
Do Jews have Jewish privilege? If not, how are they so much more successful than most other groups in the US?
Because the unsuccessful Jews die?
Any group can become more successful on average by simply removing all the below-average members. Few groups jump at the chance. Some groups, like the Jews, have no choice.
OK I'll answer seriously if nobody else will.
Being part of any group has certain advantages and certain disadvantages relative to being a part of certain other groups. There are certainly privileges idiosyncratic to being Jewish, there's also disadvantages.
In terms of why they are more successful than most other groups, a combination of (statistically) higher intelligence and ingroup bias which leads them to receive preferential treatment from other members of the same group.
"OK I'll answer seriously if nobody else will."
Why would you do such a thing? *Never* feed a troll. Before or after midnight.
I don't think he's a troll, I think he's intelligently probing the concept of "privilege" as it is used in current-year discourse.
I think it might be done more effectively on another forum where people have less pre-existing skepticism to the "privilege" idea. But he'd be banned immediately on those sorts of forums, so maybe this is the most reasonable forum.
Do you feel that's broadly true of the many, many provocative throwaway comments he makes on multiple topics on every Open Thread? He's a troll even if, just this once, he made you think about something.
And you don't feed trolls. If they happen to be talking about something you want to discuss, there will be other opportunities to have that discussion.
I dunno man. I'd never noticed this particular commenter before this thread, so I searched for all his comments in the thread and didn't think they were particularly bad.
I hope you're right.
A good reply to a difficult question.
I’d like to add, that not all subgroups of the Jewish community are more successful than baseline.
For me this indicates that the observed success is probably a cultural trait.
Kiras Joel is a good example.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiryas_Joel,_New_York
For a Wikipedia article, this was some interesting drama.
It's from drinking the blood of gentile children, right Hammond?. Duh.
I think traditionally it was baked into the matzah, and its removal is why modern matzah tastes horrible.
Nah, drinking children’s blood is old fashioned. Today’s Jews prefer to extort money and power from the rest of us using their invisible giant space lasers.
/sarcasm
How is he not banned here? Seriously. What possible value does he add to this or any other discourse?
I recommend those who object to his presence --- I am one of them --report every single comment he makes. Anyone who is a paid subscriber might want to raise the issue on a hidden thread, too.
Later edit: Ascend objected to my calling for people to report every comment,
and I agree that's not fair. So I'm amending my call: IF Hammond makes a claim with no reasoning or data to back it up, or backed up by a link to junk data, AND you think the comment is grounds for banning, THEN I hope you will take the trouble to report him. Scott does eventually respond to reports, though with a huge lag time.
I strongly disagree with "report every single comment he makes". This is the sort of toxic harrassment that ruins so much of the internet. Report the comments you have a problem with, not the ones you don't because you don't like who made them.
(For what it's worth, I don't object to his presence, though I understand why others might. I think he's got a single-issue obsession, but it's one that doesn't have much coverage here (or anywhere) while being something a fair number of people actually believe: I'd rather their beliefs be out in the open and subject to scrutiny rather than being driven into underground secrecy. And also, his top-level comments are usually lazy, but unlike say the bunch of pro-hamas trolls that Scott banned in January, he actually engages with replies to some extent.)
You're right, it's not reasonable to put out a call for people to report every comment he makes, and I'll go back and modify mine. On the other hand, many of his comments are reportable, because he making broad claims about sensitive matters either with no data or reasoning to support them, or with weak and inaccurate data. His linked evidence for his repeated question "why do Jews hate whites" is a screen shot of 20 books by authors with Jewish names with titles that could be taken as broadly critical of whites. This is non-evidence. First of all, you could probably find 20 books or 20 books by people with Chinese names criticizing US parenting. You can start with Tiger Mom. Is that evidence that Chinese-Americans Fucking Hate White Parents? And I looked up 3 of the books inHammond's screen shot out of curiosity and they don't support the case that the authors hate gentiles. One with "white trash" in the title was about poor whites as an unfairly ignored group. One book was a series of interviews about with small children from well-off white families about black people, investigating their early attitudes and ideas about blacks and how they evolve. It did not sound like an angry, accusatory book. And there was no mention in the reviews I read of Jews. It seems entirely possible that there were Jewish kids among those interviewed in the study. Saying the interviews were with white kids would not imply to most people that none were Jewish. I checked another of Hammond's links in earlier This Group Sux posts and it was nearly as weak. Others who have checked some of his links have stated here that they do not say what he claims they do.
I don't object at all to discussions here of the topics and issues Hammond raises. But he is a terrible representative of the point of view he speaks from.
So I will modify my post to say that I personally will report every future Hammond post where he's backing up his points with junk evidence, and that I hope any who shares my view them takes the trouble to report them.
Hidden threads? Are those still a thing?
Yes. We usually have one a week, though sometimes Scott instead puts up a subscribers'-only post. Seems like it's been several weeks now since we had one. I think probably Scott's just distracted by parenting 2 infants and has lost track of how long it's been since we had one.
Agreed.
I keep suggesting he hire someone to manage reports, or allow the group here to develop some system for handling godawful posts.
I think a main driver of your loss of readership must be substrack's abysmal interface. The website is ridiculously slow (particularly on mobile where it is almost unusable).
I can imagine many people dont want to subscribe with the website being so poor (as I assume many of the reader friendly versions of this lack all subscriber content).
I don't understand why substack is so crap. They don't seem to provide much to you, other than presumably handling payment and providing this objectively terrible website, and presumably they take a large cut of payment.
Compared to your old website, or hacker news it is just night and day.
> I assume many of the reader friendly versions of this lack all subscriber content
FYI, I created a browser extension that improves performance considerably while preserving the comment section. You can install it on Chrome (https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/astral-codex-eleven/lmdipmgaknhfbndeaibopjnlckgghemn) or Firefox (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/astral-codex-eleven/).
I agree that ideally Substack should be fixing this on their end, but since it seems like they don't care, you might want to give the extension a try.
I've added your extension, but I needed to reload the pages. I think the page is loading faster, but I need a new comment to see how that aspect goes.
Would it be possible to make an alternative frontend for Substack, similarly to how https://www.greaterwrong.com/ is an alternative for https://www.lesswrong.com/ ?
I think it would be useful even if it was read-only and without subscriber content.
Does anyone here subscribe to "Blocked and Reported"? It looks like they have open threads that reach about 3,000 comments. I'd be interested to hear if the problems we have are the same there, or whether it's the special modifications that Substack made for Scott.
Thanks, it's good to know it's clearly something related to ACX.
The like button being hidden is one, I believe Scott mentioned some other things were being created for just him, but I don't remember what and I don't think I read what they could have been.
Delivering a few megabytes of text (at most) is really not a difficult engineering problem. It boggles my mind how substack manages to be so egregiously inefficient at this.
yeah, my engagement with the site plummeted since substack. I remain subscribed only out of appreciation since SSC, and wanting to support a voice like Scott's; but I do loathe the change.
Huh, I have a crappy old Moto smartphone which chokes on some apps but likes Substack's just fine. (Since the apps it doesn't like are for things I value less than Substack this has seemed like a net plus.)
For me Substack is worse as a web page than I am used to while browsing via this 1gig fiber broadband feed wired directly into a gamer-caliber desktop PC. It acts as if it's caching, poorly, which there is zero reason for it to be doing. I literally get a smoother Substack response on that half-dead Moto.
It was very fitting that when the comment of section broke and kicked me back to the start, yours was the first comment I saw. Even typing in this textbox somehow manages to be laggy.
> textbook
textbox?
Text box, sorry
I have 32 GB of RAM, and a full astralcodexten page refreshes at the speed of a heavily-laden three-legged donkey toiling up a steep mountain pass! But then I am based in the UK, so maybe it is the trans-Atlantic hop that takes much of the time.
Does anyone know of any real life success stories about companies using feature engineering to increase customer contact rates? Preferably something with a news article in a mainstream source. I’m trying to convince some people to dump real time weather reporting and longitude information into a bunch of tables.
More like “train a model that when the weather is this temperature and the forecast is sunny, rainy, etc” it has this average impact on customer connection rate.
A request for a Latin translation. I've always like the phrase "Strong like bull, smart like tractor," and I think it would be a good motto. Can someone translate this into Latin for me? (I used Google Translate which gave "Fortis velut taurus, sagax velut tractor," which doesn't seem right.
Using Google translate, I tried something along the lines of "Bull's strength, chariot's dexterity" (bearing in mind the Romans didn't have tractors). I think that preserves the sense of what you wish the saying to convey.
The result was "Fortitudo tauri, Dexteritas currus", which is slightly more pithy without those two "veluts". Whether the word "currus" is appropriate, I leave you to decide.
I'd go with "Potentia tauri, sapientia tractoris." "Power of a bull, wisdom of a tractor." Tractoris is a fake word but you're not going to get a real one. There is tractator but that has other implications. You could also go with "potentia tauri, sapientia aratoris" which means "strength of a bull, wisdom of a plough puller." But a plough puller could be a person instead of a machine.
I dropped the like because the Germanic languages' use of simile doesn't have an exact match in Latin. Velut is the proper translation for 'like' because medieval Latin speaking Germans/English/etc would use it that way. But it doesn't sound like actual Classical Latin. I switched out fortis (which does mean strength) for potentia because I think it sounds better with sapientia. Sagax means perceptive more than smart, from sagire meaning to perceive. There isn't a good word for smart in Latin. You have to choose some kind of intelligence and sapientia is wisdom or skill. Which is presumably what tractors don't have.
I'll get the ball rolling - maybe (tam) potens quam taurus; (tam) prudens quam tractor? I'm stretching to get the original alliteration to work. Also I'm keeping in tractor with the modern meaning because it keeps the punchline.
Your original phrase has a bit of Latin-like pithiness to it, by removing two "a"s without changing the meaning. It might be nice to keep that, by getting it down to 4 words?
Yeah, I wish we'd gotten rid of articles, at least as well as we got rid of grammatical gender and inflection.
Latin became a dead language around 750 AD, the tractor was invented in 1892. You might have to compromise.
"Tractor" is already a Latin word, it's based on the verb "to pull". We'l have to wait for an actual Latin scholar to tell us whether that's actually the correct word ending for "thing that pulls" or whether it's a weird half-English half-Latin hybrid but I'm sure there's a proper Latin version.
The Vatican has put out Latin dictionaries with new Latin words for the modern world. I don't have one, and don't know if they have "tractor", but worst comes to worst, we could just take an equivalent classical Greek word and use that as the basis for a new Latin word.
"Strong like bull, smart like...." uh I dunno, chariot maybe?
Can't remember which TV show it was, but one definitely opened with "He's as strong as an ox! (And as smart as one too.)"
The movie is about what would it be like if there was a civil war in the United States today and not as much about contemporary politics. It’s also very much a “war is bad” narrative.
So what are the two (or more) sides fighting over? Pineapple on pizza? If you're going to have a civil war, you have to have a *reason* for fighting one, and differences between the sides. The differences don't have to be huge, but they must be there, else why fight at all?
From over the pond, the most likely casus belli for a US civil war today would appear be a desire of some southern states, such as California or Texas, to secede from the Union and become independent.
I've no idea how likely that is in the foreseeable future, given how many recent immigrants in those states have left their home countries to settle in the US, so most would presumably wish to keep it thay way. But if it did ever happen, I can't imagine the Federal Government or the US Army taking it lying down.
Yeah, the problem is that the only reason anyone in Texas wants to secede is that they're afraid the rest of the country will be dominated by Californians, and the only reason anyone in California wants to secede is that they're afraid the rest of the country will be dominated by Texans. So there's no plausible way to get *both* Texas and California to secede - one one goes, the other just says "Good; I guess the United States of America belongs to people like us now".
The other problem is, our "states" haven't had the functionality of sovereign polities in over a century. They're critically dependent on the Federal Government for too many things, and don't have the skills or resources to take on those responsibilities on short notice, so they'd basically collapse if they tried to secede without the Feds holding their hand all the way. And I *think* most of them know that.
They mentioned the President having an illegal third term so presumably it's about fighting a guy trying to become a dictator.
Right, but if they covered the political aspect it would be 100% preachy leftist tirade. I haven't seen the movie but I'm pretty sure avoiding politics is a much better choice.
It would be interesting to have movie about a civil war initiated by worst of both sides, but I suppose it would need to be indie.
Are there any good live radio stations these days, specifically in the NYC area? By good, I mean interesting (not sports, NPR, shows with a GOP or Democrat axe to grind). I love listening to the radio as a medium but am often disappointed with the content of it.
I've always liked to have Bloomberg on. It's less political, nice and fairly anodyne business news most of the time.
Another solid station. Gives a good injection of wall-street perspective occasionally. And when something really big is going down in the country, they often have good live coverage without wacky hot takes. Just a bit too blood pressure-raising to listen to frequently. —- A plus is that their 1130 AM transmission is rather powerful… can pick it up here in Sussex County.
So they still do traffic?
They have prone on from somewhat of an ideological diversity...
I listen in a different party of the country and it's the most preferable.
Great suggestion, thank you.
I fondly remember jamming out to JM in the AM waiting for the middle school bus, and I now (20 yrs later!) occasionally listen to Clay Pidge’s Wake and Bake on the way to work. The music is not always… how do I say, something I understand, but the Pidge is so into it that it makes me listen a bit closer.
Scott and/or some of y'all would like this book: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250225672/ademonhauntedland
A Demon-Haunted Land by Monica Black examines the phenomenon in Germany just after WWII, of a massive upswing in the number and prominence of witch trials and faith healers. Black makes a convincing case for mass hallucination and witch hysteria as a symptom of, and method of working out, societal trauma.
There was also a big upsurge in spiritualism and seances etc after WW1. I seem to recall Arthur Conan Doyle in the 1920s firmly believing that fairies existed, and making rather a fool of himself using photos he claimed were genuine to promote his spiritualist beliefs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cottingley_Fairies
WW2? Witch trials?
Shockingly, yes. *AFTER* WWII. 1950s and 60s. It's a fascinating book.
From the linked summary:
> Most strikingly, scores of people accused their neighbors of witchcraft, and found themselves in turn hauled into court on charges of defamation, assault, and even murder.
So rather than people being put on trial for witchcraft, people were put on trial for defamation, which is not the same thing and would happen in any modern secular court system depending on defamation standards. If saying "A shot B dead" without proof is illegal, saying "A killed B with a hex" (without proof, obviously) is likely also to be illegal.
As a German, I never have heard about this before. I suppose it could have happened, if you were living under Nazi propaganda for most of your adult life and suddenly that world view falls apart because you are soundly defeated by people you thought to be your inferiors, then you might start to question everything and end up in all kinds of strange epistemic places.
On the other hand, I am not sure that guilt about being complicit in the Shoa has much to do with it. The standard position of the perpetrator generation was denial. Almost nobody wanted to talk about it ca. 1945. It was up to the next generation to start talking about what horrors the Germans had committed, and establish the Erinnerungskultur. Still, I guess that the median German in 1945 might have been aware of claims of the SS committing mass murder and perhaps might also have felt that these claims were likely true, but it was very much not talked about.
The book remarks extensively on the "not talking about it" thing and makes a pretty reasonable case for the drastic uprise in disability (and subsequent faith healing) and witchcraft accusations as being a sort of spiritual outlet for a sublimated guilt.
"We don't talk about what we saw the doctor do to our neighbor in 1943, because at the time we were all complicit... but now every time I look at him I get a bad feeling... he might be a witch." And "I never, ever think about how I turned in my Jewish best friend's mother to the SS when she came to us for help, but for some reason now whenever I try to leave my house my legs don't work. But I've heard there's a guy who talks to god who can help people like me by asking god's forgiveness."
I couldn't find one with a quick search, but I believe there was also a great outpouring of New Age / alternative healing stuff in collapse-era Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia.
"Not talked about" and "not felt about" are two very different things. Indeed, adopting a strategy of not talking about something, and trying to make it socially costly for others to talk about it, is very often a coping response to feeling very bad (maybe guilty, maybe just traumatized) about something.
So I hardly think that "the standard position of the perpetrator generation was denial" shows that they didn't feel guilty about their complicity or inaction.
Apples and oranges is putting it very, very, very mildly. The persecution, dehumanization and murder of Jews took place both inside and outside of Germany, and was carried out on a massive scale right in front of the German populace. It's also a little odd to compare such a thing to an invasion, which, however misguided or reckless and ultimately disastrous it may have been, was an act of warfare at least theoretically directed against an enemy nation's military and leadership.
I think you're missing the point. If I didn't do X, why would I feel guilty about X? Whether X took place on the Moon or inside my house, whether it's an invasion or mass murder, why would I feel guilty about something I didn't do?
You only have to identify with the killers to feel the guilt afterward.
https://inews.co.uk/news/law-to-ban-politicians-from-lying-backed-by-two-thirds-of-public-poll-shows-3029610
Wales proposes a law punishing politicians for lying.
Free link: https://archive.ph/JVFfY
I am skeptical.
From my understanding, this will be mostly applied to statements of facts. If you can't convince the pubic about the falsehood of a factual claim, putting the issuer of the claim on trial instead will just make them look like a victim on top.
Trump voters don't vote for him because they believe that every word out of his mouth is the literal truth.
Also, I will be watching how uniformly this is enforced towards mainstream politicians who use false claims as an applause light. If every time some politician claims that something disproportionally affects women and is factually proven wrong, will they go to jail for it?
I was surprised by the article saying this has never been done before. It would be interesting to see it tried, though I don't expect good results.
Depends how lying is defined in practice. The one who makes the decision is the one who would be given the power to punish any politician.
Re follistatin gene therapy. Follistatin plays an Important role in reproduction. Yet, I’ve heard nothing about the impact of this therapy on fertility. Are people aware of this relationship? Anybody studying it?
It's definitely the case that a lot of drugstores (I'm in Philadelphia) have a good bit of their merchandise in locked glass cases-- you have to get a staff member to get something out if you want to buy it. I don't *think* skin lotion is one of the items locked away.
First I heard that stuff way being stolen in quantity by organized groups to be sold on ebay. This didn't seem crazy to me. but I never checked for what was on ebay.
Then I heard there was no evidence of organized groups stealing at scale.
Then I heard this was a conspiracy by the drug store chains to have an excuse for closing locations, though I don't know why they'd go to the expense when they can just close stores.
The food isn't locked down. CVS carries a lot of shelf stable food which presumably could be resold. The original claim wasn't about desperate people stealing, it was about a few people willing to steal a lot, and a larger number people looking for bargains.
Anyone know what's going on?
In California, there is ample evidence of organized retail theft, and of increased individual shoplifting.
I have read credible arguments from, among others, business/finance blogger Wolf Richter that drugstore chains have been using the (incontrovertibly real) increase in retail theft as an excuse to close stores that they would have closed anyway for the usual reasons: general cost-cutting plus a rational response to the fact that brick-and-mortar drug chains are getting murdered by online pharmacies. (Why do they need an excuse? Because when drugstore chains close pharmacies there is inevitably an outcry from the affected communities accusing them of heartlessly removing a vital lifeline for the poor and elderly, etc., which damages the brand.)
But of course, *sigh*, this is a culture war issue. So if you're a drooling commie SJW, you are required to pretend that the marked increase in retail theft is all in our imaginations, and that retailers of all kinds have invested real shareholder money into thick glass cases, additional security guards, separate health & beauty sections with a separate cash register and theft detectors, and so on, as an elaborate show to make marginalized people look bad. And if you're a perfectly rational Bayesian prior updater, you're required to pretend that every CVS is a constant war zone, picked clean of goods at all times, and that it's unthinkable for corporations to lie or fudge the truth about their reasons for closing stores. So here we are.
I explained why a corporation in the business of running brick-and-mortar pharmacies would feel the need to offer an excuse. it's hardly "deranged" to suppose that such a company might do so. Such companies quite commonly do so (whether the excuses offered are truthful or not is irrelevant, of course). Indeed, to suggest that public-facing corporations do not offer justifications to the public for their potentially unpopular decisions is...well, in an effort to turn down the temperature here I'll just say that it's a bit out of touch with the easily observable actions of many, many corporations taking many, many unpopular actions over the years--especially grocery stores or pharmacies closing locations.
The reason I commented in the first place is because Walgreens in particular publicly claimed that it was closing stores in San Francisco due to shoplifting.. Whether or not that was the real reason, it is incontrovertible that that corporation--which demonstrably exists and is traded on the NASDAQ--publicly offered an excuse for its closing of specific stores rather than simply closing them without comment.
>Of course a company will say why it's closing a store
OK, we're making progress: we're at least back into a model of reality where companies do, contra your first comment, actually quite frequently offer public justifications for actions such as store closings.
>What's deranged
That's a strong term, and you've used it twice now. Is it particularly important to you that your interpretation of the facts before you (including the ones that I've had to bring to your attention) in this case be the correct one?
> is to insist that somehow saying "we are closing this store because it is unprofitable" would be so risky to their brand image
You've already walked back your earlier assertion that corporations are too based and alpha to deign to justify their decisions about store closings to the public. Now that you agree that sometimes they do...did you think they do it because they like the sounds of their own voices? Almost by definition, if a company feels compelled to give excuses to the public for a controversial decision, they do so because they wish to mitigate damage to the image of their brand.
>that instead they'd be willing to lie to shareholders and the government about the reason.
Shareholders? The government? The cases I have in mind haven't involved anything other than statements to the media or press releases, and I don't believe I ever implied otherwise.
Now, earlier I had to nudge you toward a model of reality in which companies occasionally feel compelled to justify their decisions to the public. I hope I don't have to do the same for a model of the world in which the content of press releases or statements to the media are 1) at least somewhat frequently inaccurate and, generally, 2) able to be made without substantial risk of prosecution for violating laws concerning disclosures to shareholders or perjury.
To be clear, I don't have enough data before me to form a strong opinion about whether Walgreens in particular or retailers in general are being honest about their reasons for closing stores. I was simply calling people's attention to an argument I've seen made in favor of "no, at least some of them aren't." It may be the case that that argument is wrong, but it's hardly "deranged" to suggest that any company anywhere might be dishonest in its public statements.
In my city it appears be both organized groups and individuals, and the individuals both stealing for personal use and for redistribution, almost certainly resale or trade in kind. I hadn't heard about eBay, but it wouldn't surprise me if there were some more sophisticated groups trying to exploit law-enforcement-inefficiencies to make a profit. I wouldn't say that it's "desperate people", necessarily. If I had to guess, I'd say it's some of the more daring or entrepreneurial addicts who pull off the big hauls, and the rest are just targets of opportunity. Most of the homeless cohort is pretty desperate as is, and the most desperate ones are usually too weak and tired and beaten-down to try this sort of thing.
Basic food is available in a number of ways, and can be cheap, so I'm not surprised that it's not locked up. Things like powdered laundry detergent have been targets, and are apparently used for black market resale to non-homeless people. I suppose this category involves factors like "stores well", "everyone needs it", "compact value", and so forth (but big boxes of powdered detergent, seriously?). Maybe people are less willing to by stolen food off the black market, but are willing to buy stolen cleaning products? I did talk to someone in my local grocery store who said that the directives for which products to seal up are handed down from corporate, so there's probably a good bit of inefficiency in that response. Just because it's sealed up, doesn't mean that anyone in my state was stealing it.
Premium ice cream was a target for a while; I'm told because it's the perfect food for when coming down off of fentanyl.
Various far-left people and groups keep shifting arguments for why this isn't happening or isn't bad, and I can't keep up with what the current nonsense is. I've even heard that it's a deliberate policy of turning left-wing neighborhoods into food deserts. A consistent theme is that this is all covered by insurance so the corporations aren't actually harmed, which of course has a few enormous things wrong with it. (At least it's not usually by the same people who claim that it's morally praiseworth to harm giant corporations.) Most, I think they just want some vaguely clever response that they can repeat loudly and righteously so they look good on camera.
Seems to be Culture Warring; there are plenty of online videos of (alleged) organised shoplifting in San Francisco (and I presume other cities) where gangs just stroll in, strip the shelves, and run back out to the waiting get-away car.
This produces a lot of heat but not much light in the comments, where you can imagine the sides line up on (1) this is the fault of the crazy Democrat local government and (2) this isn't happening and if it is it's a conspiracy by the MAGA set and if it's not it's down to poverty and lack of opportunity that poor black people are being forced to steal necessary items.
One side is "Gangs run riot, stores have to lock goods behind glass, eventually stores decide to shut down, then the bleeding-hearts go 'why is nobody willing to open a drugstore in this area that badly needs one? it must be racism!'" and the other side is, as quoted, "it's a conspiracy to close down stores by the evil capitalist chains".
What the true facts about level of thieving are, God alone knows, I don't think we'll find them from online discussion of the problem.
It's not limited to low-income areas.
A decade ago I worked for a drug store (CVS) in what is probably one of the highest income towns in America (far from the bay area or any or any other major metropolitan area). During the year or so I was working there, we got a call from... another store? district manager? that several stores had just been hit by "organized crime" (their words), who had just grabbed a bunch of makeup (the best ratio of profit margins to weight for both scalpers and the store) and walked out. We got sent pictures, and the shift supervisor sat in waiting; sure enough they walked in, grabbed a bunch, and walked out.
I got a comment on FB from a drug store person that there's a lot being stolen and resold at flea markets, which would be a lot harder to track than reselling on ebay. I don't think I've been seeing drug store stuff at flea markets, but I don't go to a lot of flea markets.
CVS and Target can close any store they want, for any reason or none. They don't need to make up an excuse.
The 2020 media environment in the US was really amazing in how it got almost all prestige media outlets in lockstep wrt the acceptable way to talk about things. This was the world of "Fiery, but peaceful, protests" and NPR running a positive piece on a book titled "In Defense of Looting" book. (I didn't read it; the interviewer and author seemed to be literally defending looting during riots as a good thing, but maybe if I read the book I'd have a more nuanced view of it.) I think a lot of this has stuck around, with a lot of media outlets basically seeing any CW-aligned question as not being about what statements are true or false, but rather about what facts would be good for the side they've decided are the good guys.
Long term, I wonder if that will be the last nail in the coffin of prestige media sources. Lying about stuff people see with their own eyes *really* destroys your credibilty fast.
"Myth vs. Reality: Trends in Retail Theft: Despite spikes in some cities, crime data doesn’t show a nationwide increase in shoplifting and other forms of retail theft."
"...Violent crime has declined nationally since jumping in 2020, but trends in retail theft are more difficult to assess, in part because of varying data collection and theft reporting methods. That said, the available crime data and industry figures cut against claims of a national increase in retail theft, despite notable spikes in some cities."
From the Brennan Center for Justice.
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/myth-vs-reality-trends-retail-theft
That crime data is almost certainly problematic. Several of the most hard-hit jurisdictions have prosecutors who refuse to prosecute shoplifting, meaning that police stop arresting shoplifters, meaning that stores stop reporting shoplifters. Meaning that it doesn't show up in the crime statistics. (Filing a criminal report can take a bit of work, and stores are understaffed as is.)
Not to mention that there are increasing numbers of people who are ideologically opposed to calling the police for almost anything. If you call the police on a shoplifter, and they actually find the person, and the person resists arrest and is shot, what then? How sure are you that the cops even found the right person? "Snitches get stitches" (the bizarro world version of "me too").
But at least bounded distrust still holds; when they say:
> Contrary to media accounts, reported incidents declined over the same period in San Francisco (down 5 percent)
We can have a decent idea of what's going on there. And they do mention this anecdote:
> Changes in how theft is reported may also influence crime counts and, by extension, perceptions of trends in retail theft. In one particularly dramatic case, a Target store in San Francisco reported 154 shoplifting incidents in September 2021 —10 times more than the preceding month — due to a “new reporting system” that made it easier for the store to document incidents with the police. The increase was so large that it skewed citywide data, making it look as if monthly shoplifting counts had doubled across San Francisco. Reporting discrepancies this sensational are likely rare. But smaller swings in the data may be more common.
But if the data is bad, then the proper conclusion is that we don't know whether shoplifting is increasing or not. I can imagine that there are just as many prosecutors who go out of their way to prosecute crimes like shoplifting, and therefore the police go out of their way to find them, or "creatively generate" incidents. I also imagine there are equal numbers of people who are ideologically committed to suppressing people in poor urban areas, for example by generating more arrests. So, on a theoretical level, it's a wash either way.
The article I linked to claims that despite spikes is some cities (which are therefore real) overall retail theft hasn't increased nationwide. And if, as you say, the change is due to a change in reporting procedures, then there isn't a real increase there either.
Any crime is too much, but it isn't really increasing, is the point.
> But if the data is bad, then the proper conclusion is that we don't know whether shoplifting is increasing or not.
I basically agree. We have a number of individual reports that it is, but no solid data. I'm going with the reports (including my own eyes), but that's my choice.
I don't think your "wash" analysis is quite right, though. There's a lot of reasons why it might be down in many places but up in a few particular cities. The key is that those cities lean left, and elect officials who lean left, and drag their police into superficially acting left, and most especially who provide the sort of homeless services that encourage people to travel hundreds of miles. (Not to mention that a left-leaning population is going to be more welcoming.)
The upshot is that I think these factors mean that the greatest increases are going to be located in the places least likely to report them.
> Any crime is too much,
This is largely irrelevant to the discussion, but have you heard the phrase "the optimal amount of X is not zero"?
https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fraud/
It's a nifty read!
"The increase was so large that it skewed citywide data, making it look as if monthly shoplifting counts had doubled across San Francisco"
I like how the 'real' explanation for this, which is supposed to reassure us all about the level of crime, is that "no, there weren't more thefts, there were more *reported* thefts, so they really were robbing this much all along!"
Did you see that SF is considering a bill to allow people to sue grocery stores that close?
https://www.salon.com/2024/04/17/why-san-francisco-is-considering-a-bill-that-would-let-shoppers-closing-grocery-stores/
Are they taking inspiration from Venezuela, or directly from Atlas Shrugged?
My city had some "renter protection" laws during covid that I think drove rental housing prices up. One made it hard to evict people, and another required owners to accept the first qualified applicant. I think there were also restrictions on the types of allowable qualifications. The result seems to have severely damaged the rental market.
Well, that will certainly encourage more grocery stores to open up in SF.
Considering how much "worst" includes, I suspect you were much seeing "fairly bad".
As for the garbage bag man, I wonder how he was doing it. Maybe he had someone on his side in security.
I went to see Civil War to a small local movie theater with friends yesterday. It was mostly a confusing experience.
Spoilers, not rot13:ing them because there's not really that much to spoil here:
I knew that the movie would try to present an "second American civil war" without trying to get too political - a befuddling decision itself - but the movie doesn't really commit to any narrative.
Is the WF justified in rebelling against the authoritarian president? Maybe? They vaguely indicate that the president is bad (he's on a third term!), but the loyalist forces are not shown doing anything particularly bad (unless you count that fed riot cops are tetchy in a situation where a suicide bomber might strike at any moment), and all the war crimes are committed by WF or the presumably WF-affliated Hawaiian shirt irregulars who execute surrendered uniformed troops. But since there's no weight to either side it's not really a "war is hell, both sides are bad" thing either.
Are they trying to portray Wagner Moura's character as someone who is doing a toxic masculinity? Maybe? Is it bad that the one community has decided to go on conducting life as normal expect with snipers on roofs? Maybe? The clearest narrative ark is the Kirsten Dunst character being on a suicide run after "losing her faith in journalism" (lol) and, in the end, willing her photography mojo to Cailee Spaeny figuratively through the lens of a camera, but since we've established that photojournalism is basically useless for anything besides taking cool photos and seeking thrills, we should we care?
The only scene with actual tension is the one with Jesse Plemons and his racist militia, and that's partly because Jesse Plemons is a great actor (some said during Breaking Bad that Jesse Plemons is a dollar store Matt Damon, I argue that eventually we'll see Matt Damon properly as a dollar store Jesse Plemons), but also in large part because these guys at least seem to hold an actual ideology and be actually doing things that happen in actual civil wars, ie. running a death squad on ethnic/religious basis. I've seen some indicate that the whole rest of the movie is basically a long intro and outro to the Jesse Plemons scene.
It was probably a good idea for them to make a war movie about reporters. Since many journalists are a obsessed with the idea of their social relevance, getting 5 stars in magazines doesn't seem particularly hard, especially since I don't think the movie was advertised as concentrating as heavily on journalism as it was.
2.5/5, 2 for some cool shots and for not being too long (though you could have easily cropped out half a hour by cutting back on some early stuff and the unnecessarily long DC fight scene) and 0.5 extra for the Jesse Plemons scene.
Wrote out the comments in this thread to a post form. https://alakasa.substack.com/p/movie-review-civil-war-an-on-film
No ROT13 because you don't like the movie so happy to spoil it for everyone else?! - people who maybe get the point of it... Many thanks
No, I looked at my comment before posting and concluded that it doesn't really include something that would count as a "spoiler" in the sense that it reveals a major plot twist in advance, namely since there aren't major plot twists or secrets to be spoiled as such.
All the reviews by people who went to see it have been "This is rubbish", so I don't think that there is much danger of spoilers. The general tenor has been in agreement with Tatu; there is no plot as such, just Photojournalist Angsty Lady and her merry band driving around the country.
You can't even extract "Orange Man Bad" as the 'point' of the movie, because nobody is given any sort of reason or set of demands for what they're doing. They just all divided up and started shooting.
I kept thinking about how this would still provide a good setting for a CRPG (why are there comparatively few CRPGs situated in a present-day-style wartime setting?), and it struck me that the plot, such as it was, was almost literally a CRPG plot already.
We start with the tutorial (water riot) where we get a refresher on how to use action points, take photos, communicate, even transfer an item to a party member. Then, at the hotel, the main quest (or maybe a big DLC quest?) starts and the party is assembled.
An early random encounter demonstrates that one party member is low on the levels or maybe has the wrong skillset, and the narrative has told us that the main quest's final encounter is dicey, so the party decides to grind side quests for EXP. They even visit a literal shop and a literal rest site.
During one of the side quests the party encounters an enemy (Plemons) that's a bit too high for their current levels, so in addition to two temp party members who were probably hardcoded to be killed anyway, they lose one of the main party members. After this, they find out that the main quest's time limit has run out and they're locked out of the best ending. However, the story graciously lets them go through the final battle for a secondary ending.
Alex Garland has apparently served as a video game writer as well, so I guess it sticks.
I haven't seen the movie, but I get the impression is that the point is wars happen because the two sides are willing to use ordinary people as a background.
Maybe the point is that photojournalism (and war coverage in general) isn't this big deal about recording and revealing truth, it's just about making journalists feel they're important when they drop into conflict hotspots and snap their little photos and then zoom out again?
That the real point of it all is "Man, this will win me a Pulitzer!" so they don't know and don't care about what is going on, about what A and B are fighting each other, it's all the same to them what the ostensible reason for the conflict is, they're just interested in the cool images they can get?
Like, they sort of hint that the Nick Offerman President character might be influenced by Trump, but he's not, really. His mannerism are not particularly Trumpish; he holds some speeches where he mentions the flag and God and such, but those would be more normie-Republican coded, and he could even be a Democrat. Completely anodyne, a waste of an actor.
I saw that in clips and my reaction was "They're trying to say 'this is Trump' without saying 'this is Trump'. but even worse, they're conflating 'normie-Republican' (as you say) with 'MAGA redhat loon Jan 6th coup democracy dies!!!!' in order to paint all Republicans as 'they're all like that, it doesn't matter who gets elected, any Republican is Trump-lite'" and that was so dumb and betrayed a lack of understanding of what is going on. Clearly we are supposed to just know by innate instinct who the Good Guys are and that naturally they vote Democrat 🙄
Yeah, but the WF rebels aren't really particularly Democratic-coded either. The only thing hinting into that direction is that they are vaguely alluded to being allied to "Portland Maoists", but in another scene, there are probably-WF-affliated militiamen wearing boogaloo boys Hawaiian shirts. A thematic mess.
"A thematic mess" seems to be the general consensus of the reviews by viewers that I've seen:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-M-fSvtQxk
If there really had been some big twist or something other of importance I'd have ROT13'ed it, since even a random glance might be fatal.
Have culture wars online died down in general, or is it just that this place is much less culture war-y than SSC? It just occurred to me that I haven't seen a lot of angry online CW disputes over the past couple years. Plenty of arguments about the ME of course, but that's over a war-war not an argument about bathrooms or whatever. I thought once we got back into an election year that the CW heat would start to burn again, but that doesn't seem to have happened. Is it over?
Funnily enough I've also seen the claim that the culture war is over made on Tumblr, but with more of a smug implication that it's over because the SJW/woke side won.
This place is a lot less heated because The Rightful Caliph does not put up with any of that, so we are on our (semi-)best behaviour.
If/when I really get into Culture War stuff, I do it on other sites (and regularly tussle with the mods of those). On here I try to remember my party manners 😀
I think Scott has been significantly less willing to engage after getting doxxed, and probably even less so now that he’s a dad.
I think the ME is taking up the energy. I think most of us are here for interesting discussions with intelligent people, and are not so much invested in waging the culture war. It's satisfying to snark about my outgroup, but I try to keep it down to avoid polluting the environment too much.
And, at least for me, most other issues have settled down. I know roughly where I stand, and am willing to talk about it with reasonable people, several levels inside a comment chain, or preferably in a hidden thread. Current events might warrant a bit of discussion. But most of the time, I'm not interested in charging headlong into the melee and using Smite Evil on a bunch of monsters that I can tell from sight are racially Always Evil.
SSC forked into DSL and ACX; with some overlap but not much compared to the total ACX commentariat. DSL I think got most of the "right wing" posters, and most of the culture war because it had enough combatants for such. ACX seems much more consistently blue-grey, to use the old SSC language, which makes it more congenial but - aside from Scott's posts - less broadly interesting.
Funny, because from my point of view, this place seem to lean right, probably because it leans skeptic, and skeptic lends itself to "small c conservatism" in many ways. It also seems to lean "Libertarian", which is more right than left, at least in the US.
According to the latest survey, almost 65% of the audience identifies as either liberal or social-democratic, against just over 30% identifying as either conservative or libertarian. (2024 poll, "Political Affiliation") Also, Democrats outnumber Republicans by 32% to 8%. (2024 poll, "American Parties")
You may be used to an environment where liberal politics are the overwhelming consensus, which isn't the case here. That would explain why this place seems to lean right, while actually being well left of center compared to the American population.
It's probably to the right of the median for young, urban, college-educated Americans, and thus to the right of any definition of "center" that comes by way of the US mainstream media(*). And to the right of most of Europe. But it's to the left of SSC, definitely to the left of DSL, and I think to the left of American society as a whole. SSC was unique, and wonderful. ACX on its best days can maybe equal that, but it's bigger and it can make Scott a decent living, which is not a trivial consideration.
*ETA: Or to the right of the consensus of most not-explicitly-right-wing parts of the internet.
"It's probably to the right of the median for young, urban, college-educated Americans"
Well, I'm only one for three there, so my own perception of this place remains unexplained. Also, I have never cared what most people on the internet think about anything, and I'm not starting now.
SSC? DSL?
Slate Star Codex, the blog Scott Alexander ran before ACX. And Data Secrets Lox, a forum created by and for the SSC commentariat as a new home, when SSC went away and it wasn't clear if or when Scott would have a new forum of his own.
You may be able to discern an anagrammatic theme in the naming.
Speaking of culture war, there is also themotte.org which took over the periodic culture war threads after some people on the internet became annoyed with opinions in the SSC CW threads and decided to go after SSC because of them.
What is DSL?
What Nancy and NotA said. DSL also had a first-mover advantage, being set up by SSC refugees in the immediate aftermath of the SSC shutdown, while it took a while for Scott and Substack to get everything arranged for ACX.
That initially gave DSL a good spectrum of commenters, which combined with a good comment interface made for a decent forum. That might have continued for many years if ACX had never happened; instead we got the fork.
I've been trying to figure out how I found out about DSL, but I'm not likely to find out.
I first learned about it in Naval Gazing, yet another SSC-spawned blog (free of culture warfare, but heavy on naval warfare). But there was a lot of general outreach, trying to find all the SSC regulars and let them know.
I also learned about it on Naval Gazing. Prior to SSC going down I was a long time lurker...DSL was great for a while, but it's been getting steadily less interesting as it undergoes evaporative cooling.
https://www.datasecretslox.com/
It's got a forum structure.
The comment interface is better, the moderation is worse.
What's wrong with the moderation?
Yeah, I clicked the link, read a few threads, and was reminded why I am not a regular reader.
The comment interface is way faster, but I think tree structure is better than linear; it is easier to see who responds to whom. But the noise-to-signal ratio feels worse; it is almost like the average internet debate for smart people.
I think that tree vs. linear isn't an obvious choice, and it's bet to make it a convenient option. I think the Tor linear structure was fine, and Reactor wrecked it by making it tree, though I admit putting replies in a tiny font made it worse.
On a site as active as asx, tree is better.
I think this is basically correct. My assumption is that the culture war will be properly over once it's uncontroversial to admit that culture warring was something the left did, contrary to their shrilly strident narrative that it was the right that was waging a culture war against all of their objectively correct positions that had all been status quo forever anyway.
I think the idea that the Culture Wars are over is wildly optimistic. Everything seems to be polarized these days--opinions are as deeply divided as ever, and regardless of who wins in November, none of it is going away.
I'm not saying it *is* over, I'm saying you will know it is by that token, when it happens. *Right now* you'd have better luck getting an average leftist to catch a squirrel with his bare hands and flay it alive than to admit this.
The people on the Left that I know are pretty convinced that the Right started it all, way back in the 1980's with the Moral Majority. The creation of Fox News was another milestone they would point to.
But I'm not saying one side or the other is more culpable with respect to cultural propaganda, quite the opposite.
Uh, metoo was blatantly obviously a retarded lynch mob mass hysteria that led to exactly, precisely nothing good whatsoever, so I doubt we'll be able to see eye to eye on prediction probabilities :-D
You don't think that in some cases, there had actually been sexual abuse that wasn't prosecuted?
I think that even in those cases, making a social media post about it did nothing good, it only stoked the fires of mob hysteria with real fuel.
Seems possible. I wonder if the Trump-Biden rematch has simply bored everyone to death. There are no new exciting personalities making waves.
I think nearly everyone has made up their minds, and are unlikely to change them at this point.
You don't think that was already true in 2016?
No, it was pretty close, and could have gone either way. My read at the time was that it was Clinton's election to lose, and she did.
It's different now--everyone has heard the arguments on both sides ad nauseum. It's all about a very small number of swing voters right now, and they haven't engaged yet.
Has anyone seen accounts by the children of wealthy parents who were busted a few years ago for using various frauds to get their kids admitted to college? I'll take interviews, articles, anything where these kids tell the story and its consequences from their point of view.
I haven't seen anything like that, but I think I can imagine what they would tell you off the record -- all rich kids pay for school admissions, it's just that there are proper channels that are more expensive, and side channels that are relatively less expensive (still very expensive though) but sometimes blow up... which is what happened now.
The thing that makes most people outraged is *not* the thing that makes it a crime. Most people are outraged that rich kids can pay for school admissions... but this is actually business as usual, this is exactly how the system is designed to work, this is how those schools got most of their wealth. The actual crime was that some families tried to get a discount by paying a wrong person instead... and unlike those who did the same thing in previous years successfully, these were unlucky and got caught.
*
Note that I am *not* defending those families: they did the thing that many people consider immoral, and on top of that, they also tried to cheat to get it cheaper. But the public outrage is actively misdirected by journalists here -- what people are outraged about is the ability to "pay to win" in a supposedly meritocratic educational system, but what the targets are selected for is "paying less than they were supposed to". They are punished for trying to cheat the people who are organizing the immoral thing, not for participating in the immoral thing per se. If this type of crime is successfully discouraged, it will not result in more fairness, but in the existing unfairness being more profitable. People participating in the outrage blindly are actually helping the thing they are outraged about.
Part of the cheating to get in situation might be that people have a reasonable sense that a good bit of admissions are arbitrary. Why is being good at an unusual but respectable sport an advantage? This is silly. Why not cheat?
"All rich kids" is I think misleading. Starting with, what's your definition of "rich"? Because the normal price for admission by generous above-board donation to the school, for any elite university, is now in the eight-figure range. Billionaires will probably pay that without hesitation; hectomillionaires might do it after thinking about it, but garden-variety multimillionaires and celebrities are priced out of that market.
And I'm skeptical that there's really that much public outrage about the handful of billionaires' kids, particularly when they are actually pumping tens of millions of dollars into the school. Things like legacy admissions are much more common, just as unearned, and don't have an obvious up side to the other students or parents, so those seem to generate more heat.
Paying half a million to a "fixer" to get in through the back door is also unearned, also does nothing for the rest of the students, and is just plain sleazy but in a novel and interesting way that people will pay attention to.
The morality of not stealing luxury cars and big-screen TVs is for the poor, or relatively poor, because the rich will simply buy the things.
Buying a thing from its rightful owner, at a mutually agreeable price, is not immoral. Not even if you're rich, and no matter how many people would rather the rightful owner not offer that thing for sale. Bribing one of the employees of the rightful owner to open the back door and let you pilfer the warehouse, is theft and is immoral. Even if you're poor, and no matter how much you really really really want the thing that rich people can afford and you cannot.
Someone will no doubt want to bring up the alleged nobility of a starving peasant stealing a loaf of bread from an uncaring Scrooge, but we're talking about a ticket to USC for someone who didn't bother to pay attention in high school, blocking that same opportunity for someone who actually earned it.
I know about the many ways rich families pay for admission, or pay for things that make admission more likely (tutors, SAT prep etc.) But I recently met someone whose family paid in quite a direct way for admission to a prestigious university, and is profoundly affected by the knowledge. Know someone else who, like maybe 30% of kids at their prep school, got a diagnosis of ADHD from a neurologist, which qualified them to have 50% more time to take the SAT. That person also is very disturbed by the feeling that they're an imposter. It's Imposter Syndrome, but with some reality basis -- though in fact both people are quite smart, as evidenced by their college performance and later achievements.
Viliam, these 2 people would definitely *not* tell you off the record that it's no big deal because everybody wealthy does some version of what their families did.
That's not just "paying for admission" though, that's "faking a disability", which seems a quite reasonable thing to feel guilty about.
I agree. The person feels awful. On the other hand, the original testing was done when he was 15 or so, and nobody said outright, "we're going to just pay a doc to say you have a disability, then you'll get 50% longer on the SAT, OK son?" He was doing badly in school (mainly because he wasn't trying) so taking him for neuropsych testing wasn't a ridiculous thing to do. And at the time he had the testing he did not know about the hidden advantages of getting labelled as someone with ADHD or severe test anxiety, just thought his parents were making too big a deal of his not being an achievatron. It's easy to hate on the kids who have parents who do this kind of shit, and to imagine they are fully on board and think it's fine, but the 2 examples I've seen so far of these kids have really been harmed by the "help" their parents gave them.
Parents are supposed to do these things in a way that their children won't find out, until maybe much later, so they can believe they won in a meritocratic competition.
If you want your kids to win at life, "unfair advantages" + "clear conscience" is the right combination for producing success, optimism, and self-esteem.
There is a similar thing with the state universities here that doesn't involve money.*
The investigating media back when we had more of that did a deep dive into college and law school admissions at Big State U's. They found pattern of a lot of "exceptions" that were found to be paired with letters written on the lucky person's behalf, by legislators. The letters were anti-correlated with e.g. LSAT scores.
These tended to be the nieces and nephews and friends' kids of the politicians.
It was very well-documented, but didn't amount to anything. This is not the sort of privilege anybody in power is inclined to deprive themselves of. You get a true bipartisan spirit on that!
And too, it didn't neatly fit the narrative of privilege. The majority of the recipients of the unmerited acceptances were from the "poorest" part of the state.
*Of course it did invove money, because legislators award money to the universities to some degree.
I think it was a combination of paying less and doing less. Sometimes the kids were claimed to be on sports teams they weren't actually on.
Also the tax fraud part of it. Families involved in this scam didn't just "pay money to try to get Timmy into a better school," the guy running the scam had a fraudulent 501c3 that scam participants "donated" to as payment for his services. They then went back at the end of the year and tried to deduct the donation as charitable when they filed their taxes. That's why it got to the level of criminal charges against many of the participants - they didn't just want to cheat to get their kids better college admissions, they committed fraud so that they could deduct the cost of that cheating from their taxes as a charitable donation.
My understanding is that there was bribery involved, too. I pay off the underwater basketweaving coach of Prestige U to say he wants my kid for the underwater basketweaving team, take some pictures of my kid in a swimming pool with a snorkel, weaving a basket, and then he gets in. I don't think you'd actually get a criminal fraud charge if you just helped your kid lie about extracurriculars in his application.
To a first approximation, the crime wasn't buying their kids' way into prestigious colleges--you can do that by making a big enough donation. The crime was buying their kids' spots at the prestigious colleges from scalpers instead of from the university.
I thought it was such a strange thing to risk. There are so many colleges - who cares which one your kid goes to? If she's a girl mostly interested in fashion and her own looks, as seemed to be the case with the celebrity ones - she will be more likely to stay the course at a lesser school anyway. This is what "marketing" majors are for. I don't know if these Hollywood people are sensitive about their own intelligence, so that to admit your kid is no genius (or no athlete?) would be too hard? But it's not like anyone would be fooled in that way. Or care.
What a bizarre final parenting lesson to teach your kid.
In the case you're probably thinking of, note that neither parent ever graduated from college themselves, but managed to work their way into elite society in ways that many would consider shallow and superficial. From some of the comments I've seen, they were rather insecure about that and wanted to make sure their children had all the educational advantages they didn't, while becoming Properly Elite in a way that a BA from Cal State Northridge really doesn't facilitate.
If you've never been to college, you might not be well equipped to determine which universities do or do not offer a solid education. And if you're also rich, you'll probably want to err on the side of caution with your own kids.
Yes. I just suspect that most people who are outraged wouldn't agree with a statement "they should have paid the full price of 'pay to win' instead" (in which case they wouldn't be required to lie about sport teams). And yet, if the parents did so, the outrage wouldn't be aimed at them now.
I have a question for those concerned about extinction risk: if intelligent life were discovered elsewhere in the universe, would that make you less worried about it because intelligent life would survive even if humans went extinct? Contrariwise, if it were somehow proven that no other intelligent life exists, would that make you more concerned?
There are x-risks which only affect our rock here and then there are x-risks which affect our light cone.
For the former part, I think there would some solace in the fact that someone else will try to get some utility of all that previously mostly pointless universe.
For the latter, I would consider an extinction which also proceeds to transform the rest of the galaxy into paperclips to be much worse. (I would still update the odds for great filters, though.)
No and no. I feel a bond with the beings on my planet, especially the ones of my species, and especially especially for certain members of my species. It's not because they're intelligent life, it's because they're all sweet embraceable you's. I'm not exactly a fan of intelligent life, and in my dark moods I think it's unfortunate that even the forms of it on our planet exist. New beings are wired to start life with such joy and excitement, and so many then go on to lives of entrapment, lethal boredom, or pain. And then they die in pain.
But isn't there the possibility of making the world better? Or is that outweighed by the possibility of making the world worse?
I dunno Moon Moth. It's imaginable that we make it better for people. But for animals? They eat each other. And there is no hospice for them, no morphine. Their deaths must be terrible, panting alone in the bushes. I know most people don't think about this, but it forces itself into my mind.
That's the hope of the glorious AI-run transhumanist future, though. We didn't find God so we build one instead, who can track the fall of every sparrow. Or something. Maybe build a simulation where nothing ever *really* suffers, and upload everything into it. Maybe there's just a little suffering-counter in the corner of our vision, with the current level and the lifetime total, and an odd but harmless situation so we don't accidentally set fire to ourselves.
I do think of it, sometimes. I'll spare you an example from last year. But also think about it sometimes when I play with cats, and they catch the toy in their mouth, bring it down with their weight on top, and do the little headshake to snap its neck. But the cats are cute, too.
Yes to both.
Depends on how similar that life is to us. If it's similar enough to be comprehensible to us then yes, it genuinely would make me feel better (both in itself and in that its discovery implies better odds of survival for us in several ways).
"Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us." -- Bill Waterson, of Calvin and Hobbes
This is not just you, but I am so tired, so goddamn tired, of the habitual undercutting of species self-respect for humans. It may have had an intent to prevent grandiosity, but I believe it's become a thing in itself, and not healthy.
“You’re only human.”
That’s what someone says when they want you to set your sights a little lower, to make your goals a little less lofty. “Only human”. It’s supposed to be a reminder that, when you get down to it, we are basically chimps who traded a little less hair for a little more brain. “Only human” means: you’re limited. You’re fragile. You are flawed. And all that is true – but that doesn’t preclude greatness.
You, and I, are human.
When evolution created us as weird chimps to hunt and gather on the African Savannah, we said “how about we thrive on every corner of every continent instead?” And when evolution looked at us skeptically and said “um…even the really cold parts? Like, there’s this whole Scandinavian region you are really not cut out for” we said “ESPECIALLY the really cold parts, and when we get there we’re going to invent IKEA because frankly these rocks are uncomfortable”, at which point evolution presumably threw up its hands and left the weird insane chimps to it.
We are the humans! We are the ones who write, who speak, who invent! We are the strange chimps who always found a way to thrive, on every corner of this ridiculous planet, no matter what it threw at us!
We are the humans! We are the ones who saw a poisonous tree, thought “that looks delicious”, turned it into almonds, and now we pour it in our coffee for breakfast! We are the humans, and we have it in ourselves to care, and love, and protect all of our people! We are perhaps uniquely endowed with the ability to go beyond what drives evolution instilled in us, to love and care and protect for its own sake.
We are the humans! We figured out what the stars are made of! We’ve peered into distant galaxies! We’ve mapped the echoes of the very beginning of the universe! We figured out what EVERYTHING is made out of, and now we take the fundamental building blocks of everything and SPLIT THEM APART to make energy. Like that! (said as a light turns on) We are the humans, and after spreading to every corner of this planet, we looked up and said “yeah, that looks good.” We are the humans, and if you want to do a full headcount you’re going to need to go into orbit. We are the humans, built to run on the Savannah, but now you can find our footprints on the moon.
We are the humans. We’re the reason you don’t see Smallpox around anymore. It got a bad case of us. Oh, and by the way, we’re not done. You know polio? It killed or paralyzed five hundred thousand of us in 1950. But humans noticed, and humans said “FUCK NO”, and inch by inch we’ve fought back, from half a million each year to just THIRTY-FOUR cases of polio in the wild in 2016. This year? Only SIXTEEN. Polio is at the gates of oblivion, and we have a message: Give smallpox our regards.
Next time someone says that you’re only human, forget the “only”! You are one of THE humans! The truth-seekers, the peacemakers, the atom-splitters, the moon-walkers, the artists, the dreamers, the lovers and protectors – The rebels who defy the world they were made for, who never stop dreaming and working for a better tomorrow.
We are not done. We have countless problems left to solve, many of them self-made. But we are the humans, and we don’t give up, and we have come this far, and as long as even one of us is still breathing, we fight – because we are ONLY HUMAN.
—From https://blog.jaibot.com/secular-solstice-dawn-speech-only-human/, which apparently doesn't exist anymore. :(
That's a somewhat different point. I take "only human" to have different meanings. It can mean don't be too ambitious, or as you say, don't be ambitious at all.
For example, I used to believe I ought to be able to come up with arguments which would convince people immediately. This was simply a wrong ambition, and I'm glad I gave it up.
On the other hand, I can be amazed that I had such a crazy ambition, and that gets into not acknowledging that part of being human is sometimes getting things wrong.
I think there's a difference between "have modest ambitious" and "your species is fundamentally disgusting".
Maybe it's a rational response to the observation that the species keeps trying over and over to come up with ways to make itself miserable if not destroy itself.
The thing is, the human race isn't close to ideally competent. It also has remarkable achievements and isn't reliably self-destructive. I feel like too much emotional weight is getting put on the negative side.
No one is perfect. If one cannot laugh at oneself, one is in a sorry state indeed. I think that includes laughing at one's species. Laughing does not mean one's species is always laughable. The highs do not cancel the lows, nor the lows the highs.
Anyone know where I can chat about a relative's stomach ulcer (caused by H. Pylori bacteria) diagnosis via endoscopy? I looked at Reddit but the discussions seemed somewhat useless on this subject.
If someone here knows the answers, my questions are :
1. What is the typical treatment i.e. what cocktail of antibiotics? Other dogs and donts with it, like diet? Is it true you have to avoid spicy food?
2. How do you tell if you're cured? Are there tests other than endoscopy? I see a lot in Amazon but no clue if they're any good.
Had an ulcer diagnosis years ago, H. Pylori. Funny thing, I don't remember having an endoscopy... Was it diagnosed from poop? Sorry, really can't recall anymore.
Anyway, the symptoms were mild, but persistent; a kind of stomach pain that was just... different from anything else I felt before.
A 2-week antibiotic course took care of that.
You would probably remember the endoscopy. You have to swallow the device -- the camera? -- on the end of the tube, before they can feed the rest of the tube down, & you have to be awake for that. It feels like swallowing a set of car keys. After that they give you IV Versed which either blisses you out or just knocks you out, but swallowing those keys is definitely memorable.
I'm going to have an endoscopy on Thursday, never had one before. Thanks for telling me about the car keys, but I'm still going to refuse sedation if I can - have to hang around being observed for 4 hours afterward, then have someone babysit me for 24 hours? All for the sake of a 15-30 min procedure? Forget that, they can just give me topical anaesthetic for my throat and I'll practice my "swallow bunch of keys" skills!
It's actually nowhere near as bad as swallowing a bunch of car keys!
As I recall, it did not actually hurt -- the problem was more that I thought it was going to, & was also afraid that it was going to get stuck in my throat. It did not get stuck, and swallowing was weird and uncomfortable but not, as I said, actually painful. Also, I've had a thing about swallowing pills & stuff all my life -- have a fear that they'll get stuck in my throat. It was pretty bad when I was a kid, but I have now overridden the urge not to swallow a handful of pills so many times that it's greatly weakened. But I think the remnant of that old phobia probably made swallowing the damn thing harder for me than for most. Anyhow, hope you get good news & useful info from the procedure.
And about staying at the doctor's for 4 hrs and then being observed for the next 24: I have disregarded that several times after procedures that knocked me out, and just announced that I was leaving. They can't actually make you stay. What they'll do to cover their asses is have you sign a form saying you're leaving against medical advice. In the US the med they give you is intravenous Versed, which is in the same family as Valium. It is *extremely* pleasant. Knocks out all anxiety, and gives you a lovely feeling of blissful wellbeing. But it wears off very quickly once they stop the IV, and you feel like your usual alert and anxious self again. I do think it would be a bad idea to drive after the procedure, but getting a ride home once I felt awake and able to walk normally has always worked out fine for me. I suppose there's a small risk that the procedure itself did some damage and they're monitoring for signs of internal bleeding, but the chances of that sort of damage seem quite small, and if it had happened you'd probably have pain or vomit blood or something.
I've done the "leaving against medical advice" a couple of times before, and they were *extremely* pissed-off about it. But I did it because "I've been here for 36 hours, you've done Sweet Fanny Adams for the problem I came in with, and I need to go to work and I might as well be home in my own bed as in this crappy overflow ward".
I am obese, which is one reason; anaesthesiologists hate sedating fat patients https://www.asahq.org/madeforthismoment/preparing-for-surgery/risks/obesity/ so I decided since it's a minor procedure and there's no good reason to get sedation (apart from "yes I'd like to have a happy daze going on") and put up with the bitching from the anesthesiologist (I had one elective procedure cancelled because the anaesthesiologist refused to do it) before, during and afterwards, I might as well put on my brave face and tell them "It will not be required". Avoiding discomfort not worth the hassle of the consultant and the knock-out guy arguing beforehand over "I'm not doing this" and delaying the procedure that I just want to get done and over with as fast as possible so I can get home and get on with things.
Oh, I see the complication. Well, it may be that anesthesiologists are not concerned about Versed the way they are about general anesthesia, where they use true knock-out drugs. Versed gives what's called "waking sedation. " Lots of people who had Versed have dim memories of the procedure after, and you're also able to respond while full of Versed to things like "could you turn your head a little?" But I'm sure you're up to doing this without drugs if that's called for.
Whatever they gave me didn't leave me with a lot of memories of the procedure at all.
Ouch, no, definitely would have remembered that! I have had a lung endoscopy many years ago, but of course no swallowing devices was involved for that one. They did knock me out quite hard for it though, I only remember being wheeled in, and then waking up and sitting in there for a few hours, waiting for the swallow reflex to coming back.
I am not an expert, but my understanding is that something like 90% of ulcers turn out to be caused by that bacterial species, and can be cured with antibiotics.
I had an ulcer diagnosed by endoscopy, and my only treatment was to take omeprazole (reduces stomach acid) for --- I'm not sure how long, I think something like a couple of months. That cured me, or at least caused all my symptoms to go away. If 2 mos. on the medication had not given the ulcer enough time to heal I would have known, because the ulcer caused a burning sensation that was different from regular heartburn. It's nos 10+ years later and I have not had a recurrence. I don't think my ulcer was a very large or severe one, and treatment may differ depending on had bad an ulcer you have, its location, etc. I'd recommend looking on Up to Date, a continuously updated online manual for doctors. I believe you can subscribe for a day or a week at a time. That will tell you what the standard treatment is, what are the indications for non-standard treatments, and what steps are needed to tell whether the ulcer has healed.
One can buy Omeprazole over the counter, at least at Costco. Last I checked, it was about $10 for 42 pills.
In this case :
1. One small ulcer plus moderate inflammation in stomach.
2. Moderate amount of H pylori bacteria detected.
Treatment recommended is Omeprazole plus 2 antibiotics (clarithromycin 500 3x a day plus Metronidazole 500 2x a day).
Note : The standard treatment according to Google search is Clarithromycin plus Amoxicillin but he remembers being allergic to Penicillin as a child so they're not doing that).
Don't forget that metronidazole and alcohol don't mix.
Amoxicillin is in the penicillin family.
And ty so very much.
Throwing this out there for people's reactions. Note: I do not necessarily endorse this view of consciousness — nor do I not endorse it.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/insects-and-other-animals-have-consciousness-experts-declare-20240419/
The hook with these endless articles is anthropomorphizing animals by playing with semantics. If we suggest insects are conscious, that renders consciousness as unremarkable as sentience, with "awareness of internal existence" not referring to cerebral self reflection and understanding abstract concepts, but some banality. It kicks the can down the road to come up with other redundant terms for what distinguishes the human experience from animals.
As far as reader squabbling is concerned, which is mostly about our relationship with animals, consciousness is a red herring anyway. Skip to what you want to say.
From the article:
“Inspired by recent research findings that describe complex cognitive behaviors in these and other animals, the document represents a new consensus and suggests that researchers may have overestimated the degree of neural complexity required for consciousness.”
Who decided complex cognitive behaviors indicate greater consciousness? People in apparent comas who cannot respond at all to the outside world sometimes indicate post-coma that they were acutely aware of what was going on around them. And I guess this means people with high IQ scores are capable of greater joy and suffering than the rest of us.
The confusion around this subject is startling. Why don’t we start with the one way we know of to temporarily and relatively safely separate a person from consciousness (general anesthesia), and try to determine what kind of neurological activity is necessarily present for consciousness to persist? This wouldn’t be remotely conclusive but it would at least be a scientific first step. Are people with high IQs (those that display more complex cognitive behaviors) more difficult to sedate? As far as I can tell, no data suggests this.
I'm a lot more inclined to believe in octopus intelligence than in bee intelligence.
The phrase "could only be described as play" would be assuming the conclusion, if it didn't require a giant leap to actually get from there to the conclusion. Also I notice that the title boldly states "have consciousness" but the text hedges with "a realistic possiblity". It's bad on purpose to make us click. And then talks about the Cambridge Declaration.
I'll again hold out and say that I have yet to hear a decent description of "consciousness", and until I do I hold it in about the same regard as I do the ancient Egyptian divisions of the soul.
Octopus opening a jar. If I had never seen a screw top lid before I think it would have taken me nearly this long to figure it out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kuAiuXezIU
They are quite smart. I feel sorry for them, since they usually have a solitary life, although maybe they wouldn't be equipped to feel what we feel, and maybe they have their own deep octopus feelings that we know not of.
This is pretty cool, though:
https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/08/23/researchers-discover-why-20000-octopuses-are-brooding-off-monterey-coast-its-the-warm-springs/
Bees seem a nice simple example of how intelligent things need not be conscious. It seems equally a stretch both to deny that a hive is intelligent and to suppose it is conscious.
Not disputing it, but I'm curious what it is you think makes a hive so obviously not conscious
"I'll again hold out and say that I have yet to hear a decent description of "consciousness", and until I do I hold it in about the same regard as I do the ancient Egyptian divisions of the soul."
I think that's actually quite easy if you define it functionally, it's just that you're forced to be far more inclusive than most people want. To the point where you have to believe that the vast majority of total pleasure and suffering are being experienced by microscopic animals, and you have very good reasons to expect that many plants and single celled organisms also have consciousness (which in my view doesn't have to entail anything beyond the kind of rudimentary learning that even many plants and protists do).
I think consciousness is just the internal state which causes something to respond to stimuli, and actively seek or avoid it. I don't think it makes sense to say that a nematode that responds to avoid a given negative stimuli (and can even learn to avoid neutral stimuli it learns to associate with that) isn't suffering, yet try to say that a (insert the least intelligent animal you think has qualia) which behaves analogously *is* suffering.
I go into this position in more depth here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RjkfdOv6bpsQkF-Y4Gp0FYbVfNZDa_NU4PYulp5r1rY/edit?usp=sharing
I do appreciate the attempt to come up with a useful definition, but, to be an annoying rationalist about it, why would you choose the word "consciousness" for this? It seems bound to create confusion when combined with the many colloquial uses of consciousness.
Personally, I tend to call this sort of thing "sentient". Things that pursue pleasure and flee pain, and that have some sort of memory and ability to change actions in the future based on past experience. Anything capable of "suffering", from a certain sort of Buddhist perspective. I'm not sure if being able to "learn" is really part of it, but it seems inseparable given the limitations of our bio neural nets.
I actually think a lot of good would come from people being more coherent in how they talk about this subject!
I think my usage of consciousness captures the most important aspect of the term which refers to whether there's something that it's subjectively "like" to be a given mind.
Sure people lump in a lot of other cognitive traits in with consciousness usually, *but I think that doing this is bad* and pretty reliably leads to equivocation and sloppy thinking. For instance it leads people to have confused models that predict an organisms capacity to suffer based on irrelevant cognitive factors which there is no logical reason to expect should matter.
I think trying to define consciousness to include all the different cognitive traits people may intuitively want to include leads to people drawing a category which is ultimately arbitrary and doesn't "cleave reality at the joints" as it were.
I believe this is actually very important in many areas especially ethics, and this particular bad categorization leads many otherwise clever rationalists to believe really dumb things. For instance I remember Yudkowski saying some silly stuff about not thinking animals experience suffering (while insisting that people who think otherwise are confused). So I worry that being confused about this subject may literally contribute to existential AGI risk.
So please help me spread the word about the subject!
Since I constantly see people talking about ethics in ways which make no sense if they're considering the qualia of microscopic organisms. I personally care about moral agency, not the capacity to feel suffering, but I think people who care more about suffering as a moral principle really ought to know about this. Since when you consider microbe and plant suffering it makes it much harder and more technologically involved to try to minimize the suffering caused by your consumption choices. Plus if this knowledge becomes more widespread then it will lead to people writing complex utilitarian analysis which consider microbes that I'm sure I will find very entertaining to read (plus they may be useful for some of of my fictional worldbuilding :p)
> I think consciousness is just the internal state which causes something to respond to stimuli, and actively seek or avoid it.
Are you saying my thermostat is conscious?
>Are you saying my thermostat is conscious?
<mild snark>
Its all ok as long as the traffic-light controllers don't start openly celebrating being the first electronics to get humans to obey them. :-)
</mild snark>
The capacity for rudimentary learning is an integral aspect here. A normal thermostat doesn’t display this because that would be needlessly complex for its purpose. Even microbes are after all far more complex in their behavior than a thermostat.
Though I do think a lot of neural networks are probably conscious. So you could make a conscious learning thermostat, and in some contrived circumstances that might be useful.
>Being conscious is a bit more than just reacting to stimulus. The thermometer isn’t conscious.
As I said in my comment you do also require some learning to say something's probably conscious, but the variety of organisms that can display classical conditioning is extremely broad. I found an interesting paper that mentions various reasons you might expect that consciousness is actually a conserved trait predating multicellularity (since that seems more parsimonious than convergent evolution): https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5413897/
If you're making the point that "consciousness" ought to be defined to include things *other* than just the capacity for subjective experience then I vehemently disagree. As I said in another comment I think defining consciousness in the sort of incoherent nebulous way that most people do almost always leads to confused thinking and equivocation: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-327/comment/55052783?utm_source=activity_item#comment-55152477?utm_source=activity_item
It's not 100% clear in context what point your short story is supposed to make. However if the red dot is supposed to be an analogy for consciousness, then I think it only really works if you define consciousness in the sort of confused way which I complain about above.
Sort of the big feature of my model of consciousness is that it's completely functional. There's nothing spooky or nebulous about consciousness within my model, it's just the internal state which responds to stimuli through changes in its internal state that lead to the behavioral changes we call learning. Of course consciousness within this model is so incredibly simple that virtually anything which displays classical conditioning is probably conscious.
Yeah the article's shit: "Scientists discover that bugs are conscious!!!!"
I grew up in a family where nobody killed insects -- not because of any religious or ethical belief, but just because it made all of us feel bad to do it. We lived in a tropical climate and the typical cockroach was an inch and a half long, and when I turned on the shower sometimes a big meaty spider came rushing up out of the drain. I'd call my father and he'd come catch the big bug in question in a cup or a paper bag and throw it out the window. I didn't even know that was unusual until middle school. Did we think they were conscious? Well, seems like there are degrees of consciousness. They're definitely more conscious than clothespins or the cucumber in the fridge. They run to avoid capture. Seems likely they feel pain when crushed -- since pain is a simple, effective mechanism for teaching animals not to do things that harm them. If you were designing a cockroach, would you just not bother with pain? Or is there some other way you could reduce its odds of destroying itself by walking into flames or whatever? I still catch bugs and throw them out the window. Seems better to err on the side of kindness, and it's really not more trouble than stepping on the thing then cleaning your shoe and the floor.
For all the soft-on-bugs people, here's a delightful bit of jug band music from Jim Kweskin called "Never Swat a Fly." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8grZJDjUId8
I always catch insects and throw them out the window. Except I swat any houseflies (don't get many, and if they get to the window first that's fine). Spiders can stay unless they look like they belong in the garden - and I move any hibernating butterflies to somewhere cool.
Houseflies are impossible to catch. Trick for getting them to fly out window: Close door to room, turn off lights, draw shades on every window but one, and open that one, including the screen. If the open window is the brightest spot in the room the flies will go straight toward it and out.
I would do that for bluebottles (carrion flies) because they have a use in nature. [Also if a mouse or something larger died in the walls, you won't get just one at a time.] And they are very enthusiastic about sunlight anyway, they want to fly out and find more corpses.
Houseflies do not get the full benefit of my pacific ways.
At one point, I had an infestation of grain moths-- small pale brown moths with a bit of iridescence. They eat grain and they're a problem if you store any. The right solution is bug-bombing, but at on point I was dealing with them by killing them by clapping them between my hands.
I was also doing meditation, and when I killed one immediately after meditation, I felt a huge jolt. I didn't end up respecting all life, I was just left with a question about what happened, and I still have no idea.
It was something I never want to experience again. People who meditate don't necessarily avoid killing-- is there a way to be less vulnerable? Might I have killed a moth with an unusually large soul? I have no idea.
Some Japanese soldiers in WW2 were Buddhists, they might have useful advice on how to be a meditator who is okay with killing. I think it probably involved some "not my karma -- I am just following orders" kind of thinking.
I generally try to avoid killing insects, but I make an exception for mosquitoes, moths (the kind that tries getting in my food), and ticks, because they are the ones who try to attack my body or property, so from certain perspective it's self-defense.
Tibet had armies until the Chinese conquered them. There were special Vajrayana rituals to cleanse the soldiers of their karma if they had to kill (there used to be a website that described the rituals, but I can't find it now). Also, a lot of Tibetan Buddhists are not vegetarians. As one lama told me (and I paraphrase), "There's not much except grass above 10,000 feet."
It's possible that the solution is to not kill immediately after meditating, though I don't know whether that's a feasible rule during a war.
Oof, I sometimes get those too. Pantry moths.
I found that bug bombing worked. What have you done about them?
"What is the sound of Nancy's hand clapping?" - grain moth mystic.
> Seems better to err on the side of kindness
Ah, the thing that nice people instinctively do, but is difficult to defend in online debates.
I'm also on team "throw them out if possible".
I think consciousness is a spectrum - insects and spiders seem to have some sort of internal life, although very limited, and are able to display difference in preference and personality. A lizard seems to have more going on, and a cow yet more. There are also differences that cut across this sort of general gradient - the average jumping spider, for instance, seems to have more going on cognitively than a goldfish does.
So on the basis of simple kindness, and of respect for another creature's existence that I'd wish to be respected in my own, I try to be as gentle as possible.
Just take that to it's logical conclusion (which unfortunately I've never seen anyone else do) and your logic here should extend far beyond just insects, or even just animals. Since having an internal state that avoid negative stimuli and seeks positive stimuli is something that many if not most organisms have a use for.
After all being able to show basic learning by associating a neutral stimuli with a negative stimuli seems to be present in so many different organisms that it could well be a conserved trait that predates multicellularity: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5413897/
I have taken it to its logical conclusion and contemplated that. The paramecia, etc. Tiny shrimp infants in our drinking water. Little sprouting things. I get it.
This is a podcast titled "Hanging with History" - which episode are you referring to?
Oops. I replied to a different sub-thread with that link and I cut and pasted in there by mistake. Correcting the original post. Also correct link is here...
https://www.quantamagazine.org/insects-and-other-animals-have-consciousness-experts-declare-20240419/
I sent you an email.
The logic of "bees are playing with things just for fun and therefore they must have consciousness" makes no sense. The argument hangs on this fun "not being connected with mating or survival". But when humans have fun it is a safe to bet that it has something to do with mating or survival, so if bees are different from humans in this way, it's odd to conclude that this difference implies a similarity.
It's cool to know that bees play, though. The scientists should try harder to figure out what it has to do with mating or survival.
OK, I'll bite. what does having fun as a human have to do with mating or survival? I suppose when you're young, doing something fun introduces you to potential sexual partners. I could see that going out clubbing or playing Twister (or better yet playing Strip Twister!) could be fun that leads to mating outcomes. But organized sports? Most sports are segregated by sex, so they don't seem to have much direct impact on mating. And they may have a negative impact on survival (certainly you're more likely to be injured playing sports than not playing sports). Rock climbing, white water rafting, parachuting, all come to mind as ways to have fun that are potentially contra-survival.
My thesis is that any typical behavior by a species has to do with mating and or survival. Survival here includes survival of your children or other close relatives. Part of why I am not a rationalist is that I don't think humans are good at figuring out which parts of our behavior are productive and which aren't.
Play/having fun obviously can serve a role in skill development and status seeking. Plenty of it may seem worthless, but I doubt that is true. Or at least no more worthless than any risk taking behavior.
I think playing may have helped survival in humans on relevant time scales (i.e. in hunter-gatherers or similar) by:
-Teaching members of a group to work together, important if you are to work as a hunting party or similar.
-Learning and exploring important skills for survival. For example hide and seek could teach you to hide from predators or stalk prey. Many games/sports teach important motoric skills and so on.
-Finding new inventions that may be important to survival by playing with what is available. For example finding new ways to use a tool or trap etc.
This is pure speculation on my part, but I'm sure more rigerous threatment of the subject exist among anthropologist etc.
I think nervous systems need stimulation, and fun is a safe way of getting it.
Although I can't think of any references right now, what you've said jibes with what mainstream anthropologists and ethologists have posited.
Unlike many on this list, I'm not enamored of the theory that geniuses have moved civilization forward. I believe that ordinary humans working together have contributed to the bulk of our engineering and scientific progress. And in immature humans, I think games are key to learning cooperation and controlled competition in groups.
I was about to reply one of your older comments with https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/nation-of-makers-industrial-britain but then my browser reloaded some of this thread.
Thanks for the link. I'm sorry that I screwed up on pasting the links.
Maybe not sympathy, but more empathy for those deemed "pests" would improve the world immensely. A lack of empathy is a major cause of suffering.
I agree. Every time people here talk about how selecting for intelligent embryos will improve the world, I say I think the world would benefit more from increasing the number of highly empathic people. Nobody even bothers to argue with me, they just ignore the idea. Does anyone really think the Israel/Palestine situation would get better if the leaders involved each had 10 extra IQ points? Even on here, with lots of smart people, I have seen someone in an Israel/Palestine argument change their mind about something exactly once.
>I say I think the world would benefit more from increasing the number of highly empathic people
I still continue to be skeptical. Most empathy is local. I interact with a tiny handful of people on a typical day. I try to make the day of the grocery store cashier that I interact with a bit better rather than a bit worse, but this is a tiny effect.
Does empathy (especially generalized empathy, not just empathy for people on your own side) seem to have a genetic basis?
I didn't know, so googled around, found this:
https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/study-finds-that-genes-play-a-role-in-empathy#:~:text=First%2C%20it%20found%20that%20how,average%20more%20empathetic%20than%20men.
So sounds like genetic contribution is there, but not large. But you could probably get something more hereditary if you threw in a coupla related and desirable traits, prob. correlated with empathy, such as low propensity for violence & rage (you sound like you'd qualify for that trait). The thing about empathy is that I don't think it gives the person high on the trait an evolutionary advantage the way intelligence does. But I think having more empathic, even-tempered people in a group will give the *group* an evolutionary advantage.
Does anyone have a strong skeptical view (or analysis) of reincarnation parapsychology? I'm specifically referring to the work of Ian Stevenson, James Tucker, and James Matlock.
The evidence for reincarnated souls (from cases of the reincarnation type) seems much stronger than that for extraterrestrial UFOs, for example, but gets a tiny fraction of the interest. I struggle to find a plausible explanation for some of these cases taken in aggregate that doesn't pose at least some problem for materalism.
I think that the gist of the matter is that aliens do not imply new physics, while reincarnation requires the state of one brain to be preserved and then reapplied to another brain, and all of that occurring naturally using some particle which would have to be frequent enough to do the job while also being elusive enough that we have not detected it yet.
Put simply, say I require one unit of evidence that someone is an alien.
Then I might require ten units for the claim that they are able to teleport people like in Star Trek, and 100 units of evidence that they can transmit information at faster than light speed.
Reincarnation as a natural process would require our world to be so that teleportation of brain contents happens naturally without us being able to detect it. Let us say that this involves another factor of 1000 of evidence over the transporter device.
In fact, most of my probability mass for reincarnation is that it would be another intelligence (aliens, simulators) intentionally to mess with us, rather than a phenomenon which occurs naturally like the microwave background or tooth decay.
Why don't aliens require new physics? We don't have physics that would allow spacecraft to reach relativistic speeds. We don't have the physics that would allow wwarp drives, wormhole travel, or any FTL travel. Unless aliens are very very long-lived or have some sort of hibernation technology, crossing interstellar space would be a challenge under physics as we know it.
But if the Block Universe Hypothesis is correct that would allow for precognition, and some other forms of ESP. Likewise panpsychism isn't ruled out by contemporary physics (but it's probably unfalsifiable).
>We don't have physics that would allow spacecraft to reach relativistic speeds
Is this true? I believe it would require a lot of energy to accelerate a space ship to relativistic speeds (a large fraction of the speed of light), but would it require new physics?
As I understand it relativity says that from the frame of reference of the space ship, travel can be arbitrarily fast - it is from an outside frame of reference that the space ship will approach but not exceed the speed of light?
(Very possible that I'm wrong about that last part)
Not endorsing theories of aliens visiting earth, just interested in space travel in general.
IANAP, but E=MC^2 says that the mass of an object under acceleration will increase in a quadratic curve (sorry, I may be using the wrong math term) as the acceleration increases. And it would require a similar increasing curve of energy consumption to keep it accelerating. Anyway, speedswhere the relativistic passing of time would be slow enough to make it feasible to cross stellar distances in a human lifespan would require sources of energy we don't have at our disposal under our current physics. And if we figured out how to hibernate or to be put into a stassis for some long period of time, a slowboat would require more fuel than would be practical. A Bussard ramjet could theoretically collect enough interstellar hydrogen to give an interstellar vehicle a limitless supply of fuel, but that would require magnetic monopoles (and if I remember my popular science that I read a couple of decades ago magnetic monopoles would require supersymmetry to be true — and tests at CERN seem to have falsified supersymmetry).
Wormholes? Right now, they're mathematical abstractions that haven't been proven to exist. And how do you create a wormhole with the physics and energies we have at our disposal? And we probably can't access the energies that could create a wormhole.
Warp drives? We don't have a mechanism to create a localized warp bubble in space-time. And again, even if we did, we probably can't access the energies that could create to create such a thing.
The objects that were filmed darting around those Navy jets seemed to be inertialess. If they were physical objects, the aliens that created them would have to have had some way to remove mass from Baryons. If the our pion-condensate theory of mass is true (and I don't think it's even falsifiable at the energies we can access) then the aliens have some way to mess with the behavior of quarks without destroying the matter that's composed of those quarks.
I am not a physicist, though. And some of what I'm telling you I may be garbled. But, bottom line, interstellar travel would require us to access energies that are beyond our capability unless we make a some breakthrough in physics.
The Voyager probes will eventually reach other solar systems. Okay, they don't have any delta-v to decelerate, but in general we have the tech to escape Sol's gravity.
It is right that the travel times will be a bit on the long side, but a million years would probably suffice (Bring a book.)
> We don't have physics that would allow spacecraft to reach relativistic speeds
I would argue that we don't have the engineering to do that.
Standard proton fusion works like this:
4 H-1 --> He-4 + 26MeV
The (mostly nonrelativistic) velocity of the Helium nucleus would be sqrt(2E/m)=sqrt(2*26MeV/4000MeV), roughly.
So if you use proton fusion and exhaust the helium, that would get you to an exhaust velocity on the order of 0.1c . Put that into the rocket equation and build a space ship in which 90% of the mass is fuel, and you get a delta v of 0.2c without any new physics required. Enough to visit another star in a human life time. Just because humankind has been struggling with getting fusion energy to become viable for a few generations there is no reason to assume that we (or some aliens) might not solve it in a few more generations.
This is a good answer, and indeed your last paragraph is part of the actual response of materialists ("more likely to be alien teenagers than actual reincarnation, so even if you had a perfect CORT it wouldn't be a knockdown argument for dualism"). I think it's really wrong, though. Materialist priors are just way too high on materialism when there is still a lot that's not understood about consciousness. Willingness to believe in alien pranksters or faster-than-light travel is, in my view, rooted in a erroneous preference for tech-coded stuff. Science fiction is considered more plausible than other sorts of fiction, regardless of the evidence for each.
Ideas like "there is a soul, comprised of material we don't understand that travels between bodies in a way we don't understand" is way more intellectual parsimonious than "there are aliens on mars messing with us by frying 4-year old heads with prank rays to make us believe in reincarnation." Physics aside, this always felt like common sense to me.
I'm not sure if you're being intentionally uncharitable or just haven't understood my comment. I didn't say any scientists believe in FTL, or that FTL being impossible is a reason to believe in reincarnation.
quiet_NaN argued that reincarnation is ex-ante 1000x less likely than FTL information transmission. He further argued that, if they exists at all, memories of past lives is more likely to come from aliens messing with us than actual reincarnated souls. I disagree with both, and think there's a resistance to the reincarnation explanation because it's less science-coded than FTL travel or alien pranksters.
How is it ex-ante less likely than FTL travel? FTL travel is just as much a pseudoscientific hypothesis as reincarnation. OTOH some recent meta-analysis of precognition studies shows that there's a statistically significant effect that people can pick up information from the future. If time isn't sequential then all sorts of information flows are possible. And ultimately, reincarnation is a type of information transfer. Of course, this meta-study also implies it's possible to have information transfer at FTL speeds. So alien possession of human consciousness is not ruled out in that scenario.
As a youngster, I believed I was an alien intelligence sent here to collect as much data about humans and this planet as I could, before I die and they uploaded it. I still don't feel very human. Humans as species puzzle me greatly. ;-)
> FTL travel is just as much a pseudoscientific hypothesis as reincarnation.
From the numbers I originally stated, I think my priors were p(reincarnation)=p(FTL)/100.
FTL+special relativity breaks causality, which feels unlikely. Physics would still be salvageable, though.
OTOH, naturally occurring (no alien pranksters) reincarnation would require a mechanism such as souls which become unlinked from the brain at death and float invisibly around until they find another brain.
Scientists have looked at nerve cells and they appear to work through ordinary chemistry. We might not understand how huge numbers of such have to be wired to make a brain, but we have had some success with building artificial neural networks recently. If souls are real we basically deal with an antagonistically designed universe, the kind where God put dinosaur bones into the rocks to test our faith in Young Earth Creationism.
The bit about children spontaneously recounting a past life around the age of 4, I’ve seen this in one of my own children. Stories about “when I was a grownup”. Seems like a variation on the imaginary friend mixed with some archetype of incarnation. That is, I think this is a real psychological phenomenon but our understanding of the mind and especially the archetypical realms is limited. No non-physical spooky stuff required to explain.
Because I've shared my past life memories with others, people have opened up with me. I had an acquaintance who worked in a daycare/nursery school, and she would ask kids who they were before they were born. Some, but not all, gave her specific answers with some interesting details. Most of our memories of our early years get overwritten by or around age four. My stepson was older than four when I heard her tell me this. So I never got to ask him about who he was in his past life. But knowing about that memory loss, I monitored his memories from ages three onward. He loved the woman who ran his daycare. He'd talk about her all the time after we picked him up from daycare. I thought she was a pill, but he'd go on and on about how Mrs <name withheld> played games or read to him. We moved him over to a nursery school when he turned four. I made a point of asking him about how Mrs <name withheld>. He remembered her quite clearly until about age four and half, when over a two-week period he forgot about her. He had no memories of her after that. I thought that was pretty amazing. The mind of children seems to go through a massive memory purge around age four.
> and she would ask kids who they were before they were born
Isn't that almost a Zen koan? ("What was your original face before you were born?")
in your experience, did they say a bunch of contradictory or obviously false stuff?
IMO, reincarnation would imply some sort of non-physical layer to reality, which contains souls (and maybe other things) and allows them to persist through time and attach to different living creatures over time.
There's various beliefs that posit such a layer, including the belief that we're all in a simulation (anyone ever used code that doesn't initialize its data structures properly?), but I don't happen to hold any of them at the moment.
>(anyone ever used code that doesn't initialize its data structures properly?)
Doesn't that come with:
Trigger warning for programmers or retired programmers! :-)
Sign at a protest: "Free the mallocs!"
LOL Many Thanks! Would the person bearing the sign worry that they might get in a heap of trouble? :-)
Strictly speaking, a "non-physical layer" is unnecessary for "souls" to persist forever. I can easily come up with a simple "physical" scenario:
Our brain functions generate fluctuating electrical currents
These currents generate fluctuating electromagnetic fields
These fields propagate outward into space
They will continue to propagate forever.
Now, the strength of these fields is vanishingly small, but greater than 0. So everything that makes me "me" will exist in this universe long after I'm dead.
Unfortunately, we understand electromagnetism and the quanta of the EM field which we call photons rather well. While admittedly not having done the math, I think that human brain is terrible at broadcasting its inner state on the EM spectrum. Aside from the fact that a lot of bands will be promptly be reabsorbed by by the surrounding brain matter, one important fact is that two axons running a micrometer apart can have vastly different functions. In a toy model, one might encode "elephant" and the other might encode "cheese". To tell apart if you have been thinking of elephants or cheese, one would have to resolve that, which means that the wave length of the photons would have to be smaller than a micrometer, so we are talking about near infra-red, almost visible. Given that my head looks rather intransparent to me, I don't think that many photons in that band will make it through the rest of my brain and my skull.
Ok I see where I went wrong, I forgot that energy is not, in fact, "analog", and cannot have arbitrarily low values. Duh!
My best skeptical argument: The idea that one's essential self can inhabit a different body at a different era in history, while having no memory of the earlier life (or a most a few weird wisps of memory) is just incoherent. What even *is* a self, then? The original body (and most of us experience our body as an important aspect of ourselves) is gone. In our new incarnation we don't speak the language we spoke in the old one, have the skills that we learned, the prejudices and preferences and habits, the friends, the family, etc. All that is gone. And, most important, we don't have the store of life memories we were accumulating up until death in our earlier incarnation. What then *is* a self if it's independent of the body, the attitudes, the info, the skills, the preferences, the attachments and the memories someone has? If I knew that in 2162 "I" would be reincarnated as a farmer on a rehabbed, well oxygenated Mars it wouldn't make me feel a bit less distressed that my present life will end in death. So "I" come back as a male farmer and don't remember or care about any of the things I do right now? Well then, good luck to that guy but he ain't me.
I think this is a really modern conception of the self. Compatibilism began as a way to rescue free will (and the self) from materialism.
I don’t find it persuasive. Right now I have many properties—love Japanese food and my family, hate spiders, can read at an advanced level, experience yellow, do division. If you took those things away from me, either by a series of unfortunate accidents or brainwashing techniques or whatever, it would still be *me* experiencing qualia.
The reincarnation hypothesis is totally coherent. Your consciousness survives without any (many) memories of your past lives. It just implies modern materialism, especially parts like functionalism, is wrong, and compatibilism becomes more of a hazy, woo-adjacent belief that isn’t necessary to explain the self.
>If I took away your memories it wouldn’t you experiencing anything at all. It would be effectively a new person, with a blank slate.
Is this then true also for a marginal change? In the same sense I'm not the same person as myself 20 years ago, 1 year ago, 1 second ago or 1 tick of whatever is the smallest unit of my brain state. So this is really a question of what the definition of self is - and the way we normally use it, it can't really be about our memories.
>If I took away your memories it wouldn’t you experiencing anything at all.
Do you believe amnesiacs are different people than they were before their amnesia? I would describe an amnesiac as a person who has forgotten memories, not an entirely new person.
I didn't say reincarnation was "proven". But I disagree that you'd have to explain how the consciousness transfer itself happens for reincarnation to be a very likely outcome. For example, if your 3 year old child (raised in rural Nebraska) said: "In a past life, I was a samurai named ____ in year 1305, with a wife named X and two sons named Y and Z. I was buried in Q specific cemetery in Japan. I also remember semifluent Japanese," I posit you would reasonably conclude that they were probably reincarnated, without knowing exactly how the consciousness transfer works.
Well, the focus in this case would be on the odd reports of things like memories or languages of some past person appearing in young children. Philosophical questions about actual persistence or continuity of identity are a separate concern. In other words there could be a phenomenon here even if it doesn't actually qualify as 'reincarnation' or what have you.
Well, yes, one could take an interest in such things. But OP asked about reincarnation.
I'd say lack of falsifiability is the big issue.
That's the issue I have with my memories of other lives. They could as easily be artifacts of my imagination. But I also realize that most of my memories from this life involve a lot of voluntary and involuntary embellishments. But because I cannot separate the embellishments from the original elements of my memories I regard all my memories with skepticism. But I cherish them even if they're false, because I still have learned from them, and I act in accordance with the entire memory corpus available to me. The only spooky event I had was meeting my wife from my past life. She admitted the connection but was very disturbed that I described some events in her past life memories. Not enough detail to pin down who we were, though. And just the act of talking about memories with each other may have distorted our memories of the memories...
They are totally falsifiable, and many have been falsified! The modern way these cases are treated is to preregister as many "early" memories as possible, and match them against actual people. If you can't find a match to the overwhelming majority of the memories, in my mind the case is not evidence of reincarnation.
Then falsify my past-life memories, please. ;-) If they're real, I was never anyone famous enough to get into recorded history. And they don't provide enough detail for me to get names and dates out of them. If they're false, they seem just as real as my supposedly real memories — which, when I examine them, are at best imperfect recordings of selected events in my life. The only reason I give *some* of my current life's memories some credence is because of all the dated documents that come along with modern living. But if I talk to family members about the details of events we experienced together, I see that either I've misremembered a lot, or my relatives have misremembered. I suspect both.
But I haven't been a materialist since LSD and Psilocybe gave me a new perspective on reality.
What about those experiences changed your mind? This sentiment always really confused me because while I can imagine evidence I could experience on drugs that would convince me of this, I've never actually heard of the experiences that people had being at all like what it would take to convince me.
I've taken plenty of both lsd and shrooms (including very high dosages) and never had a religious sort of experience, but I also can't imagine ever being convinced by any experience that I couldn't check the veracity of in some way after the fact (like say getting information about the outside world you couldn't possibly have known).
So, reality for you is consensus-based? There may be something to that. But remember Western materialism is a relatively new consensus-based phenomenon. I hope you don't get put down in the Amazon rainforest and have to deal with the consensual reality experienced by some Amazonian tribes. I forget which anthropologist it was who after a few years of living with his hosts started to see the spirit beings his hosts saw — even though he wasn't on psychotropic substances.
Anyway, I had a couple of episodes of psychokinesis while on magic mushrooms. Both witnessed by other people (who were also tripping, unfortunately). But even if was a hallucination, one would need to explain why it was a shared hallucination.
I had a rough time with a malicious entity that acted like a poltergeist that followed me home after a trip and that scared the shit out of me, after I had (presumably) come down from the trip. It seemed to feed on my fear. Luckily I had some knowledge of the theory of sympathetic magic (from my undergrad courses in Anthropology), and I was able to get rid of it.
I've communed with the non-human consciousness of trees (you can watch the lectures of the botanist Stefano Mancuso if you want some independent support that trees exhibit a type of consciousness).
Many times while tripping I was in a state which I called "the groove", in which all sorts of weird synchronicities occurred. But I had had some "magical" experiences before I started tripping — though psychedelics may have opened the gateways for other experiences that happened during my post-tripping life.
I need to write up my "magical" memoirs. I've written a few chapters, but I've had some very wild paranormal experiences — not just on psychedelic drugs. But I don't require you to believe me. I experienced what I experienced.
The consensus aspect of my view is purely pragmatic and I can absolutely imagine experimental evidence which would be able to convince me, even in a scenario where I was the only person around. If anything I'm always going to rank certain kinds of recorded evidence as far more important than corroborating eyewitness evidence.
What's important is just that I'm not entirely relying upon me and others minds being reliable in ways that seem impossible to square with all the psychological research I've seen about the unreliability of eyewitnesses.
> But even if was a hallucination, one would need to explain why it was a shared hallucination.
The sticking point for me has always been that the various psychological explanations for these sort of poorly controlled observations are ultimately much more plausible to me than them being real, given what I would consider to be an extremely suspicious lack of corroborating evidence which I should expect to exist. There's also aspects of most of these experiences that make me tend to think they're a-priori unlikely, since I would predict a-priori that if they were real there would be both more consistency between people's experiences, as well as observable evidence that can be checked later like I said before.
I definitely "want to believe" compared to most materialists, but it's hard to get your hopes up about any tests you may wish to run, when you know that other people must have already performed such tests (given how these phenomena aren't reported as being *that* rare based on the anecdotes I've heard). It very hard to imagine how it could plausibly be the case that I would be the first person to accurately record the supernatural, unless it's an extremely rare localized phenomenon or something.
I've heard people mention analogous similar sorts of experiences to the psychokinesis you mention, but it just seems really implausible to me that with everyone carrying around camera phones, we still don't have good video of these phenomena.
There's certainly plenty of excuses for why these sort of supernatural phenomena seem allergic to reliable recording devices, but I've never heard one that didn't seem like a really ad hoc justification for the lack of expected evidence.
>I've communed with the non-human consciousness of trees (you can watch the lectures of the botanist Stefano Mancuso if you want some independent support that trees exhibit a type of consciousness).
I absolutely agree trees are conscious, but I don't really know what it would mean to meaningfully "commune" with an organism that doesn't have a theory of mind, and so can't even comprehend that other minds exist. Though we may not disagree here, given what you said before about not being sure that your reincarnation memories literally happened to you given your level of enlightenment.
That being said I still have a tiny glimmer of hope, enough to be interested in proposing experiments. So if you think you have means of communicating with spiritual entities with any level of reliability let me know, as there's a lot of questions I'd propose you should ask (like say mathematical proofs such as large novel prime factorizations).
Though I worry that your experiences trying to test may unfortunately be like what Scott describes in this classic short story: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/21/universal-love-said-the-cactus-person/
The trouble is a lot of paranormal experiences are so transitory and random that it's hard to falsify them. But to your point, I no longer regard my memory as reliable, and I no longer trust my qualia as being reliable. After all we're not directly perceiving reality, we're seeing an edited version of reality through nervous systems that evolved in response to a specific set of ecological pressures. A cat or a bat almost certainly perceive the world differently from us. Moreover, our qualia are filtering out a lot of extraneous data, and for the data that gets past our filters, our mind categorizes and interprets it almost instantaneously. The reality that we perceive is not necessarily the reality out there.
No. The furthest back they go would probably be the New Kingdom of Egypt, and they're all human (some female, but predominantly male for the past thousand years). As a Buddhist, I was told that I could be reincarnated as anything. But that's not my experience of my past-life memories. I asked a Gelug lama about this. He laughed and assured me that they were all false memories. He explained that only advanced Bodhisattvas can have memories of their past lives, but (if I understood him correctly) that's more because of the omniscience that advanced Bodhisattvahood (i.e Bhumi level 10 and above, IIRC) gives to sentient beings — and not because of actual memories.
Still, they're there in my consciousness. Illusion/delusion or not they affect the way I look at the world — and that's the ultimate function of memory, isn't it?
Did you have all of these past lives memories from a very early age? Did they make sense to you as a child?
Some. As a young kid (age five? age six?), I had lots of dreams about being in ancient Egypt. But I was also aware of ancient Egypt because my folks had lots of coffee table books about ancient Egypt. So I was aware I was in ancient Egypt in my dreams. I may have had memories of other places and times, but I wasn't aware of their setting because I didn't have the historical knowledge to identify their settings.
Sure, my active imagination may have been influenced by those coffee table books full of pictures of ancient Egypt, but my folks had similar books about ancient Rome, Greece, the Holy Land, Mesopotamia, and Meso-American civilizations. I didn't have dreams about those places.
It wasn't until I was older that I had dreams and waking memories of other places and times — but I could recognize them because I had the historical and anthropological knowledge to recognize their context. All these memories are patchy, though. More like quick flashes of moving scenes — sometimes with other people — who might be speaking to me, but I can't understand their words (which makes a weird sort of sense if we assume that language is associated with the brain our mind stream happens to inhabit in a particular life).
I get the impression that I hung around ancient Egypt for many generations, though I may have bounced up to Minoan Crete a couple of times (or I was a trader who plied the Med, because I have vivid images of being on boats at on the sea) — but by the time Ptolemy took over, I had moved on to other places. There's a big gap in my past life memories from about the 4th Century BCE until about 4th of 5th centuries CE. I may have them, but because I can't place them in the context of time or culture, I don't recognize them. But they pick up again in Central Asia. I was a Buddhist monk or some sort of Buddhist scholar or philosopher in a few of those lives. Lots of images of scrolls with flowing script on them. Pleasant cities in lush valleys with dry mountains all around. Then I moved further to the Northeast. I was a Mongol in one of those lives who made a journey to a Buddhist monastery in the highlands (Tibet?). Images of the endless Steppes and riding horses across them. Then I lingered a while with the tribes that lived in the boreal forests of Siberia. I was doing shamanic things. Then I bounced over to Central and Eastern Europe in the 16th Century CE. Lots of dreams and waking memories of crowded cities with multistory buildings along rivers. And stuffy rooms full of cloth. I get the impression I was a cloth merchant of some sort in one of those lives. But I was living middle-class style lives, and there were books, so I was educated in those lives. There was a woman who seemed to be reincarnating along with me as my wife/mother/sister. There's a city in Poland (whose name escapes me at the moment) with a squared moat around it. I saw the picture of it, and I was shocked at how familiar it looked. I had the certainty that I lived in a house overlooking that moat.
As a kid of five or six, I had an irrational fear of the police. I was outside a local department store with my mom, when a police officer started talking to us in a friendly way (he may have been flirting with my mother who was a beautiful woman). He squatted down to talk to me at my level. He was just trying to be friendly, but I started screaming, "Don't let him kill me! Don't let him take me away!" My mom had to hustle me away because I freaking out. It wasn't until I was older that I realized that I had memories from WWII and the Holocaust. Men in uniforms beat me. And I died in a concentration camp. I am one of a cohort of people born between the mid-1950s and early 1960s that has traumatic memories of WWII. The former wife in my last life who I mentioned above was born the same year I was this time around and she remembered strikingly similar scenes as I did in her memory. It turns out there's a large group of Jews born in the same period that have memories of the Holocaust. I'm a goy, but I have them too. I was a scholar in my past life, who was reborn in a family of scholars — but safely in New England and not Europe! It's not just Jews. I have a Filipino friend, born around 1960, who has memories of having her legs crushed under the treads of a Japanese tank.
Of course, with the advent of cable TV, through the Hitler Channel (err, the History Channel) we've all been exposed to images of the violence of WWII. So I'm perfectly willing to admit these violent memories could just be due to suggestion. But I don't really believe that explanation.
FWIW plenty of non-Jews were sent to the camps too.
If it isn't 'reincarnation' in some continuity-of-identity sense and is just some bizarre crosstalk of human memory it would obviously still be profoundly interesting despite not being evidence for the existence of a disembodied self.
I think most reincarnation theorists would say the former, but for me I am much more concerned with verifying the phenomenon itself. It seems like a huge deal if even one individual has ever been reincarnated!
>It seems like a huge deal if even one individual has ever been reincarnated!
Hmm... I'm not sure if this is true, depending on the flavor of the "huge deal".
For the sake of discussion, if were a case where someone was reincarnated with full memories (avoiding the discussion, as Eremolalos said, about what it even _means_ to be reincarnated _without_ memories), it would certainly force us to drastically revisit how we think memories work. In that sense, it certainly _would_ be a big deal.
For any ordinary person, though, if reincarnation happened, but happened less than one time in a billion, and everyone else winds up vanishing forever, as current understanding of the brain suggests, why should much change for ordinary people (that is, people who are not neuroscientists or possibly artificial neural network engineers)? Unless there is some reason to think that it can be tweaked to happen regularly, why would one isolated case matter to John Q. Public?
Aren't aliens also incompatible with most organized religions?
I personally found the case of James Leininger (especially the skeptical correspondence between Michael Sudduth and Matlock on the matter) to be so compelling that I think it's either a case of past life memories or overt fraud with the middle ground "odd coincidences" possibility less likely than both. I'd say the same with Kemal Atasoy, although there's less publicly available material to go on. Finally, it's very remarkable that the common features of Ian Stevenson's original 20 cases suggestive of reincarnation keep coming up in new cases: memories between ages 2-6, commonly related to violent deaths, occasionally with related birthmarks, that later fade away over time.
> Aren't aliens also incompatible with most organized religions?
C.S. Lewis wrote some sci-fi on this premise. "Out of the Silent Planet" tells of a Verne/Wells-esque trip to Mars, which is inhabited by three unFallen species. If you like the genre of "first contact with aliens who are subtly Very Different", you should definitely read it. Among its virtues is that it's short.
Why would the existence of aliens contradict a religion that wasn't also based on young-Earth creationism?
It wouldn't even necessarily contradict Young Earth Creationism either. If God made us 6,000 years ago, he could have made the aliens 6,000 years ago too.
I mean, to be clear there is tons and tons of motivated reasoning behind wanting reincarnation to exist too.
What's the motivational reason for wanting to be reincarnated? All I got out of reincarnations was a bunch of fuzzy memories and people giving me funny looks if I talk about it. I didn't even get a frigging t-shirt!
The whole raison d'être for Buddhism is to get us out of the cycle of rebirth. Of course, if you view life as suffering that's a good motivation not to be reborn to suffer again and again. At least Christians get to go to heaven with alabaster buildings, manicured lawns, and angels singing hosannas. Muslims (at least male Muslims) get to go to a paradise heaven with lots wine and houri at their beck and call. (Question: are there male houri for the women?)
Let me tell you, reincarnation is not what's its cracked up to be. At best it's like only being able to remember a piece of an interesting dream. Give me nirvana, or give me death!
My son watched Gladiator last year and now he’s trying to restore the Roman Empire. Help!
I don’t usually turn to internet forums for advice but after the insanity of the past year, I’ll try anything. Last summer, my son Mark was a typical, albeit shy, fourteen year old. But that changed after he watched Gladiator with my husband. I was apprehensive about him watching an R rated movie but my husband assured me it was fine. Anyways, they never really spent that much time together so I relented. Mark loved it. He watched that movie every single day that summer. There was something magical about its characters and story that spoke to Mark and gave him romantic ideas about what Rome meant. His excitement was infectious. I hadn’t seen it in years and so for his birthday, I gave him an illustrated history book about Rome and from that point on, he was enthralled.
Mark read that book cover to cover to such an extent that he practically had it memorized. But that wasn’t enough and he wanted more. He read Wikipedia articles about Rome. He listened to podcasts about Rome. He watched youtube videos about Rome. Rome all day and Rome all night. Mark went to the library and went through the history section vigorously. The librarians loved him. They weren’t used to teenagers being so excited about reading. Every day that summer he went to the library and spent the entire day soaking up Rome. Once school started, he would go to the library after school. When he came home, he would tell us all kinds of “fun facts” about Rome. Did you know the city had a million inhabitants? Did you know that Ancient Rome traded with China? Did you know that the Roman Empire didn’t fall until 1453? My son did and he needed to make sure everyone knew. I was starting to get sick of Rome but what are you going to do? At least he was getting out of the house, and there are certainly worse hobbies your kid can have. He continued doing this for a few months and it was fine. But then it went from a hobby to an obsession.
Mark’s father indulged him in these flights of fancy by buying him Roman armor for Christmas. He read about military drills that Roman legionaries would do and imitated them. He looked ridiculous marching around our neighborhood. Worse, he insisted on wearing sandals in near freezing weather. We fought every day over it until his dad did some research and learned that Romans wore more practical shoes in colder places like Germany. But even though we fixed that problem, there was a less lethal but still enormous problem of what to do when Mark went back to school after the break. I was really worried about him going back to school. He was losing touch with reality at this point and wanted to emulate Roman generals and emperors by wearing his armor at school. I told Mark that he looked ridiculous and all the kids would make fun of him. He said that this is what he wanted to do, and I was always telling him to be more outgoing and stop caring what others thought. That was certainly not what I meant! But against my better judgement, I relented and, true to his word, he went full Roman. What happened next was weirder than I could have imagined.
On his first day back, Mark went to school and just like I said, his classmates mocked him. Everyone laughed at how stupid he looked. But Mark wasn’t bothered. “They’ll come around” he proclaimed confidently, as if it wasn’t an insane thing to say. But to my astonishment, he was right. At first, the boys mocked him. They marched around and pretended to follow his orders. But apparently they enjoyed it so much that their mockery turned in to sincerity. There was something about his confidence they found magnetic, and the girls latched themselves on to him as well. They wanted to be the Cleopatra to his Julius Caesar.(I tried telling him things turned out badly for both of them, but naturally he ignored that.) Mark became the most popular kid in school but just like his adopted namesake, he had bigger ambitions.
Mark made videos that he uploaded to Youtube. At first, it was simply educational videos but then it morphed into something bigger. In one of his videos, he made an offhand comment about restoring the Roman Empire and it went viral on social media. His video channel exploded in popularity. He kept making more videos about his plans and how he intended to achieve them. He received donations from others to make these dreams a reality. Mark promised that once the “campaigning season”(summer break) began, he would go ahead with his plans and got thousands of supporters willing to go with him. I couldn’t believe it but he literally wanted to sail to Italy and announce himself as emperor, believing they would simply let him.
As summer approached, Mark prepared for this expedition. He recruited all the boys from his high school and received money from all over the world. I asked him how he planned to invade an entire country with nothing but a few thousand schoolboys and he assured me no one would stand against him. He referenced battles from Julius Caesar’s time. I emphatically repeated that he was not Julius Caesar and he smirked and said “not yet”. Some of his subscribers lent him their own private boats and even though they weren’t the “triremes” my son wanted, he found them acceptable. Then, they got some kitchen knives as swords and cobbled together “armor” from whatever metal things they could find. I told him he couldn’t do it. He didn’t listen. My husband half heartedly said he couldn’t do it. Mark said it was his destiny. After some prodding, I got the principal to say he would be expelled for going. He talked about receiving a vision from “Mars” that said he had been blessed by the gods, and that it would be an insult not to go through with it. I took him to a therapist to cure his mental illness but she ended up agreeing with him. What was happening? I forbade him from going. I pleaded with him. I even suggested building a “New Rome” here. He wouldn’t have it. There was only one way to restore the glory of Rome and he was the one to do it. Mark left this morning. I tried to physically force him to stop but his friends simply prevented me from doing so. He plans to embark in the next few days.
Despite my pleas, there is nothing I have done that will stop him from going through with this disaster. At best, his plan would end with him humiliated for the rest of his life and at worst, he could end up dead. Has everyone lost it? Not only do his friends support him but so does everyone in his life. When pressed on why, they say there is just “something about him.” They can’t explain what that “something” is, but they all agree he has it, even the authorities. Neither the cops nor the government officials I talked to have any interest in keeping him here. Has everyone lost their mind? I tried everything I could to prevent this insanity, but nothing is working so in my desperation I turn to random people on the internet. What should I do?
Update: he did it. Ave Caesar!
Top kek. Ave Caesar!
IMO, more specificity about the details would enhance the verisimilitude. Rather than "an illustrated history book about Rome," choose an actual title or two from Osprey's catalogue. Once he starts going through the library's collections — what does Mark think about Mary Beard? What does he think about Gibbon? Rather having him "watch youtube videos about Rome," have him work his way through Scipio Martianus' channel, start speaking in Latin, and perhaps develop strong views about classical vs. ecclesiastical pronunciation. (It might also be worth giving "Gladiator" a rewatch, since one of its central premises was that the Empire was a Bad Thing and needed to be abolished in favor of a restored Republic. What does Mark think about that idea?)
Mark's motivations and thinking could also be made more psychologically plausible. If he knows that the Roman Empire "didn't fall until 1453," he knows that the Roman Empire doesn't need to be in Rome, so why exactly does he think he can't he build one "here"? (Presumably "here" is somewhere in the US, but again more specificity might be better. You might write "here in Michigan," "here in Oregon," or "here in New Jersey": which of these best fits your intended aesthetic effect?)
So.....you're posting as Brandon Fishback and your son's name in the story is Mark?
Insert "amused" emoji here.
I wanted to go more detailed about Rome but I don’t think it would work story-wise. Mark may care about Latin pronunciation but his mom certainly wouldn’t and she’s the one telling the story.
Is it important that the mom doesn't know or care about Rome? Why does this make it a better story?
For me, it was the opposite: the mom's lack of interest in her son's developing obsession struck me as unrealistic and immersion-breaking. It didn't feel like a character portrait of a mother uninterested in the details of her son's life, it felt like a story written by an author uninterested in those details. If Brandon is aiming for the former, I think the characterization needs to be established more forcefully.
I don’t know what your mom is like but I don’t know many moms that have an intricate knowledge of their sons hobbies, especially stuff like history.
Trying to get feedback on this story before posting it on my blog. Let me know what you think about any of it, from the idea to the prose.
I might be barking up the wrong tree (and I am *very bad* at literary subtexts, I literally thought Animal Farm was a story about some animals) but is this supposed to be an allegory for the existence of trans people?
No, it's about communist revolutions. Overthrow the bosses, overwork the idealists to death, and see that the new bosses are same as the old bosses.
There’s not any subtext.
For what it's worth, I assumed this was a real post -- but after a couple of paragraphs, while still thinking it was a real post, I felt sure the person was lying. I can't put my finger on why. I think one thing was that in a real post the writer would have spent more time early on talking about their point of view, explaining what kind of help they wanted, and just *venting*. Something like, "there's a crazy situation in my house. My son seems to have developed an obsession or maybe a delusion, and my husband isn't taking it seriously. I'd like to know whether anybody here has gone through something similar, and if so how you handled it. . . ." And maybe that voice would break through now and then later in the narrative. "WTF, right? And even the *teachers* don't seem that bothered. I feel as though I'm in Invasion of the body Snatchers and all the other adults have been replaced by emotionless aliens."
Also, I just am not able to believe that when the son went to school in armor the other kids turned around so quick. That just wouldn't happen. If you want people to believe the story, I think you need to come up with a more plausible explanation of how the kids became the son's followers. Like maybe he stood up to the bully substitute -- or won the basketball game for his school while in armor -- or demonstrated astonishing skill with whatever the weapons of his era were.
Not sure what to make of this. It’s definitely not supposed to be a plausible explanation about how it could happen. It’s a silly story about a kid who becomes this Ferris Bueller-esque figure who gets this done through sheer charisma even though it’s ridiculous.
I too thought it was real, but started having doubts at "They marched around and pretended to follow his orders. But apparently they enjoyed it so much that their mockery turned in to sincerity." They enjoyed following his orders? I wanted more explanation, and read further, but didn't get it.
I am so sad to find out that this is fiction.
Soon, my friend. Soon.
I like it!
Appreciate it!
In Greek mythology, the children of Kronos are Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades, Poseidon, and Zeus, in that order. The youngest are most powerful, and the oldest are least powerful. What's up with that?
Tamed fire, grain and motherhood vs control of corpses, waves and thunderstorms. Are you sure about the order of powerfulness?
Well, it's part of the story that Zeus is the youngest, so that position is fixed. (Others have told the story here)
For the rest, I just assume that they were sorted into females and males, because if you make up an order, that is the easiest grouping. That already explains like 90% of the signal you are relying on, because it is up to taste whether Poseidon is really stronger than Hades, or Demeter stronger than Hestia.
Perhaps Greeks liked the Youngest Child Wins trope (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/YoungestChildWins). Kronos was the youngest too.
Although birth order effects usually favour the eldest child, most papers on birth order effects do not take into account fathers who eat their children.
The children of Kronos and Rhea, as you may recall, were all swallowed by their father immediately after birth, with the exception of Zeus. Once Zeus was fully grown he forced his father to regurgitate all his siblings. So the older children are less powerful, proportional to the time they spent in Cronos's digestive system.
One can assume that being slowly digested inside a Titan's gullet over a period of decades or centuries slowly saps whatever potential you might have originally had, a bit like public school.
Hah! :-)
>Although birth order effects usually favour the eldest child, most papers on birth order effects do not take into account fathers who eat their children.
LOL!
And getting a double-blinded RCT past the IRB takes forever...
The Greeks understood that age both makes you stronger (e.g., 18 year olds are stronger than 8 year olds) and weaker (18 year olds are stronger than 80 year olds). For people, they believed generally that people were getting worse and worse with time. Humanity, as a whole, was decaying.
For the gods, this makes very little sense. Humans age, die, and are replaced by a new generation which can be weaker than the generation that it replaced.
For gods, they don't age. They don't die naturally. If they're going to be replaced by a new generation, the only way that makes sense is if that new generation is stronger than the generation it is replacing.
Partly it's the demands of the story: Kronos replicates Ouranos' offense by killing his own children (they get better), so it has to be the youngest child that overthrows his father and establishes the new order. It was the same in the previous generation, since Kronos was the youngest of the Titans, and avenged the death (they got better) of the giants and the hundred-handed by killing Ouranos. I would also note that the ancient Greeks did not necessarily practice primogeniture: customs varied a good deal. As to the actual order, I'm inclined to say it's poetic license. You're going to end with Zeus, why not set up a nice order? Though I'm a bit wary of saying definitely that we consider, say, Demeter less 'powerful' than Hera.
Yeah, assignation of power levels is a bit suspect. Hestia may simply have had a more concentrated focus, and we all know what happened when Demeter got upset about Persephone...
Birth-order effects.
But Zeus seems incredibly heterosexual!
Not entirely.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganymede_(mythology)
Hm, did Hera ever get upset about Ganymede? Or were those non-overlapping magisteria?
She does in the Aeneid, though it's at least partially because Zeus/Jove raised up a Trojan:
"Fearful of that, the daughter of Saturn, the old war in her remembrance that she fought at Troy for her beloved Argos long ago,—nor had the springs of her anger nor the bitterness of her vexation yet gone out of mind: deep stored in her soul lies the judgment of Paris, the insult of her slighted beauty, the hated race and the dignities of ravished Ganymede; fired with this also, she tossed all over ocean the Trojan remnant left of the Greek host and merciless Achilles, and held them afar from Latium; and many a year were they wandering driven of fate around all the seas. Such work was it to found the Roman people."
- https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/22456/pg22456-images.html
Thanks!!!
Yeah, I thought of that as soon as I clicked "post". :-)
I've been wondering if there are certain abnormal social behaviors that consistently develop in youths who learned to communicate through chat?
When I was 14-17 I would periodically, for prolonged periods of time, spend maybe 8 hours a day on average in "spaces" where communication was text based - messenger, World of Warcraft, omegle and skype especially - and if books and diaries are a space of communication, then that as well. I read. Read, wrote and typed.
My mornings with my family were mostly silent - i left my mom, dad and brother to do the talking. In school I would listen in class, give answers to the teacher, and spend the breaks playing alone or with others, but mostly in silence; after school I struggled to think of things to say, while it astounded me that the other kids could have so much to say (eventually I had the revelation that the other kids werent speaking to share information; they were just creating fun) ... at dinner i would leave the speaking to my family again, and after dinner i would do homework or read... you get the picture. When i became a teen I would get more verbose, but not in person; in text, online... VERY verbose, haha. Its embarrassing to look back at.
Anyway...
I'm asking because I know I communicate abnormally when I speak. I have been told by so many people that when they met me they thought I spoke in a bizarre fashion that was hard to comprehend but at the same time beautifully clear. And I am dying to pinpoint what it is. None of them have been able to articulate exactly what it was. I don't think it's autism. I might be autistic too, but I don't think that accounts for it. I think there's something else wrong with me and I am dying to find out what it is so that I may seek out someone who' s the same.
Were any of you chronically online when you were teens? and were you practically mute when you were "offline", but verbose when online? And do you have unusual ways of speaking now? Have you become good at talking, or will you always feel more natural when typing?
Please, I want to fix my communication so bad. I don't want to my style to be called weird. It's so estranging. Thank you
I'll second Nancy's "talking like writing" as a major cause. When encountering people in real life after meeting them initially online, I've gotten the comment "huh, you actually talk like that" several times. It's never bothered me so unfortunately I don't have any advice for fixing it.
I do think it's a result of being too online at a critical period and, prior to and in addition to that, reading a lot of old books. I was extremely shy as a child (a word which here means sub-20) and didn't talk much, so it probably is a result of not developing the same cues as most people to distinguish written vs spoken English.
Not a result of autism per se, but I would bet it is strongly correlated with high-functioning autism and similar traits, in that grey area where people sometimes self-diagnose.
It's a guess on my part, since I haven't heard him speak.
I was born before online, so my style is shaped by books.
I don't want to spam post thank you's, so I'll just type one here. Thank you. I'm still not really sure about much, but thanks to you the uncertainty is easier to bear.
Very tentative, but might you be speaking something like written English? Possibly more complex sentence structure than most people use while talking.
What makes you think autism cannot be the cause? People say it’s pretty common in autistic people, to see exactly the pattern of behaviours displayed both by you and the other people who responded (and, erm.., by me, as well, to an extent). On the other hand, I agree that this seems fixable by practice and meeting more people. And I’m really sorry to hear that it makes life difficult for you.
Can you pinpoint whether it is your selection of words, or rather your way of pronouncing them?
When I was a teenager, I could rather easily speak in the fashion of someone else. Like, I could imitate someone's speaking style, to the point that it would freak people out who know both me and the other person. By speaking style I don't mean the choice of word, I rather mean intonation, lengths of vowels, where to raise and lower the voice, stuff like that. And I used these styles permanently, like I met some guy at some youth camps and used his style for the next one or two years.
If your abnormal speaking is about pronunciation and sound, then perhaps this is something you might try. Pick some person to study, either some acquaintance or some actor, imitate their style of speaking, and make this your permanent style.
I brought it up because it resonates with Firstname's point 3 below. When I sing a song, then I imitate it one-to-one, including accent and everything. I think I just put this to the extreme as a teenager.
About myself: I was (and still am) much more on the text side than on the speech side, though not as extreme as you. I don't think that anyone has told me that I speak in a bizarre fashion, but some people told me that my voice is notable. As a kid/teenager I was in a theater group, and trained my voice quite heavily on this very clear style that you need if you want to be understood be an audience, so that may be an explanation. (Very clear pronunciation, a voice that is not necessarily loud but carries far, a little bit like singing.) And I am also pretty far in the autism spectrum.
Your post resonated with me so much that I made an account just to reply.
Disclaimer: I am definitely on the autism spectrum myself so take anything I say about "normal conversation" with a grain of salt.
I don't think I exactly fit the description you're looking for of someone who learned to communicate through text-based means first, but I decided to reply because of the following:
1. A random stranger at an ACX meetup recently told me I had a completely unique voice unlike anything they had ever heard.
2. People often tell me I "don't have an accent", and when pressed, they'll clarify with something along the lines of "well, you definitely sound American but sometimes it's like you're trying to enunciate every phoneme of every syllable." This is in spite of having grown up in the American south, where most of the people around me most definitely *did* have an accent.
3. When singing along to my favorite songs (alone of course -- I would never do this in the presence of even my best friends), I find it much more satisfying to imitate the singer's accent as much as I can than to just sing in whatever my "normal" accent is. This works even if the song is in another language, and has therefore caused a noticeable improvement in my ability to pronounce certain sounds that don't exist in English, such as a Japanese style "r" where your tongue hits the bottom of your mouth (I believe the official term is "voiced alveolar tap").
4. Growing up, people definitely noticed (and occasionally clued me in) that I only ever talked to my closest friends and family, or answered direct questions from teachers or other students in an academic context. I never engaged in small talk or even getting to know classmates sincerely because I didn't see any value in it. Every time I tried my brain was fighting against it the whole time; I just fundamentally didn't want to socialize and that was the end of it. Again, people around me were confused by this behavior since I could be very articulate in non-small talk situations.
5. For the exact same reasons I hated small talk, I never made any social media accounts, even though literally everybody I knew was signing up for Facebook at the very least. Thus, I wasn't "chronically online" by the modern definition, but I did spend a *lot* of time lurking on the internet, mostly Wikipedia at first but later on stumbled across various news websites, forums, and blogs, eventually leading me here. So I may not have "learned to communicate" online but my worldview is very skewed by the way internet people speak.
6. I also spent an utterly ridiculous amount of time as a kid watching movies from the 70s-90s (with a few 2000s movies sprinkled in), so it's very possible that influenced my "accent" more than in-person interactions did.
7. My brain goes into a state of existential panic whenever I hear a recording of myself speaking. I know most people express discomfort at the sound of their own voice, but I swear, it's dialed up to 11 for me. To give a (very) rough approximation, when I speak, what I imagine it sounds like is similar to Kyle MacLachlan (Agent Cooper from Twin Peaks) but what I hear in recordings is much closer to Jon Heder (Napoleon Dynamite). This difference is so jarring that I lose all focus and motivation for whatever I was doing immediately and have to speak at length to "recover the illusion".
So in conclusion, yeah, I'm not quite the sort of person you were looking for a response from, but I think I can give you some advice, and it may be a bit hard to hear: give up on sounding "normal". In my experience, it's not even remotely feasible. What *is* possible is being confident in the way you express yourself. Start thinking of your "beautifully clear" voice as an asset rather than a liability. If you just focus on communicating precisely what you wish to communicate, people will appreciate that, even if they think something about the way you speak sounds strange. I have found myself in numerous circumstances wherein precise articulation narrowly saved me from misunderstandings the average person might have been caught off guard by. It took an embarrassingly long time for me to realize this, but I prefer it this way. I'd rather have maximal control over what I say than sound "natural" and "easy to talk to".
Again, take all this with a grain of salt. I'm not really the advice-giving type, and I'm already going way outside my comfort zone to interact with a stranger on the internet. Hope this helps (and sorry for being verbose... I have trouble with brevity).
I meant to not spam post thank yous, and I've already posted one, but I have to thank you for bothering to make a profile and type this out. It's very endearing and relatable :) I'll just keep talking how I do, then. Keep being me, as some would say. Who cares if the message is delivered in an unusual manner if the message gets through, right?
People didn't evolve to communicate through chatrooms. They evolved to communicate through natural speech, so it makes that you would feel awkward about it. It's like learning a new language when you aren't a child. You'll have odd ticks and sound funny. If you want to be like everyone else, you have to just immerse yourself in social situations with others and speak out loud with other people more.
I'm too old to have been in your precise situation, but I was socially isolated in grade school, which led to me struggling with interpersonal interaction in college. I got better, though, but not before someone told me that they thought I sounded like what an angel would sound like. To this day, I am unsure what they meant, but I think it might have something to do with speaking in literary register and enunciating, since I had spent more time reading than talking. I think it might be something like what I hear when I listen to the recordings of Scott reading Unsong. (Give it a listen?)
I'd suggest practice would help, one way or the other. Maybe you'll always be a little different, but it probably won't hurt to find some friendly people and try to imitate what they do.
Does Mutually Assured Destruction make sense? MAD is supposed to act as a deterrent, but say that it has failed for whatever reason, Russia has launched its entire nuclear arsenal at the US, and this is sure to annihilate nearly the entire US population. The US president, in his bunker, now has to decide whether to retaliate. If he strictly follows the MAD principle, he should retaliate, reducing Russia to rubble. However, the entire point of MAD was to prevent America from being destroyed in the first place. Now that this will happen anyways, is there really a point to killing more than 100 million additional people? Perhaps the really important thing now is the continued survival of humanity. Maybe the US president in office at the time has a taste for vengeance and will retaliate anyways. But I believe most presidents would refrain for humanitarian reasons, perhaps contenting themselves with strikes on the Kremlin or at most Moscow. Now, if the Russian president knew this in advance, then he would realize that MAD is not a credible threat. If he values American lives much less than the American president values Russian lives (plausible), it is plausible that he will then go ahead and nuke America. In game theory parlance, this would be a subgame perfect Nash equilibrium.
Obviously I have made some assumptions above, but it's not clear to me that they are any less realistic than the standard ones leading to MAD. If one wanted to get back to MAD, Americans could elect more bloodthirsty/impulsive leaders, who would not hesitate to retaliate. However, this would have the unfortunate side effect of increasing the probability that the same leader initiates a nuclear first-strike, or gets involved in bloody conventional wars. An easier way would be to advertise that we are going to use MAD, regardless of whether we will. Perhaps the fact that we all learn about MAD in schools is just an elaborate facade constructed for precisely this purpose. A third way would be to implement an automatic missile detection and retaliation system, the downside being catastrophe due to false positives. None of these seems foolproof.
First off, MAD doesn't involve killing a hundred million Russians, because there are barely a hundred million Russians to kill and nuclear war is <<<100% efficient at killing. And the continued survival of humanity is not at risk from nuclear war. At this point, if Biden and Putin and Xi got together and said, "how could we kill off the human race with our current nuclear arsenals", then the lynch mob hunting them down in the aftermath would number many billions. And they'd have rebuilt industrial civilization in a century or so.
We are going to kill tens of millions of Russians in the hypothetical case of a Russian nuclear sneak attack on the United States, and reduce Russia to a thing that won't be an industrial nation for at least a generation, for three very strong reasons.
First, there will be at least a hundred million Americans who survived the war, probably a couple hundred million. Who will be busy trying to rebuild the United States of America, and that process would be greatly hindered by e.g. the Russian army invading North America. So, we're going to arrange for Russia to not be able to do that.
Second, there are over seven billion people who are neither Americans nor Russians, some of whom will die in the war but most will not. It would not be good for those people to live in a world ruled by the sort of tyrant who launches massive nuclear sneak attacks to get his way - particularly since he'll still have some of his nuclear weapons and all of his nuclear weapons factories. So, as a public service, we're going to destroy that tyrant and the nation that facilitated his brand of tyranny.
Third, after a Russian nuclear sneak attack killing many tens of millions of Americans, the surviving Americans with their own nuclear weapons are going to really, really, really hate the Russians. Hate is not a design defect in humanity; it exists for a reason, and your hypothetical is a central example of such. But even if it were a defect, it's one we aren't going to fix and it will guide our behavior.
Even if a couple of hundred million Americans survived the initial nuclear attack, the majority of them would soon die by famine.
As Mr. Doolittle says, not in the United States. Note in particular that the US has both an enormous surplus in agricultural productivity, producing I think 3-4x as much food as needed for its current population, and an even larger excess in overall shipping and logistics capability. Supply chain disruptions won't cut through those margins.
At least in the United States. Nations that depend on US food exports, might go hungry.
Do you really think the supply chain is going to survive a massive nuclear attack? Most of the stuff - ports, truck depots, warehouses, fuel depots - is going to be destroyed or badly damaged. The power network is going to be badly damaged. Without electricity you can't pump gas in modern stations. You can't fuel up the agricultural vehicles you need to harvest food or take animals to be slaughtered. You won't have the trucks you need, even if you had the gas. Within days of the attack you will have millions of injured and hungry people fleeing cities desperate for food and water. Any kind of order is going to be impossible to maintain. And shipping? Are you serious? Do you really think the major ports are going to survive? And even if they did, are you going to have the capability to load and unload them, to transport goods around, to coordinate the incoming and outgoing ships?
Yes, I'm serious. I thought it would have been pretty clear from the style and content of my previous posts that I am serious. Your question and tone strike me as argumentative posturing, and as rather insulting so please go away.
In the meantime, addressing just one of your frankly ridiculous points, do you seriously believe that a trucker trying to deliver a truckload of food to his home town is going to look at a service station and say, "Oh Noes! It is Absatively Unpossible to pump fuel without electricity!", and sit down and cry while his neighbors starve? Because I'm pretty sure he'll be back on the road in a few hours, by any of half a dozen obvious methods.
As for the rest of your objections, and the new ones you come up with, no, I'm done with you. If you want you can imagine you've won a great victory by annoying me to the point where I won't debate you any further.
Nuking farmland is very inefficient and would take far more nukes than exist. I did an analysis for a thread a few months ago and every nuke on the planet would only destroy a small percent of the US.
Some, maybe even a lot by most standards, of people will die due to broken logistics networks, but not 10s of millions.
How do you think the food gets from the farms to the people? The logistics networks are absolutely vital to prevent mass starvation. Within two or three days of an all out nuclear war a lot of people are going to experience real hunger for the first time in their lives. When that happens anarchy will not be far away. Sure the farms will be there, but food is not ready on order, without fuel distribution farmers won't be able to harvest most of it, and without reliable electricity they won't be able to keep it from rotting.
If the Russians used most of their nukes to hit farming-related infrastructure, that's a possibility. But then they would be leaving the major infrastructure and big cities in place for lack of enough nukes, which means maintaining overall stability and rebuilding the destroyed infrastructure faster.
Crops are harvested once or twice a year, so we've got many months of food (from the US alone, let alone imports from places not destroyed) in which to work out temporarily solutions. With satellite communications we would still be in contact with each other and coordinate food and other vital logistics.
Think more Shaun of the Dead (temporary issues that seem overwhelming but aren't) than Dawn of the Dead.
There's quite a bit of industry in Central and South America, Australia, and India, and none of those places are likely to be major targets in a nuclear war. Are the Chileans, Mexicans, Indians, and Australians going to forget how to operate power plants or factories because the US and Russia and China nuked each other into famine and mass death?
India and Pakistan are both nuclear powers. They’re often considered the most likely to touch off nuclear war.
But would they bomb each other because other countries are having a nuclear war?
Economists call that the time inconsistency problem. It comes up in monetary policy. Sargent won an econ nobel for it.
I don't share your view on how US presidents would react. Sparing a belligerent nation right after they've launched an enormous attack on you is atypical.
Check out Ken Follett's recent novel Never, about the world stumbling into nuclear war in the near future.
It was very plausible, and yes, the moderate American President reacted predictably.
"Now that this will happen anyways, is there really a point to killing more than 100 million additional people?"
Yes, there is. If Russia destroys America with nukes, it would be by far the most evil country that has ever existed. For the sake of wiping out an unspeakably evil country from the world, for the sake of America's honor, and for the sake of proving to all of posterity the horror of nuclear war, the American president MUST utterly annihilate Russia.
"But I believe most presidents would refrain for humanitarian reasons, perhaps contenting themselves with strikes on the Kremlin or at most Moscow."
Any president who thinks like that is not a president I will ever support.
Well said
You sound like a one-boxer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcomb's_paradox
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RAh4fekdiRhZxb2Kw/the-ultimate-newcomb-s-problem
but yes, there's no foolproof way to secure your future when the keys to your future ultimately lie in someone else's hands. The reason for the equilibrium of the Prisoner's Dilemma being (D, D) is mostly because of the assumptions that: A) the other guy has more control of your destiny than you do; and B) both of your incentives are misaligned.
When you think about it, MAD is actually borrowed from what Haidt would call "cultures of honor" (which is still practiced in the 'hood). I.e. protecting your reputation (for being vengeful) is more important than life itself. So I imagine it's at least somewhat effective.
Indeed I am a one boxer :). And interesting point about honor culture!
(I have a confession to make. I actually meant two-boxer. because MAD and one-boxing embraces precommitment, whereas two-boxing rejects precommitment.
You're questioning MAD while trying to have your cake and eat it too, which is a two-boxer thing to do. But I always get the names "one-box" and "two-box" confused. because at first glance, my brain thinks "one-box" implies "take box A", whereas "two-box" implies "take box B". Which does not reflect the actual thought experiment.)
I'm a two-boxer who endorses MAD. There's no Omega required for MAD, just people as human as us.
p.s. wait, i think i screwed up the boxes in my last comment again.
So you two-box because omega is fallible at guessing intent, but stalin the human is infallible at guessing intent? Surely I'm missing something.
Stalin was a real person, Omega is not. MAD doesn't require retroactive causality, it just requires me to want to kill you after you decide to kill me.
fair enough. I just wanted to introduce a precommitment angle to the discussion.
(I even sympathize a bit, because I've always found omega's perfect omniscence a little hard to imagine. Which is weird because I don't have that issue with laplace's demon.)
Fair enough. I can see why you would think that. I suppose for me both decisions come down to a certain kind of deontological ethics, instead. I am not "meant" to take both boxes so I don't. And I "shouldn't" harm innocent civilians so I won't. It's true that I then no longer reap the benefits of MAD, but I'm questioning the efficacy of MAD in the first place, so I don't think it's necessarily inconsistent.
Interesting! Different policies have different trade-offs, after all. They are lossy compressions, by nature. In the past, I've questioned MAD too. Although my line of thought diverges a bit. I.e. "On one hand, MAD is suppose to deter. But on the other hand, civilians are generally innocent. But on the first hand, isn't the point of democracy to make civilians responsible for policy? hmm..."
I've read that Harry Truman, upon learning of the Manhattan Project, reacted with abject horror that (paraphrasing from memory): "this isn't a weapon for killing soldiers, this is a weapon for killing women and children". And that Gorbachev refused to press the Big Red Button even during training simulations <glares at Ender Wiggin>. So your pacifism certainly has other proponents. (Although Truman did decide to use the bombs anyway...)
----
Anyway. It sounds like you're trying to look for a better solution than deterrence.
A while ago, Apxhard had an interesting comment about how society runs on consensus mechanisms, and that these mechanisms are necessarily ordered in a hierarchy by cost. Which includes coinflips, the justice system, etc. (And now blockchains!) Deterrence is advertisement, and advertisement can only do so much. It gets a lot of attention because it's the penultimate consensus mechanism. The ultimate being actual warfare. It's the ultima ratio regum. The final argument. The last resort. The BATNA. But alas, still not a guarantee that you'll get what you want. And that's just the nature of politics. If it doesn't work out, you're kinda SoL.
The difference between honor culture vs. MAD isn't the efficacy, it's the stakes. At some point, I think we just have to make peace with the possibility of nuclear annihilation. (And if that doesn't horrify you enough, I vaguely recall from "Shadow of the Giant" an explanation by Bean as to why the logic of space-warfare naturally entails a First Strike nuclear doctrine.)
I guess what im trying to say is: if you want to avoid becoming irradiated, instead of pondering MAD you should perhaps work on alternative consensus mechanisms. I hear some of them are going to the moon. :^)
I doubt that story of Truman's reaction.
I like that analogy. Even though game theory was used as a justification for MAD — MAD was an outgrowth of human psychology and not of reason.
MAD : interstate anarchy :: honor : intrastate anarchy
As above, so below. :^)
I think our instinct for vengeance is an evolved solution to this game theoretic problem. (It's imperfect and has side effects, like every other product of evolution.)
I think this is basically Kavka's Toxin Paradox - while nuking the other guy gains no profit, *intending* to nuke the other guy is necessary for deterrence to work. But how can you say you "intend" to do something if you don't actually do it when the time comes?
>A third way would be to implement an automatic missile detection and retaliation system, the downside being catastrophe due to false positives.
This is what Russia's "perimeter"/"dead hand" system is supposedly meant to do. (Although the fear was more of decapitation strikes than of the president being unwilling to push the button.)
>This is what Russia's "perimeter"/"dead hand" system is supposedly meant to do.
I realize that I'm bringing in evidence from fiction, but this always reminded me of Dr. Strangelove.
Thanks for the pointer to the paradox, that seems to be exactly the crux of the matter!
A practical reason to retaliate is to leave the world without a country willing to start nuclear war. Where "the world" is whatever is left of US (quite a lot, actually) plus the other 90% of the world population you forgot about :) They'd much prefer to live in a world where starting a nuclear war is a bad proposition.
Just imagine how unstable the world would be in your scenario if US didn't retaliate. Everybody would be with their finger on the launch button, or already pressing it preemtively.
Interesting point, thank you!
This is the little-realized altruistic aspect of vengeance. You sacrifice yourself to remove a threat to the greater population. Remember the gom jabbar test in the beginning of "Dune"?
Let's say it's 2010 and a major Hollywood producer rapes you. It's over, it's done, you won't ever be alone with him again, and you can try to recover and move on with your life. Do you call him out and seek justice? It'll turn your own life into a media circus, and destroy whatever of it you have left, and at the end it's just two people's words against each other, and maybe nothing will come of it. Maybe your career will be over, maybe other people will refuse to be alone in a room with you out of fear of false accusations. Is it worth it? How would you feel if you knew that he did this many times before, and none of his other victims said or did anything, thus passively letting him continue to rape people, now including you? Are you willing to allow him to continue doing this to other people in the future?
Putting game theory aside:
How badly would you, personally, have to be hurt, before you decided that revenge was appropriate? There's no police. No outside authority. No one is coming to help you. You're all alone, you and the button.
Maybe if they did it to your loved ones, instead of you? What's the worst thing that you can imagine? You can't save them. They're as good as dead already. And you've only got a limited time to act.
Would you describe someone who decides upon revenge as bloodthirsty or impulsive?
I am certain that I would not take revenge if it implied millions of innocent people also had to die, regardless of how much pain had been caused to me, personally. I think the desire for revenge is natural, but it shouldn't always be acted upon. I think it's tough to put game theory aside, as the reason why we have the impulse in the first place is due to (evolutionary) game theory. If I recall correctly, in "The Selfish Gene", Richard Dawkins demonstrates that a "Tit for Tat" strategy, of (1) not initiating aggression, (2) retaliating immediately and proportionately for wrongdoing, (3) forgiving the initial aggression afterwards, tends to do quite well in a population. It thus makes sense that vengeance evolved and would be a useful deterrent in many situations; it's e.g. why I support the criminal justice system. It's just not necessarily a good guide to situations that never occurred in the ancestral environment of evolutionary adaptedness. Making life-or-death decisions for millions of people is one of those cases. Governments ought to be far more circumspect about retaliation than individuals would.
But if (a) your opponent knows you won't take revenge, and (b) your opponent has no moral scruples, you're opening yourself to an attack. I think both sides during the Cold War assumed that the other side had no moral scruples. Under that assessment, it makes sense to create a deadman's switch situation (and retaliatory systems were made to be as automatic as possible to prevent someone like you who had moral scruples from interfering when the retaliation was put into motion).
Unfortunately inevitable in war. The leaders are surrounded by human shields.
As someone once said, deserve's got nothing to do with it. You kill millions of people to also kill a few guys who will predictably cause the world many more millions of lives' worth of assorted grief if they go on. And the reason they would be able to do that, is that most of the millions of people you're contemplating killing would predictably work long hours to facilitate the schemes of the malevolent few, so "innocent bystander" only gets you so far.
(In case that wasn't just a figure of speech, Clint Eastwood in "Unforgiven". What a great movie.)
How many of those hundred guilty people will harm innocents when they go free? An error on the side of caution is still an error.
A non-human shield doesn't deliberately do anything, it just gets used by the person being shielded. However, the term "hostage" is typically used for involuntary human shields so that might be a better term.
Game theorists and foreign policy interests were all well aware of these points, and the US and the Soviet Union tried the two strategies you name: Nixon intentionally cultivated an image of instability and aggressive unpredictability(“a mad dog”) so that Soviet officials would be afraid to do anything, and the Soviets advertised an automatic nuclear response system (which never actually existed) in order to discourage the US from launching a preemptive strike
This should be expanded to a full conspiracy theory. Maybe nukes actually do not exist at all. USA and Soviet Union just made them up, to discourage a possible third party from trying to interfere with their mutual conflict. Japan basically agreed to pretend to be nuked to save face (capitulation to an enemy with practically godlike weapons is less shameful that capitulation to a merely stronger enemy). In the meanwhile, a few more countries decided to call their bluff by declaring that they have nukes, too. If nukes were real, obviously Ukraine would have never given them up.
Calling the bluff is a really cool idea. But I also like the idea of it being like Star Trek TNG's first contact story, where once a country gets close enough to discovering that nukes don't exist, we have to bring them in on the secret, which is why we try to prevent other countries from getting that far. Maybe these can be combined somehow.
<mild snark>
I think this conspiracy is only possible on a young, flat Earth. :-)
</mild snark>
The nuclear silos were a cover for digging tunnels to contact the mole people on the other side of the disc.
LOL Many Thanks! Truly _deep_ cover... :-)
Interesting, thank you!
Thanks, you bring up some interesting points. I do agree with you that most Americans, especially those who grew up during the Cold War, would like a president who would be willing to vengefully nuke the enemy. I think all past presidents would have been capable of doing it; I'm just not sure whether e.g. Obama or Clinton would have actually ended up doing it when faced with the decision. I also think Bernie Sanders wouldn't have been capable of it if elected-- it's true that a majority of Americans think he's too pacifistic, but that may change over the next few decades.
Was it David Cross who said that even Ralph Nader would have invaded Afghanistan after 9/11?
I have this silly though experiment that I can't figure out. I only asked the GPT 3.5 about it and it argues that it should work, but I can't really trust that. I've also asked this question on reddit some ten years ago but the only answer that I got didn't really read the experiment setup and thought both magnets would be on at the same time.
So we have two electromagnets, A and B, set up to oppose each other, the magnets are placed at a distance and their fields are strong enough to exert a force on each other from that distance. Both magnets are fixed on a mobile platform, something like this:
A ............. B
------------
O...........O
(A and B are the electromagnets, the O O are the wheels of the platform, the dots are there cause the spaces between A and B, and between the O's got gobbled up when posting this)
Next the chain of events:
- both magnets A and B start by being off
- magnet A is turned on, magnet B is still off
- magnet A is turned off right as the electromagnetic field it generates leaves it, so long before its field reaches B (which if off when A is fired)
- just before the field from A reaches B, magnet B is turned on only long enough for the field from A to pass through it and have the fields interact, magnet B is turned off right after that, so long before its field reaches A (which is off and would still be off when the field from B passes through it)
- after the filed from B (now off) passes A (which is still off), repeat
Now, reasoning naively, the mobile platform should move towards the right, but this looks like a non inertial drive, which is impossible, so I must be missing out on why this shouldn't work, likely related to how electromagnetic momentum works, can anyone explain why this doesn't work?
If I replace A with a cannon and B with a really sturdy wall it's clear that the platform would jerk towards the left and then right, basically going nowhere, but magnetic fields are not really cannonballs so I'm at a loss here.
There's a stackexchange question which I think is equivalent here: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/421839/magnetism-and-reactionless-drives
Nice, thanks. I think I googled it when I first asked this (on a throwaway cause I thought it was a stupid question) but I didn't think of doing so now, just asked GPT, so thank you for finding this.
Still, I'm surprised by the answer. I guess I thought it was impossible cause otherwise I'd expect seeing space vehicles with a nuclear reactor and some magnets strapped to itself without the need to eject mass at one end to propel itself, but now that this seems to work I image we don't have that cause the process would be massively inefficient or something like that. Hm, get one question answered, and another one pops up, thanks again.
Edit: had a comment that disappeared which argued that I misinterpreted the stackexchange post, and I read "Bottom line: Yes, there is a net push of the magnet(s)" as there being a resulting motion, even though the sentence continues saying that both momentums balance each other, so I'm at a loss on how to interpret the meaning of a net push, and I'm still confused.
My interpretation of that StackExchange answer is that the magnets will move, but not reactionlessly. It's a photon drive - electromagnetic waves go one way, magnets go the other way.
Photon drives don't have "reaction mass" per se, but the energy of the photons comes from the mass of your reactor, so there's no free lunch. They're basically just very, very weak rockets with a more compact fuel tank.
<mild snark>
There has been some regulatory activity about AI in both the EU and the USA recently. I'm curious about whether the calls for it are in good faith, in particular which is larger:
People who are actually worried about near-term (job losses, deepfakes) issues citing existential issues
or
People who are actually worried about existential issues citing near-term (job losses, deepfakes) issues
</mild snark>
Many Thanks! That does sound plausible.
Coming to read Scott's blog for several (or is it more than 10?) years.I still feel alien. Sad.
I feel alien almost everywhere, but I view this place as a multi-species federation. :-)
I'm also of the alien-feeling persuasion. But I find the intellectual jousting to be very entertaining and addicting. But because I'm on a different wavelength from most of the people on this group, I don't feel like I could establish close friendships with most of the people here. I went to one meetup and I felt like an outsider there.
However, I feel like I'm on a similar wavelength to you, Moon Moth. I feel like you're simpatico enough that I could hang with you. That's not an invitation to connect, though. Just an observation. ;-)
I went to one meetup and everyone was a 24 year old male grad student in tech.
Not very interesting conversation, I bet.
They tried really hard. So did I. But nope, not very interesting.
As in the old political litmus test, I'd gladly have a beer with you. :-)
I've felt like outsiders at all the handful of meetups I've been to, but there's usually people there that I can have good conversations with, and now even some that I recognize, and say "hi" to, and who express regret that we didn't share a conversation this time around.
It's like the way I feel about science fiction fandom-- I don't like everyone, but it's a good place to find friends. I think I feel more at home than you two.
I used to feel more at home in some other places, but that changed, around the time I got my PTSD. The loss still aches.
I'm very sorry it's like that for you, but you're pointing at something important-- that feeling at home is a mixture of how you're treated and how you feel about how you're treated.
Which part feels alien? Given that you keep coming back, something must resonate, what is it?
I'm very poor and can't write long texts. Also not many SSC readers (zero?) in my area. Even if someone ilikes something I wrote this is a coincidence
I read an interesting anthropology piece which claimed that most of early human civilization was founded on murder. Assume that human desire is largely mimetic, i.e. people want things because other people want them (not including things biologically required for survival like food). If people want the same things but there are not enough resources for everyone, there will inevitably be conflict. All of this is pretty basic, but the next bit is the interesting part.
People are struggling as they all try to acquire a limited amount of resources. There just isn't enough to go around, so they start getting angry. Suddenly the tension reaches a boiling point and someone stabs Billy the sheepherder to death. Afterwards, the community doesn't get divided, but quite the opposite. They all agree that the real issue was Billy. He was cursed by the gods, or practicing occult magic, or maybe nobody really liked him. It wasn't that someone killed Billy to take his sheep or his wife or his land. And so everyone goes back to their daily lives, all of their angst gone for a time, until the next murder inevitably occurs down the line.
I have some doubts about this, especially because a lot of early legal development had to do with regulating blood feuds. This suggests that in fact everyone was not fine with Billy being stabbed, and maybe Billy's uncle was going to stab someone back. Fortunately the author makes it easy for us here by claiming that the coming of Christianity upended the entire murder conflict resolution paradigm. As Christians venerate victims and protecting the weak while making murder a taboo, it was no longer socially acceptable to blame societal outcasts for everything.
My question for the ACX commentariat is, does anyone know the historical background here? If the author is right, there should be a dramatic difference in murder rates between pagan Rome and Christian Rome, or early Christian societies and other societies.
It's horseshit. Pagan Viking society had a massively regulated wergild system and converting to Christianity and being told they just should not murder each other period upended it, AFAIK. Just for one example.
As a split-the-difference sort of person, I wonder whether relief-after-scapegoating is a thing that happens, but not a driving force for structuring societies.
Why a limited amount of resources? If the solution to hitting a limit is to stagnate and start infighting, eventually they'll be conquered by people who innovated and/or decided to expand.
This sounds like the short story "The Lottery".
I'd need some sources to take that argument seriously. As someone with an undergrad anthro degree, that doesn't sound like a theory an anthropologist would make. Cultural anthropologists study human cooperation. Archeologists also study human cultures from their cultural artifacts, but they've mostly bought into the theories of social cooperation (as do I). Although physical anthropologists posited the "killer ape" theory of human evolution, that went out the window when Jane Goodall witnessed chimps killing chimps.
This sounds more like an argument that an ethologist would make.
Dunno where you get that without getting the source, but what you're discussion is straight René Girard. My impression is that he was a powerful but quirky thinker; the effects he wrote about probably do happen, but I don't think they're quite as ubiquitous or they explain nearly as much as he claimed.
Like most authors with an ur-cause to everything, he has interesting intuitions but he certainly proves both too much and not enough.
Legal Systems Very Different from Ours by David Friedman may be of interest to you. It's about how societies found various ways to deal with Billy being stabbed.
I'd also add that most of the murder was done between tribes, where we de-humanize the opponent. So we can still keep most empathy for the tribe members.
If people didn't like Billy to begin with, they might decide he had it coming. But if a society always blames the victim, it is functionally a society that is completely ok with its members killing each other, and that society is going to wipe itself out. Even among chimps a killer has to worry about what the victim's friends will do.
Yeah, someone in that society would figure out that if victims always get blamed, clearly the thing to do is to do unto others before they do unto you.
Japan did not allow anybody to murder anybody else. They allowed certain people to murder certain other people. The upper classes survived because murdering them wasn't allowed, and the lower classes survived because there were too many of them for the murderers to get everyone.
not sure if you're aware, but Scott reviewed Rene Girard's "I saw Satan Fall like Lightning", regarding the religious origin of scapegoating.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-i-saw-satan-fall-like
I didn't comment on it at the time but I really wished Scott had reviewed Violence and Sacred instead. I saw Satan Fall Like Lightning feels more like a summary of Girard's ideas for people already convinced than a real attempt at convincing skeptics.
I wasn't aware of this one. Clearly the anthropologist was heavily influenced by Girard, the single victim process is exactly what he describes. He also goes on a lot about how woke is kind of a secular heresy of Christianity with exaltation of victimhood. I'm still interested in comparing murder rates in Roman society pre/post-Christianity, if that data even exists. Scott didn't go into any quantitative analysis (not knocking him for this, I don't know if it can even be done in a meaningful way.)
Sounds like a good question for David Friedman. The economist/libertarian/medieval-hobbyist who wrote a book called "legal systems very different than ours". He was a regular, before Scott aborted SSC.
https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/
Let's go further back in history and look at apes. Actually, let's just look at apes today instead. They seem to kill each other even without accumulating resources.
> Actually, let's just look at apes today instead.
You can't do that, they're contaminated by modernity.
[joking] Other way round - we got HIV from them.
But apparently we gave them patriarchy and capitalism.
I'm slowly reading a translation of Water Margin 水浒传, a Chinese novel written in the Ming dynasty and set in the twelfth century. It is essentially equivalent to the stories of Robin Hood, a heroic epic in prose telling the stories of various admirable outlaws who are oppressed in different ways by malevolent government officials.
The most prominent feature of the text, to me, is the lack of sanitization. Robin Hood stories went through a period of heavy bowdlerization and the product of that period is what modern people tend to be familiar with, but the earliest texts preserve a very clear-eyed view of what being a 14th-century highwayman meant.
The Chinese literary record is much better preserved than the medieval British oral record, and this didn't happen to Water Margin. It's pretty common for the heroes to do things that you probably wouldn't expect of a villain in a modern story.
But recently something else in the text struck me.
At this point in the story, one of our protagonists is visiting a friend, the military governor of a particular city. There is a separate civil governor, and the two governors do not get along. They have a power struggle, and the narrator tells us this:
> But not for nothing was Liu Gao a scholar. His mind was deep and devious, and he was full of schemes.
He goes on to completely anticipate and thwart the military side's plan.
Today there are many people who will happily tell you with a straight face that someone doing well on difficult tests tells you nothing but that the examinee can do well on tests. This seems to have been too implausible for the audience of a pretty openly anti-elitist set of stories in 15th-century China.
(As the civil governor, Liu Gao will have been appointed to his post after scoring highly on the civil service examinations. The text is correct to equate "civil governor" with "scholar".)
The Water Margin was definitely sanitized and changed. Famously so. There's a whole series of chapters that got added where they repent their crimes and all that. (Also, it's set in the 12th century.)
Anyway, these genius type characters are an East Asian literary archetype. It's not specifically scholars or government officials. Zhuge Liang or Sun Bin were not scholar-officials. Sun Bin was famously bad at politics. So was Yi Sunshin. Yi actually failed his exam at least once (and I believe a few times). And I think Sun and Zhuge never took them. They might still be called scholars or gentleman or so on because they were clearly intelligent. But in many cases they would be more admired for going against politics than living within it.
These are strategists. But you can see it equally with purely civil governors. Their names are just less common because war's dramatic. The idea is not "officials are smart and good" or that passing a test makes you worthy. In fact the opposite was a more common lesson. Stories of corrupt officials are more common than honest ones. The idea is that highly intelligent people exude a kind of charisma, insight, and strength through the power of their mind. And in some stories this crosses over into them being able to do literal magic.
This seems disconnected enough from my comment that I wonder if you meant to reply to someone else in the thread?
But in particular:
> The idea is not "officials are smart and good" or that passing a test makes you worthy. In fact the opposite was a more common lesson. Stories of corrupt officials are more common than honest ones.
There appears to be no implication in Water Margin that corrupt officials are worse than the other kind. Song Jiang is introduced to us as a minor court [legal court, not imperial court] official who is up to his eyeballs in corruption.
The idea that corrupt officials are no better or worse than other kinds is not the impression I'd gotten. And the fact there's 108 bandits at Mount Liang along with the other demonic connections would seem to imply some moral content.
>He goes on to completely anticipate and thwart the military side's plan.
I've been obsessed with this trope in eastern stories for years! Other examples include:
~ In "Hero (2016)" the protagonist steps up to the emperor and the first thing the emperor says is "I see you're here to kill me." There's no foreshadowing, just an infallible intuitive jump.
~In "The Three Body Problem (2008)" a character is debating covering an antagonist with a sniper rifle and is chastised with "She's sharp as a tack, She'll know," as if it's physically possible to tell if someone is pointing a rifle at you from hundreds of yards away.
~In "Shogun (2024)" as outlined recently by Freddie debour. ( I know it's not eastern, but they're leaning pretty heavily on eastern tropes)
Is this a product of the culture's hierarchy raising their leaders to supernatural heights? Is there a specific name for the phenomena of elevating natural intelligence/intuition to supernatural perception? Is this related to the crash of Korean Air Flight 801?!?
"There's no foreshadowing, just an infallible intuitive jump."
This isn't true at all – I think you may just not be familiar with wuxia tropes, or else you missed this one. The Emperor, like ourselves, can tell the titular Hero is there to kill him because of the candles. The Hero's killing intent or battle aura causes him to emanate qi toward the Emperor, causing the flames to flutter away from the Hero and toward the Emperor. It's by this token that he and we can deduce the Hero's plan, it's not an intuitive jump but physical observation.
I'm late to reply as life snuck up on me, but Thank you! I was unaware of this trope and it's exactly what I hoped to find. :)
See, in Shogun, what Freddie complained about was actually something I enjoyed. Hell yes, give me a (barely) fiction(alized) Great Man in Toranaga, a guy who actually is smart and competent and succeeds on those merits! After seeing the "subversion" of greatness fall flat on its face in the case of Napoleon, where it just made Napoleon a petty small-minded guy who occasionally succeeded in a battle almost despite himself, it certainly made for more enjoyable media.
Is it realistic? Are the Great Men infallible? (and even Toranaga isn't infallible - as Freddie's commenters point out, he didn't foresee his half-brother's betrayal, or the earthquake that devastated his forces!) Who cares, it's fiction. Whatever works.
It's not entirely fiction. Toranaga is based on Tokugawa Ieyasu, a real historical character and the founder of the Tokugawa shogunate, and the whole story leads up to the (real) battle of Sekigahara.
Yes, that's why I said (barely) fiction(alized), not just "fiction". It's still fiction in the sense that it doesn't just directly recount history with the names changed.
I wrote more about it below, but I think it's a result of the imperial examinations. In a similar way, I think the modern rationalist movement owes a lot to Arthur Conan Doyle's "Sherlock Holmes" stories. Both want to believe that sufficient intelligence allows superhuman feats.
The Judge Dee (or Di) stories might be an archetype for this. I haven't read them, so I'm recommending them here by reputation. I believe that Di is a judge noted for investigatory prowess, with a significant impact on modern Chinese pop culture.
The plot point that I highlighted in my initial comment isn't a good example of this. Supernatural deductive powers aren't required.
Only one of the Judge Dee stories is written by a Chinese person – the rest are the work of one Robert Van Gulik, a Dutch diplomat.
An association between being scholarly and intelligent is very intuitive so I’m not sure why you would think that’s strange.
I don't. I think it's normal.
Maybe the author, which is uncertain, was a scholar.
You probably live in a bubble of similarly smart people. In medieval China, with quite worse living conditions and 8 centuries of Flynn effect missing, being able to be a scholar probably put you a couple of standard deviations above the mean, in a world with a median in the 80s. Quite a few "cunning plots" become possible in these conditions.
>8 centuries of Flynn effect missing
Flynn effect is somewhat recent thing, so more like 1.5 centuries of Flynn effect and 6.5 centuries of nothing.
On vocabulary size, Flynn effect is ~0. They probably did not have anything similar to Raven's matrices (on which Flynn effect is large) back then.
Wow! You're talking about the culture that invented gunpowder, rockets, the compass, paper, moveable type printing, woodblock printing, paper money, blast furnaces, the wheelbarrow, row-crop farming, seed drills, and possibly kites. Tell me again about the low IQ of medieval Chinese?
It wasn't until the 17th Century that Europe began to outpace China in economic productivity. And after listening to the lectures up on Hanging with History (https://www.buzzsprout.com/955531) it's hard not to view the Industrial Revolution as an accident — where all the right components came together in Great Britain in the right mix — i.e. economic incentives that promoted new innovations, low government censorship that allowed a relatively free exchange of philosophical thought), the right kind of iron ore, the right kind of coal, the existential threat of invasion (from the French under Napoleon).
If it helps I don't have a better opinion on the average IQ in Europe at the same time. We know that there's little you can do to raise IQ, but there's a lot of things you can do to decrease it - most of them quality of life things. In pre-industrial societies you have almost all of them stacked up. Even the Flynn effect is probably just living conditions catching up and bringing us close to the max potential.
I'm probably a bit biased toward this way of thinking because I live in a country with major economic emigration and constant brain drain over the last 35 years. It's a lot easier here to think in terms of "you can't develop this industry because the limiting factor is how many competent people you can attract".
It's crazy to view the Industrial Revolution as an accident. Western Europe had a lot going on those last couple centuries and the Industrial Revolution was the culmination of it.
That was my opinion, too. But after listening to Hanging With History I changed my mind. Granted that Great Britain couldn't have had the Industrial Revolution outside the European context. But it couldn't have happened anywhere else in Europe, except Great Britain, because of all sorts of different inhibiting issues in the other nation-states of continental Europe.
My understanding is that the Netherlands industrialized around the same time as England.
I read The Great Divergence a couple years ago where he makes that claim and I didn’t find it persuasive at all. Europe was innovating militarily, economically, technologically and intellectually for hundreds of years before 1800. The Industrial Revolution was baked in well before it happened.
A military governor would also probably be significantly above the mean too - plus a bunch of specialized military knowledge.
What if the story had been sanitized in a different way? Instead of adding things like "he humbly prayed and God told him the optimal course of action", it would be "he scored highly on his civil service examinations and was very smart so he thought of the optimal course of action".
That is, who would be sanitizing it, and what was their public justification for holding power?
I can't quite tell what you're referring to?
I think stories will, by one means or another, tend to suit the beliefs of their transmitters and audiences.
In the case of this story, those would be highly educated members of imperial China. Of course they would want stories that celebrate incredible personal feats of intellectual prowess. There's a tendency in Chinese history and literature to downplay the contributions of millions and millions of people, and attribute it all to a stroke of genius on the part of one singularly brilliant man. (It's almost enough to make me Maoist.)
Whereas when the Grimm Brothers were revising their tales, they made alterations to suit their more wealthy, urban, educated audience. Changing mothers to stepmothers, changing being eaten to being swallowed whole (and later rescued), tacking on a paragraph-long happy ending, justified by an act of prayer inserted earlier. That sort of stuff.
I still don't understand your first comment. I observed that Water Margin failed to be sanitized to accord with modern sensibilities. I don't know how to answer "what if it had been sanitized in a different way?". The comparison might be to the sanitization that I observed had happened, of the Robin Hood legends, but that sanitization involves giving Robin Hood nobler motives and toning down his thieving, murderous behavior. (Generally removing the murderous behavior outright.)
The novelization of Water Margin probably was written by a member of the educated class. It is much less clear that that was the intended audience. The stories are mostly not original to the novel and can be traced back through popular plays, and before then (and simultaneously) they would have been part of the oral tradition.
The book has not so far done any celebrating of incredible personal feats of intellectual prowess. Journey to the West doesn't do that either, though I think there is a certain amount of lionization of Zhuge Liang in Romance of the Three Kingdoms. The closest match I know of for that description is the Judge Dee stories, which, like Romance of the Three Kingdoms, I haven't read. But I don't think it's a general theme in Chinese literature any more than Sherlock Holmes is a general theme of British literature rather than one guy who appears in several popular books.
You might note that, as I observed in my reply to Deiseach, the educated class is not portrayed _at all_ favorably in Water Margin. If you want a story written by the elite for the elite, look for Dream of the Red Chamber.
I think Erusian put it better than I did.
What I meant was, we here today expect that things like Rogin Hood and the Grimm Brothers will have passed through a cultural filter and will have been altered in certain ways, to conform to standards and to help set standards. We can predict that certain things will have been removed, and we can guess that other things have been added. Pre-modern Chinese literature is going to pass through a different cultural filter. So we today reading it will see things that would have been sanitized out of Robin Hood and the Grimm Brothers, and we also may have a harder time seeing things that were added, because we don't automatically recognize the pattern. Does that make sense?
And I may be overreacting a bit. That "superhuman omnicompetent smart guy" trope is something that specifically bugs me, and even more so when found in Chinese literature, so I'm probably oversensitive to even its milder incarnations.
And OK, yeah, Journey to the West doesn't hit that trope directly, but the Monkey King is just so over the top... Fun, yes, but...
> Today there are many people who will happily tell you with a straight face that someone doing well on difficult tests tells you nothing but that the examinee can do well on tests. This seems to have been too implausible for the audience of a pretty openly anti-elitist set of stories in 15th-century China.
If you're anti-elite, you might question the scholarship of the elites. Or you might just reject the notion that scholarship is good.
The text doesn't seem to take too high a view of intelligence; the mark of being a scholar is to be devious and scheming after all your learning has taught you how to plot and connive 😀
I think it takes a pretty traditional view of intelligence as something that's good when your friends have it and bad when your enemies do.
The view of *politics* is much more relentlessly negative.
It might also just be an easy way to explain his intelligence
On the assumption that doing well on tests is not informative as to intelligence, how would that work?
I presume "it" is straight up telling us that he is a scholar, a deep thinker, devious, and excellent at planning, not your retrospective that we should have known all this from the fact that he did well on civil service tests. If that was what we should have inferred, then there wouldn't be a need to tell us explicitly that *this* civil servant is intelligent, and in any case, it wouldn't explain any difference between him and the other civil governor, who I presume would have done similarly on the same tests.
But I haven't read this, and only know about it what you posted.
The other governor is military; they're chosen differently.
The English here explicitly relates the deep, devious, scheming mind to the fact that the civil governor is a scholar. I can't speak for the Chinese directly, but I see no real reason to doubt that it does the same.
From all this killing the pavilion was swimming in blood, bodies could be seen lying everywhere in the flickering light of the candles. Wu Song said to himself: "It had to be all or nothing; kill a hundred, you can only die for it once." Sword at the ready, he went downstairs.
"What's all the hullaballoo upstairs?" the General's wife was inquiring as Wu Song rushed in. At this monstrous sight she shrieked: "Who are you?"
But Wu Song's sword was already flying. It caught her square in the forehead and she fell with a shriek right there in front of the pavilion. Wu Song held her down but when he tried to cut off her head the sword wouldn't cut. Baffled, he saw by the light of the moon that the blade was completely blunted. "So that's why I couldn't get her head off," he thought.
He slipped out of the back door to get his halberd again and threw away the blunt sword. Then he turned and went back to the tower. A lamp could be seen approaching. It turned out to be the singing girl, Yulan, the one he'd had the trouble with before. She was accompanied by two children. When the light of her lamp fell on the General's wife where she lay dead on the floor, Yulan screamed: "Merciful Heaven!" Wu Song raised his halberd and ran her through the heart. He also killed the children, a single thrust to each. He went to the central hall, bolted the main door and returned. He found two or three more young girls and stabbed them to death too.
"Now at last," he said, "my heart is eased. Now it's time to stop." He threw away his halberd, went out of the side-door, took from his shirt-front the drinking vessels he had squashed and put them in the sack he had left in the stable, tying it on his waist. And off he strode, halberd in hand. Reaching the city wall, he thought: "If I wait for the gates to open I'll be caught. Surely the best thing to do is to climb the wall now, while it's dark, and clear off." So he leapt up onto the wall.
>He also killed the children, a single thrust to each. He went to the central hall, bolted the main door and returned. He found two or three more young girls and stabbed them to death too.
Hmm... Foreshadowing Cromwell ( https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/02/11/nits/ ), about a century later?
Wu Song also stops at an inn where, as he is already aware by reputation, the owners drug and butcher some of their guests to feed to the others. When he suspects that he has been given human meat, he provokes a fight with the proprietress (for reasons unclear to me, this translation calls her "the Ogress"; her Chinese epithet is clearly "the Tigress") and is about to kill her when her husband, the Gardener, arrives and recognizes Wu Song. After this the three of them are good friends.
This is a major exception to the general rule that you can tell the difference between heroes and villains; I don't really see any redeeming qualities in the treatment of this couple, but they're heroes anyway.
On a tangent, incapacitating drugs used to spike drinks are a significant plot element in the novel. I had thought of these as a fairly modern technology. What kind of stuff was available in the 12th-16th centuries?
I imagine you get more options for knock-out drugs if you don't need them to wake up afterward.
Also, just because it appears in fiction doesn't mean they really had it. I don't think the drug at the end of Romeo and Juliet was real.
> I imagine you get more options for knock-out drugs if you don't need them to wake up afterward.
For one thing, that wouldn't be an incapacitating drug, it would be a lethal poison.
For another, that's not relevant here, because that's not what's happening in the story.
Many Thanks!
>This is a major exception to the general rule that you can tell the difference between heroes and villains; I don't really see any redeeming qualities in the treatment of this couple, but they're heroes anyway.
Hmm... Interesting question - maybe in the literary tradition of the time the distinction between heroes and villains was some other parameter, clear to readers then, but different from what we use now???
>On a tangent, incapacitating drugs used to spike drinks are a significant plot element in the novel. I had thought of these as a fairly modern technology. What kind of stuff was available in the 12th-16th centuries?
Good question! I assume opium was available, but I thought that it (and most alkaloids) has a bitter taste. Chloral hydrate is one of the earliest synthetic sedatives, but it only goes back to 1832 (Justus von Liebig) AFAIK.
Is anyone still taking seriously the extremely optimistic hopes Yudkowsky described in the Sequences for what rationality might make people capable of, and treating that as a goal they're working towards? Is he?
"Still" would be incorrect for me.
But I applaud the effort.
I think the problem with rationalism is that it does not take into account a lot of the non-rational factors that push people in the direction of making and believing bad arguments: anger and desire to win, need to signal affiliation with valued others, self-esteem benefits of loathing an outgroup, etc. There are not many people for whom the desire to keep their thinking up to a certain standard of fairness and correctness is a powerful motivation all by itself. The people it's sufficient motivation for tend to be pretty non-social, and unusually attracted to rules and systems.
EY was quite clear that he considered his rationality a half-made art, comparable to knowing how to punch without knowing how to kick.
I don't think that half-version of rationality does that much (except get us interested in completing it). I also think the full version of it might be incomplete because it will contain things challenging to the punch's half-perspective. It is precisely because of how different it is that this missing half of the art adds so much that the first half is missing.
I do have hopes that there exists a version of self-improvement and societal improvement that can enjoy runaway success and rapidly improve us as a species. Our dialectic has worked blindly so far, but if we turn it back on itself and hone it to an edge, we will quickly become capable of jumping ahead of the schedule of insights as it looks right now.
So instead of trying to answer questions, I propose a short period of focusing on getting better at answering questions by intentionally designing dialectic infrastructure and technology; why bother trying to see through the fog to the dim light far away, when the fog will be gone and the light right up close as soon as we make our dialectic recursively self-improving?
I don't know if Jacob Falkovich is exactly as optimistic as Eliezer, but he has disagreed with my pessimistic case at https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8xLtE3BwgegJ7WBbf/is-rationalist-self-improvement-real , there's some debate in the comments.
Thanks for that interesting link. I am curious about one of your comments,
“ I think a history of the idea of procrastination would be very interesting. I get the impression that ancient peoples had very confused beliefs around it. I don't feel like there is some corpus of ancient anti-procrastination techniques from which TAPs are conspicuously missing, but why not? And premodern people seem weirdly productive compared to moderns in a lot of ways.”
Have you explored this subject elsewhere?
Nope!
My interview with Jon Askonas:
https://youtu.be/RHWhC2af4kc?si=6J1789tf7gdI6PR9
Interesting survey, I think I can see what it's trying to get at (and reading the linked Substack inclines me towards that) but I don't want to speculate until the results are in.
The one thing I'd say is the compulsory "gimme your email address"; the email I use to sign in with Google is (1) a different one to the email I use for other purposes, such as subscribing to this Substack and (2) not my real name anyway.
I think forcing people to use the Google sign-in email may result in "By the way, this is not my normal email and you won't be able to contact me with this one", so maybe an option for either "don't have to sign in to take this survey" or a place to give an alternate email address might be helpful?
I will definitely be waiting to see the results and already have a "yeah, but" response in mind to what I think the conclusions will be 😀
I noped out when my email address was required.
Ran across this yesterday, and it feels like the kind of thing I would read in an ACX links digest:
The Phantom Time Conspiracy “claims that the period from 614 A.D. to 911 A.D. was fabricated during the Middle Ages to place Otto the Third in the year 1000 and legitimize his claim over the Holy Roman Empire. The entire Carolingian period is thereby fake and we actually live in the year 1727.”
https://www.threads.net/@matsacchi/post/C6O1syiIDuC
Much like the moon landing conspiracies can be answered by "so how did they get the Soviet Union to agree that the Americans won the space race?", the obvious question for this one is "so, how did they get all the countries outside the HRE to agree to the new fake calendar?"
This reminds me of Scott's coffeepocalypse post from earlier this week.
Upon hearing about this theory I find myself immediately dismissing it, not after carefully weighing up any of the evidence of its proponents, but simply because it pattern-matches to a whole lot of other wacky theories which have turned out to be wrong.
This is what the AI Doom doubters who engage with the argument at the level of "oh yeah, people said that about coffee too" are doing. It might be frustrating if you're an insider who has had his head deep in the weeds of the argument for years, but it's what most people do most of the time about most things; I haven't got time to entertain wacky theories about the future or the past so I'll just wave them away (and hope that someone else better qualified will engage with the actual substance of the argument).
Wikipedia gives some evidence in refutation, including from astronomy and archeological dating. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_time_conspiracy_theory
Sounds like Fomenko's "New Chronology". It's a really cool theory that sounds like something you'd see in a sci-fi novel, either due to time travel shenanigans or due to planetary-scale memory loss or due to civilizational collapse on a colony.
Hilarious. I guess it would have been much easier back then to fake the past
Once in a few years I get bored enough to click on SneerClub. Today I was shocked to see it... dead?
Apparently, 10 months ago they decided to commit a collective sudoku, because the Reddit admins told them to... uhm, actually I can't even figure what exactly it was that they told them. The goodbye message just quotes a very unspecific message from Reddit admins, saying "please take steps to begin that process" and "we will reach out soon with information on what next steps will take place", which SneerClub interprets as "being told to bend the knee or to die", and chooses to die.
I suppose that explanation makes way more sense for someone in the loop. I just feel a vague discomfort about the news that even bullies feel unsafe on Reddit these days. Then again, how many people still use Reddit? I also suspect that this might all be just an excuse, and the true reason is that the moderators of SneerClub simply got tired after a decade of doing the same pointless thing over and over again, and decided to move on, but for the purpose of feeling better about themselves, they decided to rebrand their retirement as heroically sacrificing their lives on the altar of... something.
They mention that the new rules on Reddit would allow big subs to take over small ones, by having many members subscribe to the small sub and then voting for new moderators. Is this actually true? If yes, it seems like a lot of fun going to happen. (Also, if true, I can imagine a way more efficient form of protest: ten people - or one person with nine sockpuppets - taking over hundreds of subs having less than ten subscribers and replacing their homepage with a protest message. The fact that this didn't already happen makes me suspect the information might not be entirely true.)
Tried to find out more. In other posts they say they are actually protesting against API changes. That only makes me more confused. So is this about the API changes, or the fear that Scott will send thousand cultists who will vote out the existing mods and establish Scott as the only legitimate authority on hating Scott? Also, isn't it a bit ironic that you spend a decade mocking people for their worries about coming technological change, and then you get hysterical about how the coming technological change will make you unable to continue your life as usual? At least the rationalists are losing their sleep over the idea that an AI might exterminate humanity, rather than that it might make loading Reddit pages a bit slower.
Ah, seems like the have a new website, where 80% of posts are made by David Gerard. Okay guys, I wish you a nice API and not too many subscribers! I will check your website again in ten years.
A lot of small lefty political sites relocated to greener pastures - and mostly starved there, I would assume. Slightly annoying if you liked to click on them from time to time, I guess, but no great loss to the world. Most of the sites I go to, related to games, software, books etc. seem largely unchanged, though probably the APIcalypse did some damage. I don't know what if anything it did to large political sites as I don't go there or to the front page. Haven't been on SSC much lately but that looks about the same as before.
10 months ago is exactly the timing of widespread protests against the API pricing changes. SneerClub wasn't the only small subreddit that closed down and then never opened back up. Nothing about this is specific to them, closing permanently was a plausible outcome for any small sub with cantankerous mods during those protests. Nothing to see here.
> They mention that the new rules on Reddit would allow big subs to take over small ones, by having many members subscribe to the small sub and then voting for new moderators. Is this actually true?
No. The Reddit subreddit democracy thing is 1) probably not going to happen and 2) even if it did could not be used to remove SneerClub moderators in the way they're describing.
That's not what I mean. What I mean is that Reddit (the company) has no interest in allowing large subreddits to take over small subreddits in this manner. Reddit's goal is to cater to many different niches, and this would reduce the number of niches.
Destroyed, I can buy. Different from supporting takeovers.
"commit a collective sudoku"; you may have meant "seppuku"?
If your pencil's sharp enough it could be used for either.
IIRC, the Sudoku thing is a meme based on various platforms like Youtube censoring references to suicide, similar to the term "unaliving."
Damn, I was going to make a joke, but too late.
I wondered if it might be like The Motte, which decided to jump before it was pushed, and your concluding sentences make it seem that way - instead of whatever changes Reddit might demand (which probably would be hollowing-out the entire sub-reddit), they decided to pack up the caravan and move on to pastures new.
So where did they go?
Here they recruit: https://www.lesswrong.com/users/mirzhan_irkegulov (link now removed)
Here they discuss: https://awful.systems/c/sneerclub
That first link gives a 404.
Oh pity, seems like LW moderators noticed it.
To explain a joke, it was some spammer account that posted dozens of messages like "LW is shit" with links to the (old) SneerClub website. This happened a few years ago, and somehow it escaped the moderators's attention (probably because he only commented on old debates). I accidentally found it in google results when looking for SneerClub.
As far as reddit clones go, that one is actually nice and fast and neat and well designed. Or maybe it just helps that it's not constantly under DDOS like .win and voat.
I wonder if they'll let me start an awful.systems/c/fatpeoplehate?
My guess would be no. It does not seem to be a generally hateful website, only hateful in a certain direction (against "tech bros").
Does anyone know through their university library have access to Oxford Scholarship Online database or the Scholars Portal database?
I am trying to find a .mobi, .epub or .azw3 file for Joseph Heath's Following the Rules : Practical Reasoning and Deontic Constraint.
listed here:
https://academic.oup.com/book/5936
https://books.scholarsportal.info/en/read?id=/ebooks/ebooks2/oso/2012-10-01/4/acprof-9780195370294-Heath
Looks like this is available in a number of libraries, try WorldCat? Or your local librarian might be able to get it via Interlibrary Loan.
A pdf wouldn't work? It's available on libgen.
You might be out of luck here. I have access through UofT but I can't seem to download it
No hidden open threads this month? is that a policy or merely a fact?
It makes me sad.
Scott tends to forget about them.
If they were easy to find they wouldn’t be hidden! Just gotta look a little harder
Has anyone studied or thought about whether aphantasia would negatively affect IQ tests due to the tests reliance on visual pattern recognition questions? I can solve those questions but I find them so unintuitive— I have to use my hands and turn my head to try to figure out the pattern. My wife claims she can see the next tile in her minds eye. She can confabulate shapes in her mind quickly to validate her prediction.
maybe Scott can add questions about aphantasia to next survey (-;
Aphantasic identity does not have meaningful impacts on visual or spatial cognitive tasks:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053810024000618
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010945222000065
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010945221002628
I think this reflects that "aphantasia" doesn't describe a literal inability to mind's-eye visualize but a difference in answering questions/identfying and describing one's internal experience. Anecdotally, a lot of aphantasia descriptions are weirdly Barnum-y for something that should in theory be super distinct.
(Whether matrix reasoning type stuff is "visuospatial" is a different question. In theory, it isn't. In practice, everyone looks at it and goes "ah, that's visuospatial".)
It's not super distinct because there is a continuum - people with imagination have radically different capabilities and uses of it.
Those papers are really interesting, thanks for the link!
e.g. Personally I have decent (not amazing) spatial imagination - relative positions of things, so would do fine in rotating tasks. But I have very little colour or texture, and extremely low detail of images. So I'd do perfectly well at the tasks in the papers, even though I've very weak phantasic abilities.
I think the reason those papers don't find meaningful impacts is because the tasks are relatively straightforward, and there are multiple ways to do such tasks. Also often the task might be done elsewhere in the brain and merely presented consciously to phantasics via visual circuity.
We know for sure it isn't a Barnum-y fake from MRI scans (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8186241/) and that it isn't just varying description of inernal experience from Descriptive Experience Sampling (which is a very thorough method - any questions you have about it, Hurlburt will have gone into in various books)
My visual working memory is non existent, compared to something like remembering a complex software program. I find it hard to translate shapes, positions, movement, to a symbolic system in my head. My wife who is an artist never has to go through that step. It’s just so much more effortful than doing math or coding.
I have Aphantasia and an education correlated with having a very high IQ (both on the verbal and math side). I find the Raven's Progressive Matrices absurdly hard and have wondered if this reflects my being genuinely less intelligent than I think or a bias in IQ testing caused by my Aphantasia.
I have (as far as I can tell) an excellent ability to form mental images, and Raven's Progressive Matrices were a delight to do.
Working memory tests, on the other hand, I do miserably at. Though I don't think it's related, other than the fact that if I have to keep a large number in my working memory I tend to imagine it written down.
Yeah same idea. Other evidence points to my IQ being 5-10 points higher than I can squeeze out of those tests.
I looked back at "I can tolerate anything except the outgroup" and Russell Brand was seen as the go to example if the most absurd partisan Blue Tribe person, how times have changed.
The "everyone is Blue Tribe until they're accused of sexual harassment" adage seems to hold true. There is of course also an intermediate stage in all this, in which said person weakly defends free speech against blue tribe extremists.
In this case I think it's more "Everyone gets accused of sexual harassment once they stop being reliably Blue Tribe".
Same thing that happened to Bill Cosby -- everyone knew about the rape but for some reason nobody cared, until he started saying things about how young black men should really pull up their pants instead of blaming others. (This isn't a conspiracy theory, check the Hannibal Burress section on Cosby's wikipedia page, the rape allegations were deliberately resurfaced as a response to his comments about black people.)
In Brand's case, he started making remarks about vaccines and bam, suddenly everyone remembers he's a creepy druggie pervert. I have to at least respect Brand for having his own stupid opinions rather than following the path of least resistance though.