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.
Why, exactly, is it alright for women to be categorically afraid of men, have separate women's spaces, talk about how violent and evil men are, but having any kind of problem with insane rates of violence from black people is completely unacceptable?
Even if most people blacks kill are other blacks, and putting aside the black on white homicide rate is still *higher* than the white on white homicide rate, this fact is the way it is precisely because white people have to go to enormous lengths to avoid being around black people, something which is considered horribly, unforgivably racist. If women were willing/able to segregate themselves from men to the same extents whites are from blacks, then we should expect that male of female violence to be dramatically lower.
And no, for the umpteenth time, economic factors do not explain black violence, nor are these factors entirely or even mostly exogenous in the first place.
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)...
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.
I haven't posted a high-ranking Israeli government member declaring genocidal things for a long time, but quite amusingly, just right after I see a bunch of comments down thread arguing that what Israel is doing and will continue to do in Gaza is totally not a Genocide, I open Haaretz [1] and see this:
> Israel's Far-right Minister Smotrich Calls for 'No Half Measures' in the 'Total Annihilation' of Gaza
Mmm, interesting. Smotrich is the Finance Minister of Israel, and a member of the security cabinet that have formed after October 7th to oversee the war. His latest news is bitching about Moody's downgrading Israel's rating in early April, and before that attending a conference about resettling Gaza in late January.
Let's see what he has to say, perhaps those who say what's happening in Gaza is an early-stage Genocide will all the usual writing on the walls are really silly and hysterical and nothing of that sort is ever happening.
> Bezalel Smotrich called on Monday for annihilating Israel's enemies, saying "There are no half measures. [The Gazan cities of] Rafah, Deir al-Balah, Nuseirat – total annihilation. 'You will blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven' – there's no place under heaven."
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.
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...
If there's anything good that has come of the Tentefada -- and there hasn't -- it's that the insincerity of the past decade's calls for safe spaces and inclusion and #bekind have been made obvious enough that even the densest, most inattentive onlooker can see it. A year or two ago, someone using a racial slur when they were fifteen or wearing an insensitive Halloween costume or committing any other kind of "microaggression" was grounds to be kicked out of the university; today, those exact same universities grovel and cower before masked mobs of students and faculty chanting racist and genocidal slogans, occupying buildings, and fighting with police.
From day one social justice was never anything but who, whom, but now it's out in the open and regardless of their feelings on the actual Israeli-Palestinian conflict it's impossible for a good-faith observer to deny it any longer.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 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?
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.
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.
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?
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?
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
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.
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 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 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.
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".)
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?
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.”
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.
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 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.
I am a mathematics postdoc, and I am leading a group of computer science students in a project to generalize the results of alpha geometry to other fields of mathematics like algebra and analysis. We need some help with project planning and training LLMs on synthetic data. Would anyone here be interested in advising us on this/working with us?
On one hand, I've written a fair number of book reviews over the years. But on the other, I don't use Google Docs, as I don't consider Google an ethical organization and try to deal with them as little as possible.
I looked at Philosophy Bear's survey, out of curiosity. But I realized that I don't care about the $50 (if I took it, it would be for my own enjoyment), and on the other hand, I don't know what "charity" means and don't want to buy a pig in the proverbial poke. (I'm not generally motivated to support organized charities—I would rather donate directly to people whose needs I can assess myself—and some charities support causes I oppose.)
I guess I'm not a good fit to this part of the Internet ecosystem.
1) Do you promise to keep our answer-email correlations confidential? You never AFAICT say as much, and while I personally am sufficiently doxxed to not really care, a lot of those questions are cancel-bait.
Wrote a post on the UK - its people's character, the ways it's amazing, the things it does badly, and the things in which it's underrated. Would love thoughts and comments!
Every now and then, I get an email that someone liked my post. However, I have never seen/found a "like" button in the comments. I really want a way to "promote" some comments over others, and it is a constant frustration that I cannot. The only thing I have found that is close is replying, but I also don't want to spam "this" everywhere.
I was diagnosed with a brain tumour just over two years ago and I never asked for a prognosis. I have had three people close to me who had the same tumour and they all died quite quickly. I assumed that I would too.
Now it’s two years later and I am not dead yet and I am starting to think that I should have asked how long I have in the first place. I would have made very different plans if I had known I would last this long.
I have an appointment with my oncologist coming up and I think I want to ask how long I have so I can make plans for the rest of my life. If it’s a year or two, I’d rather spend it somewhere nice like a beach in Vietnam. If it’s much longer, I’ll need to carry on working. If it’s much shorter, I’ll go watch the ducks on the harbour.
My wife thinks I should forget about knowing because we are all going to die sometime and no one knows when but I wonder what the smart people here would do.
I wrote what I think on my blog but I’m more interested in what you think. What would you do? Would you ask?
On the Philosophy Bear survey, there's a left-right alignment question.
It's safe to assume this is in an American context, but even there, I don't know how to answer these, particularly given recent gyrations in what counts as left and right (left anti free speech, right anti free trade, for example). Are these scales even useful anymore? I went center left as a vague gesture at my views (socially permissive, positive on markets, think the state should keep people out of misery), but the nuance is complicated and not coherent with a left right axis, even less than historically speaking.
My music listening is generally rock, or classical or house. The latter I know nothing about but it fills the room.
I don’t listen to much pop except for the obvious genius of the Beatles or the beachboys etc.
Female pop? Not at all.
So it was with great trepidation that I let Spotify play what it considered the best songs from Taylor Swift‘s latest, and not as enthusiastically received, album - the Tortured Poet’s society.
I’ve never liked her old songs much either but I enjoyed the songs I listened to here well enough. Sure, maybe a 35 year old should move on from the break up genre, but she can throw shade like no one else. I’m not sure it helps her future dating prospects that you may get a song like “The smallest man who ever lived” written about you but as a revenge poem it’s delicious.
Will there be a dedicated announcement for book review voting this year? I was reading through the open threads for the last few, and saw 1. several complaints that people were unaware of the voting period because they don't check the threads and 2. that it was a huge pain to find people's thoughts on the reviews during voting, because spicy/CW stuff dominates open threads.
To anticipate questions related to 3: these complexities will have no effect on TFOI's updated roadmap.
We are not affiliated with the Minicircle company, and we also do not have any shared team members or formal partnerships. While we initially considered partnering with them, following our internal considerations and consultations with external experts, we made a few early adjustments to the parts of our general strategy. Among them, we decided to pause investigating the use of small-m minicircles (as an entire category) in the human intervention subproject, having identified delivery-related issues that could likely prevent the occurrence of the desired effect; we are already considering the utilization of other, more suitable methods. More news coming soon!
I tend to think of theology as something a peraon learns in order to better understand the doctrinal points of their own religious tradition. Usually to deepen their faith or to provide for defenses against attacks from othe religions. Also, inevitably, the speculation draws on the established scriptures of the faith and thus ultimately appeals to the authority of revealed knowledge to paper over any cracks. A notion that recently lodged itself in my brain is whether or not it was possible to speculate on the nature of the divine without reference to revealed knowledge and/or outside of a religious tradition.
The only examples I've been able to find have been Aristotle on Metaphysics where he outlines his argument for Prime Movers, and within Whitehead's process philosophy. But as far as I can tell that's basically it and that honestly surprised me. It's easy to understand why the majorityof theology would take place within an established tradition, but I thought that subject of (presumably) great importance would have attracted more thinkers trying to divine what we can know about it through reason alone.
So am I missing any other than the ones listed above? Also, if anyone has thoughts on the futility or nature of the subject, feel free to share.
It really troubles me how difficult it is to talk about human rights in Palestine without being in some way accused of being an antisemite, or otherwise being callous towards Israelis. It seems to be an unspoken assumption that these two mindsets are interlinked, but I just don't understand how that makes sense. Gaza and the West Bank are both in far worse shape than Israel is, so it seems obvious to me that an objective observer would be very concerned about the welfare of Palestinians right now. It troubles me that it is controversial in many spaces to express any modicum of that concern publicly, and I would be interested to know why people think this is the case.
Economists say that that the immigration of workers(M) to a country with an existing number of workers(N) will have no effect on employment. They call this the lump of labour fallacy.
Has this been proven true for all values of N and M?
The claim is that if M people emigrate, afterward N+M people will employed, regardless of the size of M relative to N.
We've delayed the mana currency conversion rate change until May 15th, so you can donate normally until then. Additionally, if you have an inactive account, you can email us (info@manifold.markets) to donate your mana anytime for the rest of the year at the old 100 to 1 rate.
We're also going to send an email with more information!
Despite the big changes to the Manifold economy that are required, I'm excited to see what use cases arise when user-created prediction markets can provide real money incentives. What kind of questions will people ask? Will users trade to hedge real life risks? Will the trading bots become much stronger?
I can't wait to see someone create a market with a subsidy of $100 or $1000 that incentivizes traders to come up with a useful answer.
For the book reviews, would it possible to add a way for the people rating the reviews to add comments if they want to? It'd be nice to get some feedback for the reviews that don't make it as finalists.
Many people have warned that if Trump gets re-elected, conservatives are preparing to gut many government agencies and usher in radical conservative reforms to various areas of policy.
Why didn't this happen during the last Trump administration? What's changed to make people expect a second Trump administration would do this?
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.
In 2018, Males were 7.6 times as likely to be murder offenders as females, while blacks were 8.2 times as likely to be murder offenders as nonblacks: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-2018/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-3.xls
Why, exactly, is it alright for women to be categorically afraid of men, have separate women's spaces, talk about how violent and evil men are, but having any kind of problem with insane rates of violence from black people is completely unacceptable?
Even if most people blacks kill are other blacks, and putting aside the black on white homicide rate is still *higher* than the white on white homicide rate, this fact is the way it is precisely because white people have to go to enormous lengths to avoid being around black people, something which is considered horribly, unforgivably racist. If women were willing/able to segregate themselves from men to the same extents whites are from blacks, then we should expect that male of female violence to be dramatically lower.
And no, for the umpteenth time, economic factors do not explain black violence, nor are these factors entirely or even mostly exogenous in the first place.
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/
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
Anyone else enjoying the new Velma? Can't wait for season 3!
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
I haven't posted a high-ranking Israeli government member declaring genocidal things for a long time, but quite amusingly, just right after I see a bunch of comments down thread arguing that what Israel is doing and will continue to do in Gaza is totally not a Genocide, I open Haaretz [1] and see this:
> Israel's Far-right Minister Smotrich Calls for 'No Half Measures' in the 'Total Annihilation' of Gaza
Mmm, interesting. Smotrich is the Finance Minister of Israel, and a member of the security cabinet that have formed after October 7th to oversee the war. His latest news is bitching about Moody's downgrading Israel's rating in early April, and before that attending a conference about resettling Gaza in late January.
Let's see what he has to say, perhaps those who say what's happening in Gaza is an early-stage Genocide will all the usual writing on the walls are really silly and hysterical and nothing of that sort is ever happening.
> Bezalel Smotrich called on Monday for annihilating Israel's enemies, saying "There are no half measures. [The Gazan cities of] Rafah, Deir al-Balah, Nuseirat – total annihilation. 'You will blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven' – there's no place under heaven."
Huh.
[1] https://archive.ph/2CeDm
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.
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...
If there's anything good that has come of the Tentefada -- and there hasn't -- it's that the insincerity of the past decade's calls for safe spaces and inclusion and #bekind have been made obvious enough that even the densest, most inattentive onlooker can see it. A year or two ago, someone using a racial slur when they were fifteen or wearing an insensitive Halloween costume or committing any other kind of "microaggression" was grounds to be kicked out of the university; today, those exact same universities grovel and cower before masked mobs of students and faculty chanting racist and genocidal slogans, occupying buildings, and fighting with police.
From day one social justice was never anything but who, whom, but now it's out in the open and regardless of their feelings on the actual Israeli-Palestinian conflict it's impossible for a good-faith observer to deny it any longer.
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?
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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?
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 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?
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.
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/
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.
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!
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?
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
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.
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.
<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>
Coming to read Scott's blog for several (or is it more than 10?) years.I still feel alien. Sad.
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.
I have a new post on Substack, "Policy, Tariffs, and Trade 4 -- China Shock 2"
https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/p/policy-tariffs-and-trade-4-china
Readers invited but commentators solicited.
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".)
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?
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 😀
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
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.
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
No hidden open threads this month? is that a policy or merely a fact?
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 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.
I am a mathematics postdoc, and I am leading a group of computer science students in a project to generalize the results of alpha geometry to other fields of mathematics like algebra and analysis. We need some help with project planning and training LLMs on synthetic data. Would anyone here be interested in advising us on this/working with us?
On one hand, I've written a fair number of book reviews over the years. But on the other, I don't use Google Docs, as I don't consider Google an ethical organization and try to deal with them as little as possible.
I looked at Philosophy Bear's survey, out of curiosity. But I realized that I don't care about the $50 (if I took it, it would be for my own enjoyment), and on the other hand, I don't know what "charity" means and don't want to buy a pig in the proverbial poke. (I'm not generally motivated to support organized charities—I would rather donate directly to people whose needs I can assess myself—and some charities support causes I oppose.)
I guess I'm not a good fit to this part of the Internet ecosystem.
Philosophy Bear:
1) Do you promise to keep our answer-email correlations confidential? You never AFAICT say as much, and while I personally am sufficiently doxxed to not really care, a lot of those questions are cancel-bait.
2) Do you consider Pause AI a political charity?
Wrote a post on the UK - its people's character, the ways it's amazing, the things it does badly, and the things in which it's underrated. Would love thoughts and comments!
https://logos.substack.com/p/thoughts-on-england-and-the-uk
Every now and then, I get an email that someone liked my post. However, I have never seen/found a "like" button in the comments. I really want a way to "promote" some comments over others, and it is a constant frustration that I cannot. The only thing I have found that is close is replying, but I also don't want to spam "this" everywhere.
How do I like a comment?
I was diagnosed with a brain tumour just over two years ago and I never asked for a prognosis. I have had three people close to me who had the same tumour and they all died quite quickly. I assumed that I would too.
Now it’s two years later and I am not dead yet and I am starting to think that I should have asked how long I have in the first place. I would have made very different plans if I had known I would last this long.
I have an appointment with my oncologist coming up and I think I want to ask how long I have so I can make plans for the rest of my life. If it’s a year or two, I’d rather spend it somewhere nice like a beach in Vietnam. If it’s much longer, I’ll need to carry on working. If it’s much shorter, I’ll go watch the ducks on the harbour.
My wife thinks I should forget about knowing because we are all going to die sometime and no one knows when but I wonder what the smart people here would do.
I wrote what I think on my blog but I’m more interested in what you think. What would you do? Would you ask?
https://www.raggedclown.com/2024/04/26/how-long-have-i-got/
On the Philosophy Bear survey, there's a left-right alignment question.
It's safe to assume this is in an American context, but even there, I don't know how to answer these, particularly given recent gyrations in what counts as left and right (left anti free speech, right anti free trade, for example). Are these scales even useful anymore? I went center left as a vague gesture at my views (socially permissive, positive on markets, think the state should keep people out of misery), but the nuance is complicated and not coherent with a left right axis, even less than historically speaking.
Scott, any last words on P(zoonosis)? (I have a market https://manifold.markets/warty/what-will-be-scott-alexanders-pzoon , otherwise resolving 90%)
My music listening is generally rock, or classical or house. The latter I know nothing about but it fills the room.
I don’t listen to much pop except for the obvious genius of the Beatles or the beachboys etc.
Female pop? Not at all.
So it was with great trepidation that I let Spotify play what it considered the best songs from Taylor Swift‘s latest, and not as enthusiastically received, album - the Tortured Poet’s society.
I’ve never liked her old songs much either but I enjoyed the songs I listened to here well enough. Sure, maybe a 35 year old should move on from the break up genre, but she can throw shade like no one else. I’m not sure it helps her future dating prospects that you may get a song like “The smallest man who ever lived” written about you but as a revenge poem it’s delicious.
Will there be a dedicated announcement for book review voting this year? I was reading through the open threads for the last few, and saw 1. several complaints that people were unaware of the voting period because they don't check the threads and 2. that it was a huge pain to find people's thoughts on the reviews during voting, because spicy/CW stuff dominates open threads.
How good will GPT5 be?
Will it flood Scott's comment threads with human quality writing?
Will it finally make translators obsolete?
Will it be so good that there won't be a book review contest 2025 because GPT5 is too good at writing reviews?
To anticipate questions related to 3: these complexities will have no effect on TFOI's updated roadmap.
We are not affiliated with the Minicircle company, and we also do not have any shared team members or formal partnerships. While we initially considered partnering with them, following our internal considerations and consultations with external experts, we made a few early adjustments to the parts of our general strategy. Among them, we decided to pause investigating the use of small-m minicircles (as an entire category) in the human intervention subproject, having identified delivery-related issues that could likely prevent the occurrence of the desired effect; we are already considering the utilization of other, more suitable methods. More news coming soon!
I tend to think of theology as something a peraon learns in order to better understand the doctrinal points of their own religious tradition. Usually to deepen their faith or to provide for defenses against attacks from othe religions. Also, inevitably, the speculation draws on the established scriptures of the faith and thus ultimately appeals to the authority of revealed knowledge to paper over any cracks. A notion that recently lodged itself in my brain is whether or not it was possible to speculate on the nature of the divine without reference to revealed knowledge and/or outside of a religious tradition.
The only examples I've been able to find have been Aristotle on Metaphysics where he outlines his argument for Prime Movers, and within Whitehead's process philosophy. But as far as I can tell that's basically it and that honestly surprised me. It's easy to understand why the majorityof theology would take place within an established tradition, but I thought that subject of (presumably) great importance would have attracted more thinkers trying to divine what we can know about it through reason alone.
So am I missing any other than the ones listed above? Also, if anyone has thoughts on the futility or nature of the subject, feel free to share.
It really troubles me how difficult it is to talk about human rights in Palestine without being in some way accused of being an antisemite, or otherwise being callous towards Israelis. It seems to be an unspoken assumption that these two mindsets are interlinked, but I just don't understand how that makes sense. Gaza and the West Bank are both in far worse shape than Israel is, so it seems obvious to me that an objective observer would be very concerned about the welfare of Palestinians right now. It troubles me that it is controversial in many spaces to express any modicum of that concern publicly, and I would be interested to know why people think this is the case.
Economists say that that the immigration of workers(M) to a country with an existing number of workers(N) will have no effect on employment. They call this the lump of labour fallacy.
Has this been proven true for all values of N and M?
The claim is that if M people emigrate, afterward N+M people will employed, regardless of the size of M relative to N.
An update on Manifold's pivot:
We've delayed the mana currency conversion rate change until May 15th, so you can donate normally until then. Additionally, if you have an inactive account, you can email us (info@manifold.markets) to donate your mana anytime for the rest of the year at the old 100 to 1 rate.
Donate your mana: https://manifold.markets/charity
We're also going to send an email with more information!
Despite the big changes to the Manifold economy that are required, I'm excited to see what use cases arise when user-created prediction markets can provide real money incentives. What kind of questions will people ask? Will users trade to hedge real life risks? Will the trading bots become much stronger?
I can't wait to see someone create a market with a subsidy of $100 or $1000 that incentivizes traders to come up with a useful answer.
For the book reviews, would it possible to add a way for the people rating the reviews to add comments if they want to? It'd be nice to get some feedback for the reviews that don't make it as finalists.
Many people have warned that if Trump gets re-elected, conservatives are preparing to gut many government agencies and usher in radical conservative reforms to various areas of policy.
Why didn't this happen during the last Trump administration? What's changed to make people expect a second Trump administration would do this?