In an unintentionally hilarious but somewhat revealing temper tantrum [0], the sore loser with defective emotional regulation and bad English Gilad Erdan, Israel's representative in the UN, tears the UN charter with a shredder from behind the podium, supposedly in a metaphorical act implying that the UN states who voted "Yes" to granting Palestine more rights (but still short of full UN membership and voting rights) are the ones who invalidate the UN charter.
It's often attributed to Voltaire that he said [1]: "I have made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'O Lord, make our enemies quite ridiculous'. God granted it.". In this sense, Erdan's hilarious stunts in the UN are threatening to make me second-guess my atheism.
This comes amidst a wider general hysteria among the Netanyahu admin. Spain and Ireland are going to unilaterally recognize Palestine on the 21st of May, expected to be followed by at least Belgium and Slovenia, possibly others. Smotrich is reported in Haaretz and Times of Israel to be ringing the alarm bells and calling for urgent action, and Saudi Arabia - mainly desperate for hanky panky with USA due to Iran - is still at least nominally conditioning its Abraham Accords normalization on Palestinian statehood.
Allah: If you exist, please make Israeli politicians and diplomats more pathetic and ridiculous, I might reconsider the Problem of Evil.
While I have nothing against making the abominable Netanyahu and his posse of miscreants look ridiculous, consider what exactly would UN recognition do for ordinary Palestinians. Nothing, I think is the answer? These are exactly the kinds of actions that drive home the irrelevance of the UN as it exists today, all optics and hot air, and no substance. But it will provide a few more cushy sinecures (is this the word?) for corrupt Palestinian leadership. NYC is nice. Far away from Hamas rockets and IDF bombs. I can only imagine the size of the bribes involved…
Huh, never heard of "sinecures" before. How come I spoke and wrote English from before puberty and I still learn new words? not fair.
I don't disagree that the UN is a pathetic shadow of the old internationalist pipe dream of something binding states by force like state law binds its citizens by force. I don't disagree that this particular vote is **probably** hot air, the only noteworthy right that Palestine seems to have gained is that it can now advance proposals, which the USA and Israel can just as easily shutdown in the Security Council as they can to those proposals by Algeria and South Africa and countless others. There is no silver bullet, and the UN - useless or not - is not the "One Weird Trick for Achieving Peace.. War Hawks HATE it", nothing is. Only tough and thankless advocating for humanity in the face of genocidal plans and daily massacres.
What I want to specifically call out with my post is:
(1) The insanity and moral bankruptcy of the "Reward for Hamas" idea, this popular way of thinking common among a certain breed of Pro-Israel supporters. According to this way of thinking, **anything** coming to Palestinians except utter and abject misery for the next 25-100 years is antisemitism and an encouragement for Hamas. Unless you resolve "Palestinians" as just another alias for "Hamas", this is an incoherent way of thinking (but that's ok, as it's not thinking that it demands out of its followers). I want to signal-boost the fact that the representatives of 143 countries, a crushing majority, do not think like this.
(2) I really just want to make fun of Gilad Erdan. I can't imagine the level of immaturity and sheer dumbassery that would make someone representing 10 million people in front of the whole world to behave like this. When he says things like "I want to hold a mirror to all of you **grumbles to himself while looking for the shredder** a mirror eh", I almost want to explode out of the sheer absurdity and sitcom-like nature of the situation.
Maybe (1) is irrelevant because the UN is so hopelessly corrupt and out of touch that the opinions of the state representatives aren't indicative of any kind of moral or common or geopolitical sense? Maybe (2) is less about Israel and more about how Israel looks at the UN, that it despises the UN so much that it deliberately assigns clowns as their representatives? Very good points, it's still funny as hell.
You can never know all the words! The journey is the goal.
I'm going to push back just a bit: Put yourself in poor Gilad's shoes.
The ashes of burnt Israelis haven't even cooled when a large number of people around the world started chanting "FTRTTS PWBF", posting pics of paraglides, and denying any civilians were harmed, and they deserved it anyway. And then on and on and on, we can rehash it ad infinitum, but I want to point out two relevant things:
From Gilad's POV, a large part of the word seems to think that whatever hurts Israelis is good for Palestinians (note that this is a conjugal function of the "**anything** coming to Palestinians except utter and abject misery for the next 25-100 years is antisemitism and an encouragement for Hamas" batshittery).
From Gilad's POV, given the above, seeing the 14 - 41 - 143 - whatever# countries vote "against Israel" only confirms the long-held conviction that the rest of the world would be super-relieved if all the jews... just kind of... disappeared. Not necessarily hacked to death or burnt alive, too messy, just pufff! and gone would be nice.
And so the cycle of misery continues, much to the benefit of Netanyahu and Smotrich and whatever the names of senior Hamas leaders enjoying their Deglet Noor for breaking fast in Qatar, while Gaza kids are being maimed and Israeli hostages tortured.
Glad the idea of yet another Iranian puppet terror state gaining diplomatic recognition is entertaining to you. It's not going to work out well for the citizens of that Iranian puppet terror state, of course, but it's been made very clear their only purpose is to act as human shields so I guess everything is going according to plan.
Who will collaborate with me to gather a bunch of Scott-style "scissor statements" and write something about both warring perspectives and how the scissor statement memes seize human attention and direct it toward unproductive ends?
1. Pragmatists Guide to Crafting Religion Review - Preamble and Chapter 1 by Eneasz Brodski: In this two-part series, the author explores the need for deep community and religion in human life, and discusses the potential for creating new "cultivars" (a mix of religion and culture) to address the challenges posed by declining birth rates and demographic changes.
TLDR Preamble: The author argues that humans need deep community and religion, and that rationalism serves some of these needs but lacks a structural framework. The book "The Pragmatist's Guide To Crafting Religion" is introduced as a potential resource for understanding how to create a new religion or community structure.
TLDR Chapter 1: The chapter discusses the role of culture as an evolutionary tool and its relationship with biology. It highlights the potential consequences of failing to adapt culture to changing circumstances and emphasizes the importance of creating new, diverse "cultivars" to ensure the survival and flourishing of human civilization.
a) The author suggests that humans have evolved to function within a strict cultural/religious framework and that operating without one can lead to psychological distress. What evidence supports this claim, and how might it inform efforts to create new community structures?
b) The chapter emphasizes the importance of cultural diversity and warns against the fragility of ethnically and culturally homogeneous societies. How can we balance the benefits of diversity with the need for shared values and cohesion within a community?
c) The authors introduce the concept of the "Index," a cultural reactor that catalogs and monitors the outcomes of intentionally constructed family cultures. What potential benefits and challenges do you foresee in implementing such a system, and how might the data it generates be used to inform the development of new cultivars?
2. How to handle genAI in organizations, according to science by Matt Beane: This article critiques common organizational approaches to dealing with generative AI (ignoring, banning, or "all hands") and proposes a science-backed framework for effective implementation, drawing on research in innovation, technology, and organizational change.
TLDR: The author argues that the three default organizational strategies for handling genAI (ignore, ban, and "all hands") are insufficient and not backed by science. Instead, he proposes a 2x2 framework of tactics, both internal and external to the organization, at the individual and collective levels, to help organizations adapt to disruptive technologies like genAI.
a) The article suggests that ignoring or banning genAI may be the best approach for some organizations, at least initially. Under what circumstances might this be true, and how can organizations determine when it's time to engage more actively with the technology?
b) The 2x2 framework presents a range of tactics for adapting to disruptive technologies, both within and outside the organization. Which of these tactics seem most promising for leveraging genAI, and how might they be combined into an effective implementation plan?
c) The author notes that genAI itself may change how the traditional playbook of tactics is implemented and lead to surprising new ways of working. How can organizations foster a culture of experimentation and learning to identify and capitalize on these emerging opportunities?
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.
TIL: In Georgian, "father" is "mama" and "mother" is "deda". Talk about confusing! Sure you wouldn't expect an isolated language family to happen to have the same words, but what are the odds that they'd be an exact reversal of English?
Does anyone know of any articles that challenge the masking theory of autism on psychological grounds? I’m interested in seeing nuances on the idea that hiding parts of oneself to fit certain social situations is not always pathological.
I think that a reasonable discussion on "autistic masking" would start with the older concept of "persona" (which literally means "mask" in Latin) and explain how the autistic version is similar or different from that. Because otherwise it sounds like the autists are the only ones who pretend in order to fit in their social environment, which couldn't be further from truth. Neurotypicals probably pretend *more*... it's just that they often do it by instinct, so it may be less of a conscious burden from them. (But maybe it is even more difficult for them to find out what is actually under the mask.)
When I look at the "Camouflaging Autistic Traits Questionnaire (CAT-Q)", my first reaction is that these are basically the opposite of the things I do. Copying someone's body language and facial expressions? I had to be told explicitly that this is a useful thing to do, and I still keep forgetting it. Monitoring and adjusting my body language and facial expressions? Most of the time I am not even aware that I have any. A script to follow in social situations? Nope, I am mostly clueless. Using behaviors that I learned from watching other people interacting? My problem is that I can't learn things by merely watching other people do them; I need to be explained explicitly what happens and how that works. Thinking about the impression I make on other people? Haha no, I fully focus on the topic that we talk about. Basically, the questionnaire is about things that people sometimes tell me that I should do, and they probably make a good point, but I usually don't do it because I forget or because it would feel too unnatural.
Then maybe this is exactly the point. I am a wild aspie from the jungle, undiagnosed and untouched by the horrors of ABA and similar. And the questionnaire is focused on the domesticated aspies, and checks the strength of their (attempted) domestication. So it seems like a valid thing. The danger is in misinterpreting its results, as if they imply something they don't. There are two possible wrong conclusion that I imagine many people would naturally make.
First, I suspect that many people will use it as a test of autism, assuming that the higher your score, the more autistic you are. (If you do a lot of "autistic masking", then you obviously must be an autist, right? And if you don't, then you are not as autistic as those who do.) But I would expect the undomesticated autists to score quite low, autists exposed to various therapies to score high, and neurotypicals probably somewhere in the middle. Because it basically measures how much you pretend to be neurotypical: some autists do, some autists don't, and the neurotypicals do those things on instinct. I would also expect neurotypical actors or salesmen or pick-up artists to score high, because they learn those behaviors on purpose, and it's the "doing this on purpose" part that the test measures.
Second, I suspect that many people will take the high score as evidence of something bad. But what the test actually measures is basically learning some social skills. If autists are typically taught those skills in an abusive way (ABA, etc.), then yes, the number of lessons will positively correlate with the amount of abuse. But there is nothing inherently abusive about teaching social skills; it's just that some assholes and quacks prefer to do it that way, and parents of autistic children are often frustrated and try to push them further than they can handle at the moment. But I can imagine e.g. an adult aspie to voluntarily take some training of social skills, and as a result increase their score in the test. (As a thought experiment, imagine a parallel universe where most math teachers are abusive but people take different amounts of math education, so someone designs a questionnaire of math skills, and concludes that the more math concepts you know the more horrible was your childhood.)
tl;dr -- putting on a mask is something that most people do in most situations; the bad part is when children are trained to do this in an abusive way
But isn't following social instincts apparent in high functioning autism as well? The definition of instinct doesn't change, no matter if you're autistic or not. It's simply following a hunch!
I mean the hunch that something you are doing or saying is leading to some meaningful connection or identification with the other you are communicating with.
What specifically do you mean by "following social instincts"?
Humans in general behave less instinctively than other species, because we also have a lot of learning and culture. There is the usual interpersonal variance, and there are also conditions such as autism. Some instincts are simple, some are more complicated and therefore more fragile. Sometimes the reaction is a combination of an instinct and learned behavior...
Those who were successfully trained to behave like normies. (Don't move your hands, look people in the eyes, don't talk about interesting topics, etc.)
Breaking news: just a few hours ago Biden announced that under no circumstances will Israel be permitted to win the war. So that's it, it's all over but the shouting. Unlike Ukraine which has operated under the same constraints for years this isn't existential for Israel, so they'll likely give up and withdraw in a few months rather than continue a now hopeless drain on their resources, the hostages will continue to be a Gilad Shalit x 100 bargaining chip for the foreseeable future, and Iran and Hamas will collect their winnings -- the only thing they had to give up was ten thousand disposable goons, twenty thousand civilians they don't give a shit about, and a bunch of infrastructure which the West will rebuild for them -- and start arming up for the next 10/7. On the plus side Netanyahu's incompetent government will probably fall and he'll be gone once and for all, but the price that was paid for that was a little too much.
In retrospect Israel lost the war on day three when they let themselves get pressured into turning the power and Internet back on to Gaza, thus accepting the ridiculous frame that they are solely responsible for the welfare of a hostile nation that has just invaded them. Israel's Achilles heel has always been its desperation to be loved, to be accepted; they believe, and even under Netanyahu and his far-right coalition still believe, that if they present enough evidence and send enough aid and bow and scrape and grovel and dance the world will magnanimously permit them to continue existing. Unfortunately, that doesn't get you shit in a world where human rights organizations are controlled by Qatar and China. The only thing that wins today is strength and the willingness to tell other people to fuck off instead of playing their games. Maybe someday Israel will recognize that, though I personally doubt it.
I think one should be suspicious of narratives that go: "People only dislike me because I am too good and too noble for this world. I need to become more ruthless." Especially if you already followed that narrative for years. Chances are, others actually perceive you as too ruthless, rather than too good.
Ultimately, it's your choice how to behave. And who knows, maybe being ruthless is the right choice in your situation. It's just that the endless whining about being "too pure for this world" gets annoying, especially when there is little evidence for that. ("We haven't exterminated all our enemies yet" is a very low bar.)
I'm on the fence here (in general principle, putting this example aside). Sometimes accepting criticism legitimizes it more than dismissing it would.
Trump is an interesting case in point - he did much better by doing this than competing republicans who mostly accepted frameworks criticizing them would have, although it also had the effect of making him more hated by people already disposed to hate him.
"Too pure for this world" is not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that it's Israel's desperation for acceptance and eagerness to jump through hoops that has failed them. Shucking and jiving for the approval of people who would secretly be pleased if they all just fell over dead, insisting desperately that they are obeying laws and principles that are violated daily by the people presuming to sit in judgment over them.
And the idea that they've been as ruthless as it's possible to be when the Syrian civil war has been going on for a decade little next door is laughable and you know it. If they were that ruthless, why are they supplying continuing to supply power, water, and food to the enemy? Wouldn't that be kinda the first thing you don't do?
I haven't gone line-by-line through Biden's speach, but I do think you are mischaracterizing it substantially. Biden has effectively announced that if Israel wants to win the war in the particular manner it is presently planning, then it will have to do so using no more American weapons than it already has. Israel already has enough American weapons to win the war in approximately the way it is currently planning, and Biden isn't going to do anything to stop them.
I think the way Israel has been fighting and is planning to win this war is about as good as it gets under these circumstances, and I think Biden is being quite naive in thinking there is a better way. The only thing this will do is degrade US-Israeli relations and make the war a bit messier than it needs to be. But Israel can still win if they want.
Also, there aren't a hundred living hostages in Hamas hands to make for "Gilad Shalit x100". There probably aren't even 20. And they'll probably all be releaased, rescued, or killed by the end of the year.
I don't mind Biden pushing behind the scenes (in general, mixed feelings about this specific decision), but doing it in the open seems likely to make the war worse since Hamas and their various supporters see what they're doing as achieving some goal.
I have faith in the ability of the current Israeli government to make the damage from hostages a hundred times that of Gilad Shalit. And to be honest, I'm not confident that said government -- which has already been slow-rolling the war for almost half a year -- is going to step on the gas now that the always-chimeric international support has completely evaporated and Biden is positioning himself to actually make good on a threat for the first time in his entire Presidency.
I'll be happy to be proven wrong, but "_this_ time Israel is going to finally take care of ____ no matter what anybody says" is a football that's been getting pulled away my entire adult life.
> just a few hours ago Biden announced that under no circumstances will Israel be permitted to win the war.
No he didn't, he said other things which you interpreted to mean this. The Rationalist Way (^TM) is to post whatever made you feel or think like X, then write that this made you feel or think X, then post the exact chain of feeling/reasoning (as much as you can reconstruct it from your conscious backseat) that made you infer X from the actual object-level.
As for how I know that Biden didn't announce this, I check Haaretz at least 10 to 15 times a day and this would have taken their front page for 5 days if true. You can prove me wrong by posting a video of him saying that or a close paraphrase, or a reputable news network quoting him as saying that.
> So that's it, it's all over but the shouting. [...] they'll likely give up and withdraw in a few months rather than continue a now hopeless drain on their resources, the hostages will continue to be a Gilad Shalit x 100 bargaining chip for the foreseeable future, and Iran and Hamas will collect their winnings
This much is true since at least late December of 2023.
And don't forget the ~100K Israelis or so that they evacuated and the lands they abandoned because of Hezbollah's bullseye on them, which they don't know how to bring back as of now, Haaretz recently reported they pushed the deadline on the return from June to September. Also the ships that the Houthis sank and/or captured.
> in retrospect Israel lost the war on day three
Good start, but how about that it lost the war since it colonized 5.5 million people and X times its own size right in the midst of the Era of Decolonization, all the way back in 1967? Do you know that Israel - for instance - has no established border? there is not a single formal document more binding than a bi-national treaty delineating Israel's borders. The true Nomadic Way: wherever the army is, that's where Israel is. The only 2 documents delineating borders are a peace treaty with Egypt (which Israel just violated by authorizing tanks into Rafah, 2.5 kilos from Egyptian land, whereas the Camp David accords [1] allow only at most 4 infantry-only battalions within 3 kilos of either side of the borders), and a peace treaty with Jordan which establishes the river as the natural border between Jordan and not-Jordan.
In retrospect, it was one hell of a mistake to base your entire national self-identity on being a victim, THEN go around and victimize countless millions and commit so many massacres, all on camera, all on fucking titktok. "Ohhh but but but how about Syria and North Korea and the Mongols and the Romans", doesn't matter, none of them do, none of them based their entire propaganda machine on weaponizing suffering. The Syrians don't have an ADL, the Syrians don't weaponize anti-Syrianism as a cudgel against naughty politicians who vote "No" to billions of dollars in ammo and Boeing Christmas presents to the "oNlY SyRiAn StaTe".
Whenever you grip a weapon, make sure you can handle the recoil. Whenever you ride a car, make sure you know which pedal the brakes are. Israel used the Holocaust as a weapon and a ride, it's totally on them to realize that this means certain commitments to self-image that they were never ready to take.
> Israel's Achilles heel has always been its desperation to be loved, to be accepted
I knew psychology has a replication crisis and is a pseudo-pseudoscience, but come on, waxing psychoanalytical on the deep psyche of an alien entity that is a modern state is a bit too much, even for an Israel supporter.
"""In the troubled and deep desperation of Israel to be loved and supported, Israel does such desperate and vulnerable things such as **Checks teleprompt** announcing their intentions to nuke Gaza, making ads for beach real estate on the shores of Gaza, casually declaring they want to slash Gaza's population by 10X, and sing for turning Gaza into a parking lot.""" By the fucking Islamic God, how do you guys maintain a straight face? What comedic genius is this and how do I cultivate one like it?
> that doesn't get you shit in a world where human rights organizations are controlled by Qatar and China
Ah yes, the big scary Chinese Qataris, the Elders of Z... I mean Qatar. They have **tentacles** everywhere, unimaginably massive influence: *everyone* who sees an image of the Palestinian children starving or under the rubble starts saying that maybe the war doing this to them isn't justified, so the Qataris truly have the power to brainwash remotely and on massive scale. They pay handsomely too, let me tell you that. "Palestinians have human rights" is $100 an hour, talking about West Bank massacres is an additional $50, every time you talk about Israeli suffering is a -$75 per Hamas rocket. Flexible hours. All in all, a pretty damn good deal.
> The only thing that wins today is strength and the willingness to tell other people to fuck off instead of playing their games.
You **kind of** do have to play other people's game when you keep begging them for anti-rocket and air defense missiles and F-35s on the cheap, as well as calling their aircraft carries in 2 different seas on short notice. Every teenage boy knows that independence is - first and foremost - when you don't need money or favors from anybody, and Israel is free at any given time to say a Jolly Good Bye to the West along with all its banks and corporations and tech startups and aircraft carries and the scum in Boeing's C-suite, just so long as they don't ask for anything from all of those after they do this. Don't want to feed the cow? Stop asking for milk.
I should add that it takes some nerve to quote the minutae of the Camp David treaty at Israel when fifty yards away an Iranian terror militia is using civilians as cover to fire rockets at other civilians and has been doing so for decades without any consequences. If the law is furious at one and shrugs at the other then the law is an ass.
I did have a response, it involves pointing out that peace treaties aren't the kind of things that you violate on a whim and justify it with "Iranian terror militia 50 yards away", and that if you want to have any credibility at all, then you as a state need to respect treaties no matter what.
Then I remembered you're kinda not interested in all that, you're interested only in pointing out how much nerve I have for holding your beloved "Only Jewish State" accountable by the exact same standards any state is held to, and which all but the most dysfunctional of dictatorships can usually pass. So I didn't bother to write the reply I have in mind, and instead reminded you that having nerves isn't a bad thing. It's kinda what being human is all about.
When Israel is criticized a hundred times as much for sins a hundred times lower than a hundred other countries, you have the gall to say that those are the "exact same standards"?
That's a lot of words, dude, and all I'm actually learning from them is that it's a mistake for a small country to outsource its defense planning to an imperial power halfway across the globe that cares more about 50,000 votes in Michigan than any kind of coherent foreign policy; you can be a client state as hard as you can and yet when the chips are down the metropole will always discover it has an important appointment elsewhere. Ukraine is learning the same lesson and no doubt so will Taiwan very shortly.
> it's a mistake for a small country to outsource its defense planning to an imperial power halfway across the globe that cares more about 50,000 votes in Michigan
Oh, definitely say what you will about the "Imperial Power" that made you more angry than 15K Palestinian women and children dead, get it out of your system, but remember: at the end of the day it's the same Imperial Power that gave to the "small country" a new air force when that country's air force was lying in shambles like broken pottery on a certain 6th of October many decades ago, the same imperial power that mobilized for it its 2 aircraft carriers and gave it free missiles and satellite surveillance and so so much more free ammo than the "Small Country" knows what to do with (dropping them on children gets old after a while).
The ingratitude of Israel and Pro-Israel supporters is actually astonishing, a beautiful sight. It's like that familiar sugar daddy dynamic where the sugar daddy refuses the sugar baby **one** request and now suddenly all hell breaks loose, and the sugar daddy's things are flying at him from the sugar baby's hands. Cringe metaphor, but that's exactly why it's so apt.
NOT that I'm complaining, I **adore** every moment of this, I just think it's hella funny how this particular manifestation of "No Honor Among Thieves" is playing out. Popcorn and Soda.
There is no world where the continued entrenchment of yet another IRGC terror army in the eastern Med is good for America, Israel, Egypt, or for that matter even Gazan civilians. But hey, I'm glad teeing up an inevitable next war, because it would be meeeeean to win this one, at least entertains you.
And there is no world in which 25K+ innocents dying and still counting is ever good for Americans, Jews everywhere, Arabs (who are the ones primarily doing the dying), or for that matter even the delusional settlers who think their Yahweh sky daddy is the one protecting them from an Iranian massacre and not the US-supplied weapons, the same US they like to bitch and moan about so much.
> because it would be meeeeean to win this one
It's a new low to trivialize a proto-genocide being investigated by the highest authority on what's a genocide, but you keep winning.
Somewhere between one and three million innocents died in Germany from 1939-1945. This is generally regarded as having been a necessary part of a good thing for Americans, Europeans, Jews everywhere, and Germans. Is Arab life more sacred than German?
You seem to be stuck in this utilitarian mindset where the numbers are the only thing that matters. The people of Gaza have made it clear that they don't have any desire to coexist with the people of Israel. They cheerfully condone kidnapping/torture/rape/murder to that end. Even before Oct 7th there was a constant low-level insurgency of rocket and terror attacks by Hamas.
It's easy for people outside of the situation to be frustrated by the conflict. To look at Israel and wonder how the killing of thousands of Gazans is justified. The calculus is different when your security is at risk. I wouldn't shrug after an attack 10x worse than 9/11 and say what can we do, retaliation will cause too much damage? I don't blame the Israelis for not shrugging either.
The Gazan people want the destruction of Israel. Israel is going to keep killing Gazans until their capability to hurt Israel is broken. I wish everyone could get along peacefully and have lollipops and sunshine too. That isn't the world we live in. Gaza started a war and saying "that's not fair!" when they are the ones being killed is at best hopelessly naïve.
Was there a prestige hierarchy among the types of engineering at the college you attended? I was at Waterloo 1988-93, and at the time, the hierarchy seemed to be Computer > {Electrical, Systems} > {Chemical, Mechanical} > Civil > Geological.
There was, but it was/is in constant flux depending on what you measure. The Mechanical engineers and Civil engineers were looked down upon due to high failure rate (a running joke: A Mechanical engineer walks into an exam room... with his wife and 2 kids), **they** in turn look down upon others, and especially Computer, because the perceived "soft" and "feminine" nature of their work, unlike the rough manly work of Civil and Mechanical engineering. Computer people (including me) constantly made fun of Electronics and Communication people because the latter suck so much at programming and write such shitty Matlab/C code that you want to bleach your eye every time you read their artistic pieces of code, etc...
It's mostly friendly and light-hearted teasing that everyone involved know to be half-wrong and half-irrelevant, but some are immature enough to let it get to their head.
Is there an endgame in Gaza that makes Israel win? I’d be interested to hear suggestions.
Israel ist trying to break Hamas in Gaza. Rafah is the only area left that Hamas firmly controls.
If Israel is doing what I think they are doing (and what I would do if I were in their shoes), they have started to transfer the Rafah population piecemeal – 100.000 at a time – to the tent camp in Khan Younis. In the process, they will detain young people suspected of being Hamas (plus unarm those stupid enough to bring arms with them to Khan Younis). Then they will destroy the weapon depots, tunnels and the like that might be in Rafah. Plus do the same (if they have not finished the job already) in the rest of Gaza. Plus, probably solidifying the road cutting Gaza in two, and keeping that under Israeli control.
Let us for the sake of argument assume that Israel succeeds in all this, with or without a lot of bloodshed.
The question is: then what can Israel do?
In political science there is something called the pottery law: “If you break it, you own it”
Which means: Someone must keep the people fed, see to it that rebuilding takes place, that children can go to school, that toilets flush, and the thousands of other tasks that must be taken care of in order for a society to function.
How is Israel going to find a sufficient number of Gazans to do this? Tens of thousands will be necessary.
In 1945, the Allies did it right by “looking through the fingers” on administrators with a former Nazi past, since most of those with a minimum of talent and ambition has joined the Nazi party, or were fellow travellers. That worked quite well (same in Japan). In Iraq, the Coalition of the Willing did the opposite: not employing anyone belonging to the Baath party after the takeover. Which is arguably the main reason why Iraq turned into a mess – most of the ones who were “clean” ideologically were the zealots and the incompetent.
---in Gaza the Israelis are unlikely to find anyone who is competent and non-Hamas willing to administer the place, at higher as well as lower levels (unless they are suicidal). And the problem with accepting competent people with a Hamas past is that they (unlike the Nazis, who accepted they had lost) cannot be trusted to stay defeated.
I hope I am overlooking something, so that Israel has an endgame after the dust has settled. That is, an endgame with some real probability of succeeding rebuilding and administering Gaza without making “owning Gaza” a forever-money drain on the Israeli economy.
"Owning Gaza" is going to be a money drain on the Israeli economy for the next generation. That's still a huge win when the alternative is the annual Al-Aqsa Flood. And if it's *just* the Israeli economy, the Gazans are going to be living in abject poverty for a decade. Better get used to those tents. Or, we can see whether all the people outside Israel who claim to care so very, very much about the Gazans, will still care next year. I expect at least some of them will; the prospects for Gaza will scale with their numbers and commitment.
Other than that, yes, as you say, go through Rafa and the population hiding there, arrange for every Hamas member to be dead, in prison, or trying very hard to convince people that they were never part of Hamas. And keep enough of an IDF presence to suppress any backsliders in the latter group. It seems to me that Israel ought to be able to keep Gaza about as peaceful as the West Bank, and more so at less cost if they're smart enough not to allow the settlers back in. That sounds like it would be a win to me.
>In political science there is something called the pottery law: “If you break it, you own it”
That law should of course be rejected. Following it is what killed the US in Iraq and Afghanistan; if we'd just kicked over Saddam, put some other general in charge, and then left, things would have gone a lot better for us. Of course, as you say that "other general" is thin on the ground in Gaza; Hamas may be shit at fighting Israeli soldiers but they're very good at murdering political opponents.
I expect in the end Israel will just leave in a generally unsatisfying way and just hope that things will work out somehow. Given that the Sunni Arab states are far more interested in normalization with Israel than they are in helping out the Palestinians, maybe over time the cause will get marginalized enough that the Pals will stop being a factor. I wouldn't bet on that one, though -- they may not have allies in the region, but they have plenty of allies in the West who'll happily join with Iran and Russia in keeping the pot boiling.
A. Deportation. Israel relocates the entire population of Gaza somewhere else so they don't have to deal with them. The problem is no one else wants to deal with Palestinians either. The Arab world regards them as a bunch of whiny losers, and past refugees have been very politically destabilizing. So Israel would have to forcibly deport hundreds of thousands of people who don't want to leave and forcibly deposit them on people who don't want to take them in. Plus the whole world would decry this as basically genocide.
B. Occupation. Like you say, Israel would have to commit its own resources to the occupation government. This would be a huge resource pit for Israel and make their people much more vulnerable to attack. Israel has specifically avoided direct occupation of Gaza in the past for these very reasons. The joint PNA-Israel governance of the West Bank is probably the absolute best outcome for Gaza, which isn't saying much. The comparisons to post-WWII nations are not really applicable. The Axis powers and their interests were totally destroyed; the surrounding Arab nations, especially Iran, would still be around. They hate Israel and have no problem using the Palestinians as a stick to beat Israel with. So there would be no cultural reset like there was with the Nazis or Imperial Japan.
C. Political Compromise. A single state is laughable. Neither side would ever possibly accept this. Multiple states (possibly separating Gaza and the West Bank into separate states) more or less goes back to the way things were before Oct 7th. Hamas is democratic in the sense that the will of people in Gaza is the destruction of Israel. Even if Hamas is totally destroyed and replaced by PLO 2 or something, PLO 2 will just launch more terror attacks on Israel like Hamas did. See point B for why the Gazans will keep hating Israel into perpetuity.
The Palestinians hate Israel and I don't think this can ever realistically be changed given the influence of the hostile Arab states bordering Israel. Any attempts to give the the Palestinians self-governance will just lead to more Oct 7th type atrocities in the future. Any attempts to remove the Palestinian people would face enormous international condemnation and there probably isn't the political will to do this even among Israelis.
I think the best case scenario in Gaza is something like the west bank after operation defensive shield - local civilian rule but gradual degrading of terrorism capabilities similar to the west bank (ending up with bringing Gaza to west bank levels of unease except without the settlements k
Yeah, I suppose that's what happens when the CCP has to do actual diplomacy for the better part of a century.
Every so often my inner troll is tempted to create maps of China with no Tibet, no Xinjiang, no Taiwan, no Inner Mongolia or Manchuria, and little dashed lines carving out Hong Kong and Macau and Shanghai.
The next question then becomes if it is really necessary to occupy also Rafah. Rather than to strike some kind of deal with Hamas, or alternatively de facto silently accept that Hamas will still be there. Since Hamas - or something very similar to Hamas - is going to resurface when all is said and done anyhow. (Given the animosity people in Gaza will feel toward Israel in the foreseeable future. All the deaths have solidified this, if nothing else.)
I tilt in the direction that occupying Rafah still makes sense from an Israeli point of view (even more so from Netanyahu's chance of personal political survival, but put a parenthesis around that). Since it at least creates some uncertainty about who among the Gazans that will emerge as leaders and top-level administrators in Gaza when things stabilizes and are brought back to some sort of normal (which will have to happen in the not-so-distant future). Then again, there are equally or even more extreme political factions in Gaza. So it is not clear-cut what is the rational/sensible next move for Israel (given the cards that have already been played - perhaps it would have been better to just build a more solid wall or to go lighter on the destruction of Gaza, but that is water under the bridge).
It may depend on how it is done, including if it can be done without chaos.
I agree with how you characterize these alternatives, but one minor nit - I don't think the hostility of the other Arab states is a factor. It's gotten pretty clear lately that Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, UAE, and perhaps others are not interested in the Palestinians any more, and only are making pro forma statements right now to keep a lid on public unrest. If your choice is between Israel, which will leave you alone if you leave it alone, and Iran, which has been running proxy wars against the Sunni world for decades... that choice is pretty clear.
The governments of the Arab states may be ready to normalize relations with Israel, but I'm not sure the population of those states is on board. Even oppressive dictatorships sometimes have to compromise with public sentiment, and a situation like this can be a great way to increase domestic stability.
I agree that the Arab nations are no longer in a position like the '40s-'70s where they are considering aggression against Israel. Still, they sponsor so many resolutions against Israel in the U.N. that Israel has more anti-resolutions than every single other country in the world combined. They also fund Palestine to the tune of millions of dollars every year through U.N. refugee programs. How much of this is so the governments can show the populace "See, we're doing something to oppose the Jews" and how much is genuine opposition to Israel I'm not sure.
It's true that heretics are often more despised than infidels. While the Sunni majority would probably take Israel over Iran, I'm far from convinced they would ever take Israel over Palestine.
Maybe in the abstract they would pick "Palestine" over "Israel," even today. But that option is not available -- the "Palestine" you'd get today isn't another Sunni Arab state, it's another Iranian colony run by the IRGC. Israel is for sure preferable to _that_.
I recently had an idea to improve acceptance of self-driving cars on the road: they should have always-on lights (while driving) that clearly identify them as self-driving, such as blue LEDs at each corner. People afraid of self-driving cars can avoid them, and everyone can see any stupid things they do.
I bet people will get used to them, and find they do far fewer stupid things than the other idiots on the road.
I think you greatly overestimate the ability of drivers, bicyclists, and pedestrians to avoid a self-driving car even if they do recognize it as such. Cars are much faster than pedestrians, and other cars have only limited options for maneuvering in traffic.
there's some level of avoidance that can be achieved by "always yield even if you have the right of way" and "pull to the side and let it pass as if it were an emergency vehicle", but I hope you can see why those are not acceptable solutions. So, I'm a bicyclist stopped at an intersection with a four-way stop sign. There's a car coming on my left, hasn't reached the intersection yet, I have right of way and should be able to cross right now. But the car is a toaster, and toasters sometimes fail to recognize stop signs and bicycles. For the sake of argument, I'm one of the people who considers this risk significantly higher than with human drivers, i.e. I am one of the people your proposal is aimed at.
A: How do I avoid the risk of being hit broadside and overrun while I cross the road like I am allowed to?
B: Will your answer to question A cause me to look favorably on the Butlerian Jihad?
A: How do you avoid the risk of being hit broadside and overrun by cars driven by humans? If you rely on the rules of the road, which I don't, you're foolhardy. People don't use turn signals when they ought to, and do when they ought not to. People become distracted. And, of course, cars of all sorts can simply break, such as brakes failing. You may think self-driving cars are more likely to hit pedestrians, but unless you think they are more likely to TARGET pedestrians, they shouldn't hit pedestrians more often than human-driven cars.
B: I had to look up what a Butlerian Jihad was, and am still confused by the question. But hopefully this will answer: technology in general is better to advance than be retarded, despite problems on the wayside. I believe self-driving vehicles will cause fewer accidents and fatalities even now, and fewer yet as time goes on.
I think a lot of the distrust in self-driving cars is what people THINK they will do, without actual proof of what they actually do. My proposal will help people see what they actually do. If you witness a pedestrian doing something stupid and a self-driving car gives up its right of way to avoid them, would that help convince you?
I only saw it in a video review of the car (which i can't find right now). I think they were exterior lights with the same intent as your suggestion. Its possible the feature got removed from the production version of the car or, because the car was >$100k, we just aren't likely to see one let alone see one in that mode.
The problem is that self-driving cars at this point are safer, in general, than human drivers, by accidents and fatalities. People need to see the roads getting safer, and to note that the accident they see on the road is almost never caused by a self-driving car. Which drivers do not observe and judge the driving ability of everyone else on the road with them?
A car confusing the "brake" and "accelerate" signals is as likely as Excel incorrectly calculating a sum of numbers. If things like that are the concern, then they need a massive PR campaign to change people's attitudes.
>A car confusing the "brake" and "accelerate" signals is as likely as Excel incorrectly calculating a sum of numbers.
My car, currently, will turn the volume up if you turn the volume knob down. It also doesn't like to let the key out of the ignition because it doesn't register the Park gear half the time. Any argument that goes "these things can't malfunction" is dead on arrival.
If you give Excel wrong numbers, it will use those wrong numbers in perpetuity. You need a human to sanity-check the thing and course-correct.
Why aren't we seeing a music video golden age? It seems like everyone has a phone and they're using it to consume video and audio in smaller and smaller bites. The obvious losers should be film and television, which are meant for bigger screens. The clear winner should be music videos - the smallest and shortest kind of audiovisual content that was consumed, say, 30 years ago.
But it looks to me like music videos peaked 5-10 years ago and haven't generated any big hits since. Is it just because of the decline of the music industry generally? Something else that I'm missing?
I don't know if music videos get released on TikTok. I thought they were too long for that. So consider Michael Jackson's Thriller - that's got a pretty good music video that lots of people are familiar with.
It seems easier than ever to put that music video in front of someone's face. Everyone has a phone and it's not like you really need a giant movie screen to watch a music video.
But we aren't seeing lots of music videos get big like Thriller. Instead, music videos seem to be getting fewer and fewer views, at least from the data I stumbled across yesterday.
I've seen plenty of good new music videos on YouTube. Is it possible there just isn't an axis for music videos to become a "big hit"? The days of MTV are long in the past.
I was looking at a list of music videos with the most views. It's possible that time has allowed them to gain an edge over newer videos, but it seems to meet that there's a pretty steep drop off around 2019-2020.
My off-the-cuff zero-expertise over-generalized theory is to blame always-on interconnected Internet culture. There aren't a bunch of small isolated micro-cultures that can develop their own cool things and then feed them into the mainstream. Instead, as soon as someone does something cool, there's pressure to get exposure and monetize it by exposing it to the giant single market, and those market incentives warp everything to sound "current". Also, the micro-cultures forced people to interact inside the micro-culture, allowing for artistic development and trends to evolve. But now, everyone's plugged into all sorts of stuff, and so any new sound is going to get influences from everywhere, and although there are some differences, they all smooth out in the end.
Underrated point. Someone once said that subcultures are like plants, they have to grow underground by themselves for a little while before revealing themselves. If you plant something and then dig it up a day later to take a look its not going to do what you want.
You're probably correct - my interpretation is skewed by the data I have access to. I was looking at the wikipedia for most watched music videos on YouTube.
I had naively thought that those numbers would just be going up over time, but to my surprise it seems like they peaked around 2019. But the data aren't going to include anything pre-YouTube and I'm not sure how I'd get that data.
My default opinion on art is that good art flourishes under constraints. We seem to shy under that conclusion and believe art only requires that you maximise creativity. But creativity is an immensely complex emergent property. Not something you can mass produce. Unless you’re Andy Warhol of course.
More generally it's disappointing we're not getting a music golden age. The possibilities for the sort of music you can create using an ordinary computer are endless, you'd think that putting this power into everyone's hands should have resulted in a groundswell of creativity, but instead music has stalled. So many new musical genres were born between 1950 and 2000ish, and then zeroish (does "mashup" count as a genre?) since 2000ish.
(edit: this came out harsher than intended. I wouldn't be surprised if innovation has slowed. but i also feel obliged to point out that the innovation hasn't dropped to exactly zero, either.)
>Phonk is a subgenre of hip hop and trap music directly inspired by 1990s Memphis rap. The style is characterized by vocals from old Memphis rap tapes and samples from early 1990s hip hop, especially cowbell samples resembling that of the Roland TR-808 drum machine
If "literally old 1990s Memphis rap tapes but with more cowbell from one specific 1980s drum machine" is what passes for a new genre these days I feel like my point is well supported. There's nothing wrong with that specific combination as a basis for a song, but for a whole genre, or even subgenre?
Renegade Master was a pretty popular song that's been remixed by other artists a number of times. It's widely regarded as a house track, despite looping a sample from a hip-hop track.
Also, I feel that in hindsight, Requiem doesn't really capture the feeling of "vocals are scuffed to the point of unintelligibility" that a lot of phonk tracks feature. so feel free to check out
there's also a more latino strain of phonk that leans more into (what i can only describe as) a moombahton-esque identity, rather than a memphis rap identity.
Sampling is when you isolate a piece of a song and use it in another musical context. The sample itself may or may not be modified in some way. a well-known example is when DJ's scratch vinyls on turntables. e.g.
now, if you compare and contrast actual examples of memphis rap and phonk, I think you'll find that there's a little more to it than just overlaying cowbells on rap tracks. e.g.
The problem isn’t creating good music. There’s plenty of that. The problem is getting a given piece of good music connected to the listeners. It costs next to nothing to release music on Spotify et.al. I’ve done it. And then it just sits there - without a massive promotional campaign, how would anyone find it in this massive ocean?
Madeon and Ichika Nito were both nobodies who went viral over youtube overnight. Meanwhile, Twitch streamers who are trying to "make it big" are constantly shilling themselves on any social media platform they can find. Be it tiktok, instagram, youtube, facebook, twitter, etc. "Wait, it's about gaming the algorithm?" Always has been. Mash'algorithm.
So yes, you need a promotional campaign. but no, the campaign doesn't needed to be funded by a hoity toity record label.
Oh, no argument here - the old system is dead, long live the new system. The game is completely different - in 1984 your goal was to be signed by a big label, and then the label promoted you. Now it’s a free-for-all, but this means you can’t just be good at music; never mind, that part is almost irrelevant, you have to figure out the promotion game, and then it’s still a lottery.
I’m not even complaining, it is what it is, my point is mainly that there’s all kinds of music out there, more than there ever was, and it’s really hard to find what you like in the roiling seas of sound.
> The possibilities for the sort of music you can create using an ordinary computer are endless
But the possibilities for *good* music are incredibly limited, and all of those possibilities have rapidly been exhausted due to composition and performance being made far more accessible. New music genres aren't going to magically form unless new technology allows for it, and unfortunately audio technology has already peaked.
I dunno, it's possible that the full space of possible musical styles that sound good has already been exhausted, but it seems more likely that something else has gone wrong. We were inventing several new genres of music per decade in the 20th century, was dubstep really the last possible point in musical space that sounded tolerable to someone?
I think it's more likely that something has just gone wrong with the pipeline that lets new sounds become popular. A young musician who comes up with something new no longer has a pipeline of people interested in putting him in front of an audience.
There are only 7 notes (12 if you go full atonal route, but I’d struggle to hum an atonal melody…). While I do think music as sound canvas will keep evolving, there are no new good-sounding harmonies or melodies to be found.
The pipeline is definitely just a directionless flood now, the old model of signing a contract with EMI who then invests into the artist is as good as dead.
It’s not a problem of audio tech. It’s a problem of a flood. There’s so much new music being released it’s impossible to even know how to look for something you’d like.
People discovered formulas for successful song creation, and stick to them. Using something non-formula is taking the risk that it won't be as good, and it indeed usually isn't, but sometimes might be. If you're in it for the money, why take the risk?
I find the same is true of restaurants nowadays. They are mostly the same within their target audience.
Good music videos were entirely manufactured by the music industry for people who sat and browsed television. Nearly all of the views you see on youtube are people who put it on for background music and don't watch the video. Music videos don't have a purpose anymore, they're not profitable, and all the amateur ones are on tiktok. There are millions of them, they're just not good. There is no money in making good ones.
It used to be a stepping stone to film making. I think Michael Bay and Spike Jonze used to be music video directors before making it to the big screen.
Maybe now the film director pipeline is shifting to social media content production instead of music videos?
Consider tiktok dances and the profileration of short-form artists like Carter Vail and Value Select. I think we're seeing exactly what you predict...but there are also a billion more of every other kind of video media, so it's hard to detect.
I can believe that music videos are the most vulnerable to competition from TikTok and such. So instead of TikTok (et al.) replacing film, it replaces the closest thing - music videos.
Pretty random: anyone here based in Taiwan, or the UAE, and have an interest in semiconductor matters?
Me and a colleague are currently on a little "AI, AGI and compute" tour, to understand how different parts of the supply chain are orienting to the current AI situation, and are trying to find folks to talk to along the way
Feel free to DM me!
(brief bio: I was part of founding Lightcone Infrastructure, the org that runs LessWrong, amont other things)
>The Vehmic courts were the regional courts of Westphalia which, in turn, were based on the county courts of Franconia. They received their jurisdiction from the Holy Roman Emperor, from whom they also received the capacity to pronounce capital punishment (German: Blutgericht) which they exercised in his name. Everywhere else the power of life and death, originally reserved to the Emperor alone, had been usurped by the territorial nobles; only in Westphalia, called "the Red Earth" because here the imperial Blutbann (jurisdiction over life and death) was still valid, were capital sentences passed and executed by the Vehmic courts in the Emperor's name alone.
> The sessions were often held in secret, whence the names of "secret court"... Attendance of secret sessions was forbidden to the uninitiated, on pain of death... A chairman (German: Stuhlherr) presided over the court, and lay judges (German: Freischöffen) passed judgment. The court also constituted a Holy Order.
> Any free man "of pure bred German stock" and of good character could become a judge. The new candidate was given secret information and identification symbols. The "knowing one" (German: Wissende) had to keep his knowledge secret, even from his closest family ("vor Weib und Kind, vor Sand und Wind"). Lay judges had to give formal warnings to known troublemakers, issue warrants, and take part in executions.
The more I learn about German history the more "romantic" and alien it seems.
Wow, thanks for sharing! I suppose this is another thing I'm glad the founders of American didn't copy from the HRE.
> It has been claimed ... that, in some cases, the condemned would be set free, given several hours' head start and then hunted down and put to death. So fearsome was the reputation of the Fehme and its reach that many thus released committed suicide rather than prolonging the inevitable.
> In an 1856 lecture, philosopher Karl Marx used the Vehmic courts as a metaphor to describe his predictions of the working-class revolution that would sweep Europe.
The recent comment "What is the "free" in "Palestine should be free"" by Bo Rothstein at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden contains some points worth sharing about the ongoing Gaza war:
"regardless of whether the slogan ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free’ is anti-Semitic or not, there is a further question: how likely is it that a ‘free Palestine’ would genuinely be ‘free’, in the sense of issuing in a democratic society that respects human rights? What type of society can we expect if the Palestinians create their own state? ...What we already know is that the principle of democratic elections has been abrogated not only by Hamas in Gaza but also by the Fatah faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which controls the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the west bank. Neither has subjected itself to the ballot box since the second legislative elections in 2006 to the Palestine National Council—deriving from the Oslo accords between Israel and the PLO—which Hamas won, subsequently wresting Gaza from the PA’s control.
Amnesty International (AI) and Human Rights Watch (HRW) have reported numerous violations of human rights by Hamas and the PA. In a report before the murderous October 7th Hamas attack on Israel and the disproportionate Israeli reprisal, AI wrote: ‘The authorities in the West Bank and Gaza Strip continue to unnecessarily restrict freedom of expression, association and assembly, often using excessive violence to disperse peaceful assemblies.’
Maybe if the Palestinians didn't have to deal with the ill effects of the military occupation, attacks from Israeli settlers, and other problems caused by their poor coexistence with the Jews, their character as a people would change and they would no longer want governments like Hamas or Fatah.
The best guidepost would be to look at how other Arab countries are governed. At best, there is Lebanon, which is tolerant and democratic, though also badly corrupt; Jordan which gets stability from its monarchy and good relations with the U.S.; and Iraq, which is also democratic and less corrupt than Lebanon. At worst, there are the military dictatorships of Egypt and Syria, and the hardline Islamic theocracy of Saudi Arabia. The benevolent dictatorships present in the other Gulf States are only made possible by massive oil wealth and small populations. Israel has no oil.
If Palestine becomes "free from the river to the sea," then it means something very bad has happened to the Jewish population of Israel and probably also to the Christians, which rules out good relations with and support from America. The Palestinians also don't have any monarchy, so they can't copy Jordan.
My guess is, after taking over what is currently Israel and defeating their longtime enemies, the Palestinians would have a civil war with each other over who was in charge. They might fight to the point of mutual exhaustion and after getting it out of their system as Lebanon and Iraq did, form a somewhat functional democratic government, or maybe one faction will defeat all the others and the winning general will make himself dictator. The economy would suck due to mismanagement and corruption regardless of the outcome, though they'd be richer than they were under Israeli control.
Governments like Hamas don't care what the people they allegedly represent, want for themselves. If the people of Gaza don't want a government like Hamas, Hamas will still rule Gaza with the stereotypical iron fist and use it as a base and a resource for attacks on Israel. Unless a whole lot of people with guns and with a willingness to kill Hamas or die trying, go in and clear them out.
There would be somewhat fewer civilian casualties if it were the Palestinians rather than the IDF who took on that task. Do you think that is a realistic proposition? Do you think it would happen organically if the "occupation" and "attacks from Israeli settlers" stopped, or would something else be required and if so what? Keep in mind that the problem du jour is in Gaza, which hasn't been occupied or settled in almost twenty years.
My primary worry with this scenario is that, if it were not a highly repressive dictatorship, it would immediately go to war with Israel. And having no greater military strength than today, it would find itself losing and facing a similar invasion to what we see today.
But at least, history tells us that dictatorships like uniforms. The shiny, spiffy, "glittering tinsel of neo-fascism". That one change would improve the situation immensely.
Agreed. If we could find a competent Palestinian dictator who would accept peaceful coexistence with Israel and *effectively* crack down on Palestinians who want to break that peace, putting that dictator in charge of Gaza and most of the West Bank would probably be an improvement for all concerned.
A democracy would be better still. But the point is probably moot on account of neither a Palestinian dictator or a Palestinian democracy would be effective at cracking down on Palestinians who want to break the peace in the near future.
A Lee Kuan Yew? The world seems to get one perhaps once a millennium :-( Other than him, Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus and George Washington, are there other examples of competent and benign dictators (or, in Washington's case, people who could have held power indefinitely if he had wanted to).
I agree with you on this one, John. The only trouble with democracy is they actually elected Hamas as their leadership (but I don't think Hamas had held free elections since they came to power). Of course, we've got democracy in Israel, which gives us a dangerous clown like Netanyahu. It's clear that neither side really wants a cease-fire right now.
I suspect Hamas really wants a cease-fire right now, but they don't have much to offer in exchange and they're (understandably) asking for too high a price for what they can offer.
But yeah, in terms of a cease fire with terms both sides would be willing to accept, that makes as little sense in 2024 Gaza as it would have in 1944 Europe.
Back when Israel was just revving up their incursion into Gaza, a senior Hamas leader said in an interview that they expected a massive response from Netanyahu. That leads me to believe either they were overconfident or coldly calculating. I suspect the latter because when you look at it in a coldly calculating way it's a win-win for Hamas. Either Israel gets bogged down in a long drawn-out war of street-to-street fighting, or they'll create a humanitarian crisis in Gaza. In the former scenario, Israel is weakened militarily. In the latter scenario, Israel will garner world condemnation and (in the Hamas calculation) get boycotted like South Africa did under the Afrikaner government. Either way, Israel will create a lot of angry Palestinian kids who will grow up committed to their cause. Meanwhile, senior Hamas political leaders get to watch safely from a distance in Dubai.
That only helps Hamas if Hamas is still present in Gaza to take advantage of it. Or some successor organization that Hamas is willing to yield its place to while they all go off to enjoy the 72 daily virgins or whatever. Israel has the ability to make Hamas in Gaza as extinct as the NSDAP in 1946 Berlin, in about the same way, and they seem to be heading in that direction.
In which case, yeah, Hamas in Qatar is still a thing, and they'll have lots of support from the Arab Street and the Elite US Colleges. But without a presence in Qatar to turn that into organized action where it matters, it won't much matter, Note that Hamas in Qatar has been unable to stir up more than minor trouble in the West Bank, where the IDF maintains a reasonably effective "No Hamas!" policy.
Israel losing US aid is a long shot, but Israel can survive without US aid. And they are not going to be voting themselves out of existence like the Afrikaner regime did, not under any plausible boycott.
The only way this turns into a win is if Israel is stopped short of de-Hamasifying Gaza. Which is probably what Hamas was hoping for, and it's not entirely out of the question now, but I don't think so.
> I suspect the latter because when you look at it in a coldly calculating way it's a win-win for Hamas.
There are reports, apparently by an independent Arab journalist, that some of the shootings of Gazans waving white flags were by Hamas. Because Hamas doesn't want non-combatant Gazans to leave the war zone, because Hamas wants to use the non-combatants as human shields, so that their martyrdom will turn public opinion against Israel.
I have no idea how much trust to put into this. Virtually everything emanating from that epistemic hellhole seems designed to manipulate the opinion of outsiders at the cost of Gazan suffering.
Of course, the question is if Israel even has to care about what the world thinks of them. The US will keep supporting Israel as long as it keeps furthering its interests in the Middle East. All Hamas is doing by alienating Israel is just giving the US more control over them.
Good post. At first I rolled my eyes and braced myself for yet another bad faith "Just Asking Questions" concern trolling that tries to distract from the most salient and fundamental point - which is that Palestine is militarily occupied by an authoritarian government that pretends it's a democracy and acts with impunity in flagrant violation of international norms reminiscent of US-proclaimed "naughty" states like Iran and Russia - by using angels-on-pinhead argumentation about hypotheticals, but then the author actually acknowledges all of that upfront and explicitly declares his IFF transponder to be Pro-Palestinian at the start of the article, so the questioning appears to be sincere.
It's not an easy question. Would it have been better to wait for Vietnam (or rather, North Vietnam) to become a liberal LGBTQ-friendly democracy **first** before marching in protest of the American bombing? Wars and occupation harden dictatorships if they don't defeat it outright, ask Syria's Al Assad, the senior, who despite being defeated in 1973 and not reclaiming The Golans from Israel, still coasted on the legitimacy of "Resistance" for decades, eventually passing on his little French-created fiefdom to his criminal genocidal scum of a son.
On other hand, victory over the occupier **is** the ultimate PR coup for the dictator, one which can and almost certainly will feed into the myth and continue to perpetuate the kingdom.
Intertwined with this question is the question of how much do people "deserve" freedoms of a certain kind if they don't give other freedoms of other kinds to other people. Do the Palestinians "deserve" self-determination and humane treatment if they don't give them to the LGBT and atheists among them? Well, difficult question, I freely admit, but I will notice that neither the Americans nor the Europeans, self-proclaimed Free World, gave those freedoms to the same categories among them until very recently, vast gulfs of 80, 100, and sometimes 150+ years separate the introduction of constitutional innovations and political concepts of freedoms and the much later exploration of wider concepts of personal and social freedoms that guarantees survival of LGBT people and atheists and those like them.
At the end of the day, you can't do much thinking when there are starving children. We can debate till the cows come home about Palestinians and their social and political habits, but that's is solely conditional on ensuring there **remains** such a thing as Palestinians, only philosophers and theologians argue about dead people.
exactly. Was reading a history of the vietnam war and while the author is liberal leaning and condemns the U.S involvement overall, he could never resist little digs at antiwar protestors along the lines of 'of course, antiwar protestors in north vietnam would have been arrested'. As though the U.S would have been so permissive if north Vietnamese bombers were overflying washington! Can think of very few examples of countries that have remained good liberal democracies while facing the adversity experienced by north vietnam or palestine
>neither the Americans nor the Europeans, self-proclaimed Free World, gave those freedoms to the same categories among them until very recently
And it should be noted that wide swaths of the electorate and of the legislatures of the US and the Europeans nations openly wish to, if not reverse, certainly stop the progress in granting those freedoms.
Thanks for the question - I have written about this decision in the past, but let me lay it out for you. It was never my intention to ferment the apple juice. This requires a huge capital investment and a lot of experience and knowledge I don't have. Making alcohol, as I'm sure you know, is a tiresome bureaucratic mess as well. So I thought that I would grow and press the apples, but then when a local cidery opened a huge facility that had capacity for pressing my apples too, I was on it! They charge me on a per gallon basis, of course, just as I charge my customer. They pump the juice into a 300 gallon food grade plastic totes and I deliver to the local breweries who ferment on their time and equipment. To build a processing plant would be another huge investment. I'm happy to work on the farm, that's my favorite part anyway, and let the processing to the processors. By the way, last year I sold 600 gallons from about 200 trees that are 6 years old or less. It takes about 10 years to get a fully mature tree that produces a good crop. I have a total of 750 trees. Each year I double production, so far!
This may be a stupid question, but as the man says, there are no stupid questions, only stupid people. So with that...
A problem with the most sophisticated, highest-parameter LLMs is that consumer hardware is incapable of running them. This means they have to run on cloud services run by large corporate providers, which in turn creates single points of failure for censorship and regulation that are already limiting their utility. How plausible is the idea of dedicated hardware accelerators that would allow, say, hundred-billion-parameter models to run on high-end consumer PCs?
Depends on throughput and cost! You could do it RN with some of the more esoteric compression methods and two 3090s. 3bit compression exists and its passable.
There is a history of inference hardware accelerators, but the problem is that due to some minutia you are pretty "locked in" to a certain architecture scale if you want to optimize operations other than big matrix multiplies. Your accelerator needs a lot of HBM as a baseline, which costs a lot, and if you get the size the market demands wrong by one OOM you are screwed. So yeah a pretty big risk but if you locked in a size very doable
Not exactly what you're asking for, but thought I'd tell you about Jeremy Howard, an Australian AI guy, who's interested in AI training that can be done on a home computer, and has a bunch of methods for squeezing more learning out of less data. Offers courses in what he calls Fast AI. Won Kaggle 2 years in a row, so he's no slouch.
People have already built proof of concept systems called “data vending machines”, where someone operates an LLM for pay, charging over the bitcoin lightning network so that transaction fees and latency aren’t an issue. This is what I think is more likely than individuals running their model models: a marketplace where technically knowledgeable vendors compete on price and quality.
Yes, but if there are multiple "data vending machines" run by competing companies (even if the _training_ is done by just a few companies), that gets around a large part (though not all) of having a single point of failure for censorship etc.
Until they all get bought up into a couple of monopolies with full staffs of trust and safety commissars. Or just regulated into oblivion, if you live in Europe or California or under Biden's second term.
Many Thanks! Yes, that could happen. The "regulated into oblivion" could happen even with consumer-level hardware able to run LLMs, if e.g. the Federal government starts requiring ISPs to detect and report the LLM models themselves being downloaded.
Still, at least _starting_ with a dozen LLM-execution-providers in separate companies would mean that some _further_ failure has to happen, while, _today_, if a handful of companies decide to censor more than they currently do, this isn't _anything_ to stop them.
It's going to be a lot harder to regulate LLMs if they're sitting on people's own computers. Stopping people from downloading things is hard, certainly a lot harder than casually leaning on Amazon-Microsoft-Google Megacorporation Inc. and telling them their AI had better say men can become pregnant if they know what's good for them.
That said, I'm not saying that people shouldn't create "data vending machines," absolutely, let a hundred flowers bloom. And in certain circumstances it might help by at least creating more alternatives to the big boys that aren't (yet) censored. But it still doesn't deliver the security of having your own LLM on your own computer; you're still at the mercy of some corporate provider who might censor you or cut you off at their whim or the whim of some pressure group or government.
It's like anything else - right now you can do it with 6-7k worth of hardware, either a Mac Pro or a bunch of GPU's and an octominer box to run them in.
Moore's law means that'll get cheaper and easier with time, so it all depends when you want to run a 100B parameter model, and model-overhang-and-optimization-wise how good those 100B models will be by then.
But 6k is already cheap to most businesses, and some people. I can't imagine it would take more than 2 years to halve that price, too.
My cursory search engine digging looks like you can run a 120B parameter model locally for $5,000 - $10,000. This gets you to ~ 1 token/s. How the ability of a pruned model like this compares to say ChatGPT, I have no idea.
Lots of people here are very good with language. I'm a late bloomer with language but my favorite use of LLMs is asking them about word etymologies. I trust them to be correct on that subject. But still, I'm so ignorant with regard to word etymologies in general I wonder where I stand compared to the average reader of this blog.
What percent of words you regularly encounter do you more or less know the etymology of?
For English etymologies I use etymonline.com. I don't know how to use an LLM, but I wouldn't trust them anyway. I'd be afraid it'd just repeat some folk etymology, or invent one.
Thank you and others for the link and the point that I shouldn't trust LLMs. I hope to test at least 100 words on an LLM to see if it makes any mistakes on etymologies. (Someone mentioned I should ask for sources, but my understanding is that LLMs are mostly likely to hallucinate when you ask for a citation or source.)
I can't say that I do know the etymology, but I could make a guess about where the word comes from. But I wouldn't trust LLMs as they have been demonstrated to just make stuff up, so always check whatever answer they give you against something else like a good dictionary.
Based on the 77 words in your post, I have some idea of the etymology (as in "that seems like a cognate of that Scandinavian and that German word, so it must be from a similar word in proto-Germanic" or whatever) of around three quarters of the words I encounter, but I know the full etymology (back to PIE or whatever) of 0% of those.
It's a bit of a weird question, to be honest. Once you know a word, who cares about where it came from?
I know some of the common ones, anything Greek or Latin is likely to stand out, especially Greek ones, I know some of the Arabic-descended etymologies because Arabic is my native language (Zero and Alcohol are well-known, but did you know "Syrup" comes from the Arabic word for "Drink"?). Where it gets hazy for me is distinguishing between Celtic-borrowed words, the words coming from the original Germanic Old English, and the French-borrowed words coming from the Normans and later influences.
> my favorite use of LLMs is asking them about word etymologies.
LLMs can act as a good search engines with one condition: Ask them to always cite a reputable source, and follow that source. It can be as simple as an online link, or you can ask them to cite a book and download that book from Libgen or Anna's Archive (OpenAI is known to train their models on the so-called "pirate" libraries, but hush hush, we have to pretend "PiRaCy" is a scary crime when individuals do it), or track down a review to source the likely-famous assertion. Never under any circumstances take a factual assertion from an LLM at face value.
You might be amused by what ChatGPT(3.5) has to say about the etymology of "syrup":
ChatGPT:
The English word "syrup" traces its etymology through several languages:
Old French: The word entered English from Old French "sirop."
Latin: The Old French "sirop" itself was derived from the Medieval Latin "siropus," which had been borrowed from Arabic "šarāb" (meaning "beverage" or "syrup").
Greek: The Arabic term "šarāb" was borrowed from the Greek "σῦρον (sŷron)," which referred to a thick drink made from fruit juice.
Proto-Indo-European: Ultimately, the Greek "σῦρον (sŷron)" can be traced back to the Proto-Indo-European root seh₂u-, meaning "juice" or "sap."
So, the English word "syrup" has a long journey through Latin, Greek, Arabic, and Old French before settling into its current form.
It was reasonable and agreeing with Wikipedia till the "Arabic 'Sharab' came from Greek" part. It's **extraordinarily** unlikely that this is remotely true:
(1) "Sharab" is just the Arabic construction for "That which is drinkable", it comes from the Arabic verb "Shareba" شرب. This verb is semitic, it has a 3-letter root ش ر ب. You can derive other things from it: (A) Shaareb شارب, Drinker; (B) Mashrba مشربة, either a tool to drink with or a place/time where drinking happens; (C) Mashroob مشروب, something which is drunk.
Outside of Arabic colloquial dialects, I have never seen a foreign word treated this way. Non-Semitic words can't be derived or derived from.
(2) Furthermore, "Drink" is a very basic human need, it's unheard of for a language to borrow words for "Eat", "Sleep", "Drink" and things like from other languages.
This is overwhelmingly likely to be a fabrication, those words probably don't exist, and Arabic can't have possibly borrowed a word as basic and as fundamental as "Drink", something which every 3 years old learn, from an obscure geographically distant language.
Oh, absolutely. It's 100% wrong about the Greek and PIE roots. I just wanted to offer confirmation of your broader advice never to trust an LLM on factual matters.
(If you ask it for the Proto-Germanic root of "syrup," ChatGPT will also invent one — "sirupaz" — rather than point out that the word doesn't have a Proto-Germanic origin.)
I would be cautious about trusting the LLMs on this subjects, there's a lot of urban legends and myths in etymology. The same advice applies to any source, but LLMs have an unfortunate tendency to regurgitate commonly held bullshit as fact.
In my native language German, most of the exotic ones. Less percentage of the very common words, but those are also often less interesting. (For example, I have no ideas for the analogues of "to be", "to go", "to do".) But I am probably an outlier since I was interested in those things when I was younger. I still am, but there is only so much you can learn.
If you mean which language the word comes from, Latin, French, Greek, etc, then the large majority of them. If you mean something more complicated then less.
Is there anyone here who's familiar with the standard "HBD / racial IQ disparities are largely genetic" arguments, and disagrees with them? If so, could you summarize your thoughts?
It's hard to know what arguments make sense without knowing what you mean by HBD.
There is a large (somewhere between .67 and 1 standard deviation) difference in IQ scores between blacks and whites in the US, and pretty solid evidence that this reflects actual differences in intelligence, since IQ scores seem to be about as good at predicting school and work performance in blacks as in whites. This is also consistent with the stuff we see in the world--blacks have worse average SATs, grades, college graduation rates, STEM degrees, MCAT scores, etc. Some people will call any discussion of this difference "HBD" and nearly all mainstream outlets do not think it should be discussed in public. Good luck finding a newspaper article on the racial statistics of the local magnet school that mentions IQ statistics.
How much of the cause of this difference is genetic vs environmental? That seems like a hard research question. We know IQ is substantially heritable from adoption studies, but blacks and whites live in somewhat different average environments, have slightly different cultures, etc., so it is hard to untangle causality. I think making a strong claim to know the answer to this question is not warranted by the available evidence, and you should be equally skeptical of the guy who confidently tells you that the black/white IQ gap is totally environmental as of the guy who says it's totally genetic.
There is also a flat-earth style HBD that says blacks dumb, whites smart. It's easy to refute, but also doing that doesn't engage with any serious thinkers. In fact, there are a lot of very smart blacks and very dumb whites/Asians/Eastern European Jews. Most people don't have any statistics background at all, so they get wrapped around the axle trying to reason about this, but overlapping bell curves are a fact of life--men average taller than women even though I know some tall women and some short men.
I think they often look at the correlation between adoptive siblings' IQ (the people raised in the same household with you) vs the correlation between biological siblings' IQ (the people who share genes with you).
Also, I believe there are now some studies where people have looked at how much genetic material two siblings share, and more shared genes goes with a higher positive correlation in IQ scores. (You share about half the genes of your siblings, but the way meiosis works means that you don't share exactly half, and that you share more genes with some siblings than with others. Similarly for grandparents and grandchildren--you get about 25% of your maternal grandma's DNA, but it's not exactly 25%, and your sister may get 29% while you get 22%.)
Sure, but then you get potential confounding because other stuff may also be more similar for identical than fraternal twins. (How you interact with people depends a lot on your appearance, for example.)
You have far more confounding and far smaller sample sizes if you look at adoptions. And that's even before considering the fact that you're restricting yourself to an unrepresentative subset of the population, making the conclusions near-meaningless anyway.
"Largely" is overselling the current evidence; "may be non-trivially genetic" is potential supportable, but any nuance tends to get lost in the screeching.
I usually hate self-replies, but wanted to keep my direct response to the initial question unmuddled.
The contrary assumption's corollary, that any population-level differences in life outcomes are prima facie evidence of systemic discrimination, is equally unfounded.
It wouldn't take much of a difference in the IQ distributions to have a measurable effect in selective situations. As a numerical example, imagine two equally-sized subpopulations with average IQs of 100 & 99, both with a SD of 15; members of the former subpopulation would be 54% of individuals with an IQ above 130.
Add in another characteristic across both subpopulations that affects the SD such that the segments with it have an SD of 16 and those without 14. Even starting from a 1:1:1:1 ratio of the four combinations, again selecting for an IQ above 130 you end up with the proportions:
- 100 & 15 : 1.41
- 100 & 14 : 0.75
- 99 & 15 : 1.22
- 99 & 14 : 0.62
N.B., the effect of both a lower mean and a lower SD is larger than the combined effects of each separately; intersectionality is real.
HBD/racial IQ guys want to present their case like it's the heterodox truth that the establishment doesn't want you to think about. First off, this should make you suspicious because that's the same thing that anti-vaxxers, flat Earthers, creationists, etc, say. But secondly, you can go type "hereditarian hypothesis" into Google Scholar and see there's plenty of scientific discussion of the question. The actual answer appears to be "it is unclear to what extent, if any, the black-white IQ gap is due to genetic differences."
However, because HBD people are mostly just racists with the gloss of scientism, they then go waaay off what that evidence, and even just what common sense and general knowledge, allow. "A meaningful portion of black-white IQ gaps are due to genetics" is a defensible position. If black people - due entirely to genetic differences - had an average IQ of, say, 95, would you notice that in daily life? It would have substantial impacts on lots of things, but not necessarily be immediately noticeable in interactions or from a birds' eye view of the world. "All Sub-Saharan Africa is a civilizational wasteland because the average IQs of blacks there are sub-70 due entirely to genetics" is completely indefensible, but they absolutely jump there (I've seen it multiple times in the ACX comments section). If this were true, a) you should expect an obvious, huge element of African history, travelography, etc, to clearly demonstrate "and these guys are really stupid" in the same way that we note that the Twa are very short, and b) is contradicted by ANY successful governance by ANY large population of African descent anywhere (Botswana, Seychelles, and the Bahamas are three examples).
Thanks for the reply. I agree that the existence of successful independent African countries is a strong counter to the "the problems of Africans are a byproduct of them being too genetically low IQ to succeed" argument. If you're willing to help me brainstorm here, can you think of any other good examples of African success that the "they are genetically low IQ" worldview can't explain?
Nigerian-Americans are the most-educated single demographic in the USA. If you assume education level directly correlates to intelligence, and take the ~70 IQ number they give for Nigeria's IQ, then a back-of-the-envelope calculation shows there are about as many Nigerian-Americans with Master's degrees as there should be in the entire country of Nigeria. (There would be variation due to the relative age pyramids for Nigerian-Americans versus Nigerians, but this would disfavor the HBD crowd, since presumably Nigerians have proportionately more people <25.)
Here's the calculation:
Overall portion of the US population with Master's degrees or better in 2022: 14.4%.
Equivalent in IQ: ~116
Z-score for a 70 IQ base population: ~3.063.
p(Z>=3.063)= 0.10957%
Total population of Nigerian-Americans: 712,294
Percent of Nigerians with a Master's or better in 2015: 29%
Population of Nigerian-Americans with a Master's or better (ignoring age): ~206,565
Total population of Nigeria: 230,842,743
Total population of Nigerians who should have the intellectual capacity to get a Master's (again, ignoring age): 252,934
Chanda Chisala made a similar argument on Unz (pointing to the academic success of black Africans in Britain and the US both), and mostly I only saw floundering suggesting truly absurd levels of superselection, but I think these calculations suggest that the levels of superselection are not just absurd, but effectively impossible. 80% of all Nigerians with an IQ of 116 or better live in the United States? C'mon.
(This was also a recalculation on my part - the 29% number is from 2015 and the 14.4% number is from 2022, whereas the 2015 report compared the 29% number to an overall 11%, which would suggest that >100% of all Nigerians capable of getting a Master's live in the USA.)
The "they are unsuccessful due to low IQ" argument also has real trouble with the natural experiments of East/West Germany and North/South Korea.
We already *know* that governance can have *massive* effects on prosperity, independent of genetics. With already known variance that large, it's pretty suspicious that people try to automatically assign African under-performance to some unseen third factor.
The relative success of African and Afro-Caribbean immigrants to the United States comes to mind. African-Canadians descended from runaway American slaves are I believe relatively more successful than their counterparts south of the border, and not consistent with the usual strong-HBD hypothesis. I might also argue the relative success of African-Americans in the armed forces as opposed to civilian life, though the counterargument there would be that the military screens out the really dumb ones (at least as long as we don't have a McNamara in charge).
This is purely anecdotal, but I've heard some very smart black people talk about a pattern where, when black immigrants come to America, the older children (roughly, high school senior or college-age at the time of immigration) turn out like their parents, but the younger children (roughly, high school junior and below) turn out like native American black people. In addition to being hearsay and anecdotal, this could be birth-order effects and regression to the mean. But it could also imply a cultural problem that can be transmitted by youth peer groups.
That's the same pattern you see with accents--come to the US at 18, and you probably go through life with an accent--come to the US at 8, and you probably sound exactly like a native within a couple years.
Do younger siblings tend to integrate/assimilate more into peer groups than older siblings? My anecdotal experiences would support this claim (n=very small), but I'd be interested to see a study.
Older siblings have less time to assimilate into their local peer group, before they go off to college or whatever and wind up in the "we're trying to be grownups and make something of our lives" peer group.
Not assimilate more, but just be less driven and less high-achiever, at least from what I remember. It's one of those things where it seemed to me like the studies had a clear idea of what was "good" (in this case, academic success and financial achievement), and ordered people by that metric, but weren't interested in developing a clear picture of what trade-offs the "low achievement" people might have made, and what they would be trading off for. Does that make sense? (My siblings and I seem to fit this perfectly. #1 was very smart, #2 was very driven, but #3 was more laid-back and social, and so far happens to be the only one of us to successfully reproduce. Beyond replacement, even.)
The counterfactual is what would happen if the same family emigrated a few years earlier or later. If earlier, would the older siblings turn out like the younger ones (thus implicating social environment) or would they keep the same trajectory (thus implicating family environment, genetics, and birth order)?
Or again, is it just anecdotes that stuck in people's minds because they, like I, am attracted to theories that would disprove HBD because we simply don't want it to be true in any significant way?
I don't want to get into depth since I've been through these debates dozens of times, but here are a few quick points to think about.
* Remember the replication crisis? Yeah. It affects basically everything, so you should already have a prior of uncertainty that strongly downweights arguments relying on old low-quality studies. And while in mainstream science, a lot of failed replications are now well known, noone in polite society touches HBD with a ten-foot pole, meaning that bad arguments easily persist unchallenged.
* Another reason to lower your prior is just the way that the HBD sphere is closed off and not subject to serious debate from outsiders. I think that if this ever changed, there's a good chance that "that which can be destroyed by the truth should be destroyed by the truth" would turn out to be the HBD side.
* HBDers also rely heavily on abuse of correlation in their arguments. E.g. they'll say "IQ is *correlated* with all good life outcomes, therefore it must be selected for" and "IQ is *correlated* with race", etc. However, correlation isn't necessarily even transitive! In fact, you can have situations where A and B are positively correlated and B and C are positively correlated by A and C are *negatively* correlated. They also completely fail to engage with all the usual problems of this sort of statistical inference. For example, correlations tend to break down at the extremes (see Scott's post about "the tails come apart" for example), or when you select for a confounding factor (Goodhearting).
* I have yet to see a good explanation for the Flynn Effect. Such a rapid rise in IQs faster than any possible evolution proves that there is *something* about IQ that is unknown, so you should treat all IQ arguments with a high uncertainty. It's also proof that IQs *can* change a lot for non-genetic reasons.
I think it's a little too easy to use the replication crisis to just dismiss any results you don't want to believe. My impression (this isn't my field) is that the core findings of IQ have held up quite well, though I'd love to hear from a real expert. The core findings as I understand them: IQ scores from the same person are pretty stable, IQ is substantially heritable, IQ positively correlates with success in school and on the job, including in jobs you would not think of as mentally very demanding, there are average IQ differences across some racial groups, but don't seem to be across genders, etc.
> you should already have a prior of uncertainty that strongly downweights arguments relying on old low-quality studies
I agree. But wanted to mention a study done by psychologist Sandra Scarr in I think the 1970's: Her subjects were black kids, using 2 measures for each: IQ, and an "African odds coefficient" calculated from blood test results. I don't know the details, but I gather there are characteristic differences in some blood group measures between people of African ancestry and people of European or Asian ancestry. So the African odds coefficient was used as a measure of how purely African someone's ancestry was. (In support of its validity: it correlated with skin color in the expected direction). Outcome: There was no correlation between a child's IQ and how genetically African they were.
If you're already enmeshed in the HBD-sphere, I'd recommend checking out Chanda Chisala, as he is an HBDer who argues against black-white IQ gaps **from an HBD perspective**, which is pretty awkward for the HBDers, and I have yet to see a good counterargument.
I'll give it a shot, I did a lot of genetics/phylogenetics at university so have a fair understanding of why this is hokum from the scientific standpoint. The one line summary is: No, it hasn't been long enough, it's unclear if there's any single factor that affects intelligence, and even if there were intelligence might not be a strong enough evolutionary factor to matter.
The first point is probably the easiest to conceptualize,. The Out of Africa theory has been shifted further and further back in timescale as we discover more archeological evidence, but the timescale remains somewhere around 70,000+ thousand years ago. While this is a long time on human scales, it's pretty minimal on evolutionary scales. Heck, lions and tigers can still interbreed and they separated millions of years ago. There simply hasn't been enough genetic drift between different human populations to allow for anything more than point changes in different population's genomes.
Some notable point examples do of this do exist, lactase persistence, sickle-cell anemia being well known, but overall humans are generically homogenous between populations. In fact, we're weirdly homogeneous suggesting an extremely narrow genetic bottleneck somewhere in our species' early life. There is more diversity in Africa, but even that's pushing plausibility. We pretty much all have the same genome, and that's only going to become more true as global travel further breaks genetic barriers.
That brings me on to my second point, intelligence is way too fuzzy a concept to be selected for genetically. Scientists have spent a lot of time studying what makes smart people smart, and so far have found no 'killer-app' in our genome that controls this variable. It is doubtful any exists at this point. The majority of human traits have been found to be continuous, i.e. they are controlled by so many factors (including but not limited to genes) that no one factor can be considered causative. While there are broad trends within family lines, no human population has been identified as a significant enough outlier that they can be considered genetically superior to any other. And even the smartest families regress to the mean over a long enough period.
Which brings me to my final point, does nature even care we're smart? I'm not even going to touch whether IQ is even a valid measure of intelligence (it seems a better proxy for education to me but that's a different essay), but even if we can quantify intelligence how much does it matter? Being related to a billionaire, or king in ages past, seems a far stronger source of positive pressure. And that's not even considering how what makes for a successful person keeps changing as humanity goes through technological revolution after revolution. Is IQ even going to mater as a selective force in a hundred years? I don't know, and your genes certainly don't.
In conclusion, from the view of genetics there's very little to link IQ to racial groups. Humans are just too similar. There's no mechanism that could have driven the fixation of intelligence boosting genes in a population within the limited timeframe available. And furthermore, there don't actually seem to be any genes that could be candidates that consistently boost intelligence. If I were to look into why IQ differs between populations I'd look into diet, education and leaded gasoline long before genones.
Okay, so why do we observe the IQ statistics we observe? Your argument would seem to say that these shouldn't exist, and yet they do. We also have evidence that those IQ scores do correlate with the stuff we actually care about, like performance at school and on the job. What's up with that?
Further, there is a lot of evidence that IQ is substantially heritable. This goes back to adoption studies using the statistics we all learned in our first stat class, but continues with modern genetic studies. (As I understand things, there are a whole lot of alleles which each have a small effect on IQ--not a gene for intelligence, but rather a bunch of stuff that sums up to allow some people to be smarter than others, and that can be inherited.)
Also, we observe other places where some groups (usually much smaller than a race) really dominate in some sporting events--I think most top marathon runners have ancestors from a particular part of Africa, for example. It's not like they were being selected for running marathons exactly, but whatever mix of selection, mutation, and drift happened there ended up producing a body type that is really good for marathon running, enough so that a subset of people from that region end up winning most marathons. It seems like you *could* have some parallel where the ancestral environment + random mutation and drift led to a brain type that is really good for a modern academic environment, say. You seem to be arguing that such a thing simply could not have happened, but I don't see why it is impossible.
The best evidence for heritability of intelligence, I believe, comes from studies of twins who were (separately) adopted. That gives you identical genetics, but randomized environments. Whether you call these "twin studes" or "adoption studies", doesn't really matter very much.
The problem is that "people who are adopted" and "people who adopt" are small and highly unrepresentative subsets of the population, so adoption studies will never be able to tell you much, just by their very nature. Even if you create a heritability estimate, it would just be an estimate of heritability *for that small, highly unrepresentative subset of the population*. Restricting to separately adopted twins just makes the problem exponentially worse, because now your sample is a tiny subset of a tiny subset.
The advantage of normal twin studies is that you can get a much larger and more representative sample (of course there's still bias, but nowhere near the bias that adoption imposes).
Maybe I'm not understanding this, but your first point could just as easily be used to argue that all ethnicities must genetically have the same average height. There's no single gene for height.
Your second and third point seem to be general arguments against intelligence evolving at all. If nature can't select genes for intelligence and doesn't want to select for intelligence, then how did most animals evolve intelligence?
Absolutely, and I think that kind of proves my point. Average height of a population is more strongly correlated to the wealth of a nation rather than any underlying genetic factors.
Intelligence evolving at all is a bit of a headscratcher, but there's some room for luck in genetics. My point was more that, given the extremely short timescale we're talking about, we'd need a very visible selective pressure (i.e malaria) to drive a population to be measurably different from it's cousins.
Height can be correlated with many things, and wealth is certainly one of them (which I would guess is because poor nutrition can reduce height, but maybe there are other reasons). But that doesn't really explain why Japan has about the same average height as countries like Zimbabwe.
Thank you for representing the minority (I think) perspective. I will try to be gentle with my disagreement, but here it goes:
Interbreeding seems irrelevant. Different dog breeds can interbreed, and yet they have different character traits and skills. Perhaps in future, with more mobility, unless we run out of oil, people will interbreed so much that the entire concept of ethnic groups will disappear, but we are not there yet. Most people have children with someone living next to them (rich people living in modern developed societies are outliers here).
Some traits are controlled by a single gene, some traits (such as height) are controlled by many. No one respectable on the "intelligence is genetically determined" side expects to find the One True IQ Gene. A genetic engineering to increase IQ, if such thing will ever exist, will most likely consist of editing many genes, each adding a little bit, many of them probably coming with some statistical side effect.
I agree that different technological levels create different selection pressure on intelligence. That said, I assume that pressures on some level also existed in the past; you probably needed IQ 100 to handle some tools, even if until historically recently, there were no tools where having IQ 150 would give you a visible advantage. I assume that intelligence is positively correlated with social skills, and I think those have always been useful. (Nerds with computers are outliers. Imagine a woman smart enough to seduce a noble and make him marry her legally, or a man smart enough to destroy his competitors and get some important role, or basically anyone using their intelligence to more efficiently use whatever other advantages they had.) And the argument of "it depends on the tech level" actually works in favor of group differences, because different groups had or still have different tech levels, so if some tech creates stronger selection pressure on intelligence, we might expect that group to be more intelligent on average.
I agree about the diet and lead. With education, it's complicated. I don't think it has an impact on IQ. However, it allows existing IQ to translate to better study outcomes, and thus higher status, creating a positive selection pressure. Basically, people who otherwise probably wouldn't notice, now pay attention to the fact that one kid keeps getting A's and praise from teachers, while other kid keeps getting D's and soon drops out of the school. (This works until you send all smart women in college, creating a negative selection pressure, where the less smart women reproduce while the smarter ones keep waiting, sometimes for too long.)
Surprisingly, you didn't mention culture. I mean, if education plays a role, then a difference between e.g. a culture where reading books is considered high-status, and a culture where reading is considered low-status, should also be important. This could potentially be a strong argument against the heritability of IQ -- the problem is that this argument is also considered politically inappropriate.
"Scientists have spent a lot of time studying what makes smart people smart, and so far have found no 'killer-app' in our genome that controls this variable."
This is exactly why I'm sceptical of the polygenic embryo selection PR. Selecting an embryo that doesn't have the genes for the disease you already know is present is one matter. Selecting an embryo on the fuzzy hopes that they will be smarter? I don't think we can do that right now, and I'm not sure it's ever going to be developed into an easy "oh yeah these three genes here make you smart or dumb" style choice.
Editing genes may be out of the question, as well as filtering individual sperm and eggs, but I can easily imagine being told:
"We believe there may be as many as 10,000 genes that affect intelligence, we've identified 1,200 of them, and we can report that one of your embryos has the "good" version of 953 of those, as well as no known genetic diseases. We estimate that this embryo would develop into a child in the 97th percentile of intelligence, and that you'd have to try an average of 65 more times to achieve a better result."
I tend to not follow HBD and IQ arguments well because I'm bad at statistics, in the sense that I don't remember what is "R^2" and what it means when someone says "explains 69% of the variance". I'm especially bad at detecting when something is trying to **fool** me with statistics, and I get fooled easily by any plausible-looking natural language description of what the statistics is "saying".
In addition to statistics, HBD and IQ arguments tend to heavily depend on Genetics, which is also quite confusing and counter intuitive, I know disjointed facts here and there, but I don't have a unified model of what Genetics can and cannot tell us, and what any particular piece of Genetics data is telling us.
My overall impressions:
(1) HBD and IQ proponents are disproportionally likely to contain bad faith actors and/or racists, who are (a) Not interested in the actual intricacies of statistics and genetics, but rather more interested in cherry-picking conclusions and quotes from papers (b) Even if good at statistics and genetics, are primarily advancing sophisticated arguments as a means to a decidedly unsophisticated ends, such as re-instituting race-based discrimination even against qualified individuals from the "lower races".
(2) HBD and IQ theories don't appear to be such dirty sinful ways of thinking in the abstract, plenty of respectable researchers in the 1970s and the 1980s and the 1990s, people who studied IQ for the express purpose of knowing how to alleviate the suffering of people who got the short end of the genetic lottery, seemed to believe a lot of the common points.
(3) HBD and IQ have a lot of question marks to explain. The Flynn effect is a common one, but another one - not sure if it's common or not - is the massive difference in outcomes between people who didn't have the time to genetically diverge. Nigerians are some of the most successful migrant population in the USA, and yet the slave population that the black population of the USA is descended from is largely from West Africa, so the same genes powering one of the USA's most successful Africans are also powering some of its least successful, why? Is it selection effects, those migrating are already affluent and hard-working, and those taken slaves are already poor and meek? Wouldn't this explanation just admit that - at least in the case of the black population of the USA - IQ and/or economic success isn't genetic? Are there other reasons? 300 years can't be such a huge period that the genes diverged enough to explain the diff. Am I just ignorant and "West Africa" contains countless distinct gene pools, and the slaves were taken from one set of gene pools while the migrants are taken from another? I don't know.
(4) Point (3) begs the question: What are the **origins** of IQ differences? All humans are the grandchildren of Bacteria at the end of the day. At some point we were close, and then we get further, and some of the "further" direction for some groups was upwards in IQ-space. Why? Food? Wealth? Weather? Culture? Institutions and nation-building? Religion and Ideology? At some point in evolutionary history the lowest-IQ people and the highest-IQ were roughly the same, what made the highest-IQ people the highest IQ?
(5) Which brings us to the dirty dirty sin of Eugenics, the much-dreaded E-word. On the one hand, I don't think it's Literally Hitler (^TM) to want - quite fucking frankly - people to stop passing on their problems to their children. I think this ideology already has a name: Anti-Natalism, and I'm one of its followers. Some were born poor, I'm not blaming them a single bit, I want to do anything and everything in my power to help them, up to and including replacing the amorphous Moloch that we came to call "Capitalism" or the "Modern Market Economy" or whatever it is when Corporations does a bunch of shenanigans and suddenly a bunch of cringe CEOs are multi millionaires. But at which point do they become complicit in making ***their children*** poor? How much self-control and self-reflection does it take to see that you can barely support yourself as it is, therefore you can't support 1 child, therefore you can't support 5 or 10. Some people are - for lack of better words - sluts, which I'm using here in the gender-neutral sense. Alright, fair enough, I don't approve but who asked for my opinion, what grinds my gears is when they start having fatherless children left and right.
On the other hand, ehhh, it's not easy to propagate this into all of its consequences. Poverty has pretty well-defined geographical and demographic outlines, enforcing Anti-Natalism with state violence will just end up reinventing Hitler independently. If we don't enforce anti-poverty and anti-slut reproduction policies then what are they good for? It's not an easy choice, no matter what you choose you will end up hating yourself when the consequences for that choice are shoved in your face every waking day in the form of either miserable malnourished children or miserable childless parents who were forced at gunpoint by the state to not have children.
(6) To what degree is IQ the be-all end-all of success? Why is it the case that success - civilizationally speaking - is never permanent? Greece was once the center of thought, before them there was Ancient Egypt and Ancient Mesopotamia, after them was the Islamic Baghdad and Islamic Spain and then Western Europe. Does that mean one of: (a) IQ is not all that relevant to the intellectual and economic success of civilizations and nations, and all people have the bare minimum necessary to achieve prominence, other things are the limiting factors (b) Old civilizations were not that great, and either they or we are exaggerating their achievements (c) Actually, old civilizations had higher IQ, and when they declined their IQ declined as well or vice versa.
What is the implication of whatever answer we choose for the current world? Asians have a higher IQ than Whites in the USA, and (*checks Google*) Japan is the highest average IQ at 106. I still notice that the USA is vastly more influential and wealthier than Japan, or China, or South Korea, so what gives? Why is it popular to point out the average IQ of some nations in Africa and say they will never achieve anything to speak of?
(7) Point (6) again, but on the micro level this time. Some jobs are high-IQ but not high-paying, some jobs are high-paying but not high-IQ (e.g. politicians), or at least not the same kind of "high IQ" that makes people good at math and factual reasoning. Is Trump high-IQ? He is - massively - politically successful, if he dropped dead right now, he will still be remembered as a remarkable case for at least 100 years from now, he is also astonishingly dumb and/or senile. Yet for 4 years he controlled more power and more raw economic muscle than possibly any person in history except other US presidents after 1950. Is this a bug in human societies - higher IQ being subjects of lower IQ -, or a bug in the very assertion that IQ is a strong predictor of success and economic achievement?
(8) To what extent is IQ a general measure of intelligence? Was it always a predictor of success, or is that just quirk of the current economic system and the prevalence of office jobs (so called "Knowledge work", but I hate that term and think it's pretentious and cringe) which require information-processing and thinking like a computer?
As you can see, most of my thoughts about this are questions. I'm not that interested in most proponents of HBD and IQ popularizers or writers, they tend to follow a predictable path that either ends in trivially true conclusions (e.g. White people shouldn't be discriminated against) or trivially wrong ones (e.g. White people are the greatest race on Earth, and even the higher-IQ Asians and Ashkenazi Jews will never amount to anything because ... because ... because they just won't okay?). But I legitimately think the subject is interesting and deep, and I legitimately think that most people arguing about it are wrong or incomplete in at least 2 or 3 or 5 different ways.
Off topic here, I reckon, but anyway: You catch a bunch of wild foxes and breed only the least wild ones. After a few generations you have a bunch of pet foxes. Nothing about intelligence, more like agreeableness. Both fuzzy. What impressed me was how little generations were needed.
I've heard an argument like this, basically that slaves in the U.S. were selected for low executive function (or IQ or whatever metric you like). But I have some problems with it.
1. How are the slave owners enforcing this mechanism? Going around and making the obedient slaves have a bunch of kids? Sterilizing or killing the defiant slaves? Is there any evidence for this kind of thing?
2. Chattel slavery (the type practiced in the U.S.) has low replacement rates in the slave population. Slavery is pretty disruptive of social structures like family and obviously they have little hope for the future. Thus they have few children. This is why slave owners have to constantly buy more slaves to replace the dying ones. It's why outlawing future imports of slaves was seen as a huge win for abolitionists, because eventually there would be no more slaves.
So slaves are somehow selected to be stupid, but they have few children, and all of this happened in maybe 7 generations, at a maximum?
Come to think of it, one of the methods of dealing with defiant slaves was to sell them to someone who would work them exceptionally hard, and possibly to death. Mississippi had a particularly bad reputation, what with the swamps and all, and that's where we get the phrase "sold down the river".
>I've heard an argument like this, basically that slaves in the U.S. were selected for low executive function (or IQ or whatever metric you like). But I have some problems with it.
One additional problem with it: This would require slave owners to have extraordinarily long time horizons. Worse than that, an individual slave owner could _maybe_ have control over a plantation from maybe age 20 to age 60, hypothetically controlling slave's childbearing for maybe two generations. For more than that, there would have to be a _family_ of slave owners enforcing a consistent genetic policy across multiples of _their_ generation. Ahem, the Draka are _fictional_.
1) I'm fairly sure that there's evidence for killing defiant slaves. I believe this would be referred to as "truncation selection"? But I haven't heard a lot of claims about "defiance" having a genetic component. And if it did, I think it would produce a population capable of repressing emotions in favor of long-term survival?
2) That's not the impression that I've gotten. There's a link below that has a graph that shows a rough doubling every 25 years or so (it mentions 1808 as the cutoff for imports). As I understand it, the high death rate of enslaved workers was caused by overwork in bad conditions, which was usually only done in places where it was profitable (sugarcane plantations in the West Indies was a major one), and was only profitable when there was a cheap source of replacement slave labor. Once the external source was cut off, slaveholders had to adopt more sustainable methods (except for ones who still had economic or non-economic motivations to work slaves to death).
The Caribbean sugar plantations burned through slave labor at a prodigious rate, mean lifespan was I believe single-digit years, and only minimal attempts at maintaining a "breeding pool". So, yeah, there the slave economy did depend on a regular stream of imports and died when the slave trade did. North America was a *much* better place to be a slave, and you could reasonably expect to see 3-4 children reach adulthood. Your master thanks you for providing him the next generation of slaves now that the imports have dried up.
But selection for stupidity. not so much. The first generation is selected for having been on the losing side of an African tribal war, which is only weakly correlated with intelligence. Subsequent generations are selected for not getting into too much trouble with their overseers or masters, and in that context "smart enough to know when to keep your head down" beats "literally too stupid to live".
I find it sad how the American "IQ vs race" discourse (on either side) effectively devours the discussions about IQ. There is so much to be said on this topic as such, even in a mono-ethnic society -- how simple-minded people have it difficult to find a job in a technologically advanced economy (in the past they could contribute e.g. by tending the sheep), how the school system fails the gifted kids, whether too much university education has a dysgenic effect, and generally about how we once believed that removing inequalities would give a fair chance to everyone and then it turned out that some of the worst inequalities are in our genes and a truly meritocratic system may actually make it worse for many.
For example, Charles Murray wrote a book on social impact of IQ differences, and everyone only cares about that one chapter where he mentioned the statistical differences between races. So he wrote another book, when he only compared white people with higher IQ to white people with lower IQ, and... most of his critics probably don't even know this book exists. I think there is a lot of projection, where "*I* only listen to IQ debates when they involve race" becomes "*other people* only talk about IQ because they are racist".
There is a kind of "Bootleggers and Baptists" situation about IQ. Both sides contain people who joined for very different reasons.
> What are the **origins** of IQ differences?
Do I understand this correctly as a question "assuming that intelligence is genetic, and that it provides an evolutionary advantage... why aren't we *all* geniuses already?"
My guess is that intelligence is a result of many different genes, so the evolutionary pressure on any specific gene is relatively small (if having a wrong copy of the gene reduces your IQ by 0.1 point, who cares), so there are many tiny IQ-increasing and IQ-decreasing genes in the population. And the intelligence is like a result of thousand coin flips -- all coins falling the right way makes you the next John von Neumann, but that is very unlikely; the average result, half of the coins falling the right way and half the wrong way, gives you IQ 100; all coins falling the wrong way will probably kill you, as very low IQ is often associated with very bad health; and maybe 75% of coins falling the right way and 25% falling the wrong way makes you retarded.
The average intelligence of a human population is then probably a result of competing evolutionary pressure towards higher IQ and harmful mutations. Some IQ-increasing genes may also have a negative side effect. (But I don't think all of them do, otherwise John von Neumann couldn't have existed.)
At point 6, I think you are making a false dilemma between intelligence being either everything or nothing. It also could be just a bonus to other traits. It's not that smarter individuals are always more successful than less smart ones; it's that when you control for other traits, the smarter ones are more successful on average. Similarly, a civilization can be more successful than most of its competitors, and yet fail one day. A few centuries are not enough? There were countries that literally lasted a single day. -- I am not making any specific claim on the relation between IQ and the success of a civilization, just pointing out the "all or nothing" mistake. The average IQ may not even be relevant; outside of democracy, it is more important who is in the positions of power, and what processes selected them there.
But if we assumed a link between IQ and the success of a civilization, I would try to look at migration. The causality can actually be the other way round: when a country becomes successful, smart people will try to move there (or maybe, everyone will try to move there, but smart people will be more likely to succeed), thus increasing the average IQ. On the other hand, a rich civilization may allow more of its stupid people survive than a poor one. The specific policies may turn out to have an IQ-increasing or IQ-decreasing effect. Also, I suck at history, so I have no idea how often a "fall of civilization" means being conquered by an external force, and how often it means falling apart as a result of an internal conflict. (Maybe country X was conquered by country Y, but before that happened, most smart people from X have emigrated to Y? So it was a loss for the country, but not necessarily for the smart people?)
USA is certainly more powerful than Japan, but consider the difference in size, plus the fact that Japan was nuked and defeated, while USA didn't have a military conflict on its own territory for a long time... and yet, today many Americans watch anime, and many American companies need to be protected against their Japanese competitors. I think that considering the starting positions hundred years ago, Japan is doing pretty well. But its possible ambitions are limited by geography. What is other countries' equivalent of anime?
Trump may seem stupid, but Clinton (Bill) and Obama seemed pretty smart and even somewhat nerdy. Still seems like smart people have a greater chance on average.
I wonder whether Christianity hurt itself genetically by associating "knowledge work" with celibate, in the profession of monks. But historically Christian countries seem doing okay, so... On the other hand, within Christianity, Protestant countries (without the celibate) seem doing better. (Also, the monks probably helped their non-celibate relatives.)
I think there are some clear trends... but also many interesting questions. The situation seems to be more obvious on the individual level -- I think, having a magical button that increases IQ by 10 points would be a clear advantage for everyone. But the society as a whole is more complicated.
> I find it sad how the American "IQ vs race" discourse (on either side) effectively devours the discussions about IQ
Kinda like every argument on the Internet to be honest. Like "Do men have it worse or do women?", one ***Hell**** of an argument to have, where men can point out they're the ones being shot at on sight and detained in Palestine and women can point out they're the ones being raped everywhere. No matter how heart-breaking and/or gruesome and/or scary, it's an interesting and enlightening argument. But on the internet, it mostly devolves to shit-flinging and invoking a weird British guy with something up his ass from the looks of how he walks.
And to think that people in the 1990s had all kinds of libertarian cyberpunk future ideas for the internet, look at how far we have descended. Fuck you Mark Cringeberg.
> how the school system fails the gifted kids, whether too much university education has a dysgenic effect
Oh, don't make me start, I could bitch about this for so long they will have to drag me from the laptop's keyboard kicking and screaming to relieve myself.
Gifted kids? Everybody. The school system fails everybody. The school system fails every student. Fails parents. Fails teachers. Fails the spider in the school's bathroom. The school system fails so hard it's impressive, you couldn't have made it fail this hard if you designed it expressly for the purpose.
> Charles Murray
Ah yes, Mr. Lowliest Scum of the Earth. YouTube is non-stop showing me constant videos of him orgasming to the destruction and loss of life in Gaza, all the while whining about "AnTiSeMiTism". I'm immune to scum agreeing with me or having other opinions, but the jolt never quite goes away.
> Do I understand this correctly as a question "assuming that intelligence is genetic, and that it provides an evolutionary advantage
More like "What **are** the factors that makes anyone intelligent to begin with, besides genes?". At some point in time we didn't have the genes for intelligence, right? We were once Bacteria. And then we gradually (through mutation and whatever other biological mechanism that change, add, and remove genes) began to have those genes. What made those genes "stronger" or "likelier" (or whatever appropriate adjective to use here) for some people and not others? Why, starting from a common initial state, did some human groups have different genetic propensity for intelligence than others? Just random perturbations and the resultant feedback loops dependent on them?
> At point 6, I think you are making a false dilemma between intelligence being either everything or nothing.
Agreed, but it's not me making the dilemma, it's the type of HBD believer who says things along the lines of "If we left the future of humanity to Africa, we would be doomed.", and for what it's worth, I tend to largely agree on the overall point, yes, places like most of Sub-Saharan Africa and most of the Middle East are not doing ok right now, and humanity is definitely doomed if somehow we wake up tomorrow to realize that those 2 are the only places left where humanity still breath (unless the loss of the rest of humanity somehow jolts them out of their long civilizational stupor, but who am I kidding).
My objection is specifically with the justification usually given: IQ. The Middle East is a literal birthplace of Civilization (including the Western one), and Africa has quite a few of its own. HBD believers - by implicitly putting IQ and civilizational decay in the same picture frame - kinda tie themselves into committing to either (A) or (B) or (C) that I have listed in point (6). **If** they admit that IQ is not the be-all end-all, they're not tied anymore, but they also lose the right to constantly point out to Africa and the Middle East and say that it's IQ that predicts all of this and all their problems are pseudo-eternal and genetics-driven.
> What is other countries' equivalent of anime?
America has Hollywood, literally the birthplace of film. Turkish TV series are extremely influential in the Middle East, and India has Bollywood. Netflix kinda solved that problem for good anyway, now everyone everywhere can watch Israeli TV and Spanish thrillers and Palestinian documentaries about 1948 massacres. However hard it was to be global with your cinema before Netflix, I think it's no longer now. Maybe I'm wrong.
HBD seems to be a heterodox counter-hypothesis to the theory that maybe four hundred years of slavery, Jim Crow, police brutality, discrimination, and redlining might have a longterm negative effect on certain ethnic groups. I haven’t seen anything compelling to prove that theory is incorrect so why would I need another?
It's a little hard to see how slavery and colonialism centuries ago are causing the children of upper-class blacks to do worse than the children of lower-class whites on their SAT scores. It's not even clear why redlining that kept their grandparents from getting a house in a good neighborhood would explain it. What mechnanism do you suppose explains something like that in terms of that historical hardship?
Other groups have suffered great historical hardships and significant discrimination in the US, (typically less severe than blacks in the US) and yet today they don't show the same kind of differences in outcomes. Irish, Chinese, Japanese, and Jews in the US all seem to be doing okay now. So it isn't obvious that we should expect hardship many generations ago to lead to poverty and dysfunction now.
Black caribbean immigrants tend to do quite well in the US. It's hard to argue that they didn't face a lot of historical hardship (West Indies sugar plantations were basically hell on earth), they often come from very poor and dysfunctional countries, and yet, they do okay here. How does this track with the historical hardships theory?
I think the black/white IQ difference in the US is very well documented, that it reflects an actual and significant difference in average intelligence, and that we should know about this when we try to make policies wrt race and education. I despair of discussing this in public because I think way the hell too many people will round this to "blacks dumb, whites smart" because they can't keep the difference between the average of a distribution and an individual drawn from the distribution straight in their heads. And yet, without knowing about this, you can't think straight about education policy, demographics of tracking and gifted programs, affirmative action in education, etc,
I don't know what fraction of this difference is genetic vs environmental, and I think untangling that question is a hard research problem. Also, as I said above, I think it doesn't matter much for policy decisions.
My guess is that caribbean immigrants to the US are probably smarter and more go-getters than the population they come from, but it's just a guess. It's interesting to me that we have a lot of high-flyers from (for example) Jamaica or Haiti here in the US, and I hope some smart people have spent some time thinking about what's going on there.
I don't think there's anything shocking about some ethnic groups in Africa being very smart on average, as I think the Igbo are. We already know this happened in Europe, with Eastern European Jews apparently ending up quite a bit smarter than the surrounding population.
I think recognizing that groups differ in average ability isn't some huge problem. We can evaluate people as individuals. You don't put all the Asian kids in the advanced math track and all the black kids in the slow math track; instead, you track the kids individually based on test scores and grades and interest. If there are blacks who want to be physicists but can't because of discrimination, this is a problem that needs to be solved; if there end up being fewer black physicists than their fraction of the population due to differences in ability or interest, that's not a problem, it's just how reality is put together.
But the point is there are genuinely people who do believe that black people are racially less intelligent than white people. Influential people like Richard Hanania.
I'm not sure what "racially less intelligent than white people" means. Is that the same as different average IQ scores for different racial groups in the US, plus IQ corresponding to whatever we mean by the word "intelligence" about equally well for blacks and whites?
Let's make this about red and green Easter eggs containing random quantities of money. Each egg was filled with some quantity of money drawn from a normal distribution. The normal distribution from which red eggs were filled has a mean of $85, and the normal distribution from which green eggs were filled has a mean of $100 (in both cases, with a standard deviation of $15).
On average, the green eggs are going to have more money in them. If you pick a green egg, then on average, you'll be about $15 richer than someone who picked a red egg.
Some people might go as far as to say that green eggs are *categorically*, or intrinsically, better than red eggs. Those people are stupid and wrong. Yes, there's a lot of predictive power in knowing an egg's color, because they were filled from different statistical distributions. But some red eggs have $120 and some green eggs only have $80: a red egg with $120 is of course better than a green egg with $80.
Going back to HBD, no reasonable person is claiming that racial differences are categorical/intrinsic/Platonic, but rather, that different racial groups have different distributions of genes which manifest as different IQ distributions.
Africa has its own reasons for being undeveloped. If you’re genuinely curious and you’re not just trying to dunk on black people to prop up your own ego you can try reading “Guns, Germs, and Steel” by Jared Diamond which goes into this topic in depth.
There are a lot of theories for why sub-Saharan Africa remains relatively poor. I don't claim any particular insight, other than to point out that countries remaining poor and dysfunctional seems like it needs less of an explanation than countries managing to get rich and well-run. Almost all of human history has been poor and dysfunctional. Probably a lot of things have to align just right to get out of that hole and start becoming a rich, well-run country.
I disagree with them on the basis that hackneyed arguments serve no purpose. You're either preaching to the choir or the excommunicated at this point. You may as well be preaching about Jesus on a street corner. We have all heard about Jesus and made up our minds about him before you got to us.
There's a post below about reincarnation and there was another one last week. To be clear, I like it when people entertain unusual ideas, so I am not knocking those posts. Yet I wonder if there's something in the water that has weakened materialism as the default view among smart people. In my day you were probably raised religious and then learned about evolution by the age of 13 and maybe mulled that for a few years and were probably an atheist by college. Or if you weren't an atheist by college, it was because you stuck with the religion you were raised on.
But now it is much more common to be raised without any religion and I wonder if materialism is no longer the obvious choice for smart skeptics like it used to be. Perhaps digital existence is changing that? Believing that life was a simulation was a fad a decade ago.
I just wonder if we are going to get crazier and crazier beliefs going forward. Chesterton said something like "The danger in not believing in God is not believing in nothing but believing in anything."
I like the Sopranos version of that when Pauli becomes obsessed with a fortune teller, but Tony asks him:
"What religion are you?"
"Catholic"
"Yeah, Catholic. So that means you don't believe in any of that shit."
I sometimes think interest in various supernatural phenomena is simply cyclical. In 1980s America, the notion of past lives became quite popular among celebrities (notably Shirley MacLaine) and thus the idea worked itself into the pop culture of the time. Of course after people had time to consider it more carefully and realized its weaknesses as an explanation, it receded. It’s been long enough now that many people don’t remember going through all this before and are discovering the idea as if for the first time. After a while I imagine it will recede again as most supernatural explanations do.
It's actually a rule that we're not allowed to believe in spiritualism and fortune-telling 😀 I remember years and years ago when I was a kid, there was a local fair/jumble sale fundraising thing going on with a fortune teller and I wanted to go in but my mother wouldn't let me and my granny explained we couldn't do that.
Obviously it wasn't a *real* fortune teller like the psychics and ghost mediums and the rest of the crew selling the hotlines and websites to learn your fortune, just someone dressed up for the fun of it, but the principle remains:
Of course, "you're not supposed to" never stopped those who wanted to, and folk religion has adapted by making a lot of charms and pseudo-magical practices out of relics and saints and "say this prayer to get your desire".
If I'm reading that link correctly, it doesn't say you're not allowed to *believe* in spiritualism and fortune-telling, it says you're not allowed to *practice* them. (It does occasionally use phrases like "falsely supposed," but overall it doesn't seem to take a clear stand on what proportion of these practices is just mumbo-jumbo and what proportion is calling on the genuine powers of Satan etc.)
I've personally noticed a math / wordcel split on physicalism.
Math and physics people tend to still be hardcore materialists, in my own experience. But your less mathy, more wordy (or more artsy) smart folk tend to entertain other schemas and paradigms at higher rates.
In terms of broader societal implications, I don't think it really makes much of a difference either way. The vast majority of people everywhere have always been either religious or non-materialist, and the rounding-error quantity of "smart skeptics" isn't going to move that broader needle regardless of how they shift.
I can't speak for anyone else, but I reject materialism on several different grounds:
1) What's a rock made of? Grains. What are grains made of? Atoms. What are atoms made of? Sub-atomic particles. What are sub-atomic particles made of? Quantum fields. What are quantum fields made of? Equations on a physicist's white board.
2) I share Wigner's bewilderment regarding why the physical universe obeys laws which can be described so elegantly by mathematics. My preferred resolution to this problem is that universes (and by extension, their governing laws) are generated by sentient minds - not the other way around.
3a) We are 100% certain that our minds are capable of hallucinating "de novo" experiences, because we do it for hours every night.
3b) Even during sober waking hours, we only experience our perception of the world--our internal reconstruction of it--while assuming as a matter of faith that our minds are accurately reconstructing an existant underlying reality.
3c) But you can never confirm that you're actually reconstructing an underlying reality, because you have no way to "directly perceive" the underlying reality, except through your own perceptions.
3d) But remember from 3a that the whole thing could just be a "de novo" hallucination.
4) If the materialists are right and sentience is just an emergent phenomenon that occurs in sufficiently complicated information processing systems, then one must accept that LLMs and Chinese rooms are potentially sentient. How can we confirm that we're in "base-level" reality, and not some emergent form of sentience dwelling inside the matrices of a generative AI algorithm? I can think of about 100 weird ways that future technology might lead to sentient minds (made of either meat or matrices-in-silicon) who think they're living in base-level reality, but actually have no contact with it.
So at the end of the day, my issue with materialism is that one must assume it as a matter of faith. It's a comforting dogma for sure, but in my view, not categorically different from the older variety of comforting dogmas.
re 2) Does the universe really follow laws that can be described elegantly by mathematics, though? To me it seems that we can currently only *approximate* the physics by mathematics, and that the mathematics are sometimes far from elegant...
You can postulate that matter generates minds, but you don't know where the matter comes from or why it behaves consistently. Or you can postulate that minds generate matter, but you don't know where the minds come from or why they behave consistently. My opinion is that the latter view is simpler and less paradoxical.
> What's a rock made of? Grains. What are grains made of? Atoms. What are atoms made of? Sub-atomic particles. What are sub-atomic particles made of? Quantum fields. What are quantum fields made of? Equations on a physicist's white board.
The last sentence is mistaking the map for the territory. The fact that physicists have a map of quantum fields doesn't mean that quantum fields comes from the map. It means that it's the simplest and most accurate way to describe quantum phenomena. If you believe that we are hallucinating it, you're going to have to say how you think hallucinations are coherent enough to reproduce the underlying math, except using the physical observations from I.e. the fine structure constant, when they had no a priori knowledge of fields.
It seems much more unlikely that hallucinations are coherent to that degree than there is something that reality that kicks back in a coherent way. And that if I am going to be assuming dogma, the dogma of "there is coherent reality" is a dogma stronger than "there is no coherent reality, I'm not going to specify how there's no coherent reality, but everything is just going to work out like there is coherent reality and I'm not going to purpose how."
I don't quite understand #2. If a complex system is the result of the emergent behavior of relatively simple parts (as #1--and current theory--suggests existence is), then doesn't it make perfect sense that, once we've worked them out, those simple bits should be relatively simply / elegantly describable (e.g. with mathematics)?
Also on the subject of nominative determinism: The evolution of targeted cannibalism and cannibal-induced defenses in invasive populations of cane toads, DeVore et al. 2021.
Turns out that when you invade an unprepared ecosystem and murder everything in there, the only remaining prey is yourself, and so cane toad tadpoles have taken to selectively tracking and hunting their younger siblings.
I'd appreciate seeing a libertarian response in case I've missed something, or didn't think hard enough about how libertarianism can address the challenges I'm presenting.
Although i've never explicitly identified as a libertarian, i've followed a similar train of thought. I have a nascent essay in my head (perhaps several), and I may at some point develop my thoughts there at greater length, so i'll try to keep this brief.
> Maybe the ideal family really looks less like a communist dictatorship and more like the Juche idea, with smiling depictions of our current and previous leaders all over the walls. But however you conceptualize it, the generic healthy family really has a strong flavor of totalitarianism.
Ben Shapiro has said something like this too, though I can't remember where. It was phrased like "capitalism at work; communism at home".
> Utilitarianism starts with the principle that maximizing human happiness is a moral good, and runs with that. Libertarianism starts with the idea that it’s immoral to violate human rights, and runs with that. The former is as humorous to me as the latter is appealing, but they’re both equally arbitrary.
Actually, I don't think it's completely arbitrary, for reasons that you hint at in your own essay. I.e. you can ground it in contract law. Contracts are essentially bundles of rights and obligations. A right is essentially a power, and an obligation is essentially a responsibility. Which ties into what I call Uncle Ben's Adage: "With great power, comes great responsibility". Which ties into the reason why a nuclear family is necessarily autocratic: kids don't have enough agency or intellect to productively wield political power (political in the sense of affecting policy at the family level, e.g. at what time dinner is held). And contracts are just agreements, which is how coordination usually happens in meatspace. The moral intuitions aren't an expression of cosmic justice or divine revelation, so much as a reflection of sound negotiation principles.
> One natural recourse is to blame democracy and hop on over to neoreaction, fine.
Why yes, in fact, I have drunk that koolaid. But not because of moldbug. I.e. the thing that made me certain that moldbug was at least directionally correct, doesn't actually come from moldbug, but from fiction. There's a few instances in my head that are vaguely gesturing in a similar direction as him. One popular example being the Lord of the Rings. Scott himself has written about being confused about "monarchy is obviously bad, yet nobody batted an eye when Aragorn reclaimed the seat of Gondor... how strange." (Also, why on earth does Moldbug use Starwars as his primary fictional metaphor? alsdkldjflsjfa) (Also, notice that Uncle Ben's Adage is inspired by Spiderman of all things. The ideological remnants of the old paradigm are still present in the water supply, but moderns seemingly don't have the capacity to recognize them.)
And this ties into your complaint about libertarians' lack of culture. They have lots of dissertations, but they're lacking in the aesthetic-vision department. the way forward imo consists of rediscovering mythology, rather than writing yet another quasi-autistic dissertation.
And I suspect a big reason why "LOTR = good" gets compartamentalized off from "democracy = good" is because the utilitarianism (which btw is a wildly confused paradigm) of the current liberal zeitgeist skews people toward treating stories purely as cheap entertainment, rather than dissertations meant to be dissected.
What I missed is any mention of what I think are good aspects of libertarianism. Broadly, respect for bodily autonomy. Specifically, freedom from government interference with medical decisions (including abortion, trans, etc.) and freedom from government interference with what you can put into your body (drugs).
> "Shouldn’t the freedom of Americans to defend ourselves have been protecting us from gun violence? Evidently not—and a new analysis from 2023 reiterates the lessons no one mentioned to me in 1993: The United States has not only far more civilian-owned guns than every other developed country,28 it also has far more murder sprees, accounting for 73% of the total mass shootings out of all developed countries.29"
Stop that.
Stop that right now.
"Murder sprees," may be breathlessly covered by the news (unless they're by and of certain demographics...), but they are vanishingly rare compared to estimated self-defense usage (and self-defense usage does indeed have to be estimated, because crimes thwarted by the mere presence of a gun generally go unreported). The most conservative, anti-gun down-playing of estimated self-defense cases are still going to vastly outnumber the victims of spree killings in any given year. We don't even need to look that up.
And this is a real thing.
I'm 44 and I've used a pistol to thwart an unambiguous imminent attack by a stranger TWICE.
And I have no doubt there were times I was dismissed as a target worth approaching due to the way carrying (with training!) changes situational awareness and demeanor. My gun is a tool that empowers me to live a higher-risk lifestyle than many women would be comfortable experiencing.
And furthermore, three fellow gun owners I know have similarly thwarted felony attempts on them, without ever firing a shot (only one of these five encounters resulted in a police report).
So yes, I'm grateful we still have this "libertarian" freedom and I very, very cheerfully accept the risk of being the victim of a spree shooting in order to have a reasonable level of confidence about not being the victim of a mundane one-on-one violent felony (and having a better chance than an unarmed person in a spree shooting, for that matter).
"ChatGPT summary of research from Harvard", does not exactly rank high on the credibility index these days.
More generally, approximately all research on "gun violence" by medical professionals and institutions is crap. It's not their area of professional expertise, almost none of them are Scott Alexander level polymathic geniuses, and their motives are compromised. Saying that doctors are the experts we should turn to gun violence because gunshot wounds are a medical problem, is like saying we should put Harvard Medical School in charge of the investigation(s) of the Boeing 737 MAX because blunt trauma and third-degree burns are medical problems.
You'll get better results from e.g. criminologists, or the FBI/DOJ if you're looking for an institutional inquiry.
I think Switzerland also has a lot of gun ownership and much less of the specifically American problems (and is probably excluded on purpose from many statistics trying to link gun ownership to violence).
My guess is that Americans are simply more aggressive than people in other developed countries, on average. (Why? An interesting question, but a different topic.) All the gun violence is better explained as a result of the overall aggressiveness... without guns, the same people would probably use knives... or fists and stones.
Yeah, it is harder to do a mass murder using a knife, but it is also harder to use a knife for self-defense.
Yeah, I pretty much tune out whenever anyone talks about "gun violence". Because, OK, we can solve that one easy - just give me 10% of federal anti-gun-violence spending to finance my Death Ray R&D project, and once I get the bugs worked out "gun violence" will be as rare and archaic a thing as "spear violence". And that's what you asked for, right?
But even within the realm of "gun violence", "mass shootings" are such a minor part of the problem that they should be ignored in any first-order analysis because, for any policy anyone might propose, even just the unintended consequences w/re all the violence that *isn't* mass shootings, would outweigh even a complete end to mass shootings. If your plan eliminates mass shootings but substantially reduces armed self-defense against other crimes, it's doing more harm than good. If it eliminates mass shootings but also substantially reduces armed robberies and the associated homicides, then advertise it on *that* basis because that's where most of the good will come from.
But there's rational analysis, and then there's the sort of "analysis" that starts with accepting the media's if-it-bleeds-it-leads framing of the issue and cares about what the media tells people to care about. Which is to say, "gun violence" and "mass shootings" but also, "libertarians BAD!", so once I see the gun violence and mass shooting stuff I know there isn't likely to be anything worth reading about liberty.
> just give me 10% of federal anti-gun-violence spending to finance my Death Ray R&D project, and once I get the bugs worked out "gun violence" will be as rare and archaic a thing as "spear violence".
It says something about this blog that I can't tell whether you're joking about creating a more advanced hand weapon, or joking about ending all life on earth. :-)
I skimmed it. I think you're trying to prove far too much.
If you want to talk about the decline of U.S. power, consider that it has nowhere to go but down. After WW2, America was the only western power in good shape and essentially became world hegemon. And again after the fall of the Soviet Union, the U.S. was the polar world power. It's hardly surprising that the world power structure is drifting towards multipolarity after the better part of a century of American dominance.
Cross-country comparisons are often poorly predictive because they fail to account for demographics. You can talk about how great Norwegian policy is relative to the U.S., but Norwegian immigrants in the U.S. also outperform the natives. Claiming a small country with a homogenous population has lower violence than a large country with a diverse population is factually true but tying this to policy choices is dubious.
Also, the life expectancy graph? Russia and India both had sharp decreases in life expectancy at the same time as the U.S. You argue that somehow America had too much freedom and was outperformed by authoritarian China. But notably (not) bastions of libertarianism Russia and India had too much freedom, even worse than the U.S.?
I'm not a libertarian but the part on guns really seems beside the point. Are the young black men shooting lots of people with handguns because of all the libertarians with gun safes full of rifles?
My not-very-informed impression is that making concealed carry permits much easier to get has basically no effect on crime. The obvious guess is that the set of people using handguns in crimes weren't ever going to bother with permits, so letting more rule-following people get a permit to be allowed to carry concealed didn't increase the number of shootings. And at the same time, the set of people walking around armed probably never becomes high enough that it substantially deters crime.
I haven't been following national politics much lately, I've been too busy this spring on the farm. If you're interested in what life is like on a small farm, there's this: https://falsechoices.substack.com/p/farm-update. I post about farming on a fairly regular basis, so if this something that interests you, subscribe for free, no charge on this substack.
You added 300 apple trees in the past 4 years for cider? That's gotta make several hundred gallons of cider. What kind of equipment do you have to chop, press, and ferment that quantity?
Because it's an open thread, here's a random meme about programming, translated from a language most of you don't read.
Someone else's code
I was recently asked why programmers hate working with other people's code. I thought for a while how to convey to the average user the whole essence of fubar. I decided to give a little analogy:
Imagine that you were entrusted with completing the construction of a laboratory on the island after another foreman. You arrive to the site and find there, in addition to the unfinished building: a huge fan (the size of a building), a large balloon, and a room full of brooms. Scratching your head,
you sort out this trash and finish the laboratory. You hand over the laboratory to the scientists, but 5 minutes later they run out shouting: “POISONOUS GAS LEAKING!!!”
- How so, damn it! It should work! - you scream in despair and call the previous foreman:
- Vasya, poisonous gas is leaking! What is the problem?
- I don’t know, everything should have worked. Did you change anything?
- Couple of things, I took out the brooms...
- The brooms were holding up the ceiling!
- What??? WTF, sorry???
- I said the brooms were holding up the ceiling. There were gas tanks above them. Very heavy gas tanks, I had to cram brooms into the room below.
- You should at least put a note on the door saying brooms are used to hold up the ceiling! We have poisonous gas leaking here! What do we do?
- Turn on the fan. It will blow the gas off the island.
- I dismantled it right away!
- Why?
- Why did you build a 120-ton fan? Couldn't you have put there a box of GAS MASKS?
- You need to search for a box of gas masks, but I still had the fan left over from my previous project.
- Vasya, I removed your fan! We're suffocating here!
- WTF are you doing there then? Get on the hot air balloon and GTFO!
"Good news. I figured out what that thing you just incinerated did. It was a Morality Core they installed after I flooded the Enrichment Center with a deadly neurotoxin, to make me stop flooding the Enrichment Center with a deadly neurotoxin. So get comfortable, while I warm up the neurotoxin emitters."
To be fair, maintaining software is only sometimes like that.
If I understand Gnuradio correctly, the way it decides which vector instructions it can use to speed up the computation is that there's a 32 bit int, where each bit that can be set represents the fact that the cpu supports a particular vector extension to a particular cpu architecture (i386, ARM, MIPS, RISC-V). Some of these architectures have several vector extensions defined (e.g.i386) each taking up a bit of which we have at most 32. Now, what happens if the total number of vector extensions across all the architectures it has been ported to is greater than 32? At this point, we recall that RISCV vector extensions can be configured by the vendor of a particular chip in various ways...
Yes, clearly, they should not have written it that way.
To slightly more generalise, if you thinking of writing a software system in such a way that you can never ever have more than 32 of a thing (because that's how big an int is on ... er, most platforms ..) be really sure that no one is ever going to want a change where you end up with more than 32 of them.
And I think I spent about two days tracing through the source code of the LLVM MIPS backend to find the place where what they meant was "am I compiling for a 64 bit MIPS CPU" but what they actually wrote was "am I compiling for MIPS64" (hint: there are other 64 bit versions of the MIPS specification in addition to MIPS64)
Introductory programming books tell you, if you think there's a bug in the compiler you're almost certainly wrong and the bug is in your program instead. This is very good advice for beginners. On the other hand, sometimes ... hey, look, when I compiled my program the compiler was seriously confused about whether the target is 32 bit or 64 bit. Time to spend the next two days reading the compiler backend to find the bug.
Попробуйте подражать программе вашего предшественника после потери исходного кода.
мне пришлось это сделать
You’d recognize the company name in an instant. I won’t mention it’s name though. They just flippin’ lost the source code somehow. I was working on the replacement that had been outsourced to two different countries for development before I was hired to straighten things out.
I have a month by month graphical record of my resting heart rate during the period. It is normally around 60 BPM. After a few months it was around 100 BPM.
Worst job I ever took on. уебывайте indeed! I can feel my heart rate ticking up just remembering it.
In a certain development project, most of the source was under revision control,and automatically tested by continuous integration every time someone made a change. Nearly all of it. Except one step that was done using a binary that lived on some developers local machine. A change caused catastrophic non-workingness. We then discovered that our ability to roll back was somewhat constrained because the last few months of test passes in continuous integration depended on a binary to which we did not actually know the version of the source.
When I recently read that the King of Jordan, who is married to a Palestinian, is a Hashemite, and that the Hashemites had killed tens of thousands of Palestinian in earlier wars, I was intrigued.
So I looked up Hashemites in Encyclopedia Brittanica, and Yikes. This story is complex — even before one considers the British role in the Middle and Near East, or Biblical narratives reaching back some 2,300 years. Sea Peoples, Philistines, and such. The key seems to be tribalism.
Fur trappers on the Gila River in the American Far Southwest found Western Apache raiders allied with the Yavapai in raids against the Akimel O’odham, the Tohono O’odham, and the Sopori. Friars trying to recruit Christians convinced Apache and Yavapai raiders not to execute women and children in their raids, but to take them as slaves.
Today’s Columbia and U.C.L.A. protesters would likely denounce the friars as colonial slave-masters and racists, cheer the raiders, and boycott the Pima farmers. They seem to have a knack for rejecting what they robotically call The Right Side of History. Is this exhibitionism and agitprop just postmodern tribalism?
"My outgroup would likely do this terrible thing, even though I have no evidence of them actually doing it - why would they do this thing I don't have evidence of them doing?".
The Drama Club has taken over the Yearbook Committee. They say this kind of thing won't happen in the eight grade. Thirteen-year-olds are said to be more mature.
I've been trying to educate myself on basic climate science, but I'm having some difficulty wrapping my head around something. Say CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is increased enough to cause 1C of warming. What does this look like mechanistically?
CO2 is a greenhouse gas, meaning it both absorbs and emits longwave radiation. In areas with high local CO2 concentration, emitted radiation is mostly reabsorbed by other GHG molecules. As the atmosphere thins out farther away from the surface of the Earth, GHG concentration decreases, so emitted radiation is more likely to escape . If CO2 concentration is increased, the height at which emission can escape is effectively raised.
The effective temperature of Earth sans atmosphere is ~250K. This is the temperature at which radiation is emitted at the top of atmosphere. Now, Earth still receives the same exact amount of energy from the sun, so the effective temperature is unchanged. The only change is the height at which radiation is emitted. This isn't a discrete height but multiple layers of temperature bands; it can be treated as a discrete height for simplicity.
Is the answer any/all of the following:
A. Stupid Simple: Thermal energy spends longer in the atmosphere because it has to travel farther to escape. More time for molecules to vibrate into each other = hotter atmosphere = slower surface cooling.
B. Lapse Rate: The troposphere cools with increasing height due to gas expansion; the C/km rate is lapse rate. Lapse rate is held constant but the 250K band is farther away from the surface. Ergo the surface must warm to maintain the lapse rate. (This seems kind of backwards to me. Also, ozone is IR active, and the stratosphere has a negative lapse rate).
C. Effective Surface Temperature: The Earth still has to return all of the energy it receives from the Sun. As the average emission height increases, molecules at that height are cooler. Cooler molecules emit less energy. The planet emits less energy until it warms enough that the new emission height is 250K.
I will aim my answer well below your level because that allows me to explain the greenhouse for an hypothetically present audience.
First of all, the Greenhouse effect is very dumbly named. Everybody has an intuition of why it is warm in a greenhouse: It prevents the warm air from just floating away. That intuition is entirely correct but completely unrelated to the greenhouse effect. Now it turns out if you put a greenhouse on the moon, where there is no air, then the moon-dirt under the greenhouse would still end up warmer than the moon-dirt outside and that is the greenhouse's greenhouse effect. But basically everybody's intuitions about real greenhouses are both correct and highly misleading when it comes to the (atmospheric) Greenhouse effect.
Now look at Earth if we sucked the atmosphere away. It actually radiates heat away. This is more visible for glowing hot objects but even colder stuff glows a little. If you look at glowing hot objects, hotter objects glow brighter but also at a different temperatures, for example white-hot is hotter than red-hod. The earth is basically only infrared-hot, so it glows mostly infrared and very dimly, so we can't really see the glow. Still it glows a little and, since glowing moves energy out, that cools it down. On the other hand, the sun shines on the Earth, and that heats it up.
Lets look at the Earth if we sucked the atmosphere away:
If Earth glowed off more Energy than it got from sunshine, it would cool down. But after cooling down it would glow less and therefore loose less energy. At some point it would be down to glowing off only exactly as much energy as the sun sends in and then it would stop cooling. On the other hand, if the Earth glowed off less energy than it received from the Sun, then it would heat up and therefore glow more, again fixing the imbalance. So basically the Earth has an equilibrium temperature where gains from sunshine and losses from glow are exactly equal and it stays at that temperature. Without an atmosphere, that equilibrium temperature would indeed be about 255K (-18°C, -1°F), which is a little chill.
What the greenhouse on the moon and our atmosphere have in common is that their reflectivity depends on the wavelength/frequency/color of the light. Both the atmosphere and the greenhouse don't reflect visible light much, which is handy because if there was a mirror up there it would be dark down here. But both are fairly reflective for infrared light. (Even more pedantically also absorptive, so the glass and the atmosphere can also be heated themselves and then also glow themselves, but that basically cancels out and we will ignore it.) So basically very little of the light coming from the sun is reflected back to space (because it has colors that aren't reflected) but a good deal of the light glowed off by Earth never makes it out to space (because it has colors reflected by the atmosphere/glasshouse). But on net what comes in must go back out, so the Earth is a little hotter and therefore glows a little more to make up for the part of its glow that doesn't make it to space. This is the Greenhouse effect. By the way, we are overdoing it at the moment, but basically we like the Greenhouse effect, since 255K is not great weather.
Now on to the actual question:
Yes, greenhouse gases both absorb and emit longwave radiation, but that cancels out quickly and on net none of the radiation stays in the gasses. (Obviously no longer true if you add nights and weather and so on, but we are painting with a broad brush here.) Averaged over not-so-long time, every bit of atmosphere emits as much radiation as it absorbs, so on net you can think about it more like tossing the radiation about in random directions than absorbing it for good. But critically, the greenhouse gas molecules don't only emit upwards, part of what they emit goes back down, so in aggregate some of the energy the ground glowed off goes back to the ground. So on net more like a reflection than an absorption.
And then the ground gets a little warmer, so it glows more, so it makes up for the part of its glow reflected by greenhouse gases, so global warming.
Also, air touches the ground and when the ground warms it heats the air and then warm air moves up and <insert meteorology textbook here>, but I think that is a distraction at the level of basically understanding the Greenhouse effect.
Thanks for writing this, although the mechanics are a little more simplified than what I wanted. I think you should be careful framing it as surface warming. While IR emission is omnidirectional, it's better to frame the effect as a net reduction in the cooling of the surface. Otherwise it might imply that a cooler body is transferring heat to a warmer body.
C-ish? The very idea of the greenhouse is that the radiation directly from the surface has a lower chance to escape directly without heating up the atmosphere.
I don't read that sentence as implying that it did/didn't/will/won't happen, just as setting up a situation that they're trying to understand the theory of regardless.
I can only see Hindi subtitles, and besides, I'm a little disappointed you haven't mentioned the ESC yet, so I thought you might enjoy a whiff of a send-up of all euro song clichés (as Terry Wogan would say): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1TzHJbvJik
At least they are more memorable than the real ones... I listened to them and can't remember anything. Yes, Ireland is silly, Germany will come last again, and why did they censor the t-shirt of the Finnish guy, but not the lack of t-shirt of the Cyprus lady? Austria has the most views, no idea why.
I bet the Finnish T-shirt censoring is because of product sponsorship rules. Given the name of the band, I wonder whether that's part of their schtick, that their outfits have to be blurred out in broadcasts...
Did you ever see the TV show "Star Trek: the Next Generation"? Austria looks like an episode with the plot "Dr. Crusher went on a first contact mission to the Planet of the Sluts, but was hit on the head and went native."
A pity, for me on Youtube in the settings it auto-translates Hindi to English. Not very well, but enough to give the gist. But even without that, I think you can get what's going on. Tehre's one scene which is a direct reference to a scene in "Bahubali" and I went "that's that scene!" and next thing this was acknowledged in the dialogue, so they're having fun with it as they're going on.
It's not terribly deep but I liked the contrast between the wanna-be superhero who models himself on Western characters like Spiderman and Batman, versus the real superhero who steps up from being a charming rogue and emulates Indian hero, Hanuman. A mix of cartoon violence, romance, and some tragic elements. I honestly will watch the sequel if/when it comes out and it's on Youtube or somewhere!
As to the Eurovision Song Contest, I've refrained so far due to the delicate politics. Ukraine versus Russia is long-running by now, so this year no Russian entry. But there *is* an Israeli entry, and there are the calls to boycott, and those acts continuing on with the contest seem to have come in for criticism.
Run-through the contestants here (I like the Armenian one, but then I'm a sucker for folk-tinged performances, it's meant to be national song after all). Forget the Irish entry, it's terrible. I don't mean that in a 'clutching my pearls because I'm so shocked!' way, on the contrary; I'm Gen X, we had Marilyn Manson for pete's sake. No, it's just an awful song.
Australia, God bless 'em, are still trying but um. Have to see the performance on the night to see what the live act is like. Belgium seem to have decided "feck it, let's go Rocky Horror!"
Why do some people believe that conspiracy theories and other false beliefs are dangerous, sometimes to the point of justifying censorship?
One reason is that in a democracy, the people need to be well-informed for the country to be run well. But what if we don't have a democracy, is there still an argument there?
The conspiracy theory I'd put a relatively high probability on involves Bruce Ivins, the guy who was pretty-much declared to have been the anthrax bomber right after he committed suicide. I figure there is a non-negligible chance of either:
a. He committed suicide, and was on the suspect list of the FBI, so they decided they could close the case and declare victory. The actual anthrax bomber is still out there, unpunished.
b. He was part of a conspiracy to carry out the anthrax bombings, and his co-conspirators poisoned him to ensure he would not turn state's evidence on him.
Most of the weight there is on (a), honestly. I think the people working on this case very much wanted to close it, they'd already gotten the wrong guy once (Hatfil), and probably once a plausible suspect died, they had a big incentive to decide he must have been the guy. Also, there are previous incidents(see Richard Jewell) that suggest that when the FBI is pursuing a high-profile terrorism case, they are probably overly interested in getting someone than in making sure it's the right someone.
The main reason to suspect (b) is because if he was one of the people involved, his co-conspirators would have had a very strong incentive to try to fake his suicide. But I would expect something more definitive and fast than poisoning by tylenol overdose--that's still likely to leave some time for a deathbed confession.
The anthrax bombings were also very odd as terrorism went. Without the warning notes that came with the anthrax spores, way more people would have died, but it's possible that nobody would have realized it was terrorism. (The Japanese cult that released nerve gas on the Tokyo subway many years ago had previously carried out a bunch of biological attacks, killed a few people, but the authorities had never figured out these were attacks rather than just weird illnesses. Without those notes, I imagine there'd still be people at the CDC to this day wondering how on Earth they'd gotten a couple of inhalation anthrax cases in the middle of New York.). Those attacks were a big part of the atmosphere of panic after 9/11, with Congress being evacuated several times for biological weapons threats, and you can imagine this as a part of a coordinated campaign to try to push us into war. Though probably it was just a lone nutcase or two, because trying to get the US willing to bomb someone back into the stone age after 9/11 was kind-of redundant--almost everyone was out for blood already.
The one conspiracy theory that I can never quite shake is the possibility of foul play in the death of Senator Paul Wellstone. His Beechcraft went down near a place where I sat around many campfires drinking cheap beer with my high school friends, just outside of my home town.
The fatal crash happened a couple weeks before the November election in 2002. I liked the man and his politics, old school, non-woke, liberal, Democrats are the party of the working class stuff.
The FBI ruled out foul play after following criminal leads. He was receiving death threats from the day he was elected.
The FBI had also been keeping tabs on Wellstone since his 1970 arrest at an anti-war protest.
I try not to go full Oliver Stone when I think about it.
Earlier in 2002 my wife and I shared a sleeping car from Amsterdam to Vienna with an Iraqi couple on what was probably their last somewhat normal holiday.
Things went amiably until the guy spotted our blue passports. He had been taking us for a British couple till then. He didn’t speak much English after that. Can’t say I blamed him.
I agree with your intuition - there's a number of beliefs I have that those in power would probably describe as "conspiracy theories". But I think there is a serious risk when conspiratorial thinking has been supercharged by social media, not just for the democratic process. E.g. if people generally can't form accurate beliefs, I imagine that would hurt entrepeneurship (the ability of society to organise itself and use its resources to create value).
I dont believe that conspiracy theories in general are dangerous or should be censored. People believed in Von Danikan's theories about ancient astronauts for decades but it didn't seem to do any harm. But certain specific conspiracy theories can hurt people: for example the theory that vaccines are dangerous and are only produced in order to provide profits to pharmacutical companies probably killed people. I would tolerate censoring that.
In addition, my impression is that various people are now deliberately weaponizing conspiracy type theories in order to manipulate people. Yes, I suspect that there is a conspiracy to politicize conspiracy style theories.
The problem isn't theories about conspiracies--there really are conspiracies, sometimes they get unearthed and end up in the newspapers or in court. The problem is the broken conspiracy theory mindset, where all evidence to the contrary somehow strengthens your conviction that the conspiracy theory is true. It's confirmation bias run amok.
There are surely dozens of actual conspiracies happening right now that would be big news if unearthed. These won't ever involve million-person omnicompetent leakproof organizations, but they'll often involve someone being on the take, or getting their buddy to help them win a contract or an election, or someone calling in favors to try to suppress an investigation that would embarrass them if it happened, or whatever.
When someone believes a conspiracy theory, it is easy to extend it in a way that supports your political goals. For example, if you want people to stop using vaccines, just tell them that the vaccines were invented by Jews, or that the government wants to control their minds using some combination of vaccines and space rays. People who already believe that Jews control the world or that the government is trying to control their minds using space rays, will find it difficult to object against the new findings, especially when you have already established yourself as a supporter of their "alternative truth".
The set of people who actually believe the Jews/CIA/Russia/etc are beaming thoughts into their heads is very small and mostly needs to be properly treated for their mental illness.
Well, if there was a false conspiracy theory that an evil outgroup had polluted the drinking water with radioactive particles, and many came to believe it, there would be a lot of chaos and distress, and probably some substantial harm would come to some people from, for ex., fights for access to "safe" water, or from their becoming dehydrated because they couldn't access any "safe" water. Some frail and fragile people would die. Active, employed people would spend less time working because of the urgency of locating drinkable water. All that's undesirable for any country, even if it's not a democracy.
So how do you avoid the crazy conspiracy theories without also suppressing the correct reporting about the problems with unsafe drinking water in Flint, MI or Jackson, MS?
Is there a way to suppress conspiracy theories? I don't know of one. Anyway, I wasn't arguing in favor of suppressing them. Somebody asked whether they were even a problem in a place that was not a democracy, & the radioactive water rumor was my example of a conspiracy theory that would do harm to a nation no matter how it was run.
Some people think that social media sites and such should try to suppress conspiracy theories. Maybe they're right, I'm not sure. I just note that a generic "no conspiracy theories" rule seems like it can suppress both crazy discussions of non-issues and sensible discussions of real issues.
As a more concrete example, I think the Catholic sexual abuse scandal had all the markers of a conspiracy theory, and would have likely been suppressed by a conspiracy-theory-suppressing mechanism. I mean, huge conspiracy across decades and hundreds of high church officials, it's obviously some kind of crazy anti-Catholic bigotry, right? And yet....
It doesn't look to me that anyone is censoring conspiracy theories. Please give me examples. But I think it's a conspiracy theory that conspiracy theories are being censored.
There can be a certain amount of our glorious homeland / their barbarous wastes here.
People interested in conspiracy theories can be prolific in their posting on that subject while being disinterested in others; depending on where they are attempting to build their soapbox, their discourse may be perceived as noise and moderated accordingly.
Since most people are generally the heroes of their own stories, /their/ mental model of what is happening then becomes "I was censored because my knowledge is too dangerous" and this is added to the conspiracy theory.
It's fairly common for people who strongly disapprove of specific conspiracy theories to advocate for outspoken proponents of those theories to be deplatformed. And it isn't unheard-of for publishers, networks, social media platforms, etc to respond to social pressure to this effect by making at least a token effort to deplatform the worst offenders.
This kind of deplatforming isn't really censorship in the strict sense, since it's private actors curating their own walled gardens rather than a formal government policy, but there are enough similarities (especially if most or all the big platforms seem to have similar policies) that deplatforming often gets rounded up to censorship in people's minds. There also is some indirect government pressure, in the form of congressional hearings about misinformation on social media and the like.
Censored by whom? There is a very wide gulf between "Twitter, a private company, decided they weren't interesting in helping you distribute your conspiracy to a wide audience" and "the actual government literally threatened you with jail time to prevent you from distributing your conspiracy theory."
"It's not censorship because a corporation did it, not the government" makes about as much sense as "it's not assault because a private citizen did it, not the police." You've still got a black eye at the end of the day. If a tiny number of monopoly corporations control the public square and decide that certain content will be removed, they aren't breaking the law but there is indeed censorship going on.
Conspiracy theories almost require belief of censorship to be memetically fit, in order to explain why not everyone already knows this big thing and how you're part if the secret special enlightened club.
Also, the censors have the power to control the media and assassinate all who oppose them... but somehow they cannot take down this one YouTube video that exposes them (or track down the author who clearly receives money from YouTube so his contact information must already be in the system).
Depends on the conspiracy theory, right? Not every conspiracy theory is maximally crazy. As far as I know (not much), the "moon landing was faked" people don't seem to think that the fakery is being hidden by a campaign of assassination. I don't think the flat-earthers think that either, but again, it's not like I'm paying any attention to them.
Of course! And it must be a curated personalized censorship in my case. The forces of evil are intent on making sure all the information fed to me is being censored selectively censored. That's why I am out of the loop! Thank you for making me aware of the darkness that surrounds my life!
Weak minds with big egos. They can't process arguments well enough to disprove them, but instead of viewing it as a fault in themselves they view it as a fault of the system for allowing the arguments to defeat them.
There was a shitpost on Twitter that nonetheless resonated with me, about how conspiracy theories used to be nerdy and weird and esoteric, the province of dusty old bookstores and obsessive shut-ins sending poorly mimeographed newsletters through the mail, and now it's just boring normie bullshit. Some influencer posts on Tik Tok that the Earth is shaped like a banana and the zoomers just instantly believe it but also don't actually act as if they've learned something staggering and new. Believing in the current conspiracy is just a pose one takes on to fit in socially, like being goth or being queer.
I guess what I'm really saying here is, #bringbackgatekeeping.
In the late 90s and early 00s I found myself doing a lot of freeway driving late at night, so I started listening to Coast to Coast AM a lot. Back then it seemed like there were a lot of unique, bespoke conspiracies and paranormal beliefs. The rise of the normie internet seems to, if anything, have standardized or at least narrowed the conspiracy ecosystem quite a bit. I’ve always been a conspiracy tourist; I don’t believe them but I’m fascinated by speculating about how people came to these conclusions. I think Qanon is a product of this standardization of conspiracies. Certain stories are elevated while others are discarded. Many of the elements of Q go back well into the C2C AM era of conspiracies, like satanic sexual abuse of children and the various Rothschilde/Illuminati/Bilderburg style group. Others seem to have fallen off entirely like reptile/dragon-like aliens secretly ruling the earth. Q is kind of a greatest hits compilation of the last 20 years of internet “researchers” comparing notes and settling on (what they consider) the likely correct narratives. Its been fascinating if you’re into these sorts of things w/o actually believing any of them. The latest twist being the guy that self-immolated outside the Trump trial and his takes on crypto. Even now Q and other conspiracy groups are studying and calibrating on his literature. Also the UFO people are as fired up as they’ve ever been.
Yes, I think so. One danger of outlandish conspiracy theories is that they sap the energy and attention away from actual conspiracies. For example, I have a hunch that all the weird Q stuff made it harder for a lot of people to take the Epstein death conspiracy with any degree of seriousness, even though it sounds plausible that he was silenced because of all the things he knew. The idiotic 9-11 conspiracies (I mean, there was a someone here a few months ago arguing fervently that it wasn't planes that hit the towers!) are a great distraction from serious questions about Saudis' ties with the Bushes. The list goes on and on.
Another problem is that they condition the mind to accept bullshit. Once you start on the path "maybe the Earth is flat after all, there's a 3-hour video explaining it in great detail", there's no lie, no obvious BS, no matter how ridiculous, that you wouldn't be able to accept. The mind's inoculation against BS is a fragile thing, and it can easily be wrecked.
One other additional problem that amplifies the energy sapping effect is that conspiracy theories are often unfalsifiable, or nearly so. They often include something like "and the evidence for this is being actively hidden". So refuting them takes a _disproportionate_ amount of time and effort.
_Sometimes_ this effect is not too bad, e.g. "The moon landings were faked" requires, roughly speaking, the cooperation of 400,000 people working on the Apollo program, plus foreign adversaries such as the USSR. No possible way. "Three may keep a secret, if but two lie in their graves."
And yet - the moon landings conspiracy is widespread, despite (because of?) its utter ridiculousness.
One factor that sustains a lot of this nonsense is that these beliefs are cost-free. A plumber can believe that Earth is flat and NASA just makes movies in a basement without any impact on his job/lifestyle. Conversely, if a sat comm engineer tried to use a flat-earth model in his job (there's no such model, but, say, he creates one), he'd quickly find out that nothing works.
So for most these people believing in ridiculous conspiracies is an identity marker. True believers, like the guy who showed up at Planet Pizza joint to free the children, are very rare and I honestly feel bad for them.
I think there's this ugly thing that sometimes happens like this:
a. People mostly determine their beliefs using social mechanisms--I see what everyone around me believes, and more-or-less believe that. Maybe I have an occasional doubt or question, but basically I follow what my society/community/family and friends believe.
b. Most of the time, even the completely batshit insane subset of these beliefs aren't really very relevant. I can think the Earth is 5000 years old and flat, that the moon landing was faked, that space aliens built the pyramids, etc., and mostly this doesn't keep me from being a perfectly fine plumber, programmer, elementary school teacher, etc.
c. Once in a while, these insane social-proof beliefs have significant personal consequences--maybe you're a 70-year old 300 lb diabetic with emphysema who refused to get a covid vaccine because of some dumbass conspiracy theory you read on the internet; maybe you became convinced that the world was ending on May 10, 2024 and burned through all your money and quit your job and left your wife, and now you're broke and unemployed and in the middle of an ugly divorce. Those social mechanisms for deciding truth screwed you over.
d. Sometimes, the crazy beliefs you accepted via social proof aren't individually harmful, but they're disastrous when they become widespread. A real-world example now is people refusing to get their kids vaccinated against measles, which causes problems only when a lot of people do it. A bigger example is counterfactual beliefs about politics or economics--if enough people in the US become convinced that a communist revolution and a dictatorship of the proletariat is the path to progress and prosperity for all, the whole country will go into the toilet (or get sent to the gulag, or starve in the dark because collective farms aren't producing much food and the power companies died after all the engineers got sent to the countryside to be peasants, or....)
>And yet - the moon landings conspiracy is widespread, despite (because of?) its utter ridiculousness.
True :-(
>One factor that sustains a lot of this nonsense is that these beliefs are cost-free.
Hmm... Agreed, in their adherent's day-to-day lives. I'm not sure what the effects are on their adherents in general discussions. I guess they wind up in somewhat the same situations as trolls? As you pointed out earlier, they wind up sapping energy and attention from everyone else.
The barber my dad took me to as a kind believed there as a 2nd Shadow Earth that we couldn't see b/c it was always on the exact opposite side of the sun as our Earth. They are technologically several centuries ahead of us, and Jesus came from there and also returned there. It had no effect on his ability to cut hair.
All kinds of goofy counterfactual beliefs work this way. If you are 100% convinced that Jesus and all of Christianity were made up as an elaborate practical joke that got out of hand, or that the Holocaust never happened, or that AIDS was created as a bioweapon to kill off blacks and gays, or that the Earth is 5000 years old, none of that affects your ability to cut hair, fill cavities, wire houses, program computers, etc.
It violates the laws of physics if your solar system includes e.g. Jupiter and if your counter-Earth doesn't have ridiculously powerful planetary stationkeeping thrusters.
However, only the L4 and L5 Lagrange points are stable.
>The points L1, L2, and L3 are positions of unstable equilibrium. Any object orbiting at L1, L2, or L3 will tend to fall out of orbit; it is therefore rare to find natural objects there, and spacecraft inhabiting these areas must employ a small but critical amount of station keeping in order to maintain their position.
Am I the only one wondering if Boeing is just straight up murdering people who may be dangerous to the financial future of the company? I hate conspiracy theories and my hatred for them is making it hard for me to even take myself seriously when I have this thought. If it weren't for Q and other stupid bullsh*t then maybe serious people would be talking more about this.
Yeah, I wonder about it. It doesn't jibe with anything I know about Boeing, but the first one did look very suspicious, so I hope the deaths are being investigated closely. It's not impossible that in an organization the size of Boeing, there's a few bad apples, and one of them knows people who know people. Or that contacts in the government were doing it to cover up shared malfeasance or simply prevent worse disclosures (Boeing has important military contracts), and in that case the investigation might be fake as well.
I don't put a high probability on any of this, so mostly I treat it as a conspiracy theory I can still joke about.
The problem with this is, how does the hypothetical "bad apple" in Boeing *benefit* from killing the whistleblowers? There might be a significant benefit for this to *Boeing*, though even that seems dubious when you're hypothetically killing people after they've already blown the whistle. But no particular person *within* Boeing, even the CEO, is going to capture more than a small fraction of that benefit, in exchange for taking on the full risk for committing multiple murders.
And getting enough of Boeing's stakeholders on board to make this an actual policy decision, with adequate incentives for whoever is going to be taking the risk as designated fall guy if things go wrong, gets you into the realm of impractical conspiracies that would leak in nothing flat.
Maybe the person wants revenge, maybe the person wants to intimidate future whistleblowers, maybe the whistleblower hadn't revealed everything yet, maybe the whistleblower knew things that the whistleblower thought were unimportant but which were actually important, maybe the whistleblower was playing both sides by engaging in blackmail.
I don't think it would make economic sense, unless the person were going to be held directly responsible for something, and the death prevented that. It might well be narcissism or vengeance or some other manifestation of ego. And I can't see it as a Board decision, but maybe one or two highly-placed people conspiring on their own would be enough. Although at that point, you'd have to start wondering about your co-equal conspirators turning on you. Better to only involve people that you have a hold on.
But like I said, I don't put a high probability on this. I think it more likely that the first death was a genuine suicide, with a last-minute low-effort attempt to say "fuck you" to Boeing by not making it absolutely clear it was suicide.
Don't underestimate the power of irrational motives. "How dare these f..kers ruin a perfectly good gig" can be a reason in and of itself, even if it makes no rational sense to go after whistleblowers in this way.
Because it would be phenomenally dumb, even for Boeing. If proof of such a thing came out you'd likely see the company get nationalized (because dissolving it would be too much of a hit to national security.) Plus, you think such a badly run organization as Boeing could keep it secret?
To steelman the Boeing whistleblower conspiracy, it would make a lot more sense to claim the CIA or DIA or whoever is doing the killings. Boeing is deeply tied into defense contracts, and the defense/commercial parts of the company aren't compartmentalized (that second bit is anecdotal by the way, if anyone knows differently say so.)
The defense and commercial parts of the company are compartmentalized at the highest level; there's no realistic possibility of any legal, economic, or regulatory blowback to Boeing Commercial Airplanes having a significant effect on Boeing Defense, Space, and Security.
Seconded. Even when BDSS is building on a BCA platform, they buy unfurnished airframes (e.g., no seats or IFE system) and then *heavily* modify them for the particular mission.
Why do you hate conspiracy theories? Not to say that's your fault or anything, we're in a bad equilibira where there's plenty to hate, I'd just like some anecdata for the specific causes/origins of why people feel repelled by conspiracy theories and stuff that sounds like conspiracy theories.
Maybe this is too spicy, I don't know, but do you guys feel it's possible for Trump to win in November? I have seen people remark that there's something weird about this election, how it doesn't feel like an election year at all, and personally, Trump already lost against Biden, I don't see why he would win this time around. I get Biden hasn't been much of an inspiring leader, but he was already uninspiring in 2020, people were just that desperate to get Trump out, so Biden won anyway.
Metaculus has it at a coin toss, which is pretty interesting, as I feel a Trump win is pretty unlikely, but I'm no sort of forecaster.
I'm personally not rooting for anyone, I'm trying to get more focused on local politics, which is what actually impacts me and mine.
Until 2020, elections were about people showing up on the election day (with very few exceptions), casting their ballot, and having it counted the same day (or, worst case, early hours of the next day).
In 2020, elections changed enormously - some states introduced early voting, most (or all?) started to accept a lot of ballots by mail, some states put up unmanned ballot dropboxes, and so on. Much of this was gamed or straight-out abused, and all in all this led to a system that was no longer comprehensible.
So until 2020 elections were about candidate support and voter turnout, and polls did a fairly good job of predicting their outcomes.
Since 2020, elections were about candidate support, voter turnout, and the mechanism by which the election was conducted in a given state. The mechanism part has quantitative effects that are very hard to predict unless you're running the exact entity that's gaming it in this particular state, but in general seems to mostly have the effect of increasing the D part of the vote (hence the D governors vetoing any attempts to roll any of it back that reach their desks).
With regards to your question about Trump, Nate Silver used to think it's a toss-up some time ago. Before 2020 I'd take his word for it - now I'm not so sure.
I am not an election forecaster, so looking at the previous years I tend to assume that any state with a D governor and Trump being less than 2% over Biden in the RCP average is automatically going to Biden, because the mechanism in that state will have enough slack built in to make it happen. That would currently be WI, MI, and PA, so Trump's chances don't look all that hot - but perhaps I'm wrong.
>looking at the previous years I tend to assume that any state with a D governor and Trump being less than 2% over Biden in the RCP average is automatically going to Biden
I am trying to figure out how you get that, because in 2020 Trump overperformed the RCP averages in almost every state. In fact, it appears that GA is the only state that Biden carried in which Trump led in the RCP average (and GA had a Republican governor)
>In 2020, elections changed enormously - some states introduced early voting, most (or all?) started to accept a lot of ballots by mail, some states put up unmanned ballot dropboxes, and so on. Much of this was gamed or straight-out abused, and all in all this led to a system that was no longer comprehensible.
Pre-2020, every state already allowed voting by mail, the primary difference was that some states require a "valid excuse" for absentee voting and others would send a mail-in ballot to anyone who asked. Voting by mail is inherently early voting, because you need to give people time to send in their ballots. So the mechanisms were already there in every state, it's just that most people didn't notice until the states were actively trying to get people to use it. If you think that mail-in ballots are inherently abusable, then they were just as abusable in 2018, 2016, 2014, etc. etc.
The thing that made mail-in voting chaotic had nothing to do with actual changes to the law - Trump wanted to push the narrative that the election was fraudulent in case he lost, and so he told his supporters not to vote by mail. Democrats, meanwhile, told their supporters to stay home to not get COVID and vote by mail. This meant that mail-in ballots had the reverse of their normal partisan leaning (normally it's older, more republican boomers voting by mail), which looked suspicious. Also, many states count mail-in ballots as a batch before or after the in-person ballots, which led to "red mirages" or "blue mirages" when that happened. (Analysts predicted this into advance, and took this into account when deciding when to call states.)
Also, I've noticed a lot of people conflate "people were able to cast fraudulent votes or vote twice" with "people voted who previously would have chosen not to, because we made it easier." The former is a crime, the latter is a *good thing*, it means more people were able to participate in the process and the result of the elections more accurately reflects the population being represented.
(Also, if your objection is "Democrats made it easier for their people to vote" then you need to have a long look at Republican attempts to restrict ballot access in Democratic areas pre-2020.)
There were always going to be problems in the first few elections that used widespread mail-in ballots. Voter confusion, bad rules and procedures, and problems of scale. My state has been doing them for over a decade, and has the bugs ironed out. But when a bunch of larger and more sclerotic states try to rush this through in the middle of a pandemic and right before the most bitter election of my lifetime... yeah, I expected some chaos.
It was a coin toss last time, and nothing much has changed since last time. Biden has as you note not been an inspiring leader, and there aren't many great accomplishments he can point to - COVID petered out on his watch but not in a way he gets any real credit for, Russia is still in Ukraine, the economy is still widely perceived as sucking, etc. Trump, OTOH, is basically the same character offering the same deal he did in 2020, and nothing he's done since 2020 would surprise anyone who knew of him in 2020.
So, we're going to toss the coin again and see what happens.
Whoever wins, what's gonna happen is global crisis and I sincerely hope there are enough sane professional public servants with the necessary backup to get the democratic parts of the world through it. Europe won't sustain without the USA, yet.
Pretty sure Trump literally does not know how to get rid of them. Does not know what form needs to be filed to turn off their payroll direct-deposit and void their accounts and keycards, does not know how to turn those things *on* for his preferred replacements, does not know who he could legally order to short-circuit the process by brute force or how to phrase the orders to keep it legal, etc.
Of course, Joe Biden doesn't know how to do that either, but there are a lot of people who do know how to do those things, who work for and are mostly loyal to Joe Biden. Given Trump's track record in hiring competent lieutenants (as opposed to sycophantic yes-men), if he pushes this far enough we could have the fun of watching Trump try to hire a bunch of new people, none of whom can figure out how to turn their own paychecks on.
Right now either could win. Don't pay too much attention to the polls, this far out they are basically worthless. They won't start reflecting voters real opinions until the end of Sept, early Oct or so. Right now, virtually everyone has made up their mind about them, except for the fraction of swing voters who are mostly disengaged from politics. The interesting thing is that these swing voters are distributed across many states, so the electoral vote is especially volatile this year. In November, it will be all about which party can motivate more people to go to the polls.
For me, this is the bottom line, unless I want to spend _so_ much analysis effort that I can convince myself that I can outguess the market. I'm not planning on doing that. If this were a thin market where 3 people were betting against 4 people and I felt I had special expertise, I might try, but not on this one.
Who do you mean by nobody? It's front and center in all my leftie news and commentary feeds. In fact, I wish I was getting less of it. I have my mom turn off CNN and MSNBC when I go over to her house, because of their horserace coverage. Right now Trump's trial is taking front and center, though. Maybe that's not strictly election-related, but you can be sure the Trump campaign sees it as election-related. I don't know about the right-leaning NYTimes and the rightwing WSJ. I've tuned them out.
>I don't know about the right-leaning NYTimes and the rightwing WSJ
Look, I know that you know this is nonsense just from the way you phrased it. If you don't want to take this discussion seriously, maybe you could head over to the Chapo Trap House Youtube comments or something.
Hmmm. In the leadup to the 2016 election, the NYTimes kept a relentless focus on Clinton's emails — which may have cost her the election. This election cycle the NYTimes is keeping a relentless focus on outlier polls that show Biden behind by five points, and they're miffed that Biden refuses to grant them an interview. I've always assumed the Right called the NYTimes a "liberal" paper just like they cherish the notion that Fox News is "fair and balanced." None on the Left consider the NYTimes to be on our side.
And the WSJ is owned by Rupert Murdock and the editorial page reflects his rightwing obsessions.
Huh. I've largely insulated myself from that news ecosystem, so I suppose that's why I'm not seeing it. But it hasn't filtered up to me through the channels I'm used to, either. And I'm not in a swing state.
Of course, the Right is pretty mute right now. The RNC is effectively broke (and broken) right now. So they're mostly incapable of funding ad campaigns for senatorial races and swing congressional races. And it sounds like most of their funds are being siphoned off to pay for Trump's legal bills (but I haven't heard of any audit being done). So Trump doesn't have much money to launch his own ad campaign.
Meanwhile, the Biden campaign is flush with cash, but they're focusing their advertising on swing states. So unless your in a swing state, you're probably not going to hear much from the presidential candidates.
> (Honestly it's also refreshing, or it would be if the things filling the news in its place weren't so terrible.)
Yeah. My wild-ass guess is that the a) we pretty much know who the candidates are, b) the media view Trump's trials as filling their campaign-coverage niche, and c) the candidates' handlers worry that anything they do could backfire. The safest route is to stay above it all and not engage.
It is a really weird election in at least two aspects. One, both candidates were locked in for their party with basically no real primary challenger. I guess you could argue DeSantis, but it quickly became clear he wasn't going to beat Trump. So all of the debates and infighting usually associated with primary season were very muted this year. Maybe this isn't too atypical in the entire history of the presidency, but it certainly differs from the last 20 years.
Two, both candidates have already been in office once. The electorate can just compare and contrast how both of them did. Everybody already knows everything about Trump and Biden by this point. So neither of them need to campaign or run ads like a traditional unproven candidate.
Also, Biden is really *old*. Trump isn't much younger, but he doesn't have the track record of cognitive decline and gaffes like Biden. This is a big deal even to non-red voters. The criminal trials are also working in Trump's favor. Regardless of the actual merit of the charges, he can point to how they were all conveniently delayed for 3 years until campaign season, and how all of the charges were brought in deep blue strongholds. The banana republic optics don't go over well with the public. Of course if he is actually a convict in November that might dissuade a lot of people in the center from voting Trump.
I once tried comparing his inaugural address to JFK’s.
Trump’s speech was largely boilerplate American Carnage and then you’d run into him using the word ‘totally’ in the manner of Jeff Spicoli. That part, you know that was Trump inserting himself into the speech writing.
I don't agree that trump doesn't have gaffes/cognitive decline but that aside ... it's not clear to me the criminal trials actually work in his favor. Plenty of people say what you say here but I think they're mostly/all already trump supporters who said the same thing about the 2019 impeachment.
Also, they are all being brought now as a result of delays partly brought on by trump himself, who has been trying to push them back as much as possible ... and the location follows where the stuff happened, with one of the cases being in Georgia and another being in Florida.
There's too many trials, though, so it really is "arson, murder and jaywalking"; from "Jan 6th he tried to take over the nation by a violent coup" to "he used the wrong account to pay off the hooker, it should have been down as a campaign expense".
I know Capone was finally brought low for tax evasion, but he wasn't being tried at the same time for burning down the Statue of Liberty. Decide which is more important, treason or adultery, then try that case. Otherwise it just looks like "we don't care about is there a real crime, we just want to send him to prison".
This is not how it works in these here United States. There's no single entity that can "decide which is more important, treason or adultery, then try that case". The cases are brought by different states, driven by their respective DA's. The degree to which our states have autonomy in these matters is sometimes bewildering for non-USians... We don't even have a national vehicle license plate, for crying out loud!
Yes, in the United States, it is possible for a local DA to undermine what would be a rational strategy for bringing down a dangerous criminal and instead making him look like a persecuted underdog that juries will be predisposed to acquit (and mobs to riot if there's a conviction anyway). This is a *bad thing*; local DAs should resist the temptation no matter how much they'd enjoy their fifteen minutes of fame, and now we're dealing with the consequences of not resisting that temptation. Local DAs have that power, and great discretion in how they use it, which means sometimes it will be used very poorly.
Thing is that the federal trials are being repeatedly delayed. I don't think Bragg is under some obligation to sit around and wait for other prosecutors to be delayed by over a year based on some "most serious case goes first" principle, especially when the clear plan is to delay past the election and then drop the charges if trump wins.
On the classified documents one, the original indictment was in like June of 2023, and the (trump-appointed) judge has repeatedly pushed things back, most recently (today) pushing back the trial date indefinitely and saying she won't even set a date until late July.
On the Jan 6 one, after the district court rejected trump's claim to immunity, and trump appealed, the prosecutor asked the Supreme Court to intervene, which they didn't do ... until a few months later after the appeals court agreed with the district court, and then at that point they agreed to take the case after trump asked, scheduling oral arguments for like 3 months later (and now awaiting a decision for what could be another month or 2).
I should clarify that I mean Biden gaffes related to senility. Reading things off the teleprompter that are clearly not meant to be spoken, rambling stories about his uncle being eaten by cannibals, having a special counsel report describe him as a well meaning but forgetful old man. As I said, Trump is also old, and not as sharp as he was in 2016. But political contests are all relative.
Also, it would be ridiculous to claim Trump doesn't make gaffes, considering some of the things he says.
Admittedly the trials are an unprecedented event in American politics. I won't claim to confidently know who that ends up benefitting. Regardless, the real loser is America. Now that centuries of tradition have been broken, I expect future presidents to be prosecuted as an extension of partisan battles. Much like the partisan impeachment without a high crime or misdemeanor of Trump was followed by the partisan impeachment without a high crime or misdemeanor of Mayorkas.
"a special counsel report describe him as a well meaning but forgetful old man"
Yeah, that one is pretty bad. Either Biden really is incapable, so he shouldn't be running, or that was a lie to get him off the hook for the same offence Trump is being accused of regarding state documents, in which case what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. You can certainly claim "it's okay if our guy does it" but that then torpedoes any claim of fairness or this is a serious crime which must be taken seriously, it's just "we will say it's bad if the other guy does it".
Except requests were made multiple times from the Nat'l Archives for Trump to return those docs. And he only returned a part of them, which is when the Nat'l archives referred it to the DoJ.
As for Biden, it was either he or his people saying, maybe we should check your files, too — just in case. They found some classified stuff, and returned it. In Biden's case it wasn't even on the Nat'l Archives and DoJ radar. Then Biden appoints a Republican special council to investigate his handling of the docs. With the result he wasn't found at fault, except that the guy said Biden was having memory issues.
If you read the transcript it's not as bad as painted by the report. He was talking about a date and said one, then turned to someone and asked, "Wait was that X, or X?" and then they confirmed it was X date, and that was the end of it.
The report made it sound much more serious than the reality, I thought.
Personally I think that Trump is very likely to win, unless Democrats can employ enough lawsuits to keep him off the ballot.
In any case, regardless of who wins, this current election is kind of boring -- it's two very old men desperately struggling to energize their base with their old-man antics. The interesting election will come in four more years. Currently I have no idea what that could even look like. Sure, Trump might run again if he loses; Biden is unlikely to do the same (barring any breakthroughs in medical science). But who would be the competition ? Maybe DeSantis on the Republican side ? But which Democrat would he be running against, AOC ? I can even picture it...
Everybody realized Trump sucks, so they voted for Biden. Now they've realized that Biden sucks too, so that choice becomes a coin flip. Combine that with the nonstop parade of crises and misery during the last four years making the Trump era look not as bad in retrospect, and there you go.
(edit: some of the crises aren't Biden's fault, and some of them are fallout from Trump or even started under him, but nobody ever said politics was fair.)
politics is messy and theres always been cheating( eletrons with no black votes when a kkk member was the winner are just part of history); theres trades off in how believable the result is and no one knowing just how much to cheat by
If bidens plan is to just ban trump from running; there isnt going to be much of a federal government after texas secceds and all the red states have trump ballots and no process to move forward, so I dont know what the democratic party is thinking not pushing him down the stairs several months ago.
Are they confident in their method of cheating? Do they think "student loan forgiveness" is enough? Is the biden family burning thru all their favors to not be replaced with literally anyone else?
> I don't see why he would win this time around.
people having the memory of a goldfish about trump saying he made the vaccine, did several rounds of the stimulus money(and therefor is part of the problem with the economy) and didnt end the iraq war(tho thats probably the cia fault)
incumbents have a disadvantage, its debatable how much, but... well
> so I dont know what the democratic party is thinking not pushing him down the stairs several months ago
Because despite everything, the DNC still believes in democracy. They're idiots. They should've known damn well that this charade of a democracy was never going to last. It was always going to go to shit the moment people realized they don't actually need to settle for compromise.
...At the same time, with how split the party is right now, they probably can't politically afford to take the first shot. Maybe they were just doomed from the start.
1) There's a big difference between prosecuting someone for crimes they have committed and prosecuting them for crimes they haven't committed; Trump is pretty clearly in the former category.
2) There's a big difference between politicians interfering in the judicial system to get rival politicians prosecuted, and prosecutors acting independently; there is no evidence of the former happening in the case of Trump.
Republicans desperately want to pretend that Trump's legal issues are because the Democrats are persecuting him rather than because he's repeatedly broken the law, but it isn't true.
> There's a big difference between politicians interfering in the judicial system to get rival politicians prosecuted, and prosecutors acting independently
Biden doesn't have to say, "will no one rid me of this turbulent dipshit?". It is known. The Schelling Point is to stop Trump.
Like, if Netanyahu were to take a stroll through the middle of Gaza tomorrow, he'd be shot dead. There wouldn't need to be a conspiracy, there wouldn't need to be a central organization giving orders. Individual people would see him and know what to do. Similarly, Democratic prosecutors know to go after Trump in whatever way they can justify, in whatever manner is most damaging to his re-election chances.
idk what news your reading or which of the cases you are making claims about the fun part is theres several
Specifically the newyork case; the judge preventing him from speaking to the supreme court, and the case is a an accusation of fraud, on a loan he already paid back and the bank said they didn't believe there was fraud, and the banks did due diligence to check the worth of the property and presumably in the paper work trump and the bank agreed to a value after a fairly standard process.
So; desperately pretending over here, but I will view any canceled events or large fines or gag orders as electron interface of newyork on little old flyover state me and the left as losing its mind.
Paying back the loan doesn't stop it from being fraud.
And saying "the banks didn't believe my lies so the fact that I lied to them doesn't matter" is.. well it's a defence I guess, but not a flattering one.
The other issue is that "presidential candidates are above the law" is a very destabilizing precedent, and it's not one that even Trump himself believes in, given how he ran on "Lock Her Up" in 2016 and wants to go after Biden over the Hunter thing now.
Prosecuting politicians over every random parking ticket or whatever is also open to abuse of course. I'd say the best norm would be something like "major politicians get 20% more lenience than someone of their social class and situation would normally get" - but if you flagrantly and egregiously break the law, you can't just run for office and cry "banana republic!" to get out of jail free.
>I'd say the best norm would be something like "major politicians get 20% more lenience than someone of their social class and situation would normally get"
That seems reasonable. I basically agree with both your points. I would add: We want politicians to leave office peacefully (and, yeah, I know this is not Trump's strong point...) - but if we start a tradition of politically motivated prosecutions of politicians when they leave office and cede power to their successors, they may _stop_ leaving office and ceding power to their successors.
Why do you say incumbents have a disadvantage? While the math used is a little confusing, OpenSecrets argues that incumbents tend to collect more in donations and are more likely to win re-election than challengers.
I'm saying incumbents do better than challengers, as measured by election rates and campaign contributions.
If incumbents did worse than the set of challengers, we would expect the average tenure to be 1.5 terms, right? Because 1.5 average terms is what we'd see if an incumbent or a challenger winning was a coin toss in any given election. Agree or disagree?
"The average length of service for Representatives at the beginning of the 118th Congress was 8.5 years (4.3 House terms); for Senators, 11.2 years (1.9 Senate terms). Table 2 shows the average length of service at the beginning of the 118th and three previous Congresses."
ChatGPT4 analysis follows, which I've skimmed over to roughly check for errors. One mistake was found and ChatGPT4 was asked to recalculate.
57.1% of U.S. Presidents who ran for a second term won their re-election, while approximately 42.9% lost. This number is slightly higher if we include LBJ.
LBJ was elected to a second term after serving part of JFKs, but I excluded him from the analysis.
List of U.S. Presidents who ran for re-election and whether they won or lost
True indicates they won re-election, False indicates they lost
True, # Washington
True, # Jefferson
True, # Madison
True, # Monroe
False, # J.Q. Adams
False, # Van Buren
True, # Lincoln (won 2nd term, assassinated early into it)
False, # Cleveland (won non-consecutive second term later)
theres been 4 maybe 5 presidents since roughly "the internet era" started and thats assuming 2001 is like post-2016, thats not enough data to make models
>incumbents have a disadvantage, its debatable how much, but... well
to
> thats not enough data to make models
The backdown is real.
Incumbents always have the advantage, people inherently dislike change. THESE incumbents are at a disadvantage, because these incumbents especially suck.
So is your argument that there's been some change which impacted the presidency but not Congress? There have been enough congressional elections to construct a workable model even if we posit that the most recent generation is a special case. Average length of congressional terms since 1987 has increased slightly, amidst significant variation, relative to the previous 40 years or so.
It at least hasn't decreased notably since that time, and has stayed very safely above the 50% reelection rate represented by a 6 year average term.
On the Republican side, it seems to be Trump or nobody. De Santis flamed out, I haven't followed Nikki Haley but hasn't she given up too?
And same for the Democrats - you're Ridin' With Biden or nobody. The big deal there, I think, will be post-election selection of who's going to replace Joe for the next presidential election; possibly Gavin Newsom? As their best bet at electability, despite all they may do about DEI, is still Moderately Well-Off White Guy.
So Trump versus Biden, Round 2, and what are the big issues? Right now the protests are not BLM but about Gaza, and I think that one is harder to whip up sentiment about. "If Trump is elected, he'll pour support into Israel!" Well, just like Biden right now, yes?
Abortion? Haven't heard much about the "millions of women who died due to being denied medically necessary abortions" so I'm thinking it isn't that live an issue, and indeed looking it up:
"There were more than a million abortions in 2023 in the formal US healthcare system, of which 63% were medication abortions—both record highs."
Jan 6th Definitely A Coup Democracy Dies? Some of those convictions seem to have been overturned, and while the whole thing is rumbling on, there's nothing new.
Trump's legal woes? Well, again, I haven't been following what is happening in Georgia after the DA and her snookums derailed all the attention there, but what I heard on the evening news just now intrigued me:
"The judge said that he understood “the magnitude of such a decision” and that jailing Mr. Trump would be a last resort. He noted: “You are the former president of the United States, and possibly the next president as well.”
Possibly the next president as well? Sounds like someone is reading the tealeaves!
So all that is left is to fight over the same old stale ground as the last eight years: Literally Hitler, Fascism For Real This Time, and so on and so on.
What I think most likely is Biden to win but by a very slim margin, possibly in the Electoral College (after which we will hear *nothing* about it being a relic of the slave-owning days which should be abolished for the will of the people from all those demanding it to be done away with after Hillary lost). Depending if he then serves out the full second term, both the Democrats and Republicans have to find new candidates for the next bout. If he doesn't, Kamala will take over but will emulate Gerald Ford in not being able to get elected for a full term in an election.
I think it's likely that Trump wins. It's been a bad year for Biden. Inflation is rampant, the campus riots have unmasked woke to a lot of people, and a special counsel officially said that Biden was too senile to answer to criminal charges regarding his misuse of classified material. Biden barely won in 2020 and things look worse for him now. The party was scrambling just a couple months ago to find a replacement candidate (they even considered Michelle Obama). You don't do that if you're confident that you can win.
Its "spicy" in the sense I bet I could convince my father to not pay taxes if trump doesn't show up on blue state ballots, and am otherwise liberal sisters to get guns and prep for a civil war; far right politics will be booming, I would know im part of it.
Removing trump by legal fraud will be an escalation, and these idiot blue states are very much threatening to do it. While I dont believe it would lead to a civil war even in the "worse timeline", its fairly strange they are doing it, and the consequences will be important.
Removing Trump by legal fraud (trigger phrase) will spend a lot of capital by the left. Political capital that will not be available to achieve other goals. You could say that Affirmative Action is off the menu for a generation, as an example of the cost of this action.
Explain like I'm five (okay, let's say like I'm fifteen) what goals central banks set interest rates for, the mechanisms by which that works, and the tradeoffs they thereby incur in.
Central banks mostly set interest rates with the goal of minimizing the number of people giving central bankers grief. The #1 thing that people give central bankers grief over is inflation. Or, rarely, deflation. And the original purpose of central banks was mostly "manage the money supply so that there's not too much inflation (and absolutely no deflation)". So, central banks really want to do that.
The #2 thing that people give central bankers grief over is unemployment, and at least in the United States that's been added to the list of things the central bankers are officially supposed to deal with. So they're also pretty big on making sure there isn't too much unemployment.
It is debatable what fills the #3 slot, but by definition it's tertiary and probably best not to worry about it for now.
W/re inflation, if we ignore the differences between cars, cantaloupes, and computers, and treat the economy as just producing and selling generic "Stuff", then prices are set by the ratio of money in circulation to stuff available for sale. If the price were anything else, merchants would change it to get more money in their own pockets while unloading excess inventory. Since the amount of Stuff being brought to market almost always increases a little bit each year, we need to increase the amount of money in circulation proportionately or there will be deflation. If we add too much money, we get inflation.
Loans, put more money into circulation. Indeed, they kind of *create* money by the usual economic definition, but if that's too much like voodoo for 15-yo you, just think of it as noncirculating money being taken out of the vaults and put into circulation - the math will still work. The lower the interest rate, the more people will want to borrow money to buy stuff(*). If you get the interest rate just right, such people will put newly-borrowed money into circulation at just the right rate to counterbalance all the new Stuff being produced and keep prices stable.
Regarding unemployment, if you want more people to be employed, you want people founding new businesses and expanding existing ones. Which takes money, and it's easiest if you can borrow the money up front and pay it back later with the profits from whatever your new employees are doing. So, lower interest rates equals more job creation because the new jobs don't need to be quite as productive to pay back the loans with profit left over.
The problem is that these two priorities point to different interest rate targets, one "as low as possible", the other "just right". So unless you're lucky enough to have low unemployment and low inflation at the same time, *somebody* is going to be giving your central bankers grief. The usual way to try and deal with that is to set one interest rate and then hint "but we might change to this other rate real soon; take that into account when making your decisions!"
Sometimes this even works.
* Lower interest rates also make people less likely to take money out of circulation and stash it in their savings account or whatever, to the same effect.
That was very good. I can't remember reading a better and shorter explanation.
I don't get the impression you go in for one-off "wow, that was great" comments (or their replies), but if this were by anyone else then I'd reply with one of those, and it seems counterproductive to make an exception simply because you have a more formal online presence than those of us whose writing voices grew up in blogland, so here's a disclaimer too. :-)
This is roughly how I explained it to my 15-year-old:
The interest rate is “the price of money”.
The central banks set their interest rate and lend money to other banks who lend it on to people and businesses at a markup. That way, the interest rate affects how much money people and companies want to borrow and spend/invest.
So…
1. Lower interest rates = “cheaper money”.
When the price (interest rate) is low, people can afford to put more stuff on their credit cards, and businesses can borrow more and invest in stuff.
That means everyone buys more stuff. Which in turn means that the businesses they buy from have to hire more people to meet demand. Which gives more people better jobs and more money in their pocket. Which means they can buy even more things. Etc. Good times for a while.
That’s how low interest rates help lower unemployment and boost growth, and why those are two common considerations when central banks set interest rates.
2. But too much of a good thing, and you risk over-heating of the economy.
If there’s not enough people to take the jobs, businesses can’t meet demand, they'll pay more for employees, wages go up, costs go up. And people spend more and more money and get into too much debt, and you risk inflation, price bubbles, looming debt crises, etc. Particularly inflation is a big one they look at.
To prevent that, central banks will nudge the interest rates a bit higher, to make it more expensive to borrow money, and more profitable to put your savings in the bank. This should make people and companies think twice before taking up loans and making huge investments, and it will cool the economy down.
(The more money people borrow, the more money is also “printed” (issued), but that’s a bit of a technicality. It’s not printed in the same way some governments printed money out of thin air to give COVID relief, but in a (somewhat twisted, but not entirely imaginary) reflection of the actual value created through all the investments and growth. So this printing of money doesn't contribute to inflation through the same mechanism.)
3. The interest rate also affects the foreign exchange rate (which is another way to think about the “price of money”).
The foreign exchange rate (e.g. how many dollars to I have to pay for a British pound) has an effect on imports and exports and prices in the country.
If interest is low, and it’s inexpensive to borrow money (and not lucrative to save money) in a particular currency, then people will sell that currency, so they can move their money to other currencies and countries where they can get better profits.
For example: If it is possible to make a big profit by borrowing money in the US and lending it to businesses in the UK (or vice versa), people will milk that. They will sell as much USD as they can and buy GBP (British pounds), until the exchange rate has adjusted and the price and potential profit matches the risk they are taking.
That way, a relatively low interest rate in the US will contribute to push the price of the US dollar down, and make other currencies more expensive for Americans.
When a currency (like the USD) is worth less than normal, that means the price of imported goods (that can’t be paid for with USD) goes up. But it also means that their (American) goods become less expensive abroad, which means they become more competitive in foreign markets.
This is good for some industries that import little (buy few things abroad) and export a lot (sell much abroad). But it's less good when it’s the other way around.
It's also good for attracting foreign tourists and keeping domestic tourism at home.
So a country's central bank may also consider the trade deficit/surplus situation, and specifics of the economy, like the health of key industries (tourism, exports).
4. Practical considerations. Central banks don’t want to be seen to do too much too quickly, so as not to shock the system, but they will often signal a long-term strategy and goal. Unfortunately, politicians will often work against what the central bank is trying to do. E.g. while the central bank wants people to spend less, the politicians don’t want to get blamed for small businesses struggling and people not having the same spending power as before, and will fight for subsidies and tax relief etc at the same time, effectively sabotaging the bank’s efforts. So, even if the central bank is apolitical, it will need a strategy for how to maneuver toward its goal slowly and steadily without getting tripped up.
This is simplified, but should hopefully go some way toward getting the basics. Hope it helps.
It often goes unexplained what "price of money" means. The uninitiated go "wait, what does it mean to buy money?" or "how does paying dollars for other dollars make sense?".
And the answer is that by money they mean debt or credit. 1 dollar in your pocket now is obviously worth something else than the promise of 1 dollar next month. But how much more? aaand that's exactly what setting the Price of Money is.
When a company wants to borrow money, one way of doing it is issuing bonds. They offer for sale the right to collect, say, $100,000 on July 1, 2029, and the free market decides what this promise is worth today.
When a government wants to raise money, it’s similar, and they usually sell the bonds at an auction. The market thus decides what it thinks is the present value of future money.
…Except the central banks can and do intervene, and they buy the bonds at a higher price. Central banks have huge monetary resources so they can drive the price up to any level they choose, and this drives down the rates for the entire market.
They do this if they think the economy should borrow more money and put it to productive use, especially in times of uncertainty when those who have the money would rather sit on it or invest it in lowest-risk government bonds.
What we call money is actually debt. If you're talking about money in a private bank account it is the debt of that private bank, if you're talking about cash it's the debt of the central bank. When you write a check your private bank reduces its debt to you by the same amount of central bank debt (now known as reserves) that it transfers to recipient's private bank. In a modern economy all money is debt. The central bank can issue as much of its own debt as it wants, as long as someone is willing to trade for it, just like everybody else. The way it does that is by buying assets (typically government bonds) and paying for them with its own debt, issued on the spot. The major difference between the debt of private companies and central bank debt is that taxes can only be paid with central bank debt, and the courts enforce contract settlements in central bank debt. The interest rate at the federal reserve market is the interest private banks charge each other for overnight loans of the debt of the central bank. The central bank controls that by issuing more or less central bank debt, and the private banks have a need for holding central bank debt because that's what they use to settle transactions between themselves.
Funded by taxpayers obviously. The entire point of a central bank is having an entity with a lot of money that can throw that money at problems that can be solved this way (dampening currency rate fluctuations, setting interest rates etc.).
That's incorrect. Our medium of exchange is the central bank debt. The central bank does not have money, and cannot have it, because holding it's own debt would be meaningless. It can print the paper version of its debt (cash) or issue the digital version of its debt (bank reserves) at will, just like anyone else can issue their own debt if they find someone that is willing to trade for it.
I guess this differs from country to country? Some central banks are very active buying and selling foreign currency to help stabilize the home currency, and you need cashy money for that.
You are right in that the central banks of export-dependent economies often find it useful to hold foreign currency. So yes, the asset side of the central bank balance sheet does matter in that context, which excludes the US and the EU.
1. gdp go up; printing money makes people not like saving money, people spend money ????, economy healthy
2. national debt to gdp doesn't go to ~~100%~ ~~150%~~ 200%, believing this is a mark of hyper inflation, if the (effective) interest rate on the national debt * debt is higher then gdp and as the national debt raises interest rates go up, congress will just declare that the money printers go brrrrr at which point its hyper inflation no one will take the worthless paper
3. 99% of banks stay solvent, stupid banks should sometimes roll the dice and die; but to many at once they hear the concept of a "bank run" and fear about a cascade effect as banks like to buy stock in other banks or play the same games as other banks(mortgages for example), so the federal reserve literally gives banks free money while trying to control stupid investments this is thru "fdic insurence"
"There is a neat way to frame unsupervised learning as likelihood maximization, but not in the usual way where you just compute the likelihood of the data using a model and ignore the likelihood of the model itself. Rather, this is the combined likelihood of model and data, where the model is treated as a sequence of code symbols..."
Can anyone recommend any resources for getting up to speed on mechanistic interpretability research? For example are there any good tutorials, or maybe papers that are especially beginner-friendly?
The WAPO recently had an article about children "remembering their past lives": https://archive.is/T6hht
While I find the claim difficult to accept, the article was quite interesting. Has anyone dug deeper into such reports, or has pointers to read more about this? I would imagine this would be some sort of priming at play, but from whom? Other adults in the children lives? Unintentional media exposure?
There is always the possibility that the parents would just be lying for publicity, not to mention the most enticing of all possibilities, of course.
I'm only responding because of a recent experience I had that is strongly related to this
I was having a coffee (with a little milk giving it a dirty color), which I had unknowingly dropped a cookie in. When bringing the cup to my mouth, the liquid sloshed revealing crumbs, and then when I was like huh, I saw the dissolved cookie and quite literally instantaneously threw up while having a powerful "memory" or reference to drinking dirty water with a dead rat or something in it.
Probably not valid evidence, but I was extremely surprised when this happened and I explored this topic a little bit more but couldn't find anything really related. My low probability guess on what happened is some experience was so traumatic that it got passed down, similar to how there's a natural fear of snakes or something.
Some studies talk about children having super accurate past life memories confirmed by relatives, but methods aren't great. I don't really know.
In college I took an anthropology class, and the professor talked about how under the effects of banisteriopsis and psychotria the users very consistently report seeing large cats, raptors, and snakes. Predators, but specifically predators of arboreal species. The specific large cat/raptor/snake is mediated by the user's culture, i.e. the user reports whatever large cat is common in the area where they are from.
This is a common (and unbelievably weird to me) theme with a variety of psychedelic drugs, that hallucinations have highly specific patterns. On jimson weed you think you have dropped a lit cigarette, on salvia you think you are an article of outdated wooden furniture. Can attest to the salvia one on my first use despite having, as far as I know, no prior expectations about it
There was some reincarnation research discussion in the last open thread, funnily enough. Something in the water.
It's a field I'm somewhat (not exceedingly, but somewhat) familiar with. It is very, very difficult to come to certain conclusions about. The obvious skeptical counterarguments fail many real cases -- James Leininger and Kumkum Verma being two of the highest-profile cases, and two that really, really do not cooperate well with the easy counterarguments. It's hard to figure out a plausible series of events for how a little girl in a rich family knows the life story of an illiterate blacksmith's wife multiple villages over, including the names of her children, years before rural people in their country had TVs or other forms of mass media easily accessible to young children.
(This is before getting into suspicious details of less clear-cut cases, like "a girl talking about how she had a past life as a boy but was unhappy and now is happy, the preregistered details of her past life match to a boy in a different village who was known for being exceptionally feminine".)
But, of course, there are reasons not to latch immediately onto the most enticing of all possibilities. Fortunately there are many unambiguous counters to these cases, such as [checks smudged writing, which is blank]
I think, sometimes, that if the body of evidence for reincarnation research supported *any other claim*, we would call it uncomplicatedly true and put it in every textbook. I think this says more about the other claims than it does about reincarnation research. I can't shake off the idea it says something about reincarnation research.
>I think, sometimes, that if the body of evidence for reincarnation research supported *any other claim*, we would call it uncomplicatedly true and put it in every textbook.
I don’t think this statement is supportable. The claim that people’s experiences not only survive the deaths of their body outside all known physical laws but also implant themselves in new embryos isn’t supported by a fraction of the type of evidence typically necessary to establish itself as accepted science.
The claim presumes Cartesian dualism, which modern science rejects. The reincarnation claims of such children as the unfortunate James Leininger also depend entirely on the objectivity/credibility of the parents and children who first report the behavior. And similar to eye-witness accounts of UFOs/cryptids/ghosts, science would prefer theories that do not violate its tested principles to those that do.
Is it more likely that James Leininger’s parents influenced their son’s behavior either intentionally or unintentionally, misreported/misremembered his statements, mistakenly connected their son’s statements to past real-world events that were coincidentally similar…OR that mind and memory exist independent of matter and move by unexplainable means from host to host despite all the evidence that says otherwise?
Not to mention for every James Leininger there are millions of others who do not report past lives.
Anything’s possible, including reincarnation I guess, but there are countless better explanations for the handful of such cases that don’t require us to disregard our fundamental understanding of the world.
The claim does not necessarily require Cartesian dualism. If we consider that our memories are a form of information, what if we pick up information from sources other than our five qualia? Of course, information from other peoples' past lives would require a monolithic model of the universe, time, and causality.
Not reincarnation-related, but it's worth reading, "The Myth of the Decline Effect in Psi Research: The Empirical Evidence"
Could you share your source for Kumkum Verma? a quick google mostly turned up dubious websites with no sourcing. People keep referencing a Stevenson who wrote this all down, is there an original paper?
Edit: I did find more on James Leininger, which *was* admittedly weird, but hard to evaluate for implausibility.
Here are articles on the case, it is included in a book by Ian Stephenson but oddly enough that particular volume seems to be missing from online libraries, though it seems you can buy a hard copy of the book on second-hand book sites:
1. Memories are modifications in the state of your brain due to perceptions.
2. The brain is not carried over from the supposed previous life.
3. Therefore, memories are not carried over from the supposed previous life.
I assume you agree with 2. To argue with 1, you have to propose some mechanism that allows for all the results of memory research (where physically changing brains changes memories) and also propose a non-physical means of recording information and interacting with the brain.
On the other hand, all you need to explain the positive data is a small number of people either running a hoax or fooling themselves.
In particular, we know that people's consciousness can be radically modified by very small amounts of chemicals, electrical stimulation, and flat-out material damage. And yet now we're postulating that memories can survive the entire brain turning into random piles of matter at death, and _also_ attach themselves to other brains.
"Running a hoax" is *not* consistent with the positive data, which routinely involves people with anti-motive for hoaxes (people who stridently believe religions that exclude reincarnation, people who believe in reincarnation and believe the particular reincarnation suggested by the case would be bad or punishing). There are non-reincarnation explanations potentially consistent with the positive data:
*Sheer, bizarre coincidence. This is not intuitively plausible, but we live in a world with eight billion people. There is a case study of a woman born without a vagina who got pregnant when she was stabbed in the stomach during a blowjob. Events can be weirder than you possibly think, including "children having detailed preregistered recollections of the life of a different identifiable person", without implying a particular cause for that.
*Misrepresentation and cherrypicking, below the hoax level. This is basically intersecting with #1. You'd need a very large body of cases, and for virtually all investigated cases to turn up nothing, but for a small number to be sheer bizarre coincidences. This is generally dismissed given Stevenson's scholarly background, but frankly, "mid-20th-century scholarly background" is not a ruleout for this. If it were the case, it's arguably more likely to have been leaked now than not, but...
Both "sheer bizarre coincidence (cherrypicked or otherwise)" and "reincarnation" are implausible. Weigh up implausibilities. I haven't decided yet.
I think a kid's belief that they had a past life might be akin to their having an imaginary friend. I had an imaginary friend til age 6 or so, and believed she was real. But of course that wouldn't explain the child's knowing verifiable details about a past self's life.
I'm repeating here a question I put up very late on the hidden thread: I've never played Magic the Gathering, but get the general idea of how it works. I've read that AI has never beaten the best human players, and is not really suited to learning to do well at the game. Why isn't it, and does the answer have any implications for how smart our present form of AI can become at other things? And if so which things?
Because high-level play basically cant be learned by trial and error. If you pick up a new deck, the first thing you need to do is read all the cards and think about what the intended combo lines are. Propably read a guide about it to make sure you dont miss anything important. Its possible to self-play yourself for years and miss huge parts of the meta because you just never happened to get there. Trying to force this is prohibitively compute-inefficient.
Also the game changes every time they release new cards, so "imitating" approaches without true understanding are out of date before theyre completed, and noone is interested in doing that.
You shouldn't underestimate trial and error. Reinforcement learning was the principle used for the DotA 2 and Starcraft 2 AIs that went on to beat pro players. Yes, a human might never learn to play well even after years of trial and error, but that's because humans play slowly. Given enough computing resources, you can train an AI for the equivalent of centuries worth of play, and then you're getting somewhere.
Well, the thing about DotA and Starcraft is that AI has a huge inherent advantage in reaction times/multitasking. MtG, being turn based, doesn't have that angle.
That being said, if it was less niche, there would probably be enough resources poured into it to make it much more competent.
The SC2 DotA2 AI devs were of course aware of those inherent advantages, and have both taken steps to nerf their bots in that regard to get close to human limitations.
Both bots had been intentionally limited to human reaction times. The DotA bot devs said that reaction times (instant vs human) would only marginally affect win rates anyway. The success rate was mostly explained by teamwork. This blog post describes that restriction and a slew of others the OpenAI 5 operated under; the "no summons" restriction in particular was a deliberate choice to deny the multitasking advantage, not a missing feature.
The SC2 AI AlphaStar has competed anonymously in an automated SC2 league and has played at Grandmaster level; it had been limited to what humans can mechanically see and do:
AIs would have a slight advantage in terms of card counting and being able to accurately calculate probabilities. But it would take a lot of work before that becomes relevant.
OK, that was my guess about it, as someone who's never played the game. So this seems important to me in thinking about neural network based AI and what it's capable of. Seems to me that any human being of normal intelligence could learn to play Magic, including looking through a new deck and and thinking in a broad way about good uses for a card ("So obviously you can use this to neutralize X. BUT actually you can also use it to neutralize a's, b's and c's, if you do it when Y is in effect."). I get that to use the new cards *really cleverly* you have to be quite smart, but to understand how to use them and play around with possible novel uses and think about ways to use them in combination -- that's just normal human intelligence at work. Lots of things in life are that way -- like figuring out how to get around a new town, or how to collaborate well with a new co-worker.
I believe the limiting factor of "AI in games" is the willingness to throw the necessary amount of money and effort at the problem. While there's probably survivorship bias going on in that failed efforts remain basically unknown in the general public, the known successes are consistently described as significant by expert players and AI researchers alike.
These other examples are especially encouraging for MtG because they require a general strategy and possibly teamwork (for DotA 2), the infinite variants of which apparently did not prevent success of the AI system over human pro players.
The lack of a strong MtG AI does not, on its own, imply anything about the limits of AI in general, simply because there has not been the same serious effort to train an MtG AI the same way it has been done for the other games listed.
id bet that nn's have some trouble "word embedding"(king+girl=queen) or "positional value"(a pawn on the 7th rank is more valuable then one on a starting position) the cards
there isnt an internet worth of "grammer" for magic cards so the human concept of "this is a removal","this is a board clear","this is a big body" cant be stolen from reading the whole internet, but using those cards correctly depends on the deck you have and what you predict the opponent has( vs a aggressive deck using a board clear to kill a single minion is probably a good idea, it be a death sentence vs a slow deck)
so given a large amount of cards humans can easily learn such concepts from the card text itself while nn's self play will be relearning the concept for each card may be a very large space and there probably need to be some sort of imposed way for it to learn it, and unlike text or chess there may not be as much fame for solving the problem.
It seems like this comment is assuming that a game AI would be implemented via a large language model, but this isn't generally how game AIs have worked - something like AlphaGo doesn't work by "scraping the internet" and analyzing what people on the internet have said about Go strategy - it has its own model for analyzing positions and picking moves.
I would guess AI is bad at deck building and trying to develop strategies that can handle a variety of situations prior to getting to the game mechanics. I suppose when one “plays against the computer” in the digital version, a programmer has pre-set whatever deck the player is opposing so it’s not technically AI.
Just musing. I’m no expert just played a little bit.
Is AI actually bad at Magic, or is it the case that all the cards are proprietary, so building and training an AI would likely get you slapped with a cease-and-desist ?
I don't have time right now to find again the source I read, but it was a respectable one, and it named several reasons why AI was not suited for the game. The one that sticks in my mind was that there are lots of unknowns and unknowables in Magic. (Of course in all games you don't know what your opponent is going to do next, but there must be some way in Magic in which you don't even know the *kind* of thing your opponent is going to do.)
Sadly, I think this used to be true in the past, but is no longer the case. In tournament play, Magic is now limited to a very small subset of cards, which means that there is a limited subset of decks that you are likely to be faced against. I think that at this point you hardly need an AI (worthy of the name), you just need to count cards :-(
Are you talking about an actual rule limiting cards, or just that there's a small number of meta decks? I can't find any information about an officially limited cardpool.
AFAIK tournament play is restricted to the last N released sets, where N~=3; but admittedly I've been out of the Magic scene for a while, so I could be wrong.
Below is what GPT4 says. Maybe it doesn't know about the new set-up in tournament play? In any case, do you have thoughts about AI's problem doing well at the old version of Magic, where new decks come into effect at regular intervals?
Magic: The Gathering (MTG) poses a unique set of challenges for artificial intelligence (AI), making it much harder for computers to master compared to games like chess or Go. Here are some of the reasons:
Complex and Dynamic Rules: MTG is known for its complex rules and the dynamic nature of its gameplay. The rules can change based on the cards played, and interactions between cards can create new rules. This level of complexity and fluidity in rules makes it difficult for AI to model and predict the game accurately.
Hidden Information: Unlike chess or Go, where all pieces are visible and the state of the game is fully known to both players, MTG involves hidden information. Players do not know their opponents' hands or the order of the cards in either player’s deck. This element of uncertainty requires strategies that account for probabilities and potential moves by the opponent, complicating the decision-making process for AI.
Large Decision Space: The decision space in MTG is vast. There are thousands of unique cards, and each has its own effects and interactions with other cards. Players can also choose from a variety of actions each turn, and the sequencing of these actions can significantly affect the outcome. The combination of numerous cards and potential sequences of play exponentially increases the complexity of the game.
Strategic Depth and Creativity: MTG requires a high level of creativity and strategic planning. Players often devise long-term strategies while adapting to new situations as they arise. This aspect of human intuition and adaptability is challenging to replicate in AI, which typically excels in stable, predictable environments.
Continuous Updates and Meta Changes: The game is constantly updated with new cards and sets, which can shift the "meta" or prevailing strategies dramatically. AI systems need continuous updates to their knowledge base and strategies to stay competitive, which is a significant undertaking given the game's complexity and frequency of updates.
These factors combined make MTG a particularly difficult game for AI to master. AI development in this area continues, but it has not yet reached the level of dominance seen in other games.
The win condition for Magic is more complicated than most games. In Chess, you only win if you capture the king. In Go, you only win if you control the most space. In DOTA or Starcraft, you only win if you destroy your opponent's base. But Magic has multiple ways to end the game. If you lose all your HP, you lose. If you run out of cards, you lose. If your opponent plays certain card combinations, you lose.
The nature of "turns" is more complicated than in most games. In Chess and Go, one player moves, then the other. In Starcraft and DOTA, both players move constantly as fast as they can. But in Magic, play goes around in turns, but certain cards can be played during other people's turns, and can interrupt their actions; there's no clean state of who's moving now.
Your hand is more complicated than something like Poker, where your hand always contains the same number of cards from the same deck. In Magic, you have to have mana to play cards. You get mana from Land cards, but you can only play one Land card per turn. If you don't draw a Land during a round, you're essentially playing a round behind. But if you draw several, you're stuck without playable cards Balancing the number of Lands in your deck to try to control how many you draw is important to winning. Likewise, you have limits on how many of a certain type of card you can include in your deck, but as far as I'm aware the overall number of cards in the deck is up to you. Too many means you don't draw what you want, too few means you run out and lose by "mill". The game begins before the game begins.
Continuous Updates can flat out change the rules. Back when I played, Magic got rid of "manaburn" as a concept. It used to be, if you created mana and didn't use it all, you took damage for every bit of mana you still had left. At some point, they axed that rule entirely.
Yes, it's very characteristically loquacious, but the bottom line is that hidden information combined with a very large decision space is what makes old-style Magic difficult for even humans to master. I think this is why they made the decision to severely restrict the set of available cards for tournament play: it reduces the complexity down to a few possible "meta" decks, with only minor variations. This makes tournaments shorter and easier to judge; but it also reduces the game play to the point where you can tell which strategy your opponent is using by the time he plays his first (non-land) card; and you can confidently predict the victor by turn 3.
Maybe system design, in the sense of complex custom software stacks, and maybe in the sense of military hardware procurement (although I have no experience there). You want something that's good enough, and also better than anything else that gets suggested, but there's no optimal solution. You have to identify key problem points, figure out what works there, and build the rest of the system around that. And you have to keep the entire system in mind while you're doing this, because although the components might naively seem to be interchangeable, they're actually not. Everything affects everything else, and changing any one bit can have side-effects anywhere else, leading to more changes, and more side-effects, and so on. If we're lucky, the modules are compartmentalized enough that it's possible to keep the whole system in mind, but if they're not, it's a nightmare.
If we humans had a decent understanding of our own biochemistry, maybe that would also count. And I bet you run into this sort of thing in psychology, too?
My biweekly COVID update here (with some HPAI slides at the end)...
1. Wastewater CpmL numbers are still dropping. In past interwave gaps they've been plateauing at increasingly higher levels after each wave, but they're now on track to fall lower than the previous June 2023 trough. (Given that a recent study indicated that JN.1 sheds significantly more virions than previous variants, this could indicate that SARS2 is circulating at lower levels than the Alpha-Delta interwave gap of June 2021.)
2. New hospitalizations due to COVID are at the lowest they've been for any of the interwave gaps. And COVID deaths are tracking lower than at any time since the first two weeks of the pandemic.
3. COVID dropped to 10th place among natural causes of death in 2023. In previous updates, I've discussed that excess deaths have returned to pre-pandemic levels.
4. In HPAI news — although *fragments* of H5N1 RNA have been detected in pasteurized milk, the virus is not capable of replicating post-pasteurization. The FDA used the “gold standard” egg inoculation & qPCR tests to determine no active virus is in pasteurized milk. But Marc Johnson makes a good point — even though we've dodged a bullet with cattle, H5N1 could become considerably more dangerous to humans if and when it begins to infect pigs. Pigs play an important role in the evolution of new human flu strains. Johnson contends, and I agree, that we need more comprehensive testing of wastewater from farms.
I actually find it kind of pleasant to read news about covid that boils down to "nothing much to worry about, everything's under control, no need to panic". It's a refreshing change.
I personally view it less as "worrying" and more as "hearing reassurance that it's fine".
Like, BLM protests were a thing back then, too. And it'd be similarly nice to see a periodic brief report on American race relations, saying "everything's fine, no need to worry, people are being chill". (Assuming that was actually true.)
Dunno, but calling Covid a 100 year flood may be like calling the warm snowless winter we had in my part of the country a hundred year flood. Pandemics are likelier now because of human encroachment on wildlife areas, prob also because of changes in weather patterns due to global warming. Florida, which had a subtropical climate til recently, now has mosquitos and other vectors carrying tropical diseases.
I didn''t blame global warming for covid, at least did not mean to sound like I did. My thought is that going forward pandemics are more likely than they have been for the 2 reasons I named: human encroachment on animal habitats and climate change. A third factor is more illness becoming antibiotic-resistant.
Au contraire, SARS2 is a fascinating virus! A lot of predictions were made about its behavior and its evolution based on other respiratory pathogens. Most have not panned out. If you're interested in science, SARS2 challenges many of the bedrock assumptions of immunology, epidemiology, and virology — and the assumption that these sciences are mature enough to be predictive.
For instance, we're still waiting for SARS2 to turn into a seasonal virus like other HCoVs that infect humans — but it hasn't. Unlike the flu or common cold HCoVs, COVID-19 waves affect the northern hemisphere and southern hemisphere at the same time.
Another one of the predictions was that the mutational patterns in the spike protein would create new Omicron-like waves. And despite some very high in vitro immune escape values for recent variants, this hasn't happened. Why hasn't it?
Then there's the prediction that SARS2 will evolve into another common cold HCoV. That may be happening, though. Some of the estimates of JN.1's infection rates — if true — would put the mortality rate from COVID-19 down in the territory of rhinoviruses. Unfortunately, I don't trust those models. I think it's still at least on par with influenza and possibly a little more deadly.
If you consider yourself a rationalist, the scientific meta-questions that surround SARS2 are pretty important. Likewise, the media and certain researchers seem to prey upon people's fears. I tell it like I see it. And right now things look pretty good.
One aside: there is a really excellent science podcast called This Week in Virology, done by a bunch of academic virologists. They are genuine experts, a mix of working and retired researchers in the field, often interviewing other experts. When covid initially arose, they expressed skepticism that it would ever be a big deal in the US.
This was a prediction by genuine experts who had no reason to mislead anyone. They weren't concerned with creating a panic, because their podcast is hardcore science (like sitting in on a journal club) that will never have a really large listener base. They just honestly got it wrong, because predicting the future is hard.
The latest in my series of reviews of Eliezer Yudkowsky's "Sequences":
Here, I review the book "Mere Goodness." Shortest summary I can give: I find and discuss two theses that he seems to argue for, find strong agreement with one and less for the other.
Any resources to get started on data science very generally (with some AI but not only)? At $dayjob we'd like to create a data team in the following year or so, and I'd like to be part of it. I'm currently a software engineer mostly writing go. I guess I should familiarize myself more with python, SQL and stuff like that? Also probably some kind of visualization tools? But the thing I most want to learn about is "how to use data to answer a question". Is starting a random project on one of my interests a good idea? From what I understand, a hard part of data is finding a question worth answering, is this something you can learn about when "playing around" with side projects? Sorry if I'm a bit all over the place, the domain seem vast and I don't know where to start.
I don't know if it's because these people weren't the right fits, or if this topic has gotten oversubscribed in popularity, but I know:
Someone who teaches a data science course at a prestigious college
Someone with a masters degree in data science from a prestigious college who I hired (not for data analytics)
Someone with a certificate in data science form a prestigious college who is looking for a job
Those three people are now: not teaching the class (or any class) anymore, not employed by me, and couldn't even get an interview for a data analytics job after a year and a half of trying and being willing to accept the most entry level positions.
Like I said, it may be more to do with the people than the field, but it's just kind of shocking that this has hit all three of them. If your job needs it and it's interesting to you, probably not a bad idea to pick up an additional skill, but in general I'd be kind of wary of this field.
Yeah, the market for that has been shrinking/we went through a bubble some years ago. Personally, I'm seriously considering it because we will have a need for it at my day job. We do ecommerce and we currently don't do anything with our client's data/behavior, and it's in the medium term strategy to start doing marketing and stuff like that.
it seems like a useless buzzword to me, so probably just take the most credible(or cynically, least) coursua classes for free and pick up whatever vaguely related math skills
It does in general, because I think it had a lot of hype and is a lot of things mixed together. I guess what I want generally is to learn to answer questions with data, and develop a sense of what questions to ask and when.
Im not convinced theres a fixable problem there; "a machine cant be held responsible and so should never make a decision" used to be a phase now its all "lol ai everything"
If you learn how ai's work so you kinda get calculus and could remake word embeddings, great; if you do anything more your probaly part of the problem and while its a coin flip if you boom or bust in the stupid hype market, 99.99 of the cyptro currencies made the world a worse place even from a pro bitcoin perspective; similar rates for social media; why will the ai boom be different in hindsight?
I see no reason not to believe the market is trying to rationalize the ai hype given that nn's are just 60 year old math, and blockchain is to bitcoin as data analytics/python is to ai; someone trying to justify the hype by compromises and the simple answer of "bitcoin is gaining in value because people want drugs online, stop pretending blockchain is better then a gossip protocall", ai hype is "ai girlfriends" have reached a tipping point, math wont make a decision, it wont free people from consequences of decisions(googles black nazis images still was an embressiment)
> I want generally is to learn to answer questions with data
prediction: even this mild sentiment in 5 years will sound like "I want to bring blockchain technology to make help donated food logistics, so Im learning eth and wrote a smart contract"
Yes, playing around with side projects you’re interested is a great way to start. If it’s something you’re interested in it will help you formulate questions.
Summary statistics will answer most questions… regressions and machine learning can help answer more niche/complex questions.
Find a dataset, then think of a good question, then hack away (knowing the more you hack, the more you may screw up). Know the data deeply… scroll through it in excel, know what each variable means, know the distribution of each column, etc. Also know that each question can be answered several ways. Different methods of answering questions often yield different results, and a bad data analyst will pick one that fits what they want. A good data analyst will deeply understand all results and be able to contextualize & present them for decision makers.
Kaggle stuff is pretty good for quick technical aspects of SQL/python for data science… but I have a feeling you’ll be able to pick that up easily. The biggest problem I’ve see with data analysis is people who are technically proficient but are horrible analysts. Not totally sure how to fix that problem, but a book like Data Detective by Tim Harford is a decent start.
Alternatively you could read a case study of someone running through a problem for themselves. For this, I’d recommend Duped by Timothy Levine. By reading that you will come to deeply understand data-driven mysteries and the kind of thinking required to unlock them.
I was pleasantly surprised that you included heavy industry; most of this sort of thing seems to be focussed on "we'll all make our living doing something vaguely related to moving bits around" rather than "where do we get stuff *from*? who makes it? how does it get from there to here?"
At minimum you must have some writing samples that we can evaluate. In the first cohort, we really only accepted people who had not only written something, but had written on the progress-related topic area that they proposed in their application. It will help a lot if you have some published writing, even if only on your own blog, but we will review writing samples sent in Google Docs or whatever.
These seem like they require you to be unemployed or on vacation for the duration. Isn't that tough for someone with AI or heavy industry expertise? It seems like that person would be trading off actually building those technologies
Yes, last cohort we had four non-Americans. The trip to San Francisco is strongly encouraged but not absolutely required, and we will pay for your travel and lodging.
(Last I saw, a bust could be commissioned for around $6k and a complete life-size figure for $30-40k, which is much cheaper than other options for marble sculpture. I am not affiliated with this company.)
I'm jonesing for a giant steel Richard Serra-style sculpture installation for my front yard to piss off my neighbors. Let me know when AI can do something like that! But I'm not in the market for hokey Nineteenth Century nymphs with six fingers.
I had to look him up and now I'm torn; while I could understand the neighbours burning your house down if you had one of the rusty iron walls in the front garden, they aren't totally horrible and would work in certain spaces.
They work best in an urban setting. And I agree about the hokey nymphs, there's already too much of that bad garden statuary in resin around.
>Last I saw, a bust could be commissioned for around $6k and a complete life-size figure for $30-40k, which is much cheaper than other options for marble sculpture.
1- Would it be actual marble?
2- That's a fuckton more expensive than what I was previously thinking of in that same space of "go back to 19th aesthetics" (commissioning broke-ass art students to do a full-size portrait in a romantique style pastiche)
"But think how embarrassing it would be to have a marble sculpture of a paladin with the wrong number of fingers!"
Think of how awesome this will be if after 50 years society collapses and a few hundred years later a 2nd renaissance occurs! Imagine all the explanations for WHY the paladins had extra fingers or all the other AI screw ups. "The extra fingers indicated their deeply spiritual believe in Diversity, Equity and Inclusion." "No, it was to indicate that radiation damaged mutants were fully integrated members of society." "No, it must have been ..."
It's robots carving the marble. They work from a 3D design that can come from anywhere. If that design was AI generated, then you should check it first before sculpting. It's not as if you give a robot a hunk of marble and just tell it to make a nice paladin please
Maybe enough patents will have expired that we will give a robot a _tank_ of marble ink and tell it to print a nice paladin! Much more efficient than CNC carving.
There's also just straight up cowardice combined with a lack of functioning societal mores towards public spaces.
There are some buildings owned by a certain corporation near me right now and there's some ugly lumpy modern art sculptures in the plaza between them. There's nothing appealing or even educational about it at all. Why isn't it, like, a statue of the founder of the company or something? J. PIERPONT MORGAN OPENING THE PANAMA CANAL or whatever. The answer is a) online journalists would call it cringe and b) a government-funded mob would pour red paint on it while the police refuse to intervene.
I'm thinking of the statue-toppling and other attacks on national symbols (or even just minor civic symbols, such as the elk statue in Portland) during the Black Lives Matter rioting, and how it was permitted and sometimes even embraced by city governments. Essentially, if a mob wants to deface something, it's getting defaced, and the government will just stand by and refuse to comment. How long do you think a statue of Jeff Bezos on an Amazon campus in Seattle would last? And of course a statue of Elon Musk doesn't bear thinking about.
Modern art defuses this by being so boring that people don't even realize it's there, and so meaningless that defacing it would actually make it more interesting, and the price we pay for that is a boring, bland civic environment with all the history of a bowl of oatmeal and all the personality and heart of a mental ward.
Hmm... I worked at HP Labs from 1980-1982, and the entrance to the building has two murals: https://www.roadarch.com/17/8/hp3.jpg and https://www.roadarch.com/17/8/hp4.jpg . They are reminiscent of field lines and equipotentials and Lissajous curves and interference patterns. This seems very reasonable to me for an electronics company.
J. Pierpont Morgan was one ugly dude. Why would I want to view a statue of his grotesque putz?
As for societal mores, which society are you referring to? A society that's been dead and gone since WWI? Or a mythical Tartarian society?
I certainly don't need any heroic depictions of historical figures. Nor do I need prancing marble nymphs exposing their marble hooters to me while they vomit water.
>J. Pierpont Morgan was one ugly dude. Why would I want to view a statue of his grotesque putz?
Because he built the Panama Canal, of course.
>As for societal mores, which society are you referring to? A society that's been dead and gone since WWI? Or a mythical Tartarian society?
A society where destroying public spaces wasn't universally considered heroic. Such a society has existed within the last ten years. I'm not asking for Tartaria, I'm just asking for basic law enforcement and maybe, if it's in the cards, public officials who don't hate and despise the place they were elected to govern.
>I certainly don't need any heroic depictions of historical figures. Nor do I need prancing marble nymphs exposing their marble hooters to me while they vomit water.
Before _we_ go any further, you're welcome to drop the smugly relaxed "you seem to be upset" schtick. It's okay to care about things.
With that out of the way, I'm mainly upset about 3 and 4. I will grant that some modern art is pleasant enough, some is actually kinda awesome, but for whatever aesthetic merits it may have it's very hard to make modern art that serves as a meaningful political or social symbol and society genuinely needs those or it will just crumble into an atomized cloud.
As for 5, "decline in moral values" is the wrong way to put it. I don't actually think moral values have declined, whatever that even means, and I am not interested in discussing the subject. I do believe that the quality of governance has declined and precipitously, largely due to governance being taken over by malevolent jerks who hate their citizens and their society. A Long March Through The Institutions, if you will.
As for 6, I think they are shared by enough people that the lack of inspiring art to fill those aesthetic values suggests the market is not clearing properly, and I blame 3 and 4 for that.
I don't think it's NIMBY and HOAs - the point of Tartaria is mostly not the quantity but the quality: I don't have a model of NIMBY that says "Oh, you can build a new headquarters, but only if you make it look like a boring warehouse".
And "Whither Tartaria" is primarily about urban and public spaces and not people's primary homes, so HOAs aren't really relevant as all, AFAIK.
That also ends up happening there though - public spaces end up spending all their excess resources on paperwork (and working to be maximally generic and inoffensive while they do it). There's no one with the discretion to try and make a cool idea happen.
If there were a fixed amount of paperwork it probably could, yeah. The problem is that paperwork seems to expand to fill the amount of paperwork handling we can do.
I am looking for employment, as I am increasingly in need of something new. I have years of regulatory compliance behind me and have been successful in most/all of my roles. I am a sponge and pick up on things quickly. Message me if I sound remotely like someone you need.
Did anyone message you? Just curious how effective this is. I am also looking for work: I have 15-16 days off a month as an airline pilot and want to diversify into an entry level python/sql coding or data science type job. Or bookkeeping with xero, or even volunteering some of the above skills to build up a bit of experience and make some connections.
The mathematically minded or those with a head for facts and figures will always be needed in the Effective Atruism movement, but what about those of us who are just artsy/humanities people? Are we of any use to ER in a professional capacity or otherwise?
Not sure if a perfect match, but there's plenty operations and people-managing roles. Local EA groups are almost always short on PeopleWithTimeAndEnergyToDoThings, so I'm suggest reaching out to any near you (or consider starting one).
To me the fundamental message of EA is that human life, everywhere in the world, present and future is valuable. You can easily imagine works that reinforce that view, that can really create an emotional case for EA that doesn’t really exist yet.
The thing about EA is that it does not engage people's need to give out of a feeling of compassion. I understand that people's need to feel an emotional investment in helping someone does not work as an engine for making a difference -- instead it makes people do things like send money to some one person whose awful story is in the news. But without engaging that need I don't think EA is going to influence many people. Someone in the arts or humanities might find a way to communicate the EA idea in a way that moves people. (It's a heavy lift, though.)
My sense is that EA is a useful corrective to the heartstring-plucking ad showing sad hungry puppies that need to be helped by sending money. But I think it can run aground in the same ways that cost/benefit analysis and trying to apply utilitarianism run aground.
May already be known to this community but if it isn't you should give Stambovsky v. Ackley a read. Possibly the most entertaining judicial opinion ever written.
"Whether the source of the spectral apparitions seen by defendant seller are parapsychic or psychogenic, having reported their presence in both a national publication (Readers' Digest) and the local press (in 1977 and 1982, respectively), defendant is estopped to deny their existence and, as a matter of law, the house is haunted."
* Hernandez: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/490/680/ which is about whether scientologists can deduct auditing expenses from their taxes which in turn (in theory) turns on whether they receive a "tangible benefit" from the auditing. (note this puts scientologists in the extremely awkward position of arguing they *dont*)
* Tilton v Marhsall: https://casetext.com/case/tilton-v-marshall another religious fraud claim where the (texas supreme) court has to brush up against the truth value of the fraud claims
* US v. Annamalai: https://casetext.com/case/united-states-v-annamalai-3 yet another religious fraud claim. This one comes up in real criminal wire fraud cases all the time. Hindu temple commits some fraud. Government convicts temple owner. Government argues in restitution that "every dollar that was deposited into the [Hindu Temple] was in fact a fraud". Court here finds no, some of the card charges for supernatural blessings are legitimate in the sense that people got what they were promised, whatever that was.
>* Hernandez: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/490/680/ which is about whether scientologists can deduct auditing expenses from their taxes which in turn (in theory) turns on whether they receive a "tangible benefit" from the auditing. (note this puts scientologists in the extremely awkward position of arguing they *dont*)
Love this. Reminds me of a tariff issue a while back, where Xmen figurines manufactured abroad would be subject to a tariff if they were "dolls" - figures made in representation of a person, or some similar definition. Put the importer in the awkward position of having to argue against the core premise of Xmen by asserting, successfully, that mutants are "nonhuman creatures."
>asserting, successfully, that mutants are "nonhuman creatures."
I'm curious; what criterion did they use? If they used "interbreeding with humans", then all of the childfree, myself included, are nonhuman. Shrug. I suppose one could say that...
Well, it seems to be as difficult to prove the nonexistence of ghosts as their existence. To falsify, you need replicable evidence. What is replicable is the aversion and as well interest of a lot of people to ghost encounters, so that for someone aversive to such things, a haunted house has less worth than one assumedly non-haunted.
This is all silly to everyone sure about the non-existence of ghosts as it was to me before I actually met one. No reason to worry, I still don't consider ghosts relevant except as a possible reminder to live your life right.
That works both ways in this decision; there are no ghosts, but the owner of the house was selling her story about it being haunted, so she's a fraud at worst or loopy at best. The purchaser is equally dumb for being scared off by the haunted house because there are no ghosts. I wonder if the objection was really to try to get the price down?
The courts can't tell people "you are crazy for believing in ghosts" so it had to decide on caveat emptor grounds.
On e of the wilder experiences in law school was seeing the super smart real estate nerd kid get cold-called on the Stambovsky case. Stambovsky is, more than anything, a case about estoppel. You could replace the word "ghost" in the argument between defendant and plaintiff with literally almost any other word, real or imaginary, so long as whatever-it-is colorably diminishes the value of the property: Gnomes, bear traps, mushroom-people, termites, broken glass, civil war re-enactors, asbestos, foot odor. The point is that you never told me [x] existed in the house, and you went around telling everyone else that, so its not fair for you to presently deny the existence of [x].
You should watch "Miracle on 34th Street" (the 1947 version for best viewing). Minor spoiler: the judge didn't rule as to whether or not Santa Claus exists, at least not without evidence to back the claim.
One of the best parts of the trial was that a key building block to the defense was asserting that the US Post Office was an efficiently run organization because it was large.
But the judge didn't have to rule on Santa's existence. The prosecution conceded the point after the defense called the prosecutor's son to the witness stand :-)
He also used that the US Post Office was authoritative. That was critical ("if the US Post Office thinks this man is Santa Claus then he is Santa Claus ..."). But there was a throwaway line leading up to that equating the US Post Office's size with efficiency.
The authoritative slant was genius (for a movie trial/hearing that doesn't need to follow actual procedures). The efficiency argument was just (from my perspective) funny.
The recent "would you rather meet a man or a bear in the woods" is a great toxoplasmosis of rage example: there's a reasonable, sympathetic point here (if you want to understand how it can feel to be a woman who's afraid of male violence, try imagining a world where you run into bears whenever you go for a walk - sure they're probably benign but you can't know for sure and it's scary), but then the version that actually gets pushed is the crazy controversial point ("yes literally a bear is safer than the average man") because of how the discourse market and boosting algorithms work.
Having recently stepped on this landmine in real life and been yelled at to shut up until I vacated the situation, I've been thinking a lot about it. The conclusion I've come to is that it's almost inherently designed to cause conflict:
The side I'll shorthand as women present the meme as "isn't it interesting that women would pick the bear--doesn't that say terrible things about the daily experience of women in society?" An empathy exercise and a totally fair point.
But if you squint, the meme looks kinda like a trolley problem-esque thought experiment: which would YOU pick? Is picking one over the other statistically wise? Etc. Catnip to a certain group of folks, usually men. Guilty as charged.
That reaction reads to the first group as "women are stupid for picking the bear," which gets interpreted as men not empathizing with the plight of women. But really it's both sides just talking right past the other, about completely different things.
I just realized that I've read through this entire subthread and _nobody_ mentioned the final scenes from midsommar. Surely an ex-boyfriend being roasted while encased in a bear skin is relevant somehow?? :-)
I'm just going to roll my eyes and respond "why not both?" if this ever comes up. Then have them look up Amie Huguenard, for what happens if you go out into the woods with a man *and* a bear.
A little beside your point, I think the metaphor you mean is "motte and bailey". Toxoplasma of rage is something like: Group A has meme A, which makes group B really angry, they answer with meme B, which in turn enrages group A to do even more of meme A.
No I do mean toxoplasma of rage. There's no one person switching between ideas - there's one crazy version and one reasonable version (geld by different people), but social media incentives boost the crazy version.
As a once-14 year old girl who intimidated two charging Rottweilers into retreating (dogs so aggressive that they had to be shot by the police 2 years later after trapping a neighbor in her car)...
...I can't give a basic answer, because it *ALL* depends on the kind of bear, the kind of man, and what tools I have with me.
Do I have my gun with me? If yes, then man, of course.
If no, then details matter:
Well-fed grizzly or black bear vs strong-looking meth-addict-dude with crazy eyes? Bear.
*Polar* bear vs a strong-looking creepy man who literally declares, "I want to rape you and then strangle you?" Man.
Black or grizzly bear vs slender, diminutive, shy 18 year old man? Man.
In other words, anyone who goes 100% one way or the other hasn't fully examined all the factors which contribute to reasonable and necessary profiling.
Seems to me like asking "what type of bear/man" is cheating a bit ... the mix of what type of man (or bear) there is out there, is part of what the question is asking.
It's like if someone asks "would you rather have $50,000 or an envelope that has a 50% of $0 and a 50% chance of $100,000" and you answer "it depends on what's in the envelope". Well, yeah...
Given the implicit purpose of the question (to convey that women are very scared of men), pointing out that women have reasonable cause to be afraid of SOME men in SOME circumstances, just as they have reason to be afraid of SOME bears in SOME circumstances, but certainly not all men or all bears in all circumstances, I consider it a relevant clap-back against exaggeration (and an argument for profiling, which is good!).
I'll just say that whatever the "implicit purpose" is, I think people have the right to answer the question as asked, and not to agree with exaggeration because of some implicit purpose.
Otherwise, how could you ever be against exaggeration?
"Joe Biden is so old he can no longer speak and is hooked up to an iron lung!"
I guess the problem is that it's hard to know if someone who says "bear over man" is overestimating the danger of men, underestimating the danger of bears, making some statistical deduction mistake, or not making a mistake at all and consciously saying that the terribleness of being attacked by a fellow human outweighs the actual risk assessment.
Like asking "do you dislike Joe Biden?" where the affirmative answer can mean "yes because he's a socialist", "yes because he's a Zionist", "yes because his policies are great and he's done such a bad job of promoting them", or "yes because I dislike all politicians, even though he's better than all the others".
What a pointlessly vague and uninformative question.
This reminds me of that poll that went viral a few years ago where 30% of American adults (and even more English adults), said they couldn't beat a rat in a fight, which can only mean that they are interpreting that question _dramatically_ differently than I would.
Worth pointing out that as long as we're considering all the possibilities, pandas are bears and I would definitely pick meeting a panda over any given man. It's a panda!
This reminds me of a funny bit Louis CK had before he was cancelled in which he told the guys in the audience to imagine that whenever they went out on a date it was with a bear because that's what it's like for a woman to go on a date with a man. "Oh, I sure hope he's nice. Oh, I sure hope he doesn't kill me."
The first and only thing that comes to my mind is the incident where a teenage girl managed to call her mother on her cell phone while she was being eaten alive by brown bears:
I haven't been following the discourse, but it occurs to me that bears are normally found it woods and they might not find the presence of a human that interesting. Whereas a human in the woods who encounters another human there is at least likely to greet them.
I had not heard about this "would you rather meet a man or a bear in the woods" thing but thanks for letting me know. Since now I understood a great meme about Proverbs 17:12.
This is what I keep trying to figure out! I'm not particularly afraid of men, but I also don't think seeing a bear in the woods = likely death. I don't feel like it's as clear-cut a question as many people seem to think.
Not really following the man vs. bear argument at all, but your risk of bear attack depends highly on which type of bear…
If it’s a black bear (all you’ll encounter in somewhere that’s not the Rocky Mountains) you’ll be fine.
If it’s a grizzly bear (which you can definitely encounter in the Rockies), you’re in danger. I don’t know the odds of encounter vs. attack… but every summer around me there are stories of people getting mauled/killed. I don’t hike in grizzly areas in my state without a rifle or 10mm pistol. Yet the odds of being able to effectively counter a grizzly attack are low… if you surprise them or they surprise you, you’ll need a lot of luck.
Though polar bears are larger than grizzlies, they're probably not more dangerous: in the areas where polar bear and grizzly territories overlap, the grizzlies bully the polar bears something fierce.
I assumed the issue is that polar bear's primary food source is large mammals. You are the polar bears diet. It is not a question about how surprised the bear is, its current temperament, whether cubs are near by. You = food is the problem.
If you encounter a polar bear in the Rockies, while you are being eaten you can at least console yourself with the thought that somehow the problem of global warming seems to have been solved.
Most of the tweets were either intentional rage bait or people complaining about the rage bait. In an ideal world both types of tweets would result in a 90 day ban from “For You” for their author but alas, that’s not the world we live in.
Any false or deceiving or intentionally incomplete statement that a person makes for the sake of attracting clicks is rage bait. It overlaps with trolling in many cases, yes.
Maybe I'm missing something, but is the contention that it is actually safer to meet a bear in the woods than a man? Dismissing the possibility that a man might actually help someone, for example, get un-lost?
The quote in the original argument was "yes literally a bear". As presented it's clearly false as a factual question (the per-encounter rate of bear attacks is way higher than the per-encounter rate of man attacks - if you ran into a dozen bears every time you went on a day hike no one would ever go). But it is just provocative enough to get argued over (and just reasonable enough to not be completely insane, since the vast majority of bear encounters really are safe).
OTOH there can be reasons to not want something other than the probability of getting killed. I mean, unless it's raining hard I'd rather go to work by bike than by tram, even though I'm like an order of magnitude less likely to get killed on the latter.
The underlying point being essentially blood libel is what I think of as objectionable; “men are best compared to, and probably more dangerous than, unreasoning animals, and it’s only a matter of hunger, breed, and circumstance whether they ignore or callously devour you.”
The quick shorthand here is can you sub either the man or the bear for African or Jew and not come up with a Klan pamphlet.
We're pretty far out of distribution on this one. The evolutionary training data is quite clear on the nature of strange men. Women should fear us, and I struggle to understand why that would cause rage.
Fun related notion, lol into Dan Grossman's 'universal phobia' (human violence). There's something extra terrifying about a fellow human attacking you.
Women should fear bears much more than they fear us. If women aren't absolutely terrified of bears, that's only because they've lived from birth in a world where men have worked very hard for centuries to make almost all bears terrified of anything that walks on two legs.
But not all bears, and by definition the bears you are most likely to meet in the woods are the ones who are less terrified of humans than the average bear. The odds of a random bear encounter in the woods leading to violence are *much* higher than the odds for a random encounter with a man(*). So this isn't a rational assessment of "evolutionary training data", it's just ignorance turned to low-grade click-bait propaganda.
* Yes, 99+% of encounters with bears end without anyone getting hurt. What do you think is the corresponding number for encounters with men?
Precisely my point is that quasi-instinctual responses aren't concerned about actual odds.
There's something deeply scary about humans. A toy example I draw from conversations with more urban youth about why they'd be terrified to go camping (and from conversations with people who did go camping and were terrified by something): skin walkers. Any of the people I had these conversations with would be hugely relieved to find the source of a noise is a bear that garbage, rather than the - very distinctly man-shaped - threat they were imagining moments prior.
For virtually all of human history, there was something deeply scary about lions and tigers and bears, oh my. And wolves, and all the rest. For virtually all of human history, *men* were who you turned to when you wanted to make sure someone had your back when there were wild animals around.
Evolution, has been teaching us all, regardless of sex or gender, to be more afraid of bears than of men for all but *maybe* the last two hundred years. And that's not enough time to evolve new quasi-instincts. So you don't get to pin this one on evolution.
Which men, you smarmy fellow? The strange ones from the next tribe over, wearing terrifying paint/masks/headdresses?
The prompt isn't "would you rather encounter a bear or a man to whom you are closely related?"
Not only is it not 'the last few hundred years' this problem goes back to our common ancestor with the chimpanzee. Look up how much of the violence in a chimp's life comes from other chimps.
Gracious, what is it about this topic that has people coping and seething so hard?
It causes rage for the same reason a business refusing to hire a qualified candidate, just because he's black, causes rage. Even if the business cited statistics about !Q, per capita crime rate, etc. they'd still be called out as bigots, and rightfully so. We've decided a long time ago that we shouldn't pre-judge individuals' character by statistics or physical characteristics. And empathy should go both ways. If men should understand why women are extra wary of them, then women should understand how men feel being treated like potential rapists right from the get-go.
Have we decided any such thing? Citation needed, lol. Joking aside, thank you - - I think I understand. Let me see if I can ITT this.
A women being afraid in your presence strikes you as impugning you in some way, as if she is judging you for being defective, deficient, or morally bad - perhaps as though she is assuming you are so hopeless with women that you would need to rape one or want to kill one.
Is this roughly correct?
That feeling is a bit outside my experience - - I'm tall, strong, and somewhat aggressive-looking - and I feel quite confident with women. When someone behaves as if she is afraid in my presence, I feel a spark of what you might call primal appreciation - - she has not been so blinded by politeness that she cannot respond appropriately. For a moment, all the centuries fall away and we are just a pair of hominids. She sees me, and I see her seeing me. The moment passes, and if socially appropriate, I may then set her at her ease with a kindly smile or a good word, but that comes later when we engage our forebrains.
Now, the day will come* when I no longer inspire fear, when age and infirmity bow my frame and women approach me naturally with the spirit of caretaking appropriate to an elder. And on that day I will be as grateful for their kindness as I can be - - just as an old woman being helped across the street by a young man will be grateful, though she still remembers male attention coming her way for rather different reasons.
*Citation needed. We don't all live so long, after all.
I went out to lunch today, and sat down at my favorite cafe. There were tons of men and women around, some in couples, and some single. No one was raping or murdering anybody, and the women seemed to be enjoying themselves (or at least the food). Is it your contention that they should've been afraid -- perhaps too afraid to venture out of their homes into a cafe populated by us deadly male predators ?
> I went out to lunch today, and sat down at my favorite cafe. There were tons of men and women around, some in couples, and some single. No one was raping or murdering anybody, and the women seemed to be enjoying themselves (or at least the food).
Some alternate universe has an Internet where everyone who has this experience posts it, every day that they have the experience. They each upvote their favorite "nothing bad was happening" story. The End.
I get the temptation to write things that are or are intended to be funny on the internet, but does it ----ing -sound- like that's my contention?
Also while I'm not familiar with the twitter man/bear thing referenced by the original comment here, I'm guessing the hypothetical isn't "would you rather there be a bear at the cafe or a male human?"
> The evolutionary training data is quite clear on the nature of strange men. Women should fear us, and I struggle to understand why that would cause rage.
I don't think that the average woman should fear the average man.
You're missing the point. 'Should' in the immediate context of evolution here means that it is healthy and fitting, not that it's bayesian. You should in some sense desire the average woman despite having less chance of being with her than of being mauled by a bear.
Once, in San Francisco I’m walking home. It’s 2am on a busy enough street and a young woman is about 20 feet ahead of me. So far so good. She turns into another less busy street, also on my way home, and so do I. It’s just me, her and a few other walkers. Maybe two more.
She turns around spies me and speeds up a little. About ten seconds later she turns right into a lane where there’s a back way to my block of apartments, which are also, presumably, her block of apartments.
This is a long lane so she will see me if I turn in, the gate is a fair bit away.
I keep walking, do a turn around the block and go in through the main entrance.
I was a bit annoyed at the time, I admit, that I’m “profiled” as being a threat (that is - as a guy, I’m white), and that I’m 5 minutes later to bed, but her fear trumps my slight peevishness.
So there was a (now banned) troll who kept asking "why is it okay for women to fear men but not for whites to fear blacks?" in the last few threads, and no one seems to have actually answered him (unless I missed it). So I'll re-ask it here. Why?
This isn't a way of saying there's no difference; I feel like there is a big difference but I can't quite identify it.
(Well there's one enormous difference I can think of, but it's not one that anyone seems to actually care about in these discussions.)
I don't think there's any deep difference between the two cases – it's just that you're from a society in which fear of Africans happens to be taboo. I've heard Japanese people express such fear without feeling weird about it, because they don't have that same taboo.
The vast majority of men are normal and well-behaved, and then there is a small fraction of testosterone-driven predators. In contrast, there isn't a "black hormone" which drives black people in particular to criminality.
You want to get me banned on my second post on this Substack?
Thanks, mate.
Honestly I’d be worried by any suspicious following male or group. Teenagers worry me a bit I think.
But I’m a guy and I’m generally not worried walking around. I used to live in an area where there were lots of drug users, and homeless. Walking down that street was a bit of a chore but not worrying. My female housemate couldn’t put up with it and left. To her it was a dangerous cesspool.
But the underlying idea of "picture how it feels to be surrounded by probably-friendly but unknowable people much bigger than you by imagining black bears" isn't in itself crazy (so long as you understand it's just a visualization exercise and not a literal comparison). But it's not a coincidence that it's the crazy version of the meme that spread.
I got so hung up on what type of bear they were talking about. If they're talking about black bears, which are generally not aggressive towards humans, I might be able to see the case for preferring a bear to a man. But most other bear types would just be silly to prefer over a man.
To be fair, I’m a dude who would rather see a bear than a human, and the relative danger of each doesn’t even factor into my decision. Neither are particularly dangerous and getting to see a bear in the wild is a rare treat. In the unlikely event it turns into an attack, my bear spray should work on either one. Plus I don’t have to worry whether the bear is going to mistake me for a predator.
Being armed with bear spray is another variable that the question didn't account for and which would change a lot of people's answers. I would rather see a bear just for novelty's sake if the question were, for example: "Would you rather meet a bear or a man while rolling through the woods in the bowels of a tank?"
I guess that’s a fair point. I just took it as a given because this isn’t a hypothetical for me as someone who spends a lot of time in bear country and has seen a handful of them. It’s just a no-brainer to me to be prepared rather than worried, and I guess I don’t see why women shouldn’t have the same attitude: carry pepper spray to ease your mind, but more importantly arm yourself with realistic expectations and understand you’ll probably never have to use it.
When I see a bear in the wild, I consider myself lucky, and the idea it will attack me isn’t something I even bother worrying about because 1) I know how rare it is and 2) I know exactly how I’ll respond if the situation takes that unexpected turn. I once came upon a couple women on a trail who frantically told me about a bear up ahead, and I realized afterwards my reaction seemed strange to them because they were expecting me to freak out and turn around rather than be like “oh cool let me rush ahead and try to get a picture”. Like the thought literally didn’t even cross my mind til they looked at me like I was crazy.
It's easy (and kinda fun) to get hung up on the details! It's a pretty optimal scizzors statement (despite - well because of - being kinda crazy at face value).
I was getting curious about the state of the election and saw that 538 has Trump leading in all the current swing states (Nevada, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Georgia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina). Lots of commentators say that the polls at this stage of the election are not predictive of the final outcome, and so I went back to see where those polls were at the beginning of May of 2020 and how those compared to the final outcome. In 6 of those 9 states, the leader at the beginning of May went on to win the election. Of the three that reversed, the highest margin that swung back toward the eventual winner of that state was North Carolina, which was polling with Biden 3 points up at the beginning of May. In fact, of those 9 states, 3 out of the 4 that had margins of 3 points or less were reversed by the election results.
So if you were to create a predictive rule based on 2020, that rule would be that a polling margin above 3 percent in May is predictive that the current poll leader will win, but that if it's below 3, there's a 75% chance they will be reversed by the election.
This would put Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania in play for Biden, while those other 6 could be written off as solid Trump states. To win, Biden would have to take all three of those, which I guess he has a 42% chance of doing? (man it's been a long time since my college probability class.)
Oddly, 42% chance Biden wins sounds intuitively right to me.
I know that this approach is woefully short on data and long on assumptions. But I'd be curious if anyone has time and access to data to know what the actual widest polling gap in May to be reversed by election day might be? (say, over the past 20 years)
Edit: Here's the election map I'm using. I gave Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, Ohio, and NC to Trump since they are currently polling with him a greater than 3 percent lead for him. https://www.270towin.com/maps/ALg1z
"This would put Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania in play for Biden, while those other 6 could be written off as solid Trump states. To win, Biden would have to take all three of those, which I guess he has a 42% chance of doing? (man it's been a long time since my college probability class.)"
You need to take into account correlations between the states. Failing to do so is part of the explanation for why Trump's chances to win in 2016 were significantly higher than generally believed.
So if one were to stipulate that there's a 75% chance that states with lower than 3% margin in May will reverse their winner in the final vote, then it's actually a 75% chance that Biden takes all three since where one goes, all go.
You need to take into account the correlation of the three states. The easy thing to do (which is common) is to assume that each is independent (so 0 correlation). Alternately, if we knew for certain that all three would vote identically then we should just treat them as a set and assign all their votes to either Trump or Biden (using whatever odds you think are best).
So, what you need to do is:
(a) Figure out what a good correlation value to use is, and
(b) Figure out the odds that Trump or Biden get some/all/most-of the votes
If you think that the correlation is 1.0 then what you said is true given your assumption. If the correlation is less than 1.0 (and it probably is) then the odds are less than 75%.
The key is that you HAVE to take into account correlations if you want a good result. The reason folks tend to not do this is because it is difficult.
Do you have the numbers for 2012? Almost all the comparison is with the other Trump elections (personality focused). What about the structural comparison with other first-term Democrats?
I don't know that there really are any good comparisons to be found with a first-term democrat, since Trump is essentially an incumbent as well. That's why I think this election is a little harder to predict. Normally the incumbent starts with a big advantage that then shrinks over time as voters get to know the new guy, but I don't think that's going to happen here.
Regardless, here are the 2012 numbers for the closest swing states:
Florida in May 2012: Obama +0.5
Final: Obama +0.9
North Carolina in May 2012: Obama +2.4
Final: Romney +2.0
Ohio in May 2012: Obama +4.9
Final: Obama +3.0
Virginia in May 2012: Obama +3.2
Final: Obama +3.9
So not nearly as much variance there. The biggest was North Carolina and that was only 4.4 swing. I would also expect in 2020 that there is going to be a lot less variance too, though who knows. 2016 was unique I think in that it took a while for some people to come around to voting for Trump because frankly a lot of Republicans didn't like him, but ended up holding their noses and doing it. Nobody is really forming opinions on a new candidate this time around.
I’m wondering if the polling differences between 2016 and 2024 are due to batshit small d anti-democratic behavior becoming normalized in those 8 years. God help us if that’s the case.
I'm not sure how you're doing the calculation. Overall polling errors is both unpredictable (there's a rule of thumb that it always goes the opposite to what conventional wisdom expects, since pollsters are more likely to not publish weird-seeming results, but even that's not very reliable). More importantly, it's generally highly correlated (the polling errors per state isn't independent, although correlations within the Midwest are stronger than, say, Georgia and Michigan).
I think your bottom line estimate of 42% is about right though.
Polling errors are somewhat unpredictable, but also somewhat predictable aren't they? Like, if a poll in May shows a candidate in a state to have a 20% lead, that candidate is probably going to win, right? How about 10%? 5%?
What's the deal with Nevada? I'm confused because it seems to be a swing state in every election yet it hasn't actually been won by the Republican since 2004.
(Maybe it's just because the Republican hasn't decisively won since 2004?)
So did MA two years ago and I think Vermont does now?
Fair point about the margin, but imagine two hypothetical states: State A has gone D by a 51% margin ten times in a row (always with the same demographics voting the same way) and State B has gone 61% R a few times, then 61% D a few times, with large numbers of back-and-forth vote-switchers. Which one is more of a swing state? (Genuine question, I don't know what the pollsters would say.)
I just feel like polling analysis focuses on a narrow range of factors, but I'm no expert.
Margins are always close, republican won senate statewide in 2012. has a republican governor. republican lost 2022 senate by less than a percentage point... what's the problem?
To be cynical, there may be a tendency of news media to bias their coverage to make their preferred side look good. Taking a reliable state and calling it a "swing state" might help accomplish that.
I suspect there are quite a few swing states that aren't seen as that swingy because the GOP hasn't won big since 2004. Colorado, New Mexico, Minnesota and New Jersey are all blueish states and likely to be won by Biden but in a clear red year they could be won by either party.
Democrats have barely won it every time, due to a combination of good political groundwork and wide (and, until 2020, growing) margins with Hispanics. but now democrats have been losing ground with nonwhite voters, so they look like the underdogs there.
The college I attend offers a course in modern physics, with this description in the handbook:
"Special Relativity: simultaneity, time dilation, length contraction, Lorentz transformations, velocity addition, rest mass, energy. Blackbody radiation: Boltzmann's and Wien's Laws, Planck's quantization. Photoelectric effect. Compton effect. Atomic spectra. Rydberg's formula. Thompson's and Rutherford's atomic models. Bohr's model of the atom."
Unlike many of the physics courses, this one doesn't have a lab component. Could it? It seems to me at least some of these things -- blackbody radiation and the photoelectric effect -- could be experimented with on a lab bench. And maybe some of the rest could be tested with elaborate equipment.
You could also just test them with some kind of simulation. I remember having physics classes with a computer lab, like detecting how many muons make it to the detector from the atmosphere (they can only last that long because of time dilation). We're not really detecting muons, but it's not like we'd be learning any more if we were.
I'm going to call bullshit on this one. You could code up a simulation so that apples fall up into the sky, inertia depends on color instead of mass, and the world is Galilean (rather than Lorentz) invariant. I'd say `playing with a simulation' tells us approximately nothing about how the world works (unless you take it on faith that the person making the simulation did it correctly, but if you are willing to take that on faith, why not just take on faith that whatever the lecturer told you in class was correct?).
The point of lab isn't to make sure your teachers aren't secretly lying to you. It's to engage with the subject in some way that's not just reading or rote memorization or plugging numbers into equations you don't intuitively understand.
At my college the lab complement to Modern Physics was a separate course (called Physics Experimental Techniques or something), unlike my other Physics classes where the lab/classroom components were more tightly paired (Electromagnetism/Electromagnetism Lab and so on)
It could easily have a lab component. Though with the focus on historic (& now mostly defunct) models of the atom, this seems to be at least partially a history of science course. That might change the approach made when setting the syllabus vs a more applied science course.
Yes it could have a lab component. Blackbody radiation, photoelectic effect and atomic spectra are all things you can measure for yourself in a lab without particularly elaborate equipment. I remember doing an experiment to measure Rydberg's constant as well, though I seem to remember getting an answer far off the actual value!
Observing muons from cosmic ray showers counts as a time dilation demonstration... ( I'm not sure if one can reasonably see them with e.g. a cloud chamber )
A beta radiation source (with MeV electrons) plus a cloud chamber and magnet will give you relativistic mass.
Typically, yes. There are sometimes provisions for taking just the labs or just the classroom parts, but I think those are aimed at people who failed one component or the other the first time they took them.
I have bee reading articles in Apple News (maybe that's the problem and I should stop there), supposedly from reputable publications covering science, reporting on physicists who are investigating ways to exceed the speed of light. Now, let's say it were possible. My questions is, what's the point. Nothing is where it seems--so how do we know where we're going. And what's to prevent us from crashing into a big rock or a big sun or a very big whole in our path since we would not see it in time, cause we are going faster than the light that would otherwise tell it was there. And of course at that speed, it would only take a speck of rock/scissors/paper to cause a disaster.
It would revolutionize physics as we know it, and increase the possibility of humanity creating an interstellar civilization in the future. The potential utility is so vast that I'm glad we have people working on it, even if there's basically no evidence that it's possible.
Just because our current spaceship designs aren't up to the job, doesn't mean that future designs can't be.
One "obvious" way to travel from point A to point B in a 3D space at FTL speeds is via a 4th dimension. We don't know how to access it today, but it doesn't mean it's impossible.
Not a physicist, but surely you would be unable to see behind you, rather than in front of you? Speeding along at FTL should make anything you were on a direct collision course with brighter, rather than dimmer, as you'll run into more photons that the object emitted. You can't get hit from behind either.
Furthermore, if you are on a trajectory to hit something, any point further along that trajectory will be be closer to the object than you are now, which means if you can see it from your starting position, you should be able to see it for your entire journey. And anything you can't see from your starting position, or at any point along the journey, can't actually hit you (since it would have to travel faster than light).
I don't see any reason why you wouldn't be able to account for displacement by e.g. comparing light wavelengths from the object as you travel.
There are many issues with FTL travel, not least the fact that it's impossible under our current understanding of the universe, but seeing where you're going seems unlikely to be one of them.
"And anything you can't see from your starting position, or at any point along the journey, can't actually hit you (since it would have to travel faster than light)."
Ah, but other people can also travel faster than light! Which creates a pretty amusing picture where the biggest risk comes from colliding with someone else.
It is the very phrase "the speed of light" that seems to confuse people. We would all be better served to think instead of it being "the speed of causality" or "the maximum speed of information". Electromagnetic waves in a vacuum then move at that speed because, well, there's nothing impeding them from doing so.
The second one accepts this framing, a lot of the mystery around quantum entanglement, black hole decay, Cherenkov radiation, etc. gets a lot less mysterious.
Calling it by what it is--the speed of causality in spacetime--then also lays bare just how inane expending any cognitive effort on FTL travel or communication is.
This is a really good point (I think, since I don't know a whole lot about physics). Calling it "causality" makes things like time dilation so much more intuitive.
If I can ask a physics question in a non-physics manner: which is ontologically primary, the speed of causality or the fact that light travels at that speed?
Does light travel at the speed of causality, or is it the speed of causilty because light travels at it?
It's been a while, but I think all we really know is that there's this speed, which appears to be the fastest that anything can travel. And pyroclasts is right, in that there are enough things that travel at that speed, that it's more parsimonious to just think of it as a fundamental limit of the universe. Calling it "causality" makes as much sense as anything. Light is merely the first thing observed to travel at that speed, so that's what we happen to call it in common speech. I don't think we really understand the effect enough to talk about ontology, outside of the context of a particular theory.
Stephen Wolfram came up with a cool but weird theory of everything, which I'm not qualified to comment on (other than it being "cool" and "weird"). As far as I can tell, it does answer your question by saying that the speed of causality is ontologically primary.
A possible solution in science fiction I've read is an ice plow on the front of a spacecraft. This acts as an ablative layer in case of collision and can be easily repaired by applying liquid water. Of course this only protects from very small masses and presumably the spacecraft would have to slow to sub-light speeds anywhere in the vicinity of a stellar system. Although I think that was actually for near light speed travel. How fast do you need to go for a stray hydrogen atom to be a hazard?
This is almost certainly SCIENCE rather then ENGINEERING. If some physicist can come up with a theoretical way to exceed the speed of light (that was generally accepted as non-bogus) this would be very interesting to the science crowd. Among other things, it might point towards "new physics."
I’m interested in the general question of what it would mean to say that an A.I. is more intelligent than the most intelligent human, something like that. That’s an issue that’s being debated extensively these days. For the most part I don’t think the issue is very well formulated.
To be honest, I don’t find it to be a very compelling issue. It doesn’t nag at me. If others weren’t discussing it, I wouldn’t bother.
The notion of intelligence itself is vague. I rather expect that as A.I. becomes more developed, we’ll develop a more sophisticated understanding the issue. The general notion seems like it can be captured in a simple analogy:
Intelligence is to a mind’s capacity for dealing with cognitive tasks, such as finding a cure for cancer
AS
Horsepower is to an engine’s ability deal with mechanical tasks, such as the acceleration of an automobile.
But I don’t want to take up the general issue in this post. Rather, I want to look at analogical reasoning. I start with 1) a specific kind of analogical reasoning, interpreting narratives, 2) use some remarks by Geoffrey Hinton to move to some more general remarks, 3) move on to another specific example, an analogy between double-entry bookkeeping and supply and demand, and then 4) conclude by wrapping things up with a comparison to computing chess, which can be implemented in well-defined search space, while analogy cannot.
The AI argument on mimetic desire is really bad - in fact it clearly doesn't understand what "mimetic" mean here. Hunger is like the archetype of non mimetic desire.
That wouldn't make the AI arguments any better because it would still need to explain how those desires are mimetic - what is imitated here. It is not arguing there is no non mimetic desire, it is arguing as if the Girardian concept of mimetic desire was exactly the same thing as the layman definition of desire.
I decided to check that paper in which I wrote up my interaction with ChatGPT and discovered that I'd called in on that very point. So thanks for the catch. I've revised my post. Here's the text that goes after the quote from Chatster:
The second paragraph is reasonable, but the third is problematic. Hunger is not mimetic on the face of it. But I was happy that it ChatGPT seemed to at least have some idea of that nature of the reasoning required and where to look and what to look for in the film. I decided not to pursue that and I turned my attention to sacrifice, first Girard, then the application to Jaws.
IMHO to avoid rehashing old arguments, any discussion on "what it would mean to say that an A.I. is more intelligent than the most intelligent human" should start with reading at least Legg&Hutter 2007 on what does intelligence mean. ( https://arxiv.org/abs/0706.3639 or the deeper discussion at https://arxiv.org/abs/0712.3329 - TL;DR "Intelligence measures an agent’s ability to achieve goals in a wide range of environments" is their proposed crude summary but with much more nuance in the papers); there are obviously newer aspects raised by what we see from machine learning advances since that, but the summary of Legg&Hutter is the basis to properly understand the context in which e.g. those Hinton's statements were made.
That crude summary has been kicking around in one form or another for decades. As I indicated above, I'm not interested in the general case in my post. My remarks are confined to a specific kind of reasoning, analogical reasoning. Why analogical reasoning? For one thing, that's what those remarks by Hinton are about. Judging from his remarks, he hasn't done any serious thinking about analogical reasoning.
I think AI and human intelligence cannot really be compared. AIs "think" algorithmically, but humans don't. Consider: stupidity is a state of being which everyone experiences, but not all the time. One aspect of intelligence is how often one is stupid, but that says nothing about the heights true intelligence can attain.
You're tasked with placing N chess knights and bishops on it such that pieces of the same kind don't threaten each other (for example, knights can't threaten knights, they can threaten bishops). Also, bishops are "see-through", unlike in real chess: you can't place two bishops on the same diagonal with a knight between them.
You can decide how many bishops vs knights to place, as long as the total is N.
I've got this sneaking suspicion that the wording of your "can you solve it for N=18" is to conceal the answer being "no". But I'm not going to try proving it.
The fact that you can get 8 and 13 as the maximum for each kind of piece individually makes me think there has to be some combination where you just lose 3, as in 8+13-3=21-3=18. Would be weird if there is some iron law that one has to lose 4 if one combines the two maximums.
Didn't mean to be disingenuous. The solution for N=18 exists, there aren't any tricks or ambiguities it exploits, it works in the same way as the N=17 solutions, it's just damn hard to find (in my opinion).
That was a really fun puzzle, thank you! The 18 solution naturally falls out when you consider the maximal configurations for the bishops and what space that might leave for the knights, which is the most interesting kind of puzzle IMO. (As opposed to brute force puzzles, which are often still fun)
And it has me questioning the whole idea of nuclear weapons. Apparently Carl Sagan was so passionate about nuclear disarmament he helped push the idea of nuclear winter an idea many consider a gross exaggeration apparently.
So, the governments of the United States, United Kingdom, France, Russia, China, India, Pakistan, and North Korea are all participating in the *same* conspiracy, and it hasn't leaked yet? Pull the other one.
If nuclear weapons didn't exist, the United States would be the first to claim so - with our level of conventional military supremacy, we'd be able to basically rule the world. Want Russia out of Ukraine? That happens by mid-2022, possibly with Vladdy P cruise-missiled out of his corner office in the Kremlin. Or maybe we keep up the lie, but give Ukraine the fighter jets and deep strike weapons and whatnot, all up front, then tell everyone how badass we are because we stood up to the full threatened might of the Russian Nuclear Arsenal and they backed down.
This is not what we see, because this is not how the world works. Nuclear weapons are very real, and very powerful, and there are still thousands of them that work.
The United States can cruise missile Putin anyway, nuclear weapons aren't as scary as you say. Most of them are probably duds and a few blown-up cities can easily be fixed up.
Sigh. It is possible that "most" of Russia's nuclear weapons are duds, but if so that means more like 60% and definitely not 99%. And it's probably not even 60%.
What is left, would do more than just blow up a few cities, and would cause damage that will not be fixed in your lifetime even if you aren't one of the casualties. A full-scale nuclear war with Russia today would be the single most catastrophic event in the history of human civilization. That threat is real, and it really does constrain our range of actions.
Most American ones too. Why bother making 10,000 warheads if you can just make 500 and pretend about the rest.
Cities don't matter and the damage radius is small. The important stuff will survive. There will be plenty of food (can't bomb farms) and plenty of oil and goods because its all distributed. Sure a few offices will get destroyed but the productive stuff will be fine.
>So, the governments of the United States, United Kingdom, France, Russia, China, India, Pakistan, and North Korea are all participating in the same conspiracy, and it hasn't leaked yet?
And Japan!
Very, very much agreed. The world would look extremely different if nuclear weapons didn't exist.
Definitely not endorsing any conspiracy theories about nuclear weapons, but for what it's worth, I've done a bit of research into this book and author after she came on Dan Carlin's podcast and have been unimpressed by what I've found:
* She's the subject of a Snopes page from 2004 - https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/terror-in-the-skies/ - she encountered suspicious behavior of a group of Middle Eastern men and and claimed this was a terrorist dry run wrote a book called "Terror in the Skies" about this incident, arguing that this shows that 9/11 could happen again. Meanwhile undercover air marshals reported that she overreacted and could have caused a dangerous panic. (Also enjoyed this writeup: https://www.salon.com/2004/07/21/askthepilot95/)
* Another book of hers is on Area 51 and from what I can tell (e.g. this review https://www.npr.org/2011/05/17/136356848/area-51-uncensored-was-it-ufos-or-the-ussr) based on sources like "a guard who says he used to work at Area 51" seems to allege that the Roswell incident was a Soviet hoax, created by putting human experimentation victims in an actual flying saucer and crashing them in the desert as an opening shot in the Cold War.
---
These two points do not paint a picture of a particularly level-headed "follow the evidence where it goes" reporter as much as someone prone to jumping to dramatic conclusions based on limited evidence.
So yeah, "fear-mongering" seems like an uncharitable-but-not-inaccurate adjective here. Arguably it's intentional: the point of the book is not necessarily to describe the most likely outcome but a (to the author) plausible worst-case scenario.
And maybe "fear-mongering" around nuclear weapons is a good thing (this seemed to more-or-less be Dan Carlin's take: he thinks we, as a general populace, don't think about the nuclear question enough)... but I think it'd be more convincing if it came from a more credible source.
On the off chance that you're sincere, however, I'm curious about how you think about epistemology. How do you decide who's credible, and who isn't? Is it mostly about what "strikes you"?
Also, would you rather have a contrarian belief that turns out to be 90% wrong, or an extremely common belief that is 90% right?
I only did a cursory look through the old threads because it wasn't worth a deep dive, and I didn't find the specific post, but I vaguely recall this same guy being here with the same "nuclear weapons aren't real" schtick some months ago.
Well naturally I’m concerned about the reality of the situation, but like the average American I’m not really in a position to verify things a conclusively as a high level academic or government functionary. I like to consider what strikes me as the more likely or plausible and then poke around the internet and ask ppl that might be more qualified to comment. But if you read books by Annie Jacobsens and others you know the government has been deceptive about a lot of things and the scenario described by Annie just seem to outrageous to be plausible.
As you know, it is possible to think that Annie Jacobsen is being hyperbolic without "questioning the whole idea of nuclear weapons".
And so I'm not convinced that you are sincerely concerned with the reality of the situation, as you don't give so much as a nod to something on the other side of the epistemic ledger. You just seem to get a kick out of spreading manure.
But let's spend a few seconds examining the idea.
There were survivors/eyewitnesses at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, so they'd have to be mistaken or lying about what happened, I guess.
Also, many of the most respected scientists of the 20th century worked on the Manhattan Project (no less than 31 Nobel laureates involved, according to this https://bit.ly/3UqXqo5). Why would, say, John von Neumann, Enrico Fermi, Richard Feynman, and so many others go to their grave with such a lie? Possible, yes. Plausible? Surely You're Joking, Mr. Catholic?
Also, the USSR getting the bomb would have to have been fake. Why would the US give them that power? And not just them. They have gone along with the lie that North Korea, China, Pakistan, and India are already nuclear powers? They have practically announced that they will give Iran that same power?
It *could* happen, of course. But how plausible is it?
And what was Castle Bravo all about? Just a fake f**k-up?
Maybe … But what strikes you as more likely or plausible?
I, for one, am willing to entertain the idea that Aldhissla, the germ theory skeptic, may not be perfectly informed about what one should expect a nuclear ground zero to look like in old photos, despite their presumably vast dataset.
>Why would, say, John von Neumann, Enrico Fermi, Richard Feynman, and so many others go to their grave with such a lie?
Not to mention the military and political chains of command for the Manhattan Project and the operational decision to drop it. Also, everyone on the Japanese side who would have had to have been in on the cover up, too. Hideki Tojo, for example, would have had a pretty good idea what state Hiroshima and Nagasaki were in right before and after the bombings and whether or not there were enough bombers in the air to do that much damage with conventional weapons. If he thought there was anything fishy about it, he went to the gallows without saying anything.
Also the population of French Polynesia, who apparently are being seeded by the French government with increased rates of cancer to cover up the fact that there was no nuclear testing done there
Imagine trying to warn ppl about MKultra in the early 60s. An intonational government mind control program doesn’t seem plausible until it is actually discovered.
If something seems plausible and if ppl I know with a track record of honesty that’s usually who I go with. But with a lot of this sort of thing nuclear weapons, MKUltra, moonlandings and so on we are dependent on a government that often lies. A commenter above acknowledged that the Soviets were faking pictures and film of Stalin. Why wouldn’t they fake nuclear weapons tests? And why would the states do the same thing?
I find the SubStack article to which you link far less credible than the carefully researched Jacobsen book. It is a terrifying book. It is understandable that one would seek reasons to discredit it, to convince oneself the outcome is not possible, to reduce helpless fear.
Pragmatically, if concerned, I would move to the Southern hemisphere now.
I am personally only unconcerned because I am 68 and consider every day a gift, albeit a gift containing chores. I would bet there is a more than 50% chance I will live to see nukes used, most likely in limited fashion, unfortunately.
Elon Musk is right to aim for Mars and he and others were right to develop AI, even with concerns. The sooner we have enough people to permanently maintain the species off Earth, the better. The sooner this becomes a moot point because we are replaced by our artificially created, super-intelligent progeny, the better. Which will come first, if either?
Hopefully this book will encourage our world "leaders" to communicate more cooperatively and effectively.
Last time he came out with this nuclear weapon conspiracy the actual son of Richard Feynman responded to him in the comments, pointing out all the ways his argument was flawed. He still didn't listen.
Okay, so here's a little trick. If nuclear weapons are not real, think of how many people would have to lie about it:
- All the American military and scientific personnel involved in the atomic weapons program.
- Oppenheimer, as he tells Congress that there's no way to find a nuclear weapon smuggled in via storage container other than with a screwdriver. So Congress is being lied to, or the contents of Congressional
- France, who also has a nuclear weapons program (fake).
- The UK, who also have a nuclear weapons program (fake) and spend a bunch of money on nuclear submarines.
- The Soviet government, who faked their nuclear weapons, and then the historians who were allowed to go through the Soviet archives after the fall of the USSR, who would have read about the fake nuclear weapons.
- The Ukrainian government, who gave back their fake nukes, and currently has every incentive to blow the whistle.
- Saddam Hussein, who had a nuclear program that was scuttled during sanctions and who was invaded and eventually killed on suspicion of having reignited it.
- The government of North Korea, who knows nukes are fake but convinces everybody to go along with their claims of having one.
- All the Soviet and Chinese scientists who "collaborated" on the Chinese nuclear program before the Soviets withdrew and the Chinese had to finish the job on their lonesome.
Now I think at this point, either we are in an Assassin's Creed scenario where literally anyone of any interest or import in history, ever, is part of the conspiracy, OR nuclear weapons are real. The former case is brain-in-a-jar stuff, if the conspiracy's that good then you're going to live the rest of your life without ever stumbling on any significant evidence, and you should discount any "evidence" you see on the presumption that the conspiracy wouldn't leave it lying around. The latter case is the universe we actually live in.
I would say nuclear weapons are also obviously real. We've detonated multiple such bombs, twice on cities. There are people who survived them and can explain how they differed from conventional firebombing. This is basically on the level of flat-earth and indicates your skepticism is miscalibrated.
Indeed. The lack of a "bald spot" in Hiroshima is a particularly weak point, since Hiroshima was an airburst. Airbursts are calculated to do "enough" damage over a wider area, as opposed to groundbursts which are designed to make a big crater and do as much damage as possible to a particularly hardy target. Especially with a relatively small nuke like the ones employed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, you're going to mostly see the same kind of damage from an airburst as you would from a large-scale conventional bombing raid.
You can make a pretty strong case for the dangers of nuclear war being somewhat overstated to the effect that there are nowhere near enough nukes to literally sterilize the Earth's surface and very probably not enough to utterly destroy industrial civilization, but that's a very different claim from the one the liked argument is making.
From the comments here, I've decided I'm not going to read either of the original linked items, but I do actually think that the risk of nuclear war is very overstated _in the popular press/media specifically_. My understanding is that we can quite definitively say that the total human nuclear arsenal, at this or any other time in history, _can't_ sterilize the earth (and has never been particularly close to large enough) and are even quite unlikely to render _humanity_ extinct. Knocking us back to pre-industrial times is _maybe_ possible but would probably have to have that as an explicit goal in any nuclear exchange rather than "do as much damage to the Americans/Soviets as possible".
My understanding is that there is also at least some scientific disagreement over the likelihood/severity of a nuclear winter scenario.
However, if the linked blog is arguing that nuclear weapons are not even real, that is some really wild shit.
It’s about more than a lack of a bald spot. A lot of the footage from nuclear tests in Soviet tests appear to be fabricated. And some of the science seems to be questionable. Why haven’t any terrorists used a nuclear weapon? Apparently they can be made the size of a suitcase. There was a Twitter thread not too long ago that said ICBMs with a live nuclear warhead has never been tested.
Making a nuclear weapon is very difficult and beyond the means of non-state terrorists. You might as well ask why anarchists didn't build their own dreadnoughts in the early 20th century.
So what, North Korea and Iraq and Iran are just wasting their time trying to make nuclear power/nuclear weapons? Every major country in the world has its foreign policy oriented around the fact that other countries are known to have nukes, despite knowing themselves that actually their nukes are fake?
This claim is just so wild and implausible that it really needs no refuting.
My friend liked to say when we were young that bears didn't exist. That they were robots or something. His point was that we can make wild silly claims about anything and make others prove to us all over again that we're wrong. But we really don't need to do that. It is not worth our time.
Because most ppl are convinced they are real even most ppl in government. It’s a convenient kabuki that helps control populations and generate millions.
A modern microprocessor is smaller than a suitcase but it requires lots of high tech equipement and very well-trained people to make. Terrorists couldn't do it.
There are a couple of seeing-counterintuitive-predictions-with-my-own-eyes experiences that I've had. The single most striking and sfnal needs a little explanation. We've all had the experience of blocking a beam of light, and we see the light impinging on the blocking object. I had access to the resonant cavity of a laser, and I had the opportunity to block the optical feedback path with my hand. I saw the light absent from _both_ sides of my hand, confirming with my own eyes that it was truly an optical feedback loop.
Not "C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate", but not a mere lineal descendant of a caveman's fire either.
A more prosaic, yet still striking example: Watching a magnetic stirrer, designed to spin a magnetic stir bar within a flask, spin a _non_magnetic piece of aluminum foil, due to eddy currents in the foil.
edit: One other prosaic answer: Just doing a simple titration, watching a beaker absorb milliliter after milliliter of an alkaline solution with no visible change, then seeing a single drop dramatically change the color of the entire solution. A situation where there really _is_ a single right answer, not a fuzzy mess of sort-of this and sort-of that and arguably the other thing.
One of my cats is being a real asshole lately, wanting his breakfast as soon as it begins to get light. Fine in December not so much approaching the summer solstice.
He’s now into opening my nightstand and stealing small items as cat toys to get me out of bed.
I’m thinking of putting a portrait of Kristi Noem on it. That’ll scare him.
I have a solution to that that works pretty well: I never give my cats their morning food til I've been up and around for a couple hours. Don't worry, he'll find other ways to be an asshole. One of mine knocks any objects small enough to push off the surface they're on. After they fall he sits for a minute staring at them on the ground, I guess thinking "wow, that was a good one" then goes hunting for the next thing.
Anything that's obviously wrong but unimportant. You grab a grocery cart and the wheel wildly spins 360° around its screw, without actually stopping the cart moving. You play a turn-based game and the camera moves slower than the characters so you get hit before the camera arrives. Two people bet on how a word is pronounced and run it through a speech program, only to misspell it and get a completely different sound. You read a poem that looks like it should rhyme and then it not only doesn't rhyme, it doesn't even attempt to relate to itself.
Today I had my blood drawn, but the doc had to undo their preparations because I've had fainting problems in the past, and we had to move to a chair that reclined. But the reclining chair was right next to the wall, so the doc had to squeeze into the corner to get to my arm. So she decided to undo her preparations again and use the other arm, which wasn't against the wall. But apparently that arm has no blood in it, or like, stealth blood. So she undid her preparations again and went back to the "squeezed into the nook" plan, but brought in a second person to hand her stuff. And it was possibly the best medical appointment I've ever had.
Sports. I don't do much, because I'm not fit enough, and I don't like the competitiveness or the culture of it. But when I do a little bit of some sport, I find myself grinning like an idiot. Dancing, too, though I'm usually unable to enjoy it because I'm too uncoordinated.
Experience: Writing programs that are "meta" in some way or another: compilers, interpreters, even something as simple as a small REPL or a command line tool that invokes, manages, or manipulates other tools. Also, explaining complex things to people who don't know them, and them understanding.
Relationship: The early phases of romantic attraction, this weird sort of social game where you both pretend you both don't know that you both feel "this way" but still drop hints with all the subtlety of a 5 years old. Also, the relationship with good parents, specifically the validation and the reason for bearing life they give you when they say something along the lines of "You're all we have in life".
I have played with Haskell and Clojure, two very different flavors of "functional". At my deepest in Haskell (which is not very deep), I have attained a kind of Enlightenment where - unlike most any language I have ever programmed with - I didn't even think of sequencing and control structures. I didn't think "First this, then that, IF x THEN y ELSE z, REPEAT 5 times", no, only types and shapes of data. I read the question prompt, I imagine the shape of the input, and I imagine the data flow transformation which will functionally (i.e. immutably, no control structures, pure equations) bend and distort the input shape into the output shape.
It was a rare and difficult-to-describe feeling. But it was good, I realized that there is nothing natural or inevitable about Time, Control Flow, or Sequencing in programming. It's only languages with mutable memory cells that train you into thinking like that. "First this, Then that" is a way of thinking so utterly ingrained into the brain of every programmer that it's difficult to even name it as a distinct belief. Haskell gradually shows you an alternative way of thinking.
I have played with Clojure for much less than I have with Haskell, and all I could think of is how such a damn shame that Lisp programmers refuse to learn Context-Free Grammars and Parsers in 2024, and why they can't admit that they lost and that humans aren't mentally equipped to write raw syntax trees in the form of hierarchical lists.
> That my favorite type of "meta" programming.
Hmmm, in what sense is functional programming "meta" in the sense that I described above? Haskell has lazy evaluation and easy-to-use Algebraic Data Types, both extremely powerful primitives that *can* be used for metaprogramming and very powerful libraries, but which technically has nothing to do with Functional Programming in the sense of immutability. Clojure has macros but again that technically has nothing to do with FP. Scala has a lot of metaprogrammy primitives but I can think of nothing which can't be attached to a non-functional languages.
Perhaps because people equate FP with higher-order functions and partial application? and functions taking other functions as input is indeed "meta" in the exact same sense I described? I don't really agree with this definition of FP anyways,
I think the essence of FP is immutability, first and foremost, and second, and third, the most important thing. The fundamental question motivating FP is "What if you don't necessarily need to think in terms of explicit one-after-the-other steps? What if Programming is not necessarily a command-by-command imperative recipe, but simply a specification of an input-output transformation, which can be expressed as a pure stateless equation like the ones that Math has been studying for dozens of centuries?"
I think I might have felt something similar. When I first used a functional programming language (SML, many years ago), it was for a compilers class. And partway through the class, I had what I can only describe as a revelation, and rewrote my entire project to be half the size and with only a quarter of the bugs. It was beautiful.
For me, it has something to do with flow, and seeing the program as a process of transformation. HTTP request in, HTTP response with web page out. The ease of being able to abstract and combine patterns was liberating. Data isn't a static thing to poke at, it's a chain of being that moves through the program.
Not having to keep track of state is a wonderful convenience, too, if the project allows it. But my bread and butter was as a C programmer, and paying close attention to various types of state is pretty much the only reason to use C. Even so, I've found that the more functional I can make my programs, the better they tend to be (although stack overflows are a risk).
This is probably unexpected among this crowd, and indeed, was unexpected to me and my "published in two science disciplines" self before it actually started happening:
I have never been closer to the profound and numinous than when I’m gearing myself up for a one rep max attempt to set a new personal or competitive powerlifting record.
When you’re that close to your limits, literally trying to exert yourself 100%, it depends on you focusing and aligning every last bit of your body, mind, and will, to call forth the successful rep from the numinous probabilistic manifold of future universes, most of which represent failure. But if you line up everything *just so* you can call forth and execute that rare success case.
And as I’m standing there on the platform before the lift, sweaty, tired, doing a concentrated breathing and mental exercise, ramping neurotransmitters as I amp myself up, and aligning as much of me as I can, I get this nonverbal feeling that's something like: “I was *born* to do this.” And then I do it.
The feeling when you're successfully placing the barbell back in the rack (or onto the floor) is indescribable. The heavens part, divine effulgence floods your mind, heavenly choirs sing hosannahs, you feel like you accomplished something that required the fullest extent of your powers along lines of excellence, something that required both peak physical power and mental and physical skill and technique.
And all you did was move a piece of metal a couple feet. 😂
Forgive me the impertinence of suggesting an experiment: try supposing that the act of lifting that weight is not done by you, but through you, as a material extension of the numinous. See if it feels even better to give the credit elsewhere, returned to the cosmic sender, unopened with a thank you note, rather than opening the package and eating the chocolate of accomplishment yourself.
Would love to hear the results of such an experiment !
I loved this response (and the other posters description), it sparked many thoughts, Yet each time I read a comment now and take something away from it i find the back of my mind saying ‘was that ai / a bot?’ I only want to engage with those who share the human experience, and it slightly ruins it if that’s in question
Actually, I often think in the way you're suggesting when I'm feeling and performing my best. Acting as an agent of Platonic excellence, or the Divine, or something similar, rather than *me* being so great and doing all this awesome/hard stuff.
After all, I'm only able to do those things due to chance or divine provenance to begin with - we're all an assortment of genes and capabilities, and if we do better than anyone else, it's mostly to do with the endowment we were born with rather than any hard work on our part.
If nature / nurture is 80/20 (which I think is roughly correct), I didn't do anything to get that 80%, it was pure good fortune from my perspective that my parents were able to pass those genes to me. And my parents and their decisions shaping my peers were by far the majority of the 20%, so there's precious little "me" in there driving whatever outcomes I can drive anyways.
So I try to culture the unattached mindset as a sort of epistemic or ego-moderating humility. And I try to culture being thankful to my parents, and the universe in general for having such great games and avocations to begin with.
I do wonder where exactly accountability, responsibility, and self-discipline fall in this schema, though - it's a very non-free-will sort of paradigm, and I think those things do probably exist and have some hand in it. It just feels like they're outside the schema entirely when you're in the mindset, though.
I don't know if I should have hope, but has Substack fixed the horrible performance of this particular blog? I checked a few big posts and I no longer get white screened, but I might have gotten lucky (comments are still kind of buggy and sometimes don't show up).
It still takes a bit of time to load comments but the page should be immediately interactive, and will no longer freeze for 10+ seconds each time you switch tabs.
I don't think so. In fact last night the site sucked in a novel way for me. I was looking for some info someone had posted months ago, and going through the open threads doing a search on each for the person's user name. Soon got to a thread with over 1000 posts and computer could not load the comments. Computer sat there insisting for a while that there were 0 comments, then tab with the site on it would just close. Happened several ties in a row.
It turns out that FBMPLA/Dynamic Networker/Jack Bauer is the most common result. Too bad it was not such a good choice. I wonder whether I should replace him with someone else.
Interestingly, it is the most common character only for dudes. For gals the most common one is FBMTLA/Net Sprinter/Miranda Priestly (The Devil Wears Prada) - and I'm wondering whether that is also a questionable choice. Thoughts?
Uh, I have only the most cursory knowledge of 24. I used ChatGPT to suggest most of the 128 characters and in many cases just did rough plausibility checks. Do you think it is not a good fit to the listed properties?
"I used ChatGPT to suggest most of the 128 characters and in many cases just did rough plausibility checks."
Please don't take this the wrong way, but I'm laughing my socks off right now. Well, using AI to match us up with our fictional counterparts certainly explains *a lot*.
Why Gunflint, I had no idea of the hidden depths of your character, you rough rider you! Post on a rationalist forum by day, hack off heads with a hacksaw by night!
I considered using just 16 characters as most of these tests do. But I figured that LLMs are really good at matching vectors in semantic space and many suggested heros seemed very good matches. The first tests by friends confirmed that. And given the low number of questions, the error bars are large, so I expect misses and so should you. At least it's good for a laugh.
Grizzly, huh? Well, I suppose that answers the question of "which would you rather meet in the woods, man or bear?" Not if the man is a Bauer, he's being a bear! A grisly grizzly!
...wow, I took the thing to see what silly fiction character I'd be compared too, and instead it just failed to load any final results at all. Refreshing took me back to the beginning.
Well, it's an online quiz so I had to take it. but the results were so wildly at variance that I had to laugh. It doesn't link up "I don't go out to meet people" with "so you don't want to meet people".
Here's my results! With commentary as to my views of same:
"Your Connection Character Type is RCNTLA, the Dynamic Seeker.
When meeting people you are only interested in romance." Could NOT be further from the truth. I don't want romance at all in any way, shape or form.
"You prefer it casual." Okay
"You prefer smaller over larger groups." Definitely
"You don't like meeting people in person." The one thing this got right!
"You like learning new stuff." Okay
"You like physical activities." Again, could not be further from the truth. If reincarnation is true, I want to come back as a sloth.
"You are most like the fictional character Sara Tancredi (Prison Break)." And here's where I start groaning. I think I heard of this show but I've never watched it, have no interest in doing so,. and, to be frank, don't give a damn about who this is.
"Sara Tancredi is a dedicated physician who initially meets her acquaintances through her professional role at the penitentiary. Her work not only requires medical expertise but also involves a high level of personal interaction with the inmates, leading to complex and significant relationships. Sara is characterized by her strong moral compass and commitment to doing what she believes is right, which guides her interactions and decisions throughout the series. Despite facing numerous personal and professional challenges, Sara remains deeply introspective and learns from each experience, which continually shapes her understanding of justice and loyalty. Her communication tends to be straightforward and direct, often underpinned by her need to manage tense situations carefully. While not overtly seeking physical engagements, her role requires a readiness to respond to emergencies, showcasing her capability to handle physically demanding situations when necessary."
She sounds like an insufferable bitch, and while I am an insufferable bitch, it's in a completely different manner to Goody-Two-Shoes Sara who - let me guess - gets seduced and roped into the plot, plan or scheme jail break by the handsome Bad Boy because despite being a prison doctor she's dumb enough to fall for "I'm innocent! I was framed! I don't belong here! And I love you madly!"
Throwing a dart at a dart board would be a better way of matching up my characteristics than this quiz, I regret to say.
You chose physical options 0 times and intellectual options 0 times."
You really do need to refine this down; I like doing things *by myself* so I don't pick "intellectual options" with other people. And if I pick "physical options" 0 times, that means I. DON'T. LIKE. PHYSICAL. ACTIVITIES.
Thank you for finding the friendship = 0 and romance = 0 as well as the activity = 0 and intellectual = 0 special cases. Didn't anticipate that. I'm correcting it. You could have selected interests at the end to hopefully improve the quality of your estimate. Though I'm worried you are a QA engineer and may break that too.
Indeed. So even more important to learn from you. Would you be up to a - hm, probably not a video call - a chat on some messenger? Or an email exchange? My email is g.zarncke at Google Mail.
I don't think I'd be much use to you, I'm the Spiders Georg of social media. Most people using such a survey probably are looking for friends/romantic partners, so adjusting those parameters will get you better results.
I didn’t really like this very much. Lots of dull descriptive behavioural questions (with no time limit, e.g. I used Meet Up a lot 10 years ago) and very little in the way of attitudinal questions - which makes any profile very unlikely to be accurate. Also the idea of profiling people for romantic / friend hangouts when they are married seems pretty flawed
I'm sorry you didn't like it. I was mostly interested in the meeting habit and tried to make it more interesting by matching with characters. But maybe the number of questions was not enough for that.
Can you say more what you think is flawed with the romantic/friend hangouts?
Well, I had a go, and I'm not really sure what it was for, but it was quite amusing - and completely wrong! I got:
"You like community. You prefer meeting people in person. You like learning new stuff. You like physical activities more than intellectual pursuits.
You are most like the fictional character Jack Bauer (24)."
Well, in fact I spend nearly all my time in intellectual pursuits, although I exercise a lot too. And I'm nothing like Jack Bauer.
There are a few grammatical errors that should be fixed, like the use of perfect tense in 'where have you met your partner?', which should be 'where did you meet your partner?'.
Has anyone out there been on buspirone for the long term? It seems everything that benefits anxiety has a potentially negative effect on sleep quality, but I’ve really been struggling to make up for a long-term loss of 1-2 hours per night. (I take my last dose at 4pm just to try to reduce impact on sleep).
It similarly seems no sleep aid is meant to be taken long-term, so I’ve been avoiding taking them for the most part. Any tips or advice appreciated.
I've taken buspirone (15mg twice daily) for just over eight months now but I'm not sure I can help you because your whole post is entirely foreign to my experience. I did a double take to the effect of "We're talking about the same medication, right? The one that has two side effects listed on the bottle, one of which is 'drowsiness'?".
My sleeping habits have been pretty irregular for ages, so it's hard for me to say *too* much about any personal effect from the buspirone, but I have noticed drowsiness after taking it sometimes, and I suspect I would notice an effect as large as you are reporting.
You'll find lots of anecdotal evidence on reddit, but I also believe there are a fair number of studies documenting increased sleep latency, suppressed REM sleep, and other sleep-reduction side effects. Granted, I am taking 60mg, so it stands to reason that I may have more exaggerated affects than you.
Glad to hear this. I remember Scott did a deep dive into melatonin awhile ago, one of his "more than you wanted to know about..." Might be worthwhile finding that. Main takeaway (which I agree with) was that the best dose is much less than what most of what's for sale contains.
My psychiatrist recommended 3mg, which I see is 10x above Scott’s recommendation from 2018. Once this runs out, I may see if I can step down in dosage.
I have a lot of trouble sleeping, and getting 30 mins or more of cardio during the day really ups my chances of sleeping well. It has to be pretty intense cardio -- the kind that make you sweat a lot. Interval training works well.
Yes. Don't take anyone's advice here since it cannot be statistically significant. Make an appointment with a neurologist who specializes in sleep disorders.
I've been a vegan for a couple of years now and I'd like to know how I'm doing for micronutrients. Can anyone recommend the best value blood tests for someone in the UK?
If you are in full time work and have workplace health insurance they often have discounted blood work providers. I had the works done for £40 through virgin
Who else is watching Eurovision?
Today's Eurovision Song Contest finale has a high promise to cause furore, so posting my explainer from the previous year in advance. https://alakasa.substack.com/p/eurovision-song-contest-a-9-point
Thanks this was very helpful for at least one confused American. Make that two, my wife is enjoying it too.
In an unintentionally hilarious but somewhat revealing temper tantrum [0], the sore loser with defective emotional regulation and bad English Gilad Erdan, Israel's representative in the UN, tears the UN charter with a shredder from behind the podium, supposedly in a metaphorical act implying that the UN states who voted "Yes" to granting Palestine more rights (but still short of full UN membership and voting rights) are the ones who invalidate the UN charter.
It's often attributed to Voltaire that he said [1]: "I have made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'O Lord, make our enemies quite ridiculous'. God granted it.". In this sense, Erdan's hilarious stunts in the UN are threatening to make me second-guess my atheism.
This comes amidst a wider general hysteria among the Netanyahu admin. Spain and Ireland are going to unilaterally recognize Palestine on the 21st of May, expected to be followed by at least Belgium and Slovenia, possibly others. Smotrich is reported in Haaretz and Times of Israel to be ringing the alarm bells and calling for urgent action, and Saudi Arabia - mainly desperate for hanky panky with USA due to Iran - is still at least nominally conditioning its Abraham Accords normalization on Palestinian statehood.
Allah: If you exist, please make Israeli politicians and diplomats more pathetic and ridiculous, I might reconsider the Problem of Evil.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GCVFs-0Uio
[1] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Voltaire
While I have nothing against making the abominable Netanyahu and his posse of miscreants look ridiculous, consider what exactly would UN recognition do for ordinary Palestinians. Nothing, I think is the answer? These are exactly the kinds of actions that drive home the irrelevance of the UN as it exists today, all optics and hot air, and no substance. But it will provide a few more cushy sinecures (is this the word?) for corrupt Palestinian leadership. NYC is nice. Far away from Hamas rockets and IDF bombs. I can only imagine the size of the bribes involved…
Huh, never heard of "sinecures" before. How come I spoke and wrote English from before puberty and I still learn new words? not fair.
I don't disagree that the UN is a pathetic shadow of the old internationalist pipe dream of something binding states by force like state law binds its citizens by force. I don't disagree that this particular vote is **probably** hot air, the only noteworthy right that Palestine seems to have gained is that it can now advance proposals, which the USA and Israel can just as easily shutdown in the Security Council as they can to those proposals by Algeria and South Africa and countless others. There is no silver bullet, and the UN - useless or not - is not the "One Weird Trick for Achieving Peace.. War Hawks HATE it", nothing is. Only tough and thankless advocating for humanity in the face of genocidal plans and daily massacres.
What I want to specifically call out with my post is:
(1) The insanity and moral bankruptcy of the "Reward for Hamas" idea, this popular way of thinking common among a certain breed of Pro-Israel supporters. According to this way of thinking, **anything** coming to Palestinians except utter and abject misery for the next 25-100 years is antisemitism and an encouragement for Hamas. Unless you resolve "Palestinians" as just another alias for "Hamas", this is an incoherent way of thinking (but that's ok, as it's not thinking that it demands out of its followers). I want to signal-boost the fact that the representatives of 143 countries, a crushing majority, do not think like this.
(2) I really just want to make fun of Gilad Erdan. I can't imagine the level of immaturity and sheer dumbassery that would make someone representing 10 million people in front of the whole world to behave like this. When he says things like "I want to hold a mirror to all of you **grumbles to himself while looking for the shredder** a mirror eh", I almost want to explode out of the sheer absurdity and sitcom-like nature of the situation.
Maybe (1) is irrelevant because the UN is so hopelessly corrupt and out of touch that the opinions of the state representatives aren't indicative of any kind of moral or common or geopolitical sense? Maybe (2) is less about Israel and more about how Israel looks at the UN, that it despises the UN so much that it deliberately assigns clowns as their representatives? Very good points, it's still funny as hell.
You can never know all the words! The journey is the goal.
I'm going to push back just a bit: Put yourself in poor Gilad's shoes.
The ashes of burnt Israelis haven't even cooled when a large number of people around the world started chanting "FTRTTS PWBF", posting pics of paraglides, and denying any civilians were harmed, and they deserved it anyway. And then on and on and on, we can rehash it ad infinitum, but I want to point out two relevant things:
From Gilad's POV, a large part of the word seems to think that whatever hurts Israelis is good for Palestinians (note that this is a conjugal function of the "**anything** coming to Palestinians except utter and abject misery for the next 25-100 years is antisemitism and an encouragement for Hamas" batshittery).
From Gilad's POV, given the above, seeing the 14 - 41 - 143 - whatever# countries vote "against Israel" only confirms the long-held conviction that the rest of the world would be super-relieved if all the jews... just kind of... disappeared. Not necessarily hacked to death or burnt alive, too messy, just pufff! and gone would be nice.
And so the cycle of misery continues, much to the benefit of Netanyahu and Smotrich and whatever the names of senior Hamas leaders enjoying their Deglet Noor for breaking fast in Qatar, while Gaza kids are being maimed and Israeli hostages tortured.
Glad the idea of yet another Iranian puppet terror state gaining diplomatic recognition is entertaining to you. It's not going to work out well for the citizens of that Iranian puppet terror state, of course, but it's been made very clear their only purpose is to act as human shields so I guess everything is going according to plan.
Who will collaborate with me to gather a bunch of Scott-style "scissor statements" and write something about both warring perspectives and how the scissor statement memes seize human attention and direct it toward unproductive ends?
Sounds interesting, I like reading both perspectives even if I'm firmly on one of them and not the other.
Do you have ready examples or will data gathering be one of the first phases of the collab? What is the posting strategy/policy?
OC ACXLW Sat May 11 Crafting Religion and Handling genAI in Organizations
Hello Folks!
We are excited to announce the 65th 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
Date: Saturday, May 11 2024
Time 2 pm
Conversation Starters:
1. Pragmatists Guide to Crafting Religion Review - Preamble and Chapter 1 by Eneasz Brodski: In this two-part series, the author explores the need for deep community and religion in human life, and discusses the potential for creating new "cultivars" (a mix of religion and culture) to address the challenges posed by declining birth rates and demographic changes.
TLDR Preamble: The author argues that humans need deep community and religion, and that rationalism serves some of these needs but lacks a structural framework. The book "The Pragmatist's Guide To Crafting Religion" is introduced as a potential resource for understanding how to create a new religion or community structure.
TLDR Chapter 1: The chapter discusses the role of culture as an evolutionary tool and its relationship with biology. It highlights the potential consequences of failing to adapt culture to changing circumstances and emphasizes the importance of creating new, diverse "cultivars" to ensure the survival and flourishing of human civilization.
Text and audio link:
https://open.substack.com/.../pragmatists-guide-to...
https://api.substack.com/.../3145bb3dae8bd7065b995591106d...
https://open.substack.com/.../pragmatists-guide-to...
https://api.substack.com/.../a0c83589111bf511837d0e594073...
Questions for discussion:
a) The author suggests that humans have evolved to function within a strict cultural/religious framework and that operating without one can lead to psychological distress. What evidence supports this claim, and how might it inform efforts to create new community structures?
b) The chapter emphasizes the importance of cultural diversity and warns against the fragility of ethnically and culturally homogeneous societies. How can we balance the benefits of diversity with the need for shared values and cohesion within a community?
c) The authors introduce the concept of the "Index," a cultural reactor that catalogs and monitors the outcomes of intentionally constructed family cultures. What potential benefits and challenges do you foresee in implementing such a system, and how might the data it generates be used to inform the development of new cultivars?
2. How to handle genAI in organizations, according to science by Matt Beane: This article critiques common organizational approaches to dealing with generative AI (ignoring, banning, or "all hands") and proposes a science-backed framework for effective implementation, drawing on research in innovation, technology, and organizational change.
TLDR: The author argues that the three default organizational strategies for handling genAI (ignore, ban, and "all hands") are insufficient and not backed by science. Instead, he proposes a 2x2 framework of tactics, both internal and external to the organization, at the individual and collective levels, to help organizations adapt to disruptive technologies like genAI.
Text and audio link:
https://www.wildworldofwork.org/.../how-to-handle-genai...
https://api.substack.com/.../67c439211421415041950be8afcc...
Questions for discussion:
a) The article suggests that ignoring or banning genAI may be the best approach for some organizations, at least initially. Under what circumstances might this be true, and how can organizations determine when it's time to engage more actively with the technology?
b) The 2x2 framework presents a range of tactics for adapting to disruptive technologies, both within and outside the organization. Which of these tactics seem most promising for leveraging genAI, and how might they be combined into an effective implementation plan?
c) The author notes that genAI itself may change how the traditional playbook of tactics is implemented and lead to surprising new ways of working. How can organizations foster a culture of experimentation and learning to identify and capitalize on these emerging opportunities?
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.
TIL: In Georgian, "father" is "mama" and "mother" is "deda". Talk about confusing! Sure you wouldn't expect an isolated language family to happen to have the same words, but what are the odds that they'd be an exact reversal of English?
You might be interested in reading this (or its sources):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mama_and_papa
Interesting link. Thanks!
I would bet on consonant repetition being load-bearing here, and probably some consonants are preferable to others, so… maybe 1:20?
Does anyone know of any articles that challenge the masking theory of autism on psychological grounds? I’m interested in seeing nuances on the idea that hiding parts of oneself to fit certain social situations is not always pathological.
I think that a reasonable discussion on "autistic masking" would start with the older concept of "persona" (which literally means "mask" in Latin) and explain how the autistic version is similar or different from that. Because otherwise it sounds like the autists are the only ones who pretend in order to fit in their social environment, which couldn't be further from truth. Neurotypicals probably pretend *more*... it's just that they often do it by instinct, so it may be less of a conscious burden from them. (But maybe it is even more difficult for them to find out what is actually under the mask.)
When I look at the "Camouflaging Autistic Traits Questionnaire (CAT-Q)", my first reaction is that these are basically the opposite of the things I do. Copying someone's body language and facial expressions? I had to be told explicitly that this is a useful thing to do, and I still keep forgetting it. Monitoring and adjusting my body language and facial expressions? Most of the time I am not even aware that I have any. A script to follow in social situations? Nope, I am mostly clueless. Using behaviors that I learned from watching other people interacting? My problem is that I can't learn things by merely watching other people do them; I need to be explained explicitly what happens and how that works. Thinking about the impression I make on other people? Haha no, I fully focus on the topic that we talk about. Basically, the questionnaire is about things that people sometimes tell me that I should do, and they probably make a good point, but I usually don't do it because I forget or because it would feel too unnatural.
Then maybe this is exactly the point. I am a wild aspie from the jungle, undiagnosed and untouched by the horrors of ABA and similar. And the questionnaire is focused on the domesticated aspies, and checks the strength of their (attempted) domestication. So it seems like a valid thing. The danger is in misinterpreting its results, as if they imply something they don't. There are two possible wrong conclusion that I imagine many people would naturally make.
First, I suspect that many people will use it as a test of autism, assuming that the higher your score, the more autistic you are. (If you do a lot of "autistic masking", then you obviously must be an autist, right? And if you don't, then you are not as autistic as those who do.) But I would expect the undomesticated autists to score quite low, autists exposed to various therapies to score high, and neurotypicals probably somewhere in the middle. Because it basically measures how much you pretend to be neurotypical: some autists do, some autists don't, and the neurotypicals do those things on instinct. I would also expect neurotypical actors or salesmen or pick-up artists to score high, because they learn those behaviors on purpose, and it's the "doing this on purpose" part that the test measures.
Second, I suspect that many people will take the high score as evidence of something bad. But what the test actually measures is basically learning some social skills. If autists are typically taught those skills in an abusive way (ABA, etc.), then yes, the number of lessons will positively correlate with the amount of abuse. But there is nothing inherently abusive about teaching social skills; it's just that some assholes and quacks prefer to do it that way, and parents of autistic children are often frustrated and try to push them further than they can handle at the moment. But I can imagine e.g. an adult aspie to voluntarily take some training of social skills, and as a result increase their score in the test. (As a thought experiment, imagine a parallel universe where most math teachers are abusive but people take different amounts of math education, so someone designs a questionnaire of math skills, and concludes that the more math concepts you know the more horrible was your childhood.)
tl;dr -- putting on a mask is something that most people do in most situations; the bad part is when children are trained to do this in an abusive way
But isn't following social instincts apparent in high functioning autism as well? The definition of instinct doesn't change, no matter if you're autistic or not. It's simply following a hunch!
I mean the hunch that something you are doing or saying is leading to some meaningful connection or identification with the other you are communicating with.
What specifically do you mean by "following social instincts"?
Humans in general behave less instinctively than other species, because we also have a lot of learning and culture. There is the usual interpersonal variance, and there are also conditions such as autism. Some instincts are simple, some are more complicated and therefore more fragile. Sometimes the reaction is a combination of an instinct and learned behavior...
Thanks for sharing! What do you mean by domesticated aspies?
Those who were successfully trained to behave like normies. (Don't move your hands, look people in the eyes, don't talk about interesting topics, etc.)
If it succeeds, none shall call it the medical model:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/article/2024/may/09/uk-toddler-has-hearing-restored-in-world-first-gene-therapy-trial
Breaking news: just a few hours ago Biden announced that under no circumstances will Israel be permitted to win the war. So that's it, it's all over but the shouting. Unlike Ukraine which has operated under the same constraints for years this isn't existential for Israel, so they'll likely give up and withdraw in a few months rather than continue a now hopeless drain on their resources, the hostages will continue to be a Gilad Shalit x 100 bargaining chip for the foreseeable future, and Iran and Hamas will collect their winnings -- the only thing they had to give up was ten thousand disposable goons, twenty thousand civilians they don't give a shit about, and a bunch of infrastructure which the West will rebuild for them -- and start arming up for the next 10/7. On the plus side Netanyahu's incompetent government will probably fall and he'll be gone once and for all, but the price that was paid for that was a little too much.
In retrospect Israel lost the war on day three when they let themselves get pressured into turning the power and Internet back on to Gaza, thus accepting the ridiculous frame that they are solely responsible for the welfare of a hostile nation that has just invaded them. Israel's Achilles heel has always been its desperation to be loved, to be accepted; they believe, and even under Netanyahu and his far-right coalition still believe, that if they present enough evidence and send enough aid and bow and scrape and grovel and dance the world will magnanimously permit them to continue existing. Unfortunately, that doesn't get you shit in a world where human rights organizations are controlled by Qatar and China. The only thing that wins today is strength and the willingness to tell other people to fuck off instead of playing their games. Maybe someday Israel will recognize that, though I personally doubt it.
I think one should be suspicious of narratives that go: "People only dislike me because I am too good and too noble for this world. I need to become more ruthless." Especially if you already followed that narrative for years. Chances are, others actually perceive you as too ruthless, rather than too good.
Ultimately, it's your choice how to behave. And who knows, maybe being ruthless is the right choice in your situation. It's just that the endless whining about being "too pure for this world" gets annoying, especially when there is little evidence for that. ("We haven't exterminated all our enemies yet" is a very low bar.)
I'm on the fence here (in general principle, putting this example aside). Sometimes accepting criticism legitimizes it more than dismissing it would.
Trump is an interesting case in point - he did much better by doing this than competing republicans who mostly accepted frameworks criticizing them would have, although it also had the effect of making him more hated by people already disposed to hate him.
"Too pure for this world" is not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that it's Israel's desperation for acceptance and eagerness to jump through hoops that has failed them. Shucking and jiving for the approval of people who would secretly be pleased if they all just fell over dead, insisting desperately that they are obeying laws and principles that are violated daily by the people presuming to sit in judgment over them.
And the idea that they've been as ruthless as it's possible to be when the Syrian civil war has been going on for a decade little next door is laughable and you know it. If they were that ruthless, why are they supplying continuing to supply power, water, and food to the enemy? Wouldn't that be kinda the first thing you don't do?
I haven't gone line-by-line through Biden's speach, but I do think you are mischaracterizing it substantially. Biden has effectively announced that if Israel wants to win the war in the particular manner it is presently planning, then it will have to do so using no more American weapons than it already has. Israel already has enough American weapons to win the war in approximately the way it is currently planning, and Biden isn't going to do anything to stop them.
I think the way Israel has been fighting and is planning to win this war is about as good as it gets under these circumstances, and I think Biden is being quite naive in thinking there is a better way. The only thing this will do is degrade US-Israeli relations and make the war a bit messier than it needs to be. But Israel can still win if they want.
Also, there aren't a hundred living hostages in Hamas hands to make for "Gilad Shalit x100". There probably aren't even 20. And they'll probably all be releaased, rescued, or killed by the end of the year.
I don't mind Biden pushing behind the scenes (in general, mixed feelings about this specific decision), but doing it in the open seems likely to make the war worse since Hamas and their various supporters see what they're doing as achieving some goal.
I have faith in the ability of the current Israeli government to make the damage from hostages a hundred times that of Gilad Shalit. And to be honest, I'm not confident that said government -- which has already been slow-rolling the war for almost half a year -- is going to step on the gas now that the always-chimeric international support has completely evaporated and Biden is positioning himself to actually make good on a threat for the first time in his entire Presidency.
I'll be happy to be proven wrong, but "_this_ time Israel is going to finally take care of ____ no matter what anybody says" is a football that's been getting pulled away my entire adult life.
> just a few hours ago Biden announced that under no circumstances will Israel be permitted to win the war.
No he didn't, he said other things which you interpreted to mean this. The Rationalist Way (^TM) is to post whatever made you feel or think like X, then write that this made you feel or think X, then post the exact chain of feeling/reasoning (as much as you can reconstruct it from your conscious backseat) that made you infer X from the actual object-level.
As for how I know that Biden didn't announce this, I check Haaretz at least 10 to 15 times a day and this would have taken their front page for 5 days if true. You can prove me wrong by posting a video of him saying that or a close paraphrase, or a reputable news network quoting him as saying that.
> So that's it, it's all over but the shouting. [...] they'll likely give up and withdraw in a few months rather than continue a now hopeless drain on their resources, the hostages will continue to be a Gilad Shalit x 100 bargaining chip for the foreseeable future, and Iran and Hamas will collect their winnings
This much is true since at least late December of 2023.
And don't forget the ~100K Israelis or so that they evacuated and the lands they abandoned because of Hezbollah's bullseye on them, which they don't know how to bring back as of now, Haaretz recently reported they pushed the deadline on the return from June to September. Also the ships that the Houthis sank and/or captured.
> in retrospect Israel lost the war on day three
Good start, but how about that it lost the war since it colonized 5.5 million people and X times its own size right in the midst of the Era of Decolonization, all the way back in 1967? Do you know that Israel - for instance - has no established border? there is not a single formal document more binding than a bi-national treaty delineating Israel's borders. The true Nomadic Way: wherever the army is, that's where Israel is. The only 2 documents delineating borders are a peace treaty with Egypt (which Israel just violated by authorizing tanks into Rafah, 2.5 kilos from Egyptian land, whereas the Camp David accords [1] allow only at most 4 infantry-only battalions within 3 kilos of either side of the borders), and a peace treaty with Jordan which establishes the river as the natural border between Jordan and not-Jordan.
In retrospect, it was one hell of a mistake to base your entire national self-identity on being a victim, THEN go around and victimize countless millions and commit so many massacres, all on camera, all on fucking titktok. "Ohhh but but but how about Syria and North Korea and the Mongols and the Romans", doesn't matter, none of them do, none of them based their entire propaganda machine on weaponizing suffering. The Syrians don't have an ADL, the Syrians don't weaponize anti-Syrianism as a cudgel against naughty politicians who vote "No" to billions of dollars in ammo and Boeing Christmas presents to the "oNlY SyRiAn StaTe".
Whenever you grip a weapon, make sure you can handle the recoil. Whenever you ride a car, make sure you know which pedal the brakes are. Israel used the Holocaust as a weapon and a ride, it's totally on them to realize that this means certain commitments to self-image that they were never ready to take.
> Israel's Achilles heel has always been its desperation to be loved, to be accepted
I knew psychology has a replication crisis and is a pseudo-pseudoscience, but come on, waxing psychoanalytical on the deep psyche of an alien entity that is a modern state is a bit too much, even for an Israel supporter.
"""In the troubled and deep desperation of Israel to be loved and supported, Israel does such desperate and vulnerable things such as **Checks teleprompt** announcing their intentions to nuke Gaza, making ads for beach real estate on the shores of Gaza, casually declaring they want to slash Gaza's population by 10X, and sing for turning Gaza into a parking lot.""" By the fucking Islamic God, how do you guys maintain a straight face? What comedic genius is this and how do I cultivate one like it?
> that doesn't get you shit in a world where human rights organizations are controlled by Qatar and China
Ah yes, the big scary Chinese Qataris, the Elders of Z... I mean Qatar. They have **tentacles** everywhere, unimaginably massive influence: *everyone* who sees an image of the Palestinian children starving or under the rubble starts saying that maybe the war doing this to them isn't justified, so the Qataris truly have the power to brainwash remotely and on massive scale. They pay handsomely too, let me tell you that. "Palestinians have human rights" is $100 an hour, talking about West Bank massacres is an additional $50, every time you talk about Israeli suffering is a -$75 per Hamas rocket. Flexible hours. All in all, a pretty damn good deal.
> The only thing that wins today is strength and the willingness to tell other people to fuck off instead of playing their games.
You **kind of** do have to play other people's game when you keep begging them for anti-rocket and air defense missiles and F-35s on the cheap, as well as calling their aircraft carries in 2 different seas on short notice. Every teenage boy knows that independence is - first and foremost - when you don't need money or favors from anybody, and Israel is free at any given time to say a Jolly Good Bye to the West along with all its banks and corporations and tech startups and aircraft carries and the scum in Boeing's C-suite, just so long as they don't ask for anything from all of those after they do this. Don't want to feed the cow? Stop asking for milk.
[1] https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/campdav.asp
I should add that it takes some nerve to quote the minutae of the Camp David treaty at Israel when fifty yards away an Iranian terror militia is using civilians as cover to fire rockets at other civilians and has been doing so for decades without any consequences. If the law is furious at one and shrugs at the other then the law is an ass.
Having a spine comes with a lot of nerves, yes.
Kinda sounds like you don't have a response to that.
I did have a response, it involves pointing out that peace treaties aren't the kind of things that you violate on a whim and justify it with "Iranian terror militia 50 yards away", and that if you want to have any credibility at all, then you as a state need to respect treaties no matter what.
Then I remembered you're kinda not interested in all that, you're interested only in pointing out how much nerve I have for holding your beloved "Only Jewish State" accountable by the exact same standards any state is held to, and which all but the most dysfunctional of dictatorships can usually pass. So I didn't bother to write the reply I have in mind, and instead reminded you that having nerves isn't a bad thing. It's kinda what being human is all about.
When Israel is criticized a hundred times as much for sins a hundred times lower than a hundred other countries, you have the gall to say that those are the "exact same standards"?
That's a lot of words, dude, and all I'm actually learning from them is that it's a mistake for a small country to outsource its defense planning to an imperial power halfway across the globe that cares more about 50,000 votes in Michigan than any kind of coherent foreign policy; you can be a client state as hard as you can and yet when the chips are down the metropole will always discover it has an important appointment elsewhere. Ukraine is learning the same lesson and no doubt so will Taiwan very shortly.
> That's a lot of words
ACX is not Twitter.
> it's a mistake for a small country to outsource its defense planning to an imperial power halfway across the globe that cares more about 50,000 votes in Michigan
Oh, definitely say what you will about the "Imperial Power" that made you more angry than 15K Palestinian women and children dead, get it out of your system, but remember: at the end of the day it's the same Imperial Power that gave to the "small country" a new air force when that country's air force was lying in shambles like broken pottery on a certain 6th of October many decades ago, the same imperial power that mobilized for it its 2 aircraft carriers and gave it free missiles and satellite surveillance and so so much more free ammo than the "Small Country" knows what to do with (dropping them on children gets old after a while).
The ingratitude of Israel and Pro-Israel supporters is actually astonishing, a beautiful sight. It's like that familiar sugar daddy dynamic where the sugar daddy refuses the sugar baby **one** request and now suddenly all hell breaks loose, and the sugar daddy's things are flying at him from the sugar baby's hands. Cringe metaphor, but that's exactly why it's so apt.
NOT that I'm complaining, I **adore** every moment of this, I just think it's hella funny how this particular manifestation of "No Honor Among Thieves" is playing out. Popcorn and Soda.
There is no world where the continued entrenchment of yet another IRGC terror army in the eastern Med is good for America, Israel, Egypt, or for that matter even Gazan civilians. But hey, I'm glad teeing up an inevitable next war, because it would be meeeeean to win this one, at least entertains you.
And there is no world in which 25K+ innocents dying and still counting is ever good for Americans, Jews everywhere, Arabs (who are the ones primarily doing the dying), or for that matter even the delusional settlers who think their Yahweh sky daddy is the one protecting them from an Iranian massacre and not the US-supplied weapons, the same US they like to bitch and moan about so much.
> because it would be meeeeean to win this one
It's a new low to trivialize a proto-genocide being investigated by the highest authority on what's a genocide, but you keep winning.
Somewhere between one and three million innocents died in Germany from 1939-1945. This is generally regarded as having been a necessary part of a good thing for Americans, Europeans, Jews everywhere, and Germans. Is Arab life more sacred than German?
You seem to be stuck in this utilitarian mindset where the numbers are the only thing that matters. The people of Gaza have made it clear that they don't have any desire to coexist with the people of Israel. They cheerfully condone kidnapping/torture/rape/murder to that end. Even before Oct 7th there was a constant low-level insurgency of rocket and terror attacks by Hamas.
It's easy for people outside of the situation to be frustrated by the conflict. To look at Israel and wonder how the killing of thousands of Gazans is justified. The calculus is different when your security is at risk. I wouldn't shrug after an attack 10x worse than 9/11 and say what can we do, retaliation will cause too much damage? I don't blame the Israelis for not shrugging either.
The Gazan people want the destruction of Israel. Israel is going to keep killing Gazans until their capability to hurt Israel is broken. I wish everyone could get along peacefully and have lollipops and sunshine too. That isn't the world we live in. Gaza started a war and saying "that's not fair!" when they are the ones being killed is at best hopelessly naïve.
Lots more than 25+ thousand innocents died in Germany in World War 2. Therefore, the Nazis were the good guys.
Was there a prestige hierarchy among the types of engineering at the college you attended? I was at Waterloo 1988-93, and at the time, the hierarchy seemed to be Computer > {Electrical, Systems} > {Chemical, Mechanical} > Civil > Geological.
There was, but it was/is in constant flux depending on what you measure. The Mechanical engineers and Civil engineers were looked down upon due to high failure rate (a running joke: A Mechanical engineer walks into an exam room... with his wife and 2 kids), **they** in turn look down upon others, and especially Computer, because the perceived "soft" and "feminine" nature of their work, unlike the rough manly work of Civil and Mechanical engineering. Computer people (including me) constantly made fun of Electronics and Communication people because the latter suck so much at programming and write such shitty Matlab/C code that you want to bleach your eye every time you read their artistic pieces of code, etc...
It's mostly friendly and light-hearted teasing that everyone involved know to be half-wrong and half-irrelevant, but some are immature enough to let it get to their head.
Is there an endgame in Gaza that makes Israel win? I’d be interested to hear suggestions.
Israel ist trying to break Hamas in Gaza. Rafah is the only area left that Hamas firmly controls.
If Israel is doing what I think they are doing (and what I would do if I were in their shoes), they have started to transfer the Rafah population piecemeal – 100.000 at a time – to the tent camp in Khan Younis. In the process, they will detain young people suspected of being Hamas (plus unarm those stupid enough to bring arms with them to Khan Younis). Then they will destroy the weapon depots, tunnels and the like that might be in Rafah. Plus do the same (if they have not finished the job already) in the rest of Gaza. Plus, probably solidifying the road cutting Gaza in two, and keeping that under Israeli control.
Let us for the sake of argument assume that Israel succeeds in all this, with or without a lot of bloodshed.
The question is: then what can Israel do?
In political science there is something called the pottery law: “If you break it, you own it”
Which means: Someone must keep the people fed, see to it that rebuilding takes place, that children can go to school, that toilets flush, and the thousands of other tasks that must be taken care of in order for a society to function.
How is Israel going to find a sufficient number of Gazans to do this? Tens of thousands will be necessary.
In 1945, the Allies did it right by “looking through the fingers” on administrators with a former Nazi past, since most of those with a minimum of talent and ambition has joined the Nazi party, or were fellow travellers. That worked quite well (same in Japan). In Iraq, the Coalition of the Willing did the opposite: not employing anyone belonging to the Baath party after the takeover. Which is arguably the main reason why Iraq turned into a mess – most of the ones who were “clean” ideologically were the zealots and the incompetent.
---in Gaza the Israelis are unlikely to find anyone who is competent and non-Hamas willing to administer the place, at higher as well as lower levels (unless they are suicidal). And the problem with accepting competent people with a Hamas past is that they (unlike the Nazis, who accepted they had lost) cannot be trusted to stay defeated.
I hope I am overlooking something, so that Israel has an endgame after the dust has settled. That is, an endgame with some real probability of succeeding rebuilding and administering Gaza without making “owning Gaza” a forever-money drain on the Israeli economy.
Anybody has a bright idea on how?
"Owning Gaza" is going to be a money drain on the Israeli economy for the next generation. That's still a huge win when the alternative is the annual Al-Aqsa Flood. And if it's *just* the Israeli economy, the Gazans are going to be living in abject poverty for a decade. Better get used to those tents. Or, we can see whether all the people outside Israel who claim to care so very, very much about the Gazans, will still care next year. I expect at least some of them will; the prospects for Gaza will scale with their numbers and commitment.
Other than that, yes, as you say, go through Rafa and the population hiding there, arrange for every Hamas member to be dead, in prison, or trying very hard to convince people that they were never part of Hamas. And keep enough of an IDF presence to suppress any backsliders in the latter group. It seems to me that Israel ought to be able to keep Gaza about as peaceful as the West Bank, and more so at less cost if they're smart enough not to allow the settlers back in. That sounds like it would be a win to me.
>In political science there is something called the pottery law: “If you break it, you own it”
That law should of course be rejected. Following it is what killed the US in Iraq and Afghanistan; if we'd just kicked over Saddam, put some other general in charge, and then left, things would have gone a lot better for us. Of course, as you say that "other general" is thin on the ground in Gaza; Hamas may be shit at fighting Israeli soldiers but they're very good at murdering political opponents.
I expect in the end Israel will just leave in a generally unsatisfying way and just hope that things will work out somehow. Given that the Sunni Arab states are far more interested in normalization with Israel than they are in helping out the Palestinians, maybe over time the cause will get marginalized enough that the Pals will stop being a factor. I wouldn't bet on that one, though -- they may not have allies in the region, but they have plenty of allies in the West who'll happily join with Iran and Russia in keeping the pot boiling.
I don't think there are any good solutions.
A. Deportation. Israel relocates the entire population of Gaza somewhere else so they don't have to deal with them. The problem is no one else wants to deal with Palestinians either. The Arab world regards them as a bunch of whiny losers, and past refugees have been very politically destabilizing. So Israel would have to forcibly deport hundreds of thousands of people who don't want to leave and forcibly deposit them on people who don't want to take them in. Plus the whole world would decry this as basically genocide.
B. Occupation. Like you say, Israel would have to commit its own resources to the occupation government. This would be a huge resource pit for Israel and make their people much more vulnerable to attack. Israel has specifically avoided direct occupation of Gaza in the past for these very reasons. The joint PNA-Israel governance of the West Bank is probably the absolute best outcome for Gaza, which isn't saying much. The comparisons to post-WWII nations are not really applicable. The Axis powers and their interests were totally destroyed; the surrounding Arab nations, especially Iran, would still be around. They hate Israel and have no problem using the Palestinians as a stick to beat Israel with. So there would be no cultural reset like there was with the Nazis or Imperial Japan.
C. Political Compromise. A single state is laughable. Neither side would ever possibly accept this. Multiple states (possibly separating Gaza and the West Bank into separate states) more or less goes back to the way things were before Oct 7th. Hamas is democratic in the sense that the will of people in Gaza is the destruction of Israel. Even if Hamas is totally destroyed and replaced by PLO 2 or something, PLO 2 will just launch more terror attacks on Israel like Hamas did. See point B for why the Gazans will keep hating Israel into perpetuity.
The Palestinians hate Israel and I don't think this can ever realistically be changed given the influence of the hostile Arab states bordering Israel. Any attempts to give the the Palestinians self-governance will just lead to more Oct 7th type atrocities in the future. Any attempts to remove the Palestinian people would face enormous international condemnation and there probably isn't the political will to do this even among Israelis.
I think the best case scenario in Gaza is something like the west bank after operation defensive shield - local civilian rule but gradual degrading of terrorism capabilities similar to the west bank (ending up with bringing Gaza to west bank levels of unease except without the settlements k
> A single state is laughable. Neither side would ever possibly accept this.
As far as I can tell, a single state is the one thing that Israel and Hamas agree on.
That's kind of like the CCP and the KMT both agreeing on "One China".
Taiwan actually believes One China should be larger than China does. Here is a map of Taiwan's territorial claims: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ROC_Administrative_and_Claims.svg
Yeah, I suppose that's what happens when the CCP has to do actual diplomacy for the better part of a century.
Every so often my inner troll is tempted to create maps of China with no Tibet, no Xinjiang, no Taiwan, no Inner Mongolia or Manchuria, and little dashed lines carving out Hong Kong and Macau and Shanghai.
I by and large agree with this reasoning.
The next question then becomes if it is really necessary to occupy also Rafah. Rather than to strike some kind of deal with Hamas, or alternatively de facto silently accept that Hamas will still be there. Since Hamas - or something very similar to Hamas - is going to resurface when all is said and done anyhow. (Given the animosity people in Gaza will feel toward Israel in the foreseeable future. All the deaths have solidified this, if nothing else.)
I tilt in the direction that occupying Rafah still makes sense from an Israeli point of view (even more so from Netanyahu's chance of personal political survival, but put a parenthesis around that). Since it at least creates some uncertainty about who among the Gazans that will emerge as leaders and top-level administrators in Gaza when things stabilizes and are brought back to some sort of normal (which will have to happen in the not-so-distant future). Then again, there are equally or even more extreme political factions in Gaza. So it is not clear-cut what is the rational/sensible next move for Israel (given the cards that have already been played - perhaps it would have been better to just build a more solid wall or to go lighter on the destruction of Gaza, but that is water under the bridge).
It may depend on how it is done, including if it can be done without chaos.
I agree with how you characterize these alternatives, but one minor nit - I don't think the hostility of the other Arab states is a factor. It's gotten pretty clear lately that Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, UAE, and perhaps others are not interested in the Palestinians any more, and only are making pro forma statements right now to keep a lid on public unrest. If your choice is between Israel, which will leave you alone if you leave it alone, and Iran, which has been running proxy wars against the Sunni world for decades... that choice is pretty clear.
The governments of the Arab states may be ready to normalize relations with Israel, but I'm not sure the population of those states is on board. Even oppressive dictatorships sometimes have to compromise with public sentiment, and a situation like this can be a great way to increase domestic stability.
I agree that the Arab nations are no longer in a position like the '40s-'70s where they are considering aggression against Israel. Still, they sponsor so many resolutions against Israel in the U.N. that Israel has more anti-resolutions than every single other country in the world combined. They also fund Palestine to the tune of millions of dollars every year through U.N. refugee programs. How much of this is so the governments can show the populace "See, we're doing something to oppose the Jews" and how much is genuine opposition to Israel I'm not sure.
It's true that heretics are often more despised than infidels. While the Sunni majority would probably take Israel over Iran, I'm far from convinced they would ever take Israel over Palestine.
Maybe in the abstract they would pick "Palestine" over "Israel," even today. But that option is not available -- the "Palestine" you'd get today isn't another Sunni Arab state, it's another Iranian colony run by the IRGC. Israel is for sure preferable to _that_.
I recently had an idea to improve acceptance of self-driving cars on the road: they should have always-on lights (while driving) that clearly identify them as self-driving, such as blue LEDs at each corner. People afraid of self-driving cars can avoid them, and everyone can see any stupid things they do.
I bet people will get used to them, and find they do far fewer stupid things than the other idiots on the road.
I think you greatly overestimate the ability of drivers, bicyclists, and pedestrians to avoid a self-driving car even if they do recognize it as such. Cars are much faster than pedestrians, and other cars have only limited options for maneuvering in traffic.
there's some level of avoidance that can be achieved by "always yield even if you have the right of way" and "pull to the side and let it pass as if it were an emergency vehicle", but I hope you can see why those are not acceptable solutions. So, I'm a bicyclist stopped at an intersection with a four-way stop sign. There's a car coming on my left, hasn't reached the intersection yet, I have right of way and should be able to cross right now. But the car is a toaster, and toasters sometimes fail to recognize stop signs and bicycles. For the sake of argument, I'm one of the people who considers this risk significantly higher than with human drivers, i.e. I am one of the people your proposal is aimed at.
A: How do I avoid the risk of being hit broadside and overrun while I cross the road like I am allowed to?
B: Will your answer to question A cause me to look favorably on the Butlerian Jihad?
A: How do you avoid the risk of being hit broadside and overrun by cars driven by humans? If you rely on the rules of the road, which I don't, you're foolhardy. People don't use turn signals when they ought to, and do when they ought not to. People become distracted. And, of course, cars of all sorts can simply break, such as brakes failing. You may think self-driving cars are more likely to hit pedestrians, but unless you think they are more likely to TARGET pedestrians, they shouldn't hit pedestrians more often than human-driven cars.
B: I had to look up what a Butlerian Jihad was, and am still confused by the question. But hopefully this will answer: technology in general is better to advance than be retarded, despite problems on the wayside. I believe self-driving vehicles will cause fewer accidents and fatalities even now, and fewer yet as time goes on.
I think a lot of the distrust in self-driving cars is what people THINK they will do, without actual proof of what they actually do. My proposal will help people see what they actually do. If you witness a pedestrian doing something stupid and a self-driving car gives up its right of way to avoid them, would that help convince you?
Mercedes has included lavender lights in at least one of their models to indicated when it is in an assisted driving mode.
That's good to know. Googling about it I couldn't determine, however, whether they were interior or exterior lights. Possibly both?
In any case, I certainly haven't seen them. I hope to see more soon. They seem to have come out last year.
I only saw it in a video review of the car (which i can't find right now). I think they were exterior lights with the same intent as your suggestion. Its possible the feature got removed from the production version of the car or, because the car was >$100k, we just aren't likely to see one let alone see one in that mode.
>People afraid of self-driving cars can avoid them,
How?
Either hang back, or (more likely) pass them.
What do people think self-driving cars would do to endanger them?
Glitch out and drive straight into things because something flipped the "brake" and "accelerate" signals.
Why are you trying to form a solution to a problem you don't understand in the first place?
The problem is that self-driving cars at this point are safer, in general, than human drivers, by accidents and fatalities. People need to see the roads getting safer, and to note that the accident they see on the road is almost never caused by a self-driving car. Which drivers do not observe and judge the driving ability of everyone else on the road with them?
A car confusing the "brake" and "accelerate" signals is as likely as Excel incorrectly calculating a sum of numbers. If things like that are the concern, then they need a massive PR campaign to change people's attitudes.
>A car confusing the "brake" and "accelerate" signals is as likely as Excel incorrectly calculating a sum of numbers.
My car, currently, will turn the volume up if you turn the volume knob down. It also doesn't like to let the key out of the ignition because it doesn't register the Park gear half the time. Any argument that goes "these things can't malfunction" is dead on arrival.
If you give Excel wrong numbers, it will use those wrong numbers in perpetuity. You need a human to sanity-check the thing and course-correct.
Why aren't we seeing a music video golden age? It seems like everyone has a phone and they're using it to consume video and audio in smaller and smaller bites. The obvious losers should be film and television, which are meant for bigger screens. The clear winner should be music videos - the smallest and shortest kind of audiovisual content that was consumed, say, 30 years ago.
But it looks to me like music videos peaked 5-10 years ago and haven't generated any big hits since. Is it just because of the decline of the music industry generally? Something else that I'm missing?
Are you talking about Tiktok or something else?
I don't know if music videos get released on TikTok. I thought they were too long for that. So consider Michael Jackson's Thriller - that's got a pretty good music video that lots of people are familiar with.
It seems easier than ever to put that music video in front of someone's face. Everyone has a phone and it's not like you really need a giant movie screen to watch a music video.
But we aren't seeing lots of music videos get big like Thriller. Instead, music videos seem to be getting fewer and fewer views, at least from the data I stumbled across yesterday.
I've seen plenty of good new music videos on YouTube. Is it possible there just isn't an axis for music videos to become a "big hit"? The days of MTV are long in the past.
I was looking at a list of music videos with the most views. It's possible that time has allowed them to gain an edge over newer videos, but it seems to meet that there's a pretty steep drop off around 2019-2020.
My off-the-cuff zero-expertise over-generalized theory is to blame always-on interconnected Internet culture. There aren't a bunch of small isolated micro-cultures that can develop their own cool things and then feed them into the mainstream. Instead, as soon as someone does something cool, there's pressure to get exposure and monetize it by exposing it to the giant single market, and those market incentives warp everything to sound "current". Also, the micro-cultures forced people to interact inside the micro-culture, allowing for artistic development and trends to evolve. But now, everyone's plugged into all sorts of stuff, and so any new sound is going to get influences from everywhere, and although there are some differences, they all smooth out in the end.
Underrated point. Someone once said that subcultures are like plants, they have to grow underground by themselves for a little while before revealing themselves. If you plant something and then dig it up a day later to take a look its not going to do what you want.
Were music videos actually peaking 5-10 years ago? I would have guessed 20-25 years ago.
You're probably correct - my interpretation is skewed by the data I have access to. I was looking at the wikipedia for most watched music videos on YouTube.
I had naively thought that those numbers would just be going up over time, but to my surprise it seems like they peaked around 2019. But the data aren't going to include anything pre-YouTube and I'm not sure how I'd get that data.
My default opinion on art is that good art flourishes under constraints. We seem to shy under that conclusion and believe art only requires that you maximise creativity. But creativity is an immensely complex emergent property. Not something you can mass produce. Unless you’re Andy Warhol of course.
More generally it's disappointing we're not getting a music golden age. The possibilities for the sort of music you can create using an ordinary computer are endless, you'd think that putting this power into everyone's hands should have resulted in a groundswell of creativity, but instead music has stalled. So many new musical genres were born between 1950 and 2000ish, and then zeroish (does "mashup" count as a genre?) since 2000ish.
does mumblerap count?
futurebass?
webcore?
hyperpop?
phonk?
djent?
(edit: this came out harsher than intended. I wouldn't be surprised if innovation has slowed. but i also feel obliged to point out that the innovation hasn't dropped to exactly zero, either.)
Wikipedia tells me:
>Phonk is a subgenre of hip hop and trap music directly inspired by 1990s Memphis rap. The style is characterized by vocals from old Memphis rap tapes and samples from early 1990s hip hop, especially cowbell samples resembling that of the Roland TR-808 drum machine
If "literally old 1990s Memphis rap tapes but with more cowbell from one specific 1980s drum machine" is what passes for a new genre these days I feel like my point is well supported. There's nothing wrong with that specific combination as a basis for a song, but for a whole genre, or even subgenre?
to drill the point home that a sample alone does not determine the genre, let's consider the relationship between
One For the trouble (by A.D.O.R.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tY68S1p1d4
WildChild - Renegade Master
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oi4imsHrqA
Renegade Master was a pretty popular song that's been remixed by other artists a number of times. It's widely regarded as a house track, despite looping a sample from a hip-hop track.
Also, I feel that in hindsight, Requiem doesn't really capture the feeling of "vocals are scuffed to the point of unintelligibility" that a lot of phonk tracks feature. so feel free to check out
ENEMY AND REVENGE (by Mista Playa)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcKiZeCnA3E
KORDHELL - ZEP TEPI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYzGDmaWF74
there's also a more latino strain of phonk that leans more into (what i can only describe as) a moombahton-esque identity, rather than a memphis rap identity.
Sampling is when you isolate a piece of a song and use it in another musical context. The sample itself may or may not be modified in some way. a well-known example is when DJ's scratch vinyls on turntables. e.g.
DJ ANGELO - Funky Turntablism
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tr3ftsCVXhc
now, if you compare and contrast actual examples of memphis rap and phonk, I think you'll find that there's a little more to it than just overlaying cowbells on rap tracks. e.g.
BigBankRob - Memphis Flow
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ng9cEhzux8Q
ROMANTICA - REQUIEM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQVrq5oaC-4
The problem isn’t creating good music. There’s plenty of that. The problem is getting a given piece of good music connected to the listeners. It costs next to nothing to release music on Spotify et.al. I’ve done it. And then it just sits there - without a massive promotional campaign, how would anyone find it in this massive ocean?
Madeon and Ichika Nito were both nobodies who went viral over youtube overnight. Meanwhile, Twitch streamers who are trying to "make it big" are constantly shilling themselves on any social media platform they can find. Be it tiktok, instagram, youtube, facebook, twitter, etc. "Wait, it's about gaming the algorithm?" Always has been. Mash'algorithm.
So yes, you need a promotional campaign. but no, the campaign doesn't needed to be funded by a hoity toity record label.
Oh, no argument here - the old system is dead, long live the new system. The game is completely different - in 1984 your goal was to be signed by a big label, and then the label promoted you. Now it’s a free-for-all, but this means you can’t just be good at music; never mind, that part is almost irrelevant, you have to figure out the promotion game, and then it’s still a lottery.
I’m not even complaining, it is what it is, my point is mainly that there’s all kinds of music out there, more than there ever was, and it’s really hard to find what you like in the roiling seas of sound.
oh, so maybe you're complaining about the threshing, rather than the marketing. yeah, that's a tough one, isn't it.
> The possibilities for the sort of music you can create using an ordinary computer are endless
But the possibilities for *good* music are incredibly limited, and all of those possibilities have rapidly been exhausted due to composition and performance being made far more accessible. New music genres aren't going to magically form unless new technology allows for it, and unfortunately audio technology has already peaked.
I dunno, it's possible that the full space of possible musical styles that sound good has already been exhausted, but it seems more likely that something else has gone wrong. We were inventing several new genres of music per decade in the 20th century, was dubstep really the last possible point in musical space that sounded tolerable to someone?
I think it's more likely that something has just gone wrong with the pipeline that lets new sounds become popular. A young musician who comes up with something new no longer has a pipeline of people interested in putting him in front of an audience.
There are only 7 notes (12 if you go full atonal route, but I’d struggle to hum an atonal melody…). While I do think music as sound canvas will keep evolving, there are no new good-sounding harmonies or melodies to be found.
The pipeline is definitely just a directionless flood now, the old model of signing a contract with EMI who then invests into the artist is as good as dead.
It’s not a problem of audio tech. It’s a problem of a flood. There’s so much new music being released it’s impossible to even know how to look for something you’d like.
People discovered formulas for successful song creation, and stick to them. Using something non-formula is taking the risk that it won't be as good, and it indeed usually isn't, but sometimes might be. If you're in it for the money, why take the risk?
I find the same is true of restaurants nowadays. They are mostly the same within their target audience.
Good music videos were entirely manufactured by the music industry for people who sat and browsed television. Nearly all of the views you see on youtube are people who put it on for background music and don't watch the video. Music videos don't have a purpose anymore, they're not profitable, and all the amateur ones are on tiktok. There are millions of them, they're just not good. There is no money in making good ones.
It used to be a stepping stone to film making. I think Michael Bay and Spike Jonze used to be music video directors before making it to the big screen.
Maybe now the film director pipeline is shifting to social media content production instead of music videos?
Consider tiktok dances and the profileration of short-form artists like Carter Vail and Value Select. I think we're seeing exactly what you predict...but there are also a billion more of every other kind of video media, so it's hard to detect.
I can believe that music videos are the most vulnerable to competition from TikTok and such. So instead of TikTok (et al.) replacing film, it replaces the closest thing - music videos.
Pretty random: anyone here based in Taiwan, or the UAE, and have an interest in semiconductor matters?
Me and a colleague are currently on a little "AI, AGI and compute" tour, to understand how different parts of the supply chain are orienting to the current AI situation, and are trying to find folks to talk to along the way
Feel free to DM me!
(brief bio: I was part of founding Lightcone Infrastructure, the org that runs LessWrong, amont other things)
Photos of musicians' ecstasy. https://imgur.com/a/JQi8N1q
Why hasn't anyone told me about the Vehmic courts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehmic_court
>The Vehmic courts were the regional courts of Westphalia which, in turn, were based on the county courts of Franconia. They received their jurisdiction from the Holy Roman Emperor, from whom they also received the capacity to pronounce capital punishment (German: Blutgericht) which they exercised in his name. Everywhere else the power of life and death, originally reserved to the Emperor alone, had been usurped by the territorial nobles; only in Westphalia, called "the Red Earth" because here the imperial Blutbann (jurisdiction over life and death) was still valid, were capital sentences passed and executed by the Vehmic courts in the Emperor's name alone.
> The sessions were often held in secret, whence the names of "secret court"... Attendance of secret sessions was forbidden to the uninitiated, on pain of death... A chairman (German: Stuhlherr) presided over the court, and lay judges (German: Freischöffen) passed judgment. The court also constituted a Holy Order.
> Any free man "of pure bred German stock" and of good character could become a judge. The new candidate was given secret information and identification symbols. The "knowing one" (German: Wissende) had to keep his knowledge secret, even from his closest family ("vor Weib und Kind, vor Sand und Wind"). Lay judges had to give formal warnings to known troublemakers, issue warrants, and take part in executions.
The more I learn about German history the more "romantic" and alien it seems.
Wow, thanks for sharing! I suppose this is another thing I'm glad the founders of American didn't copy from the HRE.
> It has been claimed ... that, in some cases, the condemned would be set free, given several hours' head start and then hunted down and put to death. So fearsome was the reputation of the Fehme and its reach that many thus released committed suicide rather than prolonging the inevitable.
> In an 1856 lecture, philosopher Karl Marx used the Vehmic courts as a metaphor to describe his predictions of the working-class revolution that would sweep Europe.
>It has been claimed ... that, in some cases, the condemned would be set free, given several hours' head start and then hunted down and put to death.
That seems a bit too much like the Wild Hunt to be true IMO. But then again it's Germany, where similar things have happened not that long ago (TW: Nazis being cruel): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%BChlviertler_Hasenjagd
That does appear to be one of the few parts not directly cribbed from the 1911 Britannica. (I wondered why the tone of the article was a bit archaic.)
For a moment there I was hoping that the name referred to an attempt to recapture this amazing guy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._F._E._Yeo-Thomas
The recent comment "What is the "free" in "Palestine should be free"" by Bo Rothstein at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden contains some points worth sharing about the ongoing Gaza war:
"regardless of whether the slogan ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free’ is anti-Semitic or not, there is a further question: how likely is it that a ‘free Palestine’ would genuinely be ‘free’, in the sense of issuing in a democratic society that respects human rights? What type of society can we expect if the Palestinians create their own state? ...What we already know is that the principle of democratic elections has been abrogated not only by Hamas in Gaza but also by the Fatah faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which controls the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the west bank. Neither has subjected itself to the ballot box since the second legislative elections in 2006 to the Palestine National Council—deriving from the Oslo accords between Israel and the PLO—which Hamas won, subsequently wresting Gaza from the PA’s control.
Amnesty International (AI) and Human Rights Watch (HRW) have reported numerous violations of human rights by Hamas and the PA. In a report before the murderous October 7th Hamas attack on Israel and the disproportionate Israeli reprisal, AI wrote: ‘The authorities in the West Bank and Gaza Strip continue to unnecessarily restrict freedom of expression, association and assembly, often using excessive violence to disperse peaceful assemblies.’
Link to the whole comment here:
https://www.socialeurope.eu/what-is-the-free-in-palestine-should-be-free
Maybe if the Palestinians didn't have to deal with the ill effects of the military occupation, attacks from Israeli settlers, and other problems caused by their poor coexistence with the Jews, their character as a people would change and they would no longer want governments like Hamas or Fatah.
The best guidepost would be to look at how other Arab countries are governed. At best, there is Lebanon, which is tolerant and democratic, though also badly corrupt; Jordan which gets stability from its monarchy and good relations with the U.S.; and Iraq, which is also democratic and less corrupt than Lebanon. At worst, there are the military dictatorships of Egypt and Syria, and the hardline Islamic theocracy of Saudi Arabia. The benevolent dictatorships present in the other Gulf States are only made possible by massive oil wealth and small populations. Israel has no oil.
If Palestine becomes "free from the river to the sea," then it means something very bad has happened to the Jewish population of Israel and probably also to the Christians, which rules out good relations with and support from America. The Palestinians also don't have any monarchy, so they can't copy Jordan.
My guess is, after taking over what is currently Israel and defeating their longtime enemies, the Palestinians would have a civil war with each other over who was in charge. They might fight to the point of mutual exhaustion and after getting it out of their system as Lebanon and Iraq did, form a somewhat functional democratic government, or maybe one faction will defeat all the others and the winning general will make himself dictator. The economy would suck due to mismanagement and corruption regardless of the outcome, though they'd be richer than they were under Israeli control.
Governments like Hamas don't care what the people they allegedly represent, want for themselves. If the people of Gaza don't want a government like Hamas, Hamas will still rule Gaza with the stereotypical iron fist and use it as a base and a resource for attacks on Israel. Unless a whole lot of people with guns and with a willingness to kill Hamas or die trying, go in and clear them out.
There would be somewhat fewer civilian casualties if it were the Palestinians rather than the IDF who took on that task. Do you think that is a realistic proposition? Do you think it would happen organically if the "occupation" and "attacks from Israeli settlers" stopped, or would something else be required and if so what? Keep in mind that the problem du jour is in Gaza, which hasn't been occupied or settled in almost twenty years.
Even if it were still a dictatorship, having an actual sovereign country would still be a huge improvement for Palestinians.
My primary worry with this scenario is that, if it were not a highly repressive dictatorship, it would immediately go to war with Israel. And having no greater military strength than today, it would find itself losing and facing a similar invasion to what we see today.
But at least, history tells us that dictatorships like uniforms. The shiny, spiffy, "glittering tinsel of neo-fascism". That one change would improve the situation immensely.
Agreed. If we could find a competent Palestinian dictator who would accept peaceful coexistence with Israel and *effectively* crack down on Palestinians who want to break that peace, putting that dictator in charge of Gaza and most of the West Bank would probably be an improvement for all concerned.
A democracy would be better still. But the point is probably moot on account of neither a Palestinian dictator or a Palestinian democracy would be effective at cracking down on Palestinians who want to break the peace in the near future.
That's all true, but waking humanity up to the fact that we don't need governments at all would be better.
https://ydydy.substack.com/p/a-government-should-do-no-more-than
A Lee Kuan Yew? The world seems to get one perhaps once a millennium :-( Other than him, Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus and George Washington, are there other examples of competent and benign dictators (or, in Washington's case, people who could have held power indefinitely if he had wanted to).
I agree with you on this one, John. The only trouble with democracy is they actually elected Hamas as their leadership (but I don't think Hamas had held free elections since they came to power). Of course, we've got democracy in Israel, which gives us a dangerous clown like Netanyahu. It's clear that neither side really wants a cease-fire right now.
I suspect Hamas really wants a cease-fire right now, but they don't have much to offer in exchange and they're (understandably) asking for too high a price for what they can offer.
But yeah, in terms of a cease fire with terms both sides would be willing to accept, that makes as little sense in 2024 Gaza as it would have in 1944 Europe.
Back when Israel was just revving up their incursion into Gaza, a senior Hamas leader said in an interview that they expected a massive response from Netanyahu. That leads me to believe either they were overconfident or coldly calculating. I suspect the latter because when you look at it in a coldly calculating way it's a win-win for Hamas. Either Israel gets bogged down in a long drawn-out war of street-to-street fighting, or they'll create a humanitarian crisis in Gaza. In the former scenario, Israel is weakened militarily. In the latter scenario, Israel will garner world condemnation and (in the Hamas calculation) get boycotted like South Africa did under the Afrikaner government. Either way, Israel will create a lot of angry Palestinian kids who will grow up committed to their cause. Meanwhile, senior Hamas political leaders get to watch safely from a distance in Dubai.
That only helps Hamas if Hamas is still present in Gaza to take advantage of it. Or some successor organization that Hamas is willing to yield its place to while they all go off to enjoy the 72 daily virgins or whatever. Israel has the ability to make Hamas in Gaza as extinct as the NSDAP in 1946 Berlin, in about the same way, and they seem to be heading in that direction.
In which case, yeah, Hamas in Qatar is still a thing, and they'll have lots of support from the Arab Street and the Elite US Colleges. But without a presence in Qatar to turn that into organized action where it matters, it won't much matter, Note that Hamas in Qatar has been unable to stir up more than minor trouble in the West Bank, where the IDF maintains a reasonably effective "No Hamas!" policy.
Israel losing US aid is a long shot, but Israel can survive without US aid. And they are not going to be voting themselves out of existence like the Afrikaner regime did, not under any plausible boycott.
The only way this turns into a win is if Israel is stopped short of de-Hamasifying Gaza. Which is probably what Hamas was hoping for, and it's not entirely out of the question now, but I don't think so.
> I suspect the latter because when you look at it in a coldly calculating way it's a win-win for Hamas.
There are reports, apparently by an independent Arab journalist, that some of the shootings of Gazans waving white flags were by Hamas. Because Hamas doesn't want non-combatant Gazans to leave the war zone, because Hamas wants to use the non-combatants as human shields, so that their martyrdom will turn public opinion against Israel.
I have no idea how much trust to put into this. Virtually everything emanating from that epistemic hellhole seems designed to manipulate the opinion of outsiders at the cost of Gazan suffering.
> senior Hamas political leaders get to watch safely from a distance in Dubai
Isn't that Qatar?
My very brief impression is that Qatar is much more miserable and autocratic place than the Emirates.
Of course, the question is if Israel even has to care about what the world thinks of them. The US will keep supporting Israel as long as it keeps furthering its interests in the Middle East. All Hamas is doing by alienating Israel is just giving the US more control over them.
Good post. At first I rolled my eyes and braced myself for yet another bad faith "Just Asking Questions" concern trolling that tries to distract from the most salient and fundamental point - which is that Palestine is militarily occupied by an authoritarian government that pretends it's a democracy and acts with impunity in flagrant violation of international norms reminiscent of US-proclaimed "naughty" states like Iran and Russia - by using angels-on-pinhead argumentation about hypotheticals, but then the author actually acknowledges all of that upfront and explicitly declares his IFF transponder to be Pro-Palestinian at the start of the article, so the questioning appears to be sincere.
It's not an easy question. Would it have been better to wait for Vietnam (or rather, North Vietnam) to become a liberal LGBTQ-friendly democracy **first** before marching in protest of the American bombing? Wars and occupation harden dictatorships if they don't defeat it outright, ask Syria's Al Assad, the senior, who despite being defeated in 1973 and not reclaiming The Golans from Israel, still coasted on the legitimacy of "Resistance" for decades, eventually passing on his little French-created fiefdom to his criminal genocidal scum of a son.
On other hand, victory over the occupier **is** the ultimate PR coup for the dictator, one which can and almost certainly will feed into the myth and continue to perpetuate the kingdom.
Intertwined with this question is the question of how much do people "deserve" freedoms of a certain kind if they don't give other freedoms of other kinds to other people. Do the Palestinians "deserve" self-determination and humane treatment if they don't give them to the LGBT and atheists among them? Well, difficult question, I freely admit, but I will notice that neither the Americans nor the Europeans, self-proclaimed Free World, gave those freedoms to the same categories among them until very recently, vast gulfs of 80, 100, and sometimes 150+ years separate the introduction of constitutional innovations and political concepts of freedoms and the much later exploration of wider concepts of personal and social freedoms that guarantees survival of LGBT people and atheists and those like them.
At the end of the day, you can't do much thinking when there are starving children. We can debate till the cows come home about Palestinians and their social and political habits, but that's is solely conditional on ensuring there **remains** such a thing as Palestinians, only philosophers and theologians argue about dead people.
exactly. Was reading a history of the vietnam war and while the author is liberal leaning and condemns the U.S involvement overall, he could never resist little digs at antiwar protestors along the lines of 'of course, antiwar protestors in north vietnam would have been arrested'. As though the U.S would have been so permissive if north Vietnamese bombers were overflying washington! Can think of very few examples of countries that have remained good liberal democracies while facing the adversity experienced by north vietnam or palestine
>neither the Americans nor the Europeans, self-proclaimed Free World, gave those freedoms to the same categories among them until very recently
And it should be noted that wide swaths of the electorate and of the legislatures of the US and the Europeans nations openly wish to, if not reverse, certainly stop the progress in granting those freedoms.
Thanks for the question - I have written about this decision in the past, but let me lay it out for you. It was never my intention to ferment the apple juice. This requires a huge capital investment and a lot of experience and knowledge I don't have. Making alcohol, as I'm sure you know, is a tiresome bureaucratic mess as well. So I thought that I would grow and press the apples, but then when a local cidery opened a huge facility that had capacity for pressing my apples too, I was on it! They charge me on a per gallon basis, of course, just as I charge my customer. They pump the juice into a 300 gallon food grade plastic totes and I deliver to the local breweries who ferment on their time and equipment. To build a processing plant would be another huge investment. I'm happy to work on the farm, that's my favorite part anyway, and let the processing to the processors. By the way, last year I sold 600 gallons from about 200 trees that are 6 years old or less. It takes about 10 years to get a fully mature tree that produces a good crop. I have a total of 750 trees. Each year I double production, so far!
I'm unsure what to make of this but I have a suggestion for your marketing department. There's a lively song that never made it to any charts and you might use it. https://youtube.com/watch?v=F2sF9LiVj0I&si=l8U9-qACPOc1jqJ8
Love it, thanks! I need to figure out all the lyrics...
This may be a stupid question, but as the man says, there are no stupid questions, only stupid people. So with that...
A problem with the most sophisticated, highest-parameter LLMs is that consumer hardware is incapable of running them. This means they have to run on cloud services run by large corporate providers, which in turn creates single points of failure for censorship and regulation that are already limiting their utility. How plausible is the idea of dedicated hardware accelerators that would allow, say, hundred-billion-parameter models to run on high-end consumer PCs?
Depends on throughput and cost! You could do it RN with some of the more esoteric compression methods and two 3090s. 3bit compression exists and its passable.
There is a history of inference hardware accelerators, but the problem is that due to some minutia you are pretty "locked in" to a certain architecture scale if you want to optimize operations other than big matrix multiplies. Your accelerator needs a lot of HBM as a baseline, which costs a lot, and if you get the size the market demands wrong by one OOM you are screwed. So yeah a pretty big risk but if you locked in a size very doable
Not exactly what you're asking for, but thought I'd tell you about Jeremy Howard, an Australian AI guy, who's interested in AI training that can be done on a home computer, and has a bunch of methods for squeezing more learning out of less data. Offers courses in what he calls Fast AI. Won Kaggle 2 years in a row, so he's no slouch.
People have already built proof of concept systems called “data vending machines”, where someone operates an LLM for pay, charging over the bitcoin lightning network so that transaction fees and latency aren’t an issue. This is what I think is more likely than individuals running their model models: a marketplace where technically knowledgeable vendors compete on price and quality.
But that's just the cloud model again with a different protocol.
Yes, but if there are multiple "data vending machines" run by competing companies (even if the _training_ is done by just a few companies), that gets around a large part (though not all) of having a single point of failure for censorship etc.
Until they all get bought up into a couple of monopolies with full staffs of trust and safety commissars. Or just regulated into oblivion, if you live in Europe or California or under Biden's second term.
Many Thanks! Yes, that could happen. The "regulated into oblivion" could happen even with consumer-level hardware able to run LLMs, if e.g. the Federal government starts requiring ISPs to detect and report the LLM models themselves being downloaded.
Still, at least _starting_ with a dozen LLM-execution-providers in separate companies would mean that some _further_ failure has to happen, while, _today_, if a handful of companies decide to censor more than they currently do, this isn't _anything_ to stop them.
It's going to be a lot harder to regulate LLMs if they're sitting on people's own computers. Stopping people from downloading things is hard, certainly a lot harder than casually leaning on Amazon-Microsoft-Google Megacorporation Inc. and telling them their AI had better say men can become pregnant if they know what's good for them.
That said, I'm not saying that people shouldn't create "data vending machines," absolutely, let a hundred flowers bloom. And in certain circumstances it might help by at least creating more alternatives to the big boys that aren't (yet) censored. But it still doesn't deliver the security of having your own LLM on your own computer; you're still at the mercy of some corporate provider who might censor you or cut you off at their whim or the whim of some pressure group or government.
It's like anything else - right now you can do it with 6-7k worth of hardware, either a Mac Pro or a bunch of GPU's and an octominer box to run them in.
Moore's law means that'll get cheaper and easier with time, so it all depends when you want to run a 100B parameter model, and model-overhang-and-optimization-wise how good those 100B models will be by then.
But 6k is already cheap to most businesses, and some people. I can't imagine it would take more than 2 years to halve that price, too.
My cursory search engine digging looks like you can run a 120B parameter model locally for $5,000 - $10,000. This gets you to ~ 1 token/s. How the ability of a pruned model like this compares to say ChatGPT, I have no idea.
Lots of people here are very good with language. I'm a late bloomer with language but my favorite use of LLMs is asking them about word etymologies. I trust them to be correct on that subject. But still, I'm so ignorant with regard to word etymologies in general I wonder where I stand compared to the average reader of this blog.
What percent of words you regularly encounter do you more or less know the etymology of?
I like to look them up if I’m not familiar with the etymology. But the OED lists 171,476 headwords in current use.
As Rainman said about the face cards left in the deck, “There’s lots of them. Lots and lots of them.”
https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/d35fe578-2f74-4805-ad3e-e585e30cfd30
Enough to have recognized and deciphered "Uncleftish Beholding" blind on the first read-through. Which means I could at least make educated guesses for much of English vocabulary w/re the knowledge of tiny indivisible things. https://msburkeenglish.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/uncleftish-beholding-aka-atomic-theory.pdf
For English etymologies I use etymonline.com. I don't know how to use an LLM, but I wouldn't trust them anyway. I'd be afraid it'd just repeat some folk etymology, or invent one.
Thank you and others for the link and the point that I shouldn't trust LLMs. I hope to test at least 100 words on an LLM to see if it makes any mistakes on etymologies. (Someone mentioned I should ask for sources, but my understanding is that LLMs are mostly likely to hallucinate when you ask for a citation or source.)
I can't say that I do know the etymology, but I could make a guess about where the word comes from. But I wouldn't trust LLMs as they have been demonstrated to just make stuff up, so always check whatever answer they give you against something else like a good dictionary.
Based on the 77 words in your post, I have some idea of the etymology (as in "that seems like a cognate of that Scandinavian and that German word, so it must be from a similar word in proto-Germanic" or whatever) of around three quarters of the words I encounter, but I know the full etymology (back to PIE or whatever) of 0% of those.
etymonline.com is a good resource for looking up etymologies, and probably just as quick and easy as asking an LLM.
As another commenter has said, I wouldn't trust LLMs very much on this.
It's a bit of a weird question, to be honest. Once you know a word, who cares about where it came from?
I know some of the common ones, anything Greek or Latin is likely to stand out, especially Greek ones, I know some of the Arabic-descended etymologies because Arabic is my native language (Zero and Alcohol are well-known, but did you know "Syrup" comes from the Arabic word for "Drink"?). Where it gets hazy for me is distinguishing between Celtic-borrowed words, the words coming from the original Germanic Old English, and the French-borrowed words coming from the Normans and later influences.
> my favorite use of LLMs is asking them about word etymologies.
LLMs can act as a good search engines with one condition: Ask them to always cite a reputable source, and follow that source. It can be as simple as an online link, or you can ask them to cite a book and download that book from Libgen or Anna's Archive (OpenAI is known to train their models on the so-called "pirate" libraries, but hush hush, we have to pretend "PiRaCy" is a scary crime when individuals do it), or track down a review to source the likely-famous assertion. Never under any circumstances take a factual assertion from an LLM at face value.
You might be amused by what ChatGPT(3.5) has to say about the etymology of "syrup":
ChatGPT:
The English word "syrup" traces its etymology through several languages:
Old French: The word entered English from Old French "sirop."
Latin: The Old French "sirop" itself was derived from the Medieval Latin "siropus," which had been borrowed from Arabic "šarāb" (meaning "beverage" or "syrup").
Greek: The Arabic term "šarāb" was borrowed from the Greek "σῦρον (sŷron)," which referred to a thick drink made from fruit juice.
Proto-Indo-European: Ultimately, the Greek "σῦρον (sŷron)" can be traced back to the Proto-Indo-European root seh₂u-, meaning "juice" or "sap."
So, the English word "syrup" has a long journey through Latin, Greek, Arabic, and Old French before settling into its current form.
It was reasonable and agreeing with Wikipedia till the "Arabic 'Sharab' came from Greek" part. It's **extraordinarily** unlikely that this is remotely true:
(1) "Sharab" is just the Arabic construction for "That which is drinkable", it comes from the Arabic verb "Shareba" شرب. This verb is semitic, it has a 3-letter root ش ر ب. You can derive other things from it: (A) Shaareb شارب, Drinker; (B) Mashrba مشربة, either a tool to drink with or a place/time where drinking happens; (C) Mashroob مشروب, something which is drunk.
Outside of Arabic colloquial dialects, I have never seen a foreign word treated this way. Non-Semitic words can't be derived or derived from.
(2) Furthermore, "Drink" is a very basic human need, it's unheard of for a language to borrow words for "Eat", "Sleep", "Drink" and things like from other languages.
(3) According to Google, there is no such thing as σῦρον, the alleged word that ChatGPT cites as the origin for Sharab. The closest equivalent that Googling yields are https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%A3%E1%BF%A6%CF%81%CE%BF%CF%82 and https://www.blueletterbible.org/lexicon/g4951/kjv/tr/0-1/. One is the name of an island, the other is the verb "To Drag".
(4) Just like ChatGPT fabricates in Ancient Greek, it also fabricates in PIE: there is no such thing as a root seh₂u according to Google, the closest is seh₂ul https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/*Seh%E2%82%82ul_and_*Meh%E2%82%81not, the God of the Sun in Proto-Indo Euro culture, from which the Greek God "Sol" apparently descends. There is the seh₁ https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/seh%E2%82%81-, the verb "To Press" or "To Insert".
This is overwhelmingly likely to be a fabrication, those words probably don't exist, and Arabic can't have possibly borrowed a word as basic and as fundamental as "Drink", something which every 3 years old learn, from an obscure geographically distant language.
Oh, absolutely. It's 100% wrong about the Greek and PIE roots. I just wanted to offer confirmation of your broader advice never to trust an LLM on factual matters.
(If you ask it for the Proto-Germanic root of "syrup," ChatGPT will also invent one — "sirupaz" — rather than point out that the word doesn't have a Proto-Germanic origin.)
>Never under any circumstances take a factual assertion from an LLM at face value.
Very much agreed!
> Once you know a word, who cares about where it came from?
Historical linguists!
>It's a bit of a weird question, to be honest. Once you know a word, who cares about where it came from?
People who are intellectually curious?
Some of them, but a lot are not.
And?
I would be cautious about trusting the LLMs on this subjects, there's a lot of urban legends and myths in etymology. The same advice applies to any source, but LLMs have an unfortunate tendency to regurgitate commonly held bullshit as fact.
Exactly. Trusting an LLM here sounds insane.
In my native language German, most of the exotic ones. Less percentage of the very common words, but those are also often less interesting. (For example, I have no ideas for the analogues of "to be", "to go", "to do".) But I am probably an outlier since I was interested in those things when I was younger. I still am, but there is only so much you can learn.
If you mean which language the word comes from, Latin, French, Greek, etc, then the large majority of them. If you mean something more complicated then less.
None, I Google Search all of them.
Is there anyone here who's familiar with the standard "HBD / racial IQ disparities are largely genetic" arguments, and disagrees with them? If so, could you summarize your thoughts?
It's hard to know what arguments make sense without knowing what you mean by HBD.
There is a large (somewhere between .67 and 1 standard deviation) difference in IQ scores between blacks and whites in the US, and pretty solid evidence that this reflects actual differences in intelligence, since IQ scores seem to be about as good at predicting school and work performance in blacks as in whites. This is also consistent with the stuff we see in the world--blacks have worse average SATs, grades, college graduation rates, STEM degrees, MCAT scores, etc. Some people will call any discussion of this difference "HBD" and nearly all mainstream outlets do not think it should be discussed in public. Good luck finding a newspaper article on the racial statistics of the local magnet school that mentions IQ statistics.
How much of the cause of this difference is genetic vs environmental? That seems like a hard research question. We know IQ is substantially heritable from adoption studies, but blacks and whites live in somewhat different average environments, have slightly different cultures, etc., so it is hard to untangle causality. I think making a strong claim to know the answer to this question is not warranted by the available evidence, and you should be equally skeptical of the guy who confidently tells you that the black/white IQ gap is totally environmental as of the guy who says it's totally genetic.
There is also a flat-earth style HBD that says blacks dumb, whites smart. It's easy to refute, but also doing that doesn't engage with any serious thinkers. In fact, there are a lot of very smart blacks and very dumb whites/Asians/Eastern European Jews. Most people don't have any statistics background at all, so they get wrapped around the axle trying to reason about this, but overlapping bell curves are a fact of life--men average taller than women even though I know some tall women and some short men.
Usually, it's twin studies that are used to estimate heritability.
Also, people put up for adoption are inherently a biased sample, even without considering race.
I think they often look at the correlation between adoptive siblings' IQ (the people raised in the same household with you) vs the correlation between biological siblings' IQ (the people who share genes with you).
Also, I believe there are now some studies where people have looked at how much genetic material two siblings share, and more shared genes goes with a higher positive correlation in IQ scores. (You share about half the genes of your siblings, but the way meiosis works means that you don't share exactly half, and that you share more genes with some siblings than with others. Similarly for grandparents and grandchildren--you get about 25% of your maternal grandma's DNA, but it's not exactly 25%, and your sister may get 29% while you get 22%.)
The problem is there aren't that many adoptees and they're an extremely selected and biased sample.
The standard way to estimate heritability is to compare fraternal vs identical twins.
Sure, but then you get potential confounding because other stuff may also be more similar for identical than fraternal twins. (How you interact with people depends a lot on your appearance, for example.)
You have far more confounding and far smaller sample sizes if you look at adoptions. And that's even before considering the fact that you're restricting yourself to an unrepresentative subset of the population, making the conclusions near-meaningless anyway.
"Largely" is overselling the current evidence; "may be non-trivially genetic" is potential supportable, but any nuance tends to get lost in the screeching.
I usually hate self-replies, but wanted to keep my direct response to the initial question unmuddled.
The contrary assumption's corollary, that any population-level differences in life outcomes are prima facie evidence of systemic discrimination, is equally unfounded.
It wouldn't take much of a difference in the IQ distributions to have a measurable effect in selective situations. As a numerical example, imagine two equally-sized subpopulations with average IQs of 100 & 99, both with a SD of 15; members of the former subpopulation would be 54% of individuals with an IQ above 130.
Add in another characteristic across both subpopulations that affects the SD such that the segments with it have an SD of 16 and those without 14. Even starting from a 1:1:1:1 ratio of the four combinations, again selecting for an IQ above 130 you end up with the proportions:
- 100 & 15 : 1.41
- 100 & 14 : 0.75
- 99 & 15 : 1.22
- 99 & 14 : 0.62
N.B., the effect of both a lower mean and a lower SD is larger than the combined effects of each separately; intersectionality is real.
HBD/racial IQ guys want to present their case like it's the heterodox truth that the establishment doesn't want you to think about. First off, this should make you suspicious because that's the same thing that anti-vaxxers, flat Earthers, creationists, etc, say. But secondly, you can go type "hereditarian hypothesis" into Google Scholar and see there's plenty of scientific discussion of the question. The actual answer appears to be "it is unclear to what extent, if any, the black-white IQ gap is due to genetic differences."
However, because HBD people are mostly just racists with the gloss of scientism, they then go waaay off what that evidence, and even just what common sense and general knowledge, allow. "A meaningful portion of black-white IQ gaps are due to genetics" is a defensible position. If black people - due entirely to genetic differences - had an average IQ of, say, 95, would you notice that in daily life? It would have substantial impacts on lots of things, but not necessarily be immediately noticeable in interactions or from a birds' eye view of the world. "All Sub-Saharan Africa is a civilizational wasteland because the average IQs of blacks there are sub-70 due entirely to genetics" is completely indefensible, but they absolutely jump there (I've seen it multiple times in the ACX comments section). If this were true, a) you should expect an obvious, huge element of African history, travelography, etc, to clearly demonstrate "and these guys are really stupid" in the same way that we note that the Twa are very short, and b) is contradicted by ANY successful governance by ANY large population of African descent anywhere (Botswana, Seychelles, and the Bahamas are three examples).
Thanks for the reply. I agree that the existence of successful independent African countries is a strong counter to the "the problems of Africans are a byproduct of them being too genetically low IQ to succeed" argument. If you're willing to help me brainstorm here, can you think of any other good examples of African success that the "they are genetically low IQ" worldview can't explain?
Nigerian-Americans are the most-educated single demographic in the USA. If you assume education level directly correlates to intelligence, and take the ~70 IQ number they give for Nigeria's IQ, then a back-of-the-envelope calculation shows there are about as many Nigerian-Americans with Master's degrees as there should be in the entire country of Nigeria. (There would be variation due to the relative age pyramids for Nigerian-Americans versus Nigerians, but this would disfavor the HBD crowd, since presumably Nigerians have proportionately more people <25.)
Here's the calculation:
Overall portion of the US population with Master's degrees or better in 2022: 14.4%.
Equivalent in IQ: ~116
Z-score for a 70 IQ base population: ~3.063.
p(Z>=3.063)= 0.10957%
Total population of Nigerian-Americans: 712,294
Percent of Nigerians with a Master's or better in 2015: 29%
Population of Nigerian-Americans with a Master's or better (ignoring age): ~206,565
Total population of Nigeria: 230,842,743
Total population of Nigerians who should have the intellectual capacity to get a Master's (again, ignoring age): 252,934
Chanda Chisala made a similar argument on Unz (pointing to the academic success of black Africans in Britain and the US both), and mostly I only saw floundering suggesting truly absurd levels of superselection, but I think these calculations suggest that the levels of superselection are not just absurd, but effectively impossible. 80% of all Nigerians with an IQ of 116 or better live in the United States? C'mon.
(This was also a recalculation on my part - the 29% number is from 2015 and the 14.4% number is from 2022, whereas the 2015 report compared the 29% number to an overall 11%, which would suggest that >100% of all Nigerians capable of getting a Master's live in the USA.)
The "they are unsuccessful due to low IQ" argument also has real trouble with the natural experiments of East/West Germany and North/South Korea.
We already *know* that governance can have *massive* effects on prosperity, independent of genetics. With already known variance that large, it's pretty suspicious that people try to automatically assign African under-performance to some unseen third factor.
The relative success of African and Afro-Caribbean immigrants to the United States comes to mind. African-Canadians descended from runaway American slaves are I believe relatively more successful than their counterparts south of the border, and not consistent with the usual strong-HBD hypothesis. I might also argue the relative success of African-Americans in the armed forces as opposed to civilian life, though the counterargument there would be that the military screens out the really dumb ones (at least as long as we don't have a McNamara in charge).
This is purely anecdotal, but I've heard some very smart black people talk about a pattern where, when black immigrants come to America, the older children (roughly, high school senior or college-age at the time of immigration) turn out like their parents, but the younger children (roughly, high school junior and below) turn out like native American black people. In addition to being hearsay and anecdotal, this could be birth-order effects and regression to the mean. But it could also imply a cultural problem that can be transmitted by youth peer groups.
That's the same pattern you see with accents--come to the US at 18, and you probably go through life with an accent--come to the US at 8, and you probably sound exactly like a native within a couple years.
I expect so, yes.
Do younger siblings tend to integrate/assimilate more into peer groups than older siblings? My anecdotal experiences would support this claim (n=very small), but I'd be interested to see a study.
Older siblings have less time to assimilate into their local peer group, before they go off to college or whatever and wind up in the "we're trying to be grownups and make something of our lives" peer group.
Well, OK, maybe not if they go to Columbia.
Not assimilate more, but just be less driven and less high-achiever, at least from what I remember. It's one of those things where it seemed to me like the studies had a clear idea of what was "good" (in this case, academic success and financial achievement), and ordered people by that metric, but weren't interested in developing a clear picture of what trade-offs the "low achievement" people might have made, and what they would be trading off for. Does that make sense? (My siblings and I seem to fit this perfectly. #1 was very smart, #2 was very driven, but #3 was more laid-back and social, and so far happens to be the only one of us to successfully reproduce. Beyond replacement, even.)
The counterfactual is what would happen if the same family emigrated a few years earlier or later. If earlier, would the older siblings turn out like the younger ones (thus implicating social environment) or would they keep the same trajectory (thus implicating family environment, genetics, and birth order)?
Or again, is it just anecdotes that stuck in people's minds because they, like I, am attracted to theories that would disprove HBD because we simply don't want it to be true in any significant way?
I don't want to get into depth since I've been through these debates dozens of times, but here are a few quick points to think about.
* Remember the replication crisis? Yeah. It affects basically everything, so you should already have a prior of uncertainty that strongly downweights arguments relying on old low-quality studies. And while in mainstream science, a lot of failed replications are now well known, noone in polite society touches HBD with a ten-foot pole, meaning that bad arguments easily persist unchallenged.
* Another reason to lower your prior is just the way that the HBD sphere is closed off and not subject to serious debate from outsiders. I think that if this ever changed, there's a good chance that "that which can be destroyed by the truth should be destroyed by the truth" would turn out to be the HBD side.
* HBDers also rely heavily on abuse of correlation in their arguments. E.g. they'll say "IQ is *correlated* with all good life outcomes, therefore it must be selected for" and "IQ is *correlated* with race", etc. However, correlation isn't necessarily even transitive! In fact, you can have situations where A and B are positively correlated and B and C are positively correlated by A and C are *negatively* correlated. They also completely fail to engage with all the usual problems of this sort of statistical inference. For example, correlations tend to break down at the extremes (see Scott's post about "the tails come apart" for example), or when you select for a confounding factor (Goodhearting).
* I have yet to see a good explanation for the Flynn Effect. Such a rapid rise in IQs faster than any possible evolution proves that there is *something* about IQ that is unknown, so you should treat all IQ arguments with a high uncertainty. It's also proof that IQs *can* change a lot for non-genetic reasons.
I think it's a little too easy to use the replication crisis to just dismiss any results you don't want to believe. My impression (this isn't my field) is that the core findings of IQ have held up quite well, though I'd love to hear from a real expert. The core findings as I understand them: IQ scores from the same person are pretty stable, IQ is substantially heritable, IQ positively correlates with success in school and on the job, including in jobs you would not think of as mentally very demanding, there are average IQ differences across some racial groups, but don't seem to be across genders, etc.
> you should already have a prior of uncertainty that strongly downweights arguments relying on old low-quality studies
I agree. But wanted to mention a study done by psychologist Sandra Scarr in I think the 1970's: Her subjects were black kids, using 2 measures for each: IQ, and an "African odds coefficient" calculated from blood test results. I don't know the details, but I gather there are characteristic differences in some blood group measures between people of African ancestry and people of European or Asian ancestry. So the African odds coefficient was used as a measure of how purely African someone's ancestry was. (In support of its validity: it correlated with skin color in the expected direction). Outcome: There was no correlation between a child's IQ and how genetically African they were.
If you're already enmeshed in the HBD-sphere, I'd recommend checking out Chanda Chisala, as he is an HBDer who argues against black-white IQ gaps **from an HBD perspective**, which is pretty awkward for the HBDers, and I have yet to see a good counterargument.
I'll give it a shot, I did a lot of genetics/phylogenetics at university so have a fair understanding of why this is hokum from the scientific standpoint. The one line summary is: No, it hasn't been long enough, it's unclear if there's any single factor that affects intelligence, and even if there were intelligence might not be a strong enough evolutionary factor to matter.
The first point is probably the easiest to conceptualize,. The Out of Africa theory has been shifted further and further back in timescale as we discover more archeological evidence, but the timescale remains somewhere around 70,000+ thousand years ago. While this is a long time on human scales, it's pretty minimal on evolutionary scales. Heck, lions and tigers can still interbreed and they separated millions of years ago. There simply hasn't been enough genetic drift between different human populations to allow for anything more than point changes in different population's genomes.
Some notable point examples do of this do exist, lactase persistence, sickle-cell anemia being well known, but overall humans are generically homogenous between populations. In fact, we're weirdly homogeneous suggesting an extremely narrow genetic bottleneck somewhere in our species' early life. There is more diversity in Africa, but even that's pushing plausibility. We pretty much all have the same genome, and that's only going to become more true as global travel further breaks genetic barriers.
That brings me on to my second point, intelligence is way too fuzzy a concept to be selected for genetically. Scientists have spent a lot of time studying what makes smart people smart, and so far have found no 'killer-app' in our genome that controls this variable. It is doubtful any exists at this point. The majority of human traits have been found to be continuous, i.e. they are controlled by so many factors (including but not limited to genes) that no one factor can be considered causative. While there are broad trends within family lines, no human population has been identified as a significant enough outlier that they can be considered genetically superior to any other. And even the smartest families regress to the mean over a long enough period.
Which brings me to my final point, does nature even care we're smart? I'm not even going to touch whether IQ is even a valid measure of intelligence (it seems a better proxy for education to me but that's a different essay), but even if we can quantify intelligence how much does it matter? Being related to a billionaire, or king in ages past, seems a far stronger source of positive pressure. And that's not even considering how what makes for a successful person keeps changing as humanity goes through technological revolution after revolution. Is IQ even going to mater as a selective force in a hundred years? I don't know, and your genes certainly don't.
In conclusion, from the view of genetics there's very little to link IQ to racial groups. Humans are just too similar. There's no mechanism that could have driven the fixation of intelligence boosting genes in a population within the limited timeframe available. And furthermore, there don't actually seem to be any genes that could be candidates that consistently boost intelligence. If I were to look into why IQ differs between populations I'd look into diet, education and leaded gasoline long before genones.
Okay, so why do we observe the IQ statistics we observe? Your argument would seem to say that these shouldn't exist, and yet they do. We also have evidence that those IQ scores do correlate with the stuff we actually care about, like performance at school and on the job. What's up with that?
Further, there is a lot of evidence that IQ is substantially heritable. This goes back to adoption studies using the statistics we all learned in our first stat class, but continues with modern genetic studies. (As I understand things, there are a whole lot of alleles which each have a small effect on IQ--not a gene for intelligence, but rather a bunch of stuff that sums up to allow some people to be smarter than others, and that can be inherited.)
Also, we observe other places where some groups (usually much smaller than a race) really dominate in some sporting events--I think most top marathon runners have ancestors from a particular part of Africa, for example. It's not like they were being selected for running marathons exactly, but whatever mix of selection, mutation, and drift happened there ended up producing a body type that is really good for marathon running, enough so that a subset of people from that region end up winning most marathons. It seems like you *could* have some parallel where the ancestral environment + random mutation and drift led to a brain type that is really good for a modern academic environment, say. You seem to be arguing that such a thing simply could not have happened, but I don't see why it is impossible.
> This goes back to adoption studies
I think you mean twin studies, not adoption studies.
The best evidence for heritability of intelligence, I believe, comes from studies of twins who were (separately) adopted. That gives you identical genetics, but randomized environments. Whether you call these "twin studes" or "adoption studies", doesn't really matter very much.
The problem is that "people who are adopted" and "people who adopt" are small and highly unrepresentative subsets of the population, so adoption studies will never be able to tell you much, just by their very nature. Even if you create a heritability estimate, it would just be an estimate of heritability *for that small, highly unrepresentative subset of the population*. Restricting to separately adopted twins just makes the problem exponentially worse, because now your sample is a tiny subset of a tiny subset.
The advantage of normal twin studies is that you can get a much larger and more representative sample (of course there's still bias, but nowhere near the bias that adoption imposes).
Maybe I'm not understanding this, but your first point could just as easily be used to argue that all ethnicities must genetically have the same average height. There's no single gene for height.
Your second and third point seem to be general arguments against intelligence evolving at all. If nature can't select genes for intelligence and doesn't want to select for intelligence, then how did most animals evolve intelligence?
Absolutely, and I think that kind of proves my point. Average height of a population is more strongly correlated to the wealth of a nation rather than any underlying genetic factors.
Intelligence evolving at all is a bit of a headscratcher, but there's some room for luck in genetics. My point was more that, given the extremely short timescale we're talking about, we'd need a very visible selective pressure (i.e malaria) to drive a population to be measurably different from it's cousins.
Height can be correlated with many things, and wealth is certainly one of them (which I would guess is because poor nutrition can reduce height, but maybe there are other reasons). But that doesn't really explain why Japan has about the same average height as countries like Zimbabwe.
>In fact, we're weirdly homogeneous suggesting an extremely narrow genetic bottleneck somewhere in our species' early life.
Does this make us the cheetahs of the great apes? :-)
Thank you for representing the minority (I think) perspective. I will try to be gentle with my disagreement, but here it goes:
Interbreeding seems irrelevant. Different dog breeds can interbreed, and yet they have different character traits and skills. Perhaps in future, with more mobility, unless we run out of oil, people will interbreed so much that the entire concept of ethnic groups will disappear, but we are not there yet. Most people have children with someone living next to them (rich people living in modern developed societies are outliers here).
Some traits are controlled by a single gene, some traits (such as height) are controlled by many. No one respectable on the "intelligence is genetically determined" side expects to find the One True IQ Gene. A genetic engineering to increase IQ, if such thing will ever exist, will most likely consist of editing many genes, each adding a little bit, many of them probably coming with some statistical side effect.
I agree that different technological levels create different selection pressure on intelligence. That said, I assume that pressures on some level also existed in the past; you probably needed IQ 100 to handle some tools, even if until historically recently, there were no tools where having IQ 150 would give you a visible advantage. I assume that intelligence is positively correlated with social skills, and I think those have always been useful. (Nerds with computers are outliers. Imagine a woman smart enough to seduce a noble and make him marry her legally, or a man smart enough to destroy his competitors and get some important role, or basically anyone using their intelligence to more efficiently use whatever other advantages they had.) And the argument of "it depends on the tech level" actually works in favor of group differences, because different groups had or still have different tech levels, so if some tech creates stronger selection pressure on intelligence, we might expect that group to be more intelligent on average.
I agree about the diet and lead. With education, it's complicated. I don't think it has an impact on IQ. However, it allows existing IQ to translate to better study outcomes, and thus higher status, creating a positive selection pressure. Basically, people who otherwise probably wouldn't notice, now pay attention to the fact that one kid keeps getting A's and praise from teachers, while other kid keeps getting D's and soon drops out of the school. (This works until you send all smart women in college, creating a negative selection pressure, where the less smart women reproduce while the smarter ones keep waiting, sometimes for too long.)
Surprisingly, you didn't mention culture. I mean, if education plays a role, then a difference between e.g. a culture where reading books is considered high-status, and a culture where reading is considered low-status, should also be important. This could potentially be a strong argument against the heritability of IQ -- the problem is that this argument is also considered politically inappropriate.
"Scientists have spent a lot of time studying what makes smart people smart, and so far have found no 'killer-app' in our genome that controls this variable."
This is exactly why I'm sceptical of the polygenic embryo selection PR. Selecting an embryo that doesn't have the genes for the disease you already know is present is one matter. Selecting an embryo on the fuzzy hopes that they will be smarter? I don't think we can do that right now, and I'm not sure it's ever going to be developed into an easy "oh yeah these three genes here make you smart or dumb" style choice.
Editing genes may be out of the question, as well as filtering individual sperm and eggs, but I can easily imagine being told:
"We believe there may be as many as 10,000 genes that affect intelligence, we've identified 1,200 of them, and we can report that one of your embryos has the "good" version of 953 of those, as well as no known genetic diseases. We estimate that this embryo would develop into a child in the 97th percentile of intelligence, and that you'd have to try an average of 65 more times to achieve a better result."
I tend to not follow HBD and IQ arguments well because I'm bad at statistics, in the sense that I don't remember what is "R^2" and what it means when someone says "explains 69% of the variance". I'm especially bad at detecting when something is trying to **fool** me with statistics, and I get fooled easily by any plausible-looking natural language description of what the statistics is "saying".
In addition to statistics, HBD and IQ arguments tend to heavily depend on Genetics, which is also quite confusing and counter intuitive, I know disjointed facts here and there, but I don't have a unified model of what Genetics can and cannot tell us, and what any particular piece of Genetics data is telling us.
My overall impressions:
(1) HBD and IQ proponents are disproportionally likely to contain bad faith actors and/or racists, who are (a) Not interested in the actual intricacies of statistics and genetics, but rather more interested in cherry-picking conclusions and quotes from papers (b) Even if good at statistics and genetics, are primarily advancing sophisticated arguments as a means to a decidedly unsophisticated ends, such as re-instituting race-based discrimination even against qualified individuals from the "lower races".
(2) HBD and IQ theories don't appear to be such dirty sinful ways of thinking in the abstract, plenty of respectable researchers in the 1970s and the 1980s and the 1990s, people who studied IQ for the express purpose of knowing how to alleviate the suffering of people who got the short end of the genetic lottery, seemed to believe a lot of the common points.
(3) HBD and IQ have a lot of question marks to explain. The Flynn effect is a common one, but another one - not sure if it's common or not - is the massive difference in outcomes between people who didn't have the time to genetically diverge. Nigerians are some of the most successful migrant population in the USA, and yet the slave population that the black population of the USA is descended from is largely from West Africa, so the same genes powering one of the USA's most successful Africans are also powering some of its least successful, why? Is it selection effects, those migrating are already affluent and hard-working, and those taken slaves are already poor and meek? Wouldn't this explanation just admit that - at least in the case of the black population of the USA - IQ and/or economic success isn't genetic? Are there other reasons? 300 years can't be such a huge period that the genes diverged enough to explain the diff. Am I just ignorant and "West Africa" contains countless distinct gene pools, and the slaves were taken from one set of gene pools while the migrants are taken from another? I don't know.
(4) Point (3) begs the question: What are the **origins** of IQ differences? All humans are the grandchildren of Bacteria at the end of the day. At some point we were close, and then we get further, and some of the "further" direction for some groups was upwards in IQ-space. Why? Food? Wealth? Weather? Culture? Institutions and nation-building? Religion and Ideology? At some point in evolutionary history the lowest-IQ people and the highest-IQ were roughly the same, what made the highest-IQ people the highest IQ?
(5) Which brings us to the dirty dirty sin of Eugenics, the much-dreaded E-word. On the one hand, I don't think it's Literally Hitler (^TM) to want - quite fucking frankly - people to stop passing on their problems to their children. I think this ideology already has a name: Anti-Natalism, and I'm one of its followers. Some were born poor, I'm not blaming them a single bit, I want to do anything and everything in my power to help them, up to and including replacing the amorphous Moloch that we came to call "Capitalism" or the "Modern Market Economy" or whatever it is when Corporations does a bunch of shenanigans and suddenly a bunch of cringe CEOs are multi millionaires. But at which point do they become complicit in making ***their children*** poor? How much self-control and self-reflection does it take to see that you can barely support yourself as it is, therefore you can't support 1 child, therefore you can't support 5 or 10. Some people are - for lack of better words - sluts, which I'm using here in the gender-neutral sense. Alright, fair enough, I don't approve but who asked for my opinion, what grinds my gears is when they start having fatherless children left and right.
On the other hand, ehhh, it's not easy to propagate this into all of its consequences. Poverty has pretty well-defined geographical and demographic outlines, enforcing Anti-Natalism with state violence will just end up reinventing Hitler independently. If we don't enforce anti-poverty and anti-slut reproduction policies then what are they good for? It's not an easy choice, no matter what you choose you will end up hating yourself when the consequences for that choice are shoved in your face every waking day in the form of either miserable malnourished children or miserable childless parents who were forced at gunpoint by the state to not have children.
(6) To what degree is IQ the be-all end-all of success? Why is it the case that success - civilizationally speaking - is never permanent? Greece was once the center of thought, before them there was Ancient Egypt and Ancient Mesopotamia, after them was the Islamic Baghdad and Islamic Spain and then Western Europe. Does that mean one of: (a) IQ is not all that relevant to the intellectual and economic success of civilizations and nations, and all people have the bare minimum necessary to achieve prominence, other things are the limiting factors (b) Old civilizations were not that great, and either they or we are exaggerating their achievements (c) Actually, old civilizations had higher IQ, and when they declined their IQ declined as well or vice versa.
What is the implication of whatever answer we choose for the current world? Asians have a higher IQ than Whites in the USA, and (*checks Google*) Japan is the highest average IQ at 106. I still notice that the USA is vastly more influential and wealthier than Japan, or China, or South Korea, so what gives? Why is it popular to point out the average IQ of some nations in Africa and say they will never achieve anything to speak of?
(7) Point (6) again, but on the micro level this time. Some jobs are high-IQ but not high-paying, some jobs are high-paying but not high-IQ (e.g. politicians), or at least not the same kind of "high IQ" that makes people good at math and factual reasoning. Is Trump high-IQ? He is - massively - politically successful, if he dropped dead right now, he will still be remembered as a remarkable case for at least 100 years from now, he is also astonishingly dumb and/or senile. Yet for 4 years he controlled more power and more raw economic muscle than possibly any person in history except other US presidents after 1950. Is this a bug in human societies - higher IQ being subjects of lower IQ -, or a bug in the very assertion that IQ is a strong predictor of success and economic achievement?
(8) To what extent is IQ a general measure of intelligence? Was it always a predictor of success, or is that just quirk of the current economic system and the prevalence of office jobs (so called "Knowledge work", but I hate that term and think it's pretentious and cringe) which require information-processing and thinking like a computer?
As you can see, most of my thoughts about this are questions. I'm not that interested in most proponents of HBD and IQ popularizers or writers, they tend to follow a predictable path that either ends in trivially true conclusions (e.g. White people shouldn't be discriminated against) or trivially wrong ones (e.g. White people are the greatest race on Earth, and even the higher-IQ Asians and Ashkenazi Jews will never amount to anything because ... because ... because they just won't okay?). But I legitimately think the subject is interesting and deep, and I legitimately think that most people arguing about it are wrong or incomplete in at least 2 or 3 or 5 different ways.
>All humans are the grandchildren of Bacteria at the end of the day.
Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2608/
https://metazooa.com/
Many Thanks! Cool game - pick the next guess to get as much information as possible...
Off topic here, I reckon, but anyway: You catch a bunch of wild foxes and breed only the least wild ones. After a few generations you have a bunch of pet foxes. Nothing about intelligence, more like agreeableness. Both fuzzy. What impressed me was how little generations were needed.
I've heard an argument like this, basically that slaves in the U.S. were selected for low executive function (or IQ or whatever metric you like). But I have some problems with it.
1. How are the slave owners enforcing this mechanism? Going around and making the obedient slaves have a bunch of kids? Sterilizing or killing the defiant slaves? Is there any evidence for this kind of thing?
2. Chattel slavery (the type practiced in the U.S.) has low replacement rates in the slave population. Slavery is pretty disruptive of social structures like family and obviously they have little hope for the future. Thus they have few children. This is why slave owners have to constantly buy more slaves to replace the dying ones. It's why outlawing future imports of slaves was seen as a huge win for abolitionists, because eventually there would be no more slaves.
So slaves are somehow selected to be stupid, but they have few children, and all of this happened in maybe 7 generations, at a maximum?
Come to think of it, one of the methods of dealing with defiant slaves was to sell them to someone who would work them exceptionally hard, and possibly to death. Mississippi had a particularly bad reputation, what with the swamps and all, and that's where we get the phrase "sold down the river".
>I've heard an argument like this, basically that slaves in the U.S. were selected for low executive function (or IQ or whatever metric you like). But I have some problems with it.
One additional problem with it: This would require slave owners to have extraordinarily long time horizons. Worse than that, an individual slave owner could _maybe_ have control over a plantation from maybe age 20 to age 60, hypothetically controlling slave's childbearing for maybe two generations. For more than that, there would have to be a _family_ of slave owners enforcing a consistent genetic policy across multiples of _their_ generation. Ahem, the Draka are _fictional_.
1) I'm fairly sure that there's evidence for killing defiant slaves. I believe this would be referred to as "truncation selection"? But I haven't heard a lot of claims about "defiance" having a genetic component. And if it did, I think it would produce a population capable of repressing emotions in favor of long-term survival?
2) That's not the impression that I've gotten. There's a link below that has a graph that shows a rough doubling every 25 years or so (it mentions 1808 as the cutoff for imports). As I understand it, the high death rate of enslaved workers was caused by overwork in bad conditions, which was usually only done in places where it was profitable (sugarcane plantations in the West Indies was a major one), and was only profitable when there was a cheap source of replacement slave labor. Once the external source was cut off, slaveholders had to adopt more sustainable methods (except for ones who still had economic or non-economic motivations to work slaves to death).
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1010169/black-and-slave-population-us-1790-1880/
Apparently more slaves were born in America than imported. Guess I was way off on that one.
The Caribbean sugar plantations burned through slave labor at a prodigious rate, mean lifespan was I believe single-digit years, and only minimal attempts at maintaining a "breeding pool". So, yeah, there the slave economy did depend on a regular stream of imports and died when the slave trade did. North America was a *much* better place to be a slave, and you could reasonably expect to see 3-4 children reach adulthood. Your master thanks you for providing him the next generation of slaves now that the imports have dried up.
But selection for stupidity. not so much. The first generation is selected for having been on the losing side of an African tribal war, which is only weakly correlated with intelligence. Subsequent generations are selected for not getting into too much trouble with their overseers or masters, and in that context "smart enough to know when to keep your head down" beats "literally too stupid to live".
I find it sad how the American "IQ vs race" discourse (on either side) effectively devours the discussions about IQ. There is so much to be said on this topic as such, even in a mono-ethnic society -- how simple-minded people have it difficult to find a job in a technologically advanced economy (in the past they could contribute e.g. by tending the sheep), how the school system fails the gifted kids, whether too much university education has a dysgenic effect, and generally about how we once believed that removing inequalities would give a fair chance to everyone and then it turned out that some of the worst inequalities are in our genes and a truly meritocratic system may actually make it worse for many.
For example, Charles Murray wrote a book on social impact of IQ differences, and everyone only cares about that one chapter where he mentioned the statistical differences between races. So he wrote another book, when he only compared white people with higher IQ to white people with lower IQ, and... most of his critics probably don't even know this book exists. I think there is a lot of projection, where "*I* only listen to IQ debates when they involve race" becomes "*other people* only talk about IQ because they are racist".
There is a kind of "Bootleggers and Baptists" situation about IQ. Both sides contain people who joined for very different reasons.
> What are the **origins** of IQ differences?
Do I understand this correctly as a question "assuming that intelligence is genetic, and that it provides an evolutionary advantage... why aren't we *all* geniuses already?"
My guess is that intelligence is a result of many different genes, so the evolutionary pressure on any specific gene is relatively small (if having a wrong copy of the gene reduces your IQ by 0.1 point, who cares), so there are many tiny IQ-increasing and IQ-decreasing genes in the population. And the intelligence is like a result of thousand coin flips -- all coins falling the right way makes you the next John von Neumann, but that is very unlikely; the average result, half of the coins falling the right way and half the wrong way, gives you IQ 100; all coins falling the wrong way will probably kill you, as very low IQ is often associated with very bad health; and maybe 75% of coins falling the right way and 25% falling the wrong way makes you retarded.
The average intelligence of a human population is then probably a result of competing evolutionary pressure towards higher IQ and harmful mutations. Some IQ-increasing genes may also have a negative side effect. (But I don't think all of them do, otherwise John von Neumann couldn't have existed.)
At point 6, I think you are making a false dilemma between intelligence being either everything or nothing. It also could be just a bonus to other traits. It's not that smarter individuals are always more successful than less smart ones; it's that when you control for other traits, the smarter ones are more successful on average. Similarly, a civilization can be more successful than most of its competitors, and yet fail one day. A few centuries are not enough? There were countries that literally lasted a single day. -- I am not making any specific claim on the relation between IQ and the success of a civilization, just pointing out the "all or nothing" mistake. The average IQ may not even be relevant; outside of democracy, it is more important who is in the positions of power, and what processes selected them there.
But if we assumed a link between IQ and the success of a civilization, I would try to look at migration. The causality can actually be the other way round: when a country becomes successful, smart people will try to move there (or maybe, everyone will try to move there, but smart people will be more likely to succeed), thus increasing the average IQ. On the other hand, a rich civilization may allow more of its stupid people survive than a poor one. The specific policies may turn out to have an IQ-increasing or IQ-decreasing effect. Also, I suck at history, so I have no idea how often a "fall of civilization" means being conquered by an external force, and how often it means falling apart as a result of an internal conflict. (Maybe country X was conquered by country Y, but before that happened, most smart people from X have emigrated to Y? So it was a loss for the country, but not necessarily for the smart people?)
USA is certainly more powerful than Japan, but consider the difference in size, plus the fact that Japan was nuked and defeated, while USA didn't have a military conflict on its own territory for a long time... and yet, today many Americans watch anime, and many American companies need to be protected against their Japanese competitors. I think that considering the starting positions hundred years ago, Japan is doing pretty well. But its possible ambitions are limited by geography. What is other countries' equivalent of anime?
Trump may seem stupid, but Clinton (Bill) and Obama seemed pretty smart and even somewhat nerdy. Still seems like smart people have a greater chance on average.
I wonder whether Christianity hurt itself genetically by associating "knowledge work" with celibate, in the profession of monks. But historically Christian countries seem doing okay, so... On the other hand, within Christianity, Protestant countries (without the celibate) seem doing better. (Also, the monks probably helped their non-celibate relatives.)
I think there are some clear trends... but also many interesting questions. The situation seems to be more obvious on the individual level -- I think, having a magical button that increases IQ by 10 points would be a clear advantage for everyone. But the society as a whole is more complicated.
> I find it sad how the American "IQ vs race" discourse (on either side) effectively devours the discussions about IQ
Kinda like every argument on the Internet to be honest. Like "Do men have it worse or do women?", one ***Hell**** of an argument to have, where men can point out they're the ones being shot at on sight and detained in Palestine and women can point out they're the ones being raped everywhere. No matter how heart-breaking and/or gruesome and/or scary, it's an interesting and enlightening argument. But on the internet, it mostly devolves to shit-flinging and invoking a weird British guy with something up his ass from the looks of how he walks.
And to think that people in the 1990s had all kinds of libertarian cyberpunk future ideas for the internet, look at how far we have descended. Fuck you Mark Cringeberg.
> how the school system fails the gifted kids, whether too much university education has a dysgenic effect
Oh, don't make me start, I could bitch about this for so long they will have to drag me from the laptop's keyboard kicking and screaming to relieve myself.
Gifted kids? Everybody. The school system fails everybody. The school system fails every student. Fails parents. Fails teachers. Fails the spider in the school's bathroom. The school system fails so hard it's impressive, you couldn't have made it fail this hard if you designed it expressly for the purpose.
> Charles Murray
Ah yes, Mr. Lowliest Scum of the Earth. YouTube is non-stop showing me constant videos of him orgasming to the destruction and loss of life in Gaza, all the while whining about "AnTiSeMiTism". I'm immune to scum agreeing with me or having other opinions, but the jolt never quite goes away.
> Do I understand this correctly as a question "assuming that intelligence is genetic, and that it provides an evolutionary advantage
More like "What **are** the factors that makes anyone intelligent to begin with, besides genes?". At some point in time we didn't have the genes for intelligence, right? We were once Bacteria. And then we gradually (through mutation and whatever other biological mechanism that change, add, and remove genes) began to have those genes. What made those genes "stronger" or "likelier" (or whatever appropriate adjective to use here) for some people and not others? Why, starting from a common initial state, did some human groups have different genetic propensity for intelligence than others? Just random perturbations and the resultant feedback loops dependent on them?
> At point 6, I think you are making a false dilemma between intelligence being either everything or nothing.
Agreed, but it's not me making the dilemma, it's the type of HBD believer who says things along the lines of "If we left the future of humanity to Africa, we would be doomed.", and for what it's worth, I tend to largely agree on the overall point, yes, places like most of Sub-Saharan Africa and most of the Middle East are not doing ok right now, and humanity is definitely doomed if somehow we wake up tomorrow to realize that those 2 are the only places left where humanity still breath (unless the loss of the rest of humanity somehow jolts them out of their long civilizational stupor, but who am I kidding).
My objection is specifically with the justification usually given: IQ. The Middle East is a literal birthplace of Civilization (including the Western one), and Africa has quite a few of its own. HBD believers - by implicitly putting IQ and civilizational decay in the same picture frame - kinda tie themselves into committing to either (A) or (B) or (C) that I have listed in point (6). **If** they admit that IQ is not the be-all end-all, they're not tied anymore, but they also lose the right to constantly point out to Africa and the Middle East and say that it's IQ that predicts all of this and all their problems are pseudo-eternal and genetics-driven.
> What is other countries' equivalent of anime?
America has Hollywood, literally the birthplace of film. Turkish TV series are extremely influential in the Middle East, and India has Bollywood. Netflix kinda solved that problem for good anyway, now everyone everywhere can watch Israeli TV and Spanish thrillers and Palestinian documentaries about 1948 massacres. However hard it was to be global with your cinema before Netflix, I think it's no longer now. Maybe I'm wrong.
HBD seems to be a heterodox counter-hypothesis to the theory that maybe four hundred years of slavery, Jim Crow, police brutality, discrimination, and redlining might have a longterm negative effect on certain ethnic groups. I haven’t seen anything compelling to prove that theory is incorrect so why would I need another?
A few obvious problems with that theory:
It's a little hard to see how slavery and colonialism centuries ago are causing the children of upper-class blacks to do worse than the children of lower-class whites on their SAT scores. It's not even clear why redlining that kept their grandparents from getting a house in a good neighborhood would explain it. What mechnanism do you suppose explains something like that in terms of that historical hardship?
Other groups have suffered great historical hardships and significant discrimination in the US, (typically less severe than blacks in the US) and yet today they don't show the same kind of differences in outcomes. Irish, Chinese, Japanese, and Jews in the US all seem to be doing okay now. So it isn't obvious that we should expect hardship many generations ago to lead to poverty and dysfunction now.
Black caribbean immigrants tend to do quite well in the US. It's hard to argue that they didn't face a lot of historical hardship (West Indies sugar plantations were basically hell on earth), they often come from very poor and dysfunctional countries, and yet, they do okay here. How does this track with the historical hardships theory?
Hold on I thought you were defending HBD? How do high-performing black Afro-Caribbeans prove your point?
I think the black/white IQ difference in the US is very well documented, that it reflects an actual and significant difference in average intelligence, and that we should know about this when we try to make policies wrt race and education. I despair of discussing this in public because I think way the hell too many people will round this to "blacks dumb, whites smart" because they can't keep the difference between the average of a distribution and an individual drawn from the distribution straight in their heads. And yet, without knowing about this, you can't think straight about education policy, demographics of tracking and gifted programs, affirmative action in education, etc,
I don't know what fraction of this difference is genetic vs environmental, and I think untangling that question is a hard research problem. Also, as I said above, I think it doesn't matter much for policy decisions.
My guess is that caribbean immigrants to the US are probably smarter and more go-getters than the population they come from, but it's just a guess. It's interesting to me that we have a lot of high-flyers from (for example) Jamaica or Haiti here in the US, and I hope some smart people have spent some time thinking about what's going on there.
I don't think there's anything shocking about some ethnic groups in Africa being very smart on average, as I think the Igbo are. We already know this happened in Europe, with Eastern European Jews apparently ending up quite a bit smarter than the surrounding population.
I think recognizing that groups differ in average ability isn't some huge problem. We can evaluate people as individuals. You don't put all the Asian kids in the advanced math track and all the black kids in the slow math track; instead, you track the kids individually based on test scores and grades and interest. If there are blacks who want to be physicists but can't because of discrimination, this is a problem that needs to be solved; if there end up being fewer black physicists than their fraction of the population due to differences in ability or interest, that's not a problem, it's just how reality is put together.
But the point is there are genuinely people who do believe that black people are racially less intelligent than white people. Influential people like Richard Hanania.
I'm not sure what "racially less intelligent than white people" means. Is that the same as different average IQ scores for different racial groups in the US, plus IQ corresponding to whatever we mean by the word "intelligence" about equally well for blacks and whites?
Let's make this about red and green Easter eggs containing random quantities of money. Each egg was filled with some quantity of money drawn from a normal distribution. The normal distribution from which red eggs were filled has a mean of $85, and the normal distribution from which green eggs were filled has a mean of $100 (in both cases, with a standard deviation of $15).
On average, the green eggs are going to have more money in them. If you pick a green egg, then on average, you'll be about $15 richer than someone who picked a red egg.
Some people might go as far as to say that green eggs are *categorically*, or intrinsically, better than red eggs. Those people are stupid and wrong. Yes, there's a lot of predictive power in knowing an egg's color, because they were filled from different statistical distributions. But some red eggs have $120 and some green eggs only have $80: a red egg with $120 is of course better than a green egg with $80.
Going back to HBD, no reasonable person is claiming that racial differences are categorical/intrinsic/Platonic, but rather, that different racial groups have different distributions of genes which manifest as different IQ distributions.
Things exist outside America.
HBDers seem remarkably incurious about the performance of recent West African immigrants.
Africa has its own reasons for being undeveloped. If you’re genuinely curious and you’re not just trying to dunk on black people to prop up your own ego you can try reading “Guns, Germs, and Steel” by Jared Diamond which goes into this topic in depth.
There are a lot of theories for why sub-Saharan Africa remains relatively poor. I don't claim any particular insight, other than to point out that countries remaining poor and dysfunctional seems like it needs less of an explanation than countries managing to get rich and well-run. Almost all of human history has been poor and dysfunctional. Probably a lot of things have to align just right to get out of that hole and start becoming a rich, well-run country.
I disagree with them on the basis that hackneyed arguments serve no purpose. You're either preaching to the choir or the excommunicated at this point. You may as well be preaching about Jesus on a street corner. We have all heard about Jesus and made up our minds about him before you got to us.
That strikes me as more of a "let's not go there..." than a genuine disagreement.
I'm a race-realist, but I think it's a stupid topic that serves no purpose other than say Sailer's obnoxious racism.
I've yet to make up my mind. Do you have an object-level reason to disagree with the thesis?
No. I made up my mind years ago. I'm a race realist, I suppose. But I disagree politically with most of those who also are. I'm on the left.
Makes sense. I'm on the left as well, so I guess I also disagree politically with most people who have my take on HBD (which is to be unsure).
How do you have a sensible discussion about tracking in schools or the way magnet schools select students without knowing about these facts?
There's a post below about reincarnation and there was another one last week. To be clear, I like it when people entertain unusual ideas, so I am not knocking those posts. Yet I wonder if there's something in the water that has weakened materialism as the default view among smart people. In my day you were probably raised religious and then learned about evolution by the age of 13 and maybe mulled that for a few years and were probably an atheist by college. Or if you weren't an atheist by college, it was because you stuck with the religion you were raised on.
But now it is much more common to be raised without any religion and I wonder if materialism is no longer the obvious choice for smart skeptics like it used to be. Perhaps digital existence is changing that? Believing that life was a simulation was a fad a decade ago.
I just wonder if we are going to get crazier and crazier beliefs going forward. Chesterton said something like "The danger in not believing in God is not believing in nothing but believing in anything."
I like the Sopranos version of that when Pauli becomes obsessed with a fortune teller, but Tony asks him:
"What religion are you?"
"Catholic"
"Yeah, Catholic. So that means you don't believe in any of that shit."
I sometimes think interest in various supernatural phenomena is simply cyclical. In 1980s America, the notion of past lives became quite popular among celebrities (notably Shirley MacLaine) and thus the idea worked itself into the pop culture of the time. Of course after people had time to consider it more carefully and realized its weaknesses as an explanation, it receded. It’s been long enough now that many people don’t remember going through all this before and are discovering the idea as if for the first time. After a while I imagine it will recede again as most supernatural explanations do.
> Yeah, Catholic. So that means you don't believe in any of that shit."
That’s actually true. Religious believers tend not to believe in woo, outside of their own dogma. I suppose it’s excluded.
It's actually a rule that we're not allowed to believe in spiritualism and fortune-telling 😀 I remember years and years ago when I was a kid, there was a local fair/jumble sale fundraising thing going on with a fortune teller and I wanted to go in but my mother wouldn't let me and my granny explained we couldn't do that.
Obviously it wasn't a *real* fortune teller like the psychics and ghost mediums and the rest of the crew selling the hotlines and websites to learn your fortune, just someone dressed up for the fun of it, but the principle remains:
https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/catechism/index.cfm?recnum=5791
Of course, "you're not supposed to" never stopped those who wanted to, and folk religion has adapted by making a lot of charms and pseudo-magical practices out of relics and saints and "say this prayer to get your desire".
If I'm reading that link correctly, it doesn't say you're not allowed to *believe* in spiritualism and fortune-telling, it says you're not allowed to *practice* them. (It does occasionally use phrases like "falsely supposed," but overall it doesn't seem to take a clear stand on what proportion of these practices is just mumbo-jumbo and what proportion is calling on the genuine powers of Satan etc.)
I've personally noticed a math / wordcel split on physicalism.
Math and physics people tend to still be hardcore materialists, in my own experience. But your less mathy, more wordy (or more artsy) smart folk tend to entertain other schemas and paradigms at higher rates.
In terms of broader societal implications, I don't think it really makes much of a difference either way. The vast majority of people everywhere have always been either religious or non-materialist, and the rounding-error quantity of "smart skeptics" isn't going to move that broader needle regardless of how they shift.
I can't speak for anyone else, but I reject materialism on several different grounds:
1) What's a rock made of? Grains. What are grains made of? Atoms. What are atoms made of? Sub-atomic particles. What are sub-atomic particles made of? Quantum fields. What are quantum fields made of? Equations on a physicist's white board.
2) I share Wigner's bewilderment regarding why the physical universe obeys laws which can be described so elegantly by mathematics. My preferred resolution to this problem is that universes (and by extension, their governing laws) are generated by sentient minds - not the other way around.
3a) We are 100% certain that our minds are capable of hallucinating "de novo" experiences, because we do it for hours every night.
3b) Even during sober waking hours, we only experience our perception of the world--our internal reconstruction of it--while assuming as a matter of faith that our minds are accurately reconstructing an existant underlying reality.
3c) But you can never confirm that you're actually reconstructing an underlying reality, because you have no way to "directly perceive" the underlying reality, except through your own perceptions.
3d) But remember from 3a that the whole thing could just be a "de novo" hallucination.
4) If the materialists are right and sentience is just an emergent phenomenon that occurs in sufficiently complicated information processing systems, then one must accept that LLMs and Chinese rooms are potentially sentient. How can we confirm that we're in "base-level" reality, and not some emergent form of sentience dwelling inside the matrices of a generative AI algorithm? I can think of about 100 weird ways that future technology might lead to sentient minds (made of either meat or matrices-in-silicon) who think they're living in base-level reality, but actually have no contact with it.
So at the end of the day, my issue with materialism is that one must assume it as a matter of faith. It's a comforting dogma for sure, but in my view, not categorically different from the older variety of comforting dogmas.
re 2) Does the universe really follow laws that can be described elegantly by mathematics, though? To me it seems that we can currently only *approximate* the physics by mathematics, and that the mathematics are sometimes far from elegant...
Where are these sentient brains coming from to begin with and why are they all experiencing the same anyway?
I don't know.
You can postulate that matter generates minds, but you don't know where the matter comes from or why it behaves consistently. Or you can postulate that minds generate matter, but you don't know where the minds come from or why they behave consistently. My opinion is that the latter view is simpler and less paradoxical.
How do minds come into the world - materialists would say that happens at birth, along with the physical reality of the baby and its brain.
> What's a rock made of? Grains. What are grains made of? Atoms. What are atoms made of? Sub-atomic particles. What are sub-atomic particles made of? Quantum fields. What are quantum fields made of? Equations on a physicist's white board.
The last sentence is mistaking the map for the territory. The fact that physicists have a map of quantum fields doesn't mean that quantum fields comes from the map. It means that it's the simplest and most accurate way to describe quantum phenomena. If you believe that we are hallucinating it, you're going to have to say how you think hallucinations are coherent enough to reproduce the underlying math, except using the physical observations from I.e. the fine structure constant, when they had no a priori knowledge of fields.
It seems much more unlikely that hallucinations are coherent to that degree than there is something that reality that kicks back in a coherent way. And that if I am going to be assuming dogma, the dogma of "there is coherent reality" is a dogma stronger than "there is no coherent reality, I'm not going to specify how there's no coherent reality, but everything is just going to work out like there is coherent reality and I'm not going to purpose how."
I don't quite understand #2. If a complex system is the result of the emergent behavior of relatively simple parts (as #1--and current theory--suggests existence is), then doesn't it make perfect sense that, once we've worked them out, those simple bits should be relatively simply / elegantly describable (e.g. with mathematics)?
Wigner's argument is made here: https://www.maths.ed.ac.uk/~v1ranick/papers/wigner.pdf
It's a readable paper, so I'd recommend taking a look if the topic interests you.
The author of the economics paper "The City as a Growth Machine: Toward a Political Economy of Place" is named Harvey Molotch.
Molotch studying Moloch.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2777096
Also on the subject of nominative determinism: The evolution of targeted cannibalism and cannibal-induced defenses in invasive populations of cane toads, DeVore et al. 2021.
Turns out that when you invade an unprepared ecosystem and murder everything in there, the only remaining prey is yourself, and so cane toad tadpoles have taken to selectively tracking and hunting their younger siblings.
Are there any libertarians around? As an ex-libertarian, I've written an argument against libertarianism here: https://thingstoread.substack.com/p/is-libertarianism-a-bad-idea
I'd appreciate seeing a libertarian response in case I've missed something, or didn't think hard enough about how libertarianism can address the challenges I'm presenting.
Although i've never explicitly identified as a libertarian, i've followed a similar train of thought. I have a nascent essay in my head (perhaps several), and I may at some point develop my thoughts there at greater length, so i'll try to keep this brief.
> Maybe the ideal family really looks less like a communist dictatorship and more like the Juche idea, with smiling depictions of our current and previous leaders all over the walls. But however you conceptualize it, the generic healthy family really has a strong flavor of totalitarianism.
Ben Shapiro has said something like this too, though I can't remember where. It was phrased like "capitalism at work; communism at home".
> Utilitarianism starts with the principle that maximizing human happiness is a moral good, and runs with that. Libertarianism starts with the idea that it’s immoral to violate human rights, and runs with that. The former is as humorous to me as the latter is appealing, but they’re both equally arbitrary.
Actually, I don't think it's completely arbitrary, for reasons that you hint at in your own essay. I.e. you can ground it in contract law. Contracts are essentially bundles of rights and obligations. A right is essentially a power, and an obligation is essentially a responsibility. Which ties into what I call Uncle Ben's Adage: "With great power, comes great responsibility". Which ties into the reason why a nuclear family is necessarily autocratic: kids don't have enough agency or intellect to productively wield political power (political in the sense of affecting policy at the family level, e.g. at what time dinner is held). And contracts are just agreements, which is how coordination usually happens in meatspace. The moral intuitions aren't an expression of cosmic justice or divine revelation, so much as a reflection of sound negotiation principles.
> One natural recourse is to blame democracy and hop on over to neoreaction, fine.
Why yes, in fact, I have drunk that koolaid. But not because of moldbug. I.e. the thing that made me certain that moldbug was at least directionally correct, doesn't actually come from moldbug, but from fiction. There's a few instances in my head that are vaguely gesturing in a similar direction as him. One popular example being the Lord of the Rings. Scott himself has written about being confused about "monarchy is obviously bad, yet nobody batted an eye when Aragorn reclaimed the seat of Gondor... how strange." (Also, why on earth does Moldbug use Starwars as his primary fictional metaphor? alsdkldjflsjfa) (Also, notice that Uncle Ben's Adage is inspired by Spiderman of all things. The ideological remnants of the old paradigm are still present in the water supply, but moderns seemingly don't have the capacity to recognize them.)
And this ties into your complaint about libertarians' lack of culture. They have lots of dissertations, but they're lacking in the aesthetic-vision department. the way forward imo consists of rediscovering mythology, rather than writing yet another quasi-autistic dissertation.
And I suspect a big reason why "LOTR = good" gets compartamentalized off from "democracy = good" is because the utilitarianism (which btw is a wildly confused paradigm) of the current liberal zeitgeist skews people toward treating stories purely as cheap entertainment, rather than dissertations meant to be dissected.
What I missed is any mention of what I think are good aspects of libertarianism. Broadly, respect for bodily autonomy. Specifically, freedom from government interference with medical decisions (including abortion, trans, etc.) and freedom from government interference with what you can put into your body (drugs).
> "Shouldn’t the freedom of Americans to defend ourselves have been protecting us from gun violence? Evidently not—and a new analysis from 2023 reiterates the lessons no one mentioned to me in 1993: The United States has not only far more civilian-owned guns than every other developed country,28 it also has far more murder sprees, accounting for 73% of the total mass shootings out of all developed countries.29"
Stop that.
Stop that right now.
"Murder sprees," may be breathlessly covered by the news (unless they're by and of certain demographics...), but they are vanishingly rare compared to estimated self-defense usage (and self-defense usage does indeed have to be estimated, because crimes thwarted by the mere presence of a gun generally go unreported). The most conservative, anti-gun down-playing of estimated self-defense cases are still going to vastly outnumber the victims of spree killings in any given year. We don't even need to look that up.
And this is a real thing.
I'm 44 and I've used a pistol to thwart an unambiguous imminent attack by a stranger TWICE.
And I have no doubt there were times I was dismissed as a target worth approaching due to the way carrying (with training!) changes situational awareness and demeanor. My gun is a tool that empowers me to live a higher-risk lifestyle than many women would be comfortable experiencing.
And furthermore, three fellow gun owners I know have similarly thwarted felony attempts on them, without ever firing a shot (only one of these five encounters resulted in a police report).
So yes, I'm grateful we still have this "libertarian" freedom and I very, very cheerfully accept the risk of being the victim of a spree shooting in order to have a reasonable level of confidence about not being the victim of a mundane one-on-one violent felony (and having a better chance than an unarmed person in a spree shooting, for that matter).
I don't doubt your personal experience, but here's some dissenting research from Harvard: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/gun-threats-and-self-defense-gun-use-2/
ChatGPT summary for the TL;DR folks:
- Guns are not used millions of times each year in self-defense
- Claim of many millions of annual self-defense gun uses by American citizens is invalid
- Most purported self-defense gun uses are in escalating arguments, often socially undesirable and illegal
- Majority rated as illegal by criminal court judges
- Firearms are used more often to intimidate than in self-defense
- Firearms used far more often to frighten and intimidate than in self-defense
- Guns in the home are used more often to intimidate intimates than to thwart crime
- Guns used more often to frighten intimates than thwart crime
- Adolescents are far more likely to be threatened with a gun than to use one in self-defense
- Young people more likely to be threatened with a gun than to use one in self-defense
- Criminals who are shot are typically the victims of crime
- One in four detainees wounded in events unrelated to incarceration
- Few criminals are shot by decent law-abiding citizens
- Data from emergency departments belie claims of millions of self-defense gun uses
- Self-defense gun use is rare and not more effective at preventing injury than other protective actions
- Victims use guns in less than 1% of contact crimes
- Women never use guns to protect themselves against sexual assault
- Little evidence that self-defense gun use is uniquely beneficial in reducing injury or property loss
"ChatGPT summary of research from Harvard", does not exactly rank high on the credibility index these days.
More generally, approximately all research on "gun violence" by medical professionals and institutions is crap. It's not their area of professional expertise, almost none of them are Scott Alexander level polymathic geniuses, and their motives are compromised. Saying that doctors are the experts we should turn to gun violence because gunshot wounds are a medical problem, is like saying we should put Harvard Medical School in charge of the investigation(s) of the Boeing 737 MAX because blunt trauma and third-degree burns are medical problems.
You'll get better results from e.g. criminologists, or the FBI/DOJ if you're looking for an institutional inquiry.
Please read my comment again. The Harvard study is bullshit which is not worth referencing.
Well said! Many Thanks!
> My gun is a tool that empowers me to live
We need a catchy, 2020s, ST:TNGized version of "God created men, Col. Colt made them equal".
This particular woman probably doesn't want the publicity, but maybe that could play as a "this could be any woman around you, anyone with a purse":
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/dennis-butler-shooting/
What happens in groups of people all capable of quick lethal violence is politeness. Very nice and stable for generations.
I think Switzerland also has a lot of gun ownership and much less of the specifically American problems (and is probably excluded on purpose from many statistics trying to link gun ownership to violence).
My guess is that Americans are simply more aggressive than people in other developed countries, on average. (Why? An interesting question, but a different topic.) All the gun violence is better explained as a result of the overall aggressiveness... without guns, the same people would probably use knives... or fists and stones.
Yeah, it is harder to do a mass murder using a knife, but it is also harder to use a knife for self-defense.
Yeah, I pretty much tune out whenever anyone talks about "gun violence". Because, OK, we can solve that one easy - just give me 10% of federal anti-gun-violence spending to finance my Death Ray R&D project, and once I get the bugs worked out "gun violence" will be as rare and archaic a thing as "spear violence". And that's what you asked for, right?
But even within the realm of "gun violence", "mass shootings" are such a minor part of the problem that they should be ignored in any first-order analysis because, for any policy anyone might propose, even just the unintended consequences w/re all the violence that *isn't* mass shootings, would outweigh even a complete end to mass shootings. If your plan eliminates mass shootings but substantially reduces armed self-defense against other crimes, it's doing more harm than good. If it eliminates mass shootings but also substantially reduces armed robberies and the associated homicides, then advertise it on *that* basis because that's where most of the good will come from.
But there's rational analysis, and then there's the sort of "analysis" that starts with accepting the media's if-it-bleeds-it-leads framing of the issue and cares about what the media tells people to care about. Which is to say, "gun violence" and "mass shootings" but also, "libertarians BAD!", so once I see the gun violence and mass shooting stuff I know there isn't likely to be anything worth reading about liberty.
> just give me 10% of federal anti-gun-violence spending to finance my Death Ray R&D project, and once I get the bugs worked out "gun violence" will be as rare and archaic a thing as "spear violence".
It says something about this blog that I can't tell whether you're joking about creating a more advanced hand weapon, or joking about ending all life on earth. :-)
I like Earth; it's where I keep all my stuff. I'll stick with really cool hand weapons. Though I'll probably keep the very best ones for myself :-)
I skimmed it. I think you're trying to prove far too much.
If you want to talk about the decline of U.S. power, consider that it has nowhere to go but down. After WW2, America was the only western power in good shape and essentially became world hegemon. And again after the fall of the Soviet Union, the U.S. was the polar world power. It's hardly surprising that the world power structure is drifting towards multipolarity after the better part of a century of American dominance.
Cross-country comparisons are often poorly predictive because they fail to account for demographics. You can talk about how great Norwegian policy is relative to the U.S., but Norwegian immigrants in the U.S. also outperform the natives. Claiming a small country with a homogenous population has lower violence than a large country with a diverse population is factually true but tying this to policy choices is dubious.
Also, the life expectancy graph? Russia and India both had sharp decreases in life expectancy at the same time as the U.S. You argue that somehow America had too much freedom and was outperformed by authoritarian China. But notably (not) bastions of libertarianism Russia and India had too much freedom, even worse than the U.S.?
I'm not a libertarian but the part on guns really seems beside the point. Are the young black men shooting lots of people with handguns because of all the libertarians with gun safes full of rifles?
My not-very-informed impression is that making concealed carry permits much easier to get has basically no effect on crime. The obvious guess is that the set of people using handguns in crimes weren't ever going to bother with permits, so letting more rule-following people get a permit to be allowed to carry concealed didn't increase the number of shootings. And at the same time, the set of people walking around armed probably never becomes high enough that it substantially deters crime.
I haven't been following national politics much lately, I've been too busy this spring on the farm. If you're interested in what life is like on a small farm, there's this: https://falsechoices.substack.com/p/farm-update. I post about farming on a fairly regular basis, so if this something that interests you, subscribe for free, no charge on this substack.
You added 300 apple trees in the past 4 years for cider? That's gotta make several hundred gallons of cider. What kind of equipment do you have to chop, press, and ferment that quantity?
Because it's an open thread, here's a random meme about programming, translated from a language most of you don't read.
Someone else's code
I was recently asked why programmers hate working with other people's code. I thought for a while how to convey to the average user the whole essence of fubar. I decided to give a little analogy:
Imagine that you were entrusted with completing the construction of a laboratory on the island after another foreman. You arrive to the site and find there, in addition to the unfinished building: a huge fan (the size of a building), a large balloon, and a room full of brooms. Scratching your head,
you sort out this trash and finish the laboratory. You hand over the laboratory to the scientists, but 5 minutes later they run out shouting: “POISONOUS GAS LEAKING!!!”
- How so, damn it! It should work! - you scream in despair and call the previous foreman:
- Vasya, poisonous gas is leaking! What is the problem?
- I don’t know, everything should have worked. Did you change anything?
- Couple of things, I took out the brooms...
- The brooms were holding up the ceiling!
- What??? WTF, sorry???
- I said the brooms were holding up the ceiling. There were gas tanks above them. Very heavy gas tanks, I had to cram brooms into the room below.
- You should at least put a note on the door saying brooms are used to hold up the ceiling! We have poisonous gas leaking here! What do we do?
- Turn on the fan. It will blow the gas off the island.
- I dismantled it right away!
- Why?
- Why did you build a 120-ton fan? Couldn't you have put there a box of GAS MASKS?
- You need to search for a box of gas masks, but I still had the fan left over from my previous project.
- Vasya, I removed your fan! We're suffocating here!
- WTF are you doing there then? Get on the hot air balloon and GTFO!
(Source: https://pikabu.ru/story/chuzhoy_kod_5762938 , run through Google Translate and slightly cleaned up.)
I always find myself reciting Rudyard Kipling's "The Palace" in my head when refactoring and/or working with legacy code.
https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poem/poems_palace.htm
Thank you! Somehow I'd never seen this before. It's beautiful.
+1
"Good news. I figured out what that thing you just incinerated did. It was a Morality Core they installed after I flooded the Enrichment Center with a deadly neurotoxin, to make me stop flooding the Enrichment Center with a deadly neurotoxin. So get comfortable, while I warm up the neurotoxin emitters."
-- GLaDOS, "Portal"
To be fair, maintaining software is only sometimes like that.
If I understand Gnuradio correctly, the way it decides which vector instructions it can use to speed up the computation is that there's a 32 bit int, where each bit that can be set represents the fact that the cpu supports a particular vector extension to a particular cpu architecture (i386, ARM, MIPS, RISC-V). Some of these architectures have several vector extensions defined (e.g.i386) each taking up a bit of which we have at most 32. Now, what happens if the total number of vector extensions across all the architectures it has been ported to is greater than 32? At this point, we recall that RISCV vector extensions can be configured by the vendor of a particular chip in various ways...
Yes, clearly, they should not have written it that way.
>each taking up a bit of which we have at most 32
Lo, though the Y2K bug is gone these four and twenty years, yet the spirit of the bug lives on!
To slightly more generalise, if you thinking of writing a software system in such a way that you can never ever have more than 32 of a thing (because that's how big an int is on ... er, most platforms ..) be really sure that no one is ever going to want a change where you end up with more than 32 of them.
This generalises further, of course.
And I think I spent about two days tracing through the source code of the LLVM MIPS backend to find the place where what they meant was "am I compiling for a 64 bit MIPS CPU" but what they actually wrote was "am I compiling for MIPS64" (hint: there are other 64 bit versions of the MIPS specification in addition to MIPS64)
Introductory programming books tell you, if you think there's a bug in the compiler you're almost certainly wrong and the bug is in your program instead. This is very good advice for beginners. On the other hand, sometimes ... hey, look, when I compiled my program the compiler was seriously confused about whether the target is 32 bit or 64 bit. Time to spend the next two days reading the compiler backend to find the bug.
Попробуйте подражать программе вашего предшественника после потери исходного кода.
мне пришлось это сделать
You’d recognize the company name in an instant. I won’t mention it’s name though. They just flippin’ lost the source code somehow. I was working on the replacement that had been outsourced to two different countries for development before I was hired to straighten things out.
I have a month by month graphical record of my resting heart rate during the period. It is normally around 60 BPM. After a few months it was around 100 BPM.
Worst job I ever took on. уебывайте indeed! I can feel my heart rate ticking up just remembering it.
In a certain development project, most of the source was under revision control,and automatically tested by continuous integration every time someone made a change. Nearly all of it. Except one step that was done using a binary that lived on some developers local machine. A change caused catastrophic non-workingness. We then discovered that our ability to roll back was somewhat constrained because the last few months of test passes in continuous integration depended on a binary to which we did not actually know the version of the source.
When I recently read that the King of Jordan, who is married to a Palestinian, is a Hashemite, and that the Hashemites had killed tens of thousands of Palestinian in earlier wars, I was intrigued.
So I looked up Hashemites in Encyclopedia Brittanica, and Yikes. This story is complex — even before one considers the British role in the Middle and Near East, or Biblical narratives reaching back some 2,300 years. Sea Peoples, Philistines, and such. The key seems to be tribalism.
Fur trappers on the Gila River in the American Far Southwest found Western Apache raiders allied with the Yavapai in raids against the Akimel O’odham, the Tohono O’odham, and the Sopori. Friars trying to recruit Christians convinced Apache and Yavapai raiders not to execute women and children in their raids, but to take them as slaves.
Today’s Columbia and U.C.L.A. protesters would likely denounce the friars as colonial slave-masters and racists, cheer the raiders, and boycott the Pima farmers. They seem to have a knack for rejecting what they robotically call The Right Side of History. Is this exhibitionism and agitprop just postmodern tribalism?
"My outgroup would likely do this terrible thing, even though I have no evidence of them actually doing it - why would they do this thing I don't have evidence of them doing?".
The Drama Club has taken over the Yearbook Committee. They say this kind of thing won't happen in the eight grade. Thirteen-year-olds are said to be more mature.
I've been trying to educate myself on basic climate science, but I'm having some difficulty wrapping my head around something. Say CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is increased enough to cause 1C of warming. What does this look like mechanistically?
CO2 is a greenhouse gas, meaning it both absorbs and emits longwave radiation. In areas with high local CO2 concentration, emitted radiation is mostly reabsorbed by other GHG molecules. As the atmosphere thins out farther away from the surface of the Earth, GHG concentration decreases, so emitted radiation is more likely to escape . If CO2 concentration is increased, the height at which emission can escape is effectively raised.
The effective temperature of Earth sans atmosphere is ~250K. This is the temperature at which radiation is emitted at the top of atmosphere. Now, Earth still receives the same exact amount of energy from the sun, so the effective temperature is unchanged. The only change is the height at which radiation is emitted. This isn't a discrete height but multiple layers of temperature bands; it can be treated as a discrete height for simplicity.
Is the answer any/all of the following:
A. Stupid Simple: Thermal energy spends longer in the atmosphere because it has to travel farther to escape. More time for molecules to vibrate into each other = hotter atmosphere = slower surface cooling.
B. Lapse Rate: The troposphere cools with increasing height due to gas expansion; the C/km rate is lapse rate. Lapse rate is held constant but the 250K band is farther away from the surface. Ergo the surface must warm to maintain the lapse rate. (This seems kind of backwards to me. Also, ozone is IR active, and the stratosphere has a negative lapse rate).
C. Effective Surface Temperature: The Earth still has to return all of the energy it receives from the Sun. As the average emission height increases, molecules at that height are cooler. Cooler molecules emit less energy. The planet emits less energy until it warms enough that the new emission height is 250K.
I will aim my answer well below your level because that allows me to explain the greenhouse for an hypothetically present audience.
First of all, the Greenhouse effect is very dumbly named. Everybody has an intuition of why it is warm in a greenhouse: It prevents the warm air from just floating away. That intuition is entirely correct but completely unrelated to the greenhouse effect. Now it turns out if you put a greenhouse on the moon, where there is no air, then the moon-dirt under the greenhouse would still end up warmer than the moon-dirt outside and that is the greenhouse's greenhouse effect. But basically everybody's intuitions about real greenhouses are both correct and highly misleading when it comes to the (atmospheric) Greenhouse effect.
Now look at Earth if we sucked the atmosphere away. It actually radiates heat away. This is more visible for glowing hot objects but even colder stuff glows a little. If you look at glowing hot objects, hotter objects glow brighter but also at a different temperatures, for example white-hot is hotter than red-hod. The earth is basically only infrared-hot, so it glows mostly infrared and very dimly, so we can't really see the glow. Still it glows a little and, since glowing moves energy out, that cools it down. On the other hand, the sun shines on the Earth, and that heats it up.
Lets look at the Earth if we sucked the atmosphere away:
If Earth glowed off more Energy than it got from sunshine, it would cool down. But after cooling down it would glow less and therefore loose less energy. At some point it would be down to glowing off only exactly as much energy as the sun sends in and then it would stop cooling. On the other hand, if the Earth glowed off less energy than it received from the Sun, then it would heat up and therefore glow more, again fixing the imbalance. So basically the Earth has an equilibrium temperature where gains from sunshine and losses from glow are exactly equal and it stays at that temperature. Without an atmosphere, that equilibrium temperature would indeed be about 255K (-18°C, -1°F), which is a little chill.
What the greenhouse on the moon and our atmosphere have in common is that their reflectivity depends on the wavelength/frequency/color of the light. Both the atmosphere and the greenhouse don't reflect visible light much, which is handy because if there was a mirror up there it would be dark down here. But both are fairly reflective for infrared light. (Even more pedantically also absorptive, so the glass and the atmosphere can also be heated themselves and then also glow themselves, but that basically cancels out and we will ignore it.) So basically very little of the light coming from the sun is reflected back to space (because it has colors that aren't reflected) but a good deal of the light glowed off by Earth never makes it out to space (because it has colors reflected by the atmosphere/glasshouse). But on net what comes in must go back out, so the Earth is a little hotter and therefore glows a little more to make up for the part of its glow that doesn't make it to space. This is the Greenhouse effect. By the way, we are overdoing it at the moment, but basically we like the Greenhouse effect, since 255K is not great weather.
Now on to the actual question:
Yes, greenhouse gases both absorb and emit longwave radiation, but that cancels out quickly and on net none of the radiation stays in the gasses. (Obviously no longer true if you add nights and weather and so on, but we are painting with a broad brush here.) Averaged over not-so-long time, every bit of atmosphere emits as much radiation as it absorbs, so on net you can think about it more like tossing the radiation about in random directions than absorbing it for good. But critically, the greenhouse gas molecules don't only emit upwards, part of what they emit goes back down, so in aggregate some of the energy the ground glowed off goes back to the ground. So on net more like a reflection than an absorption.
And then the ground gets a little warmer, so it glows more, so it makes up for the part of its glow reflected by greenhouse gases, so global warming.
Also, air touches the ground and when the ground warms it heats the air and then warm air moves up and <insert meteorology textbook here>, but I think that is a distraction at the level of basically understanding the Greenhouse effect.
Thanks for writing this, although the mechanics are a little more simplified than what I wanted. I think you should be careful framing it as surface warming. While IR emission is omnidirectional, it's better to frame the effect as a net reduction in the cooling of the surface. Otherwise it might imply that a cooler body is transferring heat to a warmer body.
Thank you for taking the time to write this. This is a great explanation.
C-ish? The very idea of the greenhouse is that the radiation directly from the surface has a lower chance to escape directly without heating up the atmosphere.
> Say CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is increased enough to cause 1C of warming
Why are you talking about that like it's a hypothetical? That already happened back in 2015.
I don't read that sentence as implying that it did/didn't/will/won't happen, just as setting up a situation that they're trying to understand the theory of regardless.
A ridiculous but charming movie, very self-aware about the other movies it's referencing, and one I wanted to see ever since the trailers.
Well, it's up on Youtube now. The auto-generated translation is a bit rickety but it'll do:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KNsIpr3qCM
Looks like they're setting up for a sequel and I'll watch it if it and when it becomes available!
I can only see Hindi subtitles, and besides, I'm a little disappointed you haven't mentioned the ESC yet, so I thought you might enjoy a whiff of a send-up of all euro song clichés (as Terry Wogan would say): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1TzHJbvJik
Thanks for the link!
All I can say about that parody video is that Iceland have my vote!
At least they are more memorable than the real ones... I listened to them and can't remember anything. Yes, Ireland is silly, Germany will come last again, and why did they censor the t-shirt of the Finnish guy, but not the lack of t-shirt of the Cyprus lady? Austria has the most views, no idea why.
I bet the Finnish T-shirt censoring is because of product sponsorship rules. Given the name of the band, I wonder whether that's part of their schtick, that their outfits have to be blurred out in broadcasts...
Did you ever see the TV show "Star Trek: the Next Generation"? Austria looks like an episode with the plot "Dr. Crusher went on a first contact mission to the Planet of the Sluts, but was hit on the head and went native."
A pity, for me on Youtube in the settings it auto-translates Hindi to English. Not very well, but enough to give the gist. But even without that, I think you can get what's going on. Tehre's one scene which is a direct reference to a scene in "Bahubali" and I went "that's that scene!" and next thing this was acknowledged in the dialogue, so they're having fun with it as they're going on.
It's not terribly deep but I liked the contrast between the wanna-be superhero who models himself on Western characters like Spiderman and Batman, versus the real superhero who steps up from being a charming rogue and emulates Indian hero, Hanuman. A mix of cartoon violence, romance, and some tragic elements. I honestly will watch the sequel if/when it comes out and it's on Youtube or somewhere!
As to the Eurovision Song Contest, I've refrained so far due to the delicate politics. Ukraine versus Russia is long-running by now, so this year no Russian entry. But there *is* an Israeli entry, and there are the calls to boycott, and those acts continuing on with the contest seem to have come in for criticism.
Run-through the contestants here (I like the Armenian one, but then I'm a sucker for folk-tinged performances, it's meant to be national song after all). Forget the Irish entry, it's terrible. I don't mean that in a 'clutching my pearls because I'm so shocked!' way, on the contrary; I'm Gen X, we had Marilyn Manson for pete's sake. No, it's just an awful song.
Australia, God bless 'em, are still trying but um. Have to see the performance on the night to see what the live act is like. Belgium seem to have decided "feck it, let's go Rocky Horror!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_t3qclcXUM
> Belgium seem to have decided "feck it, let's go Rocky Horror!"
That is EXACTLY what I thought. "I'm just seven hours old" was going through my head instead of the lyrics.
Not available in the US unfortunately!
Why do some people believe that conspiracy theories and other false beliefs are dangerous, sometimes to the point of justifying censorship?
One reason is that in a democracy, the people need to be well-informed for the country to be run well. But what if we don't have a democracy, is there still an argument there?
The conspiracy theory I'd put a relatively high probability on involves Bruce Ivins, the guy who was pretty-much declared to have been the anthrax bomber right after he committed suicide. I figure there is a non-negligible chance of either:
a. He committed suicide, and was on the suspect list of the FBI, so they decided they could close the case and declare victory. The actual anthrax bomber is still out there, unpunished.
b. He was part of a conspiracy to carry out the anthrax bombings, and his co-conspirators poisoned him to ensure he would not turn state's evidence on him.
Most of the weight there is on (a), honestly. I think the people working on this case very much wanted to close it, they'd already gotten the wrong guy once (Hatfil), and probably once a plausible suspect died, they had a big incentive to decide he must have been the guy. Also, there are previous incidents(see Richard Jewell) that suggest that when the FBI is pursuing a high-profile terrorism case, they are probably overly interested in getting someone than in making sure it's the right someone.
The main reason to suspect (b) is because if he was one of the people involved, his co-conspirators would have had a very strong incentive to try to fake his suicide. But I would expect something more definitive and fast than poisoning by tylenol overdose--that's still likely to leave some time for a deathbed confession.
The anthrax bombings were also very odd as terrorism went. Without the warning notes that came with the anthrax spores, way more people would have died, but it's possible that nobody would have realized it was terrorism. (The Japanese cult that released nerve gas on the Tokyo subway many years ago had previously carried out a bunch of biological attacks, killed a few people, but the authorities had never figured out these were attacks rather than just weird illnesses. Without those notes, I imagine there'd still be people at the CDC to this day wondering how on Earth they'd gotten a couple of inhalation anthrax cases in the middle of New York.). Those attacks were a big part of the atmosphere of panic after 9/11, with Congress being evacuated several times for biological weapons threats, and you can imagine this as a part of a coordinated campaign to try to push us into war. Though probably it was just a lone nutcase or two, because trying to get the US willing to bomb someone back into the stone age after 9/11 was kind-of redundant--almost everyone was out for blood already.
The one conspiracy theory that I can never quite shake is the possibility of foul play in the death of Senator Paul Wellstone. His Beechcraft went down near a place where I sat around many campfires drinking cheap beer with my high school friends, just outside of my home town.
The fatal crash happened a couple weeks before the November election in 2002. I liked the man and his politics, old school, non-woke, liberal, Democrats are the party of the working class stuff.
The FBI ruled out foul play after following criminal leads. He was receiving death threats from the day he was elected.
The FBI had also been keeping tabs on Wellstone since his 1970 arrest at an anti-war protest.
I try not to go full Oliver Stone when I think about it.
I remember that one! The sinking feeling of "oh shit, we're another step closer to that Iraq war insanity".
Earlier in 2002 my wife and I shared a sleeping car from Amsterdam to Vienna with an Iraqi couple on what was probably their last somewhat normal holiday.
Things went amiably until the guy spotted our blue passports. He had been taking us for a British couple till then. He didn’t speak much English after that. Can’t say I blamed him.
The damage the baby Bush presidency did to this country is breathtaking and may never be quite undone.
I agree with your intuition - there's a number of beliefs I have that those in power would probably describe as "conspiracy theories". But I think there is a serious risk when conspiratorial thinking has been supercharged by social media, not just for the democratic process. E.g. if people generally can't form accurate beliefs, I imagine that would hurt entrepeneurship (the ability of society to organise itself and use its resources to create value).
I dont believe that conspiracy theories in general are dangerous or should be censored. People believed in Von Danikan's theories about ancient astronauts for decades but it didn't seem to do any harm. But certain specific conspiracy theories can hurt people: for example the theory that vaccines are dangerous and are only produced in order to provide profits to pharmacutical companies probably killed people. I would tolerate censoring that.
In addition, my impression is that various people are now deliberately weaponizing conspiracy type theories in order to manipulate people. Yes, I suspect that there is a conspiracy to politicize conspiracy style theories.
The problem isn't theories about conspiracies--there really are conspiracies, sometimes they get unearthed and end up in the newspapers or in court. The problem is the broken conspiracy theory mindset, where all evidence to the contrary somehow strengthens your conviction that the conspiracy theory is true. It's confirmation bias run amok.
There are surely dozens of actual conspiracies happening right now that would be big news if unearthed. These won't ever involve million-person omnicompetent leakproof organizations, but they'll often involve someone being on the take, or getting their buddy to help them win a contract or an election, or someone calling in favors to try to suppress an investigation that would embarrass them if it happened, or whatever.
When someone believes a conspiracy theory, it is easy to extend it in a way that supports your political goals. For example, if you want people to stop using vaccines, just tell them that the vaccines were invented by Jews, or that the government wants to control their minds using some combination of vaccines and space rays. People who already believe that Jews control the world or that the government is trying to control their minds using space rays, will find it difficult to object against the new findings, especially when you have already established yourself as a supporter of their "alternative truth".
The set of people who actually believe the Jews/CIA/Russia/etc are beaming thoughts into their heads is very small and mostly needs to be properly treated for their mental illness.
Maybe, but I can't see censoring something because the style of thinking it represents *might* expose someone to dangerous messages later.
Well, if there was a false conspiracy theory that an evil outgroup had polluted the drinking water with radioactive particles, and many came to believe it, there would be a lot of chaos and distress, and probably some substantial harm would come to some people from, for ex., fights for access to "safe" water, or from their becoming dehydrated because they couldn't access any "safe" water. Some frail and fragile people would die. Active, employed people would spend less time working because of the urgency of locating drinkable water. All that's undesirable for any country, even if it's not a democracy.
So how do you avoid the crazy conspiracy theories without also suppressing the correct reporting about the problems with unsafe drinking water in Flint, MI or Jackson, MS?
Is there a way to suppress conspiracy theories? I don't know of one. Anyway, I wasn't arguing in favor of suppressing them. Somebody asked whether they were even a problem in a place that was not a democracy, & the radioactive water rumor was my example of a conspiracy theory that would do harm to a nation no matter how it was run.
Some people think that social media sites and such should try to suppress conspiracy theories. Maybe they're right, I'm not sure. I just note that a generic "no conspiracy theories" rule seems like it can suppress both crazy discussions of non-issues and sensible discussions of real issues.
As a more concrete example, I think the Catholic sexual abuse scandal had all the markers of a conspiracy theory, and would have likely been suppressed by a conspiracy-theory-suppressing mechanism. I mean, huge conspiracy across decades and hundreds of high church officials, it's obviously some kind of crazy anti-Catholic bigotry, right? And yet....
Yeah, I think plenty of non-Democratic places have had pogroms when a rumor about an unpopular minority spread through the population.
It doesn't look to me that anyone is censoring conspiracy theories. Please give me examples. But I think it's a conspiracy theory that conspiracy theories are being censored.
There can be a certain amount of our glorious homeland / their barbarous wastes here.
People interested in conspiracy theories can be prolific in their posting on that subject while being disinterested in others; depending on where they are attempting to build their soapbox, their discourse may be perceived as noise and moderated accordingly.
Since most people are generally the heroes of their own stories, /their/ mental model of what is happening then becomes "I was censored because my knowledge is too dangerous" and this is added to the conspiracy theory.
It's fairly common for people who strongly disapprove of specific conspiracy theories to advocate for outspoken proponents of those theories to be deplatformed. And it isn't unheard-of for publishers, networks, social media platforms, etc to respond to social pressure to this effect by making at least a token effort to deplatform the worst offenders.
This kind of deplatforming isn't really censorship in the strict sense, since it's private actors curating their own walled gardens rather than a formal government policy, but there are enough similarities (especially if most or all the big platforms seem to have similar policies) that deplatforming often gets rounded up to censorship in people's minds. There also is some indirect government pressure, in the form of congressional hearings about misinformation on social media and the like.
They were being censored in 2020, though.
Censored by whom? There is a very wide gulf between "Twitter, a private company, decided they weren't interesting in helping you distribute your conspiracy to a wide audience" and "the actual government literally threatened you with jail time to prevent you from distributing your conspiracy theory."
(Wow, this brings me back!)
"It's not censorship because a corporation did it, not the government" makes about as much sense as "it's not assault because a private citizen did it, not the police." You've still got a black eye at the end of the day. If a tiny number of monopoly corporations control the public square and decide that certain content will be removed, they aren't breaking the law but there is indeed censorship going on.
Conspiracy theories almost require belief of censorship to be memetically fit, in order to explain why not everyone already knows this big thing and how you're part if the secret special enlightened club.
Isn't the usual model "the ignorant sheeple don't realize...."
Also, the censors have the power to control the media and assassinate all who oppose them... but somehow they cannot take down this one YouTube video that exposes them (or track down the author who clearly receives money from YouTube so his contact information must already be in the system).
Depends on the conspiracy theory, right? Not every conspiracy theory is maximally crazy. As far as I know (not much), the "moon landing was faked" people don't seem to think that the fakery is being hidden by a campaign of assassination. I don't think the flat-earthers think that either, but again, it's not like I'm paying any attention to them.
Of course! And it must be a curated personalized censorship in my case. The forces of evil are intent on making sure all the information fed to me is being censored selectively censored. That's why I am out of the loop! Thank you for making me aware of the darkness that surrounds my life!
Weak minds with big egos. They can't process arguments well enough to disprove them, but instead of viewing it as a fault in themselves they view it as a fault of the system for allowing the arguments to defeat them.
There was a shitpost on Twitter that nonetheless resonated with me, about how conspiracy theories used to be nerdy and weird and esoteric, the province of dusty old bookstores and obsessive shut-ins sending poorly mimeographed newsletters through the mail, and now it's just boring normie bullshit. Some influencer posts on Tik Tok that the Earth is shaped like a banana and the zoomers just instantly believe it but also don't actually act as if they've learned something staggering and new. Believing in the current conspiracy is just a pose one takes on to fit in socially, like being goth or being queer.
I guess what I'm really saying here is, #bringbackgatekeeping.
I was into conspiracy theories before they were cool, but now they've gone corporate and sold out, man....
Unironically this!
In the late 90s and early 00s I found myself doing a lot of freeway driving late at night, so I started listening to Coast to Coast AM a lot. Back then it seemed like there were a lot of unique, bespoke conspiracies and paranormal beliefs. The rise of the normie internet seems to, if anything, have standardized or at least narrowed the conspiracy ecosystem quite a bit. I’ve always been a conspiracy tourist; I don’t believe them but I’m fascinated by speculating about how people came to these conclusions. I think Qanon is a product of this standardization of conspiracies. Certain stories are elevated while others are discarded. Many of the elements of Q go back well into the C2C AM era of conspiracies, like satanic sexual abuse of children and the various Rothschilde/Illuminati/Bilderburg style group. Others seem to have fallen off entirely like reptile/dragon-like aliens secretly ruling the earth. Q is kind of a greatest hits compilation of the last 20 years of internet “researchers” comparing notes and settling on (what they consider) the likely correct narratives. Its been fascinating if you’re into these sorts of things w/o actually believing any of them. The latest twist being the guy that self-immolated outside the Trump trial and his takes on crypto. Even now Q and other conspiracy groups are studying and calibrating on his literature. Also the UFO people are as fired up as they’ve ever been.
Very well said. Cultural stagnation has even hit conspiracy theorizing :(
Yes, I think so. One danger of outlandish conspiracy theories is that they sap the energy and attention away from actual conspiracies. For example, I have a hunch that all the weird Q stuff made it harder for a lot of people to take the Epstein death conspiracy with any degree of seriousness, even though it sounds plausible that he was silenced because of all the things he knew. The idiotic 9-11 conspiracies (I mean, there was a someone here a few months ago arguing fervently that it wasn't planes that hit the towers!) are a great distraction from serious questions about Saudis' ties with the Bushes. The list goes on and on.
Another problem is that they condition the mind to accept bullshit. Once you start on the path "maybe the Earth is flat after all, there's a 3-hour video explaining it in great detail", there's no lie, no obvious BS, no matter how ridiculous, that you wouldn't be able to accept. The mind's inoculation against BS is a fragile thing, and it can easily be wrecked.
One other additional problem that amplifies the energy sapping effect is that conspiracy theories are often unfalsifiable, or nearly so. They often include something like "and the evidence for this is being actively hidden". So refuting them takes a _disproportionate_ amount of time and effort.
_Sometimes_ this effect is not too bad, e.g. "The moon landings were faked" requires, roughly speaking, the cooperation of 400,000 people working on the Apollo program, plus foreign adversaries such as the USSR. No possible way. "Three may keep a secret, if but two lie in their graves."
And yet - the moon landings conspiracy is widespread, despite (because of?) its utter ridiculousness.
One factor that sustains a lot of this nonsense is that these beliefs are cost-free. A plumber can believe that Earth is flat and NASA just makes movies in a basement without any impact on his job/lifestyle. Conversely, if a sat comm engineer tried to use a flat-earth model in his job (there's no such model, but, say, he creates one), he'd quickly find out that nothing works.
So for most these people believing in ridiculous conspiracies is an identity marker. True believers, like the guy who showed up at Planet Pizza joint to free the children, are very rare and I honestly feel bad for them.
I think there's this ugly thing that sometimes happens like this:
a. People mostly determine their beliefs using social mechanisms--I see what everyone around me believes, and more-or-less believe that. Maybe I have an occasional doubt or question, but basically I follow what my society/community/family and friends believe.
b. Most of the time, even the completely batshit insane subset of these beliefs aren't really very relevant. I can think the Earth is 5000 years old and flat, that the moon landing was faked, that space aliens built the pyramids, etc., and mostly this doesn't keep me from being a perfectly fine plumber, programmer, elementary school teacher, etc.
c. Once in a while, these insane social-proof beliefs have significant personal consequences--maybe you're a 70-year old 300 lb diabetic with emphysema who refused to get a covid vaccine because of some dumbass conspiracy theory you read on the internet; maybe you became convinced that the world was ending on May 10, 2024 and burned through all your money and quit your job and left your wife, and now you're broke and unemployed and in the middle of an ugly divorce. Those social mechanisms for deciding truth screwed you over.
d. Sometimes, the crazy beliefs you accepted via social proof aren't individually harmful, but they're disastrous when they become widespread. A real-world example now is people refusing to get their kids vaccinated against measles, which causes problems only when a lot of people do it. A bigger example is counterfactual beliefs about politics or economics--if enough people in the US become convinced that a communist revolution and a dictatorship of the proletariat is the path to progress and prosperity for all, the whole country will go into the toilet (or get sent to the gulag, or starve in the dark because collective farms aren't producing much food and the power companies died after all the engineers got sent to the countryside to be peasants, or....)
Thanks, this is a good breakdown of various harms of these beliefs.
Many Thanks!
>And yet - the moon landings conspiracy is widespread, despite (because of?) its utter ridiculousness.
True :-(
>One factor that sustains a lot of this nonsense is that these beliefs are cost-free.
Hmm... Agreed, in their adherent's day-to-day lives. I'm not sure what the effects are on their adherents in general discussions. I guess they wind up in somewhat the same situations as trolls? As you pointed out earlier, they wind up sapping energy and attention from everyone else.
Identity needs to be maintained, it's hard work!
Many Thanks! LOL!
The barber my dad took me to as a kind believed there as a 2nd Shadow Earth that we couldn't see b/c it was always on the exact opposite side of the sun as our Earth. They are technologically several centuries ahead of us, and Jesus came from there and also returned there. It had no effect on his ability to cut hair.
All kinds of goofy counterfactual beliefs work this way. If you are 100% convinced that Jesus and all of Christianity were made up as an elaborate practical joke that got out of hand, or that the Holocaust never happened, or that AIDS was created as a bioweapon to kill off blacks and gays, or that the Earth is 5000 years old, none of that affects your ability to cut hair, fill cavities, wire houses, program computers, etc.
I kind of... like this one :)
180° out-of-phase sych orbit is a perfect hiding place. I doesn't violate any laws of physics nor it requires 100k+ people to keep a secret.
It violates the laws of physics if your solar system includes e.g. Jupiter and if your counter-Earth doesn't have ridiculously powerful planetary stationkeeping thrusters.
>I doesn't violate any laws of physics
To first order, true. It is the L3 Lagrange point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrange_point
However, only the L4 and L5 Lagrange points are stable.
>The points L1, L2, and L3 are positions of unstable equilibrium. Any object orbiting at L1, L2, or L3 will tend to fall out of orbit; it is therefore rare to find natural objects there, and spacecraft inhabiting these areas must employ a small but critical amount of station keeping in order to maintain their position.
Am I the only one wondering if Boeing is just straight up murdering people who may be dangerous to the financial future of the company? I hate conspiracy theories and my hatred for them is making it hard for me to even take myself seriously when I have this thought. If it weren't for Q and other stupid bullsh*t then maybe serious people would be talking more about this.
There’s plenty of conspiracy out there. It’s separating the wheat from the chaff that’s worth doing.
Yeah, I wonder about it. It doesn't jibe with anything I know about Boeing, but the first one did look very suspicious, so I hope the deaths are being investigated closely. It's not impossible that in an organization the size of Boeing, there's a few bad apples, and one of them knows people who know people. Or that contacts in the government were doing it to cover up shared malfeasance or simply prevent worse disclosures (Boeing has important military contracts), and in that case the investigation might be fake as well.
I don't put a high probability on any of this, so mostly I treat it as a conspiracy theory I can still joke about.
The problem with this is, how does the hypothetical "bad apple" in Boeing *benefit* from killing the whistleblowers? There might be a significant benefit for this to *Boeing*, though even that seems dubious when you're hypothetically killing people after they've already blown the whistle. But no particular person *within* Boeing, even the CEO, is going to capture more than a small fraction of that benefit, in exchange for taking on the full risk for committing multiple murders.
And getting enough of Boeing's stakeholders on board to make this an actual policy decision, with adequate incentives for whoever is going to be taking the risk as designated fall guy if things go wrong, gets you into the realm of impractical conspiracies that would leak in nothing flat.
Maybe the person wants revenge, maybe the person wants to intimidate future whistleblowers, maybe the whistleblower hadn't revealed everything yet, maybe the whistleblower knew things that the whistleblower thought were unimportant but which were actually important, maybe the whistleblower was playing both sides by engaging in blackmail.
I don't think it would make economic sense, unless the person were going to be held directly responsible for something, and the death prevented that. It might well be narcissism or vengeance or some other manifestation of ego. And I can't see it as a Board decision, but maybe one or two highly-placed people conspiring on their own would be enough. Although at that point, you'd have to start wondering about your co-equal conspirators turning on you. Better to only involve people that you have a hold on.
But like I said, I don't put a high probability on this. I think it more likely that the first death was a genuine suicide, with a last-minute low-effort attempt to say "fuck you" to Boeing by not making it absolutely clear it was suicide.
Don't underestimate the power of irrational motives. "How dare these f..kers ruin a perfectly good gig" can be a reason in and of itself, even if it makes no rational sense to go after whistleblowers in this way.
Because it would be phenomenally dumb, even for Boeing. If proof of such a thing came out you'd likely see the company get nationalized (because dissolving it would be too much of a hit to national security.) Plus, you think such a badly run organization as Boeing could keep it secret?
To steelman the Boeing whistleblower conspiracy, it would make a lot more sense to claim the CIA or DIA or whoever is doing the killings. Boeing is deeply tied into defense contracts, and the defense/commercial parts of the company aren't compartmentalized (that second bit is anecdotal by the way, if anyone knows differently say so.)
The defense and commercial parts of the company are compartmentalized at the highest level; there's no realistic possibility of any legal, economic, or regulatory blowback to Boeing Commercial Airplanes having a significant effect on Boeing Defense, Space, and Security.
Well my conspiracy theory only made it 11 hours. Sad.
Seconded. Even when BDSS is building on a BCA platform, they buy unfurnished airframes (e.g., no seats or IFE system) and then *heavily* modify them for the particular mission.
That's not the conspiracy that's being proposed, though, so is it really a steelman?
Why do you hate conspiracy theories? Not to say that's your fault or anything, we're in a bad equilibira where there's plenty to hate, I'd just like some anecdata for the specific causes/origins of why people feel repelled by conspiracy theories and stuff that sounds like conspiracy theories.
See my reply above/earlier to the OP.
Exactly!
Maybe this is too spicy, I don't know, but do you guys feel it's possible for Trump to win in November? I have seen people remark that there's something weird about this election, how it doesn't feel like an election year at all, and personally, Trump already lost against Biden, I don't see why he would win this time around. I get Biden hasn't been much of an inspiring leader, but he was already uninspiring in 2020, people were just that desperate to get Trump out, so Biden won anyway.
Metaculus has it at a coin toss, which is pretty interesting, as I feel a Trump win is pretty unlikely, but I'm no sort of forecaster.
I'm personally not rooting for anyone, I'm trying to get more focused on local politics, which is what actually impacts me and mine.
I'll tell you what's weird about this election.
Until 2020, elections were about people showing up on the election day (with very few exceptions), casting their ballot, and having it counted the same day (or, worst case, early hours of the next day).
In 2020, elections changed enormously - some states introduced early voting, most (or all?) started to accept a lot of ballots by mail, some states put up unmanned ballot dropboxes, and so on. Much of this was gamed or straight-out abused, and all in all this led to a system that was no longer comprehensible.
So until 2020 elections were about candidate support and voter turnout, and polls did a fairly good job of predicting their outcomes.
Since 2020, elections were about candidate support, voter turnout, and the mechanism by which the election was conducted in a given state. The mechanism part has quantitative effects that are very hard to predict unless you're running the exact entity that's gaming it in this particular state, but in general seems to mostly have the effect of increasing the D part of the vote (hence the D governors vetoing any attempts to roll any of it back that reach their desks).
That's where we are now. Our elections are no longer transparent, and this is bad and weird. My favorite example of how bad this is is NY-22 in 2020 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_New_York%27s_22nd_congressional_district_election ) - the congressional race that took from November to February to resolve!
With regards to your question about Trump, Nate Silver used to think it's a toss-up some time ago. Before 2020 I'd take his word for it - now I'm not so sure.
I am not an election forecaster, so looking at the previous years I tend to assume that any state with a D governor and Trump being less than 2% over Biden in the RCP average is automatically going to Biden, because the mechanism in that state will have enough slack built in to make it happen. That would currently be WI, MI, and PA, so Trump's chances don't look all that hot - but perhaps I'm wrong.
>looking at the previous years I tend to assume that any state with a D governor and Trump being less than 2% over Biden in the RCP average is automatically going to Biden
I am trying to figure out how you get that, because in 2020 Trump overperformed the RCP averages in almost every state. In fact, it appears that GA is the only state that Biden carried in which Trump led in the RCP average (and GA had a Republican governor)
>In 2020, elections changed enormously - some states introduced early voting, most (or all?) started to accept a lot of ballots by mail, some states put up unmanned ballot dropboxes, and so on. Much of this was gamed or straight-out abused, and all in all this led to a system that was no longer comprehensible.
Pre-2020, every state already allowed voting by mail, the primary difference was that some states require a "valid excuse" for absentee voting and others would send a mail-in ballot to anyone who asked. Voting by mail is inherently early voting, because you need to give people time to send in their ballots. So the mechanisms were already there in every state, it's just that most people didn't notice until the states were actively trying to get people to use it. If you think that mail-in ballots are inherently abusable, then they were just as abusable in 2018, 2016, 2014, etc. etc.
You can see a list of all procedural changes here, if you're curious: https://ballotpedia.org/Changes_to_election_dates,_procedures,_and_administration_in_response_to_the_coronavirus_(COVID-19)_pandemic,_2020#Summary_of_developments
The thing that made mail-in voting chaotic had nothing to do with actual changes to the law - Trump wanted to push the narrative that the election was fraudulent in case he lost, and so he told his supporters not to vote by mail. Democrats, meanwhile, told their supporters to stay home to not get COVID and vote by mail. This meant that mail-in ballots had the reverse of their normal partisan leaning (normally it's older, more republican boomers voting by mail), which looked suspicious. Also, many states count mail-in ballots as a batch before or after the in-person ballots, which led to "red mirages" or "blue mirages" when that happened. (Analysts predicted this into advance, and took this into account when deciding when to call states.)
Also, I've noticed a lot of people conflate "people were able to cast fraudulent votes or vote twice" with "people voted who previously would have chosen not to, because we made it easier." The former is a crime, the latter is a *good thing*, it means more people were able to participate in the process and the result of the elections more accurately reflects the population being represented.
(Also, if your objection is "Democrats made it easier for their people to vote" then you need to have a long look at Republican attempts to restrict ballot access in Democratic areas pre-2020.)
There were always going to be problems in the first few elections that used widespread mail-in ballots. Voter confusion, bad rules and procedures, and problems of scale. My state has been doing them for over a decade, and has the bugs ironed out. But when a bunch of larger and more sclerotic states try to rush this through in the middle of a pandemic and right before the most bitter election of my lifetime... yeah, I expected some chaos.
It was a coin toss last time, and nothing much has changed since last time. Biden has as you note not been an inspiring leader, and there aren't many great accomplishments he can point to - COVID petered out on his watch but not in a way he gets any real credit for, Russia is still in Ukraine, the economy is still widely perceived as sucking, etc. Trump, OTOH, is basically the same character offering the same deal he did in 2020, and nothing he's done since 2020 would surprise anyone who knew of him in 2020.
So, we're going to toss the coin again and see what happens.
Whoever wins, what's gonna happen is global crisis and I sincerely hope there are enough sane professional public servants with the necessary backup to get the democratic parts of the world through it. Europe won't sustain without the USA, yet.
I hope so too. The bad news is that the Trump team is screening certified bootlickers for a second term.
And those sane professionals? Trump refers to them as the ‘deep state’. He wants them gone.
Pretty sure Trump literally does not know how to get rid of them. Does not know what form needs to be filed to turn off their payroll direct-deposit and void their accounts and keycards, does not know how to turn those things *on* for his preferred replacements, does not know who he could legally order to short-circuit the process by brute force or how to phrase the orders to keep it legal, etc.
Of course, Joe Biden doesn't know how to do that either, but there are a lot of people who do know how to do those things, who work for and are mostly loyal to Joe Biden. Given Trump's track record in hiring competent lieutenants (as opposed to sycophantic yes-men), if he pushes this far enough we could have the fun of watching Trump try to hire a bunch of new people, none of whom can figure out how to turn their own paychecks on.
So, yeah, global crisis.
I’m thinking of his first cabinet meeting. They went around the table singing the praises of the amazing president.
Except for Jim Mattis who declined to suck up and praised the US military instead. Thank you Jim Mattis.
Right now either could win. Don't pay too much attention to the polls, this far out they are basically worthless. They won't start reflecting voters real opinions until the end of Sept, early Oct or so. Right now, virtually everyone has made up their mind about them, except for the fraction of swing voters who are mostly disengaged from politics. The interesting thing is that these swing voters are distributed across many states, so the electoral vote is especially volatile this year. In November, it will be all about which party can motivate more people to go to the polls.
>Metaculus has it at a coin toss
For me, this is the bottom line, unless I want to spend _so_ much analysis effort that I can convince myself that I can outguess the market. I'm not planning on doing that. If this were a thin market where 3 people were betting against 4 people and I felt I had special expertise, I might try, but not on this one.
> I have seen people remark that there's something weird about this election, how it doesn't feel like an election year at all
examples please
How about, it's literally May and nobody's talking about the election? That's a little weird!
(Honestly it's also refreshing, or it would be if the things filling the news in its place weren't so terrible.)
Who do you mean by nobody? It's front and center in all my leftie news and commentary feeds. In fact, I wish I was getting less of it. I have my mom turn off CNN and MSNBC when I go over to her house, because of their horserace coverage. Right now Trump's trial is taking front and center, though. Maybe that's not strictly election-related, but you can be sure the Trump campaign sees it as election-related. I don't know about the right-leaning NYTimes and the rightwing WSJ. I've tuned them out.
>I don't know about the right-leaning NYTimes and the rightwing WSJ
Look, I know that you know this is nonsense just from the way you phrased it. If you don't want to take this discussion seriously, maybe you could head over to the Chapo Trap House Youtube comments or something.
Hmmm. In the leadup to the 2016 election, the NYTimes kept a relentless focus on Clinton's emails — which may have cost her the election. This election cycle the NYTimes is keeping a relentless focus on outlier polls that show Biden behind by five points, and they're miffed that Biden refuses to grant them an interview. I've always assumed the Right called the NYTimes a "liberal" paper just like they cherish the notion that Fox News is "fair and balanced." None on the Left consider the NYTimes to be on our side.
And the WSJ is owned by Rupert Murdock and the editorial page reflects his rightwing obsessions.
"Reporting anything that makes a Democrat look bad makes a newspaper right-wing."
Huh. I've largely insulated myself from that news ecosystem, so I suppose that's why I'm not seeing it. But it hasn't filtered up to me through the channels I'm used to, either. And I'm not in a swing state.
Of course, the Right is pretty mute right now. The RNC is effectively broke (and broken) right now. So they're mostly incapable of funding ad campaigns for senatorial races and swing congressional races. And it sounds like most of their funds are being siphoned off to pay for Trump's legal bills (but I haven't heard of any audit being done). So Trump doesn't have much money to launch his own ad campaign.
Meanwhile, the Biden campaign is flush with cash, but they're focusing their advertising on swing states. So unless your in a swing state, you're probably not going to hear much from the presidential candidates.
> (Honestly it's also refreshing, or it would be if the things filling the news in its place weren't so terrible.)
Yeah. My wild-ass guess is that the a) we pretty much know who the candidates are, b) the media view Trump's trials as filling their campaign-coverage niche, and c) the candidates' handlers worry that anything they do could backfire. The safest route is to stay above it all and not engage.
for a "Trump is going to lose" perspective, there's an entire substack that very self-awarely calls itself Hopium. https://www.hopiumchronicles.com/
It is a really weird election in at least two aspects. One, both candidates were locked in for their party with basically no real primary challenger. I guess you could argue DeSantis, but it quickly became clear he wasn't going to beat Trump. So all of the debates and infighting usually associated with primary season were very muted this year. Maybe this isn't too atypical in the entire history of the presidency, but it certainly differs from the last 20 years.
Two, both candidates have already been in office once. The electorate can just compare and contrast how both of them did. Everybody already knows everything about Trump and Biden by this point. So neither of them need to campaign or run ads like a traditional unproven candidate.
Also, Biden is really *old*. Trump isn't much younger, but he doesn't have the track record of cognitive decline and gaffes like Biden. This is a big deal even to non-red voters. The criminal trials are also working in Trump's favor. Regardless of the actual merit of the charges, he can point to how they were all conveniently delayed for 3 years until campaign season, and how all of the charges were brought in deep blue strongholds. The banana republic optics don't go over well with the public. Of course if he is actually a convict in November that might dissuade a lot of people in the center from voting Trump.
>but he doesn't have the track record of cognitive decline and gaffes like Biden
30 seconds of Trump on Gettysburg
With a claim of plagiarism from John Stewart’s 7th grade book report: Gettysburg, Wow
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sjZ0un61IRM
Using this speech as evidence of Trump's decline would imply that he spoke in a better manner in the past.
Good point.
I once tried comparing his inaugural address to JFK’s.
Trump’s speech was largely boilerplate American Carnage and then you’d run into him using the word ‘totally’ in the manner of Jeff Spicoli. That part, you know that was Trump inserting himself into the speech writing.
I don't agree that trump doesn't have gaffes/cognitive decline but that aside ... it's not clear to me the criminal trials actually work in his favor. Plenty of people say what you say here but I think they're mostly/all already trump supporters who said the same thing about the 2019 impeachment.
Also, they are all being brought now as a result of delays partly brought on by trump himself, who has been trying to push them back as much as possible ... and the location follows where the stuff happened, with one of the cases being in Georgia and another being in Florida.
There's too many trials, though, so it really is "arson, murder and jaywalking"; from "Jan 6th he tried to take over the nation by a violent coup" to "he used the wrong account to pay off the hooker, it should have been down as a campaign expense".
I know Capone was finally brought low for tax evasion, but he wasn't being tried at the same time for burning down the Statue of Liberty. Decide which is more important, treason or adultery, then try that case. Otherwise it just looks like "we don't care about is there a real crime, we just want to send him to prison".
This is not how it works in these here United States. There's no single entity that can "decide which is more important, treason or adultery, then try that case". The cases are brought by different states, driven by their respective DA's. The degree to which our states have autonomy in these matters is sometimes bewildering for non-USians... We don't even have a national vehicle license plate, for crying out loud!
Yes, in the United States, it is possible for a local DA to undermine what would be a rational strategy for bringing down a dangerous criminal and instead making him look like a persecuted underdog that juries will be predisposed to acquit (and mobs to riot if there's a conviction anyway). This is a *bad thing*; local DAs should resist the temptation no matter how much they'd enjoy their fifteen minutes of fame, and now we're dealing with the consequences of not resisting that temptation. Local DAs have that power, and great discretion in how they use it, which means sometimes it will be used very poorly.
Thing is that the federal trials are being repeatedly delayed. I don't think Bragg is under some obligation to sit around and wait for other prosecutors to be delayed by over a year based on some "most serious case goes first" principle, especially when the clear plan is to delay past the election and then drop the charges if trump wins.
On the classified documents one, the original indictment was in like June of 2023, and the (trump-appointed) judge has repeatedly pushed things back, most recently (today) pushing back the trial date indefinitely and saying she won't even set a date until late July.
On the Jan 6 one, after the district court rejected trump's claim to immunity, and trump appealed, the prosecutor asked the Supreme Court to intervene, which they didn't do ... until a few months later after the appeals court agreed with the district court, and then at that point they agreed to take the case after trump asked, scheduling oral arguments for like 3 months later (and now awaiting a decision for what could be another month or 2).
I should clarify that I mean Biden gaffes related to senility. Reading things off the teleprompter that are clearly not meant to be spoken, rambling stories about his uncle being eaten by cannibals, having a special counsel report describe him as a well meaning but forgetful old man. As I said, Trump is also old, and not as sharp as he was in 2016. But political contests are all relative.
Also, it would be ridiculous to claim Trump doesn't make gaffes, considering some of the things he says.
Admittedly the trials are an unprecedented event in American politics. I won't claim to confidently know who that ends up benefitting. Regardless, the real loser is America. Now that centuries of tradition have been broken, I expect future presidents to be prosecuted as an extension of partisan battles. Much like the partisan impeachment without a high crime or misdemeanor of Trump was followed by the partisan impeachment without a high crime or misdemeanor of Mayorkas.
"a special counsel report describe him as a well meaning but forgetful old man"
Yeah, that one is pretty bad. Either Biden really is incapable, so he shouldn't be running, or that was a lie to get him off the hook for the same offence Trump is being accused of regarding state documents, in which case what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. You can certainly claim "it's okay if our guy does it" but that then torpedoes any claim of fairness or this is a serious crime which must be taken seriously, it's just "we will say it's bad if the other guy does it".
Except requests were made multiple times from the Nat'l Archives for Trump to return those docs. And he only returned a part of them, which is when the Nat'l archives referred it to the DoJ.
As for Biden, it was either he or his people saying, maybe we should check your files, too — just in case. They found some classified stuff, and returned it. In Biden's case it wasn't even on the Nat'l Archives and DoJ radar. Then Biden appoints a Republican special council to investigate his handling of the docs. With the result he wasn't found at fault, except that the guy said Biden was having memory issues.
If you read the transcript it's not as bad as painted by the report. He was talking about a date and said one, then turned to someone and asked, "Wait was that X, or X?" and then they confirmed it was X date, and that was the end of it.
The report made it sound much more serious than the reality, I thought.
Or alternatively, he was trying to make Biden look bad in order to boost Trump's chances.
Personally I think that Trump is very likely to win, unless Democrats can employ enough lawsuits to keep him off the ballot.
In any case, regardless of who wins, this current election is kind of boring -- it's two very old men desperately struggling to energize their base with their old-man antics. The interesting election will come in four more years. Currently I have no idea what that could even look like. Sure, Trump might run again if he loses; Biden is unlikely to do the same (barring any breakthroughs in medical science). But who would be the competition ? Maybe DeSantis on the Republican side ? But which Democrat would he be running against, AOC ? I can even picture it...
Everybody realized Trump sucks, so they voted for Biden. Now they've realized that Biden sucks too, so that choice becomes a coin flip. Combine that with the nonstop parade of crises and misery during the last four years making the Trump era look not as bad in retrospect, and there you go.
(edit: some of the crises aren't Biden's fault, and some of them are fallout from Trump or even started under him, but nobody ever said politics was fair.)
I believe its a toss up
>there's something weird about this election
politics is messy and theres always been cheating( eletrons with no black votes when a kkk member was the winner are just part of history); theres trades off in how believable the result is and no one knowing just how much to cheat by
If bidens plan is to just ban trump from running; there isnt going to be much of a federal government after texas secceds and all the red states have trump ballots and no process to move forward, so I dont know what the democratic party is thinking not pushing him down the stairs several months ago.
Are they confident in their method of cheating? Do they think "student loan forgiveness" is enough? Is the biden family burning thru all their favors to not be replaced with literally anyone else?
> I don't see why he would win this time around.
people having the memory of a goldfish about trump saying he made the vaccine, did several rounds of the stimulus money(and therefor is part of the problem with the economy) and didnt end the iraq war(tho thats probably the cia fault)
incumbents have a disadvantage, its debatable how much, but... well
> so I dont know what the democratic party is thinking not pushing him down the stairs several months ago
Because despite everything, the DNC still believes in democracy. They're idiots. They should've known damn well that this charade of a democracy was never going to last. It was always going to go to shit the moment people realized they don't actually need to settle for compromise.
...At the same time, with how split the party is right now, they probably can't politically afford to take the first shot. Maybe they were just doomed from the start.
> the DNC still believes in democracy.
?
I understand they use words differently over there in Washington, but how is using legalese to remove someone from the ballot democracy?
Two important distinctions:
1) There's a big difference between prosecuting someone for crimes they have committed and prosecuting them for crimes they haven't committed; Trump is pretty clearly in the former category.
2) There's a big difference between politicians interfering in the judicial system to get rival politicians prosecuted, and prosecutors acting independently; there is no evidence of the former happening in the case of Trump.
Republicans desperately want to pretend that Trump's legal issues are because the Democrats are persecuting him rather than because he's repeatedly broken the law, but it isn't true.
> There's a big difference between politicians interfering in the judicial system to get rival politicians prosecuted, and prosecutors acting independently
Biden doesn't have to say, "will no one rid me of this turbulent dipshit?". It is known. The Schelling Point is to stop Trump.
Like, if Netanyahu were to take a stroll through the middle of Gaza tomorrow, he'd be shot dead. There wouldn't need to be a conspiracy, there wouldn't need to be a central organization giving orders. Individual people would see him and know what to do. Similarly, Democratic prosecutors know to go after Trump in whatever way they can justify, in whatever manner is most damaging to his re-election chances.
idk what news your reading or which of the cases you are making claims about the fun part is theres several
Specifically the newyork case; the judge preventing him from speaking to the supreme court, and the case is a an accusation of fraud, on a loan he already paid back and the bank said they didn't believe there was fraud, and the banks did due diligence to check the worth of the property and presumably in the paper work trump and the bank agreed to a value after a fairly standard process.
So; desperately pretending over here, but I will view any canceled events or large fines or gag orders as electron interface of newyork on little old flyover state me and the left as losing its mind.
Paying back the loan doesn't stop it from being fraud.
And saying "the banks didn't believe my lies so the fact that I lied to them doesn't matter" is.. well it's a defence I guess, but not a flattering one.
The other issue is that "presidential candidates are above the law" is a very destabilizing precedent, and it's not one that even Trump himself believes in, given how he ran on "Lock Her Up" in 2016 and wants to go after Biden over the Hunter thing now.
Prosecuting politicians over every random parking ticket or whatever is also open to abuse of course. I'd say the best norm would be something like "major politicians get 20% more lenience than someone of their social class and situation would normally get" - but if you flagrantly and egregiously break the law, you can't just run for office and cry "banana republic!" to get out of jail free.
>I'd say the best norm would be something like "major politicians get 20% more lenience than someone of their social class and situation would normally get"
That seems reasonable. I basically agree with both your points. I would add: We want politicians to leave office peacefully (and, yeah, I know this is not Trump's strong point...) - but if we start a tradition of politically motivated prosecutions of politicians when they leave office and cede power to their successors, they may _stop_ leaving office and ceding power to their successors.
Why do you say incumbents have a disadvantage? While the math used is a little confusing, OpenSecrets argues that incumbents tend to collect more in donations and are more likely to win re-election than challengers.
https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/incumbent-advantage
Though there are probably a lot of spurious challengers tipping the odds.
Biden also has more campaign donations for the 2024 election, though not astronomically more.
https://www.opensecrets.org/2024-presidential-race
It tends to swap between left vs right
incumbents do better vs others in the same party, but im prety sure the president is blamed to the current crisis no matter who's fault it was
I'm saying incumbents do better than challengers, as measured by election rates and campaign contributions.
If incumbents did worse than the set of challengers, we would expect the average tenure to be 1.5 terms, right? Because 1.5 average terms is what we'd see if an incumbent or a challenger winning was a coin toss in any given election. Agree or disagree?
"The average length of service for Representatives at the beginning of the 118th Congress was 8.5 years (4.3 House terms); for Senators, 11.2 years (1.9 Senate terms). Table 2 shows the average length of service at the beginning of the 118th and three previous Congresses."
https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R47470#:~:text=Truman%20Scholars.18-,Congressional%20Service,118th%20and%20three%20previous%20Congresses.
Ten of 45 presidents have run for re-election and lost.
https://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/0812/5-presidents-who-couldnt-secure-a-second-term.aspx
ChatGPT4 analysis follows, which I've skimmed over to roughly check for errors. One mistake was found and ChatGPT4 was asked to recalculate.
57.1% of U.S. Presidents who ran for a second term won their re-election, while approximately 42.9% lost. This number is slightly higher if we include LBJ.
LBJ was elected to a second term after serving part of JFKs, but I excluded him from the analysis.
List of U.S. Presidents who ran for re-election and whether they won or lost
True indicates they won re-election, False indicates they lost
True, # Washington
True, # Jefferson
True, # Madison
True, # Monroe
False, # J.Q. Adams
False, # Van Buren
True, # Lincoln (won 2nd term, assassinated early into it)
False, # Cleveland (won non-consecutive second term later)
False, # B. Harrison
False, # Taft
True, # Wilson
True, # F.D. Roosevelt (won more than two terms)
False, # Hoover
True, # Eisenhower
False, # Carter
True, # Reagan
True, # Clinton
False, # G.H.W. Bush
True, # G.W. Bush
True, # Obama
False, # Trump
theres been 4 maybe 5 presidents since roughly "the internet era" started and thats assuming 2001 is like post-2016, thats not enough data to make models
From
>incumbents have a disadvantage, its debatable how much, but... well
to
> thats not enough data to make models
The backdown is real.
Incumbents always have the advantage, people inherently dislike change. THESE incumbents are at a disadvantage, because these incumbents especially suck.
So is your argument that there's been some change which impacted the presidency but not Congress? There have been enough congressional elections to construct a workable model even if we posit that the most recent generation is a special case. Average length of congressional terms since 1987 has increased slightly, amidst significant variation, relative to the previous 40 years or so.
It at least hasn't decreased notably since that time, and has stayed very safely above the 50% reelection rate represented by a 6 year average term.
https://www.termlimits.com/new-research-congressional-tenure-steadily-increasing/
So if we can agree that incumbents had an advantage 40 years ago, the evidence that's available suggests that they still have that advantage today.
I think it's not impossible, but is it likely?
On the Republican side, it seems to be Trump or nobody. De Santis flamed out, I haven't followed Nikki Haley but hasn't she given up too?
And same for the Democrats - you're Ridin' With Biden or nobody. The big deal there, I think, will be post-election selection of who's going to replace Joe for the next presidential election; possibly Gavin Newsom? As their best bet at electability, despite all they may do about DEI, is still Moderately Well-Off White Guy.
So Trump versus Biden, Round 2, and what are the big issues? Right now the protests are not BLM but about Gaza, and I think that one is harder to whip up sentiment about. "If Trump is elected, he'll pour support into Israel!" Well, just like Biden right now, yes?
Abortion? Haven't heard much about the "millions of women who died due to being denied medically necessary abortions" so I'm thinking it isn't that live an issue, and indeed looking it up:
https://www.bmj.com/content/384/bmj.q715
"There were more than a million abortions in 2023 in the formal US healthcare system, of which 63% were medication abortions—both record highs."
Jan 6th Definitely A Coup Democracy Dies? Some of those convictions seem to have been overturned, and while the whole thing is rumbling on, there's nothing new.
Trump's legal woes? Well, again, I haven't been following what is happening in Georgia after the DA and her snookums derailed all the attention there, but what I heard on the evening news just now intrigued me:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/06/nyregion/trump-trial-gag-order-contempt.html
"The judge said that he understood “the magnitude of such a decision” and that jailing Mr. Trump would be a last resort. He noted: “You are the former president of the United States, and possibly the next president as well.”
Possibly the next president as well? Sounds like someone is reading the tealeaves!
So all that is left is to fight over the same old stale ground as the last eight years: Literally Hitler, Fascism For Real This Time, and so on and so on.
What I think most likely is Biden to win but by a very slim margin, possibly in the Electoral College (after which we will hear *nothing* about it being a relic of the slave-owning days which should be abolished for the will of the people from all those demanding it to be done away with after Hillary lost). Depending if he then serves out the full second term, both the Democrats and Republicans have to find new candidates for the next bout. If he doesn't, Kamala will take over but will emulate Gerald Ford in not being able to get elected for a full term in an election.
I think it's likely that Trump wins. It's been a bad year for Biden. Inflation is rampant, the campus riots have unmasked woke to a lot of people, and a special counsel officially said that Biden was too senile to answer to criminal charges regarding his misuse of classified material. Biden barely won in 2020 and things look worse for him now. The party was scrambling just a couple months ago to find a replacement candidate (they even considered Michelle Obama). You don't do that if you're confident that you can win.
Trump has a roughly 50% chance of winning in November. There's nothing particularly spicy or weird about it.
the criminal trails are new and spicy element into american politics; cant wait for 2028 when both candidates are on trail instead of campaigning
but they are new and we neither know whether he'd be convicted, nor what the impact would be. so 50/50 still.
I notice you actually proposed the same :)
its 50/50 but its not a normal 50/50
Its "spicy" in the sense I bet I could convince my father to not pay taxes if trump doesn't show up on blue state ballots, and am otherwise liberal sisters to get guns and prep for a civil war; far right politics will be booming, I would know im part of it.
Removing trump by legal fraud will be an escalation, and these idiot blue states are very much threatening to do it. While I dont believe it would lead to a civil war even in the "worse timeline", its fairly strange they are doing it, and the consequences will be important.
Removing Trump by legal fraud (trigger phrase) will spend a lot of capital by the left. Political capital that will not be available to achieve other goals. You could say that Affirmative Action is off the menu for a generation, as an example of the cost of this action.
Explain like I'm five (okay, let's say like I'm fifteen) what goals central banks set interest rates for, the mechanisms by which that works, and the tradeoffs they thereby incur in.
Central banks mostly set interest rates with the goal of minimizing the number of people giving central bankers grief. The #1 thing that people give central bankers grief over is inflation. Or, rarely, deflation. And the original purpose of central banks was mostly "manage the money supply so that there's not too much inflation (and absolutely no deflation)". So, central banks really want to do that.
The #2 thing that people give central bankers grief over is unemployment, and at least in the United States that's been added to the list of things the central bankers are officially supposed to deal with. So they're also pretty big on making sure there isn't too much unemployment.
It is debatable what fills the #3 slot, but by definition it's tertiary and probably best not to worry about it for now.
W/re inflation, if we ignore the differences between cars, cantaloupes, and computers, and treat the economy as just producing and selling generic "Stuff", then prices are set by the ratio of money in circulation to stuff available for sale. If the price were anything else, merchants would change it to get more money in their own pockets while unloading excess inventory. Since the amount of Stuff being brought to market almost always increases a little bit each year, we need to increase the amount of money in circulation proportionately or there will be deflation. If we add too much money, we get inflation.
Loans, put more money into circulation. Indeed, they kind of *create* money by the usual economic definition, but if that's too much like voodoo for 15-yo you, just think of it as noncirculating money being taken out of the vaults and put into circulation - the math will still work. The lower the interest rate, the more people will want to borrow money to buy stuff(*). If you get the interest rate just right, such people will put newly-borrowed money into circulation at just the right rate to counterbalance all the new Stuff being produced and keep prices stable.
Regarding unemployment, if you want more people to be employed, you want people founding new businesses and expanding existing ones. Which takes money, and it's easiest if you can borrow the money up front and pay it back later with the profits from whatever your new employees are doing. So, lower interest rates equals more job creation because the new jobs don't need to be quite as productive to pay back the loans with profit left over.
The problem is that these two priorities point to different interest rate targets, one "as low as possible", the other "just right". So unless you're lucky enough to have low unemployment and low inflation at the same time, *somebody* is going to be giving your central bankers grief. The usual way to try and deal with that is to set one interest rate and then hint "but we might change to this other rate real soon; take that into account when making your decisions!"
Sometimes this even works.
* Lower interest rates also make people less likely to take money out of circulation and stash it in their savings account or whatever, to the same effect.
That was very good. I can't remember reading a better and shorter explanation.
I don't get the impression you go in for one-off "wow, that was great" comments (or their replies), but if this were by anyone else then I'd reply with one of those, and it seems counterproductive to make an exception simply because you have a more formal online presence than those of us whose writing voices grew up in blogland, so here's a disclaimer too. :-)
I certainly don't mind an occasional "wow, that was great!" Thanks.
At the risk of going to far, I always read your comments because they are thoughtful, smart, fair and often funny.
This is roughly how I explained it to my 15-year-old:
The interest rate is “the price of money”.
The central banks set their interest rate and lend money to other banks who lend it on to people and businesses at a markup. That way, the interest rate affects how much money people and companies want to borrow and spend/invest.
So…
1. Lower interest rates = “cheaper money”.
When the price (interest rate) is low, people can afford to put more stuff on their credit cards, and businesses can borrow more and invest in stuff.
That means everyone buys more stuff. Which in turn means that the businesses they buy from have to hire more people to meet demand. Which gives more people better jobs and more money in their pocket. Which means they can buy even more things. Etc. Good times for a while.
That’s how low interest rates help lower unemployment and boost growth, and why those are two common considerations when central banks set interest rates.
2. But too much of a good thing, and you risk over-heating of the economy.
If there’s not enough people to take the jobs, businesses can’t meet demand, they'll pay more for employees, wages go up, costs go up. And people spend more and more money and get into too much debt, and you risk inflation, price bubbles, looming debt crises, etc. Particularly inflation is a big one they look at.
To prevent that, central banks will nudge the interest rates a bit higher, to make it more expensive to borrow money, and more profitable to put your savings in the bank. This should make people and companies think twice before taking up loans and making huge investments, and it will cool the economy down.
(The more money people borrow, the more money is also “printed” (issued), but that’s a bit of a technicality. It’s not printed in the same way some governments printed money out of thin air to give COVID relief, but in a (somewhat twisted, but not entirely imaginary) reflection of the actual value created through all the investments and growth. So this printing of money doesn't contribute to inflation through the same mechanism.)
3. The interest rate also affects the foreign exchange rate (which is another way to think about the “price of money”).
The foreign exchange rate (e.g. how many dollars to I have to pay for a British pound) has an effect on imports and exports and prices in the country.
If interest is low, and it’s inexpensive to borrow money (and not lucrative to save money) in a particular currency, then people will sell that currency, so they can move their money to other currencies and countries where they can get better profits.
For example: If it is possible to make a big profit by borrowing money in the US and lending it to businesses in the UK (or vice versa), people will milk that. They will sell as much USD as they can and buy GBP (British pounds), until the exchange rate has adjusted and the price and potential profit matches the risk they are taking.
That way, a relatively low interest rate in the US will contribute to push the price of the US dollar down, and make other currencies more expensive for Americans.
When a currency (like the USD) is worth less than normal, that means the price of imported goods (that can’t be paid for with USD) goes up. But it also means that their (American) goods become less expensive abroad, which means they become more competitive in foreign markets.
This is good for some industries that import little (buy few things abroad) and export a lot (sell much abroad). But it's less good when it’s the other way around.
It's also good for attracting foreign tourists and keeping domestic tourism at home.
So a country's central bank may also consider the trade deficit/surplus situation, and specifics of the economy, like the health of key industries (tourism, exports).
4. Practical considerations. Central banks don’t want to be seen to do too much too quickly, so as not to shock the system, but they will often signal a long-term strategy and goal. Unfortunately, politicians will often work against what the central bank is trying to do. E.g. while the central bank wants people to spend less, the politicians don’t want to get blamed for small businesses struggling and people not having the same spending power as before, and will fight for subsidies and tax relief etc at the same time, effectively sabotaging the bank’s efforts. So, even if the central bank is apolitical, it will need a strategy for how to maneuver toward its goal slowly and steadily without getting tripped up.
This is simplified, but should hopefully go some way toward getting the basics. Hope it helps.
It often goes unexplained what "price of money" means. The uninitiated go "wait, what does it mean to buy money?" or "how does paying dollars for other dollars make sense?".
And the answer is that by money they mean debt or credit. 1 dollar in your pocket now is obviously worth something else than the promise of 1 dollar next month. But how much more? aaand that's exactly what setting the Price of Money is.
Thanks!
I liked it.
When a company wants to borrow money, one way of doing it is issuing bonds. They offer for sale the right to collect, say, $100,000 on July 1, 2029, and the free market decides what this promise is worth today.
When a government wants to raise money, it’s similar, and they usually sell the bonds at an auction. The market thus decides what it thinks is the present value of future money.
…Except the central banks can and do intervene, and they buy the bonds at a higher price. Central banks have huge monetary resources so they can drive the price up to any level they choose, and this drives down the rates for the entire market.
They do this if they think the economy should borrow more money and put it to productive use, especially in times of uncertainty when those who have the money would rather sit on it or invest it in lowest-risk government bonds.
"Central banks have huge monetary resources"
How can central banks have a lot of money if they keep buying government bonds? Do they collect taxes from the banks?
They own the money printer.
What we call money is actually debt. If you're talking about money in a private bank account it is the debt of that private bank, if you're talking about cash it's the debt of the central bank. When you write a check your private bank reduces its debt to you by the same amount of central bank debt (now known as reserves) that it transfers to recipient's private bank. In a modern economy all money is debt. The central bank can issue as much of its own debt as it wants, as long as someone is willing to trade for it, just like everybody else. The way it does that is by buying assets (typically government bonds) and paying for them with its own debt, issued on the spot. The major difference between the debt of private companies and central bank debt is that taxes can only be paid with central bank debt, and the courts enforce contract settlements in central bank debt. The interest rate at the federal reserve market is the interest private banks charge each other for overnight loans of the debt of the central bank. The central bank controls that by issuing more or less central bank debt, and the private banks have a need for holding central bank debt because that's what they use to settle transactions between themselves.
Funded by taxpayers obviously. The entire point of a central bank is having an entity with a lot of money that can throw that money at problems that can be solved this way (dampening currency rate fluctuations, setting interest rates etc.).
That's incorrect. Our medium of exchange is the central bank debt. The central bank does not have money, and cannot have it, because holding it's own debt would be meaningless. It can print the paper version of its debt (cash) or issue the digital version of its debt (bank reserves) at will, just like anyone else can issue their own debt if they find someone that is willing to trade for it.
I guess this differs from country to country? Some central banks are very active buying and selling foreign currency to help stabilize the home currency, and you need cashy money for that.
You are right in that the central banks of export-dependent economies often find it useful to hold foreign currency. So yes, the asset side of the central bank balance sheet does matter in that context, which excludes the US and the EU.
You need foreign currency for that, which is not money in the local country because it is not used as a medium of exchange in the local economy.
1. gdp go up; printing money makes people not like saving money, people spend money ????, economy healthy
2. national debt to gdp doesn't go to ~~100%~ ~~150%~~ 200%, believing this is a mark of hyper inflation, if the (effective) interest rate on the national debt * debt is higher then gdp and as the national debt raises interest rates go up, congress will just declare that the money printers go brrrrr at which point its hyper inflation no one will take the worthless paper
3. 99% of banks stay solvent, stupid banks should sometimes roll the dice and die; but to many at once they hear the concept of a "bank run" and fear about a cascade effect as banks like to buy stock in other banks or play the same games as other banks(mortgages for example), so the federal reserve literally gives banks free money while trying to control stupid investments this is thru "fdic insurence"
Interesting take on calculating the probability of a statistical model or computer program https://lunaverus.com/programLikelihoods
"There is a neat way to frame unsupervised learning as likelihood maximization, but not in the usual way where you just compute the likelihood of the data using a model and ignore the likelihood of the model itself. Rather, this is the combined likelihood of model and data, where the model is treated as a sequence of code symbols..."
Can anyone recommend any resources for getting up to speed on mechanistic interpretability research? For example are there any good tutorials, or maybe papers that are especially beginner-friendly?
https://alignmentjam.com/post/quickstart-guide-for-mechanistic-interpretability should be exactly that.
Yeah that's perfect, thanks!
The WAPO recently had an article about children "remembering their past lives": https://archive.is/T6hht
While I find the claim difficult to accept, the article was quite interesting. Has anyone dug deeper into such reports, or has pointers to read more about this? I would imagine this would be some sort of priming at play, but from whom? Other adults in the children lives? Unintentional media exposure?
There is always the possibility that the parents would just be lying for publicity, not to mention the most enticing of all possibilities, of course.
Did you see our reincarnation discussion on open thread 327? Lots of good points were made by all.
https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/open-thread-327?r=7xjun&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=55051665
I somehow missed it, thanks! Many interesting points indeed
more materialist claims of "bloodline memory" in simpler creatures and what that may mean for a "hacker" worldview
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxgTczCIkM8
I'm only responding because of a recent experience I had that is strongly related to this
I was having a coffee (with a little milk giving it a dirty color), which I had unknowingly dropped a cookie in. When bringing the cup to my mouth, the liquid sloshed revealing crumbs, and then when I was like huh, I saw the dissolved cookie and quite literally instantaneously threw up while having a powerful "memory" or reference to drinking dirty water with a dead rat or something in it.
Probably not valid evidence, but I was extremely surprised when this happened and I explored this topic a little bit more but couldn't find anything really related. My low probability guess on what happened is some experience was so traumatic that it got passed down, similar to how there's a natural fear of snakes or something.
Some studies talk about children having super accurate past life memories confirmed by relatives, but methods aren't great. I don't really know.
How could you even test this?
In college I took an anthropology class, and the professor talked about how under the effects of banisteriopsis and psychotria the users very consistently report seeing large cats, raptors, and snakes. Predators, but specifically predators of arboreal species. The specific large cat/raptor/snake is mediated by the user's culture, i.e. the user reports whatever large cat is common in the area where they are from.
This is a common (and unbelievably weird to me) theme with a variety of psychedelic drugs, that hallucinations have highly specific patterns. On jimson weed you think you have dropped a lit cigarette, on salvia you think you are an article of outdated wooden furniture. Can attest to the salvia one on my first use despite having, as far as I know, no prior expectations about it
There was some reincarnation research discussion in the last open thread, funnily enough. Something in the water.
It's a field I'm somewhat (not exceedingly, but somewhat) familiar with. It is very, very difficult to come to certain conclusions about. The obvious skeptical counterarguments fail many real cases -- James Leininger and Kumkum Verma being two of the highest-profile cases, and two that really, really do not cooperate well with the easy counterarguments. It's hard to figure out a plausible series of events for how a little girl in a rich family knows the life story of an illiterate blacksmith's wife multiple villages over, including the names of her children, years before rural people in their country had TVs or other forms of mass media easily accessible to young children.
(This is before getting into suspicious details of less clear-cut cases, like "a girl talking about how she had a past life as a boy but was unhappy and now is happy, the preregistered details of her past life match to a boy in a different village who was known for being exceptionally feminine".)
But, of course, there are reasons not to latch immediately onto the most enticing of all possibilities. Fortunately there are many unambiguous counters to these cases, such as [checks smudged writing, which is blank]
I think, sometimes, that if the body of evidence for reincarnation research supported *any other claim*, we would call it uncomplicatedly true and put it in every textbook. I think this says more about the other claims than it does about reincarnation research. I can't shake off the idea it says something about reincarnation research.
>I think, sometimes, that if the body of evidence for reincarnation research supported *any other claim*, we would call it uncomplicatedly true and put it in every textbook.
I don’t think this statement is supportable. The claim that people’s experiences not only survive the deaths of their body outside all known physical laws but also implant themselves in new embryos isn’t supported by a fraction of the type of evidence typically necessary to establish itself as accepted science.
The claim presumes Cartesian dualism, which modern science rejects. The reincarnation claims of such children as the unfortunate James Leininger also depend entirely on the objectivity/credibility of the parents and children who first report the behavior. And similar to eye-witness accounts of UFOs/cryptids/ghosts, science would prefer theories that do not violate its tested principles to those that do.
Is it more likely that James Leininger’s parents influenced their son’s behavior either intentionally or unintentionally, misreported/misremembered his statements, mistakenly connected their son’s statements to past real-world events that were coincidentally similar…OR that mind and memory exist independent of matter and move by unexplainable means from host to host despite all the evidence that says otherwise?
Not to mention for every James Leininger there are millions of others who do not report past lives.
Anything’s possible, including reincarnation I guess, but there are countless better explanations for the handful of such cases that don’t require us to disregard our fundamental understanding of the world.
The claim does not necessarily require Cartesian dualism. If we consider that our memories are a form of information, what if we pick up information from sources other than our five qualia? Of course, information from other peoples' past lives would require a monolithic model of the universe, time, and causality.
Not reincarnation-related, but it's worth reading, "The Myth of the Decline Effect in Psi Research: The Empirical Evidence"
https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/wd26f
Could you share your source for Kumkum Verma? a quick google mostly turned up dubious websites with no sourcing. People keep referencing a Stevenson who wrote this all down, is there an original paper?
Edit: I did find more on James Leininger, which *was* admittedly weird, but hard to evaluate for implausibility.
Here are articles on the case, it is included in a book by Ian Stephenson but oddly enough that particular volume seems to be missing from online libraries, though it seems you can buy a hard copy of the book on second-hand book sites:
https://psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk/articles/kumkum-verma-reincarnation-case#footnote1_xclx766
Stevenson, I. (1975). Cases of the Reincarnation Type. Vol. I: Ten Cases in India. Charlottesville, Virginia, USA: University Press of Virginia.
https://www.theosophical.org/publications/quest-magazine/reincarnations-white-crow?
The counterargument goes something like this:
1. Memories are modifications in the state of your brain due to perceptions.
2. The brain is not carried over from the supposed previous life.
3. Therefore, memories are not carried over from the supposed previous life.
I assume you agree with 2. To argue with 1, you have to propose some mechanism that allows for all the results of memory research (where physically changing brains changes memories) and also propose a non-physical means of recording information and interacting with the brain.
On the other hand, all you need to explain the positive data is a small number of people either running a hoax or fooling themselves.
In particular, we know that people's consciousness can be radically modified by very small amounts of chemicals, electrical stimulation, and flat-out material damage. And yet now we're postulating that memories can survive the entire brain turning into random piles of matter at death, and _also_ attach themselves to other brains.
"Running a hoax" is *not* consistent with the positive data, which routinely involves people with anti-motive for hoaxes (people who stridently believe religions that exclude reincarnation, people who believe in reincarnation and believe the particular reincarnation suggested by the case would be bad or punishing). There are non-reincarnation explanations potentially consistent with the positive data:
*Sheer, bizarre coincidence. This is not intuitively plausible, but we live in a world with eight billion people. There is a case study of a woman born without a vagina who got pregnant when she was stabbed in the stomach during a blowjob. Events can be weirder than you possibly think, including "children having detailed preregistered recollections of the life of a different identifiable person", without implying a particular cause for that.
*Misrepresentation and cherrypicking, below the hoax level. This is basically intersecting with #1. You'd need a very large body of cases, and for virtually all investigated cases to turn up nothing, but for a small number to be sheer bizarre coincidences. This is generally dismissed given Stevenson's scholarly background, but frankly, "mid-20th-century scholarly background" is not a ruleout for this. If it were the case, it's arguably more likely to have been leaked now than not, but...
Both "sheer bizarre coincidence (cherrypicked or otherwise)" and "reincarnation" are implausible. Weigh up implausibilities. I haven't decided yet.
I think a kid's belief that they had a past life might be akin to their having an imaginary friend. I had an imaginary friend til age 6 or so, and believed she was real. But of course that wouldn't explain the child's knowing verifiable details about a past self's life.
I read that one last night. The most enticing possibility is pretty wild.
I'm repeating here a question I put up very late on the hidden thread: I've never played Magic the Gathering, but get the general idea of how it works. I've read that AI has never beaten the best human players, and is not really suited to learning to do well at the game. Why isn't it, and does the answer have any implications for how smart our present form of AI can become at other things? And if so which things?
Because high-level play basically cant be learned by trial and error. If you pick up a new deck, the first thing you need to do is read all the cards and think about what the intended combo lines are. Propably read a guide about it to make sure you dont miss anything important. Its possible to self-play yourself for years and miss huge parts of the meta because you just never happened to get there. Trying to force this is prohibitively compute-inefficient.
Also the game changes every time they release new cards, so "imitating" approaches without true understanding are out of date before theyre completed, and noone is interested in doing that.
You shouldn't underestimate trial and error. Reinforcement learning was the principle used for the DotA 2 and Starcraft 2 AIs that went on to beat pro players. Yes, a human might never learn to play well even after years of trial and error, but that's because humans play slowly. Given enough computing resources, you can train an AI for the equivalent of centuries worth of play, and then you're getting somewhere.
Well, the thing about DotA and Starcraft is that AI has a huge inherent advantage in reaction times/multitasking. MtG, being turn based, doesn't have that angle.
That being said, if it was less niche, there would probably be enough resources poured into it to make it much more competent.
The SC2 DotA2 AI devs were of course aware of those inherent advantages, and have both taken steps to nerf their bots in that regard to get close to human limitations.
Both bots had been intentionally limited to human reaction times. The DotA bot devs said that reaction times (instant vs human) would only marginally affect win rates anyway. The success rate was mostly explained by teamwork. This blog post describes that restriction and a slew of others the OpenAI 5 operated under; the "no summons" restriction in particular was a deliberate choice to deny the multitasking advantage, not a missing feature.
https://openai.com/index/openai-five-benchmark
The SC2 AI AlphaStar has competed anonymously in an automated SC2 league and has played at Grandmaster level; it had been limited to what humans can mechanically see and do:
https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/alphastar-grandmaster-level-in-starcraft-ii-using-multi-agent-reinforcement-learning/
Edited the post to clarify that the bots are no longer operating or being developed.
AIs would have a slight advantage in terms of card counting and being able to accurately calculate probabilities. But it would take a lot of work before that becomes relevant.
OK, that was my guess about it, as someone who's never played the game. So this seems important to me in thinking about neural network based AI and what it's capable of. Seems to me that any human being of normal intelligence could learn to play Magic, including looking through a new deck and and thinking in a broad way about good uses for a card ("So obviously you can use this to neutralize X. BUT actually you can also use it to neutralize a's, b's and c's, if you do it when Y is in effect."). I get that to use the new cards *really cleverly* you have to be quite smart, but to understand how to use them and play around with possible novel uses and think about ways to use them in combination -- that's just normal human intelligence at work. Lots of things in life are that way -- like figuring out how to get around a new town, or how to collaborate well with a new co-worker.
I believe the limiting factor of "AI in games" is the willingness to throw the necessary amount of money and effort at the problem. While there's probably survivorship bias going on in that failed efforts remain basically unknown in the general public, the known successes are consistently described as significant by expert players and AI researchers alike.
Obvious examples include Chess and Go.
Other gaming examples are
Starcraft 2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaStar_(software)
DotA 2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAI_Five
Poker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluribus_(poker_bot)
These other examples are especially encouraging for MtG because they require a general strategy and possibly teamwork (for DotA 2), the infinite variants of which apparently did not prevent success of the AI system over human pro players.
The lack of a strong MtG AI does not, on its own, imply anything about the limits of AI in general, simply because there has not been the same serious effort to train an MtG AI the same way it has been done for the other games listed.
id bet that nn's have some trouble "word embedding"(king+girl=queen) or "positional value"(a pawn on the 7th rank is more valuable then one on a starting position) the cards
there isnt an internet worth of "grammer" for magic cards so the human concept of "this is a removal","this is a board clear","this is a big body" cant be stolen from reading the whole internet, but using those cards correctly depends on the deck you have and what you predict the opponent has( vs a aggressive deck using a board clear to kill a single minion is probably a good idea, it be a death sentence vs a slow deck)
so given a large amount of cards humans can easily learn such concepts from the card text itself while nn's self play will be relearning the concept for each card may be a very large space and there probably need to be some sort of imposed way for it to learn it, and unlike text or chess there may not be as much fame for solving the problem.
It seems like this comment is assuming that a game AI would be implemented via a large language model, but this isn't generally how game AIs have worked - something like AlphaGo doesn't work by "scraping the internet" and analyzing what people on the internet have said about Go strategy - it has its own model for analyzing positions and picking moves.
I would guess AI is bad at deck building and trying to develop strategies that can handle a variety of situations prior to getting to the game mechanics. I suppose when one “plays against the computer” in the digital version, a programmer has pre-set whatever deck the player is opposing so it’s not technically AI.
Just musing. I’m no expert just played a little bit.
Is AI actually bad at Magic, or is it the case that all the cards are proprietary, so building and training an AI would likely get you slapped with a cease-and-desist ?
I don't have time right now to find again the source I read, but it was a respectable one, and it named several reasons why AI was not suited for the game. The one that sticks in my mind was that there are lots of unknowns and unknowables in Magic. (Of course in all games you don't know what your opponent is going to do next, but there must be some way in Magic in which you don't even know the *kind* of thing your opponent is going to do.)
Sadly, I think this used to be true in the past, but is no longer the case. In tournament play, Magic is now limited to a very small subset of cards, which means that there is a limited subset of decks that you are likely to be faced against. I think that at this point you hardly need an AI (worthy of the name), you just need to count cards :-(
Are you talking about an actual rule limiting cards, or just that there's a small number of meta decks? I can't find any information about an officially limited cardpool.
AFAIK tournament play is restricted to the last N released sets, where N~=3; but admittedly I've been out of the Magic scene for a while, so I could be wrong.
Even if that were the case, you'd end up with a situation where the AI falls apart the moment it encounters a slightly off-meta deck.
Paging Seth, Probably Better Known as SaffronOlive.
Below is what GPT4 says. Maybe it doesn't know about the new set-up in tournament play? In any case, do you have thoughts about AI's problem doing well at the old version of Magic, where new decks come into effect at regular intervals?
Magic: The Gathering (MTG) poses a unique set of challenges for artificial intelligence (AI), making it much harder for computers to master compared to games like chess or Go. Here are some of the reasons:
Complex and Dynamic Rules: MTG is known for its complex rules and the dynamic nature of its gameplay. The rules can change based on the cards played, and interactions between cards can create new rules. This level of complexity and fluidity in rules makes it difficult for AI to model and predict the game accurately.
Hidden Information: Unlike chess or Go, where all pieces are visible and the state of the game is fully known to both players, MTG involves hidden information. Players do not know their opponents' hands or the order of the cards in either player’s deck. This element of uncertainty requires strategies that account for probabilities and potential moves by the opponent, complicating the decision-making process for AI.
Large Decision Space: The decision space in MTG is vast. There are thousands of unique cards, and each has its own effects and interactions with other cards. Players can also choose from a variety of actions each turn, and the sequencing of these actions can significantly affect the outcome. The combination of numerous cards and potential sequences of play exponentially increases the complexity of the game.
Strategic Depth and Creativity: MTG requires a high level of creativity and strategic planning. Players often devise long-term strategies while adapting to new situations as they arise. This aspect of human intuition and adaptability is challenging to replicate in AI, which typically excels in stable, predictable environments.
Continuous Updates and Meta Changes: The game is constantly updated with new cards and sets, which can shift the "meta" or prevailing strategies dramatically. AI systems need continuous updates to their knowledge base and strategies to stay competitive, which is a significant undertaking given the game's complexity and frequency of updates.
These factors combined make MTG a particularly difficult game for AI to master. AI development in this area continues, but it has not yet reached the level of dominance seen in other games.
Some specifics I don't see in there:
The win condition for Magic is more complicated than most games. In Chess, you only win if you capture the king. In Go, you only win if you control the most space. In DOTA or Starcraft, you only win if you destroy your opponent's base. But Magic has multiple ways to end the game. If you lose all your HP, you lose. If you run out of cards, you lose. If your opponent plays certain card combinations, you lose.
The nature of "turns" is more complicated than in most games. In Chess and Go, one player moves, then the other. In Starcraft and DOTA, both players move constantly as fast as they can. But in Magic, play goes around in turns, but certain cards can be played during other people's turns, and can interrupt their actions; there's no clean state of who's moving now.
Your hand is more complicated than something like Poker, where your hand always contains the same number of cards from the same deck. In Magic, you have to have mana to play cards. You get mana from Land cards, but you can only play one Land card per turn. If you don't draw a Land during a round, you're essentially playing a round behind. But if you draw several, you're stuck without playable cards Balancing the number of Lands in your deck to try to control how many you draw is important to winning. Likewise, you have limits on how many of a certain type of card you can include in your deck, but as far as I'm aware the overall number of cards in the deck is up to you. Too many means you don't draw what you want, too few means you run out and lose by "mill". The game begins before the game begins.
Continuous Updates can flat out change the rules. Back when I played, Magic got rid of "manaburn" as a concept. It used to be, if you created mana and didn't use it all, you took damage for every bit of mana you still had left. At some point, they axed that rule entirely.
The answer used the word “creative” and I think that right there is going to be to be the key. It was definitely something that popped into my head.
> Below is what GPT4 says.
Yes, it's very characteristically loquacious, but the bottom line is that hidden information combined with a very large decision space is what makes old-style Magic difficult for even humans to master. I think this is why they made the decision to severely restrict the set of available cards for tournament play: it reduces the complexity down to a few possible "meta" decks, with only minor variations. This makes tournaments shorter and easier to judge; but it also reduces the game play to the point where you can tell which strategy your opponent is using by the time he plays his first (non-land) card; and you can confidently predict the victor by turn 3.
So now I'm thinking, what important tasks that people do are like deck-building?
Maybe system design, in the sense of complex custom software stacks, and maybe in the sense of military hardware procurement (although I have no experience there). You want something that's good enough, and also better than anything else that gets suggested, but there's no optimal solution. You have to identify key problem points, figure out what works there, and build the rest of the system around that. And you have to keep the entire system in mind while you're doing this, because although the components might naively seem to be interchangeable, they're actually not. Everything affects everything else, and changing any one bit can have side-effects anywhere else, leading to more changes, and more side-effects, and so on. If we're lucky, the modules are compartmentalized enough that it's possible to keep the whole system in mind, but if they're not, it's a nightmare.
If we humans had a decent understanding of our own biochemistry, maybe that would also count. And I bet you run into this sort of thing in psychology, too?
any fuzzy knapsack problem probably?
Filling a shipping container with antiques, or other nonstandized goods
My biweekly COVID update here (with some HPAI slides at the end)...
1. Wastewater CpmL numbers are still dropping. In past interwave gaps they've been plateauing at increasingly higher levels after each wave, but they're now on track to fall lower than the previous June 2023 trough. (Given that a recent study indicated that JN.1 sheds significantly more virions than previous variants, this could indicate that SARS2 is circulating at lower levels than the Alpha-Delta interwave gap of June 2021.)
2. New hospitalizations due to COVID are at the lowest they've been for any of the interwave gaps. And COVID deaths are tracking lower than at any time since the first two weeks of the pandemic.
3. COVID dropped to 10th place among natural causes of death in 2023. In previous updates, I've discussed that excess deaths have returned to pre-pandemic levels.
4. In HPAI news — although *fragments* of H5N1 RNA have been detected in pasteurized milk, the virus is not capable of replicating post-pasteurization. The FDA used the “gold standard” egg inoculation & qPCR tests to determine no active virus is in pasteurized milk. But Marc Johnson makes a good point — even though we've dodged a bullet with cattle, H5N1 could become considerably more dangerous to humans if and when it begins to infect pigs. Pigs play an important role in the evolution of new human flu strains. Johnson contends, and I agree, that we need more comprehensive testing of wastewater from farms.
https://x.com/beowulf888/status/1787203012328636868
Many Thanks!
> My biweekly COVID update here
> 2024
its probably time to move on
I actually find it kind of pleasant to read news about covid that boils down to "nothing much to worry about, everything's under control, no need to panic". It's a refreshing change.
How many years is the correct amount to spend worrying about the aftermath of a 100 year flood?
I personally view it less as "worrying" and more as "hearing reassurance that it's fine".
Like, BLM protests were a thing back then, too. And it'd be similarly nice to see a periodic brief report on American race relations, saying "everything's fine, no need to worry, people are being chill". (Assuming that was actually true.)
Dunno, but calling Covid a 100 year flood may be like calling the warm snowless winter we had in my part of the country a hundred year flood. Pandemics are likelier now because of human encroachment on wildlife areas, prob also because of changes in weather patterns due to global warming. Florida, which had a subtropical climate til recently, now has mosquitos and other vectors carrying tropical diseases.
the spanish flu was 102 years before corona and killed plenty
> blaming global warming
what an incredible claim
I didn''t blame global warming for covid, at least did not mean to sound like I did. My thought is that going forward pandemics are more likely than they have been for the 2 reasons I named: human encroachment on animal habitats and climate change. A third factor is more illness becoming antibiotic-resistant.
Au contraire, SARS2 is a fascinating virus! A lot of predictions were made about its behavior and its evolution based on other respiratory pathogens. Most have not panned out. If you're interested in science, SARS2 challenges many of the bedrock assumptions of immunology, epidemiology, and virology — and the assumption that these sciences are mature enough to be predictive.
For instance, we're still waiting for SARS2 to turn into a seasonal virus like other HCoVs that infect humans — but it hasn't. Unlike the flu or common cold HCoVs, COVID-19 waves affect the northern hemisphere and southern hemisphere at the same time.
Another one of the predictions was that the mutational patterns in the spike protein would create new Omicron-like waves. And despite some very high in vitro immune escape values for recent variants, this hasn't happened. Why hasn't it?
Then there's the prediction that SARS2 will evolve into another common cold HCoV. That may be happening, though. Some of the estimates of JN.1's infection rates — if true — would put the mortality rate from COVID-19 down in the territory of rhinoviruses. Unfortunately, I don't trust those models. I think it's still at least on par with influenza and possibly a little more deadly.
If you consider yourself a rationalist, the scientific meta-questions that surround SARS2 are pretty important. Likewise, the media and certain researchers seem to prey upon people's fears. I tell it like I see it. And right now things look pretty good.
> the assumption that these sciences are mature enough to be predictive
Why not take the easy option of "they weren't predictive because they were wrong"?
One aside: there is a really excellent science podcast called This Week in Virology, done by a bunch of academic virologists. They are genuine experts, a mix of working and retired researchers in the field, often interviewing other experts. When covid initially arose, they expressed skepticism that it would ever be a big deal in the US.
This was a prediction by genuine experts who had no reason to mislead anyone. They weren't concerned with creating a panic, because their podcast is hardcore science (like sitting in on a journal club) that will never have a really large listener base. They just honestly got it wrong, because predicting the future is hard.
Well, the whole point is to find out why/how they were wrong, and if we can learn how to make them, ahem, less wrong in the future.
Rainbows are pretty.
According to Abrahamic religions, forever.
The latest in my series of reviews of Eliezer Yudkowsky's "Sequences":
Here, I review the book "Mere Goodness." Shortest summary I can give: I find and discuss two theses that he seems to argue for, find strong agreement with one and less for the other.
https://thothhermes.substack.com/p/where-the-sequences-are-wrong-iv
(Don't be dissuaded by the title, or rather please interpret it literally, I believe I am relatively fair.)
Links to previous installments:
https://thothhermes.substack.com/p/where-the-sequences-are-wrong-iii
https://thothhermes.substack.com/p/where-the-sequences-are-wrong-ii
https://thothhermes.substack.com/p/where-the-sequences-are-wrong
Any resources to get started on data science very generally (with some AI but not only)? At $dayjob we'd like to create a data team in the following year or so, and I'd like to be part of it. I'm currently a software engineer mostly writing go. I guess I should familiarize myself more with python, SQL and stuff like that? Also probably some kind of visualization tools? But the thing I most want to learn about is "how to use data to answer a question". Is starting a random project on one of my interests a good idea? From what I understand, a hard part of data is finding a question worth answering, is this something you can learn about when "playing around" with side projects? Sorry if I'm a bit all over the place, the domain seem vast and I don't know where to start.
I don't know if it's because these people weren't the right fits, or if this topic has gotten oversubscribed in popularity, but I know:
Someone who teaches a data science course at a prestigious college
Someone with a masters degree in data science from a prestigious college who I hired (not for data analytics)
Someone with a certificate in data science form a prestigious college who is looking for a job
Those three people are now: not teaching the class (or any class) anymore, not employed by me, and couldn't even get an interview for a data analytics job after a year and a half of trying and being willing to accept the most entry level positions.
Like I said, it may be more to do with the people than the field, but it's just kind of shocking that this has hit all three of them. If your job needs it and it's interesting to you, probably not a bad idea to pick up an additional skill, but in general I'd be kind of wary of this field.
Yeah, the market for that has been shrinking/we went through a bubble some years ago. Personally, I'm seriously considering it because we will have a need for it at my day job. We do ecommerce and we currently don't do anything with our client's data/behavior, and it's in the medium term strategy to start doing marketing and stuff like that.
it seems like a useless buzzword to me, so probably just take the most credible(or cynically, least) coursua classes for free and pick up whatever vaguely related math skills
It does in general, because I think it had a lot of hype and is a lot of things mixed together. I guess what I want generally is to learn to answer questions with data, and develop a sense of what questions to ask and when.
Im not convinced theres a fixable problem there; "a machine cant be held responsible and so should never make a decision" used to be a phase now its all "lol ai everything"
If you learn how ai's work so you kinda get calculus and could remake word embeddings, great; if you do anything more your probaly part of the problem and while its a coin flip if you boom or bust in the stupid hype market, 99.99 of the cyptro currencies made the world a worse place even from a pro bitcoin perspective; similar rates for social media; why will the ai boom be different in hindsight?
I see no reason not to believe the market is trying to rationalize the ai hype given that nn's are just 60 year old math, and blockchain is to bitcoin as data analytics/python is to ai; someone trying to justify the hype by compromises and the simple answer of "bitcoin is gaining in value because people want drugs online, stop pretending blockchain is better then a gossip protocall", ai hype is "ai girlfriends" have reached a tipping point, math wont make a decision, it wont free people from consequences of decisions(googles black nazis images still was an embressiment)
> I want generally is to learn to answer questions with data
prediction: even this mild sentiment in 5 years will sound like "I want to bring blockchain technology to make help donated food logistics, so Im learning eth and wrote a smart contract"
Yes, playing around with side projects you’re interested is a great way to start. If it’s something you’re interested in it will help you formulate questions.
Summary statistics will answer most questions… regressions and machine learning can help answer more niche/complex questions.
Find a dataset, then think of a good question, then hack away (knowing the more you hack, the more you may screw up). Know the data deeply… scroll through it in excel, know what each variable means, know the distribution of each column, etc. Also know that each question can be answered several ways. Different methods of answering questions often yield different results, and a bad data analyst will pick one that fits what they want. A good data analyst will deeply understand all results and be able to contextualize & present them for decision makers.
Kaggle stuff is pretty good for quick technical aspects of SQL/python for data science… but I have a feeling you’ll be able to pick that up easily. The biggest problem I’ve see with data analysis is people who are technically proficient but are horrible analysts. Not totally sure how to fix that problem, but a book like Data Detective by Tim Harford is a decent start.
Alternatively you could read a case study of someone running through a problem for themselves. For this, I’d recommend Duped by Timothy Levine. By reading that you will come to deeply understand data-driven mysteries and the kind of thinking required to unlock them.
Thank you for that, it helps a lot.
> The biggest problem I’ve see with data analysis is people who are technically proficient but are horrible analysts.
That's the thing I'm trying to focus on, thanks for putting it so well and for the recommandations.
AMA about the Roots of Progress blog-building fellowship. Note that this cohort we have special focus tracks on AI and heavy industry.
I was pleasantly surprised that you included heavy industry; most of this sort of thing seems to be focussed on "we'll all make our living doing something vaguely related to moving bits around" rather than "where do we get stuff *from*? who makes it? how does it get from there to here?"
Atoms are important! And progress there has been relatively stagnant, compared to bits
As I said, I was glad to see it; my initial unkind reaction was "this is more writing papers about writing papers about writing papers".
What level of experience/portfolio is required of your applicants?
At minimum you must have some writing samples that we can evaluate. In the first cohort, we really only accepted people who had not only written something, but had written on the progress-related topic area that they proposed in their application. It will help a lot if you have some published writing, even if only on your own blog, but we will review writing samples sent in Google Docs or whatever.
These seem like they require you to be unemployed or on vacation for the duration. Isn't that tough for someone with AI or heavy industry expertise? It seems like that person would be trading off actually building those technologies
No, the commitment is only 10–15 hours/week, for eight weeks. You can do it alongside a full-time job, and last cohort, several people did.
Is it open to non-Americans? I see it is online, but there is a need to travel to San Francisco at the end?
Yes, last cohort we had four non-Americans. The trip to San Francisco is strongly encouraged but not absolutely required, and we will pay for your travel and lodging.
Thanks!
By the power of AI cost savings, can we bring back Tartaria? I want my marble sculptures of griffins and paladins!
https://www.monumentallabs.co/
(Last I saw, a bust could be commissioned for around $6k and a complete life-size figure for $30-40k, which is much cheaper than other options for marble sculpture. I am not affiliated with this company.)
I'm jonesing for a giant steel Richard Serra-style sculpture installation for my front yard to piss off my neighbors. Let me know when AI can do something like that! But I'm not in the market for hokey Nineteenth Century nymphs with six fingers.
I had to look him up and now I'm torn; while I could understand the neighbours burning your house down if you had one of the rusty iron walls in the front garden, they aren't totally horrible and would work in certain spaces.
They work best in an urban setting. And I agree about the hokey nymphs, there's already too much of that bad garden statuary in resin around.
>Last I saw, a bust could be commissioned for around $6k and a complete life-size figure for $30-40k, which is much cheaper than other options for marble sculpture.
1- Would it be actual marble?
2- That's a fuckton more expensive than what I was previously thinking of in that same space of "go back to 19th aesthetics" (commissioning broke-ass art students to do a full-size portrait in a romantique style pastiche)
Yes, this is for real marble, which is why it's expensive in spite of the savings on the carving process.
But think how embarrassing it would be to have a marble sculpture of a paladin with the wrong number of fingers!
(Or feet facing sideways, or hair turning smoothly into a helmet, or whatever else the AI is going to do to our statues.)
> a marble sculpture of a paladin with the wrong number of fingers
If you and a paladin have different numbers of fingers, it's you that's wrong.
Is this a meme? Because that was laugh out loud funny for me.
Not that I'm aware of? I'm glad you enjoyed it! :)
"But think how embarrassing it would be to have a marble sculpture of a paladin with the wrong number of fingers!"
Think of how awesome this will be if after 50 years society collapses and a few hundred years later a 2nd renaissance occurs! Imagine all the explanations for WHY the paladins had extra fingers or all the other AI screw ups. "The extra fingers indicated their deeply spiritual believe in Diversity, Equity and Inclusion." "No, it was to indicate that radiation damaged mutants were fully integrated members of society." "No, it must have been ..."
It's robots carving the marble. They work from a 3D design that can come from anywhere. If that design was AI generated, then you should check it first before sculpting. It's not as if you give a robot a hunk of marble and just tell it to make a nice paladin please
This comment is going to age wonderfully in ten years.
Maybe enough patents will have expired that we will give a robot a _tank_ of marble ink and tell it to print a nice paladin! Much more efficient than CNC carving.
Maybe in ten years we will give the robots a hunk of marble and ask for a paladin! But not today
I don't think the problem with tartaria is the lack of ability to build nice stuff, I think it's things like nimbyism and HOAs blocking it
There's also just straight up cowardice combined with a lack of functioning societal mores towards public spaces.
There are some buildings owned by a certain corporation near me right now and there's some ugly lumpy modern art sculptures in the plaza between them. There's nothing appealing or even educational about it at all. Why isn't it, like, a statue of the founder of the company or something? J. PIERPONT MORGAN OPENING THE PANAMA CANAL or whatever. The answer is a) online journalists would call it cringe and b) a government-funded mob would pour red paint on it while the police refuse to intervene.
Why (b)?
I'm thinking of the statue-toppling and other attacks on national symbols (or even just minor civic symbols, such as the elk statue in Portland) during the Black Lives Matter rioting, and how it was permitted and sometimes even embraced by city governments. Essentially, if a mob wants to deface something, it's getting defaced, and the government will just stand by and refuse to comment. How long do you think a statue of Jeff Bezos on an Amazon campus in Seattle would last? And of course a statue of Elon Musk doesn't bear thinking about.
Modern art defuses this by being so boring that people don't even realize it's there, and so meaningless that defacing it would actually make it more interesting, and the price we pay for that is a boring, bland civic environment with all the history of a bowl of oatmeal and all the personality and heart of a mental ward.
> And of course a statue of Elon Musk doesn't bear thinking about.
Thank you: my new headcanon is that Elon Musk self-identifies as a rocket.
Hmm... I worked at HP Labs from 1980-1982, and the entrance to the building has two murals: https://www.roadarch.com/17/8/hp3.jpg and https://www.roadarch.com/17/8/hp4.jpg . They are reminiscent of field lines and equipotentials and Lissajous curves and interference patterns. This seems very reasonable to me for an electronics company.
Those are sweet and I strongly approve of them. They were also created in 1960.
J. Pierpont Morgan was one ugly dude. Why would I want to view a statue of his grotesque putz?
As for societal mores, which society are you referring to? A society that's been dead and gone since WWI? Or a mythical Tartarian society?
I certainly don't need any heroic depictions of historical figures. Nor do I need prancing marble nymphs exposing their marble hooters to me while they vomit water.
>J. Pierpont Morgan was one ugly dude. Why would I want to view a statue of his grotesque putz?
Because he built the Panama Canal, of course.
>As for societal mores, which society are you referring to? A society that's been dead and gone since WWI? Or a mythical Tartarian society?
A society where destroying public spaces wasn't universally considered heroic. Such a society has existed within the last ten years. I'm not asking for Tartaria, I'm just asking for basic law enforcement and maybe, if it's in the cards, public officials who don't hate and despise the place they were elected to govern.
>I certainly don't need any heroic depictions of historical figures. Nor do I need prancing marble nymphs exposing their marble hooters to me while they vomit water.
Speak for yourself!
There's a lot to unpack in your response. You seem to be upset about...
1. "modern art" (i.e. non-representational, non-message art) in public spaces
2. the governments that allow and/or fund modern art in public spaces
3. the people who vandalize or destroy art in public spaces
4. and the governments that allow this to happen
5. You also seem to believe that there's been some sort of decline in moral values that allows 1-4 to occur
6. And (implied in your statements) do you believe that your aesthetic values regarding public art are shared by the majority of people?
Before we go any further, have I stated your points correctly?
Before _we_ go any further, you're welcome to drop the smugly relaxed "you seem to be upset" schtick. It's okay to care about things.
With that out of the way, I'm mainly upset about 3 and 4. I will grant that some modern art is pleasant enough, some is actually kinda awesome, but for whatever aesthetic merits it may have it's very hard to make modern art that serves as a meaningful political or social symbol and society genuinely needs those or it will just crumble into an atomized cloud.
As for 5, "decline in moral values" is the wrong way to put it. I don't actually think moral values have declined, whatever that even means, and I am not interested in discussing the subject. I do believe that the quality of governance has declined and precipitously, largely due to governance being taken over by malevolent jerks who hate their citizens and their society. A Long March Through The Institutions, if you will.
As for 6, I think they are shared by enough people that the lack of inspiring art to fill those aesthetic values suggests the market is not clearing properly, and I blame 3 and 4 for that.
Teddy Roosevelt conquering Cuba while riding a bull moose.
Unironically yes.
I don't think it's NIMBY and HOAs - the point of Tartaria is mostly not the quantity but the quality: I don't have a model of NIMBY that says "Oh, you can build a new headquarters, but only if you make it look like a boring warehouse".
And "Whither Tartaria" is primarily about urban and public spaces and not people's primary homes, so HOAs aren't really relevant as all, AFAIK.
That also ends up happening there though - public spaces end up spending all their excess resources on paperwork (and working to be maximally generic and inoffensive while they do it). There's no one with the discretion to try and make a cool idea happen.
So perhaps AI *can* help bring back Tartaria, it just needs to work on the paperwork, not the architecture.
If there were a fixed amount of paperwork it probably could, yeah. The problem is that paperwork seems to expand to fill the amount of paperwork handling we can do.
But could AI produce the Tartarian architectural frills? The ornamental cupids would likely have two penises.
I am looking for employment, as I am increasingly in need of something new. I have years of regulatory compliance behind me and have been successful in most/all of my roles. I am a sponge and pick up on things quickly. Message me if I sound remotely like someone you need.
Did anyone message you? Just curious how effective this is. I am also looking for work: I have 15-16 days off a month as an airline pilot and want to diversify into an entry level python/sql coding or data science type job. Or bookkeeping with xero, or even volunteering some of the above skills to build up a bit of experience and make some connections.
Best of luck. I didn't receive any messages. Then again, I could've marketed myself better.
The mathematically minded or those with a head for facts and figures will always be needed in the Effective Atruism movement, but what about those of us who are just artsy/humanities people? Are we of any use to ER in a professional capacity or otherwise?
Not sure if a perfect match, but there's plenty operations and people-managing roles. Local EA groups are almost always short on PeopleWithTimeAndEnergyToDoThings, so I'm suggest reaching out to any near you (or consider starting one).
To me the fundamental message of EA is that human life, everywhere in the world, present and future is valuable. You can easily imagine works that reinforce that view, that can really create an emotional case for EA that doesn’t really exist yet.
The thing about EA is that it does not engage people's need to give out of a feeling of compassion. I understand that people's need to feel an emotional investment in helping someone does not work as an engine for making a difference -- instead it makes people do things like send money to some one person whose awful story is in the news. But without engaging that need I don't think EA is going to influence many people. Someone in the arts or humanities might find a way to communicate the EA idea in a way that moves people. (It's a heavy lift, though.)
My sense is that EA is a useful corrective to the heartstring-plucking ad showing sad hungry puppies that need to be helped by sending money. But I think it can run aground in the same ways that cost/benefit analysis and trying to apply utilitarianism run aground.
Go and create great art that would inspire mathematically minded people to work for EA causes, of course!
May already be known to this community but if it isn't you should give Stambovsky v. Ackley a read. Possibly the most entertaining judicial opinion ever written.
https://casetext.com/case/stambovsky-v-ackley
"Whether the source of the spectral apparitions seen by defendant seller are parapsychic or psychogenic, having reported their presence in both a national publication (Readers' Digest) and the local press (in 1977 and 1982, respectively), defendant is estopped to deny their existence and, as a matter of law, the house is haunted."
If anyone is interested in other times the courts have had to grapple with the supernatural/intangible in serious cases...a small list:
* Ballard: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/329/187/ which is about litigating the truth or falsehood of a religious claim in a fraud case.
* Hernandez: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/490/680/ which is about whether scientologists can deduct auditing expenses from their taxes which in turn (in theory) turns on whether they receive a "tangible benefit" from the auditing. (note this puts scientologists in the extremely awkward position of arguing they *dont*)
* Tilton v Marhsall: https://casetext.com/case/tilton-v-marshall another religious fraud claim where the (texas supreme) court has to brush up against the truth value of the fraud claims
* US v. Annamalai: https://casetext.com/case/united-states-v-annamalai-3 yet another religious fraud claim. This one comes up in real criminal wire fraud cases all the time. Hindu temple commits some fraud. Government convicts temple owner. Government argues in restitution that "every dollar that was deposited into the [Hindu Temple] was in fact a fraud". Court here finds no, some of the card charges for supernatural blessings are legitimate in the sense that people got what they were promised, whatever that was.
>* Hernandez: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/490/680/ which is about whether scientologists can deduct auditing expenses from their taxes which in turn (in theory) turns on whether they receive a "tangible benefit" from the auditing. (note this puts scientologists in the extremely awkward position of arguing they *dont*)
Love this. Reminds me of a tariff issue a while back, where Xmen figurines manufactured abroad would be subject to a tariff if they were "dolls" - figures made in representation of a person, or some similar definition. Put the importer in the awkward position of having to argue against the core premise of Xmen by asserting, successfully, that mutants are "nonhuman creatures."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toy_Biz,_Inc._v._United_States
>asserting, successfully, that mutants are "nonhuman creatures."
I'm curious; what criterion did they use? If they used "interbreeding with humans", then all of the childfree, myself included, are nonhuman. Shrug. I suppose one could say that...
The wiki article links to the court opinion. https://www.cit.uscourts.gov/sites/cit/files/slip-op%2003-2.pdf
Basically Customs already listed angels and demons as examples of "nonhuman creatures" and Xmen are closer to those than to Barbie.
Many Thanks!
Oh and I forgot this gem from my state, on whether you can compel someone to pay for the cost of a healing ritual after they beat you up.
https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/mn-supreme-court/1226123.html
Involving animal sacrifice, no less!
Fascinating that the dissenting opinion is on purely "caveat emptor" grounds. No "there are no ghosts you doofuses".
Well, it seems to be as difficult to prove the nonexistence of ghosts as their existence. To falsify, you need replicable evidence. What is replicable is the aversion and as well interest of a lot of people to ghost encounters, so that for someone aversive to such things, a haunted house has less worth than one assumedly non-haunted.
This is all silly to everyone sure about the non-existence of ghosts as it was to me before I actually met one. No reason to worry, I still don't consider ghosts relevant except as a possible reminder to live your life right.
That works both ways in this decision; there are no ghosts, but the owner of the house was selling her story about it being haunted, so she's a fraud at worst or loopy at best. The purchaser is equally dumb for being scared off by the haunted house because there are no ghosts. I wonder if the objection was really to try to get the price down?
The courts can't tell people "you are crazy for believing in ghosts" so it had to decide on caveat emptor grounds.
I definitely get judicial restraint, just feel this is a heroic application.
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/322/78/
On e of the wilder experiences in law school was seeing the super smart real estate nerd kid get cold-called on the Stambovsky case. Stambovsky is, more than anything, a case about estoppel. You could replace the word "ghost" in the argument between defendant and plaintiff with literally almost any other word, real or imaginary, so long as whatever-it-is colorably diminishes the value of the property: Gnomes, bear traps, mushroom-people, termites, broken glass, civil war re-enactors, asbestos, foot odor. The point is that you never told me [x] existed in the house, and you went around telling everyone else that, so its not fair for you to presently deny the existence of [x].
You should watch "Miracle on 34th Street" (the 1947 version for best viewing). Minor spoiler: the judge didn't rule as to whether or not Santa Claus exists, at least not without evidence to back the claim.
One of the best parts of the trial was that a key building block to the defense was asserting that the US Post Office was an efficiently run organization because it was large.
But the judge didn't have to rule on Santa's existence. The prosecution conceded the point after the defense called the prosecutor's son to the witness stand :-)
I thought the point of that was that the US Post Office was *authoritative*, without regard to efficiency.
But yes, putting his son on the stand was a brilliant move, which the lackluster prosecutor wasn't able to counter.
He also used that the US Post Office was authoritative. That was critical ("if the US Post Office thinks this man is Santa Claus then he is Santa Claus ..."). But there was a throwaway line leading up to that equating the US Post Office's size with efficiency.
The authoritative slant was genius (for a movie trial/hearing that doesn't need to follow actual procedures). The efficiency argument was just (from my perspective) funny.
Ah, yes:
"Your Honor, the figures I have just quoted indicate an efficiently run organization."
Of course, all such large organizations are efficiently run. Size naturally leads to efficiency.
The recent "would you rather meet a man or a bear in the woods" is a great toxoplasmosis of rage example: there's a reasonable, sympathetic point here (if you want to understand how it can feel to be a woman who's afraid of male violence, try imagining a world where you run into bears whenever you go for a walk - sure they're probably benign but you can't know for sure and it's scary), but then the version that actually gets pushed is the crazy controversial point ("yes literally a bear is safer than the average man") because of how the discourse market and boosting algorithms work.
Having recently stepped on this landmine in real life and been yelled at to shut up until I vacated the situation, I've been thinking a lot about it. The conclusion I've come to is that it's almost inherently designed to cause conflict:
The side I'll shorthand as women present the meme as "isn't it interesting that women would pick the bear--doesn't that say terrible things about the daily experience of women in society?" An empathy exercise and a totally fair point.
But if you squint, the meme looks kinda like a trolley problem-esque thought experiment: which would YOU pick? Is picking one over the other statistically wise? Etc. Catnip to a certain group of folks, usually men. Guilty as charged.
That reaction reads to the first group as "women are stupid for picking the bear," which gets interpreted as men not empathizing with the plight of women. But really it's both sides just talking right past the other, about completely different things.
I just realized that I've read through this entire subthread and _nobody_ mentioned the final scenes from midsommar. Surely an ex-boyfriend being roasted while encased in a bear skin is relevant somehow?? :-)
I'm just going to roll my eyes and respond "why not both?" if this ever comes up. Then have them look up Amie Huguenard, for what happens if you go out into the woods with a man *and* a bear.
A little beside your point, I think the metaphor you mean is "motte and bailey". Toxoplasma of rage is something like: Group A has meme A, which makes group B really angry, they answer with meme B, which in turn enrages group A to do even more of meme A.
No I do mean toxoplasma of rage. There's no one person switching between ideas - there's one crazy version and one reasonable version (geld by different people), but social media incentives boost the crazy version.
As a once-14 year old girl who intimidated two charging Rottweilers into retreating (dogs so aggressive that they had to be shot by the police 2 years later after trapping a neighbor in her car)...
...I can't give a basic answer, because it *ALL* depends on the kind of bear, the kind of man, and what tools I have with me.
Do I have my gun with me? If yes, then man, of course.
If no, then details matter:
Well-fed grizzly or black bear vs strong-looking meth-addict-dude with crazy eyes? Bear.
*Polar* bear vs a strong-looking creepy man who literally declares, "I want to rape you and then strangle you?" Man.
Black or grizzly bear vs slender, diminutive, shy 18 year old man? Man.
In other words, anyone who goes 100% one way or the other hasn't fully examined all the factors which contribute to reasonable and necessary profiling.
Seems to me like asking "what type of bear/man" is cheating a bit ... the mix of what type of man (or bear) there is out there, is part of what the question is asking.
It's like if someone asks "would you rather have $50,000 or an envelope that has a 50% of $0 and a 50% chance of $100,000" and you answer "it depends on what's in the envelope". Well, yeah...
Given the implicit purpose of the question (to convey that women are very scared of men), pointing out that women have reasonable cause to be afraid of SOME men in SOME circumstances, just as they have reason to be afraid of SOME bears in SOME circumstances, but certainly not all men or all bears in all circumstances, I consider it a relevant clap-back against exaggeration (and an argument for profiling, which is good!).
I'll just say that whatever the "implicit purpose" is, I think people have the right to answer the question as asked, and not to agree with exaggeration because of some implicit purpose.
Otherwise, how could you ever be against exaggeration?
"Joe Biden is so old he can no longer speak and is hooked up to an iron lung!"
"wtf no he isn't"
"well the point is that he's old"
I guess the problem is that it's hard to know if someone who says "bear over man" is overestimating the danger of men, underestimating the danger of bears, making some statistical deduction mistake, or not making a mistake at all and consciously saying that the terribleness of being attacked by a fellow human outweighs the actual risk assessment.
Like asking "do you dislike Joe Biden?" where the affirmative answer can mean "yes because he's a socialist", "yes because he's a Zionist", "yes because his policies are great and he's done such a bad job of promoting them", or "yes because I dislike all politicians, even though he's better than all the others".
What a pointlessly vague and uninformative question.
It's not a totally pointlessly vague and uniformative question, because how person answers it gives you valuable information about *them.*
eg, don't even think about dating any woman who unilaterally declares "bear."
This reminds me of that poll that went viral a few years ago where 30% of American adults (and even more English adults), said they couldn't beat a rat in a fight, which can only mean that they are interpreting that question _dramatically_ differently than I would.
Worth pointing out that as long as we're considering all the possibilities, pandas are bears and I would definitely pick meeting a panda over any given man. It's a panda!
This reminds me of a funny bit Louis CK had before he was cancelled in which he told the guys in the audience to imagine that whenever they went out on a date it was with a bear because that's what it's like for a woman to go on a date with a man. "Oh, I sure hope he's nice. Oh, I sure hope he doesn't kill me."
The first and only thing that comes to my mind is the incident where a teenage girl managed to call her mother on her cell phone while she was being eaten alive by brown bears:
https://au.news.yahoo.com/teen-calls-mum-bears-eat-003819620.html
One of the grisly ironies of that case was that it was a mother bear and her cubs.
I haven't been following the discourse, but it occurs to me that bears are normally found it woods and they might not find the presence of a human that interesting. Whereas a human in the woods who encounters another human there is at least likely to greet them.
I had not heard about this "would you rather meet a man or a bear in the woods" thing but thanks for letting me know. Since now I understood a great meme about Proverbs 17:12.
I found it so incredibly funny. Especially because it became an argument about your morals and intelligence
It did lead to a bunch of research about bear attacks, which is something I'm supportive on on general principle
<mild snark>
I assume you mean supportive of a bunch of research, rather than supportive of bear attacks? :-)
I've always liked the bumper sticker supporting the right to arm bears... :-)
</mild snark>
Reminds me of Pistols for Pandas.
Many Thanks! LOL!
Don’t forget your opposable thumb.
I’ve run into it with the bear being specified as a grizzly. Yes more women are killed by men than by grizzly bears.
It’s pretty silly though. A true but meaningless statement. Meaningless at least in the sense of the point they are trying to make.
Okay, that one double posted for some reason, try again.
I wondered how many women were attacked by men in the woods and found this story:
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/woman-raped-over-2-hours-in-woods-1.625840
I think I would prefer to meet a bear rather than this guy.
I agree that the whole thing is dumb, but it did honestly make me curious about the actual relevant odds:
How likely is a random bear encounter in the woods to result in an attack?
How likely is a random human encounter in the woods to result in an attack?
My guess for _both_ is quite low (even for a woman), but I honestly have no idea which is higher.
This is what I keep trying to figure out! I'm not particularly afraid of men, but I also don't think seeing a bear in the woods = likely death. I don't feel like it's as clear-cut a question as many people seem to think.
Not really following the man vs. bear argument at all, but your risk of bear attack depends highly on which type of bear…
If it’s a black bear (all you’ll encounter in somewhere that’s not the Rocky Mountains) you’ll be fine.
If it’s a grizzly bear (which you can definitely encounter in the Rockies), you’re in danger. I don’t know the odds of encounter vs. attack… but every summer around me there are stories of people getting mauled/killed. I don’t hike in grizzly areas in my state without a rifle or 10mm pistol. Yet the odds of being able to effectively counter a grizzly attack are low… if you surprise them or they surprise you, you’ll need a lot of luck.
And if it's a roaming polar bear, you're almost certainly dead.
Though polar bears are larger than grizzlies, they're probably not more dangerous: in the areas where polar bear and grizzly territories overlap, the grizzlies bully the polar bears something fierce.
I assumed the issue is that polar bear's primary food source is large mammals. You are the polar bears diet. It is not a question about how surprised the bear is, its current temperament, whether cubs are near by. You = food is the problem.
If you encounter a polar bear in the Rockies, while you are being eaten you can at least console yourself with the thought that somehow the problem of global warming seems to have been solved.
Most of the tweets were either intentional rage bait or people complaining about the rage bait. In an ideal world both types of tweets would result in a 90 day ban from “For You” for their author but alas, that’s not the world we live in.
...Man, you guys really need to clean up your timelines. You really should not be seeing these tweets unless you actively engage with them.
I always regret opening the For You tab, yes. The You Follow tab is fine.
...Okay, but WHY is your For You tab like that? All I get on my timeline is art and tweets about various niche interests, and also just weird tweets like this one: https://twitter.com/CrisppyBoat/status/1787279190334550473
If you don't engage with stupid tweets and just remove them from the timeline or mute them, they really shouldn't appear all that often.
Is 'rage bait' what we call trolling when we don't like it now?
Maybe "rage bait" is monetized trolling?
Any false or deceiving or intentionally incomplete statement that a person makes for the sake of attracting clicks is rage bait. It overlaps with trolling in many cases, yes.
Maybe I'm missing something, but is the contention that it is actually safer to meet a bear in the woods than a man? Dismissing the possibility that a man might actually help someone, for example, get un-lost?
The quote in the original argument was "yes literally a bear". As presented it's clearly false as a factual question (the per-encounter rate of bear attacks is way higher than the per-encounter rate of man attacks - if you ran into a dozen bears every time you went on a day hike no one would ever go). But it is just provocative enough to get argued over (and just reasonable enough to not be completely insane, since the vast majority of bear encounters really are safe).
It's bad on purpose to make you click.
OTOH there can be reasons to not want something other than the probability of getting killed. I mean, unless it's raining hard I'd rather go to work by bike than by tram, even though I'm like an order of magnitude less likely to get killed on the latter.
The underlying point being essentially blood libel is what I think of as objectionable; “men are best compared to, and probably more dangerous than, unreasoning animals, and it’s only a matter of hunger, breed, and circumstance whether they ignore or callously devour you.”
The quick shorthand here is can you sub either the man or the bear for African or Jew and not come up with a Klan pamphlet.
We're pretty far out of distribution on this one. The evolutionary training data is quite clear on the nature of strange men. Women should fear us, and I struggle to understand why that would cause rage.
Fun related notion, lol into Dan Grossman's 'universal phobia' (human violence). There's something extra terrifying about a fellow human attacking you.
Women should fear bears much more than they fear us. If women aren't absolutely terrified of bears, that's only because they've lived from birth in a world where men have worked very hard for centuries to make almost all bears terrified of anything that walks on two legs.
But not all bears, and by definition the bears you are most likely to meet in the woods are the ones who are less terrified of humans than the average bear. The odds of a random bear encounter in the woods leading to violence are *much* higher than the odds for a random encounter with a man(*). So this isn't a rational assessment of "evolutionary training data", it's just ignorance turned to low-grade click-bait propaganda.
* Yes, 99+% of encounters with bears end without anyone getting hurt. What do you think is the corresponding number for encounters with men?
Precisely my point is that quasi-instinctual responses aren't concerned about actual odds.
There's something deeply scary about humans. A toy example I draw from conversations with more urban youth about why they'd be terrified to go camping (and from conversations with people who did go camping and were terrified by something): skin walkers. Any of the people I had these conversations with would be hugely relieved to find the source of a noise is a bear that garbage, rather than the - very distinctly man-shaped - threat they were imagining moments prior.
Again, Dan Grossman on "universal human phobia".
For virtually all of human history, there was something deeply scary about lions and tigers and bears, oh my. And wolves, and all the rest. For virtually all of human history, *men* were who you turned to when you wanted to make sure someone had your back when there were wild animals around.
Evolution, has been teaching us all, regardless of sex or gender, to be more afraid of bears than of men for all but *maybe* the last two hundred years. And that's not enough time to evolve new quasi-instincts. So you don't get to pin this one on evolution.
Which men, you smarmy fellow? The strange ones from the next tribe over, wearing terrifying paint/masks/headdresses?
The prompt isn't "would you rather encounter a bear or a man to whom you are closely related?"
Not only is it not 'the last few hundred years' this problem goes back to our common ancestor with the chimpanzee. Look up how much of the violence in a chimp's life comes from other chimps.
Gracious, what is it about this topic that has people coping and seething so hard?
It causes rage for the same reason a business refusing to hire a qualified candidate, just because he's black, causes rage. Even if the business cited statistics about !Q, per capita crime rate, etc. they'd still be called out as bigots, and rightfully so. We've decided a long time ago that we shouldn't pre-judge individuals' character by statistics or physical characteristics. And empathy should go both ways. If men should understand why women are extra wary of them, then women should understand how men feel being treated like potential rapists right from the get-go.
Have we decided any such thing? Citation needed, lol. Joking aside, thank you - - I think I understand. Let me see if I can ITT this.
A women being afraid in your presence strikes you as impugning you in some way, as if she is judging you for being defective, deficient, or morally bad - perhaps as though she is assuming you are so hopeless with women that you would need to rape one or want to kill one.
Is this roughly correct?
That feeling is a bit outside my experience - - I'm tall, strong, and somewhat aggressive-looking - and I feel quite confident with women. When someone behaves as if she is afraid in my presence, I feel a spark of what you might call primal appreciation - - she has not been so blinded by politeness that she cannot respond appropriately. For a moment, all the centuries fall away and we are just a pair of hominids. She sees me, and I see her seeing me. The moment passes, and if socially appropriate, I may then set her at her ease with a kindly smile or a good word, but that comes later when we engage our forebrains.
Now, the day will come* when I no longer inspire fear, when age and infirmity bow my frame and women approach me naturally with the spirit of caretaking appropriate to an elder. And on that day I will be as grateful for their kindness as I can be - - just as an old woman being helped across the street by a young man will be grateful, though she still remembers male attention coming her way for rather different reasons.
*Citation needed. We don't all live so long, after all.
I went out to lunch today, and sat down at my favorite cafe. There were tons of men and women around, some in couples, and some single. No one was raping or murdering anybody, and the women seemed to be enjoying themselves (or at least the food). Is it your contention that they should've been afraid -- perhaps too afraid to venture out of their homes into a cafe populated by us deadly male predators ?
> I went out to lunch today, and sat down at my favorite cafe. There were tons of men and women around, some in couples, and some single. No one was raping or murdering anybody, and the women seemed to be enjoying themselves (or at least the food).
Some alternate universe has an Internet where everyone who has this experience posts it, every day that they have the experience. They each upvote their favorite "nothing bad was happening" story. The End.
I get the temptation to write things that are or are intended to be funny on the internet, but does it ----ing -sound- like that's my contention?
Also while I'm not familiar with the twitter man/bear thing referenced by the original comment here, I'm guessing the hypothetical isn't "would you rather there be a bear at the cafe or a male human?"
[edit: typo]
You said:
> The evolutionary training data is quite clear on the nature of strange men. Women should fear us, and I struggle to understand why that would cause rage.
I don't think that the average woman should fear the average man.
You're missing the point. 'Should' in the immediate context of evolution here means that it is healthy and fitting, not that it's bayesian. You should in some sense desire the average woman despite having less chance of being with her than of being mauled by a bear.
Once, in San Francisco I’m walking home. It’s 2am on a busy enough street and a young woman is about 20 feet ahead of me. So far so good. She turns into another less busy street, also on my way home, and so do I. It’s just me, her and a few other walkers. Maybe two more.
She turns around spies me and speeds up a little. About ten seconds later she turns right into a lane where there’s a back way to my block of apartments, which are also, presumably, her block of apartments.
This is a long lane so she will see me if I turn in, the gate is a fair bit away.
I keep walking, do a turn around the block and go in through the main entrance.
I was a bit annoyed at the time, I admit, that I’m “profiled” as being a threat (that is - as a guy, I’m white), and that I’m 5 minutes later to bed, but her fear trumps my slight peevishness.
You should talk on your cell phone, or whistle a happy tune! See here: https://interpersonal.stackexchange.com/questions/6588/what-to-do-if-you-are-accidentally-following-someone
So there was a (now banned) troll who kept asking "why is it okay for women to fear men but not for whites to fear blacks?" in the last few threads, and no one seems to have actually answered him (unless I missed it). So I'll re-ask it here. Why?
This isn't a way of saying there's no difference; I feel like there is a big difference but I can't quite identify it.
(Well there's one enormous difference I can think of, but it's not one that anyone seems to actually care about in these discussions.)
I don't think there's any deep difference between the two cases – it's just that you're from a society in which fear of Africans happens to be taboo. I've heard Japanese people express such fear without feeling weird about it, because they don't have that same taboo.
I think that as always, the answer is sex.
The vast majority of men are normal and well-behaved, and then there is a small fraction of testosterone-driven predators. In contrast, there isn't a "black hormone" which drives black people in particular to criminality.
In a nutshell: Melanin is not testosterone.
You want to get me banned on my second post on this Substack?
Thanks, mate.
Honestly I’d be worried by any suspicious following male or group. Teenagers worry me a bit I think.
But I’m a guy and I’m generally not worried walking around. I used to live in an area where there were lots of drug users, and homeless. Walking down that street was a bit of a chore but not worrying. My female housemate couldn’t put up with it and left. To her it was a dangerous cesspool.
We all experience different cities.
Interesting. Can you describe the nature of this annoyance?
Well mainly it’s the five minute extra walk.
Or a leftist pamphlet, these days.
But the underlying idea of "picture how it feels to be surrounded by probably-friendly but unknowable people much bigger than you by imagining black bears" isn't in itself crazy (so long as you understand it's just a visualization exercise and not a literal comparison). But it's not a coincidence that it's the crazy version of the meme that spread.
I got so hung up on what type of bear they were talking about. If they're talking about black bears, which are generally not aggressive towards humans, I might be able to see the case for preferring a bear to a man. But most other bear types would just be silly to prefer over a man.
Black bears are pretty chill. I’ve often shared the woods with them.
Remember a couple of simple things like not using the bacon for a pillow and you’ll be fine.
To be fair, I’m a dude who would rather see a bear than a human, and the relative danger of each doesn’t even factor into my decision. Neither are particularly dangerous and getting to see a bear in the wild is a rare treat. In the unlikely event it turns into an attack, my bear spray should work on either one. Plus I don’t have to worry whether the bear is going to mistake me for a predator.
Do you hike in grizzly country?
No grizzlies where I live but I have before. Never seen one though.
Gotcha. Even when hiking with a gun I’d much rather see a human than a grizzly. Grizzlies are cool to see… from the safety of a vehicle.
https://www.themeateater.com/conservation/wildlife-management/photos-wyoming-wrestlers-fight-off-grizzly-attack-with-bare-hands
This stuff happens a lot out in places where the annual # of hikers is less than the population of an east coast suburb.
Being armed with bear spray is another variable that the question didn't account for and which would change a lot of people's answers. I would rather see a bear just for novelty's sake if the question were, for example: "Would you rather meet a bear or a man while rolling through the woods in the bowels of a tank?"
I guess that’s a fair point. I just took it as a given because this isn’t a hypothetical for me as someone who spends a lot of time in bear country and has seen a handful of them. It’s just a no-brainer to me to be prepared rather than worried, and I guess I don’t see why women shouldn’t have the same attitude: carry pepper spray to ease your mind, but more importantly arm yourself with realistic expectations and understand you’ll probably never have to use it.
When I see a bear in the wild, I consider myself lucky, and the idea it will attack me isn’t something I even bother worrying about because 1) I know how rare it is and 2) I know exactly how I’ll respond if the situation takes that unexpected turn. I once came upon a couple women on a trail who frantically told me about a bear up ahead, and I realized afterwards my reaction seemed strange to them because they were expecting me to freak out and turn around rather than be like “oh cool let me rush ahead and try to get a picture”. Like the thought literally didn’t even cross my mind til they looked at me like I was crazy.
It's easy (and kinda fun) to get hung up on the details! It's a pretty optimal scizzors statement (despite - well because of - being kinda crazy at face value).
I was getting curious about the state of the election and saw that 538 has Trump leading in all the current swing states (Nevada, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Georgia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina). Lots of commentators say that the polls at this stage of the election are not predictive of the final outcome, and so I went back to see where those polls were at the beginning of May of 2020 and how those compared to the final outcome. In 6 of those 9 states, the leader at the beginning of May went on to win the election. Of the three that reversed, the highest margin that swung back toward the eventual winner of that state was North Carolina, which was polling with Biden 3 points up at the beginning of May. In fact, of those 9 states, 3 out of the 4 that had margins of 3 points or less were reversed by the election results.
So if you were to create a predictive rule based on 2020, that rule would be that a polling margin above 3 percent in May is predictive that the current poll leader will win, but that if it's below 3, there's a 75% chance they will be reversed by the election.
This would put Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania in play for Biden, while those other 6 could be written off as solid Trump states. To win, Biden would have to take all three of those, which I guess he has a 42% chance of doing? (man it's been a long time since my college probability class.)
Oddly, 42% chance Biden wins sounds intuitively right to me.
I know that this approach is woefully short on data and long on assumptions. But I'd be curious if anyone has time and access to data to know what the actual widest polling gap in May to be reversed by election day might be? (say, over the past 20 years)
Edit: Here's the election map I'm using. I gave Nevada, Arizona, Georgia, Ohio, and NC to Trump since they are currently polling with him a greater than 3 percent lead for him. https://www.270towin.com/maps/ALg1z
"This would put Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania in play for Biden, while those other 6 could be written off as solid Trump states. To win, Biden would have to take all three of those, which I guess he has a 42% chance of doing? (man it's been a long time since my college probability class.)"
You need to take into account correlations between the states. Failing to do so is part of the explanation for why Trump's chances to win in 2016 were significantly higher than generally believed.
I wrote up what I think happened (with the polling) here: http://mistybeach.com/mark/math/CorrelationsAreReal.html
So if one were to stipulate that there's a 75% chance that states with lower than 3% margin in May will reverse their winner in the final vote, then it's actually a 75% chance that Biden takes all three since where one goes, all go.
It isn't that simple. Sadly.
You need to take into account the correlation of the three states. The easy thing to do (which is common) is to assume that each is independent (so 0 correlation). Alternately, if we knew for certain that all three would vote identically then we should just treat them as a set and assign all their votes to either Trump or Biden (using whatever odds you think are best).
So, what you need to do is:
(a) Figure out what a good correlation value to use is, and
(b) Figure out the odds that Trump or Biden get some/all/most-of the votes
If you think that the correlation is 1.0 then what you said is true given your assumption. If the correlation is less than 1.0 (and it probably is) then the odds are less than 75%.
The key is that you HAVE to take into account correlations if you want a good result. The reason folks tend to not do this is because it is difficult.
2016 is probably your biggest swing here, though I couldn't swear to it.
Michigan in May 2016: Hillary +10
Final: Trump +0.2
Wisconsin in May 2016: Hillary +12
Final: Trump +0.6
Pennsylvania in May 2016: Hillary +5.3
Final: Trump +0.6
Michigan and Wisconsin had some pretty crazy swings there.
Do you have the numbers for 2012? Almost all the comparison is with the other Trump elections (personality focused). What about the structural comparison with other first-term Democrats?
I don't know that there really are any good comparisons to be found with a first-term democrat, since Trump is essentially an incumbent as well. That's why I think this election is a little harder to predict. Normally the incumbent starts with a big advantage that then shrinks over time as voters get to know the new guy, but I don't think that's going to happen here.
Regardless, here are the 2012 numbers for the closest swing states:
Florida in May 2012: Obama +0.5
Final: Obama +0.9
North Carolina in May 2012: Obama +2.4
Final: Romney +2.0
Ohio in May 2012: Obama +4.9
Final: Obama +3.0
Virginia in May 2012: Obama +3.2
Final: Obama +3.9
So not nearly as much variance there. The biggest was North Carolina and that was only 4.4 swing. I would also expect in 2020 that there is going to be a lot less variance too, though who knows. 2016 was unique I think in that it took a while for some people to come around to voting for Trump because frankly a lot of Republicans didn't like him, but ended up holding their noses and doing it. Nobody is really forming opinions on a new candidate this time around.
2012 was unusual in just how stable it was. That's why 538 was able to give Obama a 90% chance despite only a narrow polling lead.
I’m wondering if the polling differences between 2016 and 2024 are due to batshit small d anti-democratic behavior becoming normalized in those 8 years. God help us if that’s the case.
Thats remarkable. Thanks.
I'm not sure how you're doing the calculation. Overall polling errors is both unpredictable (there's a rule of thumb that it always goes the opposite to what conventional wisdom expects, since pollsters are more likely to not publish weird-seeming results, but even that's not very reliable). More importantly, it's generally highly correlated (the polling errors per state isn't independent, although correlations within the Midwest are stronger than, say, Georgia and Michigan).
I think your bottom line estimate of 42% is about right though.
I should have included this link: https://www.270towin.com/maps/ALg1z
Polling errors are somewhat unpredictable, but also somewhat predictable aren't they? Like, if a poll in May shows a candidate in a state to have a 20% lead, that candidate is probably going to win, right? How about 10%? 5%?
Error direction is unpredictable. Error magnitude is more predictable though.
What's the deal with Nevada? I'm confused because it seems to be a swing state in every election yet it hasn't actually been won by the Republican since 2004.
(Maybe it's just because the Republican hasn't decisively won since 2004?)
> yet it hasn't actually been won by the Republican since 2004
The current governor of Nevada is Republican!
You're just being blinded by a) purely looking at presidential elections and b) ignoring the margin of victory.
So did MA two years ago and I think Vermont does now?
Fair point about the margin, but imagine two hypothetical states: State A has gone D by a 51% margin ten times in a row (always with the same demographics voting the same way) and State B has gone 61% R a few times, then 61% D a few times, with large numbers of back-and-forth vote-switchers. Which one is more of a swing state? (Genuine question, I don't know what the pollsters would say.)
I just feel like polling analysis focuses on a narrow range of factors, but I'm no expert.
Margins are always close, republican won senate statewide in 2012. has a republican governor. republican lost 2022 senate by less than a percentage point... what's the problem?
To be cynical, there may be a tendency of news media to bias their coverage to make their preferred side look good. Taking a reliable state and calling it a "swing state" might help accomplish that.
it took them forever to stop calling ohio and fla swing states, so i would doubt it.
Good point.
I suspect there are quite a few swing states that aren't seen as that swingy because the GOP hasn't won big since 2004. Colorado, New Mexico, Minnesota and New Jersey are all blueish states and likely to be won by Biden but in a clear red year they could be won by either party.
Democrats have barely won it every time, due to a combination of good political groundwork and wide (and, until 2020, growing) margins with Hispanics. but now democrats have been losing ground with nonwhite voters, so they look like the underdogs there.
Thanks, that seems to explain it perfectly.
The college I attend offers a course in modern physics, with this description in the handbook:
"Special Relativity: simultaneity, time dilation, length contraction, Lorentz transformations, velocity addition, rest mass, energy. Blackbody radiation: Boltzmann's and Wien's Laws, Planck's quantization. Photoelectric effect. Compton effect. Atomic spectra. Rydberg's formula. Thompson's and Rutherford's atomic models. Bohr's model of the atom."
Unlike many of the physics courses, this one doesn't have a lab component. Could it? It seems to me at least some of these things -- blackbody radiation and the photoelectric effect -- could be experimented with on a lab bench. And maybe some of the rest could be tested with elaborate equipment.
You could also just test them with some kind of simulation. I remember having physics classes with a computer lab, like detecting how many muons make it to the detector from the atmosphere (they can only last that long because of time dilation). We're not really detecting muons, but it's not like we'd be learning any more if we were.
I'm going to call bullshit on this one. You could code up a simulation so that apples fall up into the sky, inertia depends on color instead of mass, and the world is Galilean (rather than Lorentz) invariant. I'd say `playing with a simulation' tells us approximately nothing about how the world works (unless you take it on faith that the person making the simulation did it correctly, but if you are willing to take that on faith, why not just take on faith that whatever the lecturer told you in class was correct?).
The point of lab isn't to make sure your teachers aren't secretly lying to you. It's to engage with the subject in some way that's not just reading or rote memorization or plugging numbers into equations you don't intuitively understand.
At my college the lab complement to Modern Physics was a separate course (called Physics Experimental Techniques or something), unlike my other Physics classes where the lab/classroom components were more tightly paired (Electromagnetism/Electromagnetism Lab and so on)
It could easily have a lab component. Though with the focus on historic (& now mostly defunct) models of the atom, this seems to be at least partially a history of science course. That might change the approach made when setting the syllabus vs a more applied science course.
Yes it could have a lab component. Blackbody radiation, photoelectic effect and atomic spectra are all things you can measure for yourself in a lab without particularly elaborate equipment. I remember doing an experiment to measure Rydberg's constant as well, though I seem to remember getting an answer far off the actual value!
Is any part of special relativity testable with lab-grade equipment?
Observing muons from cosmic ray showers counts as a time dilation demonstration... ( I'm not sure if one can reasonably see them with e.g. a cloud chamber )
A beta radiation source (with MeV electrons) plus a cloud chamber and magnet will give you relativistic mass.
Does your college usually have labs and theory in the same course? Iirc in my school those would just be different classes.
Typically, yes. There are sometimes provisions for taking just the labs or just the classroom parts, but I think those are aimed at people who failed one component or the other the first time they took them.
Check the course catalog. They probably have a physics lab that covers these things but isn’t technically a companion course.
I have bee reading articles in Apple News (maybe that's the problem and I should stop there), supposedly from reputable publications covering science, reporting on physicists who are investigating ways to exceed the speed of light. Now, let's say it were possible. My questions is, what's the point. Nothing is where it seems--so how do we know where we're going. And what's to prevent us from crashing into a big rock or a big sun or a very big whole in our path since we would not see it in time, cause we are going faster than the light that would otherwise tell it was there. And of course at that speed, it would only take a speck of rock/scissors/paper to cause a disaster.
FTL communication would still be useful w/o humans traveling at that speed
> what's the point
It would revolutionize physics as we know it, and increase the possibility of humanity creating an interstellar civilization in the future. The potential utility is so vast that I'm glad we have people working on it, even if there's basically no evidence that it's possible.
Just because our current spaceship designs aren't up to the job, doesn't mean that future designs can't be.
One "obvious" way to travel from point A to point B in a 3D space at FTL speeds is via a 4th dimension. We don't know how to access it today, but it doesn't mean it's impossible.
Not a physicist, but surely you would be unable to see behind you, rather than in front of you? Speeding along at FTL should make anything you were on a direct collision course with brighter, rather than dimmer, as you'll run into more photons that the object emitted. You can't get hit from behind either.
Furthermore, if you are on a trajectory to hit something, any point further along that trajectory will be be closer to the object than you are now, which means if you can see it from your starting position, you should be able to see it for your entire journey. And anything you can't see from your starting position, or at any point along the journey, can't actually hit you (since it would have to travel faster than light).
I don't see any reason why you wouldn't be able to account for displacement by e.g. comparing light wavelengths from the object as you travel.
There are many issues with FTL travel, not least the fact that it's impossible under our current understanding of the universe, but seeing where you're going seems unlikely to be one of them.
"And anything you can't see from your starting position, or at any point along the journey, can't actually hit you (since it would have to travel faster than light)."
Ah, but other people can also travel faster than light! Which creates a pretty amusing picture where the biggest risk comes from colliding with someone else.
It is the very phrase "the speed of light" that seems to confuse people. We would all be better served to think instead of it being "the speed of causality" or "the maximum speed of information". Electromagnetic waves in a vacuum then move at that speed because, well, there's nothing impeding them from doing so.
The second one accepts this framing, a lot of the mystery around quantum entanglement, black hole decay, Cherenkov radiation, etc. gets a lot less mysterious.
Calling it by what it is--the speed of causality in spacetime--then also lays bare just how inane expending any cognitive effort on FTL travel or communication is.
This is a really good point (I think, since I don't know a whole lot about physics). Calling it "causality" makes things like time dilation so much more intuitive.
If I can ask a physics question in a non-physics manner: which is ontologically primary, the speed of causality or the fact that light travels at that speed?
Does light travel at the speed of causality, or is it the speed of causilty because light travels at it?
It's been a while, but I think all we really know is that there's this speed, which appears to be the fastest that anything can travel. And pyroclasts is right, in that there are enough things that travel at that speed, that it's more parsimonious to just think of it as a fundamental limit of the universe. Calling it "causality" makes as much sense as anything. Light is merely the first thing observed to travel at that speed, so that's what we happen to call it in common speech. I don't think we really understand the effect enough to talk about ontology, outside of the context of a particular theory.
Stephen Wolfram came up with a cool but weird theory of everything, which I'm not qualified to comment on (other than it being "cool" and "weird"). As far as I can tell, it does answer your question by saying that the speed of causality is ontologically primary.
https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/04/finally-we-may-have-a-path-to-the-fundamental-theory-of-physics-and-its-beautiful/
A possible solution in science fiction I've read is an ice plow on the front of a spacecraft. This acts as an ablative layer in case of collision and can be easily repaired by applying liquid water. Of course this only protects from very small masses and presumably the spacecraft would have to slow to sub-light speeds anywhere in the vicinity of a stellar system. Although I think that was actually for near light speed travel. How fast do you need to go for a stray hydrogen atom to be a hazard?
This is almost certainly SCIENCE rather then ENGINEERING. If some physicist can come up with a theoretical way to exceed the speed of light (that was generally accepted as non-bogus) this would be very interesting to the science crowd. Among other things, it might point towards "new physics."
Which publications? (Or link to the articles?)
Introducing physical warp drives
Alexey Bobrick and Gianni Martire
Published 20 April 2021 • © 2021 IOP Publishing Ltd
Classical and Quantum Gravity, Volume 38, Number 10
Citation Alexey Bobrick and Gianni Martire 2021 Class. Quantum Grav. 38 105009
DOI 10.1088/1361-6382/abdf6e
Breaking the warp barrier: hyper-fast solitons in Einstein–Maxwell-plasma theory
Erik W Lentz
Published 9 March 2021 • © 2021 IOP Publishing Ltd
Classical and Quantum Gravity, Volume 38, Number 7
Citation Erik W Lentz 2021 Class. Quantum Grav. 38 075015
DOI 10.1088/1361-6382/abe692
New Post: Intelligence, A.I. and analogy: Jaws & Girard, kumquats & MiGs, double-entry bookkeeping & supply and demand, https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2024/05/intelligence-ai-and-analogy-jaws-girard.html
I’m interested in the general question of what it would mean to say that an A.I. is more intelligent than the most intelligent human, something like that. That’s an issue that’s being debated extensively these days. For the most part I don’t think the issue is very well formulated.
To be honest, I don’t find it to be a very compelling issue. It doesn’t nag at me. If others weren’t discussing it, I wouldn’t bother.
The notion of intelligence itself is vague. I rather expect that as A.I. becomes more developed, we’ll develop a more sophisticated understanding the issue. The general notion seems like it can be captured in a simple analogy:
Intelligence is to a mind’s capacity for dealing with cognitive tasks, such as finding a cure for cancer
AS
Horsepower is to an engine’s ability deal with mechanical tasks, such as the acceleration of an automobile.
But I don’t want to take up the general issue in this post. Rather, I want to look at analogical reasoning. I start with 1) a specific kind of analogical reasoning, interpreting narratives, 2) use some remarks by Geoffrey Hinton to move to some more general remarks, 3) move on to another specific example, an analogy between double-entry bookkeeping and supply and demand, and then 4) conclude by wrapping things up with a comparison to computing chess, which can be implemented in well-defined search space, while analogy cannot.
I wonder if the GPT-N responses would be improved if a billion instances of
"<collection of random words> This is gibberish." was added to the training set...
edit: BTW, FWIW, I just tried a simple, _bounded_ analogy test on GPT4:
>Of these four things: Fourier series, Taylor series, Asymptotic series, Maclaurin Series, which two are most closely analogous and why?
and it _did_ pick the right choice out of the 6 possibilities, Taylor/Maclaurin, and for the right reason, Maclaurin being a special case of Taylor https://chat.openai.com/share/1f6ad5cd-307c-42a9-a087-3745d6740910
Sometime predict-the-next-token _is_ enough (though I've seen GPT4 fall on its face often enough...)
The AI argument on mimetic desire is really bad - in fact it clearly doesn't understand what "mimetic" mean here. Hunger is like the archetype of non mimetic desire.
Some would argue that there is no non-mimetic desire.
That wouldn't make the AI arguments any better because it would still need to explain how those desires are mimetic - what is imitated here. It is not arguing there is no non mimetic desire, it is arguing as if the Girardian concept of mimetic desire was exactly the same thing as the layman definition of desire.
I decided to check that paper in which I wrote up my interaction with ChatGPT and discovered that I'd called in on that very point. So thanks for the catch. I've revised my post. Here's the text that goes after the quote from Chatster:
The second paragraph is reasonable, but the third is problematic. Hunger is not mimetic on the face of it. But I was happy that it ChatGPT seemed to at least have some idea of that nature of the reasoning required and where to look and what to look for in the film. I decided not to pursue that and I turned my attention to sacrifice, first Girard, then the application to Jaws.
IMHO to avoid rehashing old arguments, any discussion on "what it would mean to say that an A.I. is more intelligent than the most intelligent human" should start with reading at least Legg&Hutter 2007 on what does intelligence mean. ( https://arxiv.org/abs/0706.3639 or the deeper discussion at https://arxiv.org/abs/0712.3329 - TL;DR "Intelligence measures an agent’s ability to achieve goals in a wide range of environments" is their proposed crude summary but with much more nuance in the papers); there are obviously newer aspects raised by what we see from machine learning advances since that, but the summary of Legg&Hutter is the basis to properly understand the context in which e.g. those Hinton's statements were made.
That crude summary has been kicking around in one form or another for decades. As I indicated above, I'm not interested in the general case in my post. My remarks are confined to a specific kind of reasoning, analogical reasoning. Why analogical reasoning? For one thing, that's what those remarks by Hinton are about. Judging from his remarks, he hasn't done any serious thinking about analogical reasoning.
I think AI and human intelligence cannot really be compared. AIs "think" algorithmically, but humans don't. Consider: stupidity is a state of being which everyone experiences, but not all the time. One aspect of intelligence is how often one is stupid, but that says nothing about the heights true intelligence can attain.
Because sometimes (non-political) controversial items need that uncomfortable inserting into polite conversation. https://blockedepistemology.substack.com/p/vannevar-bush-and-the-program
Anyone who knows who Vannevar Bush is (his autobiography was re-printed by Stripe Press in 2022) will probably be interested in this; context is UAPs
"The wheels of justice..."
The mills of mods, surely..
The Scales of Scott
Perfect
Consider a 5x5 chessboard: https://i.imgur.com/qlwuFJd.jpeg
You're tasked with placing N chess knights and bishops on it such that pieces of the same kind don't threaten each other (for example, knights can't threaten knights, they can threaten bishops). Also, bishops are "see-through", unlike in real chess: you can't place two bishops on the same diagonal with a knight between them.
You can decide how many bishops vs knights to place, as long as the total is N.
Can you solve it for N=17? (easy)
Can you solve it for N=18? (hard)
Some selected N=17 solutions:
kbknk
nknkb
knknk
bknkn
knkbk
-----
kknkk
knnnk
bbbbb
knnnk
kknkk
-----
bkbkk
knbnk
nknnn
knbnk
bkbkk
-----
kbkbk
nknkn
knknk
nknkn
kbkbk
-----
kkkkk
bnnnb
bnbnb
bnnnb
kkkkk
-----
kkkkk
bnbnb
bnnnb
kkkkk
bnnnb
-----
bknkk
knbnk
bknnb
knbnk
bknkk
I've got this sneaking suspicion that the wording of your "can you solve it for N=18" is to conceal the answer being "no". But I'm not going to try proving it.
The fact that you can get 8 and 13 as the maximum for each kind of piece individually makes me think there has to be some combination where you just lose 3, as in 8+13-3=21-3=18. Would be weird if there is some iron law that one has to lose 4 if one combines the two maximums.
Didn't mean to be disingenuous. The solution for N=18 exists, there aren't any tricks or ambiguities it exploits, it works in the same way as the N=17 solutions, it's just damn hard to find (in my opinion).
That was a really fun puzzle, thank you! The 18 solution naturally falls out when you consider the maximal configurations for the bishops and what space that might leave for the knights, which is the most interesting kind of puzzle IMO. (As opposed to brute force puzzles, which are often still fun)
You mean knights are "see-through".
17 was easy, lets see if I can also do 18
Right, I guess bishops are "seeing-through".
Just finished Annie Jacobsen’s “Nuclear War A Scenario”. And it strikes me as sensationalist fear mongering propaganda. I read this article
https://aldhissla.substack.com/p/questioning-the-nuclear-weapon-narrative
And it has me questioning the whole idea of nuclear weapons. Apparently Carl Sagan was so passionate about nuclear disarmament he helped push the idea of nuclear winter an idea many consider a gross exaggeration apparently.
So, the governments of the United States, United Kingdom, France, Russia, China, India, Pakistan, and North Korea are all participating in the *same* conspiracy, and it hasn't leaked yet? Pull the other one.
If nuclear weapons didn't exist, the United States would be the first to claim so - with our level of conventional military supremacy, we'd be able to basically rule the world. Want Russia out of Ukraine? That happens by mid-2022, possibly with Vladdy P cruise-missiled out of his corner office in the Kremlin. Or maybe we keep up the lie, but give Ukraine the fighter jets and deep strike weapons and whatnot, all up front, then tell everyone how badass we are because we stood up to the full threatened might of the Russian Nuclear Arsenal and they backed down.
This is not what we see, because this is not how the world works. Nuclear weapons are very real, and very powerful, and there are still thousands of them that work.
The United States can cruise missile Putin anyway, nuclear weapons aren't as scary as you say. Most of them are probably duds and a few blown-up cities can easily be fixed up.
Sigh. It is possible that "most" of Russia's nuclear weapons are duds, but if so that means more like 60% and definitely not 99%. And it's probably not even 60%.
What is left, would do more than just blow up a few cities, and would cause damage that will not be fixed in your lifetime even if you aren't one of the casualties. A full-scale nuclear war with Russia today would be the single most catastrophic event in the history of human civilization. That threat is real, and it really does constrain our range of actions.
Most American ones too. Why bother making 10,000 warheads if you can just make 500 and pretend about the rest.
Cities don't matter and the damage radius is small. The important stuff will survive. There will be plenty of food (can't bomb farms) and plenty of oil and goods because its all distributed. Sure a few offices will get destroyed but the productive stuff will be fine.
>So, the governments of the United States, United Kingdom, France, Russia, China, India, Pakistan, and North Korea are all participating in the same conspiracy, and it hasn't leaked yet?
And Japan!
Very, very much agreed. The world would look extremely different if nuclear weapons didn't exist.
Definitely not endorsing any conspiracy theories about nuclear weapons, but for what it's worth, I've done a bit of research into this book and author after she came on Dan Carlin's podcast and have been unimpressed by what I've found:
* She's the subject of a Snopes page from 2004 - https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/terror-in-the-skies/ - she encountered suspicious behavior of a group of Middle Eastern men and and claimed this was a terrorist dry run wrote a book called "Terror in the Skies" about this incident, arguing that this shows that 9/11 could happen again. Meanwhile undercover air marshals reported that she overreacted and could have caused a dangerous panic. (Also enjoyed this writeup: https://www.salon.com/2004/07/21/askthepilot95/)
* Another book of hers is on Area 51 and from what I can tell (e.g. this review https://www.npr.org/2011/05/17/136356848/area-51-uncensored-was-it-ufos-or-the-ussr) based on sources like "a guard who says he used to work at Area 51" seems to allege that the Roswell incident was a Soviet hoax, created by putting human experimentation victims in an actual flying saucer and crashing them in the desert as an opening shot in the Cold War.
---
These two points do not paint a picture of a particularly level-headed "follow the evidence where it goes" reporter as much as someone prone to jumping to dramatic conclusions based on limited evidence.
So yeah, "fear-mongering" seems like an uncharitable-but-not-inaccurate adjective here. Arguably it's intentional: the point of the book is not necessarily to describe the most likely outcome but a (to the author) plausible worst-case scenario.
And maybe "fear-mongering" around nuclear weapons is a good thing (this seemed to more-or-less be Dan Carlin's take: he thinks we, as a general populace, don't think about the nuclear question enough)... but I think it'd be more convincing if it came from a more credible source.
This is one of the more interesting conspiracy theories I've heard of, especially since if it were true, it would be great news.
And if I knew it to be true, I would definitely keep it a secret, since the results of the hoax are so obviously salutary.
I'm sure you realize that this comment looks like just more trolling with conspiracy theories, like that flat earth flirtation that got you banned(?) a few months ago (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-310/comment/46863432).
On the off chance that you're sincere, however, I'm curious about how you think about epistemology. How do you decide who's credible, and who isn't? Is it mostly about what "strikes you"?
Also, would you rather have a contrarian belief that turns out to be 90% wrong, or an extremely common belief that is 90% right?
I wonder if this isn't our old friend Marxbro working under a different handle?
Something about the sentence structure reminds me of Marxbro, but the attitude seems completely different.
I only did a cursory look through the old threads because it wasn't worth a deep dive, and I didn't find the specific post, but I vaguely recall this same guy being here with the same "nuclear weapons aren't real" schtick some months ago.
I think I even made the same joke about hamsters.
Well naturally I’m concerned about the reality of the situation, but like the average American I’m not really in a position to verify things a conclusively as a high level academic or government functionary. I like to consider what strikes me as the more likely or plausible and then poke around the internet and ask ppl that might be more qualified to comment. But if you read books by Annie Jacobsens and others you know the government has been deceptive about a lot of things and the scenario described by Annie just seem to outrageous to be plausible.
As you know, it is possible to think that Annie Jacobsen is being hyperbolic without "questioning the whole idea of nuclear weapons".
And so I'm not convinced that you are sincerely concerned with the reality of the situation, as you don't give so much as a nod to something on the other side of the epistemic ledger. You just seem to get a kick out of spreading manure.
But let's spend a few seconds examining the idea.
There were survivors/eyewitnesses at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, so they'd have to be mistaken or lying about what happened, I guess.
Also, many of the most respected scientists of the 20th century worked on the Manhattan Project (no less than 31 Nobel laureates involved, according to this https://bit.ly/3UqXqo5). Why would, say, John von Neumann, Enrico Fermi, Richard Feynman, and so many others go to their grave with such a lie? Possible, yes. Plausible? Surely You're Joking, Mr. Catholic?
Also, the USSR getting the bomb would have to have been fake. Why would the US give them that power? And not just them. They have gone along with the lie that North Korea, China, Pakistan, and India are already nuclear powers? They have practically announced that they will give Iran that same power?
It *could* happen, of course. But how plausible is it?
And what was Castle Bravo all about? Just a fake f**k-up?
Maybe … But what strikes you as more likely or plausible?
I, for one, am willing to entertain the idea that Aldhissla, the germ theory skeptic, may not be perfectly informed about what one should expect a nuclear ground zero to look like in old photos, despite their presumably vast dataset.
>Why would, say, John von Neumann, Enrico Fermi, Richard Feynman, and so many others go to their grave with such a lie?
Not to mention the military and political chains of command for the Manhattan Project and the operational decision to drop it. Also, everyone on the Japanese side who would have had to have been in on the cover up, too. Hideki Tojo, for example, would have had a pretty good idea what state Hiroshima and Nagasaki were in right before and after the bombings and whether or not there were enough bombers in the air to do that much damage with conventional weapons. If he thought there was anything fishy about it, he went to the gallows without saying anything.
Also the population of French Polynesia, who apparently are being seeded by the French government with increased rates of cancer to cover up the fact that there was no nuclear testing done there
Imagine trying to warn ppl about MKultra in the early 60s. An intonational government mind control program doesn’t seem plausible until it is actually discovered.
I won’t engage more unless you answer the questions about epistemology: How do you decide who and what to believe?
If something seems plausible and if ppl I know with a track record of honesty that’s usually who I go with. But with a lot of this sort of thing nuclear weapons, MKUltra, moonlandings and so on we are dependent on a government that often lies. A commenter above acknowledged that the Soviets were faking pictures and film of Stalin. Why wouldn’t they fake nuclear weapons tests? And why would the states do the same thing?
I find the SubStack article to which you link far less credible than the carefully researched Jacobsen book. It is a terrifying book. It is understandable that one would seek reasons to discredit it, to convince oneself the outcome is not possible, to reduce helpless fear.
Pragmatically, if concerned, I would move to the Southern hemisphere now.
I am personally only unconcerned because I am 68 and consider every day a gift, albeit a gift containing chores. I would bet there is a more than 50% chance I will live to see nukes used, most likely in limited fashion, unfortunately.
Elon Musk is right to aim for Mars and he and others were right to develop AI, even with concerns. The sooner we have enough people to permanently maintain the species off Earth, the better. The sooner this becomes a moot point because we are replaced by our artificially created, super-intelligent progeny, the better. Which will come first, if either?
Hopefully this book will encourage our world "leaders" to communicate more cooperatively and effectively.
Wait? Is this saying nukes don't even exist? That's a wild claim.
Nuclear plants secretly hamster-powered.
Giant space hamsters.
Nuclear power is obviously real the question is about whether or not nuclear weapons exist.
My grandfather was a newspaper reporter who was at one of the early tests. There was a giant explosion. But I suppose it could have been faked.
Last time he came out with this nuclear weapon conspiracy the actual son of Richard Feynman responded to him in the comments, pointing out all the ways his argument was flawed. He still didn't listen.
Okay, so here's a little trick. If nuclear weapons are not real, think of how many people would have to lie about it:
- All the American military and scientific personnel involved in the atomic weapons program.
- Oppenheimer, as he tells Congress that there's no way to find a nuclear weapon smuggled in via storage container other than with a screwdriver. So Congress is being lied to, or the contents of Congressional
- France, who also has a nuclear weapons program (fake).
- The UK, who also have a nuclear weapons program (fake) and spend a bunch of money on nuclear submarines.
- The Soviet government, who faked their nuclear weapons, and then the historians who were allowed to go through the Soviet archives after the fall of the USSR, who would have read about the fake nuclear weapons.
- The Ukrainian government, who gave back their fake nukes, and currently has every incentive to blow the whistle.
- Saddam Hussein, who had a nuclear program that was scuttled during sanctions and who was invaded and eventually killed on suspicion of having reignited it.
- The government of North Korea, who knows nukes are fake but convinces everybody to go along with their claims of having one.
- All the Soviet and Chinese scientists who "collaborated" on the Chinese nuclear program before the Soviets withdrew and the Chinese had to finish the job on their lonesome.
Now I think at this point, either we are in an Assassin's Creed scenario where literally anyone of any interest or import in history, ever, is part of the conspiracy, OR nuclear weapons are real. The former case is brain-in-a-jar stuff, if the conspiracy's that good then you're going to live the rest of your life without ever stumbling on any significant evidence, and you should discount any "evidence" you see on the presumption that the conspiracy wouldn't leave it lying around. The latter case is the universe we actually live in.
I would say nuclear weapons are also obviously real. We've detonated multiple such bombs, twice on cities. There are people who survived them and can explain how they differed from conventional firebombing. This is basically on the level of flat-earth and indicates your skepticism is miscalibrated.
Indeed. The lack of a "bald spot" in Hiroshima is a particularly weak point, since Hiroshima was an airburst. Airbursts are calculated to do "enough" damage over a wider area, as opposed to groundbursts which are designed to make a big crater and do as much damage as possible to a particularly hardy target. Especially with a relatively small nuke like the ones employed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, you're going to mostly see the same kind of damage from an airburst as you would from a large-scale conventional bombing raid.
You can make a pretty strong case for the dangers of nuclear war being somewhat overstated to the effect that there are nowhere near enough nukes to literally sterilize the Earth's surface and very probably not enough to utterly destroy industrial civilization, but that's a very different claim from the one the liked argument is making.
From the comments here, I've decided I'm not going to read either of the original linked items, but I do actually think that the risk of nuclear war is very overstated _in the popular press/media specifically_. My understanding is that we can quite definitively say that the total human nuclear arsenal, at this or any other time in history, _can't_ sterilize the earth (and has never been particularly close to large enough) and are even quite unlikely to render _humanity_ extinct. Knocking us back to pre-industrial times is _maybe_ possible but would probably have to have that as an explicit goal in any nuclear exchange rather than "do as much damage to the Americans/Soviets as possible".
My understanding is that there is also at least some scientific disagreement over the likelihood/severity of a nuclear winter scenario.
However, if the linked blog is arguing that nuclear weapons are not even real, that is some really wild shit.
It links to a few very interesting books questioning the Hiroshima and Nagasaki narrative
https://archive.org/details/Hiroshima_revisited
By a German medical doctor and
And a book questioning their very existence by a professor of applied mathematics
https://www.fakeologist.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Death-Object-Exploding-the-Nuclear-Weapons-Hoax-by-Akio-Nakatani.pdf
It’s about more than a lack of a bald spot. A lot of the footage from nuclear tests in Soviet tests appear to be fabricated. And some of the science seems to be questionable. Why haven’t any terrorists used a nuclear weapon? Apparently they can be made the size of a suitcase. There was a Twitter thread not too long ago that said ICBMs with a live nuclear warhead has never been tested.
https://rumble.com/v3oa2tm-the-nuclear-hoax-nukes-do-not-exist-full-3-hour-documentary.html
The Soviets faked a lot of pictures and film of Joseph Stalin. Does that mean that Stalin didn't really exist?
No but it proves we should be extremely skeptical about anything they tell us or what gets “accidentally” leaked.
Making a nuclear weapon is very difficult and beyond the means of non-state terrorists. You might as well ask why anarchists didn't build their own dreadnoughts in the early 20th century.
So what, North Korea and Iraq and Iran are just wasting their time trying to make nuclear power/nuclear weapons? Every major country in the world has its foreign policy oriented around the fact that other countries are known to have nukes, despite knowing themselves that actually their nukes are fake?
This claim is just so wild and implausible that it really needs no refuting.
My friend liked to say when we were young that bears didn't exist. That they were robots or something. His point was that we can make wild silly claims about anything and make others prove to us all over again that we're wrong. But we really don't need to do that. It is not worth our time.
I wonder how India and Pakistan came to each agree that the other had nuclear weapons.
Or why Israel risks war with Iran by assassinating Iranian scientists if they can't possibly produce a nuclear bomb.
Because most ppl are convinced they are real even most ppl in government. It’s a convenient kabuki that helps control populations and generate millions.
Bears are just much easier to verify. The footage we have of so called nuclear tests mostly appear to be fraudulent.
"Appears" to you, a highly unreliable person who was going on about flat-earth earlier.
A modern microprocessor is smaller than a suitcase but it requires lots of high tech equipement and very well-trained people to make. Terrorists couldn't do it.
What thing (or experience or relationship) gives you an unexpected amount of joy?
Attending mass, especially in one church. After few experiences I still don't expect the joy to be repeated, but it has been.
Fresh sheets on my bed.
Experience:
There are a couple of seeing-counterintuitive-predictions-with-my-own-eyes experiences that I've had. The single most striking and sfnal needs a little explanation. We've all had the experience of blocking a beam of light, and we see the light impinging on the blocking object. I had access to the resonant cavity of a laser, and I had the opportunity to block the optical feedback path with my hand. I saw the light absent from _both_ sides of my hand, confirming with my own eyes that it was truly an optical feedback loop.
Not "C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate", but not a mere lineal descendant of a caveman's fire either.
A more prosaic, yet still striking example: Watching a magnetic stirrer, designed to spin a magnetic stir bar within a flask, spin a _non_magnetic piece of aluminum foil, due to eddy currents in the foil.
edit: One other prosaic answer: Just doing a simple titration, watching a beaker absorb milliliter after milliliter of an alkaline solution with no visible change, then seeing a single drop dramatically change the color of the entire solution. A situation where there really _is_ a single right answer, not a fuzzy mess of sort-of this and sort-of that and arguably the other thing.
Defecating
*!!!FINALLY!!!* sneezing.
When Costco restocks a favorite item I'd resigned myself to having been discontinued.
Driving my car past bus stops.
The second verse of this song: https://youtu.be/zeZAtpelckU?feature=shared
Seeing towering mountains 30+ miles away
Sitting outside drinking beer with friends of many years
Looking at my lawn after I mow it
Seeing new calves (as in young cows) run around
Happens quite regularly with music. Not a very original point, but it does it.
Homemade apple compote. Someone asking me to pray the lauds or vespers together.
Cats, esp. blissed-out ones asleep in a ridiculous position or late-night zoomies cats.
Very much agreed!
Here are my 2 guys: https://imgur.com/a/L81bxaw
Many Thanks! They are beautiful, and look adorable cuddled together like that.
One of my cats is being a real asshole lately, wanting his breakfast as soon as it begins to get light. Fine in December not so much approaching the summer solstice.
He’s now into opening my nightstand and stealing small items as cat toys to get me out of bed.
I’m thinking of putting a portrait of Kristi Noem on it. That’ll scare him.
I have a solution to that that works pretty well: I never give my cats their morning food til I've been up and around for a couple hours. Don't worry, he'll find other ways to be an asshole. One of mine knocks any objects small enough to push off the surface they're on. After they fall he sits for a minute staring at them on the ground, I guess thinking "wow, that was a good one" then goes hunting for the next thing.
They all get into their share mischief. They’re lucky they are so lovable overall.
Jank. Things missing the mark, but not by so much that they need correcting.
Also coffee. The precursor to jank.
What is jank?
Anything that's obviously wrong but unimportant. You grab a grocery cart and the wheel wildly spins 360° around its screw, without actually stopping the cart moving. You play a turn-based game and the camera moves slower than the characters so you get hit before the camera arrives. Two people bet on how a word is pronounced and run it through a speech program, only to misspell it and get a completely different sound. You read a poem that looks like it should rhyme and then it not only doesn't rhyme, it doesn't even attempt to relate to itself.
Today I had my blood drawn, but the doc had to undo their preparations because I've had fainting problems in the past, and we had to move to a chair that reclined. But the reclining chair was right next to the wall, so the doc had to squeeze into the corner to get to my arm. So she decided to undo her preparations again and use the other arm, which wasn't against the wall. But apparently that arm has no blood in it, or like, stealth blood. So she undid her preparations again and went back to the "squeezed into the nook" plan, but brought in a second person to hand her stuff. And it was possibly the best medical appointment I've ever had.
I didn’t say I would die if I didn’t have coffee. I said *someone* would die.
I have to fast for a blood draw this morning. It's been six hours since coffee and I can feel the seconds crawl by.
When my child is thoroughly enjoying something I also enjoy. Also her fits of laughter.
Sports. I don't do much, because I'm not fit enough, and I don't like the competitiveness or the culture of it. But when I do a little bit of some sport, I find myself grinning like an idiot. Dancing, too, though I'm usually unable to enjoy it because I'm too uncoordinated.
If students tell me they liked my lessons. Pure bliss.
Thing: cars and computers, especially new ones.
Experience: Writing programs that are "meta" in some way or another: compilers, interpreters, even something as simple as a small REPL or a command line tool that invokes, manages, or manipulates other tools. Also, explaining complex things to people who don't know them, and them understanding.
Relationship: The early phases of romantic attraction, this weird sort of social game where you both pretend you both don't know that you both feel "this way" but still drop hints with all the subtlety of a 5 years old. Also, the relationship with good parents, specifically the validation and the reason for bearing life they give you when they say something along the lines of "You're all we have in life".
Compilers are fun. Have you gotten into functional programming yet? That my favorite type of "meta" programming.
I have played with Haskell and Clojure, two very different flavors of "functional". At my deepest in Haskell (which is not very deep), I have attained a kind of Enlightenment where - unlike most any language I have ever programmed with - I didn't even think of sequencing and control structures. I didn't think "First this, then that, IF x THEN y ELSE z, REPEAT 5 times", no, only types and shapes of data. I read the question prompt, I imagine the shape of the input, and I imagine the data flow transformation which will functionally (i.e. immutably, no control structures, pure equations) bend and distort the input shape into the output shape.
It was a rare and difficult-to-describe feeling. But it was good, I realized that there is nothing natural or inevitable about Time, Control Flow, or Sequencing in programming. It's only languages with mutable memory cells that train you into thinking like that. "First this, Then that" is a way of thinking so utterly ingrained into the brain of every programmer that it's difficult to even name it as a distinct belief. Haskell gradually shows you an alternative way of thinking.
I have played with Clojure for much less than I have with Haskell, and all I could think of is how such a damn shame that Lisp programmers refuse to learn Context-Free Grammars and Parsers in 2024, and why they can't admit that they lost and that humans aren't mentally equipped to write raw syntax trees in the form of hierarchical lists.
> That my favorite type of "meta" programming.
Hmmm, in what sense is functional programming "meta" in the sense that I described above? Haskell has lazy evaluation and easy-to-use Algebraic Data Types, both extremely powerful primitives that *can* be used for metaprogramming and very powerful libraries, but which technically has nothing to do with Functional Programming in the sense of immutability. Clojure has macros but again that technically has nothing to do with FP. Scala has a lot of metaprogrammy primitives but I can think of nothing which can't be attached to a non-functional languages.
Perhaps because people equate FP with higher-order functions and partial application? and functions taking other functions as input is indeed "meta" in the exact same sense I described? I don't really agree with this definition of FP anyways,
I think the essence of FP is immutability, first and foremost, and second, and third, the most important thing. The fundamental question motivating FP is "What if you don't necessarily need to think in terms of explicit one-after-the-other steps? What if Programming is not necessarily a command-by-command imperative recipe, but simply a specification of an input-output transformation, which can be expressed as a pure stateless equation like the ones that Math has been studying for dozens of centuries?"
I think I might have felt something similar. When I first used a functional programming language (SML, many years ago), it was for a compilers class. And partway through the class, I had what I can only describe as a revelation, and rewrote my entire project to be half the size and with only a quarter of the bugs. It was beautiful.
For me, it has something to do with flow, and seeing the program as a process of transformation. HTTP request in, HTTP response with web page out. The ease of being able to abstract and combine patterns was liberating. Data isn't a static thing to poke at, it's a chain of being that moves through the program.
Not having to keep track of state is a wonderful convenience, too, if the project allows it. But my bread and butter was as a C programmer, and paying close attention to various types of state is pretty much the only reason to use C. Even so, I've found that the more functional I can make my programs, the better they tend to be (although stack overflows are a risk).
When my wife Carol smiles at me.
Pretty cool. I love my wife’s relaxed laughter. It’s like music.
How lovely that you give her cause to. Win-win
This is probably unexpected among this crowd, and indeed, was unexpected to me and my "published in two science disciplines" self before it actually started happening:
I have never been closer to the profound and numinous than when I’m gearing myself up for a one rep max attempt to set a new personal or competitive powerlifting record.
When you’re that close to your limits, literally trying to exert yourself 100%, it depends on you focusing and aligning every last bit of your body, mind, and will, to call forth the successful rep from the numinous probabilistic manifold of future universes, most of which represent failure. But if you line up everything *just so* you can call forth and execute that rare success case.
And as I’m standing there on the platform before the lift, sweaty, tired, doing a concentrated breathing and mental exercise, ramping neurotransmitters as I amp myself up, and aligning as much of me as I can, I get this nonverbal feeling that's something like: “I was *born* to do this.” And then I do it.
The feeling when you're successfully placing the barbell back in the rack (or onto the floor) is indescribable. The heavens part, divine effulgence floods your mind, heavenly choirs sing hosannahs, you feel like you accomplished something that required the fullest extent of your powers along lines of excellence, something that required both peak physical power and mental and physical skill and technique.
And all you did was move a piece of metal a couple feet. 😂
Beautiful!
Forgive me the impertinence of suggesting an experiment: try supposing that the act of lifting that weight is not done by you, but through you, as a material extension of the numinous. See if it feels even better to give the credit elsewhere, returned to the cosmic sender, unopened with a thank you note, rather than opening the package and eating the chocolate of accomplishment yourself.
Would love to hear the results of such an experiment !
I loved this response (and the other posters description), it sparked many thoughts, Yet each time I read a comment now and take something away from it i find the back of my mind saying ‘was that ai / a bot?’ I only want to engage with those who share the human experience, and it slightly ruins it if that’s in question
Actually, I often think in the way you're suggesting when I'm feeling and performing my best. Acting as an agent of Platonic excellence, or the Divine, or something similar, rather than *me* being so great and doing all this awesome/hard stuff.
After all, I'm only able to do those things due to chance or divine provenance to begin with - we're all an assortment of genes and capabilities, and if we do better than anyone else, it's mostly to do with the endowment we were born with rather than any hard work on our part.
If nature / nurture is 80/20 (which I think is roughly correct), I didn't do anything to get that 80%, it was pure good fortune from my perspective that my parents were able to pass those genes to me. And my parents and their decisions shaping my peers were by far the majority of the 20%, so there's precious little "me" in there driving whatever outcomes I can drive anyways.
So I try to culture the unattached mindset as a sort of epistemic or ego-moderating humility. And I try to culture being thankful to my parents, and the universe in general for having such great games and avocations to begin with.
I do wonder where exactly accountability, responsibility, and self-discipline fall in this schema, though - it's a very non-free-will sort of paradigm, and I think those things do probably exist and have some hand in it. It just feels like they're outside the schema entirely when you're in the mindset, though.
I don't know if I should have hope, but has Substack fixed the horrible performance of this particular blog? I checked a few big posts and I no longer get white screened, but I might have gotten lucky (comments are still kind of buggy and sometimes don't show up).
By total coincidence, I got annoyed enough by this to write a tampermonkey script last night:
// ==UserScript==
// @name Block VisibilityChange Event on ACX
// @namespace http://tampermonkey.net/
// @version 0.1
// @description Stop visibilitychange event handler from being attached
// @author Robert Mushkatblat
// @match https://www.astralcodexten.com/*
// @grant none
// @run-at document-start
// ==/UserScript==
(function() {
const originalAddEventListener = EventTarget.prototype.addEventListener;
EventTarget.prototype.addEventListener = function(type, listener, options) {
if (type === 'visibilitychange') {
console.log('Blocked visibilitychange listener');
return;
}
originalAddEventListener.call(this, type, listener, options);
};
})();
---
It still takes a bit of time to load comments but the page should be immediately interactive, and will no longer freeze for 10+ seconds each time you switch tabs.
I don't think so. In fact last night the site sucked in a novel way for me. I was looking for some info someone had posted months ago, and going through the open threads doing a search on each for the person's user name. Soon got to a thread with over 1000 posts and computer could not load the comments. Computer sat there insisting for a while that there were 0 comments, then tab with the site on it would just close. Happened several ties in a row.
There's a browser extension which attempts to fix this
https://github.com/maksverver/astral-codex-eleven
I tried this for firefox and it completely breaks the comments. Oh well.
I've been using it since it came out (the firefox version), and except for one short term hiccup, it's been working very well for me.
I made my first survey! And I'd be happy if some people would try it out.
It is about how and why people meet. And I made it in a way that you are matched to a fictional character and the end of the quiz.
I call it the Connection Character Type Test:
https://www.guidedtrack.com/programs/cdg587i/run
Jack Bauer? I hope I never have to cut anyone’s head off with a hacksaw.
It turns out that FBMPLA/Dynamic Networker/Jack Bauer is the most common result. Too bad it was not such a good choice. I wonder whether I should replace him with someone else.
Interestingly, it is the most common character only for dudes. For gals the most common one is FBMTLA/Net Sprinter/Miranda Priestly (The Devil Wears Prada) - and I'm wondering whether that is also a questionable choice. Thoughts?
Uh, I have only the most cursory knowledge of 24. I used ChatGPT to suggest most of the 128 characters and in many cases just did rough plausibility checks. Do you think it is not a good fit to the listed properties?
"I used ChatGPT to suggest most of the 128 characters and in many cases just did rough plausibility checks."
Please don't take this the wrong way, but I'm laughing my socks off right now. Well, using AI to match us up with our fictional counterparts certainly explains *a lot*.
Why Gunflint, I had no idea of the hidden depths of your character, you rough rider you! Post on a rationalist forum by day, hack off heads with a hacksaw by night!
I considered using just 16 characters as most of these tests do. But I figured that LLMs are really good at matching vectors in semantic space and many suggested heros seemed very good matches. The first tests by friends confirmed that. And given the low number of questions, the error bars are large, so I expect misses and so should you. At least it's good for a laugh.
It's fine.
Don't worry. I just thought of one of the more unsettling things Jack did during the show's run.
The guy with the head in question was already dead. Jack just needed proof. The fate of the world depended on it. Again.
I never watched 24 because the premise didn't appeal to me, but come on: he didn't have his phone and camera with him, but he did have a hacksaw?
This is why, kids, you make sure to have a full charge and your credit topped-up before you leave the house!
I didn’t give enough detail. Bauer was undercover as a terrorist and had to establish his terrorist bona fides with a grizzly act.
Grizzly, huh? Well, I suppose that answers the question of "which would you rather meet in the woods, man or bear?" Not if the man is a Bauer, he's being a bear! A grisly grizzly!
(I kill myself!😁)
The final screen showed nothing! Just blank white!
I am sorry. I think that was me "fixing" Deiseach's special case. It should work again now.
I also hit this issue a little while ago (page 13 is blank). So I think it might still be broken!
Should be working again.
Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha! The Curse Of the Misanthrope befell ye all!
...wow, I took the thing to see what silly fiction character I'd be compared too, and instead it just failed to load any final results at all. Refreshing took me back to the beginning.
I am sorry. I think that was me "fixing" Deiseach's special case. It should work again now.
Well, it's an online quiz so I had to take it. but the results were so wildly at variance that I had to laugh. It doesn't link up "I don't go out to meet people" with "so you don't want to meet people".
Here's my results! With commentary as to my views of same:
"Your Connection Character Type is RCNTLA, the Dynamic Seeker.
When meeting people you are only interested in romance." Could NOT be further from the truth. I don't want romance at all in any way, shape or form.
"You prefer it casual." Okay
"You prefer smaller over larger groups." Definitely
"You don't like meeting people in person." The one thing this got right!
"You like learning new stuff." Okay
"You like physical activities." Again, could not be further from the truth. If reincarnation is true, I want to come back as a sloth.
"You are most like the fictional character Sara Tancredi (Prison Break)." And here's where I start groaning. I think I heard of this show but I've never watched it, have no interest in doing so,. and, to be frank, don't give a damn about who this is.
"Sara Tancredi is a dedicated physician who initially meets her acquaintances through her professional role at the penitentiary. Her work not only requires medical expertise but also involves a high level of personal interaction with the inmates, leading to complex and significant relationships. Sara is characterized by her strong moral compass and commitment to doing what she believes is right, which guides her interactions and decisions throughout the series. Despite facing numerous personal and professional challenges, Sara remains deeply introspective and learns from each experience, which continually shapes her understanding of justice and loyalty. Her communication tends to be straightforward and direct, often underpinned by her need to manage tense situations carefully. While not overtly seeking physical engagements, her role requires a readiness to respond to emergencies, showcasing her capability to handle physically demanding situations when necessary."
She sounds like an insufferable bitch, and while I am an insufferable bitch, it's in a completely different manner to Goody-Two-Shoes Sara who - let me guess - gets seduced and roped into the plot, plan or scheme jail break by the handsome Bad Boy because despite being a prison doctor she's dumb enough to fall for "I'm innocent! I was framed! I don't belong here! And I love you madly!"
Throwing a dart at a dart board would be a better way of matching up my characteristics than this quiz, I regret to say.
The scoring seems really off. What part of "you picked 0 romance" gets us to "you only interested in romance"?
"Your romance score is 50%.
When meeting people you are only interested in romance.
You chose romantic options 0 times and friendship options 0 times."
No, picking 0 both times means I don't need a lover *or* a friend, unlike the song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHLchEtMKQg
Same with this:
"Your activity score is 50%.
You like physical activities.
You chose physical options 0 times and intellectual options 0 times."
You really do need to refine this down; I like doing things *by myself* so I don't pick "intellectual options" with other people. And if I pick "physical options" 0 times, that means I. DON'T. LIKE. PHYSICAL. ACTIVITIES.
Thank you for finding the friendship = 0 and romance = 0 as well as the activity = 0 and intellectual = 0 special cases. Didn't anticipate that. I'm correcting it. You could have selected interests at the end to hopefully improve the quality of your estimate. Though I'm worried you are a QA engineer and may break that too.
Not a QA engineer, rather a hermit crab misanthrope who likes to hole up in their cave and growl at the very notion of social interaction 😀
I agree, you're not going to get many cases like that!
Indeed. So even more important to learn from you. Would you be up to a - hm, probably not a video call - a chat on some messenger? Or an email exchange? My email is g.zarncke at Google Mail.
I don't think I'd be much use to you, I'm the Spiders Georg of social media. Most people using such a survey probably are looking for friends/romantic partners, so adjusting those parameters will get you better results.
I didn’t really like this very much. Lots of dull descriptive behavioural questions (with no time limit, e.g. I used Meet Up a lot 10 years ago) and very little in the way of attitudinal questions - which makes any profile very unlikely to be accurate. Also the idea of profiling people for romantic / friend hangouts when they are married seems pretty flawed
I'm sorry you didn't like it. I was mostly interested in the meeting habit and tried to make it more interesting by matching with characters. But maybe the number of questions was not enough for that.
Can you say more what you think is flawed with the romantic/friend hangouts?
Well, I had a go, and I'm not really sure what it was for, but it was quite amusing - and completely wrong! I got:
"You like community. You prefer meeting people in person. You like learning new stuff. You like physical activities more than intellectual pursuits.
You are most like the fictional character Jack Bauer (24)."
Well, in fact I spend nearly all my time in intellectual pursuits, although I exercise a lot too. And I'm nothing like Jack Bauer.
There are a few grammatical errors that should be fixed, like the use of perfect tense in 'where have you met your partner?', which should be 'where did you meet your partner?'.
I'm sorry your results didn't match.
Did you try selecting interests at the end to improve the quality of your estimate?
Thank you for finding the grammar issue.
Okay, not completely wrong; I do like learning new stuff.
Has anyone out there been on buspirone for the long term? It seems everything that benefits anxiety has a potentially negative effect on sleep quality, but I’ve really been struggling to make up for a long-term loss of 1-2 hours per night. (I take my last dose at 4pm just to try to reduce impact on sleep).
It similarly seems no sleep aid is meant to be taken long-term, so I’ve been avoiding taking them for the most part. Any tips or advice appreciated.
I've taken buspirone (15mg twice daily) for just over eight months now but I'm not sure I can help you because your whole post is entirely foreign to my experience. I did a double take to the effect of "We're talking about the same medication, right? The one that has two side effects listed on the bottle, one of which is 'drowsiness'?".
My sleeping habits have been pretty irregular for ages, so it's hard for me to say *too* much about any personal effect from the buspirone, but I have noticed drowsiness after taking it sometimes, and I suspect I would notice an effect as large as you are reporting.
You'll find lots of anecdotal evidence on reddit, but I also believe there are a fair number of studies documenting increased sleep latency, suppressed REM sleep, and other sleep-reduction side effects. Granted, I am taking 60mg, so it stands to reason that I may have more exaggerated affects than you.
N = 1, I took melatonin every night for over 20 years with no bad side effects.
Thanks - this actually has made a big difference for me the past 2 nights
Glad to hear this. I remember Scott did a deep dive into melatonin awhile ago, one of his "more than you wanted to know about..." Might be worthwhile finding that. Main takeaway (which I agree with) was that the best dose is much less than what most of what's for sale contains.
My psychiatrist recommended 3mg, which I see is 10x above Scott’s recommendation from 2018. Once this runs out, I may see if I can step down in dosage.
I have a lot of trouble sleeping, and getting 30 mins or more of cardio during the day really ups my chances of sleeping well. It has to be pretty intense cardio -- the kind that make you sweat a lot. Interval training works well.
Yes. Don't take anyone's advice here since it cannot be statistically significant. Make an appointment with a neurologist who specializes in sleep disorders.
I've been a vegan for a couple of years now and I'd like to know how I'm doing for micronutrients. Can anyone recommend the best value blood tests for someone in the UK?
Or perhaps a Hair Tissue Mineral Test
If you are in full time work and have workplace health insurance they often have discounted blood work providers. I had the works done for £40 through virgin