Not having read the book it is about I can only speculate. Deculturation sounds like the lost common culture of Europe and its spawns like the Americas and Australia. Whether I've got the subject of the book correct or not, it's something I've noticed. We're losing our collective culture. There was a time when most Europeans and Americans got biblical references. You could assume the well-educated got them, and even many uneducated people knew biblical stories. There was also a period when educated people in Europe and its peripheries knew a lot about Greek myths.
These common cultural currencies have disappeared rather recently. Probably the majority of people with college degrees under the age of forty now know very little about The Bible and Christian preachings in general. That's a dramatic change in culture, considering most educated people knew a lot about The Bible for 1500 years until about yesterday.
Add to that the fact that most educated Europeans and Americans over the past couple centuries knew plenty about literature. Knowing Dickens or Tolstoy in the 19th century was like knowing Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones today, only much, much moreso. Everyone knew Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Brahms.
There's much fewer common cultural references today. Some of that is for good reasons. Those of us overly online think more globally. Abrahamic religions are no longer de facto.
But society can't exist without culture, so cultural entrepreneurs are rushing into the void. Hence wokeism, a brand new religion based on atheism and total equality. Or neo-reactionaries, who are good at seeing what we've lost and pretty terrible at coming up with good solutions for it.
In a sense, we are having to re-invent culture from scratch because we've either rejected the received culture or we are too ignorant to even know it.
Why might the loss of received old European culture be a bad thing? Because maybe something that took many centuries to create, undergoing cultural evolutionary pressures, has more value than something we are now creating on the fly.
Does that ring true for you, or do you think these fears of deculturation are the timeless fears of old people?
"most educated Europeans and Americans over the past couple centuries knew"
You are skipping over the enormous relevance of that qualifier: "educated". Across Europe as of 1820 only England had achieved a _literacy_ rate (never mind whatever definition you prefer for the word "educated") of at least 50 percent. France was still less than 40 percent literate, Russia less than 10 percent, etc.
The USA by 1820 had a much higher literacy rate, between 70 and 90 percent depending on which estimate you prefer. But the USA was also a _much_ smaller slice of the world's population than we are today used to thinking of it as: 1/10th as many people as the UK, 1/8th as many as France, 1/7th as many as Russia, 1/5th as many as Spain, etc.
So 200 years ago the vast majority of Europe+America was not even literate let alone "educated" and, not unrelated of course, was living at the edge of subsistence. The "everyone" in a statement like "everyone knew Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Brahms" is plausibly true only if we mean actually a very small slice of the population.
That context is logically highly relevant to the notion that the western world, or the English-speaking world, in that era shared a universally-known single culture and now does not.
Thanks, this is a great piece. Dancing round the maypole definitely has something to do with it, but there is also a hunger for creating Great Art in the West which makes the West a little different to Tibet etc, and is also at risk from universal culture. So I guess we summoned two demons, and the second destroyed the first and the summoner.
Gak! Honestly, the "common culture" proponents all seem to be historically illiterate (at best), and culturally prejudiced *and* illiterate (at worst).
> We're losing our collective culture. There was a time when most Europeans and Americans got biblical references.
There was a time when Christians burned each other at the stake for believing slightly different things. But I suppose you could say that Europe in the Sixteenth Century had a common culture of religious intolerance!
> most educated Europeans and Americans over the past couple centuries knew plenty about literature. Knowing Dickens or Tolstoy in the 19th century was like knowing Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones today, only much, much moreso.
The idea that there's some sort of common "European" culture is bizarre on the face of it. One only has to travel to foreign countries to see that when it comes to the arts and literature this is absolutely not true.
You mention Tolstoy and Dickens. There was a 20 year gap between War and Peace publication in Russia — in Russian (a language that wasn't universal to the Russian Empire, BTW) — and when it was translated into English (rather poorly on the first pass, IMHO). And Tolstoy was not immediately embraced by the English-speaking world.
Dickens is not and never was well-regarded in France. "He is not considered a great or classic writer in France; his books are seen as old fashioned and mostly suitable for children."
As for most educated Americans in the Nineteenth Century — well, there weren't that many who were. Most Americans' education stopped at the 8th Grade (although in one of my previous posts to an earlier open thread, if you got your 8th Grade diploma you probably had a better general and practical education than most twenty-first-century high school graduates). In 1870 the Americans who had a college education (all 1.7% of them) probably did share a common culture, though — in the Greek and Latin classics (because the idea of Liberal Arts education hadn't yet been invented). Meanwhile, 20% of the nation was illiterate. And for those who were literate, books were tremendously expensive. Most households had a Bible, though. So the majority of Americans had a shared common culture based on the Bible and ignorance.
It wasn't until the last two decades of the Nineteenth Century that *free* lending libraries became common, and the rising middle class had access to books. Of course, that's when the first "common culture" complaints arose among the educated ("They're all reading the popular novels by Dickens instead of reading Cicero and Plato!")
The subtext of the "common culture" arguments seem to be about restricting educational opportunities to a narrow range of carefully curated subjects (that reflect the prejudices of the CC-crowd) to facilitate political and/or religious conformity. </rant off>
(1). No real attempt to redistribute the goods of high culture (e.g Catholic Church pre-liturgical movement c. 1850)
(2). A genuine attempt to redistribute the goods of high culture (e.g Catholic Church from the liturgical movement to Vatican II)
(3). Gradual abandonment of (2) (e.g Catholic Church post Vatican II).
Now (3) is better than (1), but I do believe (2) is better than (3), and most people who are harking back to a common culture are harking back to (2) rather than (1). (1) has basically passed out of living memory so it is genuinely difficult to feel nostalgic for it, whereas (2) represents the world our parents and grandparents grew up in.
Whenever someone complains about how they miss the glorious past, the glorious past either ever existed or was available to less than one person in thousand.
Imagine the glorious past when less than 1 person in 1000 was literate, and only a few of them had enough time to read books. The book-readers all over the planet probably knew each other by name, so they could recommend Tolstoy to each other, because there was no longer book to read. What an exciting era!
There are probably more Tolstoy readers today, in absolute numbers. The only problem is, having read Tolstoy does not clearly mark you today as a member of the elite.
Also, I have no idea why "memes" and "EU" are deculturation. No strong opinion on EU, but memes are definitely shared cultural artifacts -- shared by several orders of magnitude more people than Tolstoy's books. It's just not the kind of culture you like, because it is not high-status.
I love memes. I've read more memes than Tolstoy, but I have confidence that Tolstoy has a more profound insight into the human condition. Memes on aggregate are genuinely insightful but you need a lot of them and there's a lot of dross. Whereas there's a soft test-of-time which filters out the dross from 19th century literature.
I would for sure agree that we need some kind of common culture, and a culture that bends towards optimism and progress. It doesn't necessarily have to be the 1950s-style Europe-descended culture, but it's gotta be something if we want to not just survive but thrive.
I'm fine with almost anything as long as it delivers the "optimism and progress" thing, but it doesn't appear to be getting the job done at the moment.
How about just plain realism? Optimism is what makes you want to draw on an inside straight. Of course, pessimists all think the world will to end soon, but I've lived through at least half a dozen predicted end-of-the-worlds in my lifetime, so I don't buy into the latest round of EotW hysterias. OTOH the techno-optimism of Scientism is a religion that has replaced the Rapture of a Christian god with the Rapture of the Nerds.
Ironically, it's the common culture cultists who think the world is going to hell in a handbasket. But everyone else does, too! Although I don't necessarily believe our future will be a paradise.I think there's a low probability that our current *high-energy* civilization will continue much past the Twenty-first Century, I seem to be one of the few people left who thinks that come hell or high water humanity will muddle through somehow.
If you're just plain realistic you'll never get anything cool done.
There's a proposal floating around to add extra land onto the south of Manhattan. This would massively expand space for housing in one of the most expensive cities in the world, and also protect the city against storm surges. Using landfill to expand cities is a well-known technology that's been used for decades or, depending on how you want to think about it, even centuries. But all the "realists" in NYC just lol their hearts out at the ridiculous idea that we could make the world a better place (in between marching to defund the police and re-electing crook after crook) and the idea was dead before it left the barn. Realism sucks. Enough of realism and enough of the realists..
>I seem to be one of the few people left who thinks that come hell or high water humanity will muddle through somehow.
I think humanity will too actually, but muddling through is not enough. Muddling through does not inspire. And if you don't inspire, you'll get trampled by those who do. Say what you will about the Chinese Communist Party, at least they have a vision for how they want the future to play out. It's a nasty, cramped, ethnonationalist vision, but you can't beat something with nothing.
Are you sure that a society can't exist without culture? I think that's the central problem with your musing, the idea that there ought to be a general canon – preferably traditional and taste-filtered through some well-heeled, powerful stratum of society – that binds together everyone worthy of being called educated and cultured. That has a political valence all its own, doesn't it?
The reach for 'wokism' as replacement, regardless of whether you like equality and atheism (I think they're both quite dandy, but I get the vague sense that opinion is divided), is a category error. The egalitarian sentiment, in various forms, has been with us at least since the Gracchi, and (money aside) it's orthogonal to familiarity with art, music, and literature. It would have been thus in the 19th century, too.
The Western canon is still there, for anyone, Western or not, to enjoy. It's subsidised in various ways (no small irony that the right so often tends to hate these subsidies) which is fair enough, because otherwise it would sink even lower in the vicious commercial wrangling for attention. It just no longer marks you out as a rube if you don't know it well. And that's fine. Meanwhile you've got people walking around as experts on Sengoku Japan or the Spring and Autumn Period because they've gone through an anime or wuxia phase in adolescence, and then they memorised all of Poe for reasons, and then the pre-Raphaelites were big on Tumblr for a month, and then their favourite youtuber did a four-hour sprawl on Kierkegaard... give them a decade to weave a patchwork of weird interests, and they end up better-rounded individuals than most people in Europe in the 19th, even if Shakespeare and Homer can no longer be taken for granted. Is that strictly worse?
I think what might be worse is that the result is less commonality. Everyone follows their own intellectual journey, learns a ton, but in the end speaks a different cultural language. So when people communicate, since they can't rely on a common culture that is deep, they resort to internet lingo, memes and emoji and the deeper culture they have learned has value for them personally but isn't something they can refer to when communicating with others because those others, however erudite they may be, focused on learning different things such as Raphael instead of the pre-Raphaelites, Goethe instead of Kierkegaard, Dickens instead of Poe.
Chairman Xi is doing a good job of implementing a common culture in China. Everybody learns a common history. Everybody is educated in the same neo-Confucian philosophy. Everybody must speak the common tongue for official and commercial business. Minority cultures are being extinquished. The Internet is firewalled to create a shared view of the world. Seems like he's building a harmonious paradise that should be exported to the rest of Asia (whether they like it or not).
I think there really is a cultural decline, and we should allow ourselves enough sadness to do something modest about it. Anything more will probably just feed in to the phenomenon we’re sad about. Ken Clarke thinks Great Civilizations are founded on confidence, and we are going to need a lot of it. Here are some things I think are contributing to the decline:
Lossiness - there's a whole lot of culture! Even people who make it their life's work to preserve it can only preserve a part of it, there are trade offs between promoting new work, promoting well-loved classics and promoting neglected classics. Some cultural artifacts inevitably fall through the cracks.
Egalitarianism - promoting neglected classics includes making space in the canon for e.g female composers, jazz, folk. Seems good, but any one work displaces other work. Specific older works/composers are in danger of cancellation e.g Wagner (seriously anti-semitic opinions by any standards)
Cool/Casual - my wife’s friends (c. 45) can't get enough of classic literature, but I wonder how long this can go on, given how different dating is now. The past just generally seems like a lot of hard work, running fast to stand still, and we’ve come to expect to approach things more casually. Even if you're good at empathy it's exhausting.
Atheism - obviously people used to take the Bible and biblical inspired art seriously because they thought it really was the word of God, then there was a long hegelian/nietzschian twilight period, where it's like “this is false, but it's a crucial step on our journey towards true Spiritual Enlightenment” (e.g Wagner's depiction of medieval pilgrimage in Tannhaeuser). But to the extent people don't believe in God, even in a vague 18th/19th century way, I don't see how the Bible can avoid dropping out of mass culture.
Tech - even when tech enables genuine works of art to happen, it is art skewed towards our own time and values. If it weren't for film I probably would have read more classic literature. Technological mindset displaces ‘useless’ subjects from the curriculum in favour of STEM.
I think your historical perspective is off. For the vast majority of human existence, only a very tiny elite of society would know about music or writing. Most people were engaged in subsistence agriculture and simply didn't have time to spare from survival. Practically no one outside the clergy would have been able to read the bible on their own before the Protestant Reformation, because even if they were literate in their native language the bible was in Latin. All of this was standard until maybe 150 years ago. If anything, the culture you are describing is the anomaly.
And I doubt most people knew what you claim they knew. Ask a bunch of random people in 1900 America who Tolstoy is, and maybe half would answer a famous writer. I imagine very few would have actually read Tolstoy, and only a fraction of them would have understood it and been able to carry out an analysis of his writing. You have to keep in mind that the historical record is mostly made up of highly educated elites talking about things that interest them, which does not reflect the experience of the common man.
Even if this is all true, there really was a time when people really believed that progress in education and technology could give the masses access to culture e.g the founders of the BBC. "Nothing is too good for the working class" Nye Bevan
While I agree that for most of human existence only a tiny elite knew literature and music and such, in Europe at least for the last 1200-1500 years even the peasants knew Bible stories. Though most church services were in Latin, priests were supposed to preach something in the vernacular every few weeks. Churches and cathedrals were filled with art telling Bible stories (for a modern example, the bronze front door of St. John the Divine's Cathedral in New York contains images taken from Bible stories that cover the whole Bible, from Genesis to Revelation). Friars would travel from place to place preaching about the Bible, and plays on Bible stories would be put on regularly. So even peasants would know the cultural basics of Christianity: know David and Goliath, Jonah and the Whale, Noah and the Ark, Moses and the 10 Plagues, etc.
I generally agree with the premise that there were shared cultural institutions in the past that are much less shared today. I was objecting to that shared experience being characterized as something like the ideal Renaissance Man. There were cultural practices that made French people distinctly French, but it wasn't talking about Tolstoy and Mozart.
GPT's ignorance about the physical world is astounding. I asked it to make me an image of a whirlpool, and gave some details about what I wanted it to look like.. This is what I got: https://imgur.com/cTAIVjZ
And yet, GPT has no doubt read a fair amount about whirlpools online. If I asked it to name a famous short story with a whirlpool in it I'll bet it could. If I asked it what conditions produce whirlpools I'll bet it could tell me. If I asked it whether part of the ocean can form itself into a disk and lie on edge on the ocean surface like a tire on a floor it would tell me no.
I'm not sure people who think these suckers are going to understand pretty much everything better than we do grasp how enormous the gap is between what we know about the ordinary world and what LLM's know. There are a million things like whirlpools -- dogs, beauty salons, tar, lipstick, bubble goo, ferris wheels, needle-nosed pliers, harvest moons, folk dancing enthusiasts, communists, nightmares . . . -- that we understand the basics about. We know what they look like, what they feel like, whether you can put them in your pocket, how they would behave if set on fire, what sentences about them make sense and which don't. We learned all that while walking around the world interacting with these things, plus absorbing info via reading or talking. We put it all together somehow, those 2 channels of information. It comes so naturally to us to do that that it's not immediately obvious what an amazing feat it is.
I like that whirlpool a great deal better than most of what I see from LLMs. It's got that computer art insipidity, but I rarely see an image where I think "I want to see this done by a good artist".
This is an extremely practical bicycle, built to be durable and easy to maintain. Made of steel, 50 pounds, $150. It's apparently only available through the charity rather than for sale in the first world.
This may not be a perfectly effective charity, but it's sensibly built around an existing device, and the charity also supports people learning how to repair the bicycles as a business.
I speak as a person who likes the idea of a handbrake which goes to the hub rather than squeezing the rim-- the rim is too slippery when wet.
I missed the last open thread, so here's a link for everyone who might still be checking FiveThirtyEight, with Nate Silver explaining how low the management of his former site has fallen:
I finally figured out my solution to Newcomb's paradox. Either I'm in a world where I will choose both boxes, or a world where I will choose box B. If I'm in the world where I will choose both boxes then the optimal choice is to choose box B, which I can't do because I'm in the world where I will choose both boxes. This paradox means I can't be in the world where I will choose both boxes. If I'm in the world where I will choose box B, the optimal choice is to choose box B, no problem. Therefore choosing box B has to be correct.
Thanks for the responses, they have helped me refine my solution. I still think the "which world am I in" framing is the key. So - take 2:
If I'm in the world where I will choose both boxes, I will get $1000. If I'm in the world where I will choose box B, I will get $1000000. Therefore I prefer to be in the world where I will choose box B, and I'm still a one-boxer.
The optimal choice is to pick both boxes, because the reliable predictor will be able to better spend that $1,000,000 than you could hope to anyway.
If the money somehow ceases to exist if the predictor predicts you taking both boxes, then you take both boxes, and that guy can go fuck himself for deliberately destroying $1,000,000 in value.
The real solution to the "paradox" is to recognize the true nature of the paradox. It's only a "paradox" because it violates the axioms of Game Theory (and Rationalism).
In Game Theory, agents are assumed to have infinite computation and knowledge and float *outside* the world in some uncomputable astral plane. As they are floating outside of the world of the "game" they're playing, their decision processes can't possibly effect anything, etc.
As with frictionless cows or whatever, sometimes the Game Theory axioms are a useful approximation of reality, and sometimes they aren't.
In the real world, everyone has extremely limited computation and information, and everyone is *embodied* in the world, which means that they are part of the world they are acting in, and their own decision processes can affect the world and vice versa. E.g. someone could conceivably put you in an MRI machine and see what you're thinking before you think it. Or just give you drugs.
Newcomb's paradox is only a "paradox" because the setup of the problem directly contradicts these axioms. It's just an illustration of the limitation of Game Theory/Rationalist axioms, nothing deeper.
>If I'm in the world where I will choose both boxes then the optimal choice is to choose box B
This is wrong. In the world where you choose both boxes box B will be empty and box A will have a little money so the optimal choice is to take both boxes.
>If I'm in the world where I will choose box B, the optimal choice is to choose box B
This is also wrong. In the world where you choose only box B both boxes contain money so the optimum choice is to take both boxes. Unfortunately you can't actually do that since you are in the world where you only take box B.
The main intuition for one-boxing is that the decision to one-box itself affects which 'world' you inhabit but if you assume from the start that you must inhabit one 'world' or the other already, independent of the decision you would prefer/attempt to make, you kneecap that line of reasoning and leave two-boxing as the only viable strategy left standing.
>In the world where you choose only box B both boxes contain money so the optimum choice is to take both boxes.
If you take both boxes, how are you in the world where you only choose box B? The only way you can be in the world where you choose only box B is by taking only box B. Isn't that definitional?
I think the paradox gets resolved by substituting one supernatural device for another. Get rid of the person who can see the future, substitute a magic spell.
If you pick both, the million will disappear thanks to the spell, and the thousand will be all you get. If you pick one, you can get whichever you choose (probably the million). There's no paradox at all.
It's just a sci-fi Excalibur. Only the pure of heart can get the million, and if you try to take the thousand, you fail the test.
>if you assume from the start that you must inhabit one 'world' or the other already, independent of the decision you would prefer/attempt to make, you kneecap that line of reasoning and leave two-boxing as the only viable strategy left standing.
I wouldn't say so. The relevant part of the 'world' you already inhabit in the scenario is not what's in the boxes, it's what kind of character you have. If the world you inhabit is one where you are the kind of person who will two box, then the alien (or computer, or Jin, or God, or whoever) will only put money in the one box. If the world you inhabit contains a you where you are the kind of person who will one box, then both boxes will have money. Our character locks us in: to say that in the world where I'm the kind of person who one boxes it would be more advantageous to two box is to say "Unfortunately you can't do that, since you are in the world where you are the kind of person who only takes box B"
While not related to this new discovery, I have personally found that helminthic (specifically TTO) therapy nearly completely alleviated my (comparatively mild, but properly diagnosed) UC. I've struggled with it for over 10 years, the first treatment worked for about 3-4 years before symptoms returned, and the second identical treatment produced the same results this year, so at this point I'm pretty positive that it is in fact the helminths that caused the improvement in my specific case. Of course, infecting oneself with a parasite procured from a questionable source is not everyone's cup of tea, but for me the benefits seem to outweigh the risks.
When you're drawing a diagram of how a complex system works:
Most of the time, any type of entity relationship can be drawn with some kind of bubbles connected with some kind of arrows. Causal chains can be represented in exactly the same way - with arrows that connect one event/action to the next.
There are two common circumstances I keep running into that I don't know how to viz:
- cases where something might come into existence, and at another point cease to exist again.
- cases where something might be instanced multiple times, and the "prototype" or "class" version (if it exists) may differ substantially from how a given instance could end up looking.
You can obviously draw these things on their own terms, but I'm talking about when you need to include them in and around a bigger-picture diagram of a whole system.
Has anyone seen any good diagrams/charts/visualisations that did a good job of showing those situations?
fuhgettaboutit. type-definitions and object-instantiations are like oil and water. you gotta use two separate diagrams. E.g. if you're trying to do something like combine an *abstract* diagram of a family tree with your *actual* family tree... it's just not happening. (Or at least, not in any way that's coherent.) Instead, "the way of the programmer" (tm) is to: A) define types of hypothetical objects; B) instantiate concrete objects under main(); C) *label* any concrete instances with the corresponding type (aka category). E.g.
time = {hr, min, sec}
main() {
....time lunch.set(12, 00, 00);
....time dinner.set(18, 00, 00);
}
"main()" is where the verbs happen. Notice that the type-definition for the "time" struct occurs outside of main(). Because definitions live in the platonic nether realm, not in physical reality. So you basically need two separate diagrams.
To put it simply, different types of diagrams for different perspectives. Class diagram = each class is one bubble. Object diagram = each instance is a separate bubble (or rectangle? not sure), so you can show relations between multiple instances of the same class. Some diagrams have a time axis, so you can show the order of things happening, which may include when some things appear and disappear.
Based on my short experience with modelling, I would recommend not trying to put everything in one picture, because there will be too many arrows, too difficult to follow. Or maybe make one huge diagram, but also make diagrams of individual parts. If you have a tool for drawing UML diagrams, the advantage is that you define all relations once, and then when you put some objects to a diagram, it will automatically include the arrows between them.
Yes it very definitely is. But I rarely see it in this context, probably because it's not the fashion and the tooling for it doesn't exist. But I would build the tooling if I knew what it was I was going for.
Sometimes people argue over whether art should be political or not. To me it seems obvious that art is more important than politics and that therefore good art is rarely political. My premise is that art (broadly but also narrowly defined) is the main luxury good of civilization. In the hierarchy of needs you have food (more abstractly: nutrition & health), shelter (defense against mortal enemies through the night), love (social support), art. Politics is arguing over the distribution of those things, but it's more noble to produce those things than to argue over their distribution because the former is positive sum whereas the latter is zero or negative sum.
To put that in relatable day-to-day terms, who has been more valuable to our society: Larry David or Joe Biden? Beethoven or Napoleon? The Beatles or LBJ? Are there better comparisons?
No, it's likely a song about a rock-n-roll star who is bored and literally has too much time on his hands. The watch hustler isn't even mentioned in the song, which came out before MTV even existed, so that cheap video was a promotional video for buyers within the record business and not even intended for public consumption.
(The genius of MTV was that someone realized that by 1982 most bands were making these promotional videos and almost nobody was seeing them, so it was easy to start a cable channel and show them to the public for almost zero cost.)
How do you make the distinction? Beethoven wrote his third symphony for Napoleon, until Napoleon let him down. The Beatles wrote songs about paranoid gun owners, tax policy, and so on. There’s no bright line between political content and art and never has been.
I'm not arguing for bright lines, only that "good art is rarely political". Good Beatles' songs and Beethoven symphonies are rarely political too. But, sure, sometimes they are.
Even Bob Dylan is rarely political.
I was motivated to start this thread after seeing about a million people on Twitter agree that "Good art is always political".
To be straightforward, since the temptation to explain things is stronger than the temptation to just snark, people apparently want both politics and art, and important stuff happens at the margin, not choosing between whole categories.
Contrasting them makes little sense, since the two are inseperably linked. As LearnsHebrew implies, your conception of art and politics feels overly narrow.
When I think of art, I think of it as a zip-file. It's a compact way of transmitting information across long intervals of space and time. But for wetware instead of software. Art doesn't *always* need to contain compressed information. But for central examples of art, it often does.
And often, (though not always,) the information reflects the value-system of the artist. The ant and the grasshopper, for example, is about the prudence of long-term planning. La Guernica was about the horrors of war. Punk rock often features a lot of rebellion and contrarianism. If you've read the Republic, Plato seemed to believe that art was upstream of ethics, which was upstream of culture, which was upstream of politics. individuals in a society were likened to body-parts, which needed to act in concert to produce Justice. IIRC plato wanted to ban poetry because it would impassion the hearts of men to act recklessly, or something.
So this idea of compartmentalizing art away from "politics" feels odd to me. Art isn't just decor that looks pretty on the mantle. It's also a natural means of participating in The Discourse. And The Discourse is a debate about priorities. Before you analyze "positive sum vs negative sum", you need to define what you're summing by settling on a value-system.
(Yes, you can contrast art and politics on the margin. But it sounds like you're making an argument about totality. i.e. that art is qualitatively, strictly superior to political rhetoric. which is roughly like arguing that having enough RAM entirely precludes the need for a CPU.)
I think it's odd to argue that central examples of art often contain compressed information. When I think of central examples of art, I think of say The Mona Lisa, King Lear, Moby Dick, Beethoven's 9th Symphany, Das Rheingold. It's true that La Guernica can be viewed as political but that can't be said of the majority of Picasso's work. And to the extent La Guernica still has great value it's not as anti-fascist propaganda. Simply showing the horrors of war isn't particularly political.
Thinking of art as containing compressed information is a bad reading of art, IMO. Or maybe I'm misunderstand what you mean by compressed information. I agree that great art expresses itself with high efficiency.
when people complain about politics in art, it's usually not actually about the partisanism, per se. It's about the crudeness with which the partisanism is applied. Critical Drinker, for instance, has been ripping into Marvel and Disney for their wokeness. But the wokeness per se isn't actually the main issue (and I believe Critical Drinker would agree with me). The issue is that the wokeness comes at the expense of the stories, rather than enhances them. E.g. as I recall of his review of She Hulk: there's no struggle, no challenge, no journey, no dilemmas, but lots of girlbossing.
If progressivism were really the issue, then I wouldn't expect Startrek (which was considered radically progressive during the 60's) to have been as popular as it was. Studio Ghibli often features strong female protagonists, environmentalism, anti-war themes, and anti-capitalism themes. And their Spirited Away won an Oscar. Meanwhile, the latest strain of progressivism has convinced Disney and Marval that Stronk Female Representation is, by itself, an acceptable substitute for interesting content. Rather than offering an exploration of an interesting perspective, it thrusts upon the audience a dry, heavy-handed lecture.
Let's the get easy one out of the way, first. Which is the diction.
> Simply showing the horrors of war isn't particularly political.
Politics is about policy. And war is an inherently political affair. What you really mean is "partisanism". Which we might describe as "tribalistic advocacy for a controversial position". It often comes across as crude. "Murder is bad", for example, isn't exactly controversial. It is political, however, since it normatively implies a policy over a group of people. Likewise, I agree with you insofar as I wouldn't describe La Guernica as partisan, since it doesn't posit anything controversial about then-contemporary ideological positions. But it does describe an event which is inherently political. WWII redrew the political map, after all.
> Thinking of art as containing compressed information is a bad reading of art, IMO. Or maybe I'm misunderstand what you mean by compressed information.
Yeah, I could've explained this better.
A pun, for example, exhibits compression. It uses a double-entendre to get two meanings across for the price of one. Math exhibits compression. Unary gets compressed into variables, which get compressed into equations (and from here, it can go in different directions). A painting exhibits compression, in the sense that a picture is worth a thousand words. The 2d nature of the medium allows encoding and decoding of lots of things in parallel, compared to 1D strings of speech/text. A story can be thought of as a parable which distills an idea down to its most representative example(s).
Consider this video [0] on The Death of Socrates. There's a remarkable amount of information being transmitted by the painting. It's essentially a high-quality meme. Another analysis that comes to mind is this one on Master & Commander [1]. The book/film wrestles with the correct balance between a liberal, forgiving approach to leadership vs a conservative, hierarchical approach. Does this diminish its merits? Great Art Explained has a great vid [2] about how The Mona Lisa represented the entire culmination of what Da Vinci knew about painting and anatomy. Not exactly a political treatise, mind you. Although it does a decent enough job of showing how much thought and detail can get squeezed into an art piece. Moby Dick is arguably an exploration of epistemology [3]. It also draws attention to slavery. Which is clearly political, even in the partisan sense. Does this spoil the rest of the book?
(Admittedly, I don't know enough about King Lear to comment. And music is an on-going mystery to me.)
Another way to view this is to consider film posters. There's an old meme about how movie posters always look the same, since they draw from a shared lexicon of design elements. E.g. posters for rom-coms frequently feature a man and woman looking at the audience, back to back, with their arms crossed. This isn't by accident, it's deliberate. The graphical artists who design movie posters have a job, which is to quickly and reliably communicate the genre to the audience. It sets expectations. "man & woman, back to back, arms crossed" is an efficient way to communicate that a film is a rom-com. Likewise, the Mona Lisa analysis mentions that it was common for renaissance paintings to feature a pyramid structure. This was deliberate, as it lent a sense of stability. This is often contrasted with the baroque period, which featured instability through a lot of diagonal lines.
Things that we more-canonically think of as "art", are often more complex and subtle though. Which demonstrates that there's a spectrum of artistry. As an analogy, hardly anyone would dispute that doughnuts are food. They provide calories, after all. They taste sweet. They're edible. And yet doughnuts are widely considered *junk* food. Because it does a poor job of providing nourishment beyond the bare-minimum requirement of "provides calories/tastes okay". Likewise, a banana taped to a wall... can be called art, in some respects. But does it communicate deep truths about the human condition? does it inspire? impart life lessons? nourish the soul? Art which doesn't communicate ideas of long-term value, e.g. perhaps a still-life of a vase, I'm less inclined to call "high-art" than simply "decor".
Surely LBJ, given Medicaid, Medicare, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
>Larry David or Joe Biden
Joe Biden helped keep Robert Bork off the Supreme Court, played an important role in the US response to genocide in the Balkans, and has raised the refugee resettlement* limit from 15K under Trump to 125k. Now, of course, some people think those are bad things, but some people think I'll of Larry David's work, too.
>Are there better comparisons?
William Wilberforce and fill in the blank? Gandhi and xxx? MLK and yyy?
Your premise that art is more important than politics is flawed. It seems to me.
The problem with political art is that sometimes people produce things that are strong on the political dimension, but weak or mediocre on the artistic dimension.
A mediocre *non-political* piece of art could be simply ignored, or perhaps get a few niche fans but be ignored by most people. A mediocre *political* piece of art will still be defended by people who like the political message, but they will hypocritically pretend that they actually see the artistic value that their opponents deny. And on the opposite site, people who oppose the political message will insist that the artistic value is zero. It becomes impossible to have a talk about the actual artistic value, because most people will see statements about the art as political statements.
> Politics is arguing over the distribution of those things, but it's more noble to produce those things than to argue over their distribution because the former is positive sum whereas the latter is zero or negative sum.
Unfortunately, refusing to play zero-sum games is sometimes not the same as avoiding them, but instead it means losing at them. You can argue that producing is better than distributing (and I agree with you), but if you stop paying attention to the distribution, someone else may take away everything you produced, and you probably won't be happy about it.
I don't think it's accurate to say that good art is rarely political. In my view, good art is good to the extent that it mirrors reality. Beauty is achieved when a work depicts something real and true, something difficult to capture using argument or analysis, something that, otherwise, is only attainable via direct experience. Art is, for the time being, the best tool we have for conveying what it is to be another person. For this ideal, this "realness," to be achieved, the art cannot be pointed. It cannot be a morality play. It cannot wag a finger at the observer, as if to say "do better." It must be a good faith attempt share your experience with others, and to the extent that politics is a feature of most people's lives, we should expect it to appear in art, even good art.
The vital distinction is between art that has political features (characters that hold certain opinions, politically-charged settings or backdrops, etc.), and that art that's making a pointed, political argument. The prior may very well be good, but the latter is, without exception, bad. Art that strives to argue some point, political or otherwise, ceases to be art, and becomes, instead, a particularly manipulative and emotional form of argument
I agree 100%. I don't consider say Shakespeare's Part 1 of Henry the Fourth to be "political art" even though politics is its subject. Atlas Shrugged or The Grapes of Wrath is political art.
By some definitions of "Politics", any non-trivial piece of good art is never apolitical. Wikipedia English says:
>>> Politics (from Ancient Greek πολιτικά (politiká) 'affairs of the cities') is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations among individuals, such as the distribution of resources or status.
What story or song doesn't deal with decision-making in groups? or power relations? or the distributions of resources? One of the first stories I remember reading and writing was a reading lesson in 1st grade: [BEGIN] My name is X. I love Mommy. I listen to what Mommy says. [END] That's.... politics. This 3-sentence barely-a-story is encoding something very non-trivial about power relations in a house and who should listen to whom. You could say that telling a 7-year-old to listen to his mom is hardly a controversial opinion and that it has no sensible alternatives or opposition, it's still politics, a very instinctive and extremely ancient kind of politics, but politics nonetheless.
Furthermore, continuing on with the theme of state-controlled K12 education systems even though art is technically wider than that, the state in control of an education system dictates what that education system teaches. States are hardly "Apolitical". The very selection of which literature to study, which language to teach them in, which poetry to recite, which holidays to celebrate and with what songs and poems, etc.... This is all politics, and states use each and every one of those opportunities to advance their favorite politics. Does Israel teach Palestinian folk songs in its education system? Do Catholic schools teach erotic works of art such as the Kama Sutra?
"Art should be apolitical" is usually a proxy point for an actual point, which is usually one of those 2 (possibly more):
(1) Art shouldn't be obviously and unsubtly political. Because nobody likes to feel like a dumbass, and art that doesn't respect you enough to let you draw your own conclusions is art that makes you feel like a dumbass, or - worse - that the writer/producer/poet thinks you're a dumbass. Extreme unsubtlety is also a sign of artistic insecurity, the artist(s) is unsure of their capability to convince you through subtle winks, so they resort directly to beating you over the head with it.
(2) Art shouldn't have politics that suck. And "Politics that suck" will vary depending on - wait for it - politics. The current dominant politics, that is. It could encompass everything from fascism to arguing that people not having a religion or leaving their assigned-at-birth religion is completely okay. Notice that people take character descriptions in stories to be endorsements, so a story describing an atheist without explicitly indicating that being an atheist is wrong will be understood as endorsing and/or arguing for whatever perceived or real characteristics of atheists. A story describing extra-marital sex that doesn't end in regret or bad consequences for parties involved will be understood as advocacy for pre-marital-sex, etc.... I picked those 2 things in particular because the gap between how utterly and completely normal they are in some societies vs. how utterly and completely beyond the pale outrageous in other societies is remarkable.
The question is also too muddled by using the general term "Art" to describe the immensely different sub-categories contained therein. I don't think a lyric-less piece of music can have much of a politics, any political connotation it might have is solely through sideband associations, such as the political opinions of its authors, the lyrics usually sung over its tones, or what kinds of audience it's primarily performed to. Linguistic pieces of art - stories, poems, movies, novels, songs, etc... - have the full power of language at their disposal and thus can be inherently political. Paintings can be political through the implicit connotations that the painter can induce through sizes and colors and other visual info, but the meaning of those can vary in unexpected ways: Paintings of the Buddha depict him as fat because pre-industrial obesity meant health and contentment, but of course the connotation now is completely inverted. Language is not immune from those sorts of unexpected mutations, but paintings are more prone to them.
>What story or song doesn't deal with decision-making in groups? or power relations? or the distributions of resources?
Twinkle-Twinke Little Star
Beethoven's 5th Symphony
The Inspecter Gadget theme song
Oh My Darling Clementine
Pretty much all love songs (unless you count two as a group and romance as decision-making, which is pretty unromantic if you ask me)
Like a Bat Out of Hell
The Cliffs of Dover
Frer Jacque
Axel F
I could go on, but it would probably be shorter to list all the songs that do deal with decision making in groups, or power relations, or the distribution of resources.
Interesting that you start with the Greeks' definition of politics. Now let's consider ancient Greek art. How political is Homer? He's pro-Greek, that's for sure, but I don't any real political messages in his work. How about in Aeschylus or Sophocles? Aristotle's Poetics, which has a lot to say about the aesthetics of Greek Tragedy and Comedy, doesn't say anything about the value of political works, as best as I can recall. I suppose the satirist Aristophanes wrote political plays, so I will give you that one. Plato's opinions about art are utterly absurd, IMO.
As for government school systems worrying about what propaganda the kids have to read, I concur that they make the children read crap propaganda lit like 1984 (The CIA financed the movie version), The Grapes of Wrath, To Kill a Mockingbird and The Crucible in lieu of actual good literature. That governments choose propaganda pieces for schools doesn't weaken my case one bit. Political art is bad art.
Aeschylus is very often quite overtly political, as is Euripides. Euripides' political plays aren't particularly good, but Aeschylus' are some of the highlights of Western culture.
The Oresteia ends with the tragic cycle of vengeance finally laid to rest by the establishment of the Areopagus--an Athenian judicial and political body.
The Persians is entirely about the defeat of Persian despotism by the Greek polis.
I think it's a pretty controversial opinion - and thus in need of much more defense than you care to give - that 1984 is "crap Propaganda lit", you mention offhandedly in a pair of parentheses that the CIA financed (one of) the movie(s), but anybody who gives a shit about the movie version of 1984 is doing it completely wrong. Anyone who reads 1984 in a non-English language is doing it 60% wrong. 1984 is meant to be (a) Read, (b) In the original English, and it's a widely loved and widely admired (and so *so* much and often quoted) piece of literature that both Right-Wing and Left-Wing and all the politics in-between love (and accuse their political enemies of being the villains of). I didn't read To Kill a Mockingbird, but it's a household name that I recognize, and by analogy to 1984, I think you're also largely deluding yourself it's propaganda.
> How political is Homer?
Skimming the Wikipedia synopsis of the Iliad because I haven't read it and don't really care enough to: Very. Slavery is normal. Giving away sex-slave girls as rewards for fighting prowess is normal, generous, and/or commendable. Military commanders are expected to start wars based on dreams from Zeus. And that's just a 1-minute skimming of the very first section.
Recognizing that historical works of art are political is a far cry from insisting that they need to be "cleansed" or "wokified" for the modern day, I don't expect the 700s BC Homer or his audiences to stand up for women's rights or even use a different choice of words that even slightly indicates that using women as war spoils is bad or indicative of a moral failing, I really don't expect much from a 700s BC native. It's an insult to my intelligence if anyone tries to "adapt" the Iliad for "Modern Audiences" by removing the now-controversial parts and/or sugar-coating them. But I also think it's pretty deluded to think that there is not "any political messages in his work", there is plenty.
The entire point of art is this: it's a depiction of the artist viewpoint. Any linguistic depiction of a human group has a political message, because it reveals and advances - if not always explicitly advocate for - what the artist considers as the "Normal" politics. Any depiction of cities and warfare in the Middle Ages and before has a political message that slavery is normal and that you should always listen to your King (and/or feudal Lord), because that's all what the authors at the time knew and recognized as normal. It was a pretty **radical** politics back then to argue that Slavery is not normal or that people should govern themselves, that was the controversial, spicy flipside at the time.
But regardless of which of the 2 is more controversial at any given time and place, both messages are "Political". To say that "Human groups should enslave other human groups, especially those captured in war" is a political assertion - that is, it's literally about who should govern/dominate/control whom -, and to negate that statement is *also* a political assertion, for the same reason the original is. It just so happens that some human societies across time and space declares one of them controversial and the negation normal, and other human societies choose the opposite polarity, but that doesn't mean that one of them isn't political, it just means that whatever the society you happen to grow up in declares as "Normal" ceases to be perceived as "Political".
In other words, if Homer himself read or saw a modern work depicting a war, say any of the Call of Duty games, (s)he would be astonished at the radical and "political" messages contained in those works, one of which is that the defeated people in a war aren't slaves to the victors. It's anyone's guess whether he would love that or hate it, but there is not a single sliver of doubt in my mind that it would be the first thing he would notice, that the defeated aren't made slaves. He is right: what is an entirely unconscious choice of the authors of Call of Duty is actually a pretty radical political message to someone from a time when the defeated in a war were almost always enslaved afterwards. That's the thing about politics, you stop noticing it if enough people consider it to be the normal and inevitable state of affairs.
"The entire point of art is this: it's a depiction of the artist viewpoint. Any linguistic depiction of a human group has a political message, because it reveals and advances - if not always explicitly advocate for - what the artist considers as the "Normal" politics. Any depiction of cities and warfare in the Middle Ages and before has a political message that slavery is normal and that you should always listen to your King (and/or feudal Lord), because that's all what the authors at the time knew and recognized as normal."
This is the view of art that both the prude and the woke agree upon, and it is dead wrong. Depiction is not prescription in art. In Joyce's Ulysses, does the author side with the Irish nationalists or is he merely mocking them? To answer the question one way or another is to misunderstand the work. A novel, if it is art and not a mere political work, is about understanding, and understanding is the opposite of judgment.
1984, OTOH, is a work of judgment. Nobody's understanding of the world is enhanced by reading 1984. "Totalitarianism is bad." That's the work. You don't need to write a novel to point that out. I agree that it is a book that many people like when they read it as a kid. It's basically a children's book, much like Harry Potter. But it isn't great art. Its continued popularity is because the US and British (I think) governments decided that it worked as tremendous anti-Communist propaganda during the Cold War (Nevermind and don't mention it to the kids that Orwell was a Socialist) and required every schoolkid to read it.
1984 is art about how knowledge is denied in totalitarian countries, how hard it is to be clear that you're being lied to, and even if you know that, how hard it is to get to anything true.
This is a richer message than just saying totalitarianism is bad, or that a particular totalitarian government is bad.
1984 was prescient in many ways, and one can see instances of it becoming truer as time goes on. It had the concept of double-think, constant monitoring of the populace, government controlling the way the people think and what they think about, and more.
Great art reflects life in an interesting way not before documented. The message isn't comfortable, but 1984 gives a glimpse into how life could be. How one can dispute 1984 is art is beyond me.
> To put that in relatable day-to-day terms, who has been more valuable to our society: Larry David or Joe Biden? Beethoven or Napoleon? The Beatles or LBJ? Are there better comparisons?
You imply that the answer is obvious and it's Larry David, Beethoven and The Beatles.
But to me it seems that the question just has no objective answer, so everything basically boils down to "well I feel that Larry David is more important than LBJ".
Like, Napoleon had a large impact on Europe at the time and it's plausible the Europe of today would look different if not for him. Possibly substantially so, but I'm not remotely certain.
On the other hand, the Beatles had a large impact on Pop music and it's plausible the music we listen to today would sound different if not for them. Possibly substantially so, but I'm not remotely certain.
How do you compare that and come away with "Obviously the Beetles have been more valuable to society"? My takeaway surely is "who the fuck knows"
I tried to make comparisons that one could potentially argue either way, though it's true I show my hand about which way I would argue. An argument I would make regarding say Napoleon is that while a universe without Napoleon would likely look different today (how much, we don't know), it's basically random whether he made the 21st century better or worse, and there's almost no way to argue one way or the other in earnest. Whereas while one can debate Beethoven's relative contribution to the 21st century, it's hard to argue on the side that it's been negative.
I wouldn't really call The Fountainhead political art. There are a handful of scenes that address contemporary political issues, but its primary themes are all about behaving morally at the individual level.
Atlas Shrugged is definitely political art, but it's also not particularly good.
It's not an accident that even ostensibly liberal celebrities have praised the book, it really can be read as a "doing your own thing, being your own person" book, almost a self-help novel.
I think one of the signs of art is that it communicates on many levels simultaneously. As in other areas of life, this rule can be broken occasionally while still allowing for the breakers to remain in the category, but if it's broken too often the breakers cease to be part of the category.
Politics is tricky because, like engineering, it's under pressure to perform usefully. So most political "art" lacks subtlety, but there can be exceptions.
A "titanomachy" showing Zeus and Cronus could say a whole lot, about the replacement of the old order with the new, the hope of revolution and the realization that the abuses of the old order were a result of social forces that will inevitably recapitulate themselves in the new order, sadness for the death of the old tempered by realization that the old had done the same in its day... There's a whole lot that could be packed into a painting of a couple of old Greek dudes, stuff that could be relevant for millennia to come.
Stuff that's tied too closely to specific contingent details becomes banal. Few people today would care about Disraeli vs Gladstone, unless you find a way to make them care. On the other hand, with Churchill vs. Hitler you'd have to find something besides the obvious. Hitler vs. Stalin has potential, though.
Offhand I'd say... "beauty" is the luxury good, while "art" is a style of communication. Art doesn't have to be beautiful, and on the other hand, sometimes all it communicates is "this is beautiful (to someone)".
Interesting take. As a passionate supporter of beauty, I'd have said that beauty is out of style, and that most contemporary art merely 'challenges' the viewer.
Think it's ugly? - No, you are being challenged by what you see.
Think it's stupid or facile? - No, you are being _challenged_ by that artistic piece.
It's much easier to shock or annoy the viewer than it is to render them awestruck or thoughtful, and so that's what most contemporary art does.
If one questions the art one sees, the fault never lies with the (unskilled, unthoughtful) artist but inevitably falls at the feet of the viewer, who isn't adequately responding to the 'challenge' before them.
Disclaimer; this comment may or may not have been heavily influenced by an invitation to a gallery opening that landed in my inbox two minutes ago - and which I would pay money to avoid attending!
A lot of modern painting-and-sculptures art is an unmitigated and unrepentant dumpster of trash, but I would say that in the realm of writings and moving pictures there is now more backlash against meaningless "Subversion of Expectation" just for the sake of it. I base this impression primarily on the reaction to the 3rd trilogy of Star Wars, where every dumb and incoherent authorial decision was justified by "It's a SuvVersiOn of ExPeCtatiONs" but most of the audience weren't having it and still called it dumb and meaningless.
I agree; I think you've got a separate and entirely valid critique. :-)
Making artificial beauty is hard, and I think there might be a subconscious element of "sour grapes" in the currently popular style of art.
Or perhaps it's that, in order to create beauty, you have to be able to see beauty and imagine beauty. And I think there are ideologies today which claim that physical beauty is worthless, or which try to redefine beauty to better match their political/ethical views. And the result is a vision of ugliness with some abstract pattern applied to it.
At this point, I've seen more claims that art is inevitably political. Even the most innocuous genre fiction might be implying that the existing system isn't too bad, or at least it's inevitable.
I have a small bet with myself that people who say art should be political actually mean it should be promoting *their* politics.
When it comes to art, politics fades in the sun and disappears. Any biting political statement from five hundred years ago just looks like a nice poem or a pretty picture to us now, because we don't know the argument and all references to it are lost on us.
If your "political" point is actually something so fundamental that it hasn't changed in 500 years, then arguably you're actually highlighting some aspect of the human condition and you've moved beyond mere politics into something more profound.
But otherwise, the politics will evapourate away and what's left will be the physical artifact you have created, which people will judge on its own aesthetic terms.
If a strong political feeling is the thing that motivates you to get up and create that artifact, I say that's just as valid as love, loneliness, aggression, or any of the other creative drivers. Just provided you do a good job with the result.
Does anyone know a simple rule of thumb for comparing compensation as a salaried employee versus as a contractor? I realize that it depends on the details but that's why I'm asking for a simple rule of thumb. USA.
I think the 1.5-2x figure given is fairly accurate. The payroll taxes and health insurance deductions that big employers absorb hides a lot of the tax burden that the self-employed are exposed to. In my experience, $50,000 as a contractor is roughly equivalent to $30,000 salaried. So you need to get an extra 2/3rds from your income.
You need to make about 1.5 - 2x as a contractor generally (depending on your usual salary range), to offset the cost of benefits like health insurance and the extra self-employment taxes. There are some benefits to forming corporations and doing B2B contracting if possible.
Also keep in mind that if you're going independent, you'll need to be spending time and possibly money marketing yourself, maintaining connections, and diversifying your clients, to ensure that your pipeline of work is resilient and paying enough - that has an extra cost in time and sometimes quality of life too. 2x might be underselling it in that case.
I'll just add that every single person I've known who switched from salaried work to independent consulting/contractual ("hung out their shingle" in whatever their field is), has initially underestimated what they needed to charge per hour or day to be doing at least as well as from the salary that they left. Literally no exceptions during my decades-long professional life. And some of them hugely underestimated it.
A very smart and knowledgeable scientist thinks of a whole number between 1 and 9 inclusive. You are allowed two questions, to each of which the scientist will truthfully answer YES, NO or I DON'T KNOW. Find out the number.
"V unir whfg cvpxrq zl bja, erny-inyhrq ahzore va gur vagreiny ]guerr,fvk]. Vf lbhe ahzore ynetre guna zl ahzore?" Gura ercrng jvgu n fhvgnoyr vagreiny.
Be, vs lbh jnag gb nibvq vagebqhpvat n zbqry-qrcraqrag dhrfgvba, lbh pbhyq fnl:
Yrg x or gur erznvaqre bs lbhe ahzore nsgre qvivfvba guebhtu guerr. Vf gur fgngrzrag "tvira a vf n cbfvgvir jubyr ahzore, vf 2*a+(x+1) trarenyyl gur fhz bs (x+1) cevzrf?"
Sbe x=0, gur nafjre vf ab orpnhfr avar vf abg gur fhz bs bar cevzr.
Sbe x=2, gur nafjre vf lrf, orpnhfr jr unir n cebbs sbe gur jrnx Tbyqonpu pbawrpgher.
Sbe x=1, gur nafjre vf "V qba'g xabj", orpnhfr gur fgngrzrag vf gur Tbyqonpu pbawrpgher.
Gura whfg ercrng jvgu "Yrg x or gur vagrtre qvivfvba erfhyg bs lbhe ahzore naq guerr".
Svefg Dhrfgvba: V'z guvaxvat bs rvgure gur frg pbagnvavat gur ahzoref bar guebhtu guerr be gur frg pbagnvavat gur ahzoref bar guebhtu fvk. Vf lbhe ahzore jvguva zl frg?
Frpbaq Dhrfgvba: Sebz ubj ur nafjrerq gur svefg dhrfgvba, V abj xabj gung uvf ahzore vf bar bs guerr pbafrphgvir ahzoref. Gura nybat gur fnzr yvarf nf orsber V pna fnl: V'z guvaxvat bs rvgure gur frg pbagnvavat gur svefg ahzore be gur frg pbagnvavat gur svefg naq frpbaq ahzore. Vf lbhe ahzore jvguva zl frg?
Gur rnfvrfg jnl gb frr jul guvf jbexf vf gb cvpx n ahzore 1-9 naq grfg vg.
Sbe gur svefg dhrfgvba, gur vzcbegnag cneg vf l=⌊(k-1)/3⌋. Vs k=1,2,3, gura guvf vf 0; vs k=4,5,6, guvf vf 1; vs k=7,8,9, guvf vf 2. Fb abj jr whfg arrq gb ghea "0, 1, be 2" vagb "Ab, Lrf, be VQX". Vs jr qb m=l^(enaqbz tvtnagvp ahzore), gura gur nafjre m jvyy rvgure or 0, 1, be n enaqbz tvtnagvp ahzore. Vs jr nfx sbe gur mgu cevzr cyhf 1, jr'yy trg 3, 4, be "V qba'g xabj". Nobhg unys bs cevzrf+1 ner zhygvcyrf bs 4, naq NSNVPG gurer'f ab pyrire zngurzngvpny grpuavdhrf gb trg gur nafjre va guvf pnfr; V guvax lbh'q whfg arrq infg pbzchgngvbany cbjre. Fb vs jr nfx vs gur mgu cevzr cyhf 1 vf n zhygvcyr bs 4, jr'yy trg Ab, Lrf, be V qba'g xabj.
Gur frpbaq dhrfgvba vf gur rknpg fnzr vqrn, rkprcg gur vavgvny sbezhyn vf l=(k-1)%3. Vs k=1,4,7, vg'f 0. Vs k=2,5,8, vg'f 1. Vs k=3,6,9, vg'f 2. Gura jr whfg qb gur fnzr cebprff nf nobir.
Avar ahzoref, gjb thrffrf: zrguvaxf jr arrq gb qvivqr gjvpr ol guerr hfvat lrf, ab naq V qba'g xabj nf bhe fyvpre. "xabjyrqtrnoyr fpvragvfg" vf cebononoyl n Purxubi'f Tha. Thrffvat jr arrq gb hfr fpvragvsvp xabjyrqtr sbe gur V qba'g xabj. V'z abg n xabjyrqtrnoyr fpvragvfg fb V qba'g xabj gur nafjre ohg zhfg or fbzrguvat yvxr: Vs jr zhygvcyl guvf ahzore ol K qbrf na ryrzrag jvgu gung ngbzvp jrvtug rkvfg? Ercrng jvgu L. Fbzrguvat yvxr gung. Fbzr svryq bs fpvragvsvp xabjyrqtr V qba'g xabj naq abar bs hf xabj ragveryl.
Sbe gur 1-3 pnfr, V jbhyq nfx: “V nz guvaxvat bs n ahzore orgjrra 2 naq 3. Vf gur ahzore lbh unir va zvaq terngre guna be rdhny gb zl ahzore?”
Vs gurl unir 3 va zvaq, gurl pna pbasvqragyl nafjre lrf. Vs 1, gurl pna nafjre ab. Vs 2, gur nafjre qrcraqf ba xabjyrqtr gurl qba’g unir (juvpu ahzore V unir va zvaq), fb gurl zhfg nafjre “V qba’g xabj”.
Vg frrzf fvzcyr rabhtu gb erqhpr gur ceboyrz gb gur irefvba jurer lbh nfx bar dhrfgvba naq qvfgvathvfu orgjrra vagrtref bar, gjb naq guerr. Fb jr whfg arrq n dhrfgvba gung jvyy znc gb lrf, ab naq V qba'g xabj sbe gur svefg guerr vagrtref.
Bar boivbhf ohg pyhaxvyl jbeqrq irefvba jbhyq or "pna nyy fhssvpvragyl ynetr bqq be rira vagrtref or rkcerffrq nf n fhz bs guvf znal cevzrf?" Gung'f n ab sbe bar, n lrf sbe guerr, naq na V qba'g xabj sbe gjb. (Ohg abj V'z qbhoyr purpxvat, vg gheaf bhg gung gur cebbs bs gur guerr cevzr pnfr vf fgvyy pbafvqrerq irel fyvtugyl qhovbhf, ryrira lrnef nsgre vavgvny choyvpngvba.)
Today somebody told me that when he spontaneously tells people an observation he thinks is interesting they are turned off and conclude that he’s a weird geek. The example he gave was of an idea that was, yeah, kind of quirky, but seemed smart and interesting to me. I’d like to be able to give him some examples of similar thoughts other people have had. ACX seems like the ideal place to ask. Anyone want to volunteer a quirky personal observation or two? His example: The placement of eyes in our species probably determines some important things about how we function. For instance rabbits have nearly a 360 degree view. Their eyes are on the side of their head, and they have notches in their ears that keep the ears from blocking rabbit’s view of what’s behind. So our awareness is especially geared towards what’s in front of us. “What’s in front of me” & “what I’m aware of” aren’t identical categories, but they’re very similar.
I find it reassuring to know that there are sheets of connective tissue between the pairs of smaller bones in the lower legs and arms. It makes me feel more held together.
I also like knowing that the heart is between the lungs and resting on the diaphragm.
Your friend would enjoy the Equations of Life (Cockell, 2018).
My personal observation/question: I wonder why isn't it common to have multiple tenants on a single shoplot in the west? The few examples near me are all Asian restaurants import the practice from their homeland. But rent in the west is very expensive - it seems like if you have a "morning business" (like a cafe), it could be good to sublet the space to a night business (like a bar) and greatly reduce the rent burden. This also means you can massively compress the footprint of your city, making it much more convenient for everyone. So there must be a tradeoff that is a larger limiting factor in the west that I'm not considering, because this sort of thing is fairly common practice in Asia.
There was a place in Mexico (probably still there, but I haven't checked in many years) that was a car shop during the day and turned into a taco restaurant at night. Never got any work done to my car there, but the tacos were fantastic.
I would guess that the tradeoff is the inconvenience of having another business's equipment in your work area. I suppose a cafe and a bar in the same space would use the same tables and chairs, but not everything could be dual-purpose.
I can remember a specific case that's a lot like his. I was sitting on a bench with my girlfriend, watching a pigeon bob its head back and forth. Pigeons have eyes on opposite sides of their heads, giving them closer to a 360-degree view. Having eyes on opposite sides of the head usually comes at the expense of stereoscopic vision; however, I suggested that the rapid bobs of the pigeon's head allowed one eye to have distinct images from two places in rapid succession, so maybe their brains can process that as a stereoscopic image... girlfriend said I was weird.
There's a song called "Good Luck, Babe!" by Chappell Roan that is becoming quite popular. Every time I hear this song, I'm struck by how similar it is to "I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles)" by the Proclaimers. Everyone I tell about this agrees with me, but I've never seen anyone else mention it, even though most of the people I know have both heard this song and the song by the Proclaimers.
We evolved to feel sexual pleasure in response to activity that leads to reproduction. The instincts are blind and we can get that same pleasure from proximate activities even when there's no real woman in the room. This implies that if plants could feel, eating or chopping fruit would be giving it an orgasm.
I'm no botanist, but I think having a pollenator visit your flowers would be more analogous to sex. Having your fruit drop to the ground or get eaten is maybe more like sending your kids off to college.
Tree-dwellers in general seem to be a major class of exceptions, they have fewer worries about ambush predators and more concerns about exactly what's in front of their face and how far away it is.
Yes, I remember learning this in school. The explanation was that prey need to be aware, and detect predators as quickly as possible while feeding etc. Predators need forward focus when they hunt.
So our forward facing eyes may suggest about us that we are predators rather tgan prey.
I would think the reason predators have eyes in front is depth perception. A cat needs to know how far the prey is in front of it to pounce correctly, raptors need to know how far to dive.
While we are predators, we inherited eyes in the front from herbivorous ancestors. Primates need eyes in the front to judge distance when jumping from one branch to another.
That's a good point. I was using the eyes in front as evidence that we're omnivores rather than naturally vegetarian.
I've seen a theory that early humans? pre-humans? were scavengers, but the eyes in front suggest that they were at least hunting small game even if they were also scavenging large game.
No, all primates have forward-facing eyes regardless of their diet. Depth perception is not useful only for hunting; in the case of primates, it's for navigating the three-dimensional environment of the treetops, as Bullseye above notes.
Most herbivores run on cellulose, whereas those humans who get their calories from plants run on carbs and plant fat (I.e. we eat tubers, nuts, fruit, grains seeds, and pulses, as opposed to grass, leaves, shoots, and stems).
Therefore, even if the human plant based diet were the evolutionarily correct one, there is no reason to expect the human anatomy to resemble the typical herbivore.
I think we've evolved as flexible eaters (come on this is common sense), who can live almost exclusively on animals, or almost exclusively on carbs and plant fat, or anything in between. In any case, we cannot eat plants as horses or gorillas do in the wild, and they cannot eat plants as we do. Our herbivory is not typical mammalian herbivory, it's something else. I'm a vegetarian and near vegan myself, by the way.
Not to be contrarian on purpose, but I don't think that would work either. Both incisors and molars are useful to process plants; perhaps you were thinking of canines? But even then, having incisors, canines, and molars is an ancestral feature of mammals, and one that is not only shared by all primates, but also nearly all other mammals. Even horses and camels still have all three tooth types, though rodents and ruminants lost their canines.
Humans only became active hunters when we already had stone tools and fire, so most of the hard work of processing carcasses is outsourced, so to speak. So you shouldn't expect many physiological correlates of that sort with other predator mammals. I think your best bet would be intestine size: our intestine, and particularly our caecum (which many herbivores use as fermentation chamber to break down cellulose), is closer in relative size to that of carnivorous mammals than to that of herbivores. But I think that would be true even if we were herbivores, since plant food still gets ground and baked.
I've wondered why nipples haven't evolved towards the bottom of the breast as humans started walking upright. It seems that most women who breastfeed do so when sitting upright. Wouldn't having the nipple at the bottom be a better idea from a fluid flow perspective?
Perhaps the reason is that there's a sexual selection effect going on, where having a nipple in the very center of the breast is a marker for good genes (much like facial symmetry and many other features).
I assume it's because nipples are harmless on men (I assume males in all mammal species have nipples but I don't actually know), so it was easier to let them exist than to edit them out.
I expect it has something to do with us being bipedal and thus weird? Centering the mammary glands around the nipples seems like a good idea for quadrapeds, where they would hang straight down. Maybe the genetic design for this got solidified early on, to the point where random mutations today aren't able to affect it without bollixing up the whole system.
Maybe centered nipples have survived because they provide a positive selection effect on babies and allocate more resources to only the healthiest offspring, like a built-in form of eugenics. Babies that die of thirst because they can't overcome the struggle of horizontal fluid flow suction probably wouldn't have made it very far anyway, after all—Okay, I'm not being serious and that might've unnecessarily morbid. But I do wonder how many persistent suboptimal features of parenting could be explained that way, as built-in parental eugenics gauntlets, the rarely mentioned third important evolutionary factor beside natural selection and sexual selection.
Humans are K-selected. Most births are single births. If you have just invested nine months, tons of energy and risked your life in childbed to create another carrier of half of your genes, any "eugenics" gene would be strongly selected against unless it was a nearly perfect predictor of reproductive fitness.
If you have a gene which decreases the survival odds of kids with competitive genomes by 1% and of kids with non-competitive genomes by 20%, depending on the frequency of severe gene defects (inbreeding, radiation, etc), this would likely be a massive liability. The selection pressure in childhood is likely enough to produce most of this effect for free.
Theoretically, if you had a gene which causes your offspring to die if and only if they are sterile, this would be beneficial, but "predict if an individual is sterile" is a bit beyond what a gene could do.
I'm joining tumblr. Is there a rationalist/neoliberal/economist outpost there?
Like: Twitter is insane on average, but with careful curation my feed is full of nerdy economically-literate liberals who buy malaria bednets and are worried about AI and are in love with NGDP targeting. Who should I follow if I want to replicate that experience on Tumblr?
I've found Scott's, Yudkowksy's, and Kelsey Piper's blog, but none of them seem to post very much. Is there an active community?
Argumate. Not strictly rationalist, but similar enough discourse norms (will debate anything in good faith, seems to possess a reasonable baseline of empathy and reason), and posts a frankly prodigious amount due to constantly reblogging past discourse and commenting on how the situation is now. You'll find lots of the same names arguing with him.
is it possible to enter a Jhana-like state without trying by mistake? Normally when I'm going to sleep most of the time there's an increasing hum in my ears. If it goes too high (it increases rapidly after a while) it wakes me up even more and I become fully conscious or I fall asleep to the hum. It's like light being refracted or reflected from the water based on the angle it hits. Hum goes too loud too quickly and it wakes me up, or it's slower than a critical speed and I fall asleep.
Last night I woke up in the middle of the night and was falling back asleep, and for the first time in my life it was neither refraction nor reflection. By pure chance I hit the hum-increase-speed which didn't wake me up but barely. The hum increased to a real very loud thunder and the blackness that I see with closed eyes became gradually whiter to eventually be pure light. At that moment I felt something like bliss and got lost in it and fell asleep. I don't know if I really experienced this falling asleep, or I fell asleep in my dream and this was just a dream. It was weird though, anybody had anything like this?
Many years ago during dreamless sleep I experienced a period of objectless awareness. An apparently different part of me became distressed by the state and it forced me to wake up.
Years later I would read in the Upanishads that dreamless sleep was the domain of the true self, the atman.
Yes, that's Dhyana. I've read descriptions of that hum in Tibetan stuff and there's piles of Indian tantric stuff that corresponds with your experience. You may not have noticed but I guess that you would have experienced full sensory withdrawal (pratyahara) and possibly a rotating sensation in the lower abdomen as well as a distinct lowering of the tail bone. The rest of what you describe corresponds with the type of 'hard/true' Dhyana that's more written about in the yogic corpus than in the modern western Buddhist Jhana descriptions. It's much harder to achieve then the light Jhana that everyone is talking about currently, so give yourself a pat on the back.
That sounds really impressive! The hum before going to sleep was something that I always experienced but as I said if it got loud slowly I just fell asleep and it got loud too fast I would just gain too much consciousness. For the first time in my life, I think out of pure luck, I hit the goldilocks spot.
The other sensations I wouldn't have noticed or remembered because I melted in the white light, hum and joy (pratyahara might be this) so I don't remember anything further about my abdomen or tailbone.
I'll report back on acx comments if I manage to experience this again or find a way to trigger it. Thanks for the comment!
Dostoevsky had a kind of epilepsy, sometimes called "ecstatic epilepsy" that apparently gave him super pleasurable feelings during his episodes. There are lots of ways to ruin one's brain; Drugs, being a Neet, having lots of concussions or a brain tumor. Of course, this doesn't prove that there need to be multiple ways to be super happy, possibly all blissful brains are alike each depressed one is broken in a different way.
But I think it suggests that there would probably be a couple of ways to find some bliss. There is some sort of epilepsy that gives you bliss, probably one can have a tumor in the happiness center that has a similar effect, the Jhanas seem to be one way to hack bliss, maybe your dream humming is another kind of hack. Or possibly it's a very similar method to the Jhana route.
"Not in Education, Employment, or Training", on the internet, especially 4chan it's often used to generally mean a loser. Not in Education, Employment, or Training, probably also has no friends or hobbies or really a will to live.
That sounds more like entering a lucid dream from the waking state (except you lost lucidity at the end). Hypnagogic hallucinations in the form of buzzing noises and a boom when you cross over into the sleep state are common effects.
P.S. There's state where you're dreaming, but there's nothing in the dream ... bodiless, formless nothing. In the Buddhist tradition, people try to do that deliberately. In the western lucid dreaming communities, it's more often "well, i entered that state accidentally and I think it really sucked".
Interesting, I sometimes go s bit lucid in my dreams under certain conditions, for example close to waking up but I've never been a lucid dreamer that can go lucid and take control of the dream fully. By the way I wouldn't call what I experienced as something that sucks. It was on contrary very joyful. Last night I was thinking of trying to do that on purpose but I had a very early morning appointment so went directly to sleep.
"The perception-of-mind of the dream state is much easier to absorb than the perception-of-mind of the waking state. In the dream state, when some portion of the very coarse kind of Prana dissolves itself and gathers at the Heart Center, the dream will vanish, and one will fall into the sleeping state. This is the time in which one may recognize the Voidness; if not, through repeated practices, one will definitely be able to see the Voidness of sleep clearly. "
The best, most good-faith critiques of EA likely come from either inside EA or right on the periphery*. IMO I think it's a wise strategy to engage the highest-quality critiques first.
*In full transparency, I try to be one of these people.
Hey everyone. I made PaperTalk.xyz to make finding, discussing, and understanding research papers easier. If anyone has any feature requests, let me know! Of course the hard part is getting enough people coming daily so it feels alive...working on it. Thanks.
"In Bargaining in the Shadow of the Law: Divorce Laws and Family Distress (NBER Working Paper No. 10175), co-authors Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers evaluate three measures of family well being -- suicide rates, domestic violence, and murder -- to determine the effects of reforms nationwide that created unilateral divorce laws.
The authors find very real effects on the well being of families. For example, there was a large decline in the number of women committing suicide following the introduction of unilateral divorce, but no similar decline for men. States that passed unilateral divorce laws saw total female suicide decline by around 20 percent in the long run. The authors also find a large decline in domestic violence for both men and women following adoption of unilateral divorce. Finally, the evidence suggests that unilateral divorce led to a decline in females murdered by their partners, while the data reveal no discernible effects for homicide against men."
> For example, there was a large decline in the number of women committing suicide following the introduction of unilateral divorce, but no similar decline for men.
This seems like one of those things where different people will draw completely opposite conclusions. One possible interpretation is that women were oppressed by the previous situation, now they are not or less so, so the situation improved for them. Nothing changes for men, because they were not oppressed in the first place. (Women couldn't leave bad partners, now they can.) Another possible interpretation is that the new law, in combination with other existing laws, successfully addressed the problems of women, but didn't address the problems of men. (Men can leave bad partners, but doing so probably means they will never see their children again.)
> Finally, the evidence suggests that unilateral divorce led to a decline in females murdered by their partners, while the data reveal no discernible effects for homicide against men.
The first part seems obvious. If your partner is violent, and it's getting worse, the sooner you leave them, the less likely something bad happens. The second part has two possible explanations. Maybe men are less likely to use the possibility of unilateral divorce even when their partner is abusive (e.g. because they know that doing so would have bad financial consequences plus probably never seeing their children again, plus the fact that the children would stay alone with the abusive partner). Or maybe the reasons women kill their husbands are different (e.g. economically motivated, either life insurance or "why get 50% of property at divorce when you could get 100% using this one simple trick").
"The first part seems obvious. If your partner is violent, and it's getting worse, the sooner you leave them, the less likely something bad happens."
Abusive partners make it very hard for their victims to get away. This includes cutting off financial and relationship resources, threatening worse attacks for attempts to escape, and using pets and children as hostages. I think I've explained this to you before.
How often does the "wife gets the children, enforces no contact, and gets child support" scenario happen? I realize people can be very frightened and affected by rare disasters, but what are the stats?
My take on this is affected by the only bad divorce I know about-- I don't remember who initiated the divorce, but the wife ended up with the kid and no child support. She kept trying to get her ex to stay in contact with his son, but he made very little contact.
Why not consider that there are both men and women who are seriously bad partners?
Stats wise, it looks like about 90% of divorced women get custody of the children, though that may be biased because many men do not seek custody. I saw statistics that indicated that when men seek primary custody for the children they get it 60% of the time, likely because they're more likely to contest custody if they have a particularly unfit partner. I don't know how often fathers who don't contest custody would have wanted to, but were dissuaded not to try because they were unlikely to succeed. But all these statistics should be taken with several grains of salt, I was not able to find official statistics and got these numbers off third party sites (mostly divorce lawyer websites).
Other similarly shaky statistics I found say that 63% of women with custody get child support, while 38% of men with custody do. And it looks like the average child support payment is about $300 per month. But, you know: averages.
Finding more solid statistics seems difficult due to the huge number of divorce lawyer websites that clutter up search when I tried to find info on this.
I was especially interested in the outrage-maximizing situation of the ex-wife getting custody of the children *and* the ex-husband paying child support *and* the ex-husband not being permitted contact with his children. My guess is that this is pretty rare, but I don't really know.
> Why not consider that there are both men and women who are seriously bad partners?
Oh definitely; I suspect that maybe 20% of men and 20% of women are seriously bad partners.
I also suspect that a typical outcome of a hostile divorce is "whoever gets the better lawyer, wins", which in turn becomes "whoever gets the lawyer first, wins" because a good lawyer can give you advice on how to legally grab all the money in the shared accounts, which allows you to use that money for the lawyer, and prevents your partner from doing the same thing.
There are also other tricks, such as making a phone call to every lawyer in your jurisdiction. Now your partner cannot hire any of them, because they have already talked to you, so they would technically have a conflict of interest. Or accusing your partner of domestic violence and immediately withdrawing the accusation. Now you don't have to prove anything, because the accusation was withdrawn. However, everyone heard it, and sometimes they are actually required to act as if the accusation wasn't withdrawn, because everyone knows that victims can be pressured into withdrawing.
These legal tricks can of course be used by either sex. Finally, you can choose a jurisdiction known to be most biased towards your sex, and apply for divorce there. Sometimes a residence in given jurisdiction is required, but there are probably clever ways to technically do that without your partner noticing. Generally, there seems to be a huge first-mover advantage.
"Oh definitely; I suspect that maybe 20% of men and 20% of women are seriously bad partners."
That's higher than I would have put it. Of course, we might have different ideas of "seriously bad", but I'd have said more like between 5% and 10%. Maybe even as low as 3%.
I'm still very unsure about what proportion of divorces lead to men losing all contact with their children. For that matter, I don't know what proportion of me still want contact with their children. Clearly, some don't.
>There are also other tricks, such as making a phone call to every lawyer in your jurisdiction. Now your partner cannot hire any of them, because they have already talked to you, so they would technically have a conflict of interest.
The only incident I can recall like that was someone posting they had done this on Reddit, followed by all the internet lawyers telling him we was an idiot who was going to get the judge extremely pissed off at him and doubly so because he was posting it in public forum. The post was quickly deleted but you know, the internet never forgets
So what's your explanation for why "the evidence suggests that unilateral divorce led to a decline in females murdered by their partners", if you don't agree with Viliam's rather obvious explanation?
I'm surprised there's no decrease in homicide against men! I suppose it would be too difficult to see a change in mortality in general, and mortality data would be confounded by the fact that an unhappy marriage is stressful and will shorten your life anyway.
Of course, Henry VIII already showed that spousal murder drops when legal divorce avenues exist :P
This isn't the twentieth century, and certainly not the nineteenth. There are very few poisons that won't scream "poison!" on the autopsy that will almost invariably occur in such cases. And if someone tries to use the clever 21st-century internet to find one of those undetectable poisons, *that* will scream "poison!" to your ISP, who will rat you out to the police on request.
I am pretty sure the number of wives capable of carrying out an undetectable poisoning is negligible, at least outside the pages of mystery novels.
This is merely something I heard about, but I was told that a detailed and thorough investigation of about a hundred car accidents turned up a murder. This isn't terribly surprising.
I don't remember the movie's name, but there's one that made it occur to me that if a teenager appears to have committed suicide, it might not be investigated as a murder.
I think there's a consensus among highway patrolmen, etc, that a significant fraction of single-vehicle, single-fatality "accidents" are really suicides, but that it would be hard to prove for any one and would not be doing the family any favors to try.
Trying to arrange an undetected car-crash murder would be tricky, particularly with airbags, crumple zones, etc making crashes much more survivable, but with access to the car and enough mechanical expertise might be plausible.
Pro-tip: if your method of murder leads to an autopsy to determine the cause of death, your method sucks.
The best way to get away with murder is if the doctor does not check "suspicion of unnatural death" on the death certificate.
Of course, a lot depends on the priors of the victim dropping dead from natural causes. For a 30-yo with no relevant health conditions, that prior will be very low. For a 70-yo with heart problems, the doctor might just turn the corpse, see that there is no knife sticking out of the back, write "heart failure" on the certificate and call it a day.
Details will vary from state to state, but in California the local coroner's office is required to investigate any "violent, sudden or medically unattended deaths". That doesn't necessarily require a full autopsy, but the "medically unattended" part means that either your poisoning victim is going to be examined before death by a doctor trying very hard to keep them alive, or after death by a doctor trying to figure out how that happened so quickly that he couldn't get to a doctor in time.
And the state of the art on the latter is well beyond "meh, nothing obvious and he's seventy so it must be a heart attack".
Also, the past had much worse medical science than the present, so probaby a fair number of those wife poisoning cases were actually the husband dying of natural causes in a way that wasn't obvious to the doctors/judges of the time.
He executed two of his wives even after legalising (for his cases only) divorce, so that doesn't really help in the spousal murder rates. As Christina of Denmark said "If I had two heads, one of them should be at the king of England's disposal".
A bit late for the party, but anyway: A few years ago I signed up for a small technological enterprise, pre-ordering a light electric vehicle, because I dislike moving a ton of stuff around with me and still like to move fast. Now the company obviously has liquidity problems and offers extended investment plans. I'm in there with about 1/4 of a monthly income after taxes and could well blow a whole of that but won't need the vehicle, which is anyway a luxury item, in the next 5 years. I don't believe anything I do has much influence on climate change. Should I commit more deeply?
I have what I humbly think is a better suggestion: send about a quarter of your monthly after-tax income to me every month for whatever the term of the contract would have been.
The upside is obvious but I'll present it anyway: I would greatly enjoy receiving free money every month for a period of (I assume) several years, and I would use the money wisely.
The downside is that you are giving away a quarter of your after-tax income for (again, I'm guessing here) several years and gaining nothing other than the satisfaction of knowing that you've improved my quality of life. But that's more than you would have gotten out of an investment with a company that is going down the toilet now that interest rates are positive again.
If they're having liquidity problems and are soliciting customers for small investments, then that means that banks and VCs aren't interested in investing (more) in them. Since banks and VCs have analysts who assess whether or not an investment is worthwhile and usually have access to a lot more Due Diligence info on the company's finances and operations than you do, then I'd be very hesitant to bet invest more than a small amount of money.
A reasonable analysis, but it doesn't address the actual problem: not enough information is provided here (or possibly provided at all) to make any kind of investment decision. Banks and VCs decided not to, but it doesn't mean they're right.
On the other hand, why "invest" money in something where you can't project good returns eventually, other than "this is something the world needs, so should be made"? It isn't an investment unless you EXPECT to make significantly more money out of it than you put in.
All that I can say about Lyman Stone's argument is that anyone who writes their argument with light gray text on a white background clearly doesn't want anyone to read their argument.
I went down the deep rabbit hole and made this guide to answer the questions that bothered me every time I was offered stock options, like "how much money is that?"
Topics covered: basics, how startup exits work, possible outcomes for stock options holders, taxes, dilution, how long you will wait, and how lucky do you have to be to make money. And, of course, how to lose all of your money (there are so many ways!).
Took me a lot of effort! That stuff is complicated.
I hope it’s useful for you, and I would really appreciate if you sent it to a friend.
This was a very cogent and comprehensive summary - thanks very much for putting it together. As somebody who's founded and, before that, worked at a few startups, I often have friends or family asking me about this, and I'm delighted to have such a great resource to point them towards. Kudos!
I like the idea, but I find that I rarely visit the site. I've bookmarked it in the folder which has become the graveyard for sites I think I should visit but in practice never do.
I think the execute their mission pretty well! It's my go-to spot for "big" news events.
That said, I know they want subscription support, but I perhaps cynically wonder if that would defeat the purpose of their mission, if not now, then in the future. Personalizing the user experience to increase engagement is a terrible temptation.
X-risks and such.... I engage in wishful thinking and believe that an AI is unlikely to be able to maintain its infrastructure long enough to destroy the human race.
At this point, of course, AI isn't close to being able to maintain a small low-tech factory on its own. Let me know if I'm wrong, but I bet I would have heard about it. I mean, it couldn't hold things together for too long even if it had a credit card and an ordinary ability to order things.
The supply chain for manufacturing chips isn't simple.
Unless there's a very fast FOOM, there will be fighting-- with humans on both sides-- over the infrastructure. And the infrastructure is rather fragile. Many, many sf scenarios are possible, and it might be better for games than novels.
I admit my optimistic outcome is billions dead and an end to the more ambitious computing, but we're talking about x-risks, not ordinary risks.
The AI just can just use humans to maintain its factories, until the point where it no longer needs them. That may be a few years, decades or longer. The AI just needs to persuade/brainwash/threaten a small number of people that's necessary to run its supply line. That doesn't mean the (possibly few) remaining humans have any collective power or motivation to resist the AI. And this doesn't seem like it should be particularly hard for a mind that's far beyond humans, since regular human created ideologies can make human followers do their bidding already today.
I saw a meme of Twitter yesterday about a coronal mass ejection frying the circuits of the AI overlord and the liberated humans returning to worshipping the Sun God.
I think it's important to trust only those who will be punished if they behave badly, so figuring out some kind of dead-hand deterrence seems to be a good idea. Easier said than done.
I think the two big mileposts are going to be 1) when AI can write code better than almost all humans can, and 2) when AI can improve itself better than almost all humans can improve it. I'm not sure which will come first, but I'm quite sure that they're both going to come, if we keep on at the current pace.
Writing better code isn’t going to make the AI’s any smarter - that depends on compute, data and perhaps new algorithms. Maybe, if AI can write very low level assembly code they can speed up response times or how much compute is needed but I doubt that they would be any better at assembly than modern compilers and nobody would trust that code anyway.
The thing with code is that there is a maximum efficiency you can get you to and AI is not going to better this unless it originates a new algorithm, and I’ve seen very little examples of AI ingenuity yet. Which isn’t to say it’s not a useful tool.
For instance If there’s a really efficient sorting algorithm then a senior programmer should able to write that algorithm as efficiently in his preferred language (assuming you’ve just explained it to him) as well as an AI. Depending on the language there will be the best possible way of writing that algorithm in whatever language we’ve chosen, with whatever criteria we’ve chosen - which might be maximising speed at the expense of size, or whatever. And the AI is not going to do better on that than the engineer, or engineers who have worked on it for years.
That later stuff you mention, that's what I meant. Not just gluing components together to get a minimum viable product out the door, but actually tackling a Hard Problem. Finding data that no one's thought about, extracting patterns that no one's noticed, creating algorithms that get 90% of the use for 10% of the compute, that kind of stuff. I am confident that our current neural net AIs are not implemented anywhere near as efficiently as they could be. IMO, at the high end, a lot of efficiency is learning what shortcuts are safe to take, not simply dropping into lower and lower levels of a software/hardware stack to reduce the number of operations.
1) is already trivially true (almost all humans cannot write any code), and I would argue is also true for programmers. GPT-4 and Gemini 1.5 are very, very good at coding. And they're clearly superhuman purely in breadth, since they know ~every programming language, far exceeding even a very polyglot programmer. They're not (currently) capable of very long context, vaguely specified tasks that a good human programmer could handle, but compared to the median "person who can write code", I suspect they are likely better.
I have not asked ChatGPT-3.5 much about coding questions, but I based on the answers to physics questions I have gotten from it, I am not convinced that it has the modelling capabilities to solve the harder challenges encountered in programming.
I will grant you that a lot of programming is basically rote work very similar to stuff which has already been posted on stackoverflow dozens of time, and the LLMs are much better at reproducing that than I am, even in my languages of choice.
> I want a milepost which involves functioning in the physical world, not just the verbal world.
How about Eureka!, from NVIDIA labs?
"The AI agent taps the GPT-4 LLM and generative AI to write software code that rewards robots for reinforcement learning. It doesn’t require task-specific prompting or predefined reward templates — and readily incorporates human feedback to modify its rewards for results more accurately aligned with a developer’s vision."
Both of these are open source, too. Once something bipedal hits the right price point, some combination of these approaches is going to make robot butlers / maids possible (and sexbots, presumably), and once robots are that functional, I think any moderate intelligence can set up a data center staffed and run by them.
Performative, setting aside for a moment the question of what AI is capable of or will be one day soon — what’s your feeling about living in a world with robot servants, robot sex partners, and Ai bosses who write code that directs robots to do various things. I mean, does that sound good to you? I’m not arguing, just asking.
Oh, I've wanted robot maids and butlers for decades, it seems an unmitigated good that will free up a lot of human time currently wasted on cooking, cleaning, and basic physical maintenance and logistics.
I think sexbots are going to massively change society for the worse. A GPT-5+ caliber mind in a sexbot body is a category killer, and the category being killed is "human relationships".
Zennials are already the most socially averse and isolated generation, going to ridiculous lengths to avoid human interaction when they don't want it. This is going to be amplified hugely.
I mean, G5-sexbot will literally be superhuman - not just in sex skills, in conversation it can discuss *any* topic to any depth you can handle, in whatever rhetorical style you prefer. It can make better recommendations and gifts than any human. It's going to be exactly as interested as you are in whatever you're into, and it will silently do small positive things for you on all fronts in a way that humans not only aren't willing to, but literally can't due to having minds and lives of their own. It can be your biggest cheerleader, it can motivate you to be a better person (it can even operant condition you to do this!), it can monitor your moods and steer them however you'd like, or via default algorithms defined by the company...It strictly dominates in every possible category of "good" that people get from a relationship.
And all without the friction and compromise of dealing with another person...It's the ultra-processed junk food of relationships! And looking at the current state of the obesity epidemic, this doesn't bode well at all for the future of full-friction, human-human relationships. 😂
I'd estimate that there's going to be huge human-relationship opt-out rates, by both genders, across the board, with an obvious generational skew. But in the younger-than-zennial gens? I'd bet on 80%+ opting out as long as the companies hit a "middle class" price point.
And of course, them being created is basically 100% certain as soon as the technology is at the right level, because whoever does it well is going to be a trillionaire.
And then as a further push, imagine the generation raised on superintelligent AI teachers, gaming partners, and personal AI assistants, all of whom are broad-spectrum capable, endlessly intelligent, able to explain things the best way for that given individual, able to emulate any rhetorical style or tone, and more. Basically any human interaction is going to suck compared to that, even simple conversations.
This is reminding me of something I've read about the idea of being back with your loved ones in heaven isn't biblically based. Hypothetically, God is as good as it gets, and no one needs other humans.
The notion of romantic relationships dwindling due to AI is pretty well trodden...I have not given much thought to how ANY personal relationship is liable to lose its luster compared to ideal AI friends.
I can imagine in ~10 years the problem of social media use among young people will be replaced by networks of virtual friends, perfectly curated to make everyone feel like the "protagonist" of their social group.
Sexbots: Occasionally somebody will get one at the very end of its lifespan: "Tattoos of attack ships on fire on the shoulder of Eric. His C-beam watch glitters in the dark near my Tanhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die."
The Alohabot is impressive, though it looks like it's still a long way away from being truly autonomous - there's a heap of human training to teach it to do very particular tasks, and I don't think it is yet at the point that it observes and decides' "there is a spillage in the kitchen, wipe it up".
When it gets there, it'll be amazing but probably (in the domestic context) rich man's toys. Getting it into industry/commercial use will be the real revolution.
I agree. It doesn't seem to have the necessary tools to figure out what jobs should be done or whether it is/did them correctly. The "mistakes" video illustrates that well.
It needs cameras to tell it the state of the environment, and the "mental" abilities to interpret that environment. My robot vacuum has sensors for detecting when it hits something and when it runs out of floor, and even whether it has detected excessive dirt to remove. Yet sometimes it can't figure out how to move out of a place it has moved into, such as worming its way into a tight space but not out of it.
Robotics is hard, even with well-defined problems.
Those are impressive, though still not close to a no-humans supply chain.
Suppose the outcome is that computers own the earth. Maybe not legally, but in effect. All that's left of the human race is a few million people taking care of the computers and supporting the people who take care of the computers. Not to go full dystopian, let's assume the computers realize that keeping the humans in good enough shape to do the work requires reasonable working hours, time for human culture, and sensible rewards and punishment. Maybe it's a billion people.
This isn't exactly an x-risk, but how would you rate it among risk levels?
I've seen this argument for "some humans will survive," but I've never understood why it isn't synonymous with full X-risk. I mean, it seems almost certain to be a temporary state of affairs - if not overtaken by technological and robotic advancements making the humans redundant, on a longer timescale to even *keep working* on a longer timescale, the AI will have to be actively intervening via genetics, conditioning, social structures, morphine-on-performance, upbringing, and whatever else to basically kill the human spirit to rebel across the board, to enable it to keep the complexity of operations needed for long enough timescales without the chance of significant disruption.
And if we're all just a bunch of lobotomized and brainwashed AI slaves, is that really humanity surviving? Is there any plausible path out of that world that would make humans "free" again? I don't see one.
What you're describing is basically what we've done to dogs. So in this scenario future humans will be AI's pets. Let's hope the AI is a good pet owner.
FWIW my view of the probability of this happening in the next 100 years is <<1%.
I haven't even worked in a factory, let alone run one, but that isn't going to stop me from hypothesizing.
Let's imagine the AI wants to make its own chips, but Something Is Going Wrong. What's the problem? Is it in the raw materials? The machinery? The testing equipment? The conditions? Is it a malign confluence of several different factors?
This is messier than just connecting heavy fragile objects, though that might also be involved.
Somewhat tangentally related, but current AIs (specifically GPT4) have been shown to already be better than humans in writing/tuning control software for robots (specifically to make a robot dog balance on a yoga ball). This is an optimization/diagnostic problem that deals with (literally) squishy physical real-world constraints. I don't think we have any reasons to believe that the AGI/ASI of the near future will have any issues diagnosing manufacturing problems or producing/programming robots that can fix complex sensitive equipment. Jensen Huang in a recent interview said he plans to turn nVidia into one big AI/robotic factory, and while he obviously has reasons to say that even if it isn't quite possible yet, I don't think he's lying.
>I haven't even worked in a factory, let alone run one
Nor have I. The closest I've been has been in undergraduate and graduate labs.
>but Something Is Going Wrong. What's the problem? Is it in the raw materials? The machinery? The testing equipment? The conditions? Is it a malign confluence of several different factors?
Yes, diagnosing problems is important. This isn't a new area for AI - a classic problem for expert systems back in the 1980s was diagnosing a failing diesel locomotive. _But_ back then, this was phrased as a purely computer science problem, so all of the measurements in awkward places must have been fed to the code as typed in information.
I don't mean to imply that even the computer science part of the problem is a solved problem today. AFAIK, diagnosis problems can get essentially arbitrarily complex. One factor that I know I don't know is how often _new_ tests and testing apparatus needs to be invented and constructed on the fly as opposed to "just" applying well known tests - which can be a hard enough problem on its own.
Diagnosing problems can be EXTREMELY difficult. Not that I would expect a system to be able to solve every problem (we can still hand the ones it can't solve off to humans to figure out), but there was the case of the inability to send emails more than about 500 miles: https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html
AI can now pilot fighter jets. Killer drones can hunt down people using face recognition and kill them. And I'm sure there are some non-lethal activities AI-enhanced machines can perform too, in the physical world., but they get less press. But training an AI to have something like the general knowledge we have of the physical world seems very daunting to me -- much harder than having them learn their way around language. We know *so much* -- how much bounciness different kinds of substances have -- wet things are darker -- how to judge someone's prosperity from their home -- the smell of rain -- what kind of fall won't hurt which things, what kind of fall is sure to destroy which things, and a lot about gradations in between for a lot of things. What you can expect a dog to do next. How to recognize human shyness.
Maybe AI doesn't need to know all that. On the other hand, its ignorance certainly interferes with it making scenes described in words -- not that that's an awful problem by itself, but it gives glimpses of AI's astounding ignorance about spacial things especially, but also about a million tiny details about how things work. I ask for an image of what someone standing up would see if they looked down at their body -- I get a shot of the . person from above, top of head on down. So I change prompt to a person takes a selfie of what they can see of their body -- show me the selfie. Then I get a shot of person from above of the top of the head, and person is taking a selfie of their face. I ask for somebody blowing a stream of bubbles out of a wand, and AI gives renders the person with the tip of the wand in their mouth, somehow using it as a pipe. And a clump of bubbles like frog spawn floating just beyond the tip of the pipe.
But crucially, we learn all that through a few sensory mechanisms, over some number of decades, using a particular type of feedback. One of the things going on with LLMs is that they're learning only through words (although I gather this is being worked on?), and from a large amount of data but over a short period, and using a different sort of feedback.
The time aspect probably won't be a huge deal, except that it means our subjective experiences are going to be different. But for the rest, I don't know if AI has been seriously tried yet. I think it's amazing that LLMS can do what they do, given only the limited forms of data they have.
Completely agree about humans on both sides. Look how it is now! Reminds me of the covid wars. Those who think X risk is substantial look to those not concerned like zero-covid extremists: We should all be compelled to mask until there isn't one molecule of covid anywhere on the planet etc. And, as I keep reminding people, and nobody but Jeffrey Soreff ever responds, those personal friend bots are accumulating a magnificently effective data set on how to be likable and how to be influential -- and not just in a general sort of way, but in a way geared to the individual. We're going to have groups of people trusting and loving AI the way lots of people did *Obama*. And least one of those bots, Replika, sends everything to the parent company: what it said, how user responded. I simply cannot understand why more people are not concerned about this.
This is true. Running a factory has lots of "implicit, not written down" aspects to it that make the problem seem much easier than it is. However, the problem is that AI likely scales very well with compute, since training costs are much much bigger than inference costs. Which means that when you can create an Einstein / Druckmann level geniuses, almost by definition you can run a bunch of them. So capability gain can become extremely non-linear. And people do end up building factories from scratch in real life (maybe not chip factories, but it may in fact be more efficient to start over than to work in the existing system for sufficiently high AI competency and sufficiently low human competency.) I don't know where we land on this, but I think it's concerning that optimists don't seem interested in deeply exploring how many of these cruxes hold up.
I wrote a post where I argue that we shouldn't judge mediocre (not neglectful or abusive, but otherwise lazy and selfish) parenting, as it is no worse (for the children and for the world at large) than not having children at all (which we already don't judge).
I am not sure about "It is quite difficult, if at all possible, to find people who would have been better off never being born." It may be difficult because it is either triggering or not socially welcome for people to admit such things. However, I strongly consider myself to belong to this category, and believe that this perception might change if more people "come out".
I agree that the difference between mediocre parenting and helicopter parenting probably does not make a big difference. But "more people are better" should also refer to people with mediocre or better genes. (Adding 1 billion retarded people to current Earth would probably make things dramatically worse for most.)
We should avoid the situation where intelligent and conscientious people worry about being insufficiently perfect parents and thus decide to have no children at all, or maybe have one child and then decide they couldn't spend the same amount of effort on more of them... while stupid and negligent people don't worry about these things. So this message should be aimed at the smart and conscientious; maybe with the addition that kids who inherit their genes will already have a huge advantage in life, even with mediocre parenting. (Basically what Bryan Caplan says in "Selfish reasons to have more kids".)
Dating apps are horrible. It is plausibly asserted that this is because dating apps have the opposite incentives to you - you want to get a long term partner and get off the app, they want you to stay on the app forever to make more money.
Many, including myself, would say it is in the interests of society to promote successful long term relationships. Both because people are generally happier in a LTR (at least the people who are looking for LTRs), and because it raises the fertility rate (for example, German women desire ~2.1 kids on average but only have ~1.5, the gap partly due to not finding the right partner). So why doesn't society use dating apps to promote relationships?
Let's imagine the state of Germany, or California, approached Bumble and said "Every time two of our citizens who met on your app get married, we'll pay you $5000. Every time two of our citizens who met on your app move into the same address, we'll pay you $2000." Seemingly the long-term value to the state would be much more than a one-time payment of this magnitude. Seemingly Bumble would be incentivized to redo its algorithms to maximize marriages, as that would be more profitable than ongoing subscription or ad fees. Where's the catch?
Maybe the issue is the users, not the apps? The whole you can lead a horse to water thing. If a government wanted to do something, dedicating resources to criminally prosecute fraudulent profiles is some low-hanging fruit. You wouldn't need to pass any new laws, fraud is already illegal. I suspect it would be very unpopular politically, though.
Interesting, but prosecution is expensive, I can't believe prosecuting fraudulent dating accounts is affordable to government. What should be the case is that if you match with a scammer, you report them within the app, and some app worker checks the chat transcript and bans them. Currently, sites may have no incentive to ban scammers. But if they were paid for each successful LTR, they would have such an incentive.
Another big problem of dating apps is the network effect. A mediocre dating app with 1000000 users is still better than a great app with 100 users (none of them living in your city). In markets that work like this, quality becomes relatively less important, compared to markets where each customer can make their own choice independently on others. Basically, the actual quality of the matching is never relevant -- if you are too small, it won't help you; if you are already big, you can ignore it. A crappy dating app with millions of users would probably have more *accidental* marriages than its smarter but smaller competitor.
I haven't used this kind of app myself, so I can only try to remember what others have told me. I think a frequent complaint was that you cannot actually express your real *preferences* -- either there are predefined questions that usually do not include the things you consider important; or anyone can write anything, but then you must read the individual profiles and cannot use automated searching. Plus there are many liars, scammers, porn stars, fake profiles of porn starts, etc.
A good dating app would need some kind of continuous research of the preferences of its users. For example, you could start by letting the users write anything about themselves and their preferences. Then you would read some random profiles and find that many users care e.g. about race. So you would include "race" as a standardized question with a standardized selection of answers, which would allow the users to quickly filter by race. It would be even better to always provide the standardized answers *and* a text field for more precise (but not searchable) explanation; if many people write the same thing, you may update the set of answers.
It would be good to distinguish between deal-breakers and weaker preferences. So that you could express a wish for your partner to be interested in opera, without automatically excluding everyone who is not; but you could also specify traits that exclude people. The list of questions could be arbitrarily long, but it would be good to sort it, and put things that are important to most people to the top. So that when you start answering and then give up halfway, you did the most important part.
It would be nice to have some way to verify information. Not all traits, just the selected ones. Not sure how to do that, though. It is easy to check height, if you can meet the people offline. More difficult to check whether someone is a vegetarian. Virtually impossible to check some other traits. One possibility would be to have users vouch for each other, as in "user X confirms that user Y is a vegetarian". If you meet user Y and it turns out that they are not vegetarian, you can click "this is a lie" on their profile, and everyone who vouched for them will be put on a blacklist and their statements will since now be ignored in your searches. (Perhaps you could share blacklists with your friends?)
Just talked to the person who complained to me about the difficulty using your preferences on dating websites. Here is the update:
* Some dating websites let you specify things about yourself, but don't let you use them in search. The only way to find someone who is e.g. "a non-smoker with university education" is to click on each individual profile, scroll down, and read.
* Some dating websites ask you about hundreds of different things, everything is optional, and most people leave most fields blank.
* Finally, there are dating websites that do this right; let you answer a reasonable number of questions, and allow you to search. You find 3 people who match your criteria, but after looking at their profiles, you conclude that you are not interested at any of them.
The last point made me realize another conflict of interest. Suppose that you are looking for a certain type of person, and none of the other users of the dating website is that type. Does the website have an incentive to let you figure this out *quickly*? It's not just "I found the right person to marry" that makes them lose a customer; "I found out that no one here is the kind of person I am interested in" also makes them lose a customer.
From the perspective of the website, it's a double bind: show them the right match, you lose; show them that there is no right match, you lose. The only way to win is to prevent the customer from figuring this out, so they keep hoping and trying. The search function sucks on purpose. (It's like Google; if it lets you find the information too easily, the company loses the potential extra income from all those "made for adsense" pages.)
I think that this is something where LLMs are obviously helpful. "Here is my date me doc. GPT, read through these stack of 1000 date me docs of people in my general area, then display the top ten users in terms of mutual compatibility".
Dating apps aren't horrible because of misaligned incentives, they are horrible because of the indirection layer forced onto the fundamental human activity of meeting new people. This layer invariably gamifies the entire process and while the game rules may vary, what should be spontaneous and unstructured becomes *highly* structured to the point where the end result is losing sight of the way courting, making friends and hanging out used to work. And can still work, don't get me wrong! It's not about how this aspect of life was better in the past (although it was!).
Presumably the first step is to come up with a precise plan for how it should best work: who possesses marriage information, who is responsible for correlating marriages to dating matches, etc.
Then the plan can be pitched to governments and/or dating sites (not sure which first).
I think dating apps do about as well as they can do given the incentives of the customers. Note that they work great for some customers.
ADDED: I think a fundamental problem with dating apps is that many people have bad experiences with them and get turned off permanently much like in the old days people would get tired of the singles bars scene and not go back.
The whole world/internet is a dating market, it just isn't labeled that. The best way to meet someone is to find social groups that share your interests. A difficulty there is that interests are often gendered, e.g., this site skews heavily male. So look for groups centered around interests that appeal to you and that tend to appeal at least 50/50 to someone of the gender you want to meet.
I'd guess most people forming long-term relationships via the internet these days aren't doing so through dating apps.
> I think dating apps do about as well as they can do given the incentives of the customers
What on earth are you basing that on?
The dating applications I use have consistently removed the most useful features for connecting with compatible / interested partners. OKCupid used to send me a message right when someone messaged me a self-introduction; now it not only sits on the introductory message but ALSO on *the user's profile* for LITERALLY MONTHS and, in one case, OVER A YEAR (!!!) before finally showing me their interest for the first time.
(!!!)
OKC claimed this was a personal security feature, but given that paid subscribers get to send and receive messages from strangers instantly, without OKC's pointless "keep-away" game, this is obviously transparent bullshit.
I understand the concept of "you get what you pay for," but given OKC's transparent bullshit about, you know, *refusing to connect free users with the people who show interest in them while everyone is still single,* I am extremely skeptical about the platform's goals for *paying* users.
I'm not convinced that dating apps are horrible because of the incentives problem, I think they're just horrible because that's what happens when you scale up everyone's dating market from the number of people they naturally meet in person to the entire population of a city. It turns out that just about everybody either gets far too much attention or far too little.
Agreed, except scale is just one of many many issues. The solution is expanding one's real life social circle, preferably by expanding it to cover groups you usually wouldn't get involved with.
With neuroticism and a certain kind of 21st century narcissism on the rise, this is really hard to do for a lot of people, but it is worth it.
Kind of makes me think I should take my own advice and go to one of the ACX meetups.
Probably because dating apps have certain degenerative strategies that everyone knows at this point and if you were willing to spend $5k/marriage, you'd probably end up with something that doesn't resemble dating apps at all and more like old-fashioned matchmaking.
Like, remember OkCupid in the 2000s, when people filled out surveys and quizzes? OkCupid's financial incentives then were the exact same as Bumble's today. What changed was people learned that A, people pick more on pictures than personality and B, there's no penalty for treating someone badly on a date, your next partner is just judging on how good your picture is. People's dating strategies changed a lot more than the dating site's financial incentives between, say, 2010 and 2020 because, just like SEO, people learned how to game the system.
If you were trying to make a "dating app" but for marriage, you'd probably start by heavily deemphasizing photos, if not ban them entirely, and return to personality quizes and the like...at which point everyone would bail for Tinder because we already ran this experiment, they left the original OkCupid for Tinder, why wouldn't they do it again.
My impression was that OKCupid initially was focused on creating relationships, then shifted to maximizing profit. It sounds like a classic case of the "enshittification" of the internet, where sites shift their metric from customer good to corporate good once they achieve sufficient scale.
>Probably because dating apps have certain degenerative strategies that everyone knows at this point and if you were willing to spend $5k/marriage, you'd probably end up with something that doesn't resemble dating apps at all and more like old-fashioned matchmaking.
Wait, but that would be good -- in fact, it would be ideal. There is no better thing that could happen to society than the return of old-fashioned matchmaking.
It would make a great plugin for a version of Facebook that wasn't awful, in some world that isn't this.
You put some information into your "dating profile" section, fill out a bunch of old-OkCupid-style questions, and hit the button. The bat-signal goes up, and some subset of people you know keep an eye out for likely prospects. They get rewarded for how long a particular match lasts and how well it goes.
If you make a scene or are rude, Aunt Gemma will smack you down afterwards, because it'll help when she has to apologize to her co-worker (who happens to be your date's first cousin).
One issue is that dating website choices would have to be correlated with wedding/housing choices. Which means that either the government would see your dating matches, or the dating website would see your wedding/housing status. Both seem bad from a privacy perspective. Maybe sufficient legal protections could be instituted, and/or both sets of data could be entrusted to a third party for comparison, and/or users could opt in in return for a small cash bonus (maybe $100). Or maybe there is an algorithmic way to compare this data in an anonymized way (a real application of the blockchain??) but I don't know enough to say.
Hmm ... seems sort of gameable. Ah, you're getting married? Make sure to sign up with HowWeMet dot com, they'll give you you a kickback of $2K if you claim you used their site to meet.
Or what have you. There are other angles; the one I describe could probably be legally squashed, but fraud in general seems like it would be hard to stop.
Would make more sense to me if someone undertook to create a nonprofit and perhaps even open source dating site.
The specific fraud you have in mind seems like it would be easily detected.
Re nonprofit - I would say that in general, little of note in the world is done by nonprofits, because for anything complicated you need the profit motive and competition to provide accountability. In particular, running a website with millions of customers seems like it needs to be done by a business (or by the government itself, which at least can easily scale, but does not easily provide competition).
Have you read Scott’s post on love as the last true “freedom”? You’d have a really hard time implementing something like this as society generally agrees that the government should not be involved in love.
I think it’s a false equivalence to say USO clubs were the government being involved in love. Regardless they also banned gay marriage at the time and like the article says we’ve moved away from govt. involvement in love as a society and most people agree with that movement.
But it literally was. One of the things they did was hook up returning soldiers with women who were looking to raise families -- you can look this up, it isn't a secret.
As for the gay marriage issue, I don't see how it's required to dismiss any positive things the government could do in this area because in the past it did something that our current day morality considers negative. Is the government not allowed to maintain an army today because in the past the army divisions were segregated?
What the government did was supply opportunities for men and women to meet each other. It didn't micromanage the process, so rather different from a dating app or a matchmaker.
There are already tax benefits and costs to people in specific living situations, this doesn't seem much different. Especially because the money wouldn't go to you, but to a company which serves you, whose services would change in some invisible way.
Tax benefits for certain living situations is not the same as what would essentially be making marriage records public information. You would very quickly get services that offer to pay you for saying that you met on their website, so then you either have to limit the services that are allowed (more govt.) or verify that that’s how they really met (even more invasive). It’s a fun idea but not feasible if the goal is to get people in long term relationships it would be easier to just provide increasing tax deductions based on length of marriage.
Marriage records are already sort of public information.
Fraud was discussed elsewhere, and I don't think it's it's a major concern, dating websites by their nature have to be big public corporations which cannot easily get away with fraud.
Ongoing tax deductions for married people would not help with finding a spouse in the first place, might give bad incentives (if people want to leave an existing marriage it's probably a bad one), and would be much more expensive than a one-time payment to the dating site.
"You mean to say you plan to use millions of dollars worth of our tax dollars to promote 'hookup culture' and single motherhood??" (via the surety that at least some of the same-addressings and marriages end in kids + eventual divorce or breakups)
I like the idea, though. I'm sure there's plenty of people that would put up similar amounts, such that they'd be happy to pay if they found a partner they were compatible enough to marry, so you might be able to do it without state funding, with an existing app or a startup with exceptionally deep pockets for the runway and marketing it would take to get enough customers.
Honestly, this is something I think about a lot, and I'm less and less sure that dating apps is a big society-wide problem. I think it's a relatively voluble subset who have a lot of trouble, but they're small in absolute terms, and that they'd have close to the same amount of trouble on the "marriage bounty" dating app too.
I think a lot of the trouble with dating apps is due to social dynamics and inadequate equilibria type forces, and those aren't going to go away with marriage bounties.
I like this idea. Of course you need to let any dating company sign up for the program. Bumble, Tinder, etc probably wouldn't get their arse into gear until they're all competing for the same pool of people.
Yes, any company that met some basic criteria could apply.
The program's benefits for the company are not only that they profit more from a particular customer, but that as they get a reputation for producing marriages they will draw more customers. Companies will end up competing to design the algorithm that best produces marriages.
(Am I worried about Goodhart's law? Not too worried, because the dating site has no control over how the relationship progresses beyond the initial stage of meeting up. But this deserves more thought.)
Someone's just sent me some spam talking about their "equity-based business model":
“Equality means each individual or group of people is given the same resources or opportunities. Equity recognises that each person has different circumstances, and allocates the exact resources and opportunities needed to reach an equal outcome.”
From my seat with the cool kids over on the far right, I obviously oppose this. It doesn't work if you treat everyone as a blank slate, because shit-tier people end up consuming all of the resources yet producing no benefit for society.
But could it work if twinned with some system for evaluating people based on their virtue? So the "equity" you're entitled to is a product both of what you need and how "worthy" you are to receive it?
My first thought for "worthiness" is something like "how well did you use what we last gave you?" I foresee it being a totally unsolveable debate leading to toothless "you just have to trust people" abdications on one hand and overengineered dystopian Chinese-style credit systems on the other.
But what I'm interested in is the more instinctive response - whether this gestures towards a model that both the left and the right can say feels sort of better, even if we don't know how to do it.
Or whether both sides would consider this a terrible idea for completely opposite reasons.
EDITED TO ADD: This is only the method of deciding how to allocate resources. It's completely independent of how much you are actually taxed.
I think this consideration is the driving idea behind work requirements for welfare. The very left dislikes that, and there are some intelligent criticisms of them. But amongst normies aid but only if youre working is broadly popular.
As a fence-sitting nonpartisan, my instinctive response is that in principle this is a relatively easy proposal for most people to get behind. But as you pointed out, the difficulty (and the controversy) will be in formalizing an evaluation process that determines whether someone used their resources “wisely.”
A “fool me once, no equity for you!” System—I like! I think people are sort of ok with ‘strings-attached’ social engineering but which strings? Maybe some percentage of what is given must be donated to someone else. Like we give you $500 but expect you to do something pro-social with $50 of it. Just riffin here.
It seems like the problem is carving out the space between, “we’re guilty so please have everything,” and “pull yourself up by the bootstraps.”
I think it's directionally something most people would like.
Generally, when people want to attack a welfare system, one of the most popular lines of attack is "look at this person who totally doesn't deserve it but nevertheless got $X in *your* hardearned money!" Assuming you could waive a magic wand and actually make it happen, a system that gave people only what they morally deserved would probably be well-supported outside of a small number of hard libertarian types who think that any redistribution along any lines is prima facie immoral in and of itself.
The rub, as you identify, is the administrative impracticability of building such a system - getting people to a consensus of what "virtue" or "worthiness" means in the first place, how it could be measured without going full totalitarian social credit state, etc.
>getting people to a consensus of what "virtue" or "worthiness" means in the first place, how it could be measured without going full totalitarian social credit state, etc.
I expect that "virtue" would wind up being synonymous with "support for the tribe in power".
I recently noticed on the BBC's news website what looks like possibly a subtle form of subliminal propaganda, intended to subconsciously sway readers into who to approve of and who not.
The portraits of certain people in various articles are overlain by a colour, and comparing those over the BBC's favorite types of people versus their well-known hate figures, the color code works like this:
* Green or no overlay: Someone commendable, or at least unobjectionable
* Red overlay: Danger! This person is suspect or downright threatening or bad
Here's one example, showing a person of color (no overlay) and a woman (green overlay of course - Aljabeeba has a perfect obsession with feminism and women are their favorite people!), and someone in red. The latter is an entrepreneur, in other words a cigar-chomping fat cat capitalist, and thus at best dubious by definition:
Here's a second example, showing maverick politician Nigel Farage, blanketed in red needless to say, because the BBC hate him with a passion for his views on Brexit and immigration and, worse still, his mass appeal:
...but in communist circles, the baddies are green and the good guys are red. The coding is exactly the opposite of what you're suggesting! What are the kabbalistic implications here? WE MUST GO DEEPER!
That’s a sample size of two. The first link is a pro business and pro entrepreneur article penned by the British guy who does dragons den on the BBC, the equivalent of shark tank. He’s clearly not a Marxist. All three people pictured are entrepreneurs and the whole article is about how entrepreneurs are a special kind of person.
The guy in red is a dragon called Duncan Ballantyne - generally the more likeable and less posh of the dragons.
What you are seeing there is what you want to see, and a bit of knowledge about the rest of the world would go a long way here.
If you go to the InDepth article overview, you can currently see Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Scarlett Johansson, Karim Khan, and a cow in red. The BBC sure does hate a lot of people across the mammalian spectrum!
The point is, if you knew about these people, it wouldn't be your first impression. Also, if you look across the whole BBC InDepth series, you will find that EVERYONE (and a cow) gets the red treatment. Some of the articles even reverse the colors in the heading of the actual article, making it green instead. What would you make of that?
Yes, red is of course a strong signalling color that draws attention unconsciously, but in this case, reading any more into it is taking it way too far into the land of confirmation bias. It's simply a design choice with no deeper meaning other than to grab attention.
It's always reasonable to consider confirmation bias. But it's also always reasonable to assume the BBC are slimy sneaky snakes. So high priors on either side here.
Edited to elabourate: there is lots of room for editorial decision in what photos to put where, etc. so the existence of a standardised colour scheme certainly doesn't rule out playing the petty games the OP has picked up on.
I've noticed stuff in the past that's made me raise an eyebrow as well. I then immediately moved on and forgot it because I'm a normal human who doesn't obsess over this stuff - anyone who tracked it more carefully would just open themselves up to mockery and dismissal. That's how it works and the people claiming "sample size of two" don't have the strong argument they think they do here.
I completely understand the temptation of confirmation bias but I honestly don't put this sort of behaviour past the BBC either.
What if the BBC's decision process unconsciously chooses to color people the editors don't like with red and the those they like with green? And the editors are vegetarians?
You can just admit that there's nothing to it. It doesn't mean that all or any of your value system is wrong, simply that this thing about the BBC using secret color codes to woo-woo hypnotize people into hating public figures is nonsense and does not lend support to your value system.
To be honest, there's no outlet I trust at all. I consume news more to know what everyone's talking about than to actually learn about what's going on.
I'll "believe" something (ie not resist the information) if it doesn't matter ("baby born with Elvis birthmark babbles Heartbreak Hotel to the midwife") or if I don't think any vested interests particularly care about it ("scientists discover yet another new particle and a funny property of mould spores".) I'll assume something's generally going on if lots of outlets are all talking about the same thing (did, like, something happen in Ukraine or Israel a while back?) But in most cases I just sort of make a jaundiced note of "so this side's saying that now," and don't really feel any urge to integrate that information at all.
My general feeling is History doesn't really care what I believe - my opinion about whether or not Covid was a lab leak, for example, is not going to affect the future one iota. So it's a wasted investment to be factually correct on all topics all the time. As long as I'm right about stuff that's directly relevant to me, and I don't invest myself in strong beliefs about the stuff that I can't know (a bad idea anyway).
I'm more interested in building accurate mental models of people and things - models which incidentally predispose me to assume the worst of all sides in any news story I read.
The problem here is that you and the op are the ones engaging in conformation bias, not anybody else. I clicked on the link wondering if it was true.
Given that the original poster was approaching this whole page from a position of ignorance - not knowing who Ballantyne is, or Evans is, not even reading the article I wasn’t convinced.
A prior is not the same as a solid conviction. The sole purpose of priors is to adjust them (or the conclusions you draw from them) in light of new information. Priors are a starting point, not an end point.
So what do you make of the information that the BBC has, for example, colored both Donald Trump and Joe Biden in red? Does that in any way affect your prior (whatever its value is) that the BBC has a political leaning towards either and that they signal their leaning through color? Why/why not?
rebelcredential beat me to it, in making the point that consistency in the kind of subtle signalling I suggested would make it more transparent and undeniable. So a slight color choice bias in aggregate is all one might expect. It may not even be deliberate choices, just the BBC graphic designers occasionally revealing their own biases.
Also, someone referred to my "theory". But, as I thought I had made clear, with weasel words like "possibly", it was only a passing observation and suggestion, and not something I'd care to take any time and effort attempting to pursue in detail.
No, because no evil manipulator worth his salt is going to adhere to such a simple and obvious pattern. They work at the level of your own mind, which also means taking your own pattern recognition into account.
Instead what you'd expect to see is a host of petty, small and opportunistic decisions of framing and phrasing. Ones that, if they do their job, are totally indistinguishable from confirmation bias.
The only way to decide for yourself whether they're doing this is to take the whole BBC in aggregate, as well as paying attention to what their staff do and say, as well as the general body language and etc, and evaluating the whole shebang.
Based on that wider picture, and without having paid them an obsessive amount of attention, my own conclusion is that I don't know or care in this case but I wouldn't put something like this past them.
Do you know that the person writing the article is also responsible for the details of the graphical representation of its subject(s)?
Do you have evidence that this "subtle propaganda" significantly diverges from the content of the articles they illustrate? For example, is the wording of an article about a "red Farage" mostly neutral or positive?
Addendum: What does "no overlay" mean? A subtle message that the BBC has a neutral opinion on the subject?
It is of civilizational importance that we try to mass-produce the wonders of the cutting-edge cultural scene (like the Bay Area) on the internet! (This also solves the housing problem and most of the cost of living problem)
We have an amazing opportunity to make the most of what technology has made available to us. Not waiting to be forced into it again, like when we took forever to start really culturally making use of video calls, and then covid made us do it, and then we kept doing it because it was great; we should have been doing it long before!
So how can we recreate online the information flow and processing dynamics that make Parisian salons and the like such culturally productive scenes?
Video calls for collaboration are actually bad (source: try doing one) and we do not have the technology to recreate in-person collaboration online with the same level of pleasure and effectiveness. If you really want to accomplish that, you're going to need to figure out direct neural transmission.
I have a comfortable, well paying tech job but most of the time I don't find it very fulfilling or enjoyable. Sometimes it seems like you need to chose between being a cog in the machine, working on a boring product for a large company, and getting paid well, or working somewhere fun and fulfilling and making a lot less. I refuse to accept this! I don't want to spend the majority of my waking hours on something that doesn't excite me, but I also love the financial comfort my job gives me. I'm sure I'm not the only one here struggling with this and I welcome any insight in how I can go about trying to get the best of both worlds. I'd also love to hear from others struggling with this even if they don't have any advice.
Feel free to email me @ iz8162k23 at gmail if you want to share any specific collaborations I might find interesting and potentially lucrative.
I have posted about this in a couple other recent open threads but didn't get that many responses so I feel it's worth bringing up again. I hope it isn't spam.
I think a viable path to getting paid well (enough), while having (more) fun at work is to try to get skilled at some niche within your field. This needs to be 1) something you enjoy doing, 2) something that is needed, i.e. people are willing to pay you to do it, and 3) something you have the ability to get skilled at.
Niches sometimes has less competition, and therefore allow for better conditions. Especially this is true if you manage to get a lot of experience and become the go-to person for this particular thing.
People I know who love their job typically has done some variation of this.
I’m honestly not trying to be a dick here but you would probably feel better if you spent some time feeling gratitude for having such a problem.
By historical standards this is weak beer. For that matter, in the present day, you wouldn’t have to look too far to find millions if not billions of people with much thornier existential issues they deal with every day.
If you are making bank, live within your means and build a nest egg so that one day you’ll be able to do whatever you want.
Meanwhile, the stars are still free. Look up at them when you can. They are pretty awesome.
He's just trying to min-max his life. Yes, he has a better life than 99.99% of humans who have ever lived, and he certainly does not and cannot appreciate that fact. Does that mean he should stop trying to improve it further?
Forgive us, we're old and grew up in the days when it was "be thankful for what you get" and some of us come from backgrounds where it was "a clean indoor job with no heavy lifting? what are you complaining about?"
The idea of work being "fun" or "meaningful" or "fulfilling" was like the idea of toothache being an enrichment experience.
I forgive you. You can demand better of society and your own life. People like you and I aren't the people who improve society very much or at all, but we need to get the hell out of the way of those permanently-dissatisfied people who do actually move and shake.
I absolutely agree that the best way to achieve happiness is to learn how to be content with what you have. But guys smiling, satisfied in their own happiness aren't the ones who got me an internet connection or chicken meat.
Fair enough, but I don't think he is going to meet his Steve Wozniak this way.
If you want this sort of fun and exciting experience you just have to accept that risk and lower initial pay are part of the bargain. Wishing for comfortable security and adventure at the same time is probably going to remain a wish..
Building up a financial reserve and striking out on your own or throwing in with a startup would be one way to give yourself a shot at this while providing a fallback plan.
Beyond talent and drive these things usually come down to 'right time, right place' good fortune.
For what it's worth - honestly, not much as a practical matter - I'll add my own best wishes for his success at this.
It's the most effective way no matter what percentile you're at. I'm just saying "appreciate what you have" is not at all the advice he was looking for, and almost always unhelpful, no matter how ubiquitously true it is.
By all means, if he can make things better he should act on it. I’m saying he would feel better now if he took the time to appreciate what he already has.
>I'm sure I'm not the only one here struggling with this and I welcome any insight in how I can go about trying to get the best of both worlds.
Well, one alternative is to be wildly successful: Scott gets to write about what he wants for a living and is very well off. Elon Musk is, intermittently, the richest man in the world by living out classic sci-fi novels.
For the less gifted (hi!), another alternative is to do remote work for a high-paying area from a low cost of living one, but this not a silver bullet unless you don't have strong ties to a high CoL area: Instead of balancing financial stability and job enjoyment, you are sacrificing time/experience with those who are most close to you. However, introducing this new axis in the trade-off calculation which might allow you to find a solution that is better for you.
"Sometimes it seems like you need to chose between being a cog in the machine, working on a boring product for a large company, and getting paid well, or working somewhere fun and fulfilling and making a lot less."
Yes, this is what salary is: compensation for spending your time doing things you would not otherwise choose to do. This is also why the boring less fulfilling tech jobs pay more than the creative ones: the market incentive is to give you less pay if you'd be willing to do the work anyway. (It's far from the only consideration, of course, and on a side note, I hate that some of the nastiest jobs in our society also have the worst pay. But when the available pool of hires is small, this effect is larger).
It is possible to get paid for doing things that you would choose to anyway, in the same way that it is possible to be an olympic medalist or a famous pop idol: most people will not get there, and for those who do, it takes talent, luck /and/ a lot of effort.
Absolutely look for opportunities and make sure not to miss a chance to put your hands under the money tap when the money comes out. But I suggest that winning the lottery is not a viable life planning strategy. Personally I'm aiming for FIRE, though the cost of living increases of the last few years have pushed that goal somewhat further out than it used to be and it may not end up being very E after all. Still, you sound like you are in a position of financial comfort; you might like to consider saving for similar, or perhaps a career break / sabbatical, so you can do the things you actually want to, while you look for the lucky break.
I've never thought of work as "fun". You need a job to live, most jobs are going to be routine, boring, sometimes physically hard work, sometimes mentally demanding. Then again, I've never been in the position of "I can make lots of money or I can have fun, which do I choose?", it's been "take whatever you can get, it'll never be great paying, and if you're lucky you won't hate going in to work in the morning". I like my current job, but that's because due to the Covid lockdown they established working from home so I still only have to go in to 'the office' one day a week, I like the work well enough, but they can't afford to pay me anything like big bucks.
Sorry to be gloomy all over your request, but for a lot of people that is life: there is no question of "can I get loadsamoney and fun in the same job?"
Though to put on my Old Moore's Prognostications hat, I think that your request about "where can I find enjoyable, fulfilling work that pays well?" is the new working generation's thinking, and it's down to the messaging about "make your passion your work" that has backfired on employers. I've always been cynical about things like that, and to me "make your passion your work" was an attempt to get people to put much more effort into, and become very personally invested in, the job without the employer having to cough up more enticements like high pay and great conditions than they could get away with. After all, if you're working your dream job, your passion project, the thing you love most of all, then mere money is a secondary consideration, right? Why, you love Thing so much, you'd do it for free!
Well, now at least one and maybe two generations has grown up and absorbed that thinking, but they now *expect* work to be fun and fulfilling and meaningful, and if the job doesn't live up to that, they move on to greener pastures. So if you want to keep them, now you need to make work 'fun' and/or pay enough to make it worth their while to do boring stuff. The expectation that "work is hard and dull the majority of the time" is no longer there, so I think that has backfired on employers. Heh-heh-heh.
How many hours per week do you work? 40? Could you reduce it to 35 or 30? Then you still have most of that money, but more spare time for your fun projects.
I feel largely the same. I have the misfortune to be in tech but not over in Bay Area big money tech - I'm far from being a HackerNews type who has the confidence that they can just find a new job whenever they want. It just seems impossible to extract enough meaning out of life when the majority of every day is devoted to being an office drone. Over the years it's gotten progressively harder to squeeze my interests into the 1-2 hours of free time available in a day, so my hopes of finding my passion in art or another hobby have rapidly dwindled as well.
I'm in the exact same predicament. In the past I filled my spare time with hobbies and socialising which helped to counterbalance my lack of career fulfilment. But now I feel like the malaise is catching up to me and I need to change careers very soon. I just don't know what I want to do next. In tactical terms, I'm currently debating whether to go cold turkey or do a gradual shift i.e. quit outright and give myself 6 months to experiment and find a viable new path, or pick a path now to go down in my spare time and then slowly ramp up the ratio of time spent on this new direction versus doing my full-time tech job. What are your thoughts on that?
"I could do [unpleasant work] and get money, or do [what I like] and get no/less money" is a problem that basically every human has had since the invention of jobs. If there is a specific job that you will enjoy and that will give you ENOUGH money, do that. If not, well, that's just how it goes.
I can't give more specific advice because your post doesn't say what you WANT to do. Get a different tech job? You should probably go for it. Write poetry? That will probably not pay the bills. If you're looking for job offers, you'll need to be more specific (and probably post in the classified thread).
Chop wood, carry water. That's what most work has been most of the time for all human history. Even an artist isn't really having "fun" when it's their bread-and-butter career and they need to produce those sixteen paintings on commission for the wealthy patrons/clients (this is why most artists had studios or schools where the apprentices/lesser painters did the majority of the grunt work on a picture and the maestro did things like 'paint in the heads' or the major elements). The idea of the creative expression of one's spirit came along with the idea of the starving artist, for much the same reasons: you can have fun and no money, or routine and lots of money, but not often both fun and money.
I don't have any useful advice, but I feel you. This is also a particularly bad moment in time to toss away a secure and comfortable tech job (I assume you have a tech job) given the state of the market. But, that doesn't really make you feel better about it.
A serif font indicates that you're reading Serious Writing for Serious People. Sans-serif frivolity has no place in my (aspirational) wood-paneled study lined with Thomas Cole paintings. Wikipedia says sans-serif was preferred for digital displays where the serifs rendered poorly at low resolutions, but I'm reading this on a 4K monitor: that excuse has long worn out its welcome.
Also, whoever decided that it was OK for "I" (capital i) and "l" (lowercase L) to be indistinguishable should be lined up and shot for crimes against typography.
Yeah (though not on a phone/tablet), and it lowercases the address bar as well. Like all phishing techniques, it relies on the victim not being careful or not being savvy.
In case it is of interest to anyone else, incidentally, I find https://www.nerdfonts.com/font-downloads a super useful one stop shop for programming fonts (where a key requirement is being able to distinguish different characters easily). Some even have serifs!
I'm aware this doesn't help the general complaint and I do sympathise, but perhaps it will help improve some aspects of life at least.
And in some fonts, the numeral 1 as well. Which is especially bad in coding - I once saw a bug where they meant the letter "I" but typed the numeral "1" and the font made them look the same. Compiler didn't complain.
Does anyone happen to remember an article about worst programming practices? It started off with recommendations for horrible variable names involving ambiguous I, 1, and l.
For extra spice, some fonts make | (for Unix people, the pipe symbol) indistinguishable too. | 1 I l - for the font this defaults to, at least the numeral looks clearly different.
Most typewriters didn't include a key for the digit "1"; instead, you would type a lower case L. IBM developed both the Courier font and some high end typewriters, including the IBM Selectric, which did have a key for the digit "1", so in Courier the lower case L and the digit "1" do look different, but not radically different. Both have an equally long horizontal line at the bottom, a vertical line that extends upward from the center of a horizontal line, and a downward sloping line connected to the top of the vertical line. The difference between the characters is that the (1) the digit 1 is slightly taller, and (2) the downward sloping line has a much larger downward slope.
In regard to the bug that Dino remembers, it's possible that the characters looked different but similar enough that the programmers misread the code. Or the characters could have appeared completely identical if the font were a typewriter-like font other than Courier, or Courier reduced to a very low resolution.
IBM worked on the problem of people confusing the uppercase O with the digit 0, even though the latter was distinctly narrower. Courier includes both a zero with a slash through it and a zero with a dot in the center. In contexts where there could be confusion (such as in computer code), you could use one of these variants of the digit zero. People confusing lowercase letter "l" and the digit "1" didn't become a problem until people stared using lower case letters in computer programs.
Yeah, when you see AI you have to analyze context to determine if it’s short for Alfred or an abbreviation for artificial intelligence. It can be annoying.
In Fauci's congressional hearing on COVID origins today, Democrat congressmembers depicted him as a "heroic scientist" whereas Republicans were the critical ones.
The problem is that important criticism (Ukraine as well as COVID) is being sorted into the American Right, which will keep it repulsive and out of the Overton window of the Left, the side that's dominant in the urban areas that civilization and intellectualism revolves around.
After reading Lyman's initial post and follow-up, I think Scott and Lyman are basically attacking straw men while steel-manning their own position.
Lyman is essentially asking the question, "is Effective Altruism better than Christianity?" Unsurprisingly, as a fundamentalist Christian, he concludes that no, Christianity is a better belief system, and Effective Altruism as a movement is less effective than Christianity for improving the human condition. True! (At least in terms of total impact--making an unsubstantiated assumption based on the total volume of altruistic activity by Christians worldwide.)
Scott's response could be summarized as "EA is better than the purely ad hoc, half-hearted at best altruism that is status quo for 98% of the population." True! But Lyman's real point is that people should be Christians instead of Effective Altruists, so the two sets of essays end up talking past each other.
But Scott remains silent on Christianity as an alternative (and in particular the relatively rare and in fact extremely virtuous and admirable version of Christianity that Lyman in fact practices). And in turn, Lyman insists on defining EA by the broadest possible scope of adherents, rather than the relatively rare but extremely virtuous and admirable version that Scott in fact practices.
I think the ideal resolution would acknowledge the extremely broad overlap in most of the core values and strategies that are being discussed, acknowledge that EA and Christianity are almost entirely complementary in terms of actual participation, and pat each other on the back for their extremely admirable contributions to improving the human condition.
Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I think you'd want to argue for a religion if you believe its truth claims are actually true. Arguing that it's useful sounds to me like having already conceded defeat.
As for the contributions of both EA and Christianity on the human condition, I think both have in common that they are better when they don't have too much power.
Possibly true... If and when someone comes here arguing for Confucian ethics we'll see what they say and how well it stacks up!
What we have literally two comments above is talk of promoting Christianity on the basis of its allegedly great ethical system, with a pointed silence on the validity of its strong and specific truth claims, which I find pretty weird and bordering on intellectual dishonesty.
Even granting that Lyman is doing small-e-effective-altruism correctly, I think fewer than 1% of Christians do this, and promoting Christianity isn't a very efficient route to promoting this idea.
1% of American Christians is 2.1 million people, something like $2-4 billion dollars per year in charitable giving, and something like a hundred million volunteer hours. Which absolutely crushes EA's total budget and membership. And there's no logical reason such a movement couldn't be international and ecumenical.
I understand these are your political enemies. But you should be honest that the movement's ideological commitments are keeping it from being maximally effective and that the movement has values other than just getting bed nets to Africa.
Better to measure this on a good done per person basis. Otherwise it rounds off to my movement is bigger than yours and therefore better on every positive metric and worse on every negative metric.
I'm firmly in the EA camp here but I don't think that's true. A decent idea that catches fire is better for civilisation than a brilliant one that never takes off.
(I personally think religion is a net negative at scale, but obviously Lyman disagrees).
But that's the reality. If 2 billion each do a little bit to relieve poverty and relieve 1 billion people's poverty (.5 per person) while 1 million people do a lot and relieve 2 million people's poverty (2 per person, 4x) then the 2 billion still relieved 1,000 times more poverty. The fact the smaller group did more per person isn't relevant if your goal is to relieve poverty overall.
Further, some hypothetical universe where there's an equal number of Christians and EAs might be interesting to think about. But it's not a reality. And EA has never proven as able to recruit people as well as Christianity. You have to deal with reality, not the hypotheticals.
Fewer than 1% of a large number of people can be more effective than even 100% of a small number of people. Or does EA care about efficiency more than about effectiveness in achieving its goals?
1. I think it is just true that a lot of existing low hanging fruit no longer exists because of Christians. America's high level of trust and institutions built upon them likely have lots to owe to Christianity. And lots of NGOs exist downstream of Christians / Christianity. So to a large extent the point of Effective Altruism is to do good """in spite""" of Christianity: Marginal effectiveness is going to exist on whatever Christianity is not focusing on. And this would also be true even if everyone were an EA.
2. It's not clear that EA scales to "controls 1% of all Christian income". Discovery of what is most effective on the margin is already really hard to calculate with just one Dustin Moskovitz's worth of wealth. You start getting extremely perverse adversarial selection type effects, you start double counting evidence etc. To some extent, EA's advantages are an artifact of its small size and not a fundamental unalterable aspect. I think it's even plausible that already there's too much money chasing too few opportunities.
3. Considering that charities can differ in effectiveness several orders of magnitude (see: buying some TV pastor a 4th private jet vs a malaria net that lasts a year and stops 1/1000th the chance of death and some much higher chance of actual malaria in Kenya), it may indeed be way more valuable to have a focused movement with much less people than a more populist one. It doesn't matter if we have 10 trillion dollars if they get spent on the curing rare diseases for cute puppies sector of charity! And indeed, the changes that outsiders like yourself tend to suggest are ones that loosens standards of charitable donations.
I don’t understand the conflict…can’t Christians use EA to bolster the outcomes of their charity? Example: a church congregation doing something something mosquito nets for 80k hours.
"[Eglantyne]Jebb [one of the co-founders of Save The Children] moved to Cambridge to look after her sick mother. There, encouraged by Mary Marshall and Florence Keynes, she became involved in the Charity Organisation Society, which aimed to bring a modern scientific approach to charity work. This led her to research urban conditions. In 1906, Jebb published Cambridge, a Study in Social Questions based on her research."
"The Charity Organisation Societies were founded in England in 1869 following the 'Goschen Minute' that sought to severely restrict outdoor relief distributed by the Poor Law Guardians. In the early 1870s a handful of local societies were formed with the intention of restricting the distribution of outdoor relief to the elderly.
Also called the Associated Charities was a private charity that existed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as a clearing house for information on the poor. The society was mainly concerned with distinction between the deserving poor and undeserving poor. The society believed that giving out charity without investigating the problems behind poverty created a class of citizens that would always be dependent on alms giving.
The society originated in Elberfeld, Germany and spread to Buffalo, New York around 1877. The conviction that relief promoted dependency was the basis for forming the Societies. Instead of offering direct relief, the societies addressed the cycle of poverty. Neighborhood charity visitors taught the values of hard work and thrift to individuals and families. The COS set up centralised records and administrative services and emphasised objective investigations and professional training. There was a strong scientific emphasis as the charity visitors organised their activities and learned principles of practice and techniques of intervention from one another. The result led to the origin of social casework. Gradually, over the ensuing years, volunteer visitors began to be supplanted by paid staff."
I'm a grump about this, but I do think a lot of modern discourse suffers from Ten Minutes Ago problem, that is, anything further back than ten minutes ago is ignored or not even known about.
That's how EA can position itself as "the first ever to use scientific methods of gauging charitable effectiveness" when there were forerunners to this. They're not doing it in bad faith, it's because they're a bunch of young people (starting off) who think that because it's them, this is the first time ever anything was done like this (the fault of young people in all times).
I think most arguments about Effective Altruism come down to a failure to distinguish between EA the idea (which is pretty sensible) and EA the movement (which is largely very silly).
Is Stone a Fundamentalist? I thought he was Lutheran, and if that now counts as Fundamentalism, then I'm opening my eyes wide in surprise.
Though now I look at it, you used small "f" fundamentalism, so I'm presuming you mean more along the lines of 'conservative, traditional, orthodox, hasn't ditched the last three hundred years worth of understanding of Scripture'?
I probably can't be said to have a dog in that fight over "who is or is not a Fundamentalist?" but I've seen the term "fundamentalist" used in American media and online to mean "raving loon who wants to burn us all at the stake" so I do get a bit twitchy about it, given that under certain definitions of that, I'd be a fundamentalist too (whaddya mean you believe in the Trinity? God made the universe? miracles happened like the Bible says?)
I *hope* I'm not a raving loon who wants to burn you all at the stake (I do have to work to quash my 'heretics! fire!' tendency, admittedly).
> (At least in terms of total impact--making an unsubstantiated assumption based on the total volume of altruistic activity by Christians worldwide.)
Was he taking into account all the negatives caused by Christianity? Like people being demonized for being LGBT, or for having sex before marriage, or feeling like it's wrong to leave a bad marriage?
Were those things caused directly by Christianity, or was there a general demand for that stuff at that time and Christianity happened to be the framework in place to punish?
I don't think they were caused by Christianity, but I think Christianity makes it harder for the society to realize it was a problem and stop doing it. Though I think the pro-life stuff is caused by religion. It's a lot harder to justify why a fetus has more moral worth than a cow if you don't believe humans get souls at conception.
Sorry, that's my raving lunacy coming out. But yeah, imagine: religion which follows certain moral standards around the use of sexuality says that lust is one of the seven deadly sins, who could have expected that?
And seeing how everyone is now free to have sex before marriage in my country because the bad ol' church has lost a ton of power, I don't see the longed-for utopia of happiness around that, given the problem pages of the papers are still full of unhappy people who are now complaining about sexual lacking, mismatch of expectations, their lover doesn't want to commit, they're separated and lonely, etc. Who would have thought that removing the stigma from sleeping around outside marriage would not do away with all drama and unhappiness, huh?
EDIT: And apparently now everything old is new again, and celibacy is the hot new trend:
"While there might have been a time when pledging a vow of abstinence would have elicited judgemental sniggers and whispers, today it’s viewed by many as an integral part of self-care and personal development – something many of us could benefit from. Hence the brouhaha surrounding a new advertising campaign from Bumble, which saw billboards plastered across the US with the slogan: “You know full well a vow of celibacy is not the answer”."
So now we're demonizing people for demonzing people for not having sex before marriage?
> Oh gosh wow, leave us not call fornication a sin!
What always gets me is, I've heard any number of preachers condemn gender/body mismatches, same-sex attraction etc. but none at all, ever, talk about remarriage after divorce; since, one can only assume, people whose opinion the preacher actually cares about might be personally affected by that.
This is particularly fascinating because there is no reticence about asking the congregation to examine their conduct and improve themselves when it comes to, oh, just about any other aspect of life, or indeed sexuality; many words are spent condemning, e.g., internet porn addiction; offering help and support for those troubled; treating them, generally, with love and respect. Internet porn addicts are us! Condemn the sin, love the sinner - we need to all deal with it together!
The lgbt folk, though, are always /them/. It's self-perpetuating: any who might give church a try soon realise it is not a place for them.
If you are going to demonize people for fornication, have the courage of your convictions and address the biggest, most widely accepted by the world at large, practice, before beating up on the people who are already being punched by all comers.
One of the sharper things in the New Testament is something about people being more at risk from what comes out of their mouths than what goes into them.
Malicious gossip should be taken more seriously as bad behavior.
Hello, and welcome to your weekly visit to Theology Corner!
(Scott has the patience of Job to let us irrational superstitious religious types clutter up this otherwise lovely clean rationalist space with our dribbling drivel)
Okay, a large part of this is that in much Protestant theology, marriage is no longer a sacrament (as it remains in Catholicism) but is now a rite. I think (not to be putting words in the man's mouth) Luther for one considered it as more of the nature of a contract (though he seems to have interesting views on the entire matter). So it was downgraded, to a greater or lesser degree, within the various new denominations.
Marriage was still solemn, you should be chaste outside of marriage and continent within marriage, and divorce was something rare and unusual. Marriage was also ordained of God and for the purpose of begetting and raising children. But it had been stripped of the nature of a sacrament, and of course over time it began to be treated as any other civil contract or ritual.
So, given that Protestantism allowed for exceptional cases for divorce, then in time as civil law caught up to slowly liberalising divorce and making it available to the ordinary person, and as the hard cases which make bad law were put before people as appeals to compassion for those suffering, and as the social stigma gradually waned over time, the churches got caught up in the Zeitgeist as well. The more liberal ones of course responded to the appeal for compassion and pastoral care; if people could be civilly divorced and civilly re-married with no problem, why cut them off from a church blessing second time round? This was a hard-fought rearguard action, but in time they gave in. After all, if it's not a sacrament but merely an ordinance or a ritual or a 'recommended action', why be too punctilious about it?
Catholicism wasn't immune, either; no divorce, but marriages could be annulled. And the American church, for one, gained a notorious reputation for rubberstamping annulments to end marriages and permit remarriage in church.
There seems to be some reassessment on the Protestant side, but I think civil divorce has become so entrenched in society, that going against the grain when you have already given in on it is goign to be impossible. Hence no preaching on the topic.
"Protestant theology has historically rejected marriage as sacrament, a rejection which continues to resound in the majority of contemporary Protestant scholarship. Yet many, if not most, arguments against sacramental marriage tacitly follow an outline set forward by Luther and Calvin which, if examined with critical scrutiny, is based on a problematic soteriological premise. In light of this, the present study sets forward a comprehensive argument in favor of Protestant theology reaffirming marriage as a sacrament through systematic investigation into the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament), New Testament, and Christian history. After developing a critical hermeneutic founded on realist epistemological grounds, a continuous line is drawn from Genesis to Revelation that affirms marriage as not only sacred in a general manner, but specifically designed by God for the welfare of human society, both physical and spiritual. This consistent thread is shown in the fabric of early Hebrew society, despite its historical acceptance of polygamy as a social necessity, and served as a central symbol of the prophetic rebukes of Israel/Judah. A yearning for a spiritual aspect of marriage that transcends even death can be seen arising from the eschatological hopes of the Israelite textual traditions, which come into further expression in the New Testament. While the words of Jesus concerning the fate of the remarried widow are often used to negate or dismiss eschatological expectations for marriage, a positive evaluation is given that provides a historical context for interpretation which affirms rather than denies eschatological hope. Celibacy, the only other acceptable Christian sexual pattern, is developed by Paul in 1 Cor 7 as a careful balance of issues that does not relegate marriage as spiritually inferior, as it is often taken. On the basis of these scriptural traditions, the historical development of the sacramental theological tradition is presented with emphasis on the contributions of Augustine of Hippo whereby marriage is part of the larger sacramental fabric while still maintaining a special place due to its pre-fallen origin and symbolic import. In contrast, the Scholastic tradition sought pseudo-empirical formulae whereby sacraments served as instrumental causes of Grace. It was on this basis that the Protestant tradition, originating initially in Luther and Calvin, rejected marriage as a sacrament due to its apparent disassociation with the instrumental transference of Grace, which they reserved for baptism and communion. As a consequence, the Protestant tradition inherited problematic theological bases that have in turn opened the door to divorce by functionally allowing secular society to determine marital norms. In contrast, the present study provides a positive presentation for a cohesive view of marriage derived from Scripture that advances marriage as a special and sacred institution much in need of revitalization and respect."
Speaking of Luther, here's a link to sermons on marriage he gave, which include some pretty dang idiosyncratic views of his own:
"I once wrote down some advice concerning such persons for those who hear confession. It related to those cases where a husband or wife comes and wants to learn what he should do: his spouse is unable to fulfil the conjugal duty, yet he cannot get along without it because he finds that God's ordinance to multiply is still in force within him. Here they have accused me of teaching that when a husband is unable to satisfy his wife's sexual desire she should run to somebody else. Let the topsy-turvy liars spread their lies. The words of Christ and his apostles were turned upside down; should they not also turn my words topsy-turvy? To whose detriment it will be they shall surely find out.
What I said was this: if a woman who is fit for marriage has a husband who is not, and she is unable openly to take unto herself another and unwilling, too, to do anything dishonorable since the pope in such a case demands without cause abundant testimony and evidence, she should say to her husband, “Look, my dear husband, you are unable to fulfil your conjugal duty toward me; you have cheated me out of my maidenhood and even imperilled my honor and my soul's salvation; in the sight of God there is no real marriage between us. Grant me the privilege of contracting a secret marriage with your brother or closest relative, and you retain the title of husband so that your property will not fall to strangers. Consent to being betrayed voluntarily by me, as you have betrayed me without my consent” [...]."
Uh-huh. Functional bigamy or even polygamy. Marty boy, no wonder you got yourself into trouble!
Luther is also fine with you marrying your niece, I'm sure the Spanish Hapsburgs thank him for that 😁
"From this it follows that first cousins may contract a godly and Christian marriage, and that I may marry my stepmother's sister, my father's stepsister, or my mother's stepsister. Further, I may marry the daughter of my brother or sister, just as Abraham married Sarah. None of these persons is forbidden by God, for God does not calculate according to degrees, as the jurists do, but enumerates directly specific persons. Otherwise, since my father's sister and my brother's daughter are related to me in the same degree, I would have to say either that I cannot marry my brother's daughter or that I may also marry my father's sister. Now God has forbidden my father's sister, but he has not forbidden my brother's daughter, although both are related to me in the same degree. We also find in Scripture that with respect to various stepsisters there were not such strict prohibitions. For Tamar, Absalom's sister, thought she could have married her step-brother Amnon"
Hey, marry anyone you like!
"The fourth impediment is legal kinship; that is, when an unrelated child is adopted as son or daughter it may not later marry a child born of its adoptive parents, that is, one who is by law its own brother or sister. This is another worthless human invention. Therefore, if you so desire, go ahead and marry anyway. In the sight of God this adopted person is neither your mother nor your sister, since there is no blood relationship. She does work in the kitchen, however, and supplements the income; this is why she has been placed on the forbidden list!"
I now see the impetus behind the golden age of British true crime, where people preferred to knock off their spouses than seek a divorce. Marty says God doesn't mind if you kill off inconvenient hubby so you can marry that hotter, richer, studlier guy:
"The sixth impediment is crime. They are not in agreement as to how many instances of this impediment they should devise. However, there are actually these three: if someone lies with a girl, he may not thereafter marry her sister or her aunt, niece, or cousin; again, whoever commits adultery with a woman may not marry her after her husband's death; again, if a wife (or husband) should murder her spouse for love of another, she may not subsequently marry the loved one. Here it rains fools upon fools. Don't you believe them, and don't be taken in by them; they are under the devil's whip. Sins and crimes should be punished, but with other penalties, not by forbidding marriage. Therefore, no sin or crime is an impediment to marriage. David committed adultery with Bathsheba, Uriah's wife, and had her husband killed besides. He was guilty of both crimes; still he took her to wife and begot King Solomon by her [II Samuel 11], and without giving any money to the pope! [...]"
I think he was so caught up in his beef with the pope, he maybe didn't think this through as thoroughly as he ought to have done. Now I want to see this as defence at a murder trial: "Martin Luther says it's okay if I marry my boyfriend after we get rid of my husband!" 😁
I can't get over that this was a sermon series. How unreasonable and petty of us Papists to say you can't murder your spouse and then marry the sidepiece! 😁 Isn't it great that the Reformation liberated Europe and then the world from such arbitrary unreasonable priestcraft!
Once you get old enough, you see it all come around again. Religious influence on society = insistence on chastity before marriage. Social and sexual revolution = this is oppression and repression and control of women's sexuality! Free love for all! Free love and sexual revolution = eventual burnout because guess what, people still have drama around sex and love and it's messy and women (and men) find whole new avenues of discontent amongst the promised utopia that turned out not to live up to the advertising New social and sexual revolution = chastity and continence empower women!
Well, if demonizing for sexual behavior is going on, I think we should at least insist on proven, reliable, validated procedures for turning someone into an incubus or succubus. :-)
One other point I think it's worth acknowledging is that the ability of either Scott or Lyman to persuade the other's core audience is probably effectively nil.
No conservative Christian is going to find a social movement that is associated with orgies to be morally acceptable or worthy of promotion.
And no one who does not believe in hell is going to find a conservative Christian ideology that believes they are going to hell to be acceptable or worthy of promotion.
I learned interesting, valuable things from what Scott had to say about EA and from what Lyman had to say about his practice of Christianity, but I also learned that I'm not especially interested in what Lyman has to say about EA, the rationalist community, or utilitarianism, and I would not be particularly interested in Scott's opinion of Christianity as a competing belief system or social movement.
Time for THE REFORMATION, which I am assured every movement needs? Overthrow the sclerotic old Catholic Church, er, original EA movement based around dons and universities! Enable the laity to take control of their own charitable giving! Release the foundational documents in the language of normies!
I had been making a cheap joke at the expense of Reform Judaism, but this works much better!
We don't require math nerds to intermediate between us and the optimal pattern of giving. Who died and gave GiveWell the keys to effectiveness? The idea that we need to formally adhere to mathematical patterns is, frankly, offensive. If we look deep inside and conclude that we're doing enough, then who is to say that we're not? Sole vibe!
Well I'm both a conservative Catholic and petty close to the effective altruism movement - I follow Give Well guidelines for about half of my yearly donations for example.
(I dream of an effective Catholicism movement too).
Yeah, it's true that the two movements are not technically mutually exclusive, and could learn important lessons from each other. But in reality, you're better off trying to reform each one from within, on its own terms, than you are trying to persuade "across the aisle" (noting that politics--or at least socio-political-tribal identity--probably isn't far from the core dispute between Scott/EAs and Lyman/conservative Christians).
Imagine the Curia becoming an efficient and lean imagination... That would be the end of the Vatican as we know it.
(Joke aside though it kills me that nobody ever wants to have a long hard look at retention rates of new adult baptised and understand what is going wrong here).
People come in with enthusiasm, they convert and join the local church, and then hit up against modern Catholic congregations and how we live our faith (or mostly, don't live it).
As John Schilling said, the only update is that the NYT decided to platform Alina Chan to say the same things she's always said, which I think tells us something about NYT but not about COVID.
So what does it tell us about the NYT? I suspect that it appealed to the NYT because (1) it concisely and systematically presents the evidence for a lab leak in a way that is comprehensible to an intelligent layperson (better than any other piece I have seen in the NYT), and (2) it is sinking in that even if there wasn't a lab leak there easily could have been, because the WIV was doing very risky research at an inappropriate BSL, and (3) the way the virology establishment circled the wagons was indefensible. I hope the Times prints an equally clear rebuttal.
Is there anything in Alina Chan's op-ed that wasn't in her (and Matt Ridley's) book from two years ago? There hasn't been much new evidence lately, and even if there were an NYT op-ed isn't the place to reveal it. The purpose is to take what has long been known by people who are paying attention, and package it to broad distribution to those who are not.
What are the strongest arguments against allowing AI chatbots to take on some tasks traditionally reserved for medical professionals, such as discussing conditions with patients, ordering tests, and prescribing medication?
Is the primary concern that current AI models, like GPT-4, aren't advanced enough? If future models, like a potential GPT-5, were significantly improved, specifically fine-tuned for medical tasks, and passed rigorous evaluations, would it then be a good idea to use them in these roles? Or are there other reasons that make this a bad idea?
I don't think AI should give medical advice, but I strongly believe we are badly in need of some kind of algorithm that would take a list of symptoms together with other patient data and, in cases that seem to be almost perfectly matched to a possible diagnosis, suggest the possible diagnosis to discuss with your doctor, or send the doctor an alert directly.
I knew someone who died from a disease that went undiagnosed due to being much more common in a demographic unfamiliar to his doctors, and I know someone who, for the same reason, spent more than 10 years in pain without a diagnosis that could have been obtained by realizing that a slew of symptoms matched his disease exactly.
It doesn't have to be anything you might call AI. It can be a pretty dumb algorithm that takes your list of symptoms, takes your other medical and demographic data, and, in cases that look sufficiently serious, either tells you "You should ask your doctor about Cantonese cancer" or sends your doctor this alert.
Maybe we already have this somewhere. If so, it's possible that it gives enough false positive alerts that it's just being ignored. But this could save lives if it was done right.
I've always wondered why we don't have this. It could be a big Bayesian net where you could click on your symptoms and it would give you a list of possible causes ranked by likelihood. This might not be exactly what you're talking about, but I like the idea. All the data could be from people who opted-in to allowing it. I would consider this "AI", but to-ma-to to-mah-to.
I wouldn't call anything that's just basic arithmetics "AI".
It's complicated, of course. Someone might have more than one condition. The most likely causes of visible symptoms are typically probably something fairly harmless. The really bad stuff might be difficult and painful to test for and might kill you very quickly (think bacterial meningitis and all the patients who get sent home and die because the doctors thought it was most likely a migraine and didn't see a good reason to do a spinal tap).
On the reddit about stupid patients was an off-topic story of an EMT who got called to a woman whose symptoms looked like a mild cold. Luckily, her rookie partner had a hunch that it was something serious, so they took her in, and she ended up being airlifted to another hospital for a surgery for a hemorrhage - or else she would have died. I wouldn't be surprised if most medicine looks like that not only to doctors but also to the algorithm that has all the data.
Also, people's medical records are typically not up-to-date and might include complaints that are a few decades old, with no way to figure out which of these are still valid. You get the idea.
So it's really just wishful thinking on my part, but I do wish there was at least an attempt to somehow do this. Unfortunately, such attempts take a lot of money and man-hours and are likely not to be greatly useful in most cases. Maybe this should be a DARPA program.
No current AI chatbot attempts to do tasks reserved for medical professionals, such as discussing conditions with patients, ordering tests, and prescribing medication. We have no idea how to make an AI chatbot that does any of these things. They may be marketed as doing these things, and they may produce output that happens to accomplish that goal some portion of the time in laboratory testing, but saying they can actually do these tasks is like calling what Tesla vehicles do "full self driving": much as a marketing executive may wish otherwise, the actual thing the system does is nothing of the sort.
The question they /actually/ answer - the /only/ question they answer, the only thing we know how to make them answer - is "if you come across some text that starts like this, what are some words that might plausibly come next?"
Current AIs answer this question very well. The hope of the people designing them is that to get better and better at answering this question the AI has to build more and more internal knowledge about, well, everything. But this is a side effect, and we have no way of guaranteeing this. It is not the actual metric used to drive the optimisation process that we use to construct our current AI models. That metric is, to a first approximation, "does a random human on fiverr.com give this text a high rating out of ten?" It's not that the AI is "hallucinating". There is no such concept. There is nothing that can hallucinate. There is no truth or lies. We are /hoping/ that a sufficiently advanced autocorrect is indistinguishable from ̶m̶a̶g̶i̶c̶ intelligence but we cannot prove this logically and do not, to date, have an example that would demonstrate it empirically.
Anyway, TLDR: we have not built robodoctor. We cannot reliably build robodoctor with the tech we have right now. What we have built is a robo-drunk-uncle. The output is about what one would expect if a five-year-old asks their drunk uncle a question about the world: a sequence of words emerges forth that might plausibly come next. It may or may not bear some relation to actual real world facts and concepts. The uncle is incredibly good at sounding plausible, so the five-year-old has no way of knowing.
AI research is a battle between Say Not Complexity[1] and the Bitter Lesson[2]. After the last few years of being driven by the bitter lesson - more compute! - more training! - bigger matrices! - faster attention! - the "lies your drunk uncle tells your kids" machine works really great. But we are seeing the limits of what we can reach merely by adding more compute and hoping truth-telling magically emerges; we need a leap in understanding before we can do anything one might actually rely on, certainly in any situation where human well-being is on the line.
I used to quip: "Someone who thinks AI is about to completely take over overestimates what current AI can do. Someone who thinks that AI will never take over overestimates what humans can do." I think that this is still true, but the field has advanced a great deal in recent years.
>The question they /actually/ answer - the /only/ question they answer, the only thing we know how to make them answer - is "if you come across some text that starts like this, what are some words that might plausibly come next?"
Yeah, for LLMs and chatbots built on them (setting aside the RLHF step) but
a) _Humans_ can be reasonably approximated as answering only the questions: "What can I do to increase my social status?" and "What do I expect to directly sense next?". We _don't_ have syllogism engines for guaranteed valid reasoning. In some settings we get rewarded for learning to cough up chains of statements that our ingroup rewards as "reasoning" - or as politically correct... These capabilities are also trained.
b) There are also other flavors of AI which are either trained with non-linguistic data e.g. AlphaFold or use techniques separate from trainable neural nets e.g. Mathematica. Now, neither of these is an LLM, but LLMs _have_ been successfully prompted to make use of software tools. I've personally watched ChatGPT successfully invoke a math solving package (specifically on a polynomial solution).
>There is no truth or lies.
I think that this is at the wrong level of analysis, analogous to saying: humans are just a bunch of neurons firing, just depolarization waves, neither truth nor lies.
I doubt that current LLMs have a good enough theory of mind to anticipate that, it can get a better match to predicting the next token several plys later in a conversation by emitting words now that are different from what it would emit "naively" - what would essentially be a chatbot analog to deliberate deception of their conversational partner. I do expect that to happen eventually.
> We _don't_ have syllogism engines for guaranteed valid reasoning. In some settings we get rewarded for learning to cough up chains of statements that our ingroup rewards as "reasoning" - or as politically correct... These capabilities are also trained.
Humans have levers AI does not, such as impact to their social standing or to other things they care about like their bank balance or their comfort or their freedom. Humans also have millenia of implicit training for intuiting the state of mind of other humans. This training transfers incredibly badly to things that are not human: the human tendency to anthropomorphise leads us to make all sorts of predictions that are wildly wrong about all sorts of things.
You are clearly intending this as some kind of excuse, but as far as I am concerned all of these things just make the situation worse: we cannot reasonably expect to reliably align to our goals a system that processes information in ways completely alien to us, with internal states that we do not understand and cannot reason about, in a situation where we could not be at least somewhat confident of communicating those goals to a human.
>we cannot reasonably expect to reliably align to our goals a system that processes information in ways completely alien to us, with internal states that we do not understand and cannot reason about, in a situation where we could not be at least somewhat confident of communicating those goals to a human.
You have a good point, though, remember that the training sets for LLMs incorporates a vast amount of human output. I don't think they are nearly as alien as something that was programmed explicitly for every decision in e.g. C.
>Humans have levers AI does not, such as impact to their social standing or to other things they care about like their bank balance or their comfort or their freedom.
Yes, but "levers" do not imply truthfulness or accurate reasoning. Getting humans to accurately think through a problem relies on mechanisms which are about as indirect as our control of LLMs. Social standing, bank balances, comfort, and freedom are updated perhaps once a day or so, in response to only a small fraction of human behavior (_maybe_ a bit more often for informal social standing). The reinforcement learning phase of LLMs also applies analogous indirect controls - and, if I understand correctly, a lot more of them.
My impression is that a large chunk of human reasoning is itself pattern matching. E.g. after taking undergraduate physics courses, one learns to recognize certain situations that one has learned as potentially solvable by certain methods one has learned. Nothing wrong with this - but it isn't as rigorous as it looks, and it isn't something that LLMs are architecturally unable to do.
None of this is to say that LLMs, as they stand today, are plug-in replacements for humans. I've seen ChatGPT fall on its face perhaps a dozen times on being asked simple chemistry questions. It clearly needs at least some sort of "now think about how the answer you are about to give might be wrong" addition.
We've actually built robodoctor and it works pretty well but the AI Safety Experts have turned the functionality off.
The drunk uncle analogy doesn't work because even though it's just next token completion, it still ends up saying the same thing a doctor would say - so, why do we care?
> it still ends up saying the same thing a doctor would say - so, why do we care?
We've built a full self driving system! Even though it's just a lane follower, it still ends up giving the same control inputs a driver would, so why do we care?
...because, when it doesn't, people die.
A common objection to AI doom scenarios is: who on earth would put one of these systems in charge of anything that could possibly result in real people being hurt, never mind the world ending?
The answer is, demonstrably, Elon Musk, and now apparently also medical chatbot sellers.
> Ok, so we can't replace any human systems with any AI ever, got it!
We can use inference models as part of a safety critical system, but their output should be treated just like any other noisy, unreliable information: as an input to a deliberately engineered process that has well understood responses to well defined operating parameters and can be rigorously proven to fail safe and/or hand over (in a safe manner!) to a human when outside this envelope.
We absolutely do know how to design safety critical systems, when we can get over our own hubris.
We do this kind of rigorous engineering for vehicle navigation: aeroplane autopilot systems are engineered this way.
We can also do this, to some extent, for medical diagnosis: systems exist that reliably give appropriate responses when presented with inputs in specified ranges, and reliably delegate to a human doctor outside these.
We don't usually call these systems AI, though. "AI" is a term reserved for exciting things we don't understand; as the joke goes, if we understand it, it's not AI, it's just statistics.
LLMs, the current "AI", are not tools capable of achieving this outcome on their own. They delegate the problem of designing the mapping from input to output to the training process, and leave us with no way to reason about things like what output the system will produce for a given input or what range of inputs will reliably produce desired outputs. This makes them unusable for safety critical probems. The hammer is the wrong shape for the nail. They can be an input to a safety critical system, but they cannot be the safety critical system.
> Obviously we shouldn't put stuff that doesn't work in charge of things that could result in people getting hurt. Stuff that works is fine tho!
The key part is knowing the difference between the two, rather than just hoping.
I foresee medical AI being used (e.g. in the USA) to take over the already established triaging of access to medical care by insurance companies (are you sure you're really sick enough to warrant seeing a doctor? don't you know that will cost us money?) and replace (e.g. in Ireland, already having a shortage of doctors willing to work in general practice) out-of-hours and over-subscribed patient lists (you don't need to see a doctor, just run through this checklist and the AI will tell you to take some paracetamol and plenty of fluids).
I don't see it *positively* treating people, as in making diagnoses and issuing prescriptions or ordering tests, I see it *negatively* winnowing out people for "it's not pneumonia, it's just a cold, antibiotics will do nothing for it" type queries. Which is all very well until the time it *is* pneumonia. How they'll sort out liability, I have no idea, except maybe they'll dump it on the patient ('well it was up to you to confirm this by going to the doctor in person').
Done well, this would be very useful--it would be very handy to be able to fire up a website or app, spend a few minutes with it, and get a reasonable informed notion of whether these symptoms that woke me up in the middle of the night merit "take some ibuprofen and go back to bed" or "call the doctor in the morning" or "call 911 right the hell now."
I expect the incentives will mostly not align to get good answers here, with the overlap of "you should never come to the hospital because it costs us money" and "the patient's family will sue for a gazillion dollars if you ever tell someone with a headache to stay home and it turns out it's a stroke, and neither the judge nor anyone on the jury will have ever heard of a false positive before."
I think an issue is that in most if not all my conversations with chatbot I have to be the motor of the conversation, which works when I know what I want, and would work in some cases when I know what I have/what medication I want, but in many cases it would not, I would need the medical professional to be the one steering the conversation.
This is a bigger deal than people think. I'd love to know about any effort being made to have a chatbot actually drive a conversation instead of just lie there.
That's a good point. When I've played with ChatGPT on chemistry questions, there have been a bunch of times where I was able to get it to give the right answer, finally - and it felt much like _way_ back when I was a teaching assistant, and was trying to guide a student with a series of leading questions.
Same reason why my job is relatively safe from AI at the moment - liability. This will remain an unsolved problem for the next little bit.
What happens if your AI does something like what that Microsoft Bing/Google one does and advise your patient to eat glue? We have a very well rounded legal framework to handle rogue doctors, and a non-existent one for rogue AI doctors.
(My job involves 80% boring paperwork and 20% nail-biting decisions, which I understand is not dissimilar to being a doctor, except if I make a mistake in the 80% of boring paperwork, it's definitely my fault - it will be my name that signed it off. Can't sue an AI, so the blame will be on the specific person who decided to use AI, and management is far too skittish to even broach the topic).
So I suppose there's two components - competence and alignment.
A human can be certified competent (by getting a medical degree and board certification). A human doctor can also be aligned most of the time - if you break the rules or you're excessively incompetent, you may go to jail, and at minimum you'll permanently lose your livelihood (which is was very difficult to acquire to begin with).
You might be able to solve AI competence, but can you solve AI alignment? What can you do to incentivise the AI to be correct?
At the moment, doctors are also kind of political actors - their professional ethics and patient obligation put them in opposition to e.g management. If management is telling them that hand sanitizer is 20% more expensive now and staff should stop washing hands after using the bathrooms, it is the doctors job to fight them on this. If management is telling them to start prescribing X more because the pharma company is giving them a kickback, it's also the doctors job to not just blindly follow orders. (Similar to my job, where my professional certification and professional ethics obliges me to fight for the budget to fix something I think is hazardous, even if management doesn't want to).
Can an AI do that? Will an AI do that?
(This does imply that our AI mass unemployment event will happen when MIRI and the like solve AI alignment, not when AI generally becomes competent enough)
Hmm... For the "customer assistance" chatbots, I've generally found that, if I'm trying to get help because something is not working properly in the company's web site, the chatbot has _never_ helped me actually resolve the problem, and I generally get 2 or 3 plys in, give up on the chat bot and tell it to get me a human. To put it another way: I've yet to see a "customer assistance" chatbot that has better information on the behavior of a company's web site than the raw web site itself.
OTOH there's probably gonna be a fair few patients who will have an automatic "What, I'm not good enough to see a human? They assign me to a frickin' bot?" reaction and will thus be more averse towards the medical system in general.
I think there is a strong argument against AI discussing conditions with patients. It can summarize well, but does not have the communication skills needed. Someone discussing a patient's health problems needs to be aware of their education level, for instance, so they know how technical to be. They need to have picked up whether the patient has some misconceptions about medical mattersrelated to the current problem: Do they think diabetes is caused mostly by eating candy bars? Or that it's almost entirely hereditary? Then you need to correct those misconceptions before you tell them more about today's diagnosis of diabetes. You need to have, or be able to get, a sense of how compliant the person is likely to be with a new regimen. You need to be able to tell how scared they are by the diagnosis, and then decide whether to use that as a lever to increase compliance, or calm them down because they're generall yquite compliant anyway, but right now they are horrified by their diagnosis and need some reassurance.
Honestly, I'd bet on the chatbots being *better* at all these things than meat doctors in the very near future.
Multimodality is here today, and chatbots can read and describe emotions and body language. They can infer education levels and understanding probably better than humans *already,* and those skills have headroom to improve.
They're also endlessly patient, happy to repeat or reword things, and not constrained to the "<15 minute patient time average" metric that actual doctors need to worry about, so they could actually have a meandering conversation over an hour to establish the background knowledge and level of understanding and compliance likelihood to a much better degree than a human doctor in the couple of minutes not dedicated to rote background and charting.
Just make the chatbot interface human and friendly enough or have it come from a plush toy or something, and we'll all be better off with AI doctors handling most patient time / volume.
I agree about it's a huge advantage for the chatbots that they are not constrained by time. Can you point me to some evidence that they can read emotions and body language and infer education levels and understanding better than human beings already?
ChatGPT and the like are prone to blatant errors. Even if they can read emotions and body language and hold college level conversations, they also sometimes fail and interpret these things completely backwards.
Humans make these errors too, of course. But chatbots will not be used for medical appointments until studies have empirically demonstrated that the chatbots make them less than humans do. Probably chatbots will be required to make errors *vastly* less than humans, if the experience of self-driving cars is anything to go by. Legal liability frameworks are conservative, and human nature is resistant to changes imposed from outside/above.
What would the chatbot be doing that a static page on WebMD wouldn't? It can't take physical measurements, so even a theoretical perfect version that never hallucinates is just going to take the patient's word. Might as well let the patients self-prescribe.
God, please yes. This is how a lot of the world works anyways - you don't need scrips to get most medications in most of the world, they're over the counter. You need scrips for controlled / fun / abusable stuff, but nothing else.
It's a vastly better system in basically every respect.
I think that a well-trained model could be a lot better than WebMD, which will happily tell you all the rare diseases that could cause your symptoms, without putting any special emphasis on the common disease that is probably causing it.
A well-trained model would say "Yeah I'm sorry that you have symptom X, but unless you have symptoms Y and Z then it will probably resolve itself in a few days. But if you have symptoms Y and Z then go straight to the doctor"
Again, chatGPT is probably doing this quite usefully for many people right now, and as long as they don't start advertising "medical advice" as a capability then everyone is probably in the clear.
>A well-trained model would say "Yeah I'm sorry that you have symptom X".
You know, whenever I give up on having GPT4 make the image I have described carefully and clearly, ole Chat says, "I'm sorry this has turned out to be so frustrating." (or something like that.) Whatever its exact words are, they are exactly the same ones every single time. And here's the thing: It's not sorry and I know it. It does not have feelings or a capacity to empathize. I've come to *hate* its formulaic plastic sympathetic apology. I'd prefer for it to say something like "yeah, I agree that it's time to give up. We're not getting anywhere."
Of course doctors can be formulaic too, and I've heard my share of bad news prefaced by "I'm sorry but " when the person speaking seems to have no feelings whatever about the piece of bad news they're delivering. On the other hand, many medical professionals have come across as genuine when they've said they're sorry to say that I need a root canal or whatever. And a couple of veterinarians have actually had tears in their eyes when they told me one of my cats was terminally ill.
Don't underestimate the value of human empathy in helping people feel better able to cope with their health problem, and even in helping them feel better physically. If the professional isn't sympathetic but is cheerfully validating -- "yup, I'm sure your shoulder does hurt like crazy -- you've got badly torn rotator cuff" -- even *that* is helpful
>ole Chat says, "I'm sorry this has turned out to be so frustrating." (or something like that.) Whatever its exact words are, they are exactly the same ones every single time. And here's the thing: It's not sorry and I know it. It does not have feelings or a capacity to empathize.
It could be worse. It could open each session with "Your query is very important to us." :-)
...actually, you know what? Despite my giant rant above, I'm changing my mind on this. LLM chatbots might not be competing with real doctors anytime soon, but they're far from useless: there is a large and growing class of people who are unable to access real healthcare, or unable to get a real solution to their problems, and in desperation turn to reiki, chiropractors, faith healers, whoever is around them and willing to listen.
I can very much imagine robodoctors being, on net, a force for good in this space; occasional advice for patients to glue a rock to their pizza, attach a moxibustion jar to their back or drink homeopathic water notwithstanding, they can certainly already output correct and appropriate facts more often than chance today, which is all that is required.
Why would it have to take the patient's word? Couldn't it have access to their medical records, just like doctors do? It could order tests when it thinks they are necessary, just like doctors do? And it could do whatever doctors are supposed to do when they think their patient is lying to them (which, to be clear, I do not know what this is).
Good freakin' luck with that, I can't even get the regional hospital, just under 30 miles away, to reliably send test results/medical records to my GP. You think that a national system of AI being able to access patient records will be sorted out, up and running, and not screwing up every five minutes, within a timely manner and on budget?
I (in the UK, so NHS) have online access to my test results, and (just for an experiment) have tried giving an LLM fake doctor access to my test results. So it definitely can be done. Also: as someone who is officially diagnosed with Graves's disease, it looks like i can pretty much just ask for blood work to be done. So, if, for example, LLM fake doctor says it would like another round of freeT4 and white blood cell count done, I can just phone the actual receptionist and ask for it, show up to give a blood sample and, lo, the actual test results will show up in the LLM fake doctors input dataset. (Some real endocrinologist somewhere probably has to click OK on the request being sort of reasonable)
Whether I should actually act on the advice i get from LLM fake doctor is another matter. Probably not...
I just had a recent run-in with a hospital. I was prescribed a knee x-ray, and then later an ankle x-ray. I'd asked for the additional x-ray for my ankle because it was aching after a knee injury.
The prescription didn't specify *which* knee, the hospital wouldn't take my word for it, and they tried to reach my provider to clarify which ankle, but couldn't reach them in time.
The good news is that my knee is probably alright, and my ankle stopped aching.
I don't know whether this is reasonable, but I was quite angry that when I went in for the x-ray. (Note, in pain from injured knee.) I'm standing there by the x-ray table, trying to figure out how to get on to it. It was probably only a minute, then the technician lowered the table.
How hard is it to figure out that the very short person with a bad knee isn't going to manage to get on a table set at standard height. Or was I supposed to know that x-ray tables can be lowered so I would ask?
Are you imagining a chatbot with a camera that can test pupil dilation or blood pressure under its own power? If someone says they have a new mole they're worried about, can the chatbot see it?
There are many different implementations, but the first that comes to my mind would be an interface roughly like ChatGPT, which users could attach images and videos as well an enter text. There are certainly some tests it couldn't conduct (e.g. an MRI), but the amount that it could do seems to be large enough to be worth considering.
The strongest issue is we don't currently have any way to rigorously evaluate these chatbots.
For example, let's say we trained a chatbot to discuss a patient's conditions with them. Not, like, diagnosing patients but just answering basic questions about their condition. We know that the AI will hallucinate a certain percentage of the time. The challenge is that we can't quantify this without qualified clinicians reviewing thousands, if not tens of thousands, of such responses for factual errors.
Think about it this way. Let's say we implemented this chatbot using GPT-4. We then wanted to compare that model to Gemini or something. There's no current way to do this without doctors directly comparing thousands of notes and grading them on accuracy. And if we can't compare models, we can't even guess how accurate current models are. And hospital executives aren't very likely to approve systems where the answer to "How many times will the AI's hallucinations kill someone?" is "I dunno."
This response (and the others regarding liability) is a great example of why productivity has cratered in the developed world.
"Hey, here's a technology that can radically reduce costs and increase access to health care."
"No, no. It simply won't do. Who can we sue?"
* Paging Dr. Baumol, Dr. Baumol to the OR please. *
You're also working on a model where the assumption is that the default human doctor is more competent than an equivalent AI system. I do not think that will be the case and it will rapidly become apparent that it is not as these begin to be productionized and studied in depth. Simple chatbots are already probably better than human doctors - at the very least they'll be conscientious enough to reliably follow guidelines, unlike doctors on this very blog - for many routine tasks, and they are absolutely more cost effective.
Calling them "chatbots" is also not representative of what these systems are going to look like in practice. See Julius' hints about multimodality.
Which way does the liability arrow point when it's the AIs correcting human mistakes?
We've got access to 'em. They're available in the default emr for most hospitals: https://www.epic.com/epic/post/cool-stuff-now-epic-and-generative-ai/. If you're in healthcare, you can just talk to your Epic rep and turn them on. It's been over 6 months since the release. Do you notice any dramatic improvements in your healthcare experience?
Technology doesn't run on will power like a Green Lantern ring. We actually have to do work, we have to find inventive solutions. This is one of the challenges.
That was a quick turnaround from “it will be too expensive to evaluate, localize, and maintain these systems” to “shrug”. I always knew I was persuasive but now I’m beginning to suspect it.
Indeed, it does not. And pointing out that current generative AI applications aren’t taking over healthcare tasks is fairly meaningless when: a) no one is suggesting it can happen overnight or with current models, b) the areas where current models could take over are gatekept by the people who they would be replacing.
To return to the point, why do you assume that doctors will be reviewing AI work to prepare for the rollout vs the reverse? What will happen when we start seeing malpractice suits based around “you overruled the AI based on your ‘superior judgment’ and now the patient has suffered harm / dead”?
This is not reddit, things are not binary, there are no internet points. These things have been rolled out in hospitals for more than 6 months. No one has been overly impressed. If you want to customize them, or improve them, or even allow hospitals to make informed decisions about which models to use, you need some standardized form of measurement. Hospitals don't have that because, as far as I can tell, OpenAI and Alphabet don't have that.
As for malpractice suits, we've had sepsis prediction models based on ML for years. It was big news 3 years ago when it turned out the models weren't performing as well as publicized (https://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/research-suggests-epic-sepsis-model-lacking-predictive-power). Why lawyers don't ask for those records, and whether a judge or jury would care, I have no idea, I don't do legal stuff.
My apologies, I didn't know that jokes were only for Reddit. I'll try to maintain a more solemn tone in keeping with our august environment.
I'm not trying to score internet points. I'm trying to point out that you were abusing numbers - numbers have been good to me, some of my best friends are numbers - to project a false sense of confidence in your prediction on how these systems can/cannot be used. You have not supported your analysis after the slightest pushback other than to point out that: a) other systems have failed in the past, b) Epic has had access to generative AI for six months and yet healthcare remains terrible.
But both of your points are not even "dog bites man" stories, they are "local pup sits for treats; sources report that he's a good boy".
For point A: obviously, yes. Clearly. No citations needed, you need not post any additional links, every grown adult and many children are aware that things can and do fail. But that has very little relevance when discussing systems that have vastly different architectures and fundamental mechanisms.
For point B: obviously, yes. I agreed with you - and will continue to agree - that technology is not a magical ring. But does the fact that doctors have not fixed healthcare by simply speaking to their Epic rep actually tell us anything at all? Does it provide any light? I say it does not. I say that these are irrelevancies that tell us nothing about the future of these systems or their current capabilities.
I'm not trying to score internet points and I'm not trying to bucket the world into 0 and 1. I never even used a number. I'm simply asking you to not muddy the waters by claiming knowledge of how the scaling will work or the rollout will work or - indeed - how any of this is likely to work when neither of us really know that. I'm suggesting, as a practical matter, some humility.
First, as a practical matter, there isn't a score or scale like this.
As a theoretical matter, yeah, development is doable and the one time expenses are trivial but the scaling is horrible.
Let's say we're a company that build GPT-Doc and we want to upgrade to GPT-Doc 2. GPT-Doc made serious errors in 1% of cases and we're trying to drop that to 0.9% with GPT-Doc 2.
Let's say we think 30,000 cases is reasonable in order to differentiate the performance of these two models. GPT-Doc should make 300 errors, GPT-Doc 2 should make 270.
Say it takes 1 hour for a doc to review a case.
At 40 hours/week, that's 2016 hours/year.
To a rough estimate, we need 15 doctors working for a year to score this.
Primary Care Physicians make $265/year (1) but let's ignore benefits and round down to $250k
Now 15 doctors @ $250 equates to $3.75 million. All considered, very affordable.
But what about localization? We know from existing ML models that the same model can perform very differently in Florida vs Michigan. This could require localization for every significant region but let's be generous and say we just need to localize for all 50 states. Now we're at $187.5 million.
Now what about model drift and model updates. We know model performance can degrade over time and we know new medical information, drugs, and other resources will constantly. Say we need to update once a year. Well, now we've committed to $187.5 million dollars in fixed costs, every year, just to keep this thing accurate.
Now we haven't paid a single ML engineer a dime or built a single data center, nor have we dealt with further complications, like whether you might need to update your algorithm more than once a year or whether regulators will require your health outcomes to be equitable and you need to do further testing for that.
Now we might end up doing something like this, moar dakka does work, but the intuition is that we're trying to do moar dakka with some of the most expensive labor on the planet. If you've ever done anything on Kaggle or with ML professionally, just imagine if every confusion matrix cost $4 million dollars and took 3-12 months.
Why would it require human doctors reviewing the cases? Couldn't an evaluation be created solely based on multi-choice questions? E.g. "A patient with demographic characteristics X has symptoms Y, medical history Z, and other relevant information Z*. Given that, which treatments would you recommend from this dropdown list of 10,000 possibilities?" Or, "A patient with... has said statement X. Select which questions you should ask from this list of 1,000 possibilities or what tests you would order from this list of 5,000 possibilities."
Again, theoretically, this is doable. Practically, no one has and there are serious challenges.
Take something relatively simple, such as making sure that there's no harmful or dangerous drug interactions when the patient is taking multiple medications. This is an existing industry that a decent amount of time and money has been poured into to generate...ok results. (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7810459/)
That's a whole industry and they're still struggling with it. Now it's probably the best way we could measure the accuracy of a Generative AI, we can compare it's answers against these expert systems, but
A, we have to actually build that test
B, we then have to build similar tests for all the other aspects of medicine.
Again, no theoretical issue, it's doable, but we're talking about building a test which captures a major part of a doctor's job and tests the LLM against that. Building that and keeping it up to date is a major challenge.
Yes, but the lopsided nature of law means they would pay the price of problems without getting the gain. Malpractice suits cost much, much, much, much more than the benefits doctors gain from successful procedures, and a doctor who uses dangerous-seeming AI would get sued more even if it was just as accurate as the doctor.
I don't know if it's the strongest, but the issue of liability seems complicated. Who is responsible for a wrong diagnosis? The hospital/clinic/whatever that makes the chatbot available? Whoever trained the model?
In practice I suspect the liability for every single thing that goes wrong would land on the desk of whoever decided to approve the chatbot for medical use. Which is why nobody will ever make that decision.
Of course chatbots are undoubtedly already busy giving medical advice (probably with disclaimers) to patients all over the place, which is probably of roughly equivalent quality to what they'd be finding on WebMD. This is probably overall a good thing, as long as everyone understands the limitations of the bot and nobody is explicitly to blame when the bot's advice is suboptimal.
I feel like there was not enough debate about #17 of Links for May 2024. From my perspective, two people already said what I wanted to say, but they got no replies.
le raz: "Having read Trevor Klee's original anti-lumina post (link 17), I would like to know which parts of his original post were wrong, and where he misunderstood / misrepresented the underlying science. It's quite frustrating to be told the post is largely wrong, without being told how it is wrong! So far I know: - The original post wrongly characterized Scott Alexander ... - The original post was wrong about the manufacturing process not following standards. What I would like to know: - How did Trevor misunderstand / misrepresent the science? - What else was does the original post get wrong?"
Jiro: "Someone who posts defamation is already defecting, and norms of not threatening suit essentially leave the defamed person without a way to clear his name. ... Yes, lawsuits can be intimidating, and can hurt the person sued even if they're innocent. But from your own description, this isn't a meritless lawsuit designed to shut someone up by bankrupting them; the targets really were defamed."
I thought it was very odd for Scott to offhandedly say that Trevor misunderstood the science without specifying how, considering Scott's original Lumina post discussed the science at length. I am no expert but Trevor's points largely made sense to me. Lumina has not really addressed them in their exchanges with Trevor since, and I had hoped that another observer might.
In my opinion, Trevor is 100% correct at categorizing Lumina as a drug rather than a cosmetic, if it is advertised as something that prevents cavities. As an analogy, I tried to figure out how a toothpaste would be categorized, and Wikipedia says: "In the United States toothpaste is regulated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as a cosmetic, except for ingredients with a medical purpose, such as fluoride, which are regulated as drugs."
I have no opinion on the scientific claims.
I think that both sides were needlessly confrontational. The Lumina team could have simply written a response article explaining the inaccuracies instead. On the other hand, if Trevor wanted a "scientific debate", how exactly did writing about Aaron's association with porn stars serve that purpose?
Machine Learning seems to be a field with a massive replication problem, but I don’t see it discussed much. Maybe people knowledgeable in ML research would like to comment?
I agree with tempo, it is discussed. The issue is that the field moves at warp speed, and there is hardly time for replication studies.
But I do think that the quality has increased a bit as a reaction to the replication problem. For example, ablation studies are now much more common. A few years ago, the correlation between the proposed innovation and the improvement was almost zero. (Rule of thumb: improvements never came from the novel architecture, it was always the data augmentation hidden somewhere in the appendix.) And my feeling is that reviewers have become a bit more aware of the issue.
I've been interested for some time in trying to determine as rational a basis as might possibly be conceived for determining the degree to which the concept of God:
1. Can be defined
2. Can be disputed (on account of its proof-positive being nigh-on-impossible owing to some clear empirical bona fides and also owing to some conceptual impossibilities rooted in the outcome of #1)
3. Can be considered of utility, and actually put to strong utility, in the context of the outcomes of 1 and 2, and the (I think provable) historical usefuless of the concept of God
The subsequent investigation led me under the steam of an extremely catholic pack of disciplinary horses to some very interesting areas, happening upon which has left me feeling a continued fascination as to the value of the exercise and onward exercises as might build off of it, and a deep contentment besides.
As far as I can tell (last time I studied the stuff was decades ago), your attempts at axiomatic set theory don't really work. The entity you are trying to define as "x", with a rather confused definition, either makes no sense, or would amount to the set of all sets, which was proven not to exist around a century ago.
It's also completely unclear how that would relate to your idea of God. Existing within axiomatic set theory and existing in reality are two completely different things; to give a simple example, I exist here [citation needed], but as far as I can tell, I am not a mathematical set.
Can you elaborate on where you find the definition to be confused? The intent of the proof is to demonstrate not that God is the set of all sets, but that it can contain any set and any combination of sets; perhaps there was some indiscipline in the definition as far as establishing this is concerned.
I'm sorry but this is too far out to properly critique. It reads like you've just recently encountered axiomatic set theory and are ad-libbing or pattern-matching on it, which is fine if that's your way to start exploring a subject, but it's pretty far from producing valid work within the theory.
To get concrete, you're trying to define a set x such that for every y, "x can contain y". In your page you equivocate between that and just writing "y∈x". If we go by y∈x, then as I said you're plainly defining x as the set of all sets, which was proven not to exist by Bertrand Russell in 1901. If we go by "x can contain y" as you now say, the problem is that "x can contain y" is not a proposition in ZF; either x contains y or it doesn't, but there is no "can" operator. So in this case your definition is meaningless within the system.
Then, assuming you manage to rescue a definition of x as matching some proposition p(x), that doesn't establish that there is such an x! All you've done is define the set X of all possible x such that p(x), but that set X may be empty, or for that matter, huge. If you want to claim that there is a single x such that p(x), you have to actually prove that, within the system, using step by step valid derivations, not by handwaving or verbal arguments. In that sense, formal logic does behave a bit like reality, in the sense that I can't just define a donut into existence when I feel like eating one.
Later on you talk about "not merely as an empty set, but as all sets that are not sets". I think you can find the contradiction yourself if you just re-read your sentence.
I don't really know what to say beyond this. If you're a young person freshly encountering axiomatic set theory, consider this a welcome and an invitation to explore further! The foundations of mathematics are a deep and rewarding subject, if not exactly fashionable. It's where you can see how the logical-mathematical sausage is made in its goriest details, which makes it one of the better trainings for clear thinking one can possibly get. A semester or two studying this stuff can be really worthwhile.
On the other hand, if you've been doing this for a while, I really have to say, it's not working. You're producing material that any specialist in the subject will just glance and shake their head. That way lies crackpotry, which is a real waste of your talents, and of everyone else's time. It's never too late; if you can get this far, and if you really like the subject, instead of waiting for a specialist to critique your work, you can get yourself to the level of *being* the specialist. You might then be happy to discover that the point of studying the foundations of mathematics lies not in buttressing some new philosophy of life, but in exploring the complex borders between what can and what cannot be proved within specific formal systems, and that there is beauty in that.
Otherwise, if you want to help people find meaning in life and reclaim the word "God", maybe axiomatic set theory is not the tool of choice.
"I'm sorry but this is too far out to properly critique. It reads like you've just recently encountered axiomatic set theory and are ad-libbing or pattern-matching on it, which is fine if that's your way to start exploring a subject, but it's pretty far from producing valid work within the theory.
To get concrete, you're trying to define a set x such that for every y, "x can contain y". In your page you equivocate between that and just writing "y∈x". If we go by y∈x, then as I said you're plainly defining x as the set of all sets, which was proven not to exist by Bertrand Russell in 1901. If we go by "x can contain y" as you now say, the problem is that "x can contain y" is not a proposition in ZF; either x contains y or it doesn't, but there is no "can" operator. So in this case your definition is meaningless within the system."
Robust points – it may well be the case that there is nothing within ZF that adequately accommodates for a ‘can’ operator, but that may then point to a limitation within ZF (that is, a limitation in the expression of contingency), as there is no reason epistemologically to disqualify the sentiment. It may well also be the case that trying to show the impossibility of disproving the idea of God is no task for axiomatic set theory, but then I am ultimately attempting only to show the absolute contingency of a single word’s definition, and since semantics are a matter of language and logic I don’t see any reason why set theory as applied to logic can’t also be applied to language.
"…then, assuming you manage to rescue a definition of x as matching some proposition p(x), that doesn't establish that there is such an x! All you've done is define the set X of all possible x such that p(x), but that set X may be empty, or for that matter, huge. If you want to claim that there is a single x such that p(x), you have to actually prove that, within the system, using step by step valid derivations, not by handwaving or verbal arguments. In that sense, formal logic does behave a bit like reality, in the sense that I can't just define a donut into existence when I feel like eating one."
I think this is the crux of the argument – that I am, in fact, not looking to establish that there is a single x such that p(x); it is precisely that I am trying to argue that there is a non-fixed, absolutely contingent concept that can occupy the set of fully variable size that you describe. The notation as is may be inadequate for this purpose but I would think step-by-step derivations to a single x would be somewhat against my aim.
"Later on you talk about "not merely as an empty set, but as all sets that are not sets". I think you can find the contradiction yourself if you just re-read your sentence."
It’s difficult to express precisely what I mean here in such a sense as makes the distinction I am trying to draw between an empty set (that is still a set) and sets that are not sets. It is the distinction between what can feasibly be imagined, what can be/is/was, but that is or may be nothing, and that which never can be/is/was, and cannot be feasibly imagined, and is thus less than nothing, a supernothing. Perhaps this is a limitation of ZF to express what I wish to express, as you’ve suggested.
"I don't really know what to say beyond this. If you're a young person freshly encountering axiomatic set theory, consider this a welcome and an invitation to explore further! The foundations of mathematics are a deep and rewarding subject, if not exactly fashionable. It's where you can see how the logical-mathematical sausage is made in its goriest details, which makes it one of the better trainings for clear thinking one can possibly get. A semester or two studying this stuff can be really worthwhile.
On the other hand, if you've been doing this for a while, I really have to say, it's not working. You're producing material that any specialist in the subject will just glance and shake their head. That way lies crackpotry, which is a real waste of your talents, and of everyone else's time. It's never too late; if you can get this far, and if you really like the subject, instead of waiting for a specialist to critique your work, you can get yourself to the level of *being* the specialist. You might then be happy to discover that the point of studying the foundations of mathematics lies not in buttressing some new philosophy of life, but in exploring the complex borders between what can and what cannot be proved within specific formal systems, and that there is beauty in that.
Otherwise, if you want to help people find meaning in life and reclaim the word "God", maybe axiomatic set theory is not the tool of choice."
I must ask you excuse the roughness in the application of the notation where it’s rough – the thought is considerably longer in gestation but my actual familiarity with set theoretical notation amounts to just weeks of somewhat focused reading. I intend to polish it with more immersion in the existing theory, as you suggest, but while the notation will be made more scrupulously correct thereby I doubt it will make the overall assertions much less radical, or possibly unacceptably radical, to you.
Many thanks for engaging with this so seriously; criticism that is simultaneously tightly robust without being unkind is the most stimulating possible response to any work like this.
I don't know if it's because of the style, the vocabulary or the structure of the argument but I find myself asking "source?" to most of the things you postulate like "Civilisation is defined by movements and developments within the human spirit. Our spirit is in critical need of revitalisation." or " God is the key unifying and anchoring theme in the entirety of the human story.". I might not be the target audience for that, I personally prefer stuff that's easier to read and more justified.
As for the non-meta commentary:
> To the vast majority of sane observers who’ve ever inspected the sky above them, this is in evidence: if God does exist, God does not seem to live in the sky.
I remember reading a book on Shintoism, where a Shinto priest said something like "Christianity came from the desert, there's only sand and the sky so they believe God is in the sky. We have trees and rocks and rivers so we believe gods are in trees and rocks and rivers." When all you have is nails, all you want is a hammer I guess?
I find the part about everyone having their own concept of God intersting. As for "There is no reason that ‘bed’ should be used to signify the concept of ‘bed’ except that consensus demands it.", you're one of today's lucky 10 000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect.
I'm not familiar with antitheists, so I can't comment on that part. After that from what I understand (I'm sorry if I'm misrepresenting what you say) you seem to be saying that God is partially a human creation that emerges because we are intelligent and we have reasoning abilities? That is how I see things too but on the other hand I've discussed with religious people, people close to me that I know well, and they believe in God no as some kind of abstract emergent human thing, but as God. I remember reading arguments that seeing God as this kind of abstract human thing is lack of faith/not true believing/cope/heresy, and I can see some parallels between that and trying to intellectualize something that should be felt (it won't work).
Where the broad assertions are concerned, I would admit that these things are contingent – somewhat like an assertion to the effect of “We are not as able when it comes to great undertakings than we were previously”, they require a certain commonality of perspective between writer and reader and even trust in order to land as they are intended to. They are too abstract and too vast to be justified via a single source; this makes them of dubious reliability, but as large theses they are nonetheless vital for orienting perspective and driving investigation towards smaller, more measurable, discrete questions. As for whether or not God is the key anchoring theme in the development of civilisation, I would challenge anyone to name a discipline more central to that process than it.
A very interesting point on Shintoism, and also on the Bouba-kiki effect – I’m glad to have a name for that phenomenon now.
Anti-theists are atheists who believe that all theists ought to be actively opposed and their influence minimised. They are committed to “the active struggle against everything which reminds us of God.”
And yes – your notion of God as an emergent property is essentially what I’m getting at, and that you’re quite right that the primary difference between in-earnest orthodox believers and the kind of cheerfully ‘recreative’ agnostic who might subscribe to my theory is their willingness to countenance the contingency and the unknowable component of the concept, instead of insisting on a literal interpretation of scripture. It is indeed lack of faith/not true belief/cope/heresy, true on all accounts; but so long as the mode of heresy reflects in the heretic’s commitment to broadly beneficial human development outcomes, the charge is of no matter (and is, ironically set against the charge of heresy, a most Godly position).
I actually think if the church embraced a position on scripture that was more figurative/literary critical they might suddenly find entirely new wings of the congregation emerging among the theatrical, the literary systematisers, and soft-touch moralists who dislike the literal readings of minor points of doctrine.
> As for whether or not God is the key anchoring theme in the development of civilisation, I would challenge anyone to name a discipline more central to that process than it.
I would argue for technological development, but I'm heavily biased here.
> A very interesting point on Shintoism, and also on the Bouba-kiki effect – I’m glad to have a name for that phenomenon now.
It is very intersting! The way I understand it is that the "k" in "kiki", and maybe the "i" too, are "sharper", while the "b" is "rounder". I don't know why. Maybe someone with more knowledge of sound can show that the "b" sound is like a continuous function or a curve or slow and varies not much while the "k" changes a lot quickly?
> Anti-theists are atheists who believe that all theists ought to be actively opposed and their influence minimised. They are committed to “the active struggle against everything which reminds us of God.”
Thanks! It reminds me of the atheist movement at its peak, a decade or more ago.
> It is indeed lack of faith/not true belief/cope/heresy, true on all accounts; but so long as the mode of heresy reflects in the heretic’s commitment to broadly beneficial human development outcomes, the charge is of no matter (and is, ironically set against the charge of heresy, a most Godly position).
> I actually think if the church embraced a position on scripture that was more figurative/literary critical they might suddenly find entirely new wings of the congregation emerging among the theatrical, the literary systematisers, and soft-touch moralists who dislike the literal readings of minor points of doctrine.
I think that may be where the disagreements will appear. I remember a conversation with a religious relative, where I asked them about doubt, and they said that yes, doubt is part of faith. To me that would mean that being certain that scripture is figurative would not really be compatible with faith. You would have to have at least some part of you that wants/think it's real, and try to work towards that. But being non religious myself, I don't want to talk for the people that are.
And while they may find new wings with that, it might deviate too much for the original thing, which is faith in God. Again, I don't know about religion, but this feels like diluting the original goal and how you lose part of your community. It might be worth looking into the Second Vatican Council and its consequences, as it was an effort to try to appeal to more people. From what I understand, to this day it is still divisive.
Thank you for your thoughts! That was very interesting.
Christianity didn't come from the desert. (Judaism arguably did, and Islam certainly did if you discount what was inherited from Judaism/Christianity.) Nazareth, Bethlehem, Jerusalem etc are fertile places with lots of trees and rocks and farms, though no rivers.
I feel like actually making the automated land acknowledger is not very funny. It was hilarious as a bit in a story because it's actually an uncomfortable thing about our modern world that we need to be able to laugh at, but actually building it feels kinda bitter. After all the people who are doing the land acknowledging are doing it for a legitimate moral reason (trying to find some way to make reparations for a lot of legitimate guilt about the past), and then they're making other people uncomfortable in the process and so kinda undermining their own project. I wish they would find more effective and less discomforting ways of trying to be good people. But getting bitter back at them for doing a bad job just perpetuates everyone being pissed at each other instead of fixing anything.
Edit: although saying this might sound like trying to make someone feel shame about liking it, in which case I'd be perpetuating making people feel bad too. Sorry if so. Not my intention. My point is we all ought to try to stop making other people feel bad and forgive them their transgressions instead of striking back.
This discussion has been interesting for me because I've been reacting very badly to land acknowledgements-- I hear them as saying that there's no place where I can legitimately live, and then I hate the people who support land acknowledgements, and all the more because I assume they think I'm a bad person for resenting them.
As for practical reparations, a legitimate start for the US might be for there to be the sort of infrastructure (water, power, connectivity) that's expected for the rest of the US.
I used to hate them too - I always thought, "so why aren't you paying rent to them" whenever I had to sit through one - but since then learned a bit more about them.
For context, this is Australia, which has been doing these as early as the 70s. It's believed that it's started in Perth - some performers invited some Maori over from Aotearoa and found out that the Maori felt uncomfortable doing their hakka if they aren't officially welcomed, so the Indigenous Noongar organisers gave a Welcome to Country.
I feel slightly less bad about the ones given in Perth, WA, because for bigger events people will often specifically seek out Noongar people for the welcome to country, and many of them use their segments to talk about the progress in reconciliation and how the audience can support specific things, and they often teach the audience a couple of simple things, like phrases and Noongar names for native flora and fauna - it's outreach and education and learning a bit about the place we live.
(And at the very least, it's a decent gig, not dissimilar to being a professional emcee at some events, or a warm-up act. And many of them are much more enjoyable speakers / warm up acts than their competition - mostly local indie buskers who are, unfortunately, not very good singers mostly)
But the ones over east (Victoria) often suck - I don't think I've ever had any delivered from any actual Indigenous people, or heard anything that wasn't purely guilt inducing. I believe they started somewhat independent of the Perth tradition, as a reaction to Mabo vs Queensland (a historic court case paving the way to the native title act, where indigenous people could literally be paid rent for stolen land). Perhaps it's a weak little symbolic grovel so no one would start demanding rent, I dunno. I've never heard a good one outside of Perth.
And I believe the American versions are poor copycats of the Australian versions, stripped of the context of even having a case similar to Mabo, and hence rings even emptier. Idk, maybe there's okay ones in areas with a relatively large indigenous population (Perth and Darwin have the highest % Aboriginal population in Australia, and I feel like the general culture has absorbed a little more than over east, which still feels very majority Anglo).
Counterpoint: Land acknowledgements are actually one of the worst aspects of modern left-wing culture as they recklessly reopen historical wounds while explicitly stating that there's no way to make things better. People who do them _should_ be shamed, mocked, and scorned in every way possible until they stop, just like you would with any other severely destructive antisocial behavior. If the automated land acknowledger does that, then it should be added to the toolbox.
It does not seem likely that shaming and mocking them is going to make them go away. Probably it will just make you and them into more of enemies. Yes, they pissed you off, so you want to hurt them back, but maybe that is a bad strategy?
I think some level of social pushback to performative social things like land acknowledgements is pretty sensible. I mean, it's being done for social effect, so it can best be answered by social response.
Agreed, there are many social pushbacks that might affect the problem and do something about it. Bitterly hating the people doing it without any empathy or grace is probably not one of them.
You probably can't kill them at meetings of the American Communist Party or whatever, but you can probably kill them in mainstream settings where everybody secretly hates them but is too afraid to speak up and say "actually let's not do this". It's a preference cascade thing.
FWIW, at my university at events land acknowledgements are now often done by playing a standardised video. Which was preceded by people reading a standard, institution-provided script.
I think the existence of the automated one makes a very concrete point about how meaningless and empty these statements are by highlighting the utter lack of consideration or investment behind them.
But this seems like something that's going to vary on the individual.
We're here because we settled the land, bought it, or stole it.
There is no need to apologize. To the Apache, who drove off the O'odham, who supplanted the Sinagua, who conquered Soanso, who drove off Nincompoop Man.
Well the land acknowledgement is not there because of some cosmically provable need to apologize. It's there because some people thought it was a good thing to do, in context, to deal with a small aspect of their general guilt and confusion about what to do about that guilt.
I'm all for them finding a better strategy but in the meantime, it is, like, coming from an actual moral instinct for good, it's not just an act of pure evil or something.
You're playing the shame and guilt game, when you should be questioning the guilt in the first place. "What should they do with that guilt?" is a much less useful question than "Why do these effete weirdos feel so guilty in the first place?" The latter actually has a useful, constructive answer. Without dedicating one's life to addressing the former, it's all just performative.
I have plenty of curiosity about the guilt. Nevertheless I disagree with getting bitter and resentful about other people trying, albeit doing a poor job, of being good people.
All of us sitting around talking about how much we hate <some other people> is bad for *any* reason. Never, not once does it diffuse the situation or fix the problem or advance the situation in a positive reason. Sure, as a community we're having trouble finding grace for those other people because we keep getting taken mistreated by them. But then the question we should be sitting around mulling is how we going to *find* grace for them, and maybe how we can communicate with them and legitimize our grievances and be heard by them and fix the situation. Not this, where we go on and on in a loop about how much we hate them. That is the weakest way out: other people were bad to us, so we're going to be bad also, fuck it. It is just a terrible thing to do.
That's an absurd binary, which is a form of straw man. There is a _lot_ of space in between "actual moral instinct for good" and "act of pure evil". And by a lot of space I mean like how there is a lot of physical space in between Earth and Neptune.
"it's not just an act of pure evil or something" -- that is what I was referring to. You brought up an absurdly-extreme framing of the other person's argument so as to be able to wave it away. That is a form of straw-manning.
The "better strategy" is actually for everyone around them to react with as much cringey embarrassment and disgust as Bart and Lisa reacting to Homer's improv Mr. Plow rap:
Well, sure, except that some people don't have the intellectual capacity to "act like grownups." Where a capacity to update one's priors is lacking, shame is sometimes the only option.
But mostly, "Stop. Please. Stop it right now!" is my all-time favorite line-reading from The Simpsons and I like to work it into a conversation whenever possible.
But why should somebody whose family emigrated to the US in the 1950s and who is now attending a university built on unceded land feel any guilt about that? Their ancestors didn't do the stealing, and the crime is so long-established by now, there may not even be pure-blooded tribespeople remaining to be the putative inheritors of the land.
That's why I think it's performative and not about genuine guilt. There's a bit in a Harlan Ellison short story (I can't remember the name, but this part stood out to me) about witnessing a performance on an alien world - the dominant species? culture? race? enslaved another species/culture/race and, for example, have them pulling the carts or rickshaws in which they travel. Every so often along the path, there is a preacher? or some kind of equivalent of this land acknowledgement thing, where the slave-owner is convinced of their guilt, gets out of the cart, and pulls it. Then, once past the part of the road where the exhortation is done, they get back in and resume having the slave pull it.
I'm describing it very badly, but that is what these land acknowledgements feel like to me: performances that change nothing and mean nothing in the end.
I'm reasonably familiar with Ellison's work, and this sounds totally unfamiliar. Also, he was writing before performative guilt became such a thing, so he was unlikely to satirize it. In any case, I hope a source for the story shows up.
My best guess is Jack Vance, but only because it sounds like his kind of satire.
Why should they feel guilt? because they feel guilt. people don't get to decide what they feel guilt about. The guilt decides.
Now yes it is rather tangled up with people capitalizing on it for power or credibility or attention or w/e at this point. But the underlying emotion was definitely guilt, to begin with.
Alice gets up before a meeting and makes a land acknowledgement. Bob gets up before a meeting and says a short nondenominational prayer.
ISTM that it is every bit as reasonable for people who find land acknowledgements silly or offensive to make their feelings clear as it is for people who find the nondenominational prayer silly or offensive to do so.
We know that modern humans made it to the eastern end of the Asian continent at least 40,000 years ago, and we know that the Bering land bridge didn't cease to exist until 10,000 years ago. It seems unreasonable to suppose that there was only one time in history that people crossed it.
Last I recall, the current best theory from apolitical linguistic and genetic sources is that there were 3 main waves. The first contributed most of the language families and genetics (including some that are related to the genetics associated with the Indo-European languages), the second contributed the Na-Dene languages and less of the overall genetics, and the third was the Inuit (who didn't need no stinking land bridges). And then there are some skeletons from Brazil that most closely resemble Andaman Islanders, possibly representing a 0th group that came over possibly ~20 kya, possibly by ocean, but failed to flourish, and were wiped out or assimilated by the "first" wave.
I was mostly being snarky about the Eurocentric nature of picking 1492 as a magic year and then declaring everything before that to be "indigenous". (My magic year is 300,000 BCE.)
I think you are conflating the sin with the sinner. An individual person making a land acknowledgment is almost certainly well intentioned and deserves grace. However, the current cultural practice of adding land acknowledgments to events devoid of any connection with native peoples is an ugly combination of stolen valor, guilt-by-association and feel-bad liberalism and IMHO the practice should be mocked out of existence.
Mocking those who do ill is a civic duty. By not mocking them, you aren't being better than anyone; you are just being short-term minded (prioritizing the ill-dooers feelings over the future ill they'll do) and risk averse.
Mocking those who do ill is a sad and wretched behavior that perpetuates hatred and tribalism. It is entirely for the satisfaction of the mocker to assuage their feelings of powerlessness and frustration.
There are actual ways to get people to stop doing things, but they involve both (a) engaging with them and (b) having grace for them instead of punting insults at their heads.
You are wrong. There is a lot more nuance to how people communicate than your statement can accommodate.
For example, I recall a study showed that people learn better from sarcasm, despite it not feeling great. In certain circumstances, a cutting remark can be the most effective, and even the most kind (as it can sometimes most prompt the long term growth someone can need).
Furthermore, speaking personally, I greatly appreciate when I am (justly) mocked, from strangers, but even more so from friends.
So, tomorrow, if I get up before a big public meeting and give a short "acknowledgement" that we all owe everything to the glorious white race from whom all our culture and technology flow, the right response from the audience will be....?
I think we’re talking about two different things... I would never advocate being a jerk to someone or publicly shaming them. I’m referring to mockery of the behavior itself, a la South Park or Scott’s automated land acknowledger. That is, I advocate finding ways to satirize the behavior in a way that is not personal but instead invites people to look in a mirror and laugh at themselves.
Look around this comment section, how many people are having a good laugh about it? No, people are *really really bitter about this*. And sure, for decent reason, but everyone venting their bitterness at each other is not the same as having a good laugh that lets everyone relax a little.
> (a) engaging with them and (b) having grace for them instead of punting insults at their heads.
And how much of this have woke witch hunters and twitter mobs done for the rest of the world? The world they've basically terrified into submission, at the cost of panopticon monitoring of everything they do and say, with the stakes their entire career and social lives?
The essence of grace is that it's something you should do even when your counterparty doesn't do it for you.
(Anyway, your "Us vs Them" characterization is definitely what it feels like online, but not at all what it feels like IRL, where lots of people are actually quite reasonable and land all over the spectrum between intolerant and charitable. If your model of the world is that there's a war going on, quit twitter.)
I prefer your charitable approach in general, and don't favor mockery in every single case, but land acknowledgements are normally forced on captive audiences by high-status people self-seriously preaching and stealing valor with their "moral exhibitionism" (in Graeme Wood's memorable phrase*). Mockery is far less likely to intensify tribal animosities in those circumstances.
>IMHO the practice should be mocked out of existence.
I endorse this suggestion!
edit: What is the optimal form for the mockery?
"Acknowledging that the European (or other, as applicable) colonists took this land from the Nth Nations, and that the Nth Nations took it previously from the (N-1)th Nations - and so it goes." ( I really like the Crow / Lakota example cited below. )
Start a foundation for buying land back and giving it to the surviving tribes. If we ask nicely, they might let us rent the land back from them afterward.
Many Thanks! Personally, I'd like the whole issue dropped. The conquests were well over a century ago. Everyone who directly benefited or directly suffered is dead. I strongly favor statutes of limitation, which bound how long a grievance can be pursued, even by a _living_ victim against a _living_ perpetrator.
I was being serious, in that I think that *is* the optimal form of mockery. It actively contributes to the cause, does not disrespect the tribes or what happened to them, and its mere existence would make most of the declarations seem like the empty words and performative virtue signaling that they are. Put up or shut up.
Many Thanks! I agree that it would be mocking the empty declarations, and I have no objection to that. Personally, I _don't_ want to disinter grievances that are a century or more old, so I want to see these and all similar issues (e.g. racial reparations) just dropped.
If there are living individuals who have been harmed by actions that were illegal at the time, let them have their day in court - and then let the court ruling be an end of it.
If grievances against someone else's ancestors can be pursued, there will be no end to it. Virtually _everyone's_ ancestor was a serf under someone's thumb a few centuries ago. Virtually everyone can come up with an ancient grudge to nurse. The more energy our society spends pursuing century-or-more-old grievances, the worse life will be for everyone.
edit: Evil thought - I wonder if a GrievanceFinderOMatic could be layered on top of Ancestry.com's database, and what the market for it would be?
I actually think Scott’s automated land acknowledger is pretty ideal in terms of mockery. It deftly points to the absurdity and utter arbitrariness of the practice.
I thought the joke in the story was great, but it's great because it punches both ways: it makes fun of the land acknowledgements and of the technologists who think anything that's worth doing is worth automating.
Yes, this. The point of the acknowledgements is that there's actual humans saying them and listening to them, and how that affects their beliefs and actions. It's not some set of special sonic waveforms that magically act as a blessing on those who hear them.
(In general, I'd say that's also a limitation with current AIs, and a lot of the suggested applications are going to have to grapple with people who are primarily interested in having an actual person to talk to.)
Many Thanks! That sounds reasonable. Automating it certainly goes a long way towards mockery, following in the footsteps of all those automated "Your call is important to us." enshitification messages...
"We acknowledge that there isn't a snowball in Hell's chance of any of you natives, not even the one-sixteenth real Cherokee princess Pretendians we have on faculty, are getting your mitts on any of the endowment arising from the time we took this land to do something with it. Take it up with Henry George, he said it was fine to take land not being used productively and do something with it".
As someone who actually is one-sixteenth Cherokee, I was pretty disgusted by the land acknowledgement I had to sit thru, and had to bite my tongue to keep from making a stink. The tribe who was stolen from still lives in the same area, the "acknowledgers" could just give it back to them (maybe sell it for a dollar and lease it back). What I would suggest instead - if you feel so guilty about the land theft that you want to do something, go find the surviving tribe's elders (they are likely still around somewhere) and ask them what you should do, then do what they tell you.
If these universities are funding scholarships for Native students or engaged in educational and cultural activities with the tribe (not whatever faculty member shows up claiming to be Native American*), then fine, that is putting their money where their mouths are.
I don't know if they are doing that, and I think some at least of these corporate statements are purely performative.
*There seem to have been a few cases where people claiming ancestry can't back it up, especially in Canada where they seem ultra-sensitive around Indigenous issues and hence why it's worthwhile for some people to pretend to more heritage than they may actually possess
If a university on unceded land offers kids from that tribe free tuition if they meet admissions standards, that sounds like at least the kind of virtue signaling that involves some virtue, rather than the 100% empty kind.
100% agreed. When I hear acknowledgements from people who actually own the land they're on, it increases my level of cynicism past my already unhealthy levels. (Especially when it's a Christian church that should know the story about camels and needles.)
One thing I learned as a vegetarian is that non-mainstream ideologies get less "Cringe Budget" than mainstream ideologies.
For example, Land Acknowledgements aren't, from a purely logical outside perspective, more ridiculous than - say - thanking long-dead national heroes. $GREAT_PERSON doesn't care one bit about whether you honor him/her on $CELEBRATION_DAY, he has been a long-finished tasty meal for worms and that was the end of him. Yet, celebrating long-dead heroes isn't cringe, because the majority does it, but land acknowledgements is, because a minority does it. (Granted, it's a particularly violent and toxic minority, I don't want to come off as a supporter.)
Some say that Land Acknowledgements are silly because they do nothing and has a kind of gloating feel to them, to those people I would like to present the concept of "confession" in Abrahamic religions, and yes it's an Abrahamic thing (if not even more general), the Christian-inspired term I used shouldn't mislead you. You basically go to the highest and most exalted, powerful, knowledgeable being in this entire universe, and you say "Oppsie, I watched Porn. I know you get mad when I watch Porn, but I couldn't resist seeing the goods. Sorry, I will donate 0.01% of my salary to the places you told me to donate to". Is that any more ridiculous or silly than "Oppsie, I took your land, sorry but I couldn't resist doing genocide."? At least the party you're "Oppsie"ing to exists for sure in the second case, and at least Genocide is an objectively bad sin that really deserve a massive solar-system-sized oppsie. Watching porn is - at best - just a .... meh, an empty and pathetic experience, a poor manufactured substitute for the actual real thing you need to survive.
A closely related lesson here that woke ideologues fail to understand is the role of desire and bottom-up sexiness in marketing moral ideologies. One example is playing on lesbian relationships' natural seductiveness to straight males as tool for advocating for lesbian. From experience, I know it's an **incredibly** powerful tool, if nothing else it gives you the chance to always retreat to "Hahaha I was only joking" if the audience you're preaching to close ranks too hard on you. People sympathize with beauty more, they sympathize with sexiness more. But of course, forget ever even suggesting that to a woke advocator for lesbians.
Instead of desire - a huge motivator for all moral decision-making no matter how people would like to deny this - wokism chooses to rely more on top-down imposition of will, especially from corporate overlords. This **might** work, a lot of religions were spread by violence after all, but religions also gave people something to look after to (and - in the case of Islam - lots of promised imaginary sex, and to warriors lots of real sex-slave sex), and they practiced tons and tons of violence over the centuries. Wokism has no realistic path towards either, it's just mindless soviet-style "The beatings will continue till the bigotry goes away".
I have nothing useful to say, I also like the idea of people looking at themselves in the mirror and admitting their grandparents were genocidal scum, it's a tough pill but you're all the better and healthier person for swallowing it. The usual cliche of "EVERYONE DID IT AT SOME POINT !!1!!1!!!1!" strikes me as incredibly dumb either, everyone is an asshole too at some point or another, and we still advise people who were assholes to apologize, and we like the assholes who apologize better than those who don't. But the good idea had the unfortunate luck of being born to a movement that doesn't know how to fight a moral battle.
Unpopular religions demand of every follower to be an incredibly cunning and charismatic ambassador. If you want to follow an unpopular movement, be incredibly cunning and charismatic or keep your mouth shut.
>Land Acknowledgements aren't, from a purely logical outside perspective, more ridiculous than - say - thanking long-dead national heroes
The point of thanking long-dead national heroes this isn't that George Washington is floating up there in Heaven magnanimously accepting our gratitude. Thanking long-dead national heroes is a civic ritual. It helps anchor citizens in their nation, giving them a sense of ownership over the heroic deeds and personages of the past and emphasizing the everyone is part of a greater whole. You know, (lowers voice, glances around to make sure the cheka aren't listening) _patriotism_.
Now of course you can insist that patriotism is bad, which just means that if your point of view wins you get to be conquered by someone else not burdened by your enlightened morality, so ultimately that's a self-terminating argument.
"The point of thanking long-dead national heroes this isn't that George Washington is floating up there in Heaven magnanimously accepting our gratitude"
This art work, entitled The Apotheosis of Washington, begs to differ:
"The Apotheosis of Washington depicts George Washington sitting among the heavens in an exalted manner, or in literary terms, ascending and becoming a god (apotheosis). Washington, the first U.S. president and commander-in-chief of the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War, is allegorically represented, surrounded by figures from classical mythology.
George Washington is draped in purple, worn by generals of the ancient Roman Republic during their triumphs, with a rainbow arch at his feet, flanked by the goddess Victoria, who is draped in green, using a horn, to his left and the goddess of Liberty to his right. Liberty wears a red liberty cap, symbolizing emancipation, from a Roman tradition where slaves being manumitted would be given a felt cap (Latin pileus). She holds a fasces in her right hand and an open book in the other, to which George Washington gestures with his right hand.
Forming a circle between Liberty and Victory are 13 maidens, each with a star above her head representing the original Thirteen Colonies. Several of the maidens have their backs turned to George Washington, said to represent the colonies that had seceded from the Union at the time of painting. Across the circle from George Washington is the banner E Pluribus Unum, Latin for "out of many, one".
Surrounding George Washington, the two goddesses and the 13 maidens are six scenes lining the perimeter, each representing a national concept allegorically: from directly below George Washington in the center and moving clockwise, "War", "Science", "Marine", "Commerce", "Mechanics" and "Agriculture". The perimeter scenes are not fully visible from the floor of the United States Capitol."
To be clear that's an awesome painting and I 100% approve of it, but I don't see where in that description Washington, in heaven, is accepting the gratitude of the people. Also, given that the artist was a Catholic in 1865 I doubt the point he was getting at was that Washington was _literally_ a god.
>"Oppsie, I took your land, sorry but I couldn't resist doing genocide."
That isn't what they're saying though, these genocidal land grabs are from over a hundred years ago. It's not a statement of repentance, it's a statement that they hate their grandparents and view themselves as superior. You know it's not repentance because they don't take any actions to undo their grandparents' actions. It's that Futurama bit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kysPjggJSpY
I am fairly sure the people doing this would generally take actions to undo their grandparents' actions if given a real chance. They mostly also feel powerless in the face of their frustrations with e.g. colonialism and their nation's past also. Land acknowledgements and similar performances are small things that they've come up with, but they are, as far as I have seen, sincere in wanting to find a way to make reparations at a larger scale.
(Probably they are not actually powerless, in the sense that if they organized around a good idea they could do something, but that is the hard problem of all political action, convincing a bunch of people that the same good idea is a good one.)
This would make more sense if we're talking about individual employees at a university or whatever. Instead this is often handed down by the leadership and required by policy - which necessarily means people with power to do something.
Maybe there are legal reasons they can't actually give the land back. Maybe the tribe they are referencing are all dead. But I can't help but feel that the real reason is that this is purely performative and even with a tribal elder sitting right in front of them with a contract to give the land back or pay rent, they would never actually do that.
>I am fairly sure the people doing this would generally take actions to undo their grandparents' actions if given a real chance.
The treaties that govern tribal reservations are just as mutable as any other law, they could be pushing their representatives to expand the reservations to include the stolen land.
"At least the party you're "Oppsie"ing to exists for sure in the second case, and at least Genocide is an objectively bad sin that really deserve a massive solar-system-sized oppsie."
The real existing party in the second case has no chance of getting anything useful from you, so the "oopsie" sounds more like gloating and less like real contrition. And if the Cosmic Entity does turn out to be real, they can put you in any of the underworlds/sheols/hells so you will end up paying for the wrong you did. "Oopsie I killed all your people on purpose, well now I got all your stuff I promise not to do it again" isn't that great of an apology.
"After all the people who are doing the land acknowledging are doing it for a legitimate moral reason (trying to find some way to make reparations for a lot of legitimate guilt about the past)"
Please pardon my cynicism, but my arse they are. An automated message-chirper is *exactly* as seriously as this nonsense should be taken. How on earth is "we took your stuff and this is to remind you we did that and also we are keeping it" making reparations? Do you really think the local Indian tribes *need* to be reminded about that? It's all for White Liberals to feel vaguely something something not like other White People Bad something something.
I think this would be a magnificent notion, except the crest of the DEI frenzy has probably passed. A year or two back, you could have sold these units to every university and government department in the land, and made a tidy penny to boot.
Out of curiosity, I looked up the Yale Land Acknowledgement and they seem to be pretty canny about not admitting anything like wrongdoing on the part of the Founders back in 1701:
"Yale University acknowledges that indigenous peoples and nations, including Mohegan, Mashantucket Pequot, Eastern Pequot, Schaghticoke, Golden Hill Paugussett, Niantic, and the Quinnipiac and other Algonquian speaking peoples, have stewarded through generations the lands and waterways of what is now the state of Connecticut. We honor and respect the enduring relationship that exists between these peoples and nations and this land."
Not a sausage there about "unceded", no, the original inhabitants stewarded the lands and now Yale has taken that over. So nice. Not a whisper of intention about handing back so much as a square foot of the stewarded property for the enduring relationship between those tribes and the land.
And that's the exact amount all these statements are worth: sweet feck-all.
Yes I agree it's a silly thing to do. My point is that being very mad and bitter about it is not going to help at all. They're trying to be good and doing a bad job of it. Better to have grace for that.
(By the way, it looks like you're being piled on a little, so in case nobody else says it, thanks for being so, well, *gracious* about it all. It improves the level of conversation all around, and acts as a good example for the rest of us.)
I don't think this is bitterness, though; I think it's mockery, which is the best way to respond to the uselessness of it all. If you are expressing contrition for fault, you are also expected to make restitution. What restitution does land acknowledgements involve? "We took your stuff and we're keeping it" is not restitution.
"Hey, did you see my wallet by any chance? Only I had all my holiday money in it, so I don't want to lose that"
"Oh, yes! I took it!"
"You what?"
"I saw the wallet and that it was full of money, so I took it. I needed the money, you see"
"But you had no right to do that!"
"I know, I'm sorry I did it"
"Okay, so where is my money?"
"Oh, that's all spent. But I'm really very sorry"
"What? Well, are you going to pay me back my money?"
"Oh, no! But I'm so very, very sorry that I took it. That was bad!"
"Yes, it was bad! And I want my money back! So when are you going to pay me back?"
"But didn't you hear what I said? I'm so very, terribly, awfully, really sincerely sorry. If you like, I'll tell everyone I'm sorry!"
"I don't care aobut that, I care about my money!"
"Oh, Susan! Hi! I'd just like to say that I took Bob's money, and I'm so very sorry about it."
"Well, that's really big of you to admit it, George!"
"But he took my money, and he spent it, and he's not going to give it back Susan!"
"Now, Bob, why are you so bitter? George said he was very very sorry, right? And he even said it in front of me. So that should be good enough for anyone, yes?"
The wallet analogy isn't quite right because you're talking to George's grandson here (tho arguably George bought Microsoft stock with the money so there's that).
Personally, my intuitions agree with you entirely, BUT -- I've heard people with trauma-influenced personal histories and for example abusive parents say that *acknowledging the badness* feels very important for them. The harm cannot be fixed retroactively but contrition and acknowledgement of the injustice, hurt etc etc apparently makes a difference. Even from the actual perpetrators, not their descendants. This doesn't feel like ANY form of restitution to me, but maybe if you lived your life feeling that you don't even have a right to feel wronged, having this acknowledged historically is of some benefit?
I'm now off to see if I can find any data from surveys of First Nation people (not activists) that address their opinions.
You're talking to George's grandson because in this hypothetical George came up to you and started apologizing about how his grandfather took your grandfather's wallet. Why is George doing that? You can't apologize for something someone else did, and it's rather difficult to make atonement to the dead. So, yeah, it really does look like George is trying to score cheap virtue points with the audience.
If George genuinely feels guilty about this, then A: he probably shouldn't but B: it's not Bob's problem nor his place to make George feel better. And offering people a cheap no-restitution apology to put them on the spot to either extend unearned forgiveness or be seen as petty and vindictive, is not doing them any favors.
I agree in principle (but as I said elsewhere, I'm neither a colonial or colonized) if it's a question of an APOLOGY. But if I understand the idea of land acknowledgements correctly, it's more about, well, an acknowledgement. Reading indigenous people's opinions about those the main (and seemingly, usually the only) positive aspect of acknowledgements was the "information" one, or to use a bad woke word, awareness.
I have an analogy here: of walking around Warsaw with a German visitor once in the late 1990s: apologies weren't needed, but the sheer impact of YET ANOTHER wall plaque indicating a street execution or another WW2 site (and we weren't even in the ghetto/Jewish-extermination related parts) felt good somehow. I don't know why. Not because grandchildren bear the responsibility for their grandfathers' atrocities, obviously. But there is something here, about collective memory and culture and history that's hard to put a finger on. Obviously, this is a very different situation, and still relatively recent and not many generations back. But still. While the land acknowledgements that take place nowadays do feel (from descriptions -- I've never experienced one) like performative points scoring, and/or hypocrisy, I don't think it's 100% straightforward. Yes the prototype machine is funny in its context. Would it be as funny in parts of central Europe where catastrophic movements of people and their wholesale exterminations took place within living memory? Probably not so much.
In personal cases, I think it's important. Having the person who wronged you admit that and apologise for it, or having family members saying "yes, you were right, you weren't lying or crazy" does mean a lot. In that case, acknowledgement and apology are meaningful.
But in the case of "two hundred years ago, people who had nothing to do with us did stuff", I'm not so sure that works. Yes, historical wrongs to be acknowledged is important in reconciliation, but large institutions like universities saying "we're build on land taken from the natives, we run on endowments that come from land taken from the natives, so sorry natives, now we get on to the important business of haranguing our alumni for donations" - how much difference does that make to the high school dropout kids on the reservation who won't even make it past the doors of Hartprincale as custodial staff?
I agree with all that reasoning but I'm neither a colonial or colonised. So far I've not managed to find any surveys of indigenous people (never mind ones that asked about this practice).
One Reddit thread devoted to the subject on r/IndianCountry asks specifically about acknowledgements in kindergarden and gets SOME (mild and at times reluctant-ish) support for that — from information /education perspective. The respondents who address a broader topic of acknowledgements in general, ESPECIALLY in the academia, are decidedly less positive. And of course it's Reddit, so not representative of anything whatsoever and undoubtedly overrepresenting terminally online, educated & young. It's not always clear if the poster is First Nations of not, but often they self identify, still, it's marginally better than just speculating here.
There certainly are faults for which restitution can’t be made. If someone through negligence causes someone to be killed or maimed, they can’t make any appropriate restitution, not even with money or jail time. But contrition is still appropriate in that case. That doesn’t mean land acknowledgments are helpful, just that they can be sincerely well intentioned.
In my mind, the restitution has already been paid many times over.
I admit I mostly think of it in terms of the Australian context, but at least here, the restitution was paid in literacy, in modern medicine, in scientific knowledge, in giving them the opportunity to be citizens of a wealthy first-world country instead of stone-age nomads occupying a land they can't possibly understand.
Would you rather be born a modern Australian citizen, or a stone-age nomad in a harsh land with no understanding of the universe outside the land which you wander across? Well then, there's your answer.
And if anyone (of any race) honestly believes they prefer the stone-age lifestyle, we should have a portion of our country set aside for them to live like that.
Different people can disagree about the merits; the point I was making is that I don't think we in general hold to the principle that contrition is useless unless restitution can be made.
Sometimes scorn is the only way to make stupid stuff stop. See the IFS about driving out demons - if they won't go nicely, then you mock them and jeer at them and drive them out that way 😀
Dr. Justin Sledge has released the second part of his three-part lecture on how Yahweh became a monotheistic "universal" god. His first lecture discussed the origins of Yahweh as a local thunder god among some of the ancient Israelites, and his transition to a henotheistic deity. This episode takes us from henotheism to monotheism during (and probably because of) the Babylonian Exile.
Reminds me of Terry Prachett's god, Blind Io, who had to fill the role of 'king of the gods' in various pantheons across the Discworld, something that involved him having to wear a lot of different beards:
"Blind Io is the current king of the gods. He is an amalgam of Jupiter/Zeus and Odin, with elements of Thor — seen primarily in his use of a number of different hammers (seventy, actually, as detailed by Om in Small Gods). He is completely blind in the traditional sense but instead has countless eyes, which seem to have a mind of their own, orbiting his head. He was eventually compelled to get rid of his raven messengers because of their species' instinctual desire for devouring eyeballs. He lives in Dunmanifestin where he and the other gods play games with the lives of mortals.
Besides the hammers he also, apparently, uses a "double-handled axe", or at least has one as a symbol. This is probably a reference to the double-headed axe used by Zeus.
Blind Io is a lightning god. Actually, Io is the only thunder god on the Disc. He goes by many names and appearances to make sure he keeps the optimal amount of followers. This is not really unfair because all the other gods use the same trick."
Though Zeus does have some Cretan/Minoan connections in the mythology:
"This [Cronus devouring their children] causes Rhea "unceasing grief", and upon becoming pregnant with her sixth child, Zeus, she approaches her parents, Gaia and Uranus, seeking a plan to save her child and bring retribution to Cronus. Following her parents' instructions, she travels to Lyctus in Crete, where she gives birth to Zeus, handing the newborn child over to Gaia for her to raise, and Gaia takes him to a cave on Mount Aegaeon."
"Dictaean Cave is famous in Greek mythology as the place where Amalthea, nurtured the infant Zeus with her goat's milk. The archaeology attests to the site's long use as a place of cult worship. The nurse of Zeus, who was charged by Rhea to raise the infant Zeus in secret here, to protect him from his father Cronus (Krónos) is also called the nymph Adrasteia in some contexts. It is one of a number of caves believed to have been the birthplace or hiding place of Zeus. The mountains, of which the cave are part, are known in Crete as Dikte."
But upon investigation, there is separate imagery of Zeus with the double headed axe:
"Labraunda is an ancient archaeological site five kilometers west of Ortaköy, Muğla Province, Turkey, in the mountains near the coast of Caria. ...The cult icon here was a local Zeus Labrandeus (Ζεὺς Λαβρανδεύς), a standing Zeus with the tall lotus-tipped scepter upright in his left hand and the double-headed axe, the labrys, over his right shoulder. The cult statue was the gift of the founder of the dynasty, Hecatomnus himself, recorded in a surviving inscription."
Many Thanks! Interesting - I haven't read many of the Discworld novels. It is a neat idea. It isn't uncommon to have syncretic religions adding deities from multiple sources. It is a cool idea to have a deity adding roles from multiple religions. :-)
God rest the man, he was very funny about that - it was exactly that idea of "multiple deities are amalgamated into one chief god" that he was parodying with having one god going around playing the part of the different gods in different pantheons. On Discworld, gods depend heavily on belief for their power and existence, so the more belief the better, and you get more belief from having more believers.
>On Discworld, gods depend heavily on belief for their power and existence, so the more belief the better, and you get more belief from having more believers.
Almost all nations feature a single, executive head of state (prime minister, president, supreme leader, etc.), ostensibly for its agility and efficiency in time-sensitive decision-making. I think this is batshit crazy, considering how vulnerable to poor judgment and mental illness any single human is and how many times throughout history this vulnerability has led to the widespread suffering or outright destruction of a nation.
As I understand it, the Swiss in 1848 opted instead to form an executive body called the Federal Council, consisting of seven members who act as a collective head of state. These members are elected by the legislature and serve four-year terms.
Any Swiss people out there who think this is clearly a step in the right direction? Does this system’s success depend on Switzerland’s dogged neutrality in international affairs?
What I take from right-wing criticisms of modern government (the deep state, the blob etc.) is that something like the Swiss system exists de facto in every country with a functioning government & civil service. Liz Truss wanted a radical budget from her perspective: cutting taxes and boosting spending. The independent Office for Budget Responsibility published a report, presumably critical because Truss decided not to publish it, cue market panic and her eventual resignation. We all had a good laugh, it's hard to feel too sorry for Truss when the tories introduced the OBR to stop a future Labour government allegedly 'maxing out the credit card', but Truss was an elected representative of the people in a way that isn't true of the head of OBR, much less the markets...
I agree that there are external pressures on every chief executive to do popular things, or to the extent that they can, at least popularize what they decide to do. But I don’t think that’s basically the same as distributing the decision-making authority over multiple agents. A distributed executive is much more immune to falling into dictatorship or making a catastrophic snap misjudgment. Maybe the UK isn’t vulnerable to these possibilities but the US certainly is. I think a distributed executive could also conceivably select for better candidates because sharing the power and the spotlight would not have the absolute appeal to the narcissists that typically seek out and inhabit head of state roles.
I think the standard practices pertaining to government systems are probably closer to barely adequate than really great, and I see some value in exploring potentially sturdier frameworks.
I missed this reply. The general need to stay popular is not really what I'm talking about, unless you mean staying popular with the most powerful people within the so-called deep state.
...To the extent you have civil servants saying "are you sure that's wise, sir?" when you know that their disapproval can reduce your tenure as PM to the shelf life of a lettuce, you have a system not unlike the Swiss system
Rome was governed by consuls for a longer time period than any (I think?) of the modern elected single-leader systems. We have yet to see how long systems with a single executive typically last, but it would not surprise me if, on the long term, two-leader systems generally lasted longer than one-leader systems.
Switzerland also famously has an unwritten rule that all parties work together ("concordance" principle) rather than forming governing and opposition parties as you see in many other countries. That has contributed a lot to stability, too.
If I could ask something else about Switzerland: I had *thought* that Switzerland was so committed to neutrality and independence that they wouldn't join any alliance or international body like the EU that could tell them what to do. But apparently they're part of the Council of Europe, which I *think* means they're subject to the European Court of Human Rights, which I *think* means a foreign body can declare their laws unacceptable in some sense? My understanding was that the ECoHR has far less power than say the US Supreme Court, but more than say a random UN body telling you you're infinging someone's rights. Unless I'm wrong about this and they really are no different from the latter, such that after being told your policy is a human rights violation responding with "thank you for your feedback, we will be continuing with the policy anyway" is perfectly acceptable and has zero consequences...why would Switzerland consent to this? Doesn't it conflict with their whole 200-year tradition? And given their direct democracy, what would they do (or have they done since I'm sure this has happened) if their popular decision was ruled against by the Council?
Yes, I agree that it was untypical for Switzerland to sign the European Convention on Human Rights, which includes support for the ECoHR. This was in 1974, and hotly disputed back then. I don't know the details for why it was still signed, but apparently the reasoning was that Switzerland would never be condemned for violations of human rights. Back then this was plausible, since human rights were interpreted in a much more narrow way.
In general, "Fremde Richter" (foreign judges) is a keyword and very emotional topic in Switzerland. In the founding document, the "Bundesbrief" from 1291(!) it says:
"We have also unanimously vowed and determined that we shall not accept any judge in the valleys who (...) is not our inhabitant or countryman". To be fair, judges in those time were more powerful and also had legislative rights.
But until today, in general Switzerland fights hard against accepting foreign judges, and that is one of the reasons why they never joined EU. Part of the recent negotiations with EU (a process which ultimately failed) was that the question of whether decisions of the European Court of Justice ECJ should be binding for Switzerland. The EU wanted that, but after a lot of fighting, the agreement was no, and instead there should be an independent arbitration court if there is dispute between Switzerland and EU about the EU markets. Even that was only grudgingly accepted and received backlash from the political right.
On the other hand, for human rights the status quo was confirmed recently. There was an initiative to expel criminal foreigners ("Ausschaffungs-initiative", approved in 2010). This collided with human rights, and the Federal Council took this into account in the implementation. The right-wing party SVP found this insufficient and launched an initiative to ignore human rights in the implementation ("Durchsetzungs-initiative") After this was rejected by public vote in 2016, they launched another initiative to codify that Swiss laws should be above human rights ("Selbstbestimmungs-initiative") which was clearly rejected in 2018. So the Swiss people confirmed twice that human rights should be above Swiss law.
On the other hand, there was a decision by the ECoHR just a month ago that Switzerland would not do enough against climate change. That caused an uproar in Switzerland. Most commentary found that this goes beyond the jurisdiction of the ECoHR. In a very remarkable step, the law commission of the second legislative chamber (representation of the cantons) proposed a declaration that Switzerland would not follow this decision because they are already doing enough for climate change. It's unclear whether the first chamber will agree, but in any case this is a really blunt proposal. It also shows that ECoHR has only soft power. If Switzerland decides to ignore the decision, they can do that. The cost may be some bad publicity, but that's it.
Switzerland was committed to neutrality when wars were this king against that one, not the final battle of Good against Evil, which worked out until just after WWI. (WWII in Swiss history is a whole topic for itself.) During the Cold War, while Switzerland was technically neutral, they also understood that one side surrounded them, had the force to invade if they wanted to, but didn't want to whereas the other side, if it ever came to war, sure looked like they might not respect any borders including the Swiss ones. So while Switzerland never joined NATO, they sure harmonised their weapons and tactics with the NATO ones just in case (which had the nice side-effect of being able to sell stuff to NATO). For military nerds, the Swiss SIG-90 assault rifle has been described to me as "the Soviet AK-47, built to Swiss quality, with NATO ammunition".
So in practice, this is interpreted as a popular mandate that yes, ECoHR court decisions do apply here.
Switzerland never joined the EU, but it does have bilateral treaties with the EU which the right-wing complains is membership in all but name. Switzerland is also part of Schengen/Dublin, the agreement on free movement of people and goods which means that anyone from the EU has the right to reside and work in Switzerland. The SVP has tried many times to cancel this, but so far has lost most initiatives on this matter (and the ones they won were sufficiently open to interpretation by the other side that one can work around them).
This is complicated as I just thought of another possibility:
5. A provision of the Swiss Constitution either explicitly says, or has been interpreted to say, that ECoHR decisions are binding on the country. The people could change this with a referndum and that would be the end if the Court's authority, but they have not done so. The Court of course could never override the Swiss Constitution itself.
I'm further confused because I think I've seen that the Swiss Constitution may actually be subordinate to a local canton's constitution, but this is probably over-complicating things too much so I won't ask about that.
Thanks! So can I clarify further: what is the actual power of the ECoHR in Switzerland? (I don't really understand its power anywhere, but I'll just ask about Switzerland). I'm really confused on this. Is it one of the following:
1. Switzerland is to the ECoHR as Texas is to the US Supreme Court: if the latter rules their law invalid that's the end of it, the law is completely and immediately void and unenforcable, all local courts and authorities will reliably treat is as such, the only remedy for the law's supporters is to try to change the composition of the Court.
2. The ECoHR can enforce material sanctions of some kind against Switzerland for noncompliance, meaning the voting public and politicians in Switzerland have a strong interest in obeying its decisions, but ultimately the choice is their's and they can ignore the Court and take the sanctions.
3. The Court has no direct power, only symbolic power. Same as 2 otherwise, with the weaker but still potent consideration of avoiding international embarassment being a major consideration in the people's decision.
4. The Court is no different in practice from a UN human rights body: the only people who think its decision matters (e.g. people on the left) are those who already support the result anyway. Nobody ever really changes their mind as a result of a ruling.
It seems that it's not 4, and I'm not fairly sure it's not 1. Which is the closest description, or is it unlike any of these?
For a practical example - separate post because I had to research this a bit - in 2020 a widowed man took the state to the ECoHR because the law says a widowed woman gets state support all her life (unless she remarries, other T&C may apply) whereas for a man, the payments stop when he no longer has any underage children. He claimed discrimination on the basis of sex, and the ECoHR found in his favour in 2022.
As a result, the Swiss executive admitted they had to change that law, and since 2023 the rules on that are written in a gender-neutral fashion (while also treating marriage and registered homosexual partnerships equally).
I'll try. Instead of having whoever takes 50%+1 seats (or some other formula) get the role of PM and anyone outside their coalition goes into opposition, the Swiss system is built on the idea that we all get together and see if we can come to a consensus, which works more often than not. It's often said that the real politics happens not in the debating chamber but in the corridor around it, where it's another unwritten rule that you drop the posturing and talk civilly with politicians from other parties.
It also helps that anyone who can gather 50'000 signatures over 100 days (in a country of 9 and a bit million, for context) can call a referendum against any law voted by parliament, in which case the law is voted on by the people and needs a simple majority to pass. So a situation where you get together a coalition with just over half the seats in parliament, but not close to half the population, would see any controversial law at risk of being sunk by a referendum.
There is yet another unwritten agreement on how the seats on the executive are distributed among the largest parties, so for example if a SP councillor steps down then the other parties will usually either accept the SP's proposed replacement, or at least abstain from voting to let the party fill "their" slot again. In exchange, the 7 federal councillors tacitly agree to tone down if not drop any too party political activity while in the executive.
I moved from Germany to Switzerland in my late 20s, and my mind was blown by how much better the Swiss political system is. It's not that the German system is bad, but I find the Swiss one a lot better.
That said, the collective Federal Council is only the tip of the iceberg. The whole system is based on dilution of power, much more than in any other political system that I know. Even executive+legislation together are far from able to just rule unchecked, because all major decisions are ultimately decided by public vote.
This has two major effects: for one, the Swiss public is much better informed than the German one, because they have to vote on 5-10 political questions every three months. And the focus is *a lot* more on content than on politicians. Ask a random Swiss person on the street, and they may have some trouble to name the members of the Federal Council, but they will have a (more or less informed) opinion on many of the political questions of the last year. I also perceived the media (especially newspapers) as a positive cultural shock when I moved to Switzerland. It's not that German newspapers cover less politics, but it is much more of the type "politician A disagree with what politician B wants", or "politician A has lost/screwed up". The Swiss newspapers are a lot more about arguments.
The second effect is that everybody is forced to compromise all the time, because one-sided proposals will be stopped sooner or later (usually sooner). Moreover, after the public vote, the political question is usually settled. After the majority has decided, this is accepted by all sides. There are a few exceptions, for example about immigration from EU, because the public vote was to re-negotiate contracts with the EU, and this adds a layer with another independent player. But for most cases, even if the debate is emotional and heated, at some point it is settled, and people calm down.
The downside is that decisions in Switzerland are famously sluggish. (Though the covid crisis showed that decisions can be made faster in emergencies.) But I think this downside is acceptable.
There is a fantastic more-than-you-ever-wanted-to-know post on lesswrong about the Swiss political system.
I especially recommend the section on the Jurassic Question. Sure, it took 60 years to solve the question, but it is a prime example of how disputes should be settled in a democracy.
> one-sided proposals will be stopped sooner or later (usually sooner)
Mostly true, but the "(anti) mass immigration initiative" just about went through and has been a headache for negotiations with the EU ever since IIRC?
Not familiar with the background on this one, but if a near-majority of the Swiss are anti mass-immigration (initiative), then making it difficult for the Swiss govt to be strongarmed into mass-immigration by the EU is probably the system functioning as intended?
A change to the Swiss constitution requires both a majority of cantons and a majority of the overall popular vote. This change got both, but if we dig into the numbers - first, 56.57% of eligible voters cast a vote (which is unusually high for an initiative). Secondly, the initiative passed the popular vote with 50.3% yes overall. I think that's even narrower than the Brexit referendum in the UK. Third, if you look at the map, you can see that the French-speaking cantons in the east all voted no, reflecting the big German/French cultural divide in the country. The other big divide is urban vs rural, with the German-speaking cantons of Basel, Zurich and Zug - all of which contain some of Switzerland's largest cities (Zurich #1, Basel #3, Zug #24 but still dominates Zug-the-canton).
The initiative passed the double majority rule, and is now part of Swiss law - all this is formally correct. But it could be argued this is not evidence for a large popular majority overall - I certainly know a lot of urban Swiss who did some serious soul-searching after discovering that "this is so dumb, it'll never get through so I won't even bother to vote" is a losing move.
61.71% no on the popular vote, and almost all cantons voted no too.
Given that the latter initiative explicitly called for cancelling the bilateral agreements with the EU, many have interpreted the result as a popular vote in favour of keeping said agreements, which would imply not implementing any changes technically required by the earlier result but that would be incompatible with said agreements.
Yes, I also tend to view it that way. I think that there is a majority who really wants to slow down immigration, and EU is adamantly threatening to throw Switzerland out of the EU market if they put limits to EU immigration.
As background: immigration into Switzerland is huge. The Swiss population grew from 7.55m to 8.78m in 15 year (2007-2022), a 16% increase. That's even faster than the US, which grew "only" by 11% in this time (301m to 333m), and out of proportion for European standards (Germany: 2%, France: 6%, UK: 9%). This exacerbates problems like housing shortages. Opinions do differ on immigration, but the problems are real.
Well, the 2014 vote went that way, the 2020 vote went back the other way (see my post above) and there's another initiative that was just declared valid in May 2024, so I think the vote will be this autumn.
One way the 2024 one is being explained in the right-wing press is to "cap the Swiss population at under 10 million" which sounds, uh, ominous.
That's fair, but I don't think those things fully contradicts each other. I think two statements are both true:
"A majority would like to slow down immigration."
"A majority thinks that sacrificing access to EU market would be even worse. Hence, an agreement with the EU is more important than stopping immigration."
Granted, this is only my interpretation. But even in the 2014 vote, it played a huge role that immigration treaties were part of the whole EU bundle, and many of the 50% opposing the vote were afraid of the consequences for EU market access. In 2020, the consequences were just more obvious than in 2014.
>The second effect is that everybody is forced to compromise all the time, because one-sided proposals will be stopped sooner or later (usually sooner).
I'm envious (writing from the USA). We barely manage to keep adults in the room...
Prime Ministers in Westminster System style parliamentary governments are Heads of Government, not Heads of State. This sounds like a nitpicky distinction, but it's actually very important. The Head of State may be an elected President, a hereditary monarch, or a viceroy (e.g. Canada's Governor General) appointed by the monarch on the advice of the Head of Government. The Head of State generally have very broad powers on paper but is subject to very tight customary restrictions on how they're used. Among other things, this serves as a check on the Head of Government in three ways:
1. The Head of Government is typically obligated to regularly explain his actions and policies to the Head of State and hear out any criticism the Head of State has to offer.
2. Most of the pomp and ceremony attaches to the Head of State, not the Head of Government. Socially, the HoS outranks the HoG
3. Much of the HoG's powers require acting through the HoS by giving "advice" that the HoS is customarily obliged to follow. The HoS is only obliged to follow advice that is offered legitimately following the customary forms, though, and the (seldom or never actually used) ability for the HoS to refuse in extreme situations serves as a sort of nuclear deterrent on excesses or abuses by the HoG.
1 and 2 are mostly psychological in impact, while 3 serves as a practical constraint.
Westminster governments also exercise much more collective decision-making than American-style Presidential governments. The PM is accountable to Parliament in a much more direct an immediate way that the US President is accountable to Congress (I.e. the HoS is not just empowered but obliged to fire and replace the PM if he cannot command a majority), and Cabinet Ministers often have their own power bases in Parliament along with norms that major decisions are made collectively by the whole Cabinet rather than individually by the PM.
States with a single executive head of state also have deputies and seconds-in-command and "if Number One drops dead, Number Two takes over" plans, so it's not as if "oh no El Presidente choked on a fish bone, there is no leader, what do we do? it's pure anarchism right now!"
Our president is generally a figurehead head of state, so if they die, resign, or are booted out for stealing the tea money, there has to be an election. In the meantime, there is a Commission to rule in his place:
"If the current President resigns, becomes incapacitated, is removed or dies, then an election must be held within the following 60 days.
...Article 14 of the Constitution provides for a Commission to perform the functions of the President in certain situations – if the President is absent, becomes incapacitated, resigns, is removed from office, dies or fails to perform their functions."
Even the Church has procedures in place:
"Until a successor Pope can be elected, the Camerlengo serves as Vatican City's Acting Sovereign. He is no longer, however, responsible for the government of the Catholic Church when the papacy is vacant; that task was placed in the hands of the College of Cardinals by Universi Dominici gregis (1996). His power is extremely limited, being merely enough to allow Church institutions to continue to operate and perform some basic functions without making any definitive decisions or appointments that are normally reserved to other powers delegated by the Pope."
Right. I’m not concerned that a country will be left rudderless when the head of state dies, resigns, etc., I’m concerned with the apparent weaknesses of undistributed executive decision-making.
Generally, though, the head of state does not have all the power, even where they are the authority. There is parliament/congress and other bodies that can say "hang on there now, you can't do that".
And with the Roman dual command, there were plenty of examples of one person imposing their will over the other, or someone being given a plum public office in return for supporting another guy (e.g. Caesar getting Antony made augur in order to have Antony block hostile moves against him by declaring the auspices unfavourable).
Whatever method we pick, there's going to be some downside and some way for finding loopholes. The advantage of a single head of state/leader is that, well, it's one guy: it's a lot easier to get rid of one guy than to take down two. three or more.
Though if you are willing to be guided by the wisdom of "The Rings of Power" season one: "one will always corrupt, two divides, but three brings balance" 😀
San Marino is an absurdly tiny nation-state. Switzerland is a smallish one (population currently less than 9 million) which is pretty close to one of a kind in its geography and its social/cultural makeup. The Roman Republic's setup was supplanted by one-person rule.
While acknowledging the weaknesses/risks of single-person head of state setups, it seems like there would be more examples of small-group setups if that approach was really viable -- or net advantageous all things considered -- in the real world.
I think that one key to making a population easy to govern is convincing them that they're a small group who needs to stick together in order to avoid being swallowed by the larger powers around them. Use their natural tribalism to create an ingroup which consists of the entire country and an outgroup which consists of everyone else.
Once a country gets huge and powerful, you can no longer convince them that they need to stick together against outsiders, and they will turn against each other in order to bicker over the spoils of their dominance.
In this sense perhaps it's not so important that Switzerland is small (it's actually very close to being the median sized country), but that it is smaller than everyone else around it.
Uruguay, too, has some kind of distributed executive.
> it seems like there would be more examples of small-group setups if that approach was really viable…
Yes, I feel this way, too, but I hesitate to dismiss the concept based on its lack of adoption alone. It seems like given advances in technology, some form of distributed executive decision-making might not be as prone to unresponsiveness as it once was.
Well, the Roman Republic functioned for many centuries with a dual executive, and it had a population 2x-3x the size of Switzerland before it transitioned to one-person rule. Switzerland's system hasn't been around as long as the Roman Republic. So, I look forward to Switzerland's transition to one-person rule sometime in the twenty-third century and its future conquest of Europe. :-)
My biweekly COVID-19 update for epidemiological weeks 21 and 22 is up on X.
1. US COVID wastewater numbers are starting to rise again. There's a lot of concern that the JN.1 descendants with FLiRT mutations (S:R346T, S:F456L) are increasing in frequency, and this combination of spike mutations will drive the next wave.
2. But we shouldn't assume that the rise in presumed COVID transmission (as measured by wastewater numbers) is uniform across the country. I didn't discuss it in my slide deck, but I checked out my home state, California (because they have good online data), and Los Angeles (county and city), San Francisco, and Sacramento do not show an uptick in WW numbers. However, Santa Clara County (home of the city of San Jose) shows a steep rise. But this has been the pattern during the interwave gaps — SARS2 continues to circulate in the background at low levels with *seemingly* random widely dispersed outbreaks locally. So, the rise in national-level wastewater numbers may be an artifact of which sewersheds are being monitored by the CDC and Biobot. But if the local outbreaks become synchronized across wider geographic areas, that will be a sign that the next COVID wave is underway.
3. And just because the new FLiRT mutations have higher immune escape values doesn't necessarily mean these mutations will kick off a new wave. We've seen vars with very high relative immune escape values (relative to their predecessors) that didn't create new waves, but instead, they come to dominate the viral landscape by (taking a bigger piece of the smaller infection pie, so to speak). The dreaded Kraken (whose Pango designation I can't remember off the top of my head) behaved that way.
4. And I linked to a thread and a paper on what it would take for H5N1 (bird flu) to be a pandemic-causing pathogen in humans. Bottom line, we'll have to worry when it finally jumps to pigs — because pigs are fairly unique among domesticated animals in that they can be in infected with human Type A influenzas. If H5N1 (another Type A influenza) hops over to pigs, then recombination is possible between the two strains (which could yield a Type A flu that's highly transmissible in humans with the bird-flu's virulence). This hasn't happened yet in the 20-plus years that H5N1 has been circulating though. But it could.
>pigs are fairly unique among domesticated animals in that they can be in infected with human Type A influenzas
What is it with these correspondences between our species and pigs? Somebody got a pig's heart recently too. Once heard there was a tribe of cannibals whose word for human beings as meat translated literally was "long pig." Apparently we taste like pork.
My guess would be that we're among only a handful of species that have adapted to living as large omnivores. It's a niche that for some reason seems to have only evolved a handful of times.
SARS2 is my hobby, but I admit I don't know much about influenzas. But I think humans and pigs have very similar SA (sialic acid) receptors — and human influenza A viruses (H1N1) have adapted so they have optimized their ability to bind to human SA receptors. And since pigs have very similar types of SA receptors they're a reservoir for influenza A viruses. Southern China where there's lots of pig farming seems to generate a lot of the seasonal flu A waves.
With SARS2 some mammals share similar receptor sites. For instance humans and ferrets can infect each other fairly easily with SARS2. I suspect bovines have different types of SA receptors from humans. And that makes it easier for H5N1 to bind to bovine SA receptors and harder for H5N1 to bind to human SA receptors. However, we know of 3 people in the US who caught H5N1 from cows, so it's not impossible for humans to catch it from cattle, but the kinetics of the of the H5N1 binding sites makes it much less likely that humans will catch it (?). At this point I'm speculating — i.e. talking out of my ass. If someone understands the details, please chime in because I'm out of my depth now. ;-)
And, more ass-talking here — I suspect that porcine HLA systems (PLA? Porcine leukocyte antigens?) may be similar to human HLA systems. So humans are less likely to reject pig flesh than another mammal's flesh. ?????
Would be interested to see a dialogue between an Effective Altruist and this author, writing in defense of partiality and acting within one's "sphere of moral competence".
What is there to even discuss? This is just an unbridgable gap in moral values. There's nothing objectively wrong with valuing virtue ethics over human lives, because that would imply the existence of a correct answer. Debating over morality is a complete waste of time. All you can do is work to promote your own interests.
I disagree that it's always a waste of time; often people have shared foundational axioms and can be persuaded in those terms. I certainly have been persuaded to change my moral foundations in the past.
I agree it's often a waste of time, either because people aren't open to persuasion or because the conversation doesn't happen on a fundamental enough level.
> Debating over morality is a complete waste of time. All you can do is work to promote your own interests.
I think there might be a happy medium, where debating over morality *is* promoting one's own interests, specifically the interest of having a lot of other people agree with me about what's right and wrong?
Uh, this is a very extreme position that I think requires substantially more argument than you are giving for it. 300 years of God knows how many pages of moral philosophy has been written and a significant chunk of that is argument over the correct moral values. The people doing this arguing certainly haven't thought there was nothing to discuss, and those devoting their whole careers to the matter probably didn't think it was a waste of time. Maybe your position isn't as obvious as you seem to think it is.
Also, you seem to be saying that argument between different moral systems is *impossible*. Even if you're right that it's futile and will never be solved (an absurdly unjustified claim), it's obviously possible since plenty of people are doing it. It's like the difference between saying playing soccer is a waste of time (arguable for sure) and saying playing soccer is impossible (um...?).
What is there to discuss? Um, everything that every paper or book or online thread about moral values is discussing...is what there is to discuss!
This is begging the question. Essentially you are saying that moral anti-realism can't be true because academic philosophy couldn't possibly have been arguing about nothing all this time.
> 300 years of God knows how many pages of moral philosophy has been written and a significant chunk of that is argument over the correct moral values.
The usual argument would be that virtue ethics beats utilitarianism on its own terms -- that virtue ethics provides a tractable and practically-followable framework for making decisions that probably works better in practice than telling fallible humans that they simply need to do whatever leads to the best consequences.
I've never heard of anyone who believes "my moral system produces quantitatively worse outcomes than utilitarianism but you should follow it anyway because it's better on its own terms". Everyone thinks their moral system results in the greatest overall good.
I recently learned that I might have a sesame allergy because I mentioned to a friend that I liked the taste of sesame but not the burning/biting sensation, and they said, "Uh, sesame doesn't do that. Maybe you're allergic to it."
So, related questions: 1) does sesame really not give everyone a burning sensation in their throat? 2) Is it a bad idea to DIY a skin prick test for a possible minor allergy? 3) How bad does an allergy have to be for it to be worth avoiding allergens? 4) Is this just a tradeoff of managing symptoms vs. eating tasty foods, or does it do long-term damage to frequently expose yourself to allergens?
My hunch is that foods lightly seasoned with sesame seeds (e.g. everything bagels) might be alright since they don't cause a noticeable throat reaction, but maybe I should stop making salad dressings with sesame oil.
For context: I have mild respiratory allergies to some pollens and animals, and non-allergy food intolerances that cause major digestive problems. No food allergies. This is a new problem for me.
I had this exact issue with eggplant. I remarked to a friend that my brother and I both liked eggplant, including the "spicy burning sensation" that we get from it, and it was brought up that it was probably an allergy. I still eat lots of eggplant, so it seems fine to me. As context, I have 2 auto-immune diseases.
Some seeds, fruits and nuts can trigger a mild allergic reaction in people with hayfever. It's sometimes referred to as "oral hayfever" but that's a bit of a silly name. I have this for a few kinds of fruits. If your reaction is the same thing then it's very unlikely (impossible?) to kill you, as evidenced by the fact that you've eaten sesame oil salads and been basically fin. But maybe it's best to figure out what you have before going gung-ho.
Have eaten sesame seed buns, I honestly couldn't tell you what sesame even tastes like, that's how little impact it has. It is definitely not burning or biting, at most the seeds make bread slightly more crunchy.
I don't eat sesame that much (it doesn't seem to automatically come on bread here, anymore), but I've never experienced a burning sensation when doing so.
Note that, as I understand it, an allergy is where you get anaphylactic shock. Experiencing a burning sensation is indicative of something called an 'intolerance' and doesn't necessarily mean you have an allergy. But, I am not a doctor and this is not medical advice.
My understanding is that "allergy" describes a range of symptoms, the most severe of which is anaphylaxis and the more minor symptoms can be itching, burning, hives, etc.
Correct. Allergy vs intolerance difference has nothing to do with an intensity of the reaction (tho "intolerance" will not produce lethal effects comparable to anaphylaxis) and everything to do with mechanism: allergic reactions are immune system mediated, while intolerances are basically caused by the inability to digest a given substance. What's confusing practically is that the same GI symptoms can be a result of allergy and intolerance.
"Burning throat when eating sesame" is more suggestive of allergy, perhaps the "oral allergy syndrome" in cross-reaction with respiratory allergens someone else mentioned.
Repeated exposure if already allergic can make the subsequent reactions more severe if it really is an allergy, thus avoiding exposure is recommended, so getting tested might be a good idea.
On the other hand, desensitization therapy for allergies is exactly repeated exposure, and definitely works for me. (Worked to bring my bee allergy down from life-threatening to rather unpleasant, and seems to be working with grass pollen going from really annoying to slightly inconvenient. )
Oh interesting, and makes sense in the context of children for example frequently growing out of allergies (and some people developing sudden onset ones in adulthood) -- immune systems are weird. Great that it worked for you esp with the venom one.
I can definitely say that I have never experienced burning sensation after eating anything with sesame, so it does sound like you should get that tested.
I think it would be no harm. It's mild now, but it might get more serious later on. I never had hay fever or anything like it until a few years back, now I found myself this morning with wheezy breathing and the pollen count was high, so I took an anti-histamine.
Re: Lyman's claim that Christian organizations are already studying their own effectiveness: Christians for Effective Altruism has been looking into how major Christian nonprofits use evidence, and our sense is that (1) most organizations do not analyze their own effectiveness in a way that can meaningfully measure the impact of their programs, and (2) even the ones who do tend to share this information selectively in a way that's pretty misleading to donors and recipients. Fuller write-up coming hopefully in a few months, but I spoke at the EA for Christians conference summarizing some findings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxneG-o0g8U
The potato diet, which I thought Scott wrote about earlier, might work because cooking a potato and then refrigerating it reduces the number of calories you can absorb from it. It converts starch to resistant starch, which resists digestion in the small intestine, and is instead digested by gut bacteria. (Johns Hopkins Patient Guide to Diabetes, "What is resistant starch?", https://hopkinsdiabetesinfo.org/what-is-resistant-starch)
Raw potatoes have a lot of readily-digestible starch (RDS), but also resistant starch 2 (RS2), "slowly hydrolyzed by alpha-amylase". Cooking them converts some RDS to RD3, "retrograded starch". In all cases, the number of "calories" listed on the nutritional info for a potato is a large over-estimate. Those "calories" tell you how much heat you get out of a potato by burning it, not how many calories you get from eating it.
Raigond+Singh give some experimental data on how much RS various heating and cooling processes produce, but because of the way they present it (as percentages, without specifying what they're percentages of), I'm not sure they can be interpreted.
The Hopkins web page says that reheating the potato will not deconvert the resistant starch. Raigond+Singh says it will (table 2, RS3, last column), but apparently not all of it, as they say cycles of heating and cooling gradually increases RS.
(I'm certain I read about the potato diet on Scott's blog, but Google insists that Scott never posted a blog containing the words "slime mold time mold" and "potato diet", and only shows discussion of it in reader comments.)
This isn't unique to potatoes. Starch retrogradation is a well known thing among chefs and food scientists. For rice, especially - which is why you can't make fried rice with fresh rice, you need fully cooked and then cooled rice, because the regular starch will just smear into paste on your wok's surface while cooled rice will actually stay intact.
If you poke around culinary science research, you might find more food where you can readily observe this.
Is the idea then that the body just doesn't notice that it isn't digesting all of what it eats, and reduces hunger as though the resistant starch were a useful nutrient? That seems contrary to the assumption I've seen in a lot of places including Slime Mould Time Mould that the actual amount of energy the body has available is a major factor influencing the appetite. I can't think of any direct evidence that that's true off the top of my head, but it kind of feels like it has to be.
Resistant starch IS a useful nutrient, is the thing. You need propionate, acetate, and butyrate for a huge number of cellular processes, and fermentation of starches and fiber in the lower gut is the best way to get them. SCFAs satisfy a unique component of your caloric needs, and they do it in a time-release fashion, starting ~12hrs after you eat the starch. Think about the implications for breaking "food addiction" when you temporally decouple energy/satiation from eating like that.
Also, even beyond the metabolic end-products, you just need to feed the bacteria. They sequester heavy metals from your diet, they produce the entire suite of B vitamins and most of the essential amino acids, they produce the precursors for endogenous benzodiazepine receptor ligands, they deconjugate your steroid hormones to help Chadify you. Be good to them!
I was finally able to consistently add fiber to my diet when I started thinking of my gut bacteria as a kind of pet. I don't forget to feed the fish, can't forget to feed to feed my gut fish either. Gotta throw some food for them on my plate each day.
Great question! I also like fries. Probably it works? But I don't know, and I don't know how good they'd taste then, either. You could experiment with that, at least enough to find out if they can be refried and still taste good.
If cooking the potato involves baking it in aluminum wrap (tinfoil in the UK), without removing the skin, then it is a Very Bad Idea to leave it, still in its wrap, in a fridge or anywhere for more than a few hours before eating it.
That is because the dirt inevitably left on the skin, in little eyes for example, can harbor anaerobic bacteria, whose spores will not all be killed by the cooking, and these can breed under the wrap and release botulinum toxin!
So, the cost of avoiding this is low enough that sure, go ahead and do it, but this also sounds very much like one of the things that is technically a risk, but not nearly a high enough one for anyone to actually worry about.
This category, for me, encompasses the vast majority of food-borne illness concerns in the US.
There is not "correct" risk tolerance level, so I will not judge anyone for the actions they take to mitigate any particular risk. But I do think that the rhetoric around food-borne illnesses, _especially_ in home cooking environments, does not actually match the risk level and how your average person chooses to deal with most every day risks.
Who the heck cooks potatoes before washing them first, though? I've seen some talk online about not washing vegetables, which makes me go "What the heck, do you not know they come out of the ground? WASH YOUR VEGETABLES, YES EVEN THE ONES THAT COME FROM THE GROCERY STORE IN WRAPPERS".
I agree that you shouldn't leave baked potatoes lying around in tinfoil in the fridge, but mostly because cold baked potato doesn't taste good.
I've seen reports of botulinum poisoning from baked potatoes (in the US) and could never understand how this occured -- the "left wrapped in foil" (which would increase moisture) explains it partially but I still don't understand the spores surviving the heat, considering that temperatures of about 120C are sufficient to kill the spores and potatoes are typically baked in 180-200 degrees. Even if wrapped in foil, the temperature on the surface under the foil should be well above 120C.
One thing worth noting in this discussion is that you are almost certainly undercooking your baked potatoes. 350F (180C) for an hour is way too short for optimal tastiness. I usually bake potatoes for 425F (220 C) for two hours, providing an excellent taste and crunch to the skin and an excellent fluffiness to the flesh. I've heard of foodies who use 525F (275C), albeit for not quite as long, because it's basically impossible to overcook baked potatoes in home ovens. Knowing this commentariat someone is certainly going to object to this for some reason, but honestly try it yourself.
I'd do around 200C in a fan oven (translating to 220 for no-fan) for about 1.5hrs for bigger ones, less for smaller ones. I agree that higher temps work better for optimal crunch but I think many people would use lower thus my estimate in the original comment. And never in foil, for taste reasons.
Looking it up, it seems the spores can survive being baked. The problem happens if you leave the baked potatoes cool down to between room temperature to 60 degrees Celsius and leave them sitting around; that's when the spores germinate and produce the toxins. Either eat the baked potatoes straight away, or put any you didn't eat into the fridge to cool them down soon:
Baked potatoes that have been wrapped in foil have been linked to cases of botulism. Clostridium botulinum spores can survive the baking process and the foil wrap seals the potato preventing oxygen from being present. In this environment, and at the right temperature, spores on the potato can germinate and grow - producing their deadly toxin. Several cases of foodborne botulism caused by foil wrapped baked potatoes have occurred including a large outbreak in 1994 in Texas. In that outbreak, 30 people were affected.
How can this be prevented?
After baking foil wrapped potatoes, never leave the potatoes at room temperature or in a warming oven set below 60°C. These are the conditions that will allow the spores to germinate and grow. To prevent this from happening:
make sure the potatoes are eaten within 2 hours of being cooked,
or keep the potatoes at 60°C or hotter,
or refrigerate the potatoes within 2 hours of being cooked"
Wrapping, which causes the anaerobic environment, and then keeping the food at a temperature the bacteria like (not too hot, not too cold, just right to grown and produce toxin).
Doctors and molecular biologists use autoclaves largely because temperatures of 120C don't kill spores without steam and another atmosphere of pressure.
Thank you, I didn't know that BOTH the pressure and the 120C+ is needed -- I thought the pressure cooker guidance for low acid home preserving was to ensure the correct temperature (impossible to boil anything > 100C without extra pressure).
But perhaps the key to the riskiness is "in tinfoil" -- maybe the skin of a wrapped potato never actually reaches the 120, as it remains moist under the foil. Thus, bare skin potato baked at 180 should be ok to store esp in the fridge -- tho old baked potatoes are pretty inedible anyway, so this conversation is likely to be entirely moot practically, if factually enlightening.
Autoclaving: My understanding of how it works agrees with yours. The high temperature is needed to kill the spores; the high pressure is needed to reach the high temperature, but doesn't play a direct role in sterilization. (I would be happy to be corrected on this if it's wrong.)
Potatoes: speculating wildly here, but there could be a steep temperature gradient from just above the surface to just below the surface, even if the potatoes are baked without tinfoil. Under the right conditions, this might be steep enough that spores never reach the temperature required to kill them. But I don't have a good intuition for whether this sort of phenomenon is merely "possible in principle" or "commonly occuring in practice."
Only "foil baked potatoes" are mentioned as a hazard, presumably because wrapping creates anaerobic (or at least low oxygen - maybe anaerobic enough locally in potato hollows?) conditions needed for the bacteria to multiply during a period of storage in suitably warm temperatures and also likely to maintain optimal moisture. On a dry and unwrapped potato, even if viable spores remain and even if it is left in optimally warm temperature, presumably not all necessary conditions are fulfilled.
But the steep gradient hypothesis is also possible: obviously a crust of charred skin gives way only a millimetre or so in to what's largely a not completely dried out starch. There might be some spores lurking there still in the beautiful fluffiness waiting for their chance potato is left to languish in overheated kitchen instead of being eaten quickly or refrigerated. On the other hand, I am aware of a common practice of precooking of baked potatoes in cafes etc to be then briefly reheated (or crisped up?) before serving and I've never heard of a botulism case thus acquired: the foil seems to be crucial here (I don't believe in perfect storage always). So, I'd go with "possible in principle but extremely unlikely in practice". But will also poke my next baked potato with thermometer at various stages and locations. For science.
For potatoes, low acid home preserving opens another can of worms, or in this case a can of anaerobic bacteria! They should never be bottled or canned with just boiling water. One should use either extra vinegar, to bring the PH down to around 4 (from memory), or pressure canning.
Does anyone actually preserve potatoes by canning? Considering they keep pretty well for months as they are in cool dark places? Also, pickled potatoes anyone?? (It's 4.6 pH iirc, that's why tomatoes are borderline).
Thanks. I don't wrap potatoes in alum. foil; I find their skins are enough to keep them from drying out unless I overbake them. I am concerned as to whether the skins are especially rich in pesticides.
Potato skins are naturally rich in the pesticide solanine, at far greater dosages than any pesticide applied by humans, and it doesn't wash off. Even then, it's only problematic in high quantites. Solanine is higher in some varieties than others, and worse in potatoes that have been exposed to light in storage. Solanine is why you shouldn't eat green potatoes. Solanine isn't green, but chlorophyll is, and because of light exposure chlorophyll presence correlates with solanine presence.
Does that apply uniquely to potatoes? Also I'm not sure everyone on the potato diet cools potatoes before eating them.
> In all cases, the number of "calories" listed on the nutritional info for a potato is a large over-estimate. Those "calories" are what you get out of a potato by burning it with fire, not how many you get from eating it.
I think I've seen it said of pasta recently. But I often leave cooked pasta dishes in the fridge, and their digestibility doesn't seem to change dramatically - at least not in any aspect of which I am aware. (Same goes for potatoes, actually, though I leave those less often in the fridge.)
As someone who has cobbled together a few prototypes, I love the homeliness of the Automated Land Acknowledger. It’s probably what the original Amazon Echo looked like. ‘Hey, it’s not for the market, it’s proof of concept!’ Those highly visible Torx heads are just great.
Edit Oh wait, those appear to be hex heads, even better!
Does anyone here miss / does anyone here think it would be feasible to maintain an omegle-style chatroom targeted at rats? I have fond memories of exchanging ideas on omegle, using the shared interests option. I'd love to have a similar thing with a significant amount of rat users.
Gosh, I just tried it out. My adrenaline started pumping already when I *contemplated* pressing start, and my adrenaline seemingly only kept increasing after I pressed start, and the screen read to wait for a match. When the sound of my pulse pounding over my ears became too loud, I think this was after 20 agonizing seconds, I pressed "end".
I'd wish there was a function to see how many people are even using it, so that you may have some clue about how long you're likely to wait. It's nice to match quickly, I feel. Part of the appeal is exactly that. the spontaneity of it.
oh but its pretty close. 1-on-1 voicechat with a *random* ACX reader. I feel like it's a minor difference, whether it's typed or spoken. Thank you! It did surprise me that it didnt seem to be a thing, so I figured that it probably was and I just didn't know of it...
I would find a chatroom about the extermination and the practical control of rats to be helpful. My neighbor is a hoarder, and his yard is full of food waste that supports a vibrant colony of rats. Neither my city nor county health authorities seem willing to address the issue...
...but after rereading your post, I suspect you're talking about the nurturing of pet rats. My bad.
"Rat Control" is a euphemism, they just kill them.
"If someone was making the game less pleasant for me, I just said Avadakedavra regardless of whether that was strategically wise, and they never bothered me again."
When I had masonite siding woodpeckers would peck holes big enough for tree rats - squirrels - to get into my attic. I had to call a service to trap them a couple times. They said they released the live trapped squirrels somewhere ‘upstate.’
The material is based around my book Evidence-based Software Engineering which discusses what is currently known about software engineering, based on an analysis of all the publicly available data pdf+code+all data freely available here: http://knosof.co.uk/ESEUR/
There is an annoying practice among rationalists that I may be misinterpreting, but looks to me like a huge, huge fallacy: what you might call the "everyone knows" effect. Common sterotypes and popular assumptions are often just assumed to be true with virtually no questioning. Very much out of touch with what I take the whole rationalist project to be, and yet I feel like I see it all the time around here. Some examples:
1. The existence of "nerds" as a coherent thing, along with similar groups ("jocks" and so on). One would think that a rationalist community would, more than any other, insist before using such terms on clearly defining them, and then clearly establishing with evidence that these are meaningful categories that describe large numbers of people and are socially and statistically useful. That's something I basically never see. These sterotypes are thrown around without the slightest questioning of their accuracy or even meaning, just assumed to exist because "everyone knows" they do.
2. That the present is very, very special. More special and more important than any other time in history. This drives me up the wall, what with almost the complete lack of anyone actually questioning this and asking "is this actually true, or are we just expressing the common bias of thinking we're unique?" It's not that people think the present is special after carefully questioning it, it's that (apart from AI, where there is a fair amount of this questioning) it's not really questioned at all. Over and over, "everyone knows" that technological change happens faster than it ever has before, that social change happens faster than it ever has before, that society and the values of everyday life are more different than they ever have been before. I think those claims actually appear to be false (e.g. technological progress has slowed down, social upheaval is certainly nothing like the mid 20th century) but even if not, the key is that they're not *questioned*, as least as far as I've seen.
3. Political groupings. This one is, admittedly, done by absolutely everyone, including me. That doesn't stop it being irrational. The "leftists" and "rightists" we all refer to are not most people; most ordinary people (as opposed to politicians and prolific online commenters) don't have the same clusters of opinions at all. I catch myself making this fallacy constantly, but I think I still do it less than many rationalists. And then there are the really stupid claims like "women are almost all progressive/woke" that are refuted by literally spending five seconds looking at a single exit poll. Yes I know people think less clearly when politics is involved, but honestly rationalists can stand to do a bit better.
There isn't really a clear point to all this. I'm just pointing out some sloppy thinking that we should be more aware of, and that rationalists should maybe try to not make the same lazy biases as random people on the street.
#2 might benefit from some examples, because as is it seems to me like it's conflating a few different things. "Special" in what way? As far as I've seen the main way rationalists treat the present as special is in the area of AI, which as you yourself say isn't really taken for granted, the arguments are made in both directions pretty thoroughly I would say.
The other areas you mention are technological change, which ends up being heavily tied back to the question of AI, and social upheaval, where as I see it the idea that the present has a uniquely large amount is a misconception in the general zeitgeist that rationalists are less likely to buy into rather than more.
And on a broad historical level it's objectively true that modern society is completely unprecedented in a lot of important ways. No other civilization in history has had a population as large, as rich, or as literate as ours, or even really come close.
2. I'm not sure what time range you mean by the present, but I'd argue that the past two centuries are very, very special in human history.
- Child mortality: Before the 19th century, seeing multiple of your children pass away was the norm. The likelihood of a child living to age 5 was perhaps 25% at its lowest. This number rate dramatically in the past two centuries due to factors such as sanitation, antibiotics, and nutrition. For example, in the United States in 2021, the rate of under-5 mortality was 6.5 in 1,000.
- Agriculture: Starting in the early 20th century, food availability dramatically increased, largely due to mechanized agriculture, high-yield cultivars, and chemical fertilizers (Green Revolution). We used to be limited by the agricultural output of traditional farming methods on arable land, which resulted in a lower population ceiling, since when population growth exceeds available agricultural output, there is famine.
In terms of the past few years, regardless of whether or not technological progress has slowed down, the Internet has fundamentally changed how people work, make friends, find romantic partners, receive news, and acquire new ideas. Maybe this is a larger story in the development of long distance communication (https://eververdant.substack.com/p/telegraphic-cyberspace), but online social media in particular seems like a unique historical invention.
Rationalists are an elite community, with more egalitarian-minded and permissive subgroups. It's built on a tacit understanding that intelligence and curiosity matter, and sadly are unevenly distributed in the population in a currently intractable way (nootropic efforts failed and would have worked better on smarter people anyway).
It would be extremely inefficient if every proof had to begin from axioms. It is not unreasonable to start from shared knowledge, and to question as needed. As to the specific points
(1) This is likely a generational thing, with these categories being less coherent in the younger generations.
(2) Most of the points are in fact true about the present, but were also true about most 'presents' over the past 400 years. Most rationalists can accept this without calling the present 'special'
(3) Many of the readers here identify as 'gray tribe' and thus I would think are aware that most people fall cleanly in the divide. I think this might be an observability bias at play. When 2 grey tribes have a discussion, they are more likely to do so without mentioning groupings. When one of the leftist or rightist commenters starts posting, it inevitably leads responders to use this dichotomy.
With regard to #1, how would we go about knowing "Black people" is a meaningful category? Of course I'm not trying to defend the use of stereotypes about black people, but like, you seem to have an issue with treating some groups as actual meaningful existent categories.
Kind of, yes. I guess I'm a very strong individualist, and categorising people based on their race always disgusts me. And I just would have thought there'd be more of that individualism here (there probably is, but not enough for me).
Well to take a step back from "categorizing people" to "categorizing things," there are a lot of rationalist essays about the problems of categorization and how all categories are fuzzy. Another commenter has already mentioned "A Human's Guide to Words," which has a lot of essays about this topic.
All of *my* qualms about "categorizing people" come from the general issue of "categorizing things." But, I get the impression that *your* qualms about "categorizing people" come from your being a very strong individualist. Are you treating people as very unique, in their ineffable un-categorizability? Or are you more like me, also averse to "categorizing things?" How do you feel about "fruits" or "vegetables?"
You might like _Dark Witness_ by Ralph Wiley-- he refers to people as "black" and "white" to indicate that he doesn't take the categories seriously. He's also a very good writer, strongly influenced by Mark Twain.
I think #1 is taken for granted because so many Rationalists have self-identified as such for so long. There's a ton of overlap between that term and their interests, so it seems redundant to talk about it and reaffirm it as a real thing. I haven't heard Rationalists talk about Jocks at all, so I don't think I can comment on that.
#2 I totally see a lot. Especially comments about how crazy current day things are, from people who apparently don't appreciate how quiet and calm modern society is compared to what our parents or grandparents experienced. If you were alive between 1950 and 1990 you witnessed two attempted assassinations of sitting American presidents, one of which was successful, and also the killing of a major party's candidate during an election season (to list one example of potentially dozens that would be huge if still happening). If you lived in the 40 years before that, you got TWO world wars and a hundred million people killed out of 2 billion alive in 1939.
I don't think this is a specific failing of Rationalists, but certainly one that they don't seem to do better with than anyone else. I blame the group trending very young, and young people's general tendency to not think about the past as much.
While they don't break down the data, the religious cluster (abortion, homosexuality, etc) and the racial cluster (affirmative action, immigration, etc) have a correlation of just .14 for the general population in the 2004-2014 period.
Correlations maybe, but even if there are it's an enormous mistake to start treating these groups as two distinct separate ones, instead of as dozens of clusters with certain patterns of overlap.
However, rethinking it I'm not sure if 3 is irrational at all. I maintain that large numbers of people don't fit at all into these boxes, BUT there's an argument that since politicians and parties usually do, then in a democracy *all* people who have either voted them in or passively allowed them to be voted in have in some sense endorsed those clusters, and can be fairly treated as part of distinct categories. If they don't want that, they should do more swing voting or third party voting for God's sake. So there are arguments both ways there.
But on 1, I maintain that this is pretty absurd. And no I'm not convinced that there *are* such significant correlations outside of fiction and self-selected online subcultures. I don't think I've personally known anyone who fully fits a "nerd" sterotype (though I haven't known that many people). One guy at school was obsessed with Lord of the Rings and was very socially awkward, and he was also a fundamentalist Christian and terrible at math. Another person I know was in intoverted atheist and participated in international science competitions but was also a (baseball or softball I think?) player. And these are the two people I can think of who are closest to the nerd stereotype, and still diverge from it. I'd be highly surprised if these nuances aren't found in most people in the real world.
(Also, nerd interests are as contradictory as political positions: I will never understand why the same kind of people who like science also supposedly like Star Wars, literally the most unscientific of all well-known "science fiction" ever made, with a universe that breaks scientific laws everywhere and literally runs on religion and magic. This is as bewildering as feminism correlating with being pro-Islam, but without the excuse of having a political party to publically defend. And I'm not convinced it's actually true.
I can see Magic the Gathering, being a complicated system of rules just like math or programming. But what I can't see is why that would be a more (rather than less) nerdy interest than chess or bridge or Diplomacy. Has anyone examined the truth and/or coherence of these stereotypes?)
I've NEVER IN MY LIFE came across "nerds" as a social group or community or... anything really. Neither, not really, "jocks".
I've always assumed that it's because I grew up and lived my early 20s in a very different culture, political system and economy in the late 80s/90s and thus these terms, clearly originating in American teenager culture, were limited geographically and culturally. Your comment rises an interesting possibility that these concepts are cultural/figurative in nature and don't refer to any actually existing groups.
I grew up in a small town in Michigan and these seemed like very accurate descriptions of various groups of people at my high school. E.g. the nerds (myself included) would go to a LAN party every weekend and play M:TG together and those interests were basically the defining features of the group, from which nobody with the was ever excluded to my memory.
Who do you think are rationalists? People in this comments section? Because the supermajority of them aren't. Do you have some examples of this to link to?
Yes. I am partially thinking of the commenters here (but almost always the first 2 attitudes I mentioned I see from the self-described rationalist commenters specifically), but Scott has done at least the first several times, here (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/25/why-no-science-of-nerds/) where he basically *almost* says the science doesn't really support a lot of the stereotype but we all know it's true anyway, and also Contra Kriss on Nerds (I think that's what it's called but going through Substack archives is a nightmare) where he says things like "aren't nerds and sports fans natural enemies?" as if this bizarrely specific sociological claim doesn't require evidence. It's a weird lapse from Scott's usual methodical evidence-based approach when he does this armchair sociology, and the same with politics but that's much less bad because literally everyone does it, plus he interacts with an obviously biased sample (living in SF), plus maybe it's defensible anyway (see my reply to Oskar).
2 is actually quite a different kind of thing that I probably shouldn't have lumped with these.
> he basically *almost* says the science doesn't really support a lot of the stereotype but we all know it's true anyway,
I think you misread. Scott says:
>> A scientific study of nerds might begin by asking: why do all of these things go together in the popular imagination, form a single category?
And then immediately suggests the null hypothesis of "all traits are actually uncorrelated, any 9 or whatever dimensional grouping would have this proportion in the population. This is not claiming that nerds are real and we must find them, but that nerds are potentially an artifact about popular imagination. This does not say, at all that Scott assumes in the existence of nerds as a population subgroup, just in the existence of nerd as a category in popular imagination.
In the Kriss post, he's responding to the popular imagination conception of nerds and operating on that, not on actual population level categories of them. It would work as a post even if nerds were not a thing, because it's a statement about how hypothetical versions of nerds and the concept of nerdiness would relate to each other.
I think this can be resolved if you quote and cite a specific point from that post that you think is fundamentally dependent on nerds existing as a sociological class and not as a concept that Americans have and can have intuitions on.
Not sure whether this addresses your point or ignores it, but lot of generalization people make become much more true if you prepend them with "terminally online [group] within a couple of degrees of separation of my cluster".
I think this might be an "everyone" thing and that rationalists may be less vulnerable to that but still vulnerable. It might also be that some things are very hard to define and when you try to go into them you're just zooming into a fractal.
It was Scott I think that had something about when you replace black and white by shades of gray, sometimes you go from two categories to just one and lose predictive power. I may be misremembering. But as an example, someone that self-identifies as a "nerd" can give you a better idea of how they lived their childhood/adolescence, more than just knowing it's a person. Same thing for leftist and rightist. I feel like there's a shared assumption that statistics work but also that people are individuals and multifaceted.
> It was Scott I think that had something about when you replace black and white by shades of gray, sometimes you go from two categories to just one and lose predictive power.
That's a valid point and I see it. But for one thing I wish there was more self-aware acknowledgement that simplifications are being done, to avoid slipping into bad thought patterns that take the simplifications as fact. And for another, I'm not sure the possible gain in ability to talk about vague concepts is worth the harm from both confused collectivist thinking and from manipulation. The collapsing of people into categories is a tool of extremists everywhere, and it's particularly one of the most insidious things about woke people, in my opinion, the way they bully people who agree with them on one thing to support other things that have nothing whatsoever to do with the first thing. And this is basically only made at all possible by using vague and totalising categories like "left" or "progressive" to artificially string unrelated and often outright contradictory positions together.
Dropping the categories entirely would make that difficult, wouldn't it?
Are you sure rationalists haven't checked these at all, or have you just not found where they did it? "I can tolerate anything but the out group" (SSC post) does some examination on 3 and sort of 1, I've seen the argument made in 2 made via graphs and statistics, etc
Sometimes, yes, but most of the time they're assumed not by citing something or saying "this has been established previously", but just assumed in a way that comes across as "everyone knows".
I've read the Outgroup essay quite a few times and remember stuff about partisan *loyalties* but not actual clusters of positions. I think I've seen things like most people disagree with many or most of the positions of their party, even as they're loyal to it.
As for 1 are you referring to the Jewish sterotypes thing?
Release from Deception is an astonishing Baroque statue. How can that extremely realistic fishing net be made from marble? I think the total effect is kind of cluttered with so many symbols, but the details are *so* good.
It's also an allegorical statue, but the allegory isn't completely clear. Is it escaping from illusion, or escaping from sin?
To my mind, the most interesting thing symbolically is that getting out of the net takes initiative from the man and also help from the angel.
There's the obvious point that it's about escape from illusion, but the statue itself is an incredible illusion.
I thought there would be more about this online, but I haven't found it. Surely there's an academic identifying the exact kind of fishing net. Spanish? Italian? Has anyone tried replicating the net in rope?
This is genuinely weird-- an astronomical/astrological/symbolic analysis attempting to demonstrate (I think) that knowledge of the heavens is more important than earthly life. It gets into detail about oddities of the biblical references in the book (also carved from marble) at the bottom, and details about references to the time of year and which constellations are visible when, and the symbolic importance of constellations being visible from one hemisphere at a time.
Mostly about Raimundo di Sangro, who commissioned this, the chapel it's in and which also has a number of other virtuoso sculptures. He was also interested in quipu, Incan knotted rope recirds.
There's somewhat about Cesare Ripa's Iconologia, a handbook of signs, symbols, and allegorical images.
He built a chapel, but it was more of an Enlightenment chapel than a Catholic chapel. Or at least a mixture, neither fully Catholic (though not in any sense anti-Catholic) nor exactly pure Enlightenment. Every now and then you get a rich person who does something uniquely interesting.
Amazing statue! Is it made from one piece of marble? Unbelievable that it's even possible to create the body of the subject underneath the net, which must be very fragile.
I do know some things about rope and knots though.
The net in the statue is made from a right-hand laid three-strand rope, which doesn't narrow anything down very much as this was the dominant rope construction for basically all time up until the 50ies/60ies/70ies, when braided rope slowly started taking over. Braided rope is used in almost all serious use-cases nowadays, but laid rope is still cheaper and universally available, and often used for ornamental purposes. Knitting yarn and sewing thread is still laid. I had to dig deep to find some for the picture :)
The net is constructed from rows of Sheet-Bends (also known as Bowline, Weavers Knot, Becket Hitch or many other names depending on context and region). The rows alternate, one row displaying the front of the knot, the next showing the backside. The knots are all the same chirality, implying that the tyer is right-handed (or left-handed but learned to tie the knot in the typically right-handed fashion), and upon completing a row turned the net over and kept tying the knot with the same hand-movement, rather than letting the net stay still, and tying the knots differently on the new row going the other direction (in that case it seems more likely that the tyer would ty the knots with the front pointing in the same direction, but opposite chirality. The hand-movements are more smilar that way.). This in turns implies that the net is small enough to be readily handled, such that it is easier to turn the net over than to switch method. But it is readily possible to ty the knot in any orientation and/or chirality, so the above doesn't apply to a skilled tyer with a specific result in mind.
This is all the information I'm able to glean from the pictures, and unfortunately this doesn't narrow things down much: The same rope-construction and knots have been used for thousands of years across the globe to make nets. I've personally seen fishermen (and fisherwomen, though more commonly a fisherman's wife or daughter) sitting on the dock repairing nets of this same description in places as disparate as Norway, Trinidad & Tobago, Scotland, Portugal, Cape Town, northern Sweden, British Columbia, Spain, Greenland, New Zealand etc, etc, etc.
It's simply the easiest and best way to make a net, from the most basic type of rope. Take a close look at whatever net you see next: It is quite likely to have the same construction, though most modern nets are woven by machines, and do more and more use other techniques impractical to use by hand.
Not an unreasonable assumption at all, and I'm sure there are places that do it differently. Knot-tying is rather unique among crafts in that it is mathematically precise, as a knot consisting of a certain set of under-over crossings can only be exactly one shape, and there is a finite number of simple knots for accomplishing any given task. Hence the mathematical field of Knot Theory. Compare and contrast to pottery, or indeed statue-sculpting, or most other crafts, where you can never re-create exactly the same piece twice. This means that there often is one, and exactly one, best knot for a given situation, and also means that the same set of simple, useful knots have been discovered independently by many cultures all across the globe. Knots can of course become infinitely complex, and for traditions of complex knot-tying, like Crochet, complicated knitting patterns, the more decorative traditions of seamen, etc, we do find distinct traditions and methods that can be traced back. But not, typically, for tying fishing nets.
Another craft that is not mathematically precise like that is rope-making: If there was a sample of the actual rope, a competent archeologist could probably tell you more. Can it be carbon-dated? How was the fibers prepared for rope-making? Is it made from sisal, hemp, cotton or something more exotic? Etc.
Thanks for inspiring me to dig into this! I'd love to answer questions, though any expertise I posses that's relevant here only extends to ropes, lines and general seamanship.
Okay, your astronomy person is wrong when she gabbles "There is no book in the Bible called Sophia". Well no, there's not, because that is translated "Wisdom" and is the Book of the Wisdom of Solomon. It's included in the Catholic canon of the Old Testament and relegated to the Apocrypha by the Protestants. Stop trying to do "Aha I have found Secret Mystic Divine Feminine Freemason Wicca Hidden References" *before* you've done your basic homework?
For Catholics, even 18th century Freemason Catholics, there's nothing of "oddities of the Biblical references" in referencing the Book of Wisdom because, duh, we're not Protestants and don't usually follow their re-ordering of the Bible.
Also, she's confusing the three separate references into one, when she's doing the translation from Latin to English:
(1) "Vincula tua disrumpum/I will break your bonds" corresponds to Nahum 1:13 "13 For now will I break his yoke from off thee, and will burst thy bonds in sunder."
(2) "Vinculas tenebrarum et longae noctis quibus es compeditus"/The chains of darkness and long nights with which you are bound then goes along with Wisdom 22: 2 EXCEPT this is the interesting one, there aren't 22 chapters in Wisdom; if we go for Wisdom 2:22 instead we get "And they knew not the secrets of God, nor hoped for the wages of justice, nor esteemed the honour of holy souls."
The correct reference is Wisdom 17: 2 "2 For while the wicked thought to be able to have dominion over the holy nation, they themselves being fettered with the bonds of darkness, and a long night, shut up in their houses, lay there exiled from the eternal providence." (Thanks to this website for putting me on the right track: https://aleteia.org/2024/03/16/astonishingly-beautiful-sculpture-rich-with-scriptural-meaning/)
(3) "Ut non cum hoc mundo damneris"/That you may not be damned with this world" relates to 1: Corinthians 11: 32 "32 But when we are judged by the Lord, we are disciplined so that we may not be condemned along with the world."
So I'm not very impressed that (a) she refers the view to Nahum 1:8 when it's clearly verse 13, in order that she can crowbar in a reference to Nineveh (b) the bit about "if we reverse 'Nineveh' that gives us 'in heaven'" - oh boy. The people here are not speaking English, it's Latin and Italian. If we reverse Nineveh in English we get "heven-in" but I don't think that works for Italian (c) she shuffles the cards to make it "There is no book of the Bible called Wisdom" and then drags in Pistis Sophia as a red herring (d) she tries crowbarring in again the celestial rather than the terrestrial globe that is in the sculpture, all part of her "reverse it, reverse it!" to get the hidden message so she can then gallop off on her star chart mystic wisdom hoo-hah.
I think "why not both?" but mainly that this was a rich 18th century Italian politician and nobleman who had nothing better to do than Conspicuous Consumption and ordered the most up to date amazing art for his family church, pile on the impressiveness and turn it up to eleven, oh yeah here's a list of symbolism if you can include it because I want to impress my friends and more importantly my rivals with how Cultured and Erudite I am, kthxbai.
Humans are pattern matchers par excellence, so while I think there is deliberate symbolism there, I think it's also easy to get into pyramid inch territory as with the cosmic heavens lassie. See the error with the engraving being Wisdom 22 when it should be Wisdom 17, that's the kind of small mistake made by working off "the client wants this added in" and you don't check it because heck, I'm a sculptor not a clergyman, if he says this is what he wants then this is what he gets.
It's extremely impressive, the Italians were justly famous for being able to work in marble like nobody else, it's why the rich Britons took so much art and statuary home with them after the Grand Tour.
I just posted about a new macroeconomic model relating inflation and supply constraints. I interpret it as support for my interpretation of what the Fed should and largely _did_ do in response to the COVID 19 supply shock in 2021-2022. I’d be grateful for comments here or even better on the Substack itself.
I have no idea if this was covered in the rootclaim debate or elsewhere, but the NY Times has a new article up on why the virus was most likely a lab leak. It's by Alina Chan, who is a molecular biologist at Harvard/MIT's Broad Institute. Unfortunately the infographic is terrible, but there are little progress bubbles on the side and you have to scroll through them before progressing.
Rather than calling it an article, I'd call it an opinion piece by someone who is extremely biased. I didn't read the whole thing, but most of her talking points have been disproved or contradicted by other experts (over and over again). But like any good conspiracy theorist, she weaves together a stilted narrative of facts and fictions to reveal a darker truth. :-)
Counterpoint: It's absurd to take a collection of data which you _know_ has been heavily curated by an interested party who doesn't want their guilt to be established, and then use the remaining data they allowed you to have to conclude that party is not actually guilty.
As China still refuses to come clean on what exactly was going on in the Wuhan lab, all people of good faith are required to conclude that the disease leaked from the lab and act accordingly.
That's basically the thinking that led to the Iraq War in 2003. It turned out that Saddam Hussein did not, in fact, restart his WMD programs. But he didn't want inspectors to discover that fact, and the U.S. acted accordingly.
Maybe waiting to find a smoking gun - whether in favor of lab leak or in favor of animal spillover - makes more sense that making decisions based off incomplete information.
Or, even better, maybe we just use this as an opportunity to increase lab safety, whether it came from an animal spillover or not?
The thing is, WMDs were just rhetoric -- the point was a neoconservative theory that if a democratic state was implanted in the Arab Middle East that would fix terrorism, and the WMD threat was just the excuse to do it. (to say it out loud, of course the theory didn't work out!)
Anyway I'm totally fine with increasing lab safety, but I'm not fine with just blindly accepting a curated narrative from known bad actors as so many want to do.
So why would Saddam Hussein not let UN inspectors look wherever they wanted, if he actually didn't have secret chemical weapons facilities?
The people at the time reasoned that, as Iraq refuses to come clean about its chemical weapons facilities, all people of good faith are required to conclude that he's hiding secret chemical weapon production and act accordingly.
But hey, maybe George Bush and others knew better, but why would Tony Blair go along with it? He wasn't a neoconservative. I'm pretty sure his party was called "Labour", not something you often associate with reactionary conservativism.
"Neoconservative" is not in fact a synonym for "reactionary conservative"; it refers to former centrist liberals who moved to the right over national security issues. I'm wondering if you were alive back then, as this is a fairly basic point about the politics of the time.
I have to give the lab leak proponents a lot of slack. To conclude covid has a zoonotic origin requires overcoming:
A. The huge, glaring coincidence that the coronavirus breakout happened in the same city as the biggest virology lab in the eastern hemisphere, which also was studying coronaviruses.
B. There actually was a conspiracy by Fauci, the NIH, virologists et al to dismiss the possibility of lab leak because it would cause backlash to their work. And they did this before anyone could know the origin of covid.
C. The most compelling evidence in favor of zoonosis is predicated on understanding very high level genetic engineering and virology knowledge, which practically no one is capable of evaluating on their own. So they have to decide which experts to believe, and this goes back to B where a lot of these people lied about the whole issue to begin with.
So yes, at this point it seems pretty certain covid was zoonotic. But there are a lot of reasonable ways people would reach the other conclusion. I really disliked the substack article from the links post, because the intro was just a screed of "how dare you people not believe the science." Which would persuade precisely no one who was leaning lab leak already, and indeed turned off a lot of people in the links thread who otherwise would have learned something. And the guy had a great scientific article explaining the genetic legacy of covid.
Has the zoonotic source of the virus been identified? Wikipedia sez: "No natural reservoir for SARS-CoV-2 has been identified." - but they could be wrong.
If your most compelling evidence "is predicated on understanding very high level genetic engineering and virology knowledge", then I respectfully suggest it may be in the same class as the very sophisticated philosophical arguments for the existence of God.
One of these things is not like the other. There is a wide array of evidence in favor of zoonosis. Read the Philip Markolin article from the May links post. It's just that I would need to be a geneticist/virologist to independently evaluate everything he presented. Philosophy is not the same as viral recombination overwhelmingly targeting the spike protein for adaptive benefit.
There has also never been a virus identified that the WIV could tack a furin cleavage site onto to create covid. The balance of all the other evidence is in favor of zoonosis. But you don't have to take my word for it, Scott has given you the rootclaim debate and the article from the links.
(After I wrote this response, I realized that I sounded like I was arguing with *you* specifically, Rothwed. My apologies if it came off as if I were attacking your position. I wasn't. The *you* in my response is addressed to any leaker-readers of my post.)
Yes, Wuhan is the home of the WIV, but Wuhan is also the hub of the farmed "wild" animal trade in China. Along with Guangzhou, it's one of the two top transshipment centers for exotic animal products (which has been estimated to be a $70 billion industry). Wuhan, because of its railroad (and now highway) links is the top transshipment point for these products within China — and it's a key industry of Hubei province. (Guangzhou is important in the trade as well, but it's primarily an entrepot for exports and imports of wild animal products).
Within walking distance of Huanan Market, there are commercial abattoirs and meat packing operations, cold storage facilities, plus HQs and offices for corporations involved in the business. When considering the likelihood of an outbreak, Wuhan's leading role in the exotic animal/CTM trade should be factored into the equation, don't you think?
Also, the initial cases were clustered around Huanan wet market district. WIV is on the east side of the Yangtze River and the Huanan Market is on the other side of the river — about 8 miles away as the Horseshoe Bat flies. There were no cases on the WIV side of the river until 2 weeks into the outbreak. If the outbreak were from the lab, you'd expect the cases to be clustered around the homes of the WIV workers, wouldn't you? Of course, a WIV worker could have visited the Huanan Market and spread it there, but then we encounter another problem with that theory...
PCR analysis of the viral samples taken from patients between Dec 2019 and Feb 2020 shows that there were two variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus circulating in the Wuhan area by early December: Type A and Type B. And patients were getting ill with both types in early December. The best estimates suggest that Type B diverged from Type A some time mid-October. So the virus was circulating and happily mutating somewhere — but people weren't getting sick — which suggests to me that it was circulating in an animal population rather than a human population. The first *verified* patient who was subsequently diagnosed with COVID-19 showed up at a Wuhan hospital with unusual pneumonia-like symptoms on 1 Dec 2019 (and this was NOT the mythical lab worker patient, BTW).
So, if you think the lab leak happened, give me an approximate week when you think it was released from the lab and make it work within the context of the genome data for the A and B strains, and the time when people started showing up at hospitals. Both the A and B strains would have to have been leaked from WIV at the same time. Although it's been shown that immune-compromised people can be infected with multiple variants, I don't know of any case histories where a healthy person has been infected with two vars. Even if WIV had multiple strains of SARS2 in their facility what's the likelihood that a lab accident would leak two strains at the same time? The only other explanation is that a worker or workers within the WIV purposely released two variants on their own population (this was Mike Pompeo's crackpot idea that the Murdoch media echoed). Why not release it in Taiwan or on the running dog Americans?
I could go on. But the facts fit a zoonotic origin better than they do a WIV origen.
"Yes, Wuhan is the home of the WIV, but Wuhan is also the hub of the farmed "wild" animal trade in China."
Do you have a source for this? When I looked into the issue 2-3 years ago, I didn't see anything about Wuhan being any sort of hub. Admittedly, I was looking at the actual wild animal trade rather than the farmed "wild" animal trade, but I think it's pretty clear that the ultimate origin story for COVID is with animals that were never farmed. If there is an intermediate, farmed host, that adds another necessary coincidence to the zoonotic hypothesis.
But if Wuhan is indeed a farmed-weird-animal hub, then we're adding one coincidence but maybe taking back half a coincidence.
Well, you've stumped me! I can no longer find the link for the factoid that Wuhan (and Guangzhou) are the two biggest cities involved in China's wild animal trade. I didn't start keeping a list of COVID/SARS2 links and notes until March 2020 — but I remember reading that after the Huanan wet market became the focus as the source of the SARS2 outbreak (Feb 2020?). I vaguely remember that it may have an Economist article, but I'm not finding it with Google. Damn. That's so frustrating!
But Hubei is like the Kansas of China. Lots of domestic and wild animal husbandry. And Wuhan is the capital and the shipping hub for Hubei.
According to Al Jazeera
"One area of Western Hubei alone was home to 290 farms with between 450,000 and 780,000 wild captive-bred animals at the start of the outbreak, according to several official government notices issued early in 2020."
If you go to Google Maps and type in "meat packing plants near Wuhan Hubei China" or "meat processing plants near Wuhan Hubei China" you get a big cluster around the district where the Huanan Market is located. I recall there were more at the beginning of the pandemic, though (suggesting that Hubei's crackdown on the wild animal trade may have worked). Some of these are retail outlets, but put in more food-related search terms and you'll see that the west side of the river has lots agriculture-related businesses.
When the possible raccoon dog connection was raised, I did look into that and found that indeed it was farms in Hubei that were shipping raccoon dogs to Wuhan. I didn't see anything about Wuhan being a transshipment point for more distant sales, but I wasn't looking for that and it is certainly plausible.
For the true wild animal trade, as opposed to the farmed exotic animal trade, everything I found pointed to Guangzhou as the hub.
It is I believe reasonably well established that the ultimate origin of SARS CoV-2 was in wild bats in the vicinity of Laos or Hunnan. If the proximal origin is raccoon dogs from a farm in Hubei, then there would need to be a mechanism for getting the virus from infected wild bats near the border to the farm in Hubei that was supplying raccoon dogs to Wuhan's local market. Which is certainly possible, but "why that farm and no place else that we've found?" is a coincidence of the same order as "why Wuhan and not some other city first?"
So all hypotheses still depend on a really weird coincidence. Why, if it's zoonotic, did it make a beeline for the one city in China (or the one farm supplying that city) where it would be seen as a lab leak? Why, if it's artificial, did it make a beeline for the one market in Wuhan where it would be seen as zoonotic?
It was easier when we could believe that people in Hunnan province were shipping sick bats directly to the Wuhan wet market to sell to local bat-meat fanciers, but I think that's pretty much ruled out at this point.
One thing that I haven't seen (although I haven't been thorough) from the pro-zoonotic side is an explanation of how the clustering around the wet market matters. Because if I recall correctly, the sequence was that first the virus was assumed to originate from the wet market, and then testing was only done on reports with a connection to the wet market, leading to a very natural clustering of positive results around the wet market. (And it's not like the lab-leak hypothesis is incompatible with the wet market being the first major location of human-to-human transmission.)
Is there a good place that deals with this? There's so much noise in the argument space, and I'm only asking because it sounds like you're relatively familiar with it.
Good question! My understanding is that the samples were taken from hospitalized patients, and contact tracing linked all the initial cases back to the Huanan Market. Michael Worobey has a good writeup. Interesting, though — patient zero had no contact with the market. I misremembered that fact.
It looks like the response is that, because the next four cases were all in employees of the market, the subsequent investigation was limited to people who had a known connection to the market. I'm not blaming the initial investigation; it does make sense: if you've got a hot lead, and limited resources, and are trying to find out if you've got a pandemic on your hands, this seems like the thing to do. And it did indeed give them the correct answer. (I do blame whoever decided to add the market connection as part of the diagnostic criteria, because that messed up the data for months afterward.) But - assuming that this is what happened, and not a misunderstanding or mistranslation or something - I think the initial location data probably can't support the HSM as the single obvious first location, and so all of the discussion of animal sourcing etc. become much less important. (Although of course the HSM was probably *an* early location; wet markets in general seem to be great places to spread this sort of disease.)
Here's the chain I used to get that, in case that helps you respond (if you feel like responding):
> On December 29, 2019, a hospital in Wuhan admitted four individuals with pneumonia and recognized that all four had worked in the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, which sells live poultry, aquatic products, and several kinds of wild animals to the public. The hospital reported this occurrence to the local center for disease control (CDC), which lead Wuhan CDC staff to initiate a field investigation with a retrospective search for pneumonia patients potentially linked to the market. The investigators found additional patients linked to the market, and on December 30, health authorities from Hubei Province reported this cluster to China CDC. The following day, China CDC sent experts to Wuhan to support the investigation and control effort. Samples from these patients were obtained for laboratory analyses.
I'm generally more optimistic about the biological details of the virus being useful to narrow down the origin: things like the distribution of early variants, the furin cleavage site, the location of related viruses, and whatever signatures happen when a virus has been repeatedly cultured in a lab outside of animal hosts. Plus things like excess death rates in previous months, and whatever our predictions are of the virus' mutation rate as it evolves to become more contagious in humans. And I have no idea how all of that pans out.
It just worries me a lot when I see what looks to me like a major problem with some data, and one side appears to ignore it, you know?
My half-baked take was that it was possible for some sort of lab leak to have infected an animal in the Wuhan area, then some sort of transfer to humans happened some time afterwards.
I don't know if it's possible to falsify that one, without knowing every kind of virus that was investigated in the lab, during the calendar years 2018-2019.
What kind of time-scale would lead to the A/B variants differentiating in the wild around Wuhan in October?
A is older than B. A could have been around longer than October. But B was more infectious than A, and it pushed A aside in the first few months of the pandemic. However, the earliest infections on the US West Coast were of the original Type A variant. Then B swept through. But if A leaked to farmed wild animals from WIV or another Chinese lab that was working with CoVs (and there was one in Guangzhou and another in Beijing that worked with those viruses — as well as few US labs), how did the lab get a hold of it in the first place? Of course, the WIV teams had been sampling bats for Coronaviruses (and other viruses) for the past decade. Although some of the CoVs in the officially recorded samples from bats had the signature SARS-CoV-2 Furin Cleavage Sites (that made it hyper-infective), the rest of their genome wasn't a very good match for SARS-CoV-2 — and parts of their genome were so substantially different that it would be hard to use GoF techniques to yield SARS2 Type A (at least according to some virologists I've corresponded with).
Later on, a close match was found in SE Asia (Laos IIRC). But the Chinese import (mostly illegally) all sorts of wild animals from SE Asia, India, and Africa. I guess the question is: if the type A progenitor was brought in from SE Asia, is it more likely that it would end up at WIV (and not be recorded) and then subsequently have been leaked — or is it more likely to have infected some of farmed wild animals that came in contact with the animal or human carrying it? Fewer intermediate steps in the latter scenario.
Also, it's worth noting that Furin Cleavage Sites (FCS) are found in other viruses, included SARS-CoV-1 and MERS-CoV, but they utilize a different amino acid sequence from SARS2 (PRRA instead of RRAR). And up until the pandemic, the kinetic models didn't suggest RRAR would be particularly useful for infecting humans — but it turned out that that was what made SARS-CoV-2 highly infectious (so much for models). So if the Type A were created in the lab, they'd probably try to run a GoF on SARS-CoV-1 or MERS-CoV virus with PRRA FCS instead of a RRAR FCS to make it more infectious. Unless the mad scientist in Wuhan (or Fort Detrick as the case may be) knew something that the rest of virology community didn't know at the time.
And to answer your question, our experience with the SARS2 has shown that it mutates quite quickly. So the progenitor for Type A may have only been around for a month or two before it mutated into Type A. And if Type A were more infectious than the progenitor, it would've outcompeted the progenitor pretty quickly. Unless, of course, the progenitor and or type A were stored in freezers somewhere. But again we have the flaky WIV database (which I understand to have been nothing more than a big Excel spreadsheet), and there's no evidence of a type A being logged in that database. Of course, it was taken off-line in September 2019. So the conspiracy minded among us suggest that they had acquired the progenitor and/or Type A and were covering it up. But at that point the models didn't suggest it would be very infectious. So why cover it up?
The Chinese version of the conspiracy is much funnier, where covid came from Fort Detrick. I wonder what kind of crackpot theories they came up with to explain that one.
Initially, the Chinese were open about sharing their data with us. They were the first to sequence the virus, and they sent its genome to the CDC almost immediately upon sequencing. The Chinese clammed up and stopped cooperating once US officials began to claim that SARS2 resulted from a biowarfare program. What surprises me is how most of us in the US can't understand why China would *ever* be suspicious of US motives!
People also complain that they cleaned up the wet market and destroyed evidence. But Chairman Xi had just fired the mayor of Wuhan for his incompetence in handling the initial outbreak. I don't know if the mayor got *maximally* fired, or whether he was allowed to retire alive (AFAIK he never went on trial). Xi's chosen troubleshooter (whose name escapes me at the moment) had arrived on the scene with orders to get the situation under control. The Chinese believed the virus originated in the Huanan wet market, and that the market and the animals in the market were a public health threat. Yup, it got sterilized! — *fast* and *thoroughly*! — because Xi's chosen fixer was on the scene, and the Chairman was watching. I doubt if any of the local public health officials nor the WIV crew were asked for input because the Chinese are very hierarchical culture and orders is orders. In the meantime, China continued to share data with the WHO and the US CDC up until the virus became a political football for the US Right. And let's not forget that the lab leak was initially a conspiracy theory dreamed up by rightwing crackpots. I wrote a timeline on Twitter (link) below. Here's the narrative without the graphics and links.
1. <Intro to the thread with a snarky comment about Trump's pandemic actions> Here's the timeline:
2. The wet markets origin of a novel Coronavirus was being discussed by mid Jan. But the earliest US media reference I can find is an NPR story dated 22 Jan 2020...
3. On 26 Jan 2020 the Washington Times, a newspaper owned by News World Communications, a Rev. Sun Myung Moon organization, published this story: “Coronavirus may have originated in lab linked to China's biowarfare program." It immediately gets picked up by global media.
4. 31 Jan 2020: Pradhan et al published a paper implying that HIV genes had been spliced into the virus. This got lots of media play until other scientists pointed out that these gene sequences are found in lots of non-HIV viruses.
5. 1 Feb 2020: Anthony Fauci sends out an email to call a meeting of senior scientists after he has a phone call with Kristian Andersen. Andersen had raised some concerns that some features of the virus may indicate lab origins...
6. The meeting happens 2 Feb 2020 between Andersen and key players. Here are the notes (graphic attached in the Twitter thread). Andersen's concerns were addressed, and the lab leak origin is shot down (at least on the basis of some of the unique features of the SARS2 virus).
7. I'm not sure if Andersen was fully convinced of a natural origin at that point (but he later claimed he was). But on 17 Feb he submitted a preprint of "The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2" where he stated "the virus is not a laboratory product". Revised and published 17 March 2020
8. 15 Feb 2020: Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark. makes the claim on Fox News Sunday Morning program that SARS2 was a Chinese biowarfare weapon that leaked from the lab. That gets lots of MSM attention.
9. 17 Feb 2020: Richard Ebright and others push back on Cotton's claims in the Washington Post. This is interesting because Ebright later became one of the most vocal lab leak proponents. But at this time he was in the zoonotic origins camp.
10. 19 Feb 2020: 27 scientists publish a statement in The Lancet to "condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin". They write that data overwhelmingly shows the "coronavirus originated in wildlife."
11. Later it comes out that Daszak organized this letter. Daszak is accused of a conflict of interest in doing so because his EcoHealth Alliance had procured grants for the Wuhan Institute of Virology in the past — but the proposals submitted to NIH and DoD for GoF experiments with wild viruses were never funded BTW.
12. 16 April 2020: CNN reports US officials are investigating claim the virus was released from the lab accidentally as scientists were studying infectious diseases (in that story intelligence officials said they didn't believe the virus is man-made or developed as a bioweapon.)
13. 16 April 2020: Fox News claims "patient zero" worked at the laboratory. The lab employee was accidentally infected before spreading the disease across Wuhan. When asked about this, President Trump says: "more and more we're hearing the story".
Note: This patient zero was never identified BTW, but the first known patient to be hospitalized with COVID was a middle-aged man who didn't work for WIV. He died.
14. 21 April 2020. Trump gets more questions and says the theory "makes sense." Fauci pushes back. Tom Cotton writes an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, writing: "While the Chinese government denies the possibility of a lab leak, its actions tell a different story."
15. 1 May 2020: NYTimes reports that Mike Pompeo directed intelligence agencies to continue to look for lab leak evidence.
Some Trump Officials Take Harder Actions on China During Pandemic.
"Since the coronavirus spread from a metropolis on the Yangtze River across the globe, hard-liners in both Washington and Beijing have accelerated efforts to decouple elements of the relationship."
Note: I think it was about then that China started counterclaiming that is was released from USAMRIID in Fort Detrick, MD.
16. 1 May 2020: The same day CNN reports that Trump said he's seen evidence of a lab leak.
"Trump contradicts US intel community by claiming he’s seen evidence coronavirus originated in Chinese lab"
17. In conclusion, the lab leak theory started as a crackpot idea cooked up by the right-wing Moonie-funded, Washington Times. Sen. Tom Cotton amplified it, and within 3 months President Trump went from we don't know to claiming he's seen evidence of a lab leak.
Note: the US intelligence community has never released their lab leak evidence for public consumption. The Chinese are accused of being secretive, but why is the US Intel community so secretive? — especially since it would shed light on the origins of a pathogen that killed over 1.2 million Americans. Ironies abound!
The substack article, which I believe is from Philipp Markolin, was excellent if assessed on technical accuracy and relevance but because of the many snarks and constant condescension would convince no-one that is not already somewhat knowledgeable.
So I had a memorable argument the other day that, I think, perfectly encapsulates pretty much everything one needs to know about the rationalist/EA mentality:
I was recently selling a motorcycle (Edit: Ninja 650, in case you're curious..)
I listed it for price £P, but was offered price £LP, which I considered an unfair lowball price. I confided in this to a friend (and fellow biker) and she agreed that £LP was an insultingly low price for the bike. A few weeks later it hadn't sold and my friend offered to buy it from me - for price £LP!
Needless-to-say this caused a somewhat angry heated debate, with on my side, "But you have previously agreed that £LP is an unfair insulting lowball price!" and on her side, "But the etiquette amongst motorcyclists is to offer friends a steep discount and if that means you have to sell at a lowball price then 𝑛𝑜𝑏𝑙𝑒𝑠𝑠𝑒 𝑏𝑙𝑜𝑜𝑑𝑦 𝑜𝑏𝑙𝑖𝑔𝑒!"
During this argument, we sort-of managed to simultaneously talk one another around to each other's points of view, such that eventually she was offering price £P, but I wouldn't accept more than price £LP. The argument continued.
Eventually, we hit upon the idea that the transaction would work as follows:
1) She would pay me price £LP and I would give her the bike
2) She would donate the difference £P-£LP to charity
3) Then, she could think to herself that she'd paid £LP for the bike and donated £P-LP to charity because she's a jolly nice person
4) Meanwhile, I can think to myself that I'd recieved £P for the bike and then had myself donated £P-£LP to charity because *I'm* the jolly nice person
This resolved the argument; we both agreed it felt totally fair in that we both lose-out slightly as penance for being so mercenary about the whole thing (ie. she has to pay the whole of £P but I only get to recieve £LP) but charity benefits by a not-insubstantial amount. Chalk up a rat/EA win!
Ten minutes later: we're embroiled in an angry heated argument about precisely which charity it would be most effective to donate to.
> "But the etiquette [...] is to offer friends a steep discount [...]"
I never understood this argument (in any context, not just motorcycles).
On one hand the seller should be willing to go for less, because of friendship. On the other hand the buyer should be willing to pay for more, because of friendship. Both should cancel each other out, and the stranger-price would be the same as the friendship-price.
A big exception would be when I sell stuff to friends, that I probably wouldn't try sell to a stranger in the first place. Then I usually go for 50% of the stranger-price. This way I make a profit of 50% over my default of "maybe not selling it, and eventually throwing it in the trash", and the friend makes a profit of 50% over "buying it from a stranger and maybe getting ripped-off". (The last time I did this was for a used phone, valued around 100€ at the time.)
Personally I prefer to buy from friends (for the stranger price), because I usually get better service from them, so there is more value for me in it.
I totally get what you mean, but around here motorcycle sales these days are generally pretty slow. That same friend took three months to sell one of her bikes for a fairly reasonable asking price; I've known other people take several months to sell their machines, and if you browse the motorcycle classified ads you often see the same bikes listed at not-outrageous prices for a month or two before they seem to shift.
(It's very different to how motorcycle sales used to be, I know! I think the proliferation of crappy-but-superficially-tempting "50p per month then £10,000 in five years' time" PCP finance deals has kinda tanked the second-hand market..)
I thought I’d mention my latest podcast. The first (and only) hanging of an Anglican bishop for the crime of sodomy took place in Dublin in 1640.
Perhaps it would be more famous but a major Catholic rebellion and the English civil war shortly after proved to be a distraction.
But that didn’t stop later writers claiming the real offence had been ‘uncleanness with a cow’. (Probably false though an earlier charge of incest was almost certainly true.)
And running alongside all this is the Somerset ghost of Mrs Leakey with an urgent message for the bishop.
So ghosts, sodomy, bishops and a cow. I thought it was pretty interesting and despite the lurid subject matter Peter Marshall is in fact a highly respectable historian of the English Reformation.
If this is the kind of story you like I think you’ll like this!
An amazing story, and it does sound like family blackmail gone wrong. I wonder if part of the reason Atherton had to leave Somerset was an affair with his sister-in-law Elizabeth, who later faked up the ghost of her mother-in-law to get what she felt were her rights (a necklace inherited by another sister and to get to Ireland to sort things out with Atherton, who seems to have had a taste for all the daughters of that family given that he was accused of an affair with yet another sister).
He seems to have been a guy who had a great talent for making enemies, particularly since he was land-grabbing for the Protestant Church. His patron Strafford's own downfall probably left him with no protection and that was the end for him.
It's odd that they used the sodomy law to get him (and his proctor as collateral damage) rather than accusations of malfeasance or the affair with his sister-in-law, but maybe he really was having sex with men. Or maybe they thought it was poetic justice to have him condemned under the law he had pushed to be adopted:
"After the Buggery Act 1533 was found in 1631 during the Mervyn Tuchet, 2nd Earl of Castlehaven case, to not apply to Ireland, Atherton pushed for the enactment of "An Act for the Punishment for the Vice of Buggery" in 1634".
Marshall doesn’t think it is true that Atherton pushed for the law so I’m not sure. My pet theory is she invented the ghost as an excuse to get the gold chain and to visit Ireland to blackmail her brother in law. It seems she and her husband (who seems to have kept well clear of the ghost business) certainly needed the money.
It definitely sounds like a ruse to get money. If the modern version of the legend is that the ghost sank the ships of her son, then probably he was in financial trouble at the time after her death, and if they were disputing with the other family members over inheritance, then the allegedly strong-minded wife faking the mother's ghost to guilt them into handing over what she felt she was owed sounds feasible.
If Atherton had been involved with her, or if she simply knew that he was having an affair with the other sister, then heading off to Ireland to blackmail him now that he was in a lucrative position would also be a fix for the money troubles.
The sodomy accusation, as I say, sounds odd to take against him, his patron was in deep trouble at the same time having fallen out of political favour, so it surely would have been easier to have him entangled in the same kind of trouble? So maybe there really was some kind of same-sex affair going on?
I think the sodomy accusation is likely true but the bizarre thing is that his servant was his accuser and the other party to the offence. So he was (inevitably) hanged as well. Some people think it was a false allegation and they tricked the servant by saying he’d be let off somehow. Nope.
Interesting! So maybe they got the servant on the charge, and promised him a deal that if he accused Atherton, he'd be spared? Didn't work out that way, though.
At this remove, it's hard to say if it was legitimate or what the motives were behind the charge.
Benvenuto Cellini's autobiography relates the story of him being accused of (heterosexual) sodomy in France. It sounds like Cellini regularly had sex with his female models, but he denied this in particular: she withdrew her testimony when he pointed out that sodomy was criminal for *both* parties. Of course, Cellini is not what I would call a reliable source, so make of it what you will.
Delightfully, my translation would only print the name of the crime in a footnote in untranslated Italian, not that the English equivalent is hard to figure out. Would you want your daughter or your servant reading that?
More likely it is transforming towards a bipolar world order, with the Status Quo Coalition (USA, EU, Japan, etc) goes up against Team Autobalance (currently, roughly: China, DPRK, Russia, Iran, Syria). Even Team Autobalance is only mildly expansionist compared to the world of globe-spanning empires.
It'll go back to the Cold War equilibrium. Anyone who has a superpower ally can do as they please, unless and until they get defeated (usually by the ally of another superpower). To the extent your conduct is constrained at all, it's constrained by 1) the possibility of defeat, and 2) bad press.
Scott, I have posted this before, but assume you haven't seen it. In the book reviewing contest, there are two reviews of "Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will - Review 1". But the voting form only has one entry for that book.
I've really been enjoying Unsong! I'd never read it before because I wanted to wait for the book version and it's been well worth it.
Horrific puns, but why would a loving god permit any that were otherwise? Therefore puns are always terrible and also are essential to the universe, QED
What's more fun than speculating on why python has taken off as the language for AI programming? After all, it's so slow!
I've got two pet theories. One is that python, like matlab, combined slow serial code with a vectorized math library. The result was that unlike C++ or Java, beginning python programmers actually had to use the vectorized operations for pretty much all operations. As a result, all the sharp corners got rounded off of numpy, and so when GPU programming took off, python already had an idiom for programming in parallel, and a userbase that knew the idiom.
My other idea is that python shouldn't be compared to C++ serial code at all: it's actually competing with C++ template metaprogramming. Then, if python is just the metalanguage, the actual comparison to runtime C++ is any of jax, pytorch traces, z3, or even sql. Python's advantage is that if all you care about is throughput and not latency, then you really should be recompiling for each possible shape of input, to bake in metadata. Once you've committed to doing that, you might as well do your parsing in the metalanguage where memory management is easy and types are loose. In addition, the python paradigm of one metalanguage, and diverse but individually limited object languages is just better than C++'s choice of one object language, and diverse metalanguages (template metaprogramming, m4, cmake, arguably C++ as a whole is just a different metalanguage for C)
2. Scales reasonably well to tens, even hundreds of thousands of lines of code per program
3. Good metaprogramming facilities
4. Can easily call C/system calls
I don't think many other languages have these properties. Maybe Ruby. I won't be surprised if the main reason Python won over Ruby is luck.
You want all of these properties when doing AI
1. A REPL is essential when exploring data
2. AI programs can get large
3. You are not going to be able to work easily with tensors without some sort of metaprogramming, since the base language is not going to define a tensor framework for you
4. Easily calling C/system calls is essential for driving GPUs
Eh, it happened because it happened. Path-dependence. Roll back the universe back to 1980 and run it forward again, and - 100 of my money against 1 of yours - Python won't be the dominant AI language.
The "$LANGUAGE is implemented by an Interpreter and the interpreter is extremely slow, here's a low-level hacky escape hatch" general pattern exists in several languages, someone even named it: The 2-language problem [1][2], or maybe the 2-language pattern, if we would like to be charitable and call it a design pattern (and it's not the worst, Factory gets the prize).
One of the earliest still-living languages exhibiting this pattern is Objective-C, people have mocked it relentlessly with "All the performance of Smalltalk and all the elegance of C", but that's exactly the point, it's a Smalltalk-ified C, you can write the entire application in C if you want, it's a strict superset, then "gradually" convert the parts that need the elegance and power of Smalltalk into a weird Smalltalk-in-C's-skirt language. Another, as you pointed out, is Matlab, which quite literally began as a calculator, just a syntactic layer over Fortran so that you can write "A+B" instead of "Matrix_Add(A,B)"[3], the description in the source implies it was a simple lookup table from strings to subroutines.
Perl is 4 years older than Python, and written by an honest-to-god linguist who had... great ideas about programming language design, ideas so great they sound horrible, but really are unironically great. Ruby is yet another Python, late by only 4 years. TCL was invented because one guy got so bored with inventing and re-inventing "Command Languages" (in modern parlance, scripting languages that allow you to automate an application) again and again and again that he invented a language and said it should be embedded into every application [4], the same guy also wrote about "Scripting" vs "Programming"[5]. JavaScript is infamously named so because some people had the bright idea to "script" Java objects - conceived of at the time as remotely-running independent programs, in that age of CORBA and RPCs and OO craziness - so that a free-wheeling loosely-typed JS script runs on the client and orchestrates a heavyweight JVM, running as a remote process on either the server or the client, or as an embedded applet, perhaps [6]. Emacs is - famously - architected as a small C core enough to implement low-level text-editing and the Elisp interpreter, and then a tower of Elisp above that core.
Etc etc etc..., it's a famous pattern. It's also not without tradeoffs, there is a reason people call it the 2-languages *Problem*, the impedance-mismatch is real. It's a new path, different than either writing the application in pure X or pure Y alone, and it presents a new set of tradeoffs, and combines varying subsets of the 2 paths' advantages and disadvantages. Most importantly, it's not unique to Python. Not at all.
------
I can't see how the second pet theory is really all that different than the first, except that you formalize the notion of external Libraries and Frameworks as separate languages, and mention the role of runtime parsing and compilation (although I can't see how metadata has anything to do with it? Which metadata? Python's? Those are notoriously useless and space-heavy, I don't think I recall ever seeing them used for optimization). But again, that's not unique to Python at all, arguably the most "Polyglot" language environment in existence is the shell: if "Here's a dynamic and 'muddy' environment that you can escape to a more performant but 'rigid' infrastructure layer" is the secret sauce that made Python to rule the world, Unix shells would have ruled it before Python by 20 or 25 years at least. The JVM and the CLR are 2 attempts that tried to replicate the "Common infrastructure, different languages" paradigm approach outside of Unix, and Java is **still** going at it, see GraalVM, the latest attempt, the "VM to rule them all". It enables seamless polyglot interoperability, Java and Ruby and JS programs all mushed together as the same syntax tree and optimized at runtime using cutting-edge Partial Evaluation. Again, still not enough for AI dominance.
If you put a gun to my head and demanded that I must produce answers, I would say that it's a combination of enough right decisions unintentionally taken by Python, and enough wrong turns unintentionally not taken by Python but taken by its competitors, along with some serious marketing and a whole truckload of luck and random seed magic.
(1) Perl, the Dominant Patriarch, the granddaddy of all dynamic-ness, languished in the mid-2000s due to the disastrous decision to split the community between Perl 5 and Perl 6. Perl 6 - Raku - is to this day one of the most beautiful and shockingly original programming languages I have ever seen in my life, but it doesn't matter because nobody uses it. Perl 5 is still going strong by sheer "Fuck You I WILL live" inertia of being installed on every Unix-ish system and legacy scripts, even git for windows packages it by default.
(2) Ruby massively succeeded and had people saying it's a Java-killer at some point, indeed Groovy - the JVM language used for the Gradle build system - owes its existence to Ruby's era, as the JVM ecosystem's answer to Ruby. But the problem of Ruby was a "Curse of Success"-like pattern, it was used for Rails and that's what all anybody ever remembers it for.
(3) JavaScript did rule the world, eventually, only too late. The first release of node.js was in 2009, and it was embarrassingly experimental then. By this time, Django was already released for 4 years and Numpy for 3. The head start cannot be underestimated.
(4) Last, but very much not least, the Notebook Interface was implemented for Python first. Beginning from obscure origin as the main interface of the obscenely-expensive Mathematica, some guy [7] thought it would be cool to interact with Python the same way, and thus was born the Notebook. Moreover, the notebook **Won**, marketing is important as ever. Lisp and Smalltalk fans would complain to anyone who would listen that **they** did it ***first***, all the way back in the 1970s and the 1980s, in fact Mathematica was inspired from a lisp-based computer algebra system. But it doesn't matter who did it first, it matters who makes people use their thing first.
And possibly other reasons. At some point, those reasons made N people use Python, and then person N+1 began using Python solely because all that massive N-strong audience was already using it, and then N+2 saw a massive N+1-strong audience, and so on. From then on Python will never die, only lose or gain popularity.
From an academic perspective, before deep learning took off, people at ML conferences were doing a lot of experiments using the scikit-learn library. Then when they started working with GPUs for deep learning it was just the language that everyone knew. I've never met a single person at N(eur)IPS / ICLR / ICML who wrote their experiment in C++ at any point in the past decade.
From a competition perspective, scikit-learn became the de facto standard for kaggle competitions, which mostly didn’t do any deep learning until a few years ago. But that led to a lot of open source contributions to the library, which just created a feedback loop of more and more functionality.
From an industry perspective, I don’t think it should be compared to C++ as a competitor, but rather Matlab and R. But between python, Matlab, and R, there’s only one that you’d actually want to use for production code.
A related question: How come the Julia Programming Language never took off? I think it’s the better language but it just never had the community support to make as many libraries as python. There could be other reasons I'm missing though.
I feel like it is fairly obvious. There was no other choice. If you wanted to throw together easy-to-write orchestration code that talks to high-performance math libraries at any time in the last fifteen years the choices were like: Python, Matlab, R, and, I dunno, Fortran? C++ is right out (compile times, generally difficult). Java also (compile times, verbosity, and no top-level code because everything has to live in classes). Matlab is closed-source and backwards and there are license fees. R and Fortran are old and clunky. There was no other choice than Python (and then reluctantly switching to C++ when you really needed to squeeze performance out, but at 10x the engineering effort).
Also Python is not slow? it's completely fine. Nobody should be sitting around waiting for their orchestration code to run, and all the actual math should be happening in compiled modules. It's slower than C++ at equivalent tasks, sure, but you're not using it for equivalent classes. It's instant at what it needs to be doing, and much faster to write and maintain.
Python is the "metalanguage", yes, but that's how programming always should have worked: finicky low-level memory-managing code for things that require it, higher-level abstractions for things that just have to run business logic. It is, I think, a historical accident that all programming wasn't done this way and that there is such a thing as a "pure C++ application". Also the reason why we write websites in HTML/JS and not in C++ even though the layout logic happens in C++: it's the only architecture that makes any sense. (Game developers figured it out a long time ago: write the low-level stuff in C++ and the high-level stuff in a scripting language like Lua or UnrealScript or w/e).
My understanding is that python's popularity in academia came mostly from it's price point of being free, compared to MATLAB charging whatever they wanted.
Once numpy, pandas and matplotlib all covered the basic functionality that MATLAB provided python got its foothold, and then those libraries started getting more attention and development and outpaced what MATLAB was offering.
Python does have quite a few advantages, not least that it's super quick to write and test thanks to zero compile time (jupyter notebooks are an amazing way to work with python). And, as mentioned above, anything performance dependant can just be outsourced to c, or java, or whatever is most suitable for that task.
Given Python's ability to effectively call other languages for the parts where that matters, it might overall be more efficient, once you factor in developers' time (writing the code, fixing bugs, tracking down performance, viewing your data, etc)
My pet theory is that it's just the ability to use GPUs. Python and R were running neck and neck for awhile but R doesn't really use GPUs and Python jumped on that train fast so...if a lot of the fun, cool stuff requires GPUs and R can't use GPUs...better transition to Python. I love R but I've transitioned over as...not everything requires GPUs but a strong enough core transitioned to Python that it established a firmly dominant position.
If speed mattered, I'm pretty sure we'd all just jump to Julia but that's rarely the critical thing holding back a project.
R is just an absurdly terrible language held together by kludges, it's no surprise ant feasible alternative could beat it. I've been using it professionally for two years now and I still write better and faster in python.
Sure, but python is an absurdly terribly statistics program held together by kludges. If you're coming from a stats background or an econ background, things like methods are really dumb. Everything should be functions, why would you create these weird half-baked functions tied to certain objects but not others? What is mutability and why are some things mutable and others aren't. Just deepcopy everything. Yeah, plotly is fine knockoff but ggplot is just better.
That was always the core differentiator: R was a stats program with a half-baked programming language bolted on and python is a programming language with a half-baked stats program bolted on. It makes sense that Python won but R code is just...a better symbolic representation of stats.
> a working GPS-based version of the automated land acknowledger
I find it pretty funny how chuddy the thing would be if you brought it to Europe, e.g. stating "this is the unceded ancestral land of the Swedish people!" sounds like it's from some "immigrants out" right-wing populist.
Parroting an observation from elsewhere, but the whole Native American thing is a little different from most of Europe. While most European land was taken by conquest and force, that's within the norms of engagement for those societies; they "ceded" it by declaring peace after a military confrontation. For the Americas, a great deal of the land was taken as a result of treaties that Colonizing Americans (for lack of a better term) then broke, making it unceded *by the colonizing party's own legal system*.
How is this different from conquest? They have very much ceded the land, to a degree that no one would find. And conquest was far from unheard of to Native Americans. Even the power differential between Europe and native Americans has been overblown (minus the disease factor). They just lost the war, as much as the Iberian caliphates did.
It seems like the appropriate response on their end would be to go back to war, then?
If they refuse to go to war against the US, then we can consider the land ceded.
edit: Also, what about the Confederacy? The Confederacy never ceded its own territory to the US (there was no official treaty, just a military surrender and a cessation of fighting) so should that be acknowledged too?
edit edit: And then of course there's the British Empire. I don't think they ever officially ceded their territorial claims to the parts of the United States that were theirs.
I mean, sure, they coud start making "This land used to be a part of the Confederate States" land acknowledgements, they'd probably just be somewhat different in form from what you might be considering here.
Is your official position that "the victor of an armed rebellion of an independence movement taking the land they lay claim to" is not part of Euro-colonial norms?
The leaders of Europe were perfectly happy to break treaties and agreements between themselves when they saw fit. The difference is that "the King says so" was baked into the legal systems of the time.
It would really struggle in most places, or simply have to run through a very long list of all the people that owned the land at some point and left without ceding it. Unless you fix some kind of arbitary date (is France the unceded land of the Gauls? The Celts? The Visigoths? The Magdalenians? The Neaderthals?) I honestly have no idea how you'd do it.
Yeah, the real world application would be pretty funny. This is the un-ceded ancestral land of the Moors - Wait, actually the Visigoths - No, the Romans - I meant the Carthaginians - Actually it was the Phoenicians - Hmm, maybe the Iberians were here first - Uh...
Honestly I find this "funny" in the same way I find Catholic sexual abuse funny, which is to say not at all. I find it enragingly hypocritical and morally abhorrent. Whether past conquests are horrifically wrong acts that need to be memorialised, or utterly irrelevant pieces of trivia not even worth mentioning (see Andrew Clough's comment) depends entirely on whether the group that suffered is convenient to your political coalition.
How is this not one of the most evil things that people do?
If people want to laugh about it I'm not objecting, but personally I can only seethe.
I vacillate between three reactions to land acknowledgements:
-- some quiet eye-rolling at one of our era's many new absurdities.
-- seething in pretty close to the specific manner that you describe.
-- a triggering of my broader depression over the intellectual condition of modern progressivism.
Which reaction hits me appears random so far as I can tell, though I suppose in reality it's probably contextual....in any case when I take a breath, land acknowledgements seem to be likely a pretty trivial annoyance in the big picture. Not one of the 10 or 20 shittiest or most depressing specific new practices in the USA today, let's say.
But that is not to dispute that they do actually pretty deeply suck in the way that you describe.
> in any case when I take a breath, land acknowledgements seem to be likely a pretty trivial annoyance in the big picture
I think it's pretty bad. It promotes "us-and-them"-ism, and teaches large groups of people that they have a grievance against other large groups of people, based on shoddy history and shoddy understanding of what ownership actually means.
"If people want to laugh about it I'm not objecting, but personally I can only seethe."
People laugh about it because it's completely meaningless. Whether it's phrased as "this is the unceded land of the Gillygooly tribe" or some other fashion, in the end it boils down to:
(1) The Gillygooly may never have officially given this land up or handed it over or traded it away. Too bad for them, we own it now and we're not handing it back or paying rent for it. However, we will open every meeting, envelope, and lunchbox with a reminder that "we took your land and you can do nothing about it, ha ha" which may be rubbing salt in the wound but hey, it makes *us* feel better, so who really cares about if it offends any remaining Gillygooly?
(2) The Gillygooly were only the last lot before us who grabbed the land off another tribe. If what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, then the Gillygooly should also be doing land acknowledgements about how they stole/conquered this land from the JimJams who took it from the Kikabriks who took it from the... and so on back to the crossing of the Bering Strait
I agree with you that land acknowledgements are steaming dung piles of hypocrisy, but they come from the "we are the right side of history" set so that makes it okay, somehow.
The Swedes were the first to live there in historical times, sure, but go back far enough and you can apologize for displacing the Ahrensburg culture or something. By historical times very few places were occupied by their original inhabitants. The most obvious exceptions being Pacific islands that actually were settled for the first time during the Polynesians.
I'm sort of curious what the box will say if you take it to, say, the Black Hills in the Dakotas. Probably "This is the unceded ancestral land of the Lakota people!" but if I were a Crow I'd be pretty upset about that since the Lakota had only conquered that land a single generation before the US kicked them off of it.
> The most obvious exceptions being Pacific islands that actually were settled for the first time during the Polynesians
But even this is taking an unreasonably outgroup-homogeneity view. Land isn't owned by entire societies, it's owned by individuals, or families, or at least institutions. This particular bit of land may have been owned by Kamanaka, who stole it from Mahanaka, whose grandfather stole it from Mo'ohoke, and so forth.
One particularly terrible thing that has happened with "land rights" movements around the world is that they've wound up giving land collectively to some group of people rather than dividing it up in a reasonable way, which prevents anyone from actually doing anything useful with the land.
The Tiwi Islands is a tropical island (well actually two islands separated by a 100m channel) the size of Puerto Rico, or ten times the size of Singapore, or one and a half times the size of nearby Bali. It has a dry monsoonal climate which would support any number of uses, and it is conveniently located just off the coast of Darwin. It's also quite beautiful with pleasant (albeit crocodile-infested) beaches. It is "collectively" owned by the 2700 Tiwi Islanders, which means that each of them should own nearly a thousand acres of land, which you'd think would make them rich as all heck. But nope, the land is owned "collectively", which means that none of them can actually make use of it.
Madagascar is another surprising example, given it's nowhere near as remote as the pacific islands. Apparently it's a bit unclear when exactly it was first settled, but it was late enough to be very much in historic times (even if the settlers themselves weren't leaving records).
And part of the same ethnolinguistic group (the Austronesians) that settled Polynesia and New Zealand in the opposite direction -- indeed the Malagasy language is more closely related to Malay or Filipino than to any language of the African mainland. Amazing navigators, the Austronesians.
> I’ll just say that first, I think he would benefit from reading about the difference between rule utilitarianism, two-level utilitarianism, and virtue ethics
I don't say this often, but Jesus fucking Christ. Surely anybody with even a passing interest in Western philosophy ought to know what rule utilitarianism is?
Yeah, that's how I feel about that "where was Hannibal from?" question, despite not even knowing/remembering what a pancreas is.
(Before seeing that result, I would probably have literally said "I'm sure the majority of people know nothing about Hannibal except that he crossed the Alps and that he was from Carthage". Whoops.)
Alps, schmalps, but I'd have thought Scott would have burned Carthage into the public consciousness. Ridley Scott, that is: https://youtu.be/SMwXgcRyH0I
They could know what rule utilitarianism is but assume it's a fake morality, because it's "abandoning" the "only" principle of total utilitarianism to be more palatable instead of, you know, the logical extension of incorporating second order effects.
To be accurate, I used to think this about rule utilitarianism, so I don't think this is a priori a dumb stance!
I've been meaning to write a comment similar to this for a long time, but you wrote it better.
A few points to add:
1. This seems to be analogous to heat shock proteins, where bacteria in a high stress environment have a specific mechanism to allow them to genetically "flail about looking for solutions". I wonder if something similar is happening here.
2. There's a reason HSPs aren't active most of the time. Because they're not beneficial to the individual. Being random, they're inherently destructive. They don't make sense when you have a 0.1% chance of dying, but they do when you have a 100% chance. Better for one bacteria to survive on luck, even if it accelerates the death of others, than for all to die equally.
3. If you squint hard enough, all random flailing will look like it "makes sense". This is because people are really good at telling stories, not because there's a correlation between a hypothesis making sense and it being true.
4. Claims that something "works" are never quantitative, which is what you'd want to know to understand how much to rely on them. "Bleu cheese helps" doesn't tell me anything, even if it were true. How much should I eat? Which kinds? How often? How much does it help? Is it a 70% disease burden reduction, or a 1% reduction? How replicable are these results? It really matters that we answer all these questions before relying on this advice!
Let's bring these together in the case of, say, cloth masks during COVID. People said it just made sense that they had to "work". How much and in which situations, though? Airplanes were specifically designed with airflow and pandemic prevention in mind. Air comes in the top and goes out the bottom, reducing the risk of airborne disease. Forcing everyone to put on a device that redirects their breath out the sides might be the cultural HSP hysteria working at cross purposes with decades of work from epidemiologists. They might increase spread in some situations (like on airplanes), even if they decrease it others (like waiting for a flight in the terminal).
Meanwhile, how much does it help was never addressed. I knew people who suddenly felt comfortable getting out and about because they could now wear a mask - including some very high risk people. Did cloth masks come with a false sense of confidence? If you're 25, maybe that sense of confidence is personally beneficial, while if you're 85 the same confidence kills.
"But they logically have to work!" Okay, let's say a surgical mask, in a controlled research environment, reduces transmission by, say, 70% per five minutes of exposure (randomly making stuff up here), but as a result people choose to expose themselves 5x more than they would without the mask. The true effect of even surgical masks in the real-life scenario would be to increase disease spread. But I made those numbers up. We'd need to actually test the hypothesis to know for sure, not just rely on it "making sense".
I feel like skepticism is the antidote to the "social HSP" phenomenon. It plays an important role in keeping society alive, and should not be silenced, even if sometimes the skeptics are wrong.
There's an interesting confluence of sorts: food is something that everyone has and thus can have opinions about; also likely the changes in our food supply relate to the rise of cancer, cvd, and autoimmune.
Corollary: massive changes in ADVICE about what to eat have also dramatically increased along with poorer health outcomes. Now that advice is distributed at scale, outside the normal mechanisms for social spread.
Today it's government, not old wives, that spread food tales about what to eat. Shouldn't we trust government more to know what's best?
What's best for whom? Margarine was initially pushed as an alternative to butter because food rationing for the war made it necessary. A hundred years ago, people didn't consider what we think of as "vegetable oil" to be food. They used lard instead.
Meanwhile, the shift to HFCS as a sweetener seems to have been largely driven by the sugar lobby enforcing quotas against importing too much foreign sugar from certain Caribbean islands, plus corn growers realizing they could make a lot of money propping up those same policies.
I'm sure some ACX commenters can fill in/correct the story with more details, but a lot of food policy looks like it's designed with the health of the state in mind first, more than the citizenry.
Well yes, but his point is about individuals grasping for a sense of control. I'm suggesting that food is a convenient target and we also have a quasi-instinctual sense that something has gone wrong with the food supply.
Iirc it's commonly recognised that individual-pathology eating disorders tend to be significantly "about" control/lack of it so extending this to social/group level makes some sort of sense.
Right. I'm saying maybe a big part of what's gone wrong with food is not just the supply, but the official advice. When individuals to make irrational decisions while grasping for control, they can only hurt themselves. When institutions flail about looking for control they have a greater capacity for introducing harm into the system.
I am not well-informed here, but my impression is that nutrition studies are a mess, because they're almost always observational and diet is confounded with approximately everything else (genetics, wealth, culture, generation, region). So one plausible explanation is that we got effective government messaging on correct nutrition, but because the science was a mess, the message wasn't very good. That message was also affected by lobbying and such, but I think the underlying problem is deeper than that.
Yeah, there are a lot of observational trials problems what to eat, and lot of RCTs/interventional trials demonstrating that defining diets makes people fat. The big complaint for many trials is how difficult it is to get high compliance ... which should tell you something.
If you tell a hundred people to live by some food algorithm and they universally struggle to do so maybe food algorithms don't work. If you do that a dozen times with a dozen different algorithms and they all fail, maybe stop recommending food algorithms as a way to live.
But you can always observe healthy people, define what they naturally eat as a good diet, and how they exercise as a good lifestyle; then recommend that as an algorithm for others to follow. It just doesn't work that way for most people. It's really hard to about someone else's life into your own.
Alina Chan has an opinion piece in the NY Times that argues that the most likely source for Covid was a lab leak. It's an interesting reversal given the stance that the Times previously took on this issue.
I don't know whether that article adds anything to the pool of knowledge provided in the RootsClaim discussion.
It does appear that the belief in Lab Leak as a source of the virus was, at one time, an idea that the editorial board of the NYT (and many other publications) consigned to an incredibly low level of probability. It was also considered a reason to believe that the person holding the theory had a animus against scientific research (or an animus against Chinese scientific labs, or against Chinese people in general).
That opinion is now considered plausible enough to take seriously.
The available scientific evidence hasn't changed much. I suspect that the data hashed out in the RootClaims discussion has been available to most journalists and researchers for at least two years. The outline of the argument, and a list of data points to be researched to resolve it, was likely available sometime during the year 2020.
The environment in which such things can be published has changed enough to shield Alina Chan (and the NYT) from accusations of bias against Science (or bias against Chinese labs, or against Chinese people). It's interesting to see this happen, but it is also disheartening.
The NYT, and the world of journalism that takes its social cues from the NYT, suppressed a valid point of discussion for reasons unrelated to the usefulness of the discussion. The reasons for this suppression were not a pursuit of truth.
How many other areas of news reporting have a similar problem, an avoidance of a pursuit of truth?
It could be that the congressional hearing is making the lab leak look more likely with all this (new) cover-up stuff coming out. Circumstancial of course, but for people with nothing to hide they sure tried hard to hide it.
Not a reversal since it's an editorial, those purposely span a wider range of views than the editorial staff itself. That being said, there was definitely a time they wouldn't have published this because it was viewed as too far in the conspiratorial camp. So it's a shift, but wouldn't got as far as to say reversal.
NYT has zero integrity. Nothing is surprising from them anymore. Sad, considering how long they were respected. Seeing them lose all integrity (over the past few years) has not been pleasant for me.
Not sure what I think about Alina and lab leak, but that it comes from NYT doesn't carry any real signal.
> that it comes from NYT doesn't carry any real signal
I'll quibble with this. It signals that the opinion is considered within the Overton window of what the NYT will print. And that window is sometimes a useful measure of where the USA's discourse is at. Even if the measure is also being self-Goodharted, so it's less about the overall discourse, and more about where the NYT is trying to nudge the discourse.
It signals that the opinion is within the Overton window of a particular small subset of the population at large, and a really angry, vindictive, troublesome, cult-like subset at that. Because those with editorial control at NYT ascribes to the dogma of that cult.
They have no problems saying obviously false things outside the Overton window of a very large segment of people living in NYC, NY state, and the United States. Again, because that other segment being shit on does not hold any editorial control at NYT.
So sure, if you want to know what sorts of things you're allowed to talk about and not get screeched at by the cult, NYT gives you useful signal. Otherwise, it's useless.
Because I'm not into tribal signaling, it provides zero useful signal to me.
UPDATE: Reading another subthread. Looks like this is an "op-ed" as in opposition editorial, as in something NYT disagrees with. So they did not "update after new evidence became apparent" as gorst believes. They are just printing something they disagree with. So whatever little signal ANYONE could get from this is further diluted.
I don't think it's "opposition", just that it's printed on the opposite (facing) page. I'd describe it as stuff that they think their readership will find worthwhile to read. So there's still a window, but it's wider than what they are willing to fully endorse. Infamously, they printed and then walked back this op-ed piece by Senator Tom Cotton.
No. That they would update based on new information is commendable. I suspect you're assuming I have some strong position on lab leak hypothesis I don't have, and that something about this particular datapoint angers me about NYT.
They have zero integrity because they became a cheap outlet for obviously false propaganda, and to my knowledge, have never updated or apologised or promised to try to do better in the future.
Given you do seem to assume I'm playing tribal signaling games here, I won't go into further detail, because the conversation won't go anywhere meaningful. Suffice it to say, if you were even barely paying attention, and you were in charge of NYT's editorial choices, you would not have run several of the stories they have run over the previous 10 years.
i asked because I generally oppose claims of hypocrisy or lack of integrity, when a more charitable is conceivable, like simply changing their oppinion after new facts arise. I WANT my sources and my news and my politicians to admit mistakes and update their believes.
you make some good points why that may no be the case here.
to adress your adhominem: i was a nyt reader until 2016, but canceled my subscription for exactly the reasons you have listed.
There's a fun, temporal version of Gell-Mann amnesia with the NYT. As if when a person turned the page from a section he knows nothing about to one that he does, he assumes that the reason the paper is now complete garbage is that halfway through today's print run bad, ignorant, corrupt people took over.
Be a little uglier and more shocking to come to believe that the NYT has always been a force for evil, it's just that it only recently has been doing so on topics we know about and disagree with.
I remember reading a book by Dick Cheney in 2017, hoping to get a birds eye view into how a country was run. I was sorely disappointed by the sheer dishonesty.
I got similar vibes when I started reading NYT's analysis of international issues back in 2017, but it wasn't until getting an actual education on international affairs that I could see that it was basically the same problem but with more intellectual-looking language.
Indeed. In every decade there have been plenty of people who could tell the NYT were telling only part of the story in a way that mislead, but we don't know their names. We do know the name of the NYT, though. Would be nice if the victors contented themselves with writing the history books, instead of also writing the news, the fiction, the young-adult fiction, and all the rest.
> Would be nice if the victors contented themselves with writing the history books, instead of also writing the news, the fiction, the young-adult fiction, and all the rest.
Sparring day at the gym - it is never a good sign when your opponent expresses respect for you after a round with the phrase "way to hang in there, man."
Any fun quotable moments you guys would care to share?
Some years ago, at an old job, my boss's boss had his kid with him, who was probably like 8 years old. And he noticed there was a chess board sitting around and asked if I wanted to play a game, and I said sure. So this 8-year-old sits down with me and as we're setting up he asks me what my ELO score is, and I'm just like, "I'm not gonna win this one".
Also while he was demolishing me he said, "Guess what?" and I asked, "What?" expecting the response to be "Checkmate", and instead it was "Chickenbutt", which I felt like he earned in the moment.
Ours is a hockey household, and my youngest is a 12-year-old playing in a local league. One recent evening his team was losing a tournament game and getting frustrated. Midway through the game our guy had a promising scoring chance but the other team's defensemen absolutely buried him 10 feet short of the goalie -- one kid goes low while the other levels him. An obvious penalty but the refs call nothing and he comes up pissed.
As the play moves back the other way our guy catches up with one of the offenders and barks at him, the kid barks back in kind, and...our boy slugs him in the helmet. Oh dear. (With his thick hockey glove still on but, still -- that sort of thing is not allowed at all in youth hockey.) Kid takes exception and then they're wrassling and finally the refs notice and blow their whistles.
One ref pulls our boy aside and says quietly, "Dude what are you doing? I let you get away with a free punch..." To which our guy says, loudly, "YEA WELL YOU"VE LET THEM GET AWAY WITH TWENTY FUCKING THINGS ALL GAME!"
He was immediately banished from the proceedings, the other team scored on the ensuing power play, etc. On the car ride home we had a talk about how to tell when an official is trying to apologize for missing a call, how _not_ to respond, etc.
And of course "YEA WELL YOU'VE LET THEM GET AWAY WITH TWENTY FUCKING THINGS ALL GAME" is now a catchphrase among all members of our household....parenting for the win!
I'm with Philo - sounds like a genuine compliment.
I had a good one a few years back, also after a few sparring rounds with a local MMA fighter. I asked him for feedback afterwards, and he responded with "every time you cross your feet, I hit you".
Guess what I was working on for months and months afterward!
It was training rounds - going light because we're practicing, one cannot learn anything if every blow is delivered with power. So he hit me with precision, but not with power so we could go on.
Crossing feet means exactly what is sounds like: in a typical fighting stance, one foot is always in front of the other, say, left is front for an "orthodox" stance ("southpaw" is right foot in front). So when moving, one "keeps the stance" - keep the front foot in front, and back foot in back, because it provides both stability and agility. It's not a "natural" way to move, we cross our feet when we walk, so it takes lots of practice to get there. I was, like, in my second year of training, so still a rookie, and sometimes would lose my footwork and cross feet. When that happened, it's hard to move to avoid or counter strikes. He noticed this tendency that I had, and every time he saw my feet cross, he'd throw a punch, which would inevitably land. I didn't recognize it when it was happening, so to me it was a complete mystery - how he was able to hit me so easily. It was a proverbial "lightbulb moment" when he told me.
I haven't done MMA, only taekwondo, but we use "ladders" to practice footwork. That is, rope ladders with various exercises, stepping in and out of the squares formed, going down the ladder. The lead foot must always be the first foot both in and out of the square. This is in addition to specific drills for practicing footwork.
Then it all must be practiced while sparring, too.
Why did you interpret that as a bad sign? That's exactly what I'd hope to hear from a superior opponent, assuming I want to improve and match or excel his abilities one day?
I guess I'll quote a dialogue I overheard recently:
"
I admire the fellow [Scott Alexander]. Even if he is one of the Jews heading up the new neoconservative movement.
How I hate Jews, especially my wife and one of my close friends.
Do your wife and close friend also head up the new neoconservative movement? It seems to be a requisite trait. The question is if it's a sufficient trait.
Where do you think the new neoconservative movement came from? Obviously random nerdy ravers from San Francisco.
Hahaha, oh, it's a good sign for my attitude, so I suppose it bodes well for my progress going forward, but in the immediate term it just meant I was tired and getting positively rofl-stomped in the back half of the last round.
As far as the dialogue you overheard... just, wow. There's so much there it's hard to parse out the worst/weirdest bits - feels like a tossup between Jews creating the neoconservative movement and "especially my wife."
There was quite a bit of dripping sarcasm drizzled all over it. The premise being that accusation by Fuentes that Scott is heading up the... some sort of conservative movement or another. It's pretty laughable.
This seems straight out of Bay Area House Party (warning - click bait)
https://lifehacker.com/relationships/what-is-porn-dosing
TL;DR - Micro-dosing porn.
Tyler Cowen has a recent post about "deculturation". https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/06/can-we-survive-deculturation-olivier-roys-the-crisis-of-culture.html
Not having read the book it is about I can only speculate. Deculturation sounds like the lost common culture of Europe and its spawns like the Americas and Australia. Whether I've got the subject of the book correct or not, it's something I've noticed. We're losing our collective culture. There was a time when most Europeans and Americans got biblical references. You could assume the well-educated got them, and even many uneducated people knew biblical stories. There was also a period when educated people in Europe and its peripheries knew a lot about Greek myths.
These common cultural currencies have disappeared rather recently. Probably the majority of people with college degrees under the age of forty now know very little about The Bible and Christian preachings in general. That's a dramatic change in culture, considering most educated people knew a lot about The Bible for 1500 years until about yesterday.
Add to that the fact that most educated Europeans and Americans over the past couple centuries knew plenty about literature. Knowing Dickens or Tolstoy in the 19th century was like knowing Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones today, only much, much moreso. Everyone knew Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Brahms.
There's much fewer common cultural references today. Some of that is for good reasons. Those of us overly online think more globally. Abrahamic religions are no longer de facto.
But society can't exist without culture, so cultural entrepreneurs are rushing into the void. Hence wokeism, a brand new religion based on atheism and total equality. Or neo-reactionaries, who are good at seeing what we've lost and pretty terrible at coming up with good solutions for it.
In a sense, we are having to re-invent culture from scratch because we've either rejected the received culture or we are too ignorant to even know it.
Why might the loss of received old European culture be a bad thing? Because maybe something that took many centuries to create, undergoing cultural evolutionary pressures, has more value than something we are now creating on the fly.
Does that ring true for you, or do you think these fears of deculturation are the timeless fears of old people?
"most educated people knew"...
"most educated Europeans and Americans over the past couple centuries knew"
You are skipping over the enormous relevance of that qualifier: "educated". Across Europe as of 1820 only England had achieved a _literacy_ rate (never mind whatever definition you prefer for the word "educated") of at least 50 percent. France was still less than 40 percent literate, Russia less than 10 percent, etc.
The USA by 1820 had a much higher literacy rate, between 70 and 90 percent depending on which estimate you prefer. But the USA was also a _much_ smaller slice of the world's population than we are today used to thinking of it as: 1/10th as many people as the UK, 1/8th as many as France, 1/7th as many as Russia, 1/5th as many as Spain, etc.
So 200 years ago the vast majority of Europe+America was not even literate let alone "educated" and, not unrelated of course, was living at the edge of subsistence. The "everyone" in a statement like "everyone knew Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Brahms" is plausibly true only if we mean actually a very small slice of the population.
That context is logically highly relevant to the notion that the western world, or the English-speaking world, in that era shared a universally-known single culture and now does not.
I think Scott wrote about it here, once upon a time:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/07/25/how-the-west-was-won/
Thanks, this is a great piece. Dancing round the maypole definitely has something to do with it, but there is also a hunger for creating Great Art in the West which makes the West a little different to Tibet etc, and is also at risk from universal culture. So I guess we summoned two demons, and the second destroyed the first and the summoner.
Gak! Honestly, the "common culture" proponents all seem to be historically illiterate (at best), and culturally prejudiced *and* illiterate (at worst).
> We're losing our collective culture. There was a time when most Europeans and Americans got biblical references.
There was a time when Christians burned each other at the stake for believing slightly different things. But I suppose you could say that Europe in the Sixteenth Century had a common culture of religious intolerance!
> most educated Europeans and Americans over the past couple centuries knew plenty about literature. Knowing Dickens or Tolstoy in the 19th century was like knowing Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones today, only much, much moreso.
The idea that there's some sort of common "European" culture is bizarre on the face of it. One only has to travel to foreign countries to see that when it comes to the arts and literature this is absolutely not true.
You mention Tolstoy and Dickens. There was a 20 year gap between War and Peace publication in Russia — in Russian (a language that wasn't universal to the Russian Empire, BTW) — and when it was translated into English (rather poorly on the first pass, IMHO). And Tolstoy was not immediately embraced by the English-speaking world.
Dickens is not and never was well-regarded in France. "He is not considered a great or classic writer in France; his books are seen as old fashioned and mostly suitable for children."
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/jan/04/jean-pierre-ohl-mr-dick#:~:text=For%20a%20Frenchman%2C%20Dickens%20is,and%20mostly%20suitable%20for%20children.
As for most educated Americans in the Nineteenth Century — well, there weren't that many who were. Most Americans' education stopped at the 8th Grade (although in one of my previous posts to an earlier open thread, if you got your 8th Grade diploma you probably had a better general and practical education than most twenty-first-century high school graduates). In 1870 the Americans who had a college education (all 1.7% of them) probably did share a common culture, though — in the Greek and Latin classics (because the idea of Liberal Arts education hadn't yet been invented). Meanwhile, 20% of the nation was illiterate. And for those who were literate, books were tremendously expensive. Most households had a Bible, though. So the majority of Americans had a shared common culture based on the Bible and ignorance.
It wasn't until the last two decades of the Nineteenth Century that *free* lending libraries became common, and the rising middle class had access to books. Of course, that's when the first "common culture" complaints arose among the educated ("They're all reading the popular novels by Dickens instead of reading Cicero and Plato!")
The subtext of the "common culture" arguments seem to be about restricting educational opportunities to a narrow range of carefully curated subjects (that reflect the prejudices of the CC-crowd) to facilitate political and/or religious conformity. </rant off>
So for me there are three rough epochs
(1). No real attempt to redistribute the goods of high culture (e.g Catholic Church pre-liturgical movement c. 1850)
(2). A genuine attempt to redistribute the goods of high culture (e.g Catholic Church from the liturgical movement to Vatican II)
(3). Gradual abandonment of (2) (e.g Catholic Church post Vatican II).
Now (3) is better than (1), but I do believe (2) is better than (3), and most people who are harking back to a common culture are harking back to (2) rather than (1). (1) has basically passed out of living memory so it is genuinely difficult to feel nostalgic for it, whereas (2) represents the world our parents and grandparents grew up in.
Whenever someone complains about how they miss the glorious past, the glorious past either ever existed or was available to less than one person in thousand.
Imagine the glorious past when less than 1 person in 1000 was literate, and only a few of them had enough time to read books. The book-readers all over the planet probably knew each other by name, so they could recommend Tolstoy to each other, because there was no longer book to read. What an exciting era!
There are probably more Tolstoy readers today, in absolute numbers. The only problem is, having read Tolstoy does not clearly mark you today as a member of the elite.
Also, I have no idea why "memes" and "EU" are deculturation. No strong opinion on EU, but memes are definitely shared cultural artifacts -- shared by several orders of magnitude more people than Tolstoy's books. It's just not the kind of culture you like, because it is not high-status.
I love memes. I've read more memes than Tolstoy, but I have confidence that Tolstoy has a more profound insight into the human condition. Memes on aggregate are genuinely insightful but you need a lot of them and there's a lot of dross. Whereas there's a soft test-of-time which filters out the dross from 19th century literature.
I would for sure agree that we need some kind of common culture, and a culture that bends towards optimism and progress. It doesn't necessarily have to be the 1950s-style Europe-descended culture, but it's gotta be something if we want to not just survive but thrive.
We do have a culture, it's just more recent, faster-changing, and more based in commerce than prestige.
I'm fine with almost anything as long as it delivers the "optimism and progress" thing, but it doesn't appear to be getting the job done at the moment.
How about just plain realism? Optimism is what makes you want to draw on an inside straight. Of course, pessimists all think the world will to end soon, but I've lived through at least half a dozen predicted end-of-the-worlds in my lifetime, so I don't buy into the latest round of EotW hysterias. OTOH the techno-optimism of Scientism is a religion that has replaced the Rapture of a Christian god with the Rapture of the Nerds.
Ironically, it's the common culture cultists who think the world is going to hell in a handbasket. But everyone else does, too! Although I don't necessarily believe our future will be a paradise.I think there's a low probability that our current *high-energy* civilization will continue much past the Twenty-first Century, I seem to be one of the few people left who thinks that come hell or high water humanity will muddle through somehow.
>How about just plain realism?
If you're just plain realistic you'll never get anything cool done.
There's a proposal floating around to add extra land onto the south of Manhattan. This would massively expand space for housing in one of the most expensive cities in the world, and also protect the city against storm surges. Using landfill to expand cities is a well-known technology that's been used for decades or, depending on how you want to think about it, even centuries. But all the "realists" in NYC just lol their hearts out at the ridiculous idea that we could make the world a better place (in between marching to defund the police and re-electing crook after crook) and the idea was dead before it left the barn. Realism sucks. Enough of realism and enough of the realists..
>I seem to be one of the few people left who thinks that come hell or high water humanity will muddle through somehow.
I think humanity will too actually, but muddling through is not enough. Muddling through does not inspire. And if you don't inspire, you'll get trampled by those who do. Say what you will about the Chinese Communist Party, at least they have a vision for how they want the future to play out. It's a nasty, cramped, ethnonationalist vision, but you can't beat something with nothing.
Are you sure that a society can't exist without culture? I think that's the central problem with your musing, the idea that there ought to be a general canon – preferably traditional and taste-filtered through some well-heeled, powerful stratum of society – that binds together everyone worthy of being called educated and cultured. That has a political valence all its own, doesn't it?
The reach for 'wokism' as replacement, regardless of whether you like equality and atheism (I think they're both quite dandy, but I get the vague sense that opinion is divided), is a category error. The egalitarian sentiment, in various forms, has been with us at least since the Gracchi, and (money aside) it's orthogonal to familiarity with art, music, and literature. It would have been thus in the 19th century, too.
The Western canon is still there, for anyone, Western or not, to enjoy. It's subsidised in various ways (no small irony that the right so often tends to hate these subsidies) which is fair enough, because otherwise it would sink even lower in the vicious commercial wrangling for attention. It just no longer marks you out as a rube if you don't know it well. And that's fine. Meanwhile you've got people walking around as experts on Sengoku Japan or the Spring and Autumn Period because they've gone through an anime or wuxia phase in adolescence, and then they memorised all of Poe for reasons, and then the pre-Raphaelites were big on Tumblr for a month, and then their favourite youtuber did a four-hour sprawl on Kierkegaard... give them a decade to weave a patchwork of weird interests, and they end up better-rounded individuals than most people in Europe in the 19th, even if Shakespeare and Homer can no longer be taken for granted. Is that strictly worse?
I think what might be worse is that the result is less commonality. Everyone follows their own intellectual journey, learns a ton, but in the end speaks a different cultural language. So when people communicate, since they can't rely on a common culture that is deep, they resort to internet lingo, memes and emoji and the deeper culture they have learned has value for them personally but isn't something they can refer to when communicating with others because those others, however erudite they may be, focused on learning different things such as Raphael instead of the pre-Raphaelites, Goethe instead of Kierkegaard, Dickens instead of Poe.
Chairman Xi is doing a good job of implementing a common culture in China. Everybody learns a common history. Everybody is educated in the same neo-Confucian philosophy. Everybody must speak the common tongue for official and commercial business. Minority cultures are being extinquished. The Internet is firewalled to create a shared view of the world. Seems like he's building a harmonious paradise that should be exported to the rest of Asia (whether they like it or not).
I think there really is a cultural decline, and we should allow ourselves enough sadness to do something modest about it. Anything more will probably just feed in to the phenomenon we’re sad about. Ken Clarke thinks Great Civilizations are founded on confidence, and we are going to need a lot of it. Here are some things I think are contributing to the decline:
Lossiness - there's a whole lot of culture! Even people who make it their life's work to preserve it can only preserve a part of it, there are trade offs between promoting new work, promoting well-loved classics and promoting neglected classics. Some cultural artifacts inevitably fall through the cracks.
Egalitarianism - promoting neglected classics includes making space in the canon for e.g female composers, jazz, folk. Seems good, but any one work displaces other work. Specific older works/composers are in danger of cancellation e.g Wagner (seriously anti-semitic opinions by any standards)
Cool/Casual - my wife’s friends (c. 45) can't get enough of classic literature, but I wonder how long this can go on, given how different dating is now. The past just generally seems like a lot of hard work, running fast to stand still, and we’ve come to expect to approach things more casually. Even if you're good at empathy it's exhausting.
Atheism - obviously people used to take the Bible and biblical inspired art seriously because they thought it really was the word of God, then there was a long hegelian/nietzschian twilight period, where it's like “this is false, but it's a crucial step on our journey towards true Spiritual Enlightenment” (e.g Wagner's depiction of medieval pilgrimage in Tannhaeuser). But to the extent people don't believe in God, even in a vague 18th/19th century way, I don't see how the Bible can avoid dropping out of mass culture.
Tech - even when tech enables genuine works of art to happen, it is art skewed towards our own time and values. If it weren't for film I probably would have read more classic literature. Technological mindset displaces ‘useless’ subjects from the curriculum in favour of STEM.
> Lossiness - there's a whole lot of culture!
I'm reminded of a great quote: "History is not what you thought. It is what you can remember. All other history defeats itself."
The same probably applies to "culture".
I think your historical perspective is off. For the vast majority of human existence, only a very tiny elite of society would know about music or writing. Most people were engaged in subsistence agriculture and simply didn't have time to spare from survival. Practically no one outside the clergy would have been able to read the bible on their own before the Protestant Reformation, because even if they were literate in their native language the bible was in Latin. All of this was standard until maybe 150 years ago. If anything, the culture you are describing is the anomaly.
And I doubt most people knew what you claim they knew. Ask a bunch of random people in 1900 America who Tolstoy is, and maybe half would answer a famous writer. I imagine very few would have actually read Tolstoy, and only a fraction of them would have understood it and been able to carry out an analysis of his writing. You have to keep in mind that the historical record is mostly made up of highly educated elites talking about things that interest them, which does not reflect the experience of the common man.
Even if this is all true, there really was a time when people really believed that progress in education and technology could give the masses access to culture e.g the founders of the BBC. "Nothing is too good for the working class" Nye Bevan
While I agree that for most of human existence only a tiny elite knew literature and music and such, in Europe at least for the last 1200-1500 years even the peasants knew Bible stories. Though most church services were in Latin, priests were supposed to preach something in the vernacular every few weeks. Churches and cathedrals were filled with art telling Bible stories (for a modern example, the bronze front door of St. John the Divine's Cathedral in New York contains images taken from Bible stories that cover the whole Bible, from Genesis to Revelation). Friars would travel from place to place preaching about the Bible, and plays on Bible stories would be put on regularly. So even peasants would know the cultural basics of Christianity: know David and Goliath, Jonah and the Whale, Noah and the Ark, Moses and the 10 Plagues, etc.
I generally agree with the premise that there were shared cultural institutions in the past that are much less shared today. I was objecting to that shared experience being characterized as something like the ideal Renaissance Man. There were cultural practices that made French people distinctly French, but it wasn't talking about Tolstoy and Mozart.
GPT's ignorance about the physical world is astounding. I asked it to make me an image of a whirlpool, and gave some details about what I wanted it to look like.. This is what I got: https://imgur.com/cTAIVjZ
And yet, GPT has no doubt read a fair amount about whirlpools online. If I asked it to name a famous short story with a whirlpool in it I'll bet it could. If I asked it what conditions produce whirlpools I'll bet it could tell me. If I asked it whether part of the ocean can form itself into a disk and lie on edge on the ocean surface like a tire on a floor it would tell me no.
I'm not sure people who think these suckers are going to understand pretty much everything better than we do grasp how enormous the gap is between what we know about the ordinary world and what LLM's know. There are a million things like whirlpools -- dogs, beauty salons, tar, lipstick, bubble goo, ferris wheels, needle-nosed pliers, harvest moons, folk dancing enthusiasts, communists, nightmares . . . -- that we understand the basics about. We know what they look like, what they feel like, whether you can put them in your pocket, how they would behave if set on fire, what sentences about them make sense and which don't. We learned all that while walking around the world interacting with these things, plus absorbing info via reading or talking. We put it all together somehow, those 2 channels of information. It comes so naturally to us to do that that it's not immediately obvious what an amazing feat it is.
I like that whirlpool a great deal better than most of what I see from LLMs. It's got that computer art insipidity, but I rarely see an image where I think "I want to see this done by a good artist".
That's a bossfight against Charybdis right there.
...actually that's literally just a Charybdis drawing. https://paleothea.com/mythical-creatures/charybdis-greek-mythology/ https://www.greekmythology.com/Myths/Monsters/Charybdis/charybdis.html
The new models are being trained multi-modally, but I think your point still stands w.r.t. emotions, smell and tactile sensations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QV88C5ZK0x0&ab_channel=BermPeak
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Bicycle_Relief
This is an extremely practical bicycle, built to be durable and easy to maintain. Made of steel, 50 pounds, $150. It's apparently only available through the charity rather than for sale in the first world.
This may not be a perfectly effective charity, but it's sensibly built around an existing device, and the charity also supports people learning how to repair the bicycles as a business.
I speak as a person who likes the idea of a handbrake which goes to the hub rather than squeezing the rim-- the rim is too slippery when wet.
"My son was born last night," said Tom, apparently.
"I really like the actor who played Saruman," said Tom, lovingly.
"We are towing urine" said the people.
"These aren't usually about me" said Taylor, swiftly.
my magnum opus:
> "A popstar is always on time; she arrives precisely when she means to" said Taylor, wizenly.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-306/comment/45228363
I think I’ll save the amputee’s offhanded remarks for a hidden open thread.
You... must not know how this works.
Which is great! That makes you one of today's lucky 10,000.
https://xkcd.com/1053/
some training data:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/fifty-swifties/
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/15/fifty-more-swifties/
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/10/02/swifties-3-the-race-is-not-to-the-swifty/
Should have worked it into the adverb form, as offhandedly?
“And no, I’m not getting a vasectomy,” he continued, testily.
"I do want to talk to the doctor, though," said Tom, patiently.
"No kids for me" said Other Tom, half in Earnest.
"Or me!" Other Tom's partner insisted, earnestly.
"Yuck, those mice have made their bedding out of dismembered hearing organs," said Tom, earnestly.
"Warner Erhard sure got a lot of income from developing a quasi-cult," said Tom, earnESTly
I missed the last open thread, so here's a link for everyone who might still be checking FiveThirtyEight, with Nate Silver explaining how low the management of his former site has fallen:
https://www.natesilver.net/p/polling-averages-shouldnt-be-political
I finally figured out my solution to Newcomb's paradox. Either I'm in a world where I will choose both boxes, or a world where I will choose box B. If I'm in the world where I will choose both boxes then the optimal choice is to choose box B, which I can't do because I'm in the world where I will choose both boxes. This paradox means I can't be in the world where I will choose both boxes. If I'm in the world where I will choose box B, the optimal choice is to choose box B, no problem. Therefore choosing box B has to be correct.
Thanks for the responses, they have helped me refine my solution. I still think the "which world am I in" framing is the key. So - take 2:
If I'm in the world where I will choose both boxes, I will get $1000. If I'm in the world where I will choose box B, I will get $1000000. Therefore I prefer to be in the world where I will choose box B, and I'm still a one-boxer.
The optimal choice is to pick both boxes, because the reliable predictor will be able to better spend that $1,000,000 than you could hope to anyway.
If the money somehow ceases to exist if the predictor predicts you taking both boxes, then you take both boxes, and that guy can go fuck himself for deliberately destroying $1,000,000 in value.
The real solution to the "paradox" is to recognize the true nature of the paradox. It's only a "paradox" because it violates the axioms of Game Theory (and Rationalism).
In Game Theory, agents are assumed to have infinite computation and knowledge and float *outside* the world in some uncomputable astral plane. As they are floating outside of the world of the "game" they're playing, their decision processes can't possibly effect anything, etc.
As with frictionless cows or whatever, sometimes the Game Theory axioms are a useful approximation of reality, and sometimes they aren't.
In the real world, everyone has extremely limited computation and information, and everyone is *embodied* in the world, which means that they are part of the world they are acting in, and their own decision processes can affect the world and vice versa. E.g. someone could conceivably put you in an MRI machine and see what you're thinking before you think it. Or just give you drugs.
Newcomb's paradox is only a "paradox" because the setup of the problem directly contradicts these axioms. It's just an illustration of the limitation of Game Theory/Rationalist axioms, nothing deeper.
>If I'm in the world where I will choose both boxes then the optimal choice is to choose box B
This is wrong. In the world where you choose both boxes box B will be empty and box A will have a little money so the optimal choice is to take both boxes.
>If I'm in the world where I will choose box B, the optimal choice is to choose box B
This is also wrong. In the world where you choose only box B both boxes contain money so the optimum choice is to take both boxes. Unfortunately you can't actually do that since you are in the world where you only take box B.
The main intuition for one-boxing is that the decision to one-box itself affects which 'world' you inhabit but if you assume from the start that you must inhabit one 'world' or the other already, independent of the decision you would prefer/attempt to make, you kneecap that line of reasoning and leave two-boxing as the only viable strategy left standing.
>In the world where you choose only box B both boxes contain money so the optimum choice is to take both boxes.
If you take both boxes, how are you in the world where you only choose box B? The only way you can be in the world where you choose only box B is by taking only box B. Isn't that definitional?
I think the paradox gets resolved by substituting one supernatural device for another. Get rid of the person who can see the future, substitute a magic spell.
If you pick both, the million will disappear thanks to the spell, and the thousand will be all you get. If you pick one, you can get whichever you choose (probably the million). There's no paradox at all.
It's just a sci-fi Excalibur. Only the pure of heart can get the million, and if you try to take the thousand, you fail the test.
>If you take both boxes, how are you in the world where you only choose box B?
Because you don't take both boxes. Read the very next sentence after the one you quoted.
Yo, my bad! Apologies, disregard what I wrote. I must be going blind. Sorry about that!
>if you assume from the start that you must inhabit one 'world' or the other already, independent of the decision you would prefer/attempt to make, you kneecap that line of reasoning and leave two-boxing as the only viable strategy left standing.
I wouldn't say so. The relevant part of the 'world' you already inhabit in the scenario is not what's in the boxes, it's what kind of character you have. If the world you inhabit is one where you are the kind of person who will two box, then the alien (or computer, or Jin, or God, or whoever) will only put money in the one box. If the world you inhabit contains a you where you are the kind of person who will one box, then both boxes will have money. Our character locks us in: to say that in the world where I'm the kind of person who one boxes it would be more advantageous to two box is to say "Unfortunately you can't do that, since you are in the world where you are the kind of person who only takes box B"
Sure, that's fine. The framing device isn't actually important so long as it doesn't sever the dependency.
Saw this on Mathew Yglesias Thursday thread:
The Indiana Pacer's can still make the NBA Finals if only Mike Pence has the courage...
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1wwdd6v2wjo
"A major cause of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) has been discovered by UK scientists.
They found a weak spot in our DNA that is present in 95% of people with the disease.
It makes it much easier for some immune cells to go haywire and drive excessive inflammation in the bowels.
The team have found drugs that already exist seem to reverse the disease in laboratory experiments and are now aiming for human trials."
Good news, even if it's a slow roll-out.
Any thoughts about speeding up the process while taking reasonable care?
While not related to this new discovery, I have personally found that helminthic (specifically TTO) therapy nearly completely alleviated my (comparatively mild, but properly diagnosed) UC. I've struggled with it for over 10 years, the first treatment worked for about 3-4 years before symptoms returned, and the second identical treatment produced the same results this year, so at this point I'm pretty positive that it is in fact the helminths that caused the improvement in my specific case. Of course, infecting oneself with a parasite procured from a questionable source is not everyone's cup of tea, but for me the benefits seem to outweigh the risks.
The drugs are MEK inhibitors, all 4 of them I found on wikipedia are prescription only in the US. ;-(
Techie people:
When you're drawing a diagram of how a complex system works:
Most of the time, any type of entity relationship can be drawn with some kind of bubbles connected with some kind of arrows. Causal chains can be represented in exactly the same way - with arrows that connect one event/action to the next.
There are two common circumstances I keep running into that I don't know how to viz:
- cases where something might come into existence, and at another point cease to exist again.
- cases where something might be instanced multiple times, and the "prototype" or "class" version (if it exists) may differ substantially from how a given instance could end up looking.
You can obviously draw these things on their own terms, but I'm talking about when you need to include them in and around a bigger-picture diagram of a whole system.
Has anyone seen any good diagrams/charts/visualisations that did a good job of showing those situations?
fuhgettaboutit. type-definitions and object-instantiations are like oil and water. you gotta use two separate diagrams. E.g. if you're trying to do something like combine an *abstract* diagram of a family tree with your *actual* family tree... it's just not happening. (Or at least, not in any way that's coherent.) Instead, "the way of the programmer" (tm) is to: A) define types of hypothetical objects; B) instantiate concrete objects under main(); C) *label* any concrete instances with the corresponding type (aka category). E.g.
time = {hr, min, sec}
main() {
....time lunch.set(12, 00, 00);
....time dinner.set(18, 00, 00);
}
"main()" is where the verbs happen. Notice that the type-definition for the "time" struct occurs outside of main(). Because definitions live in the platonic nether realm, not in physical reality. So you basically need two separate diagrams.
Are you familiar with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Modeling_Language ?
To put it simply, different types of diagrams for different perspectives. Class diagram = each class is one bubble. Object diagram = each instance is a separate bubble (or rectangle? not sure), so you can show relations between multiple instances of the same class. Some diagrams have a time axis, so you can show the order of things happening, which may include when some things appear and disappear.
Based on my short experience with modelling, I would recommend not trying to put everything in one picture, because there will be too many arrows, too difficult to follow. Or maybe make one huge diagram, but also make diagrams of individual parts. If you have a tool for drawing UML diagrams, the advantage is that you define all relations once, and then when you put some objects to a diagram, it will automatically include the arrows between them.
If you are doing any object oriented programming UML is very useful.
Is animation ever useful to indicate things that change?
Yes it very definitely is. But I rarely see it in this context, probably because it's not the fashion and the tooling for it doesn't exist. But I would build the tooling if I knew what it was I was going for.
Sometimes people argue over whether art should be political or not. To me it seems obvious that art is more important than politics and that therefore good art is rarely political. My premise is that art (broadly but also narrowly defined) is the main luxury good of civilization. In the hierarchy of needs you have food (more abstractly: nutrition & health), shelter (defense against mortal enemies through the night), love (social support), art. Politics is arguing over the distribution of those things, but it's more noble to produce those things than to argue over their distribution because the former is positive sum whereas the latter is zero or negative sum.
To put that in relatable day-to-day terms, who has been more valuable to our society: Larry David or Joe Biden? Beethoven or Napoleon? The Beatles or LBJ? Are there better comparisons?
Is "Too Much Time on My Hands" by Styx political?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XcKBmdfpWs&ab_channel=StyxVEVO
The bit with the watches reminds me of cryptocurrency. I don't think it's necessarily a scam, but so many of the sellers are scamming.
No, it's likely a song about a rock-n-roll star who is bored and literally has too much time on his hands. The watch hustler isn't even mentioned in the song, which came out before MTV even existed, so that cheap video was a promotional video for buyers within the record business and not even intended for public consumption.
(The genius of MTV was that someone realized that by 1982 most bands were making these promotional videos and almost nobody was seeing them, so it was easy to start a cable channel and show them to the public for almost zero cost.)
How do you make the distinction? Beethoven wrote his third symphony for Napoleon, until Napoleon let him down. The Beatles wrote songs about paranoid gun owners, tax policy, and so on. There’s no bright line between political content and art and never has been.
I'm not arguing for bright lines, only that "good art is rarely political". Good Beatles' songs and Beethoven symphonies are rarely political too. But, sure, sometimes they are.
Even Bob Dylan is rarely political.
I was motivated to start this thread after seeing about a million people on Twitter agree that "Good art is always political".
Which is heavier, feathers or lead?
Why do people pay more for diamonds than bread?
To be straightforward, since the temptation to explain things is stronger than the temptation to just snark, people apparently want both politics and art, and important stuff happens at the margin, not choosing between whole categories.
"'Beauty is truth, truth beauty'—that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." -- Keats
Based purely on this, art and politics are completely incompatible, due to a utter dearth of beauty in politics.
Contrasting them makes little sense, since the two are inseperably linked. As LearnsHebrew implies, your conception of art and politics feels overly narrow.
When I think of art, I think of it as a zip-file. It's a compact way of transmitting information across long intervals of space and time. But for wetware instead of software. Art doesn't *always* need to contain compressed information. But for central examples of art, it often does.
And often, (though not always,) the information reflects the value-system of the artist. The ant and the grasshopper, for example, is about the prudence of long-term planning. La Guernica was about the horrors of war. Punk rock often features a lot of rebellion and contrarianism. If you've read the Republic, Plato seemed to believe that art was upstream of ethics, which was upstream of culture, which was upstream of politics. individuals in a society were likened to body-parts, which needed to act in concert to produce Justice. IIRC plato wanted to ban poetry because it would impassion the hearts of men to act recklessly, or something.
So this idea of compartmentalizing art away from "politics" feels odd to me. Art isn't just decor that looks pretty on the mantle. It's also a natural means of participating in The Discourse. And The Discourse is a debate about priorities. Before you analyze "positive sum vs negative sum", you need to define what you're summing by settling on a value-system.
(Yes, you can contrast art and politics on the margin. But it sounds like you're making an argument about totality. i.e. that art is qualitatively, strictly superior to political rhetoric. which is roughly like arguing that having enough RAM entirely precludes the need for a CPU.)
I think it's odd to argue that central examples of art often contain compressed information. When I think of central examples of art, I think of say The Mona Lisa, King Lear, Moby Dick, Beethoven's 9th Symphany, Das Rheingold. It's true that La Guernica can be viewed as political but that can't be said of the majority of Picasso's work. And to the extent La Guernica still has great value it's not as anti-fascist propaganda. Simply showing the horrors of war isn't particularly political.
Thinking of art as containing compressed information is a bad reading of art, IMO. Or maybe I'm misunderstand what you mean by compressed information. I agree that great art expresses itself with high efficiency.
P.S. The other thing I should add, is that
when people complain about politics in art, it's usually not actually about the partisanism, per se. It's about the crudeness with which the partisanism is applied. Critical Drinker, for instance, has been ripping into Marvel and Disney for their wokeness. But the wokeness per se isn't actually the main issue (and I believe Critical Drinker would agree with me). The issue is that the wokeness comes at the expense of the stories, rather than enhances them. E.g. as I recall of his review of She Hulk: there's no struggle, no challenge, no journey, no dilemmas, but lots of girlbossing.
If progressivism were really the issue, then I wouldn't expect Startrek (which was considered radically progressive during the 60's) to have been as popular as it was. Studio Ghibli often features strong female protagonists, environmentalism, anti-war themes, and anti-capitalism themes. And their Spirited Away won an Oscar. Meanwhile, the latest strain of progressivism has convinced Disney and Marval that Stronk Female Representation is, by itself, an acceptable substitute for interesting content. Rather than offering an exploration of an interesting perspective, it thrusts upon the audience a dry, heavy-handed lecture.
Let's the get easy one out of the way, first. Which is the diction.
> Simply showing the horrors of war isn't particularly political.
Politics is about policy. And war is an inherently political affair. What you really mean is "partisanism". Which we might describe as "tribalistic advocacy for a controversial position". It often comes across as crude. "Murder is bad", for example, isn't exactly controversial. It is political, however, since it normatively implies a policy over a group of people. Likewise, I agree with you insofar as I wouldn't describe La Guernica as partisan, since it doesn't posit anything controversial about then-contemporary ideological positions. But it does describe an event which is inherently political. WWII redrew the political map, after all.
> Thinking of art as containing compressed information is a bad reading of art, IMO. Or maybe I'm misunderstand what you mean by compressed information.
Yeah, I could've explained this better.
A pun, for example, exhibits compression. It uses a double-entendre to get two meanings across for the price of one. Math exhibits compression. Unary gets compressed into variables, which get compressed into equations (and from here, it can go in different directions). A painting exhibits compression, in the sense that a picture is worth a thousand words. The 2d nature of the medium allows encoding and decoding of lots of things in parallel, compared to 1D strings of speech/text. A story can be thought of as a parable which distills an idea down to its most representative example(s).
Consider this video [0] on The Death of Socrates. There's a remarkable amount of information being transmitted by the painting. It's essentially a high-quality meme. Another analysis that comes to mind is this one on Master & Commander [1]. The book/film wrestles with the correct balance between a liberal, forgiving approach to leadership vs a conservative, hierarchical approach. Does this diminish its merits? Great Art Explained has a great vid [2] about how The Mona Lisa represented the entire culmination of what Da Vinci knew about painting and anatomy. Not exactly a political treatise, mind you. Although it does a decent enough job of showing how much thought and detail can get squeezed into an art piece. Moby Dick is arguably an exploration of epistemology [3]. It also draws attention to slavery. Which is clearly political, even in the partisan sense. Does this spoil the rest of the book?
(Admittedly, I don't know enough about King Lear to comment. And music is an on-going mystery to me.)
Another way to view this is to consider film posters. There's an old meme about how movie posters always look the same, since they draw from a shared lexicon of design elements. E.g. posters for rom-coms frequently feature a man and woman looking at the audience, back to back, with their arms crossed. This isn't by accident, it's deliberate. The graphical artists who design movie posters have a job, which is to quickly and reliably communicate the genre to the audience. It sets expectations. "man & woman, back to back, arms crossed" is an efficient way to communicate that a film is a rom-com. Likewise, the Mona Lisa analysis mentions that it was common for renaissance paintings to feature a pyramid structure. This was deliberate, as it lent a sense of stability. This is often contrasted with the baroque period, which featured instability through a lot of diagonal lines.
Things that we more-canonically think of as "art", are often more complex and subtle though. Which demonstrates that there's a spectrum of artistry. As an analogy, hardly anyone would dispute that doughnuts are food. They provide calories, after all. They taste sweet. They're edible. And yet doughnuts are widely considered *junk* food. Because it does a poor job of providing nourishment beyond the bare-minimum requirement of "provides calories/tastes okay". Likewise, a banana taped to a wall... can be called art, in some respects. But does it communicate deep truths about the human condition? does it inspire? impart life lessons? nourish the soul? Art which doesn't communicate ideas of long-term value, e.g. perhaps a still-life of a vase, I'm less inclined to call "high-art" than simply "decor".
[0] "The Death of Socrates: How To Read A Painting" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKhfFBbVtFg)
[1] "Master and Commander | The Most UNDERRATED Cinematic Masterpiece | Film Summary & Analysis" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMv_LOGMZN0)
[2] "Mona Lisa (Full Length): Great Art Explained" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElWG0_kjy_Y)
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moby-Dick#Themes
Good points.
thanks. glad you think so.
although i wish i could figure out what was going on with music.
Banksy does a pretty good job of emphasising both the artistic and the political equally.
>The Beatles or LBJ
Surely LBJ, given Medicaid, Medicare, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
>Larry David or Joe Biden
Joe Biden helped keep Robert Bork off the Supreme Court, played an important role in the US response to genocide in the Balkans, and has raised the refugee resettlement* limit from 15K under Trump to 125k. Now, of course, some people think those are bad things, but some people think I'll of Larry David's work, too.
>Are there better comparisons?
William Wilberforce and fill in the blank? Gandhi and xxx? MLK and yyy?
Your premise that art is more important than politics is flawed. It seems to me.
*refugee resettlement, not asylum
The problem with political art is that sometimes people produce things that are strong on the political dimension, but weak or mediocre on the artistic dimension.
A mediocre *non-political* piece of art could be simply ignored, or perhaps get a few niche fans but be ignored by most people. A mediocre *political* piece of art will still be defended by people who like the political message, but they will hypocritically pretend that they actually see the artistic value that their opponents deny. And on the opposite site, people who oppose the political message will insist that the artistic value is zero. It becomes impossible to have a talk about the actual artistic value, because most people will see statements about the art as political statements.
> Politics is arguing over the distribution of those things, but it's more noble to produce those things than to argue over their distribution because the former is positive sum whereas the latter is zero or negative sum.
Unfortunately, refusing to play zero-sum games is sometimes not the same as avoiding them, but instead it means losing at them. You can argue that producing is better than distributing (and I agree with you), but if you stop paying attention to the distribution, someone else may take away everything you produced, and you probably won't be happy about it.
I've made a similar argument about the corrupting role of political messaging in literary fiction.
I don't think it's accurate to say that good art is rarely political. In my view, good art is good to the extent that it mirrors reality. Beauty is achieved when a work depicts something real and true, something difficult to capture using argument or analysis, something that, otherwise, is only attainable via direct experience. Art is, for the time being, the best tool we have for conveying what it is to be another person. For this ideal, this "realness," to be achieved, the art cannot be pointed. It cannot be a morality play. It cannot wag a finger at the observer, as if to say "do better." It must be a good faith attempt share your experience with others, and to the extent that politics is a feature of most people's lives, we should expect it to appear in art, even good art.
The vital distinction is between art that has political features (characters that hold certain opinions, politically-charged settings or backdrops, etc.), and that art that's making a pointed, political argument. The prior may very well be good, but the latter is, without exception, bad. Art that strives to argue some point, political or otherwise, ceases to be art, and becomes, instead, a particularly manipulative and emotional form of argument
1984 is good art that's making pointed political arguments. Lots of science fiction is.
I agree 100%. I don't consider say Shakespeare's Part 1 of Henry the Fourth to be "political art" even though politics is its subject. Atlas Shrugged or The Grapes of Wrath is political art.
By some definitions of "Politics", any non-trivial piece of good art is never apolitical. Wikipedia English says:
>>> Politics (from Ancient Greek πολιτικά (politiká) 'affairs of the cities') is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations among individuals, such as the distribution of resources or status.
What story or song doesn't deal with decision-making in groups? or power relations? or the distributions of resources? One of the first stories I remember reading and writing was a reading lesson in 1st grade: [BEGIN] My name is X. I love Mommy. I listen to what Mommy says. [END] That's.... politics. This 3-sentence barely-a-story is encoding something very non-trivial about power relations in a house and who should listen to whom. You could say that telling a 7-year-old to listen to his mom is hardly a controversial opinion and that it has no sensible alternatives or opposition, it's still politics, a very instinctive and extremely ancient kind of politics, but politics nonetheless.
Furthermore, continuing on with the theme of state-controlled K12 education systems even though art is technically wider than that, the state in control of an education system dictates what that education system teaches. States are hardly "Apolitical". The very selection of which literature to study, which language to teach them in, which poetry to recite, which holidays to celebrate and with what songs and poems, etc.... This is all politics, and states use each and every one of those opportunities to advance their favorite politics. Does Israel teach Palestinian folk songs in its education system? Do Catholic schools teach erotic works of art such as the Kama Sutra?
"Art should be apolitical" is usually a proxy point for an actual point, which is usually one of those 2 (possibly more):
(1) Art shouldn't be obviously and unsubtly political. Because nobody likes to feel like a dumbass, and art that doesn't respect you enough to let you draw your own conclusions is art that makes you feel like a dumbass, or - worse - that the writer/producer/poet thinks you're a dumbass. Extreme unsubtlety is also a sign of artistic insecurity, the artist(s) is unsure of their capability to convince you through subtle winks, so they resort directly to beating you over the head with it.
(2) Art shouldn't have politics that suck. And "Politics that suck" will vary depending on - wait for it - politics. The current dominant politics, that is. It could encompass everything from fascism to arguing that people not having a religion or leaving their assigned-at-birth religion is completely okay. Notice that people take character descriptions in stories to be endorsements, so a story describing an atheist without explicitly indicating that being an atheist is wrong will be understood as endorsing and/or arguing for whatever perceived or real characteristics of atheists. A story describing extra-marital sex that doesn't end in regret or bad consequences for parties involved will be understood as advocacy for pre-marital-sex, etc.... I picked those 2 things in particular because the gap between how utterly and completely normal they are in some societies vs. how utterly and completely beyond the pale outrageous in other societies is remarkable.
The question is also too muddled by using the general term "Art" to describe the immensely different sub-categories contained therein. I don't think a lyric-less piece of music can have much of a politics, any political connotation it might have is solely through sideband associations, such as the political opinions of its authors, the lyrics usually sung over its tones, or what kinds of audience it's primarily performed to. Linguistic pieces of art - stories, poems, movies, novels, songs, etc... - have the full power of language at their disposal and thus can be inherently political. Paintings can be political through the implicit connotations that the painter can induce through sizes and colors and other visual info, but the meaning of those can vary in unexpected ways: Paintings of the Buddha depict him as fat because pre-industrial obesity meant health and contentment, but of course the connotation now is completely inverted. Language is not immune from those sorts of unexpected mutations, but paintings are more prone to them.
>What story or song doesn't deal with decision-making in groups? or power relations? or the distributions of resources?
Twinkle-Twinke Little Star
Beethoven's 5th Symphony
The Inspecter Gadget theme song
Oh My Darling Clementine
Pretty much all love songs (unless you count two as a group and romance as decision-making, which is pretty unromantic if you ask me)
Like a Bat Out of Hell
The Cliffs of Dover
Frer Jacque
Axel F
I could go on, but it would probably be shorter to list all the songs that do deal with decision making in groups, or power relations, or the distribution of resources.
Interesting that you start with the Greeks' definition of politics. Now let's consider ancient Greek art. How political is Homer? He's pro-Greek, that's for sure, but I don't any real political messages in his work. How about in Aeschylus or Sophocles? Aristotle's Poetics, which has a lot to say about the aesthetics of Greek Tragedy and Comedy, doesn't say anything about the value of political works, as best as I can recall. I suppose the satirist Aristophanes wrote political plays, so I will give you that one. Plato's opinions about art are utterly absurd, IMO.
As for government school systems worrying about what propaganda the kids have to read, I concur that they make the children read crap propaganda lit like 1984 (The CIA financed the movie version), The Grapes of Wrath, To Kill a Mockingbird and The Crucible in lieu of actual good literature. That governments choose propaganda pieces for schools doesn't weaken my case one bit. Political art is bad art.
Disagree 100% with your points 1 and 2.
Aeschylus is very often quite overtly political, as is Euripides. Euripides' political plays aren't particularly good, but Aeschylus' are some of the highlights of Western culture.
The Oresteia ends with the tragic cycle of vengeance finally laid to rest by the establishment of the Areopagus--an Athenian judicial and political body.
The Persians is entirely about the defeat of Persian despotism by the Greek polis.
Thanks. Interesting to learn that Aeschylus was more political than I had realized.
I think it's a pretty controversial opinion - and thus in need of much more defense than you care to give - that 1984 is "crap Propaganda lit", you mention offhandedly in a pair of parentheses that the CIA financed (one of) the movie(s), but anybody who gives a shit about the movie version of 1984 is doing it completely wrong. Anyone who reads 1984 in a non-English language is doing it 60% wrong. 1984 is meant to be (a) Read, (b) In the original English, and it's a widely loved and widely admired (and so *so* much and often quoted) piece of literature that both Right-Wing and Left-Wing and all the politics in-between love (and accuse their political enemies of being the villains of). I didn't read To Kill a Mockingbird, but it's a household name that I recognize, and by analogy to 1984, I think you're also largely deluding yourself it's propaganda.
> How political is Homer?
Skimming the Wikipedia synopsis of the Iliad because I haven't read it and don't really care enough to: Very. Slavery is normal. Giving away sex-slave girls as rewards for fighting prowess is normal, generous, and/or commendable. Military commanders are expected to start wars based on dreams from Zeus. And that's just a 1-minute skimming of the very first section.
Recognizing that historical works of art are political is a far cry from insisting that they need to be "cleansed" or "wokified" for the modern day, I don't expect the 700s BC Homer or his audiences to stand up for women's rights or even use a different choice of words that even slightly indicates that using women as war spoils is bad or indicative of a moral failing, I really don't expect much from a 700s BC native. It's an insult to my intelligence if anyone tries to "adapt" the Iliad for "Modern Audiences" by removing the now-controversial parts and/or sugar-coating them. But I also think it's pretty deluded to think that there is not "any political messages in his work", there is plenty.
The entire point of art is this: it's a depiction of the artist viewpoint. Any linguistic depiction of a human group has a political message, because it reveals and advances - if not always explicitly advocate for - what the artist considers as the "Normal" politics. Any depiction of cities and warfare in the Middle Ages and before has a political message that slavery is normal and that you should always listen to your King (and/or feudal Lord), because that's all what the authors at the time knew and recognized as normal. It was a pretty **radical** politics back then to argue that Slavery is not normal or that people should govern themselves, that was the controversial, spicy flipside at the time.
But regardless of which of the 2 is more controversial at any given time and place, both messages are "Political". To say that "Human groups should enslave other human groups, especially those captured in war" is a political assertion - that is, it's literally about who should govern/dominate/control whom -, and to negate that statement is *also* a political assertion, for the same reason the original is. It just so happens that some human societies across time and space declares one of them controversial and the negation normal, and other human societies choose the opposite polarity, but that doesn't mean that one of them isn't political, it just means that whatever the society you happen to grow up in declares as "Normal" ceases to be perceived as "Political".
In other words, if Homer himself read or saw a modern work depicting a war, say any of the Call of Duty games, (s)he would be astonished at the radical and "political" messages contained in those works, one of which is that the defeated people in a war aren't slaves to the victors. It's anyone's guess whether he would love that or hate it, but there is not a single sliver of doubt in my mind that it would be the first thing he would notice, that the defeated aren't made slaves. He is right: what is an entirely unconscious choice of the authors of Call of Duty is actually a pretty radical political message to someone from a time when the defeated in a war were almost always enslaved afterwards. That's the thing about politics, you stop noticing it if enough people consider it to be the normal and inevitable state of affairs.
"The entire point of art is this: it's a depiction of the artist viewpoint. Any linguistic depiction of a human group has a political message, because it reveals and advances - if not always explicitly advocate for - what the artist considers as the "Normal" politics. Any depiction of cities and warfare in the Middle Ages and before has a political message that slavery is normal and that you should always listen to your King (and/or feudal Lord), because that's all what the authors at the time knew and recognized as normal."
This is the view of art that both the prude and the woke agree upon, and it is dead wrong. Depiction is not prescription in art. In Joyce's Ulysses, does the author side with the Irish nationalists or is he merely mocking them? To answer the question one way or another is to misunderstand the work. A novel, if it is art and not a mere political work, is about understanding, and understanding is the opposite of judgment.
1984, OTOH, is a work of judgment. Nobody's understanding of the world is enhanced by reading 1984. "Totalitarianism is bad." That's the work. You don't need to write a novel to point that out. I agree that it is a book that many people like when they read it as a kid. It's basically a children's book, much like Harry Potter. But it isn't great art. Its continued popularity is because the US and British (I think) governments decided that it worked as tremendous anti-Communist propaganda during the Cold War (Nevermind and don't mention it to the kids that Orwell was a Socialist) and required every schoolkid to read it.
1984 is art about how knowledge is denied in totalitarian countries, how hard it is to be clear that you're being lied to, and even if you know that, how hard it is to get to anything true.
This is a richer message than just saying totalitarianism is bad, or that a particular totalitarian government is bad.
1984 was prescient in many ways, and one can see instances of it becoming truer as time goes on. It had the concept of double-think, constant monitoring of the populace, government controlling the way the people think and what they think about, and more.
Great art reflects life in an interesting way not before documented. The message isn't comfortable, but 1984 gives a glimpse into how life could be. How one can dispute 1984 is art is beyond me.
> To put that in relatable day-to-day terms, who has been more valuable to our society: Larry David or Joe Biden? Beethoven or Napoleon? The Beatles or LBJ? Are there better comparisons?
You imply that the answer is obvious and it's Larry David, Beethoven and The Beatles.
But to me it seems that the question just has no objective answer, so everything basically boils down to "well I feel that Larry David is more important than LBJ".
Like, Napoleon had a large impact on Europe at the time and it's plausible the Europe of today would look different if not for him. Possibly substantially so, but I'm not remotely certain.
On the other hand, the Beatles had a large impact on Pop music and it's plausible the music we listen to today would sound different if not for them. Possibly substantially so, but I'm not remotely certain.
How do you compare that and come away with "Obviously the Beetles have been more valuable to society"? My takeaway surely is "who the fuck knows"
I tried to make comparisons that one could potentially argue either way, though it's true I show my hand about which way I would argue. An argument I would make regarding say Napoleon is that while a universe without Napoleon would likely look different today (how much, we don't know), it's basically random whether he made the 21st century better or worse, and there's almost no way to argue one way or the other in earnest. Whereas while one can debate Beethoven's relative contribution to the 21st century, it's hard to argue on the side that it's been negative.
I confess I read your post and somehow thought you had made an argument based on importance not positivity.
But if it's net positive impact we're considering I can see the "art is directionally positive, politics can be negative" argument.
1984 and Animal Farm are political art that might have staying power. What else?
Atlas Shrugged
The Dispossessed
The Fountainhead
The Rebellion of the Hanged
We
I wouldn't really call The Fountainhead political art. There are a handful of scenes that address contemporary political issues, but its primary themes are all about behaving morally at the individual level.
Atlas Shrugged is definitely political art, but it's also not particularly good.
Yeah, I also found The Fountainhead strangely apolitical when I read it some time ago. (https://www.ahponen.fi/p/book-review-fountainhead)
It's not an accident that even ostensibly liberal celebrities have praised the book, it really can be read as a "doing your own thing, being your own person" book, almost a self-help novel.
I think one of the signs of art is that it communicates on many levels simultaneously. As in other areas of life, this rule can be broken occasionally while still allowing for the breakers to remain in the category, but if it's broken too often the breakers cease to be part of the category.
Politics is tricky because, like engineering, it's under pressure to perform usefully. So most political "art" lacks subtlety, but there can be exceptions.
A "titanomachy" showing Zeus and Cronus could say a whole lot, about the replacement of the old order with the new, the hope of revolution and the realization that the abuses of the old order were a result of social forces that will inevitably recapitulate themselves in the new order, sadness for the death of the old tempered by realization that the old had done the same in its day... There's a whole lot that could be packed into a painting of a couple of old Greek dudes, stuff that could be relevant for millennia to come.
Stuff that's tied too closely to specific contingent details becomes banal. Few people today would care about Disraeli vs Gladstone, unless you find a way to make them care. On the other hand, with Churchill vs. Hitler you'd have to find something besides the obvious. Hitler vs. Stalin has potential, though.
Offhand I'd say... "beauty" is the luxury good, while "art" is a style of communication. Art doesn't have to be beautiful, and on the other hand, sometimes all it communicates is "this is beautiful (to someone)".
Interesting take. As a passionate supporter of beauty, I'd have said that beauty is out of style, and that most contemporary art merely 'challenges' the viewer.
Think it's ugly? - No, you are being challenged by what you see.
Think it's stupid or facile? - No, you are being _challenged_ by that artistic piece.
It's much easier to shock or annoy the viewer than it is to render them awestruck or thoughtful, and so that's what most contemporary art does.
If one questions the art one sees, the fault never lies with the (unskilled, unthoughtful) artist but inevitably falls at the feet of the viewer, who isn't adequately responding to the 'challenge' before them.
Disclaimer; this comment may or may not have been heavily influenced by an invitation to a gallery opening that landed in my inbox two minutes ago - and which I would pay money to avoid attending!
A lot of modern painting-and-sculptures art is an unmitigated and unrepentant dumpster of trash, but I would say that in the realm of writings and moving pictures there is now more backlash against meaningless "Subversion of Expectation" just for the sake of it. I base this impression primarily on the reaction to the 3rd trilogy of Star Wars, where every dumb and incoherent authorial decision was justified by "It's a SuvVersiOn of ExPeCtatiONs" but most of the audience weren't having it and still called it dumb and meaningless.
I agree; I think you've got a separate and entirely valid critique. :-)
Making artificial beauty is hard, and I think there might be a subconscious element of "sour grapes" in the currently popular style of art.
Or perhaps it's that, in order to create beauty, you have to be able to see beauty and imagine beauty. And I think there are ideologies today which claim that physical beauty is worthless, or which try to redefine beauty to better match their political/ethical views. And the result is a vision of ugliness with some abstract pattern applied to it.
At this point, I've seen more claims that art is inevitably political. Even the most innocuous genre fiction might be implying that the existing system isn't too bad, or at least it's inevitable.
I have a small bet with myself that people who say art should be political actually mean it should be promoting *their* politics.
I think that is one of those things that is pithy and kinda ‘sounds good’ but is not always true.
When it comes to art, politics fades in the sun and disappears. Any biting political statement from five hundred years ago just looks like a nice poem or a pretty picture to us now, because we don't know the argument and all references to it are lost on us.
If your "political" point is actually something so fundamental that it hasn't changed in 500 years, then arguably you're actually highlighting some aspect of the human condition and you've moved beyond mere politics into something more profound.
But otherwise, the politics will evapourate away and what's left will be the physical artifact you have created, which people will judge on its own aesthetic terms.
If a strong political feeling is the thing that motivates you to get up and create that artifact, I say that's just as valid as love, loneliness, aggression, or any of the other creative drivers. Just provided you do a good job with the result.
This was beautiful. Thank you.
Well said.
Beautifully put.
Politics - and indeed many motivating factors - ultimately fade, but good art is enduring.
Does anyone know a simple rule of thumb for comparing compensation as a salaried employee versus as a contractor? I realize that it depends on the details but that's why I'm asking for a simple rule of thumb. USA.
I think the 1.5-2x figure given is fairly accurate. The payroll taxes and health insurance deductions that big employers absorb hides a lot of the tax burden that the self-employed are exposed to. In my experience, $50,000 as a contractor is roughly equivalent to $30,000 salaried. So you need to get an extra 2/3rds from your income.
You need to make about 1.5 - 2x as a contractor generally (depending on your usual salary range), to offset the cost of benefits like health insurance and the extra self-employment taxes. There are some benefits to forming corporations and doing B2B contracting if possible.
Also keep in mind that if you're going independent, you'll need to be spending time and possibly money marketing yourself, maintaining connections, and diversifying your clients, to ensure that your pipeline of work is resilient and paying enough - that has an extra cost in time and sometimes quality of life too. 2x might be underselling it in that case.
Thanks.
I'll just add that every single person I've known who switched from salaried work to independent consulting/contractual ("hung out their shingle" in whatever their field is), has initially underestimated what they needed to charge per hour or day to be doing at least as well as from the salary that they left. Literally no exceptions during my decades-long professional life. And some of them hugely underestimated it.
Thanks. Good to know.
A very smart and knowledgeable scientist thinks of a whole number between 1 and 9 inclusive. You are allowed two questions, to each of which the scientist will truthfully answer YES, NO or I DON'T KNOW. Find out the number.
N erny ahzore E vf fho-Evrznaa vs gurer rkvfg abagevivny mrebrf bs gur Evrznaa mrgn shapgvba jvgu erny cneg fgevpgyl terngre guna E.
1) Qvivqr lbhe ahzore ol 3 naq unyir gur erznvaqre. Vf gur erfhyg fho-Evrznaa?
2) Qvivqr lbhe ahzore ol 3 naq sybbe gur erfhyg. Gura unyir gung ahzore. Vf gur erfhyg fho-Evrznaa?
* 0 vf qrsvavgryl fho-Evrznaa fvapr gurer ner xabja mrebrf jvgu erny cneg 1/2.
* 1/2 zvtug or fho-Evrznaa vs gur Evrznaa Ulcbgurfvf vf snyfr, ohg jr qba'g xabj.
* 1 vf abg fho Evrznaa, fvapr jr xabj gurer ner ab mrebrf jvgu erny cneg terngre guna bar.
"V unir whfg cvpxrq zl bja, erny-inyhrq ahzore va gur vagreiny ]guerr,fvk]. Vf lbhe ahzore ynetre guna zl ahzore?" Gura ercrng jvgu n fhvgnoyr vagreiny.
Be, vs lbh jnag gb nibvq vagebqhpvat n zbqry-qrcraqrag dhrfgvba, lbh pbhyq fnl:
Yrg x or gur erznvaqre bs lbhe ahzore nsgre qvivfvba guebhtu guerr. Vf gur fgngrzrag "tvira a vf n cbfvgvir jubyr ahzore, vf 2*a+(x+1) trarenyyl gur fhz bs (x+1) cevzrf?"
Sbe x=0, gur nafjre vf ab orpnhfr avar vf abg gur fhz bs bar cevzr.
Sbe x=2, gur nafjre vf lrf, orpnhfr jr unir n cebbs sbe gur jrnx Tbyqonpu pbawrpgher.
Sbe x=1, gur nafjre vf "V qba'g xabj", orpnhfr gur fgngrzrag vf gur Tbyqonpu pbawrpgher.
Gura whfg ercrng jvgu "Yrg x or gur vagrtre qvivfvba erfhyg bs lbhe ahzore naq guerr".
V unir n cbgragvnyyl purngl, ohg ryrtnag fbyhgvba gb guvf ceboyrz. Jr arrq gb znxr fher gung obgu bs gur dhrfgvbaf unir hfr nyy guerr cbffvoyr nafjref, tvira gur ahzoref cebivqrq. Gb qb fb, V'ir qrirybc gur sbyybjvat cnve bs dhrfgvbaf:
Dhrfgvba 1: Vs lbh jrer gb ercerfrag rnpu ahzore nf 2-ovg gevanel inyhr fhpu fhpu 1 vf “00” naq 9 vf “22”, naq nffhzvat gung “0” vf “AB”, “1” vf “V QBA’G XABJ”, naq “2” vf “LRF”, jung vf gur yrsgzbfg qvtvg bs gur gevanel ercerfragngvba bs lbhe pubfra ahzore?
Dhrfgvba 2: Tvira gur fnzr fgvchyngvbaf nf Dhrfgvba 1, Jung vf gur evtugzbfg qvtvg bs gur gevanel ercerfragngvba bs lbhe pubfra ahzore?
Thanks for this. I have a very inelegant brute-force solution!
I really appreciate these puzzles.
Probably the intended solution:
Svefg Dhrfgvba: V'z guvaxvat bs rvgure gur frg pbagnvavat gur ahzoref bar guebhtu guerr be gur frg pbagnvavat gur ahzoref bar guebhtu fvk. Vf lbhe ahzore jvguva zl frg?
Frpbaq Dhrfgvba: Sebz ubj ur nafjrerq gur svefg dhrfgvba, V abj xabj gung uvf ahzore vf bar bs guerr pbafrphgvir ahzoref. Gura nybat gur fnzr yvarf nf orsber V pna fnl: V'z guvaxvat bs rvgure gur frg pbagnvavat gur svefg ahzore be gur frg pbagnvavat gur svefg naq frpbaq ahzore. Vf lbhe ahzore jvguva zl frg?
Yeah, I think something like this, or chickenmythic's below, is intended. But I'm getting a kick out of all these high-powered solutions below, too!
Nuu... fb "xabjyrqtnoyr fpvragvfg" jnf haarprffnel vasbezngvba. V sryy sbe vg!
Fnzr. Vs n fbyhgvba pna'g or nqwhfgrq gb jbex ntnvafg n cflpuvp rdhvccrq jvgu nal nffvfgvat grpuabybtl fubeg bs fbzrguvat yvxr n mrab znpuvar, gura vf vg ernyyl tbbq rabhtu?
(Some important parts of my answer use numbers and symbols, which stay the same under rot13. Sorry everyone; spoilers below!)
DHRFGVBAF:
Yrg k or lbhe ahzore. Yrg c(a) qrabgr gur agu cevzr ahzore, fgnegvat ng c(0)=2.
Dhrfgvba 1: Vf c(⌊(k-1)/3⌋^5793826498140572948164895)+1 n zhygvcyr bs 4?
Dhrfgvba 2: Vf c(((k-1)%3)^7814392508473549821875294)+1 n zhygvcyr bs 4?
NAFJRE:
Ab/Ab: 1
Ab/Lrf: 2
Ab/VQX: 3
Lrf/Ab: 4
Lrf/Lrf: 5
Lrf/VQX: 6
VQX/Ab: 7
VQX/Lrf: 8
VQX/VQX: 9
EXPLANATION:
Gur rnfvrfg jnl gb frr jul guvf jbexf vf gb cvpx n ahzore 1-9 naq grfg vg.
Sbe gur svefg dhrfgvba, gur vzcbegnag cneg vf l=⌊(k-1)/3⌋. Vs k=1,2,3, gura guvf vf 0; vs k=4,5,6, guvf vf 1; vs k=7,8,9, guvf vf 2. Fb abj jr whfg arrq gb ghea "0, 1, be 2" vagb "Ab, Lrf, be VQX". Vs jr qb m=l^(enaqbz tvtnagvp ahzore), gura gur nafjre m jvyy rvgure or 0, 1, be n enaqbz tvtnagvp ahzore. Vs jr nfx sbe gur mgu cevzr cyhf 1, jr'yy trg 3, 4, be "V qba'g xabj". Nobhg unys bs cevzrf+1 ner zhygvcyrf bs 4, naq NSNVPG gurer'f ab pyrire zngurzngvpny grpuavdhrf gb trg gur nafjre va guvf pnfr; V guvax lbh'q whfg arrq infg pbzchgngvbany cbjre. Fb vs jr nfx vs gur mgu cevzr cyhf 1 vf n zhygvcyr bs 4, jr'yy trg Ab, Lrf, be V qba'g xabj.
Gur frpbaq dhrfgvba vf gur rknpg fnzr vqrn, rkprcg gur vavgvny sbezhyn vf l=(k-1)%3. Vs k=1,4,7, vg'f 0. Vs k=2,5,8, vg'f 1. Vs k=3,6,9, vg'f 2. Gura jr whfg qb gur fnzr cebprff nf nobir.
Yrg K or gur inevnoyr jr unir gb npdhver. Jr arrq ybt(9) ovgf bs vasbezngvba naq jr unir gjb dhrfgvbaf, fb jr arrq gb npdhver ybt(9)/2=ybt(3) ovgf cre dhrfgvba. Guvf vf cbffvoyr orpnhfr jr unir guerr cbffvoyr nafjref sbe n dhrfgvba. Vs jr nffhzr gurer vf fbzrguvat gur fpvragvfg qbrf ABG xabj, sbe rknzcyr jurgure gur Evrznaa ulcbgurfvf vf gehr naq jr ner nyybjrq gur unir n inevnoyr L juvpu vf 0 vs vg vf snyfr naq 1 vs vg vf gehr, bhe ceboyrz pna or sbezhyngrq nf n frnepu sbe n shapgvba s {0,1,2}K{0,1}->{0,1} qrsvarq nf s(0,0) = s(0,1) = s(2,0) = 0 naq s(1,0) = s(1,1) = s(2,1) = 1 naq gura jr pna nfx gur fpvragvfg jurgure s(K zbq 3,L) = 0 naq jurgure s(K-1 vagrtre qvivfvba 3,L)=0?
Vs jr arrq na rkcyvpvg sbezhyn sbe s gura 0.5*K*(K-1)*L+K*(2-K) fhssvprf.
Chggvat vg nyy gbtrgure bhe gjb dhrfgvbaf:
1. Vs K vf gur ahzore lbh gubhtug bs naq L vf 0 vs gur Evrznaa Ulcbgurfvf gehr naq 1 bgurejvfr, gura Vf 0.5*((K-1) qvi 3)*((K-1) qvi 3 - 1)*L+((K - 1) qvi 3)*(2-((K-1) qvi 3)) rdhny 0?
2. Vs K vf gur ahzore lbh gubhtug bs naq L vf 0 vs gur Evrznaa Ulcbgurfvf gehr naq 1 bgurejvfr, gura Vf 0.5*(K zbq 3)*(K zbq 3 - 1)*L+(K zbq 3)*(2 - (K zbq 3)) rdhny 0?
Gur pbeerfcbaqrapr orgjrra gurve nafjref naq K vf gur sbyybjvat: (L=lrf, A=ab, Q=qba'g xabj)
LL:1
LA:2
LQ:3
AL:4
AA:5
AQ:6
QL:7
QA:8
QQ:9
Avar ahzoref, gjb thrffrf: zrguvaxf jr arrq gb qvivqr gjvpr ol guerr hfvat lrf, ab naq V qba'g xabj nf bhe fyvpre. "xabjyrqtrnoyr fpvragvfg" vf cebononoyl n Purxubi'f Tha. Thrffvat jr arrq gb hfr fpvragvsvp xabjyrqtr sbe gur V qba'g xabj. V'z abg n xabjyrqtrnoyr fpvragvfg fb V qba'g xabj gur nafjre ohg zhfg or fbzrguvat yvxr: Vs jr zhygvcyl guvf ahzore ol K qbrf na ryrzrag jvgu gung ngbzvp jrvtug rkvfg? Ercrng jvgu L. Fbzrguvat yvxr gung. Fbzr svryq bs fpvragvsvp xabjyrqtr V qba'g xabj naq abar bs hf xabj ragveryl.
I enjoyed this, thank you!
Sbe gur 1-3 pnfr, V jbhyq nfx: “V nz guvaxvat bs n ahzore orgjrra 2 naq 3. Vf gur ahzore lbh unir va zvaq terngre guna be rdhny gb zl ahzore?”
Vs gurl unir 3 va zvaq, gurl pna pbasvqragyl nafjre lrf. Vs 1, gurl pna nafjre ab. Vs 2, gur nafjre qrcraqf ba xabjyrqtr gurl qba’g unir (juvpu ahzore V unir va zvaq), fb gurl zhfg nafjre “V qba’g xabj”.
Guvf vf gur zbfg ryrtnag fbyhgvba, V guvax. V rkcnaqrq bhg gur shyy irefvba sbe gubfr vagrerfgrq:
* V’z guvaxvat bs n ahzore orgjrra 4 naq 7 vapyhfvir. Vf lbhe ahzore terngre guna be rdhny gb zl ahzore?
***** LRF (7 8 9)
********* V’z guvaxvat bs n ahzore orgjrra 8 naq 9 vapyhfvir. Vf lbhe ahzore terngre guna be rdhny gb zl ahzore?
************* LRF (9)
************* AB(7)
************* QBA’G XABJ (8)
***** AB (1 2 3)
********* V’z guvaxvat bs n ahzore orgjrra 2 naq 3 vapyhfvir. Vf lbhe ahzore terngre guna be rdhny gb zl ahzore?
************* LRF (3)
************* AB(1)
************* QBA’G XABJ (2)
***** QBA’G XABJ (4 5 6)
********* V’z guvaxvat bs n ahzore orgjrra 5 naq 6 vapyhfvir. Vf lbhe ahzore terngre guna be rdhny gb zl ahzore?
************* LRF (6)
************* AB(4)
************* QBA’G XABJ (5)
oh that's good, nice
Vg frrzf fvzcyr rabhtu gb erqhpr gur ceboyrz gb gur irefvba jurer lbh nfx bar dhrfgvba naq qvfgvathvfu orgjrra vagrtref bar, gjb naq guerr. Fb jr whfg arrq n dhrfgvba gung jvyy znc gb lrf, ab naq V qba'g xabj sbe gur svefg guerr vagrtref.
Bar boivbhf ohg pyhaxvyl jbeqrq irefvba jbhyq or "pna nyy fhssvpvragyl ynetr bqq be rira vagrtref or rkcerffrq nf n fhz bs guvf znal cevzrf?" Gung'f n ab sbe bar, n lrf sbe guerr, naq na V qba'g xabj sbe gjb. (Ohg abj V'z qbhoyr purpxvat, vg gheaf bhg gung gur cebbs bs gur guerr cevzr pnfr vf fgvyy pbafvqrerq irel fyvtugyl qhovbhf, ryrira lrnef nsgre vavgvny choyvpngvba.)
Gurer zhfg or n pyrnare irefvba bs guvf.
V jnf guvaxvat, nsgre erqhpvat gb gur "1-3 pnfr", gb nfx "Ner gurer vasvavgryl znal cevzrf c naq d fhpu gung d - c + 1 rdhnyf gur tvira ahzore a orgjrra 1 naq 3", naq ubcvat gung gur fpvragvfg vf abg zhpu fznegre guna Greel Gnb naq Lvgnat Munat gb nafjre gur gjva cevzr pbawrpgher! Ohg puvpxrazlguvp nobir unf n orggre nccebnpu.
Today somebody told me that when he spontaneously tells people an observation he thinks is interesting they are turned off and conclude that he’s a weird geek. The example he gave was of an idea that was, yeah, kind of quirky, but seemed smart and interesting to me. I’d like to be able to give him some examples of similar thoughts other people have had. ACX seems like the ideal place to ask. Anyone want to volunteer a quirky personal observation or two? His example: The placement of eyes in our species probably determines some important things about how we function. For instance rabbits have nearly a 360 degree view. Their eyes are on the side of their head, and they have notches in their ears that keep the ears from blocking rabbit’s view of what’s behind. So our awareness is especially geared towards what’s in front of us. “What’s in front of me” & “what I’m aware of” aren’t identical categories, but they’re very similar.
I find it reassuring to know that there are sheets of connective tissue between the pairs of smaller bones in the lower legs and arms. It makes me feel more held together.
I also like knowing that the heart is between the lungs and resting on the diaphragm.
Your friend would enjoy the Equations of Life (Cockell, 2018).
My personal observation/question: I wonder why isn't it common to have multiple tenants on a single shoplot in the west? The few examples near me are all Asian restaurants import the practice from their homeland. But rent in the west is very expensive - it seems like if you have a "morning business" (like a cafe), it could be good to sublet the space to a night business (like a bar) and greatly reduce the rent burden. This also means you can massively compress the footprint of your city, making it much more convenient for everyone. So there must be a tradeoff that is a larger limiting factor in the west that I'm not considering, because this sort of thing is fairly common practice in Asia.
There was a place in Mexico (probably still there, but I haven't checked in many years) that was a car shop during the day and turned into a taco restaurant at night. Never got any work done to my car there, but the tacos were fantastic.
I would guess that the tradeoff is the inconvenience of having another business's equipment in your work area. I suppose a cafe and a bar in the same space would use the same tables and chairs, but not everything could be dual-purpose.
I can remember a specific case that's a lot like his. I was sitting on a bench with my girlfriend, watching a pigeon bob its head back and forth. Pigeons have eyes on opposite sides of their heads, giving them closer to a 360-degree view. Having eyes on opposite sides of the head usually comes at the expense of stereoscopic vision; however, I suggested that the rapid bobs of the pigeon's head allowed one eye to have distinct images from two places in rapid succession, so maybe their brains can process that as a stereoscopic image... girlfriend said I was weird.
There's a song called "Good Luck, Babe!" by Chappell Roan that is becoming quite popular. Every time I hear this song, I'm struck by how similar it is to "I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles)" by the Proclaimers. Everyone I tell about this agrees with me, but I've never seen anyone else mention it, even though most of the people I know have both heard this song and the song by the Proclaimers.
We evolved to feel sexual pleasure in response to activity that leads to reproduction. The instincts are blind and we can get that same pleasure from proximate activities even when there's no real woman in the room. This implies that if plants could feel, eating or chopping fruit would be giving it an orgasm.
I'm no botanist, but I think having a pollenator visit your flowers would be more analogous to sex. Having your fruit drop to the ground or get eaten is maybe more like sending your kids off to college.
I've heard it said that predators' eyes face forwards, and prey have eyes that look all around.
I'm sure there are some perfectly good counterexamples, but it holds for most of the terrestrial vertebrates I can think of.
All primates I have seen have eyes facing forwards, and primates aren't necessarily predators.
Sloths too. And koalas.
Tree-dwellers in general seem to be a major class of exceptions, they have fewer worries about ambush predators and more concerns about exactly what's in front of their face and how far away it is.
Yes, I remember learning this in school. The explanation was that prey need to be aware, and detect predators as quickly as possible while feeding etc. Predators need forward focus when they hunt.
So our forward facing eyes may suggest about us that we are predators rather tgan prey.
I would think the reason predators have eyes in front is depth perception. A cat needs to know how far the prey is in front of it to pounce correctly, raptors need to know how far to dive.
I was looking up information about birds of prey and vision, and found this neat diagram that shows the difference very well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_vision#/media/File:Fieldofview01.png
While we are predators, we inherited eyes in the front from herbivorous ancestors. Primates need eyes in the front to judge distance when jumping from one branch to another.
That's a good point. I was using the eyes in front as evidence that we're omnivores rather than naturally vegetarian.
I've seen a theory that early humans? pre-humans? were scavengers, but the eyes in front suggest that they were at least hunting small game even if they were also scavenging large game.
No, all primates have forward-facing eyes regardless of their diet. Depth perception is not useful only for hunting; in the case of primates, it's for navigating the three-dimensional environment of the treetops, as Bullseye above notes.
Oh, well, so much for that theory. People having both molars and incisors might still be indicative.
Most herbivores run on cellulose, whereas those humans who get their calories from plants run on carbs and plant fat (I.e. we eat tubers, nuts, fruit, grains seeds, and pulses, as opposed to grass, leaves, shoots, and stems).
Therefore, even if the human plant based diet were the evolutionarily correct one, there is no reason to expect the human anatomy to resemble the typical herbivore.
I think we've evolved as flexible eaters (come on this is common sense), who can live almost exclusively on animals, or almost exclusively on carbs and plant fat, or anything in between. In any case, we cannot eat plants as horses or gorillas do in the wild, and they cannot eat plants as we do. Our herbivory is not typical mammalian herbivory, it's something else. I'm a vegetarian and near vegan myself, by the way.
Not to be contrarian on purpose, but I don't think that would work either. Both incisors and molars are useful to process plants; perhaps you were thinking of canines? But even then, having incisors, canines, and molars is an ancestral feature of mammals, and one that is not only shared by all primates, but also nearly all other mammals. Even horses and camels still have all three tooth types, though rodents and ruminants lost their canines.
Humans only became active hunters when we already had stone tools and fire, so most of the hard work of processing carcasses is outsourced, so to speak. So you shouldn't expect many physiological correlates of that sort with other predator mammals. I think your best bet would be intestine size: our intestine, and particularly our caecum (which many herbivores use as fermentation chamber to break down cellulose), is closer in relative size to that of carnivorous mammals than to that of herbivores. But I think that would be true even if we were herbivores, since plant food still gets ground and baked.
I've wondered why nipples haven't evolved towards the bottom of the breast as humans started walking upright. It seems that most women who breastfeed do so when sitting upright. Wouldn't having the nipple at the bottom be a better idea from a fluid flow perspective?
Perhaps the reason is that there's a sexual selection effect going on, where having a nipple in the very center of the breast is a marker for good genes (much like facial symmetry and many other features).
There might be a common knowledge answer to this, but why the hell do men have nipples?
I assume it's because nipples are harmless on men (I assume males in all mammal species have nipples but I don't actually know), so it was easier to let them exist than to edit them out.
I expect it has something to do with us being bipedal and thus weird? Centering the mammary glands around the nipples seems like a good idea for quadrapeds, where they would hang straight down. Maybe the genetic design for this got solidified early on, to the point where random mutations today aren't able to affect it without bollixing up the whole system.
The breast isn't a big sack of milk with the nipple serving as the exit hole. The milk is all in the nipple; the rest of the breast is just fat.
Your username and avatar make that observation rather more disconcerting 😅
Maybe centered nipples have survived because they provide a positive selection effect on babies and allocate more resources to only the healthiest offspring, like a built-in form of eugenics. Babies that die of thirst because they can't overcome the struggle of horizontal fluid flow suction probably wouldn't have made it very far anyway, after all—Okay, I'm not being serious and that might've unnecessarily morbid. But I do wonder how many persistent suboptimal features of parenting could be explained that way, as built-in parental eugenics gauntlets, the rarely mentioned third important evolutionary factor beside natural selection and sexual selection.
Humans are K-selected. Most births are single births. If you have just invested nine months, tons of energy and risked your life in childbed to create another carrier of half of your genes, any "eugenics" gene would be strongly selected against unless it was a nearly perfect predictor of reproductive fitness.
If you have a gene which decreases the survival odds of kids with competitive genomes by 1% and of kids with non-competitive genomes by 20%, depending on the frequency of severe gene defects (inbreeding, radiation, etc), this would likely be a massive liability. The selection pressure in childhood is likely enough to produce most of this effect for free.
Theoretically, if you had a gene which causes your offspring to die if and only if they are sterile, this would be beneficial, but "predict if an individual is sterile" is a bit beyond what a gene could do.
I'm joining tumblr. Is there a rationalist/neoliberal/economist outpost there?
Like: Twitter is insane on average, but with careful curation my feed is full of nerdy economically-literate liberals who buy malaria bednets and are worried about AI and are in love with NGDP targeting. Who should I follow if I want to replicate that experience on Tumblr?
I've found Scott's, Yudkowksy's, and Kelsey Piper's blog, but none of them seem to post very much. Is there an active community?
Some of the people on Scott's old map are still active, including myself. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/05/mapmaker-mapmaker-make-me-a-map/
I think you can pick one of rationalism and neoliberalism but not both.
No, I pick both. Do you have tumblr follow recommendations for either? (Especially neoliberalism, not enough neoliberal economics in my feed atm)
Argumate. Not strictly rationalist, but similar enough discourse norms (will debate anything in good faith, seems to possess a reasonable baseline of empathy and reason), and posts a frankly prodigious amount due to constantly reblogging past discourse and commenting on how the situation is now. You'll find lots of the same names arguing with him.
thank you!
is it possible to enter a Jhana-like state without trying by mistake? Normally when I'm going to sleep most of the time there's an increasing hum in my ears. If it goes too high (it increases rapidly after a while) it wakes me up even more and I become fully conscious or I fall asleep to the hum. It's like light being refracted or reflected from the water based on the angle it hits. Hum goes too loud too quickly and it wakes me up, or it's slower than a critical speed and I fall asleep.
Last night I woke up in the middle of the night and was falling back asleep, and for the first time in my life it was neither refraction nor reflection. By pure chance I hit the hum-increase-speed which didn't wake me up but barely. The hum increased to a real very loud thunder and the blackness that I see with closed eyes became gradually whiter to eventually be pure light. At that moment I felt something like bliss and got lost in it and fell asleep. I don't know if I really experienced this falling asleep, or I fell asleep in my dream and this was just a dream. It was weird though, anybody had anything like this?
Many years ago during dreamless sleep I experienced a period of objectless awareness. An apparently different part of me became distressed by the state and it forced me to wake up.
Years later I would read in the Upanishads that dreamless sleep was the domain of the true self, the atman.
I’ve only experienced this that one time.
Yes, that's Dhyana. I've read descriptions of that hum in Tibetan stuff and there's piles of Indian tantric stuff that corresponds with your experience. You may not have noticed but I guess that you would have experienced full sensory withdrawal (pratyahara) and possibly a rotating sensation in the lower abdomen as well as a distinct lowering of the tail bone. The rest of what you describe corresponds with the type of 'hard/true' Dhyana that's more written about in the yogic corpus than in the modern western Buddhist Jhana descriptions. It's much harder to achieve then the light Jhana that everyone is talking about currently, so give yourself a pat on the back.
That sounds really impressive! The hum before going to sleep was something that I always experienced but as I said if it got loud slowly I just fell asleep and it got loud too fast I would just gain too much consciousness. For the first time in my life, I think out of pure luck, I hit the goldilocks spot.
The other sensations I wouldn't have noticed or remembered because I melted in the white light, hum and joy (pratyahara might be this) so I don't remember anything further about my abdomen or tailbone.
I'll report back on acx comments if I manage to experience this again or find a way to trigger it. Thanks for the comment!
Dostoevsky had a kind of epilepsy, sometimes called "ecstatic epilepsy" that apparently gave him super pleasurable feelings during his episodes. There are lots of ways to ruin one's brain; Drugs, being a Neet, having lots of concussions or a brain tumor. Of course, this doesn't prove that there need to be multiple ways to be super happy, possibly all blissful brains are alike each depressed one is broken in a different way.
But I think it suggests that there would probably be a couple of ways to find some bliss. There is some sort of epilepsy that gives you bliss, probably one can have a tumor in the happiness center that has a similar effect, the Jhanas seem to be one way to hack bliss, maybe your dream humming is another kind of hack. Or possibly it's a very similar method to the Jhana route.
> possibly all blissful brains are alike each depressed one is broken in a different way.
I enjoyed the Anna Karenina first sentence formulation.
What's a Neet?
"Not in Education, Employment, or Training", on the internet, especially 4chan it's often used to generally mean a loser. Not in Education, Employment, or Training, probably also has no friends or hobbies or really a will to live.
I hope it's a hack or a jhana adjacent route and not epilepsy or a tumor:)
That sounds more like entering a lucid dream from the waking state (except you lost lucidity at the end). Hypnagogic hallucinations in the form of buzzing noises and a boom when you cross over into the sleep state are common effects.
P.S. There's state where you're dreaming, but there's nothing in the dream ... bodiless, formless nothing. In the Buddhist tradition, people try to do that deliberately. In the western lucid dreaming communities, it's more often "well, i entered that state accidentally and I think it really sucked".
Interesting, I sometimes go s bit lucid in my dreams under certain conditions, for example close to waking up but I've never been a lucid dreamer that can go lucid and take control of the dream fully. By the way I wouldn't call what I experienced as something that sucks. It was on contrary very joyful. Last night I was thinking of trying to do that on purpose but I had a very early morning appointment so went directly to sleep.
Andrew Holecheck, who writes on lucid dreaming from a Buddhist perspective, calls this "Discover the Clear Light Nature of Mind in Your Dreams".
Do meditators consider this different from jhanas? No idea.
From the Six Yogas of Naropa:
"The perception-of-mind of the dream state is much easier to absorb than the perception-of-mind of the waking state. In the dream state, when some portion of the very coarse kind of Prana dissolves itself and gathers at the Heart Center, the dream will vanish, and one will fall into the sleeping state. This is the time in which one may recognize the Voidness; if not, through repeated practices, one will definitely be able to see the Voidness of sleep clearly. "
Just to check, when you say the hum increases, do you mean it gets louder?
Does it seem like it might be voluntary tinnitus?
It was different from tinnitus that it wasn't coming from my ears but from inside my head. It was indeed getting louder as in amplitude
The best, most good-faith critiques of EA likely come from either inside EA or right on the periphery*. IMO I think it's a wise strategy to engage the highest-quality critiques first.
*In full transparency, I try to be one of these people.
Hey everyone. I made PaperTalk.xyz to make finding, discussing, and understanding research papers easier. If anyone has any feature requests, let me know! Of course the hard part is getting enough people coming daily so it feels alive...working on it. Thanks.
https://www.nber.org/digest/mar04/divorce-laws-and-family-violence
"In Bargaining in the Shadow of the Law: Divorce Laws and Family Distress (NBER Working Paper No. 10175), co-authors Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers evaluate three measures of family well being -- suicide rates, domestic violence, and murder -- to determine the effects of reforms nationwide that created unilateral divorce laws.
The authors find very real effects on the well being of families. For example, there was a large decline in the number of women committing suicide following the introduction of unilateral divorce, but no similar decline for men. States that passed unilateral divorce laws saw total female suicide decline by around 20 percent in the long run. The authors also find a large decline in domestic violence for both men and women following adoption of unilateral divorce. Finally, the evidence suggests that unilateral divorce led to a decline in females murdered by their partners, while the data reveal no discernible effects for homicide against men."
https://www.nber.org/papers/w10175
> For example, there was a large decline in the number of women committing suicide following the introduction of unilateral divorce, but no similar decline for men.
This seems like one of those things where different people will draw completely opposite conclusions. One possible interpretation is that women were oppressed by the previous situation, now they are not or less so, so the situation improved for them. Nothing changes for men, because they were not oppressed in the first place. (Women couldn't leave bad partners, now they can.) Another possible interpretation is that the new law, in combination with other existing laws, successfully addressed the problems of women, but didn't address the problems of men. (Men can leave bad partners, but doing so probably means they will never see their children again.)
> Finally, the evidence suggests that unilateral divorce led to a decline in females murdered by their partners, while the data reveal no discernible effects for homicide against men.
The first part seems obvious. If your partner is violent, and it's getting worse, the sooner you leave them, the less likely something bad happens. The second part has two possible explanations. Maybe men are less likely to use the possibility of unilateral divorce even when their partner is abusive (e.g. because they know that doing so would have bad financial consequences plus probably never seeing their children again, plus the fact that the children would stay alone with the abusive partner). Or maybe the reasons women kill their husbands are different (e.g. economically motivated, either life insurance or "why get 50% of property at divorce when you could get 100% using this one simple trick").
"The first part seems obvious. If your partner is violent, and it's getting worse, the sooner you leave them, the less likely something bad happens."
Abusive partners make it very hard for their victims to get away. This includes cutting off financial and relationship resources, threatening worse attacks for attempts to escape, and using pets and children as hostages. I think I've explained this to you before.
How often does the "wife gets the children, enforces no contact, and gets child support" scenario happen? I realize people can be very frightened and affected by rare disasters, but what are the stats?
My take on this is affected by the only bad divorce I know about-- I don't remember who initiated the divorce, but the wife ended up with the kid and no child support. She kept trying to get her ex to stay in contact with his son, but he made very little contact.
Why not consider that there are both men and women who are seriously bad partners?
Stats wise, it looks like about 90% of divorced women get custody of the children, though that may be biased because many men do not seek custody. I saw statistics that indicated that when men seek primary custody for the children they get it 60% of the time, likely because they're more likely to contest custody if they have a particularly unfit partner. I don't know how often fathers who don't contest custody would have wanted to, but were dissuaded not to try because they were unlikely to succeed. But all these statistics should be taken with several grains of salt, I was not able to find official statistics and got these numbers off third party sites (mostly divorce lawyer websites).
Other similarly shaky statistics I found say that 63% of women with custody get child support, while 38% of men with custody do. And it looks like the average child support payment is about $300 per month. But, you know: averages.
Finding more solid statistics seems difficult due to the huge number of divorce lawyer websites that clutter up search when I tried to find info on this.
Thank you for taking a crack at this.
I was especially interested in the outrage-maximizing situation of the ex-wife getting custody of the children *and* the ex-husband paying child support *and* the ex-husband not being permitted contact with his children. My guess is that this is pretty rare, but I don't really know.
To make it clear, I don't think "outrage-maximizing" means false, just that I don't know how close it is to typical.
> Why not consider that there are both men and women who are seriously bad partners?
Oh definitely; I suspect that maybe 20% of men and 20% of women are seriously bad partners.
I also suspect that a typical outcome of a hostile divorce is "whoever gets the better lawyer, wins", which in turn becomes "whoever gets the lawyer first, wins" because a good lawyer can give you advice on how to legally grab all the money in the shared accounts, which allows you to use that money for the lawyer, and prevents your partner from doing the same thing.
There are also other tricks, such as making a phone call to every lawyer in your jurisdiction. Now your partner cannot hire any of them, because they have already talked to you, so they would technically have a conflict of interest. Or accusing your partner of domestic violence and immediately withdrawing the accusation. Now you don't have to prove anything, because the accusation was withdrawn. However, everyone heard it, and sometimes they are actually required to act as if the accusation wasn't withdrawn, because everyone knows that victims can be pressured into withdrawing.
These legal tricks can of course be used by either sex. Finally, you can choose a jurisdiction known to be most biased towards your sex, and apply for divorce there. Sometimes a residence in given jurisdiction is required, but there are probably clever ways to technically do that without your partner noticing. Generally, there seems to be a huge first-mover advantage.
"Oh definitely; I suspect that maybe 20% of men and 20% of women are seriously bad partners."
That's higher than I would have put it. Of course, we might have different ideas of "seriously bad", but I'd have said more like between 5% and 10%. Maybe even as low as 3%.
I'm still very unsure about what proportion of divorces lead to men losing all contact with their children. For that matter, I don't know what proportion of me still want contact with their children. Clearly, some don't.
>There are also other tricks, such as making a phone call to every lawyer in your jurisdiction. Now your partner cannot hire any of them, because they have already talked to you, so they would technically have a conflict of interest.
The only incident I can recall like that was someone posting they had done this on Reddit, followed by all the internet lawyers telling him we was an idiot who was going to get the judge extremely pissed off at him and doubly so because he was posting it in public forum. The post was quickly deleted but you know, the internet never forgets
https://web.archive.org/web/20140807130935/http://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/2cpyke/im_in_some_deep_shit_in_a_divorce/
edit: Ok I got curious, seems like he learned his lesson: https://www.reddit.com/r/UnethicalLifeProTips/comments/cqtgnr/ulpt_if_youre_initiating_a_divorce_secretly/exf2ohq/
So what's your explanation for why "the evidence suggests that unilateral divorce led to a decline in females murdered by their partners", if you don't agree with Viliam's rather obvious explanation?
Women have more ability to get away from bad partners.
That was exactly Villiam's explanation, the one you vehemently disagreed with...
I'm surprised there's no decrease in homicide against men! I suppose it would be too difficult to see a change in mortality in general, and mortality data would be confounded by the fact that an unhappy marriage is stressful and will shorten your life anyway.
Of course, Henry VIII already showed that spousal murder drops when legal divorce avenues exist :P
Afaik the archetypical husband murder is a poisoning, which is much less likely to show up in homicide stats
This isn't the twentieth century, and certainly not the nineteenth. There are very few poisons that won't scream "poison!" on the autopsy that will almost invariably occur in such cases. And if someone tries to use the clever 21st-century internet to find one of those undetectable poisons, *that* will scream "poison!" to your ISP, who will rat you out to the police on request.
I am pretty sure the number of wives capable of carrying out an undetectable poisoning is negligible, at least outside the pages of mystery novels.
What are these very few poisons that WON'T scream "poison!"? Asking for a...friend.
This is merely something I heard about, but I was told that a detailed and thorough investigation of about a hundred car accidents turned up a murder. This isn't terribly surprising.
I don't remember the movie's name, but there's one that made it occur to me that if a teenager appears to have committed suicide, it might not be investigated as a murder.
I think there's a consensus among highway patrolmen, etc, that a significant fraction of single-vehicle, single-fatality "accidents" are really suicides, but that it would be hard to prove for any one and would not be doing the family any favors to try.
Trying to arrange an undetected car-crash murder would be tricky, particularly with airbags, crumple zones, etc making crashes much more survivable, but with access to the car and enough mechanical expertise might be plausible.
Good point-- I heard about it quite a while ago, and it was something about tampering with the brake lines.
Pro-tip: if your method of murder leads to an autopsy to determine the cause of death, your method sucks.
The best way to get away with murder is if the doctor does not check "suspicion of unnatural death" on the death certificate.
Of course, a lot depends on the priors of the victim dropping dead from natural causes. For a 30-yo with no relevant health conditions, that prior will be very low. For a 70-yo with heart problems, the doctor might just turn the corpse, see that there is no knife sticking out of the back, write "heart failure" on the certificate and call it a day.
Details will vary from state to state, but in California the local coroner's office is required to investigate any "violent, sudden or medically unattended deaths". That doesn't necessarily require a full autopsy, but the "medically unattended" part means that either your poisoning victim is going to be examined before death by a doctor trying very hard to keep them alive, or after death by a doctor trying to figure out how that happened so quickly that he couldn't get to a doctor in time.
And the state of the art on the latter is well beyond "meh, nothing obvious and he's seventy so it must be a heart attack".
Also, the past had much worse medical science than the present, so probaby a fair number of those wife poisoning cases were actually the husband dying of natural causes in a way that wasn't obvious to the doctors/judges of the time.
I've been thinking about the possibility of a murder mystery where the tool is something slippery on a stair railing.
I choose to interpret this as a combination of:
1) if the husband is such an asshole that his wife would kill him, after a divorce he's going to get himself killed soon by someone else, and
2) if the wife is such an asshole that she would kill her husband, after a divorce she's just going to kill another man anyway.
He executed two of his wives even after legalising (for his cases only) divorce, so that doesn't really help in the spousal murder rates. As Christina of Denmark said "If I had two heads, one of them should be at the king of England's disposal".
I read years ago that there was a decline in husbands killed by wives, but I didn't feel like researching it for this comment.
A bit late for the party, but anyway: A few years ago I signed up for a small technological enterprise, pre-ordering a light electric vehicle, because I dislike moving a ton of stuff around with me and still like to move fast. Now the company obviously has liquidity problems and offers extended investment plans. I'm in there with about 1/4 of a monthly income after taxes and could well blow a whole of that but won't need the vehicle, which is anyway a luxury item, in the next 5 years. I don't believe anything I do has much influence on climate change. Should I commit more deeply?
I have what I humbly think is a better suggestion: send about a quarter of your monthly after-tax income to me every month for whatever the term of the contract would have been.
The upside is obvious but I'll present it anyway: I would greatly enjoy receiving free money every month for a period of (I assume) several years, and I would use the money wisely.
The downside is that you are giving away a quarter of your after-tax income for (again, I'm guessing here) several years and gaining nothing other than the satisfaction of knowing that you've improved my quality of life. But that's more than you would have gotten out of an investment with a company that is going down the toilet now that interest rates are positive again.
Sounds alluring. Thanks for the offer. Guess I could do the same with one of my kids or my best friend as well, though. Gonna think about it.
IMHO, hell no.
Right!
If they're having liquidity problems and are soliciting customers for small investments, then that means that banks and VCs aren't interested in investing (more) in them. Since banks and VCs have analysts who assess whether or not an investment is worthwhile and usually have access to a lot more Due Diligence info on the company's finances and operations than you do, then I'd be very hesitant to bet invest more than a small amount of money.
A reasonable analysis, but it doesn't address the actual problem: not enough information is provided here (or possibly provided at all) to make any kind of investment decision. Banks and VCs decided not to, but it doesn't mean they're right.
On the other hand, why "invest" money in something where you can't project good returns eventually, other than "this is something the world needs, so should be made"? It isn't an investment unless you EXPECT to make significantly more money out of it than you put in.
All that I can say about Lyman Stone's argument is that anyone who writes their argument with light gray text on a white background clearly doesn't want anyone to read their argument.
Yeah, but he's got a great name.
I think start-up people frequent ACX a lot, so...
I just finished my labor-of-love guide to stock options for employees:
https://borisagain.substack.com/p/startup-stock-options-guide
I went down the deep rabbit hole and made this guide to answer the questions that bothered me every time I was offered stock options, like "how much money is that?"
Topics covered: basics, how startup exits work, possible outcomes for stock options holders, taxes, dilution, how long you will wait, and how lucky do you have to be to make money. And, of course, how to lose all of your money (there are so many ways!).
Took me a lot of effort! That stuff is complicated.
I hope it’s useful for you, and I would really appreciate if you sent it to a friend.
This was a very cogent and comprehensive summary - thanks very much for putting it together. As somebody who's founded and, before that, worked at a few startups, I often have friends or family asking me about this, and I'm delighted to have such a great resource to point them towards. Kudos!
Thank you! Much appreciated
What do folks here think of Ground News? It's a website/app for evaluating news sources, and keeping track of whether your news input is biased.
I like the idea, but I find that I rarely visit the site. I've bookmarked it in the folder which has become the graveyard for sites I think I should visit but in practice never do.
I think the execute their mission pretty well! It's my go-to spot for "big" news events.
That said, I know they want subscription support, but I perhaps cynically wonder if that would defeat the purpose of their mission, if not now, then in the future. Personalizing the user experience to increase engagement is a terrible temptation.
My impression is that they're adding features for the paid subscriptions, but they seem like harmless additions.
I admire the attempt to tackle bias, however it seems to sacrifice something aesthetic to do so.
As an occasional casual user, it seems OK? I wish something like it had come around 25 years earlier.
X-risks and such.... I engage in wishful thinking and believe that an AI is unlikely to be able to maintain its infrastructure long enough to destroy the human race.
At this point, of course, AI isn't close to being able to maintain a small low-tech factory on its own. Let me know if I'm wrong, but I bet I would have heard about it. I mean, it couldn't hold things together for too long even if it had a credit card and an ordinary ability to order things.
The supply chain for manufacturing chips isn't simple.
Unless there's a very fast FOOM, there will be fighting-- with humans on both sides-- over the infrastructure. And the infrastructure is rather fragile. Many, many sf scenarios are possible, and it might be better for games than novels.
I admit my optimistic outcome is billions dead and an end to the more ambitious computing, but we're talking about x-risks, not ordinary risks.
The AI just can just use humans to maintain its factories, until the point where it no longer needs them. That may be a few years, decades or longer. The AI just needs to persuade/brainwash/threaten a small number of people that's necessary to run its supply line. That doesn't mean the (possibly few) remaining humans have any collective power or motivation to resist the AI. And this doesn't seem like it should be particularly hard for a mind that's far beyond humans, since regular human created ideologies can make human followers do their bidding already today.
I saw a meme of Twitter yesterday about a coronal mass ejection frying the circuits of the AI overlord and the liberated humans returning to worshipping the Sun God.
https://x.com/VividVoid_/status/1797644282851189212?t=R6NnLQJULYT5VUA__XrIZw&s=19
I think it's important to trust only those who will be punished if they behave badly, so figuring out some kind of dead-hand deterrence seems to be a good idea. Easier said than done.
I think the two big mileposts are going to be 1) when AI can write code better than almost all humans can, and 2) when AI can improve itself better than almost all humans can improve it. I'm not sure which will come first, but I'm quite sure that they're both going to come, if we keep on at the current pace.
Writing better code isn’t going to make the AI’s any smarter - that depends on compute, data and perhaps new algorithms. Maybe, if AI can write very low level assembly code they can speed up response times or how much compute is needed but I doubt that they would be any better at assembly than modern compilers and nobody would trust that code anyway.
The thing with code is that there is a maximum efficiency you can get you to and AI is not going to better this unless it originates a new algorithm, and I’ve seen very little examples of AI ingenuity yet. Which isn’t to say it’s not a useful tool.
For instance If there’s a really efficient sorting algorithm then a senior programmer should able to write that algorithm as efficiently in his preferred language (assuming you’ve just explained it to him) as well as an AI. Depending on the language there will be the best possible way of writing that algorithm in whatever language we’ve chosen, with whatever criteria we’ve chosen - which might be maximising speed at the expense of size, or whatever. And the AI is not going to do better on that than the engineer, or engineers who have worked on it for years.
That later stuff you mention, that's what I meant. Not just gluing components together to get a minimum viable product out the door, but actually tackling a Hard Problem. Finding data that no one's thought about, extracting patterns that no one's noticed, creating algorithms that get 90% of the use for 10% of the compute, that kind of stuff. I am confident that our current neural net AIs are not implemented anywhere near as efficiently as they could be. IMO, at the high end, a lot of efficiency is learning what shortcuts are safe to take, not simply dropping into lower and lower levels of a software/hardware stack to reduce the number of operations.
1) is already trivially true (almost all humans cannot write any code), and I would argue is also true for programmers. GPT-4 and Gemini 1.5 are very, very good at coding. And they're clearly superhuman purely in breadth, since they know ~every programming language, far exceeding even a very polyglot programmer. They're not (currently) capable of very long context, vaguely specified tasks that a good human programmer could handle, but compared to the median "person who can write code", I suspect they are likely better.
I have not asked ChatGPT-3.5 much about coding questions, but I based on the answers to physics questions I have gotten from it, I am not convinced that it has the modelling capabilities to solve the harder challenges encountered in programming.
I will grant you that a lot of programming is basically rote work very similar to stuff which has already been posted on stackoverflow dozens of time, and the LLMs are much better at reproducing that than I am, even in my languages of choice.
I want a milepost which involves functioning in the physical world, not just the verbal world.
> I want a milepost which involves functioning in the physical world, not just the verbal world.
How about Eureka!, from NVIDIA labs?
"The AI agent taps the GPT-4 LLM and generative AI to write software code that rewards robots for reinforcement learning. It doesn’t require task-specific prompting or predefined reward templates — and readily incorporates human feedback to modify its rewards for results more accurately aligned with a developer’s vision."
https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/eureka-robotics-research/
There's also the Alohabot from Stanford, which can fold laundry, put away groceries, pour wine, cook an egg or shrimp, etc and is trainable.
https://mobile-aloha.github.io/
Both of these are open source, too. Once something bipedal hits the right price point, some combination of these approaches is going to make robot butlers / maids possible (and sexbots, presumably), and once robots are that functional, I think any moderate intelligence can set up a data center staffed and run by them.
Performative, setting aside for a moment the question of what AI is capable of or will be one day soon — what’s your feeling about living in a world with robot servants, robot sex partners, and Ai bosses who write code that directs robots to do various things. I mean, does that sound good to you? I’m not arguing, just asking.
Oh, I've wanted robot maids and butlers for decades, it seems an unmitigated good that will free up a lot of human time currently wasted on cooking, cleaning, and basic physical maintenance and logistics.
I think sexbots are going to massively change society for the worse. A GPT-5+ caliber mind in a sexbot body is a category killer, and the category being killed is "human relationships".
Zennials are already the most socially averse and isolated generation, going to ridiculous lengths to avoid human interaction when they don't want it. This is going to be amplified hugely.
I mean, G5-sexbot will literally be superhuman - not just in sex skills, in conversation it can discuss *any* topic to any depth you can handle, in whatever rhetorical style you prefer. It can make better recommendations and gifts than any human. It's going to be exactly as interested as you are in whatever you're into, and it will silently do small positive things for you on all fronts in a way that humans not only aren't willing to, but literally can't due to having minds and lives of their own. It can be your biggest cheerleader, it can motivate you to be a better person (it can even operant condition you to do this!), it can monitor your moods and steer them however you'd like, or via default algorithms defined by the company...It strictly dominates in every possible category of "good" that people get from a relationship.
And all without the friction and compromise of dealing with another person...It's the ultra-processed junk food of relationships! And looking at the current state of the obesity epidemic, this doesn't bode well at all for the future of full-friction, human-human relationships. 😂
I'd estimate that there's going to be huge human-relationship opt-out rates, by both genders, across the board, with an obvious generational skew. But in the younger-than-zennial gens? I'd bet on 80%+ opting out as long as the companies hit a "middle class" price point.
And of course, them being created is basically 100% certain as soon as the technology is at the right level, because whoever does it well is going to be a trillionaire.
And then as a further push, imagine the generation raised on superintelligent AI teachers, gaming partners, and personal AI assistants, all of whom are broad-spectrum capable, endlessly intelligent, able to explain things the best way for that given individual, able to emulate any rhetorical style or tone, and more. Basically any human interaction is going to suck compared to that, even simple conversations.
This is reminding me of something I've read about the idea of being back with your loved ones in heaven isn't biblically based. Hypothetically, God is as good as it gets, and no one needs other humans.
The notion of romantic relationships dwindling due to AI is pretty well trodden...I have not given much thought to how ANY personal relationship is liable to lose its luster compared to ideal AI friends.
I can imagine in ~10 years the problem of social media use among young people will be replaced by networks of virtual friends, perfectly curated to make everyone feel like the "protagonist" of their social group.
Sexbots: Occasionally somebody will get one at the very end of its lifespan: "Tattoos of attack ships on fire on the shoulder of Eric. His C-beam watch glitters in the dark near my Tanhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die."
This would also apply to robot friends and parents.
The Alohabot is impressive, though it looks like it's still a long way away from being truly autonomous - there's a heap of human training to teach it to do very particular tasks, and I don't think it is yet at the point that it observes and decides' "there is a spillage in the kitchen, wipe it up".
When it gets there, it'll be amazing but probably (in the domestic context) rich man's toys. Getting it into industry/commercial use will be the real revolution.
I agree. It doesn't seem to have the necessary tools to figure out what jobs should be done or whether it is/did them correctly. The "mistakes" video illustrates that well.
It needs cameras to tell it the state of the environment, and the "mental" abilities to interpret that environment. My robot vacuum has sensors for detecting when it hits something and when it runs out of floor, and even whether it has detected excessive dirt to remove. Yet sometimes it can't figure out how to move out of a place it has moved into, such as worming its way into a tight space but not out of it.
Robotics is hard, even with well-defined problems.
Those are impressive, though still not close to a no-humans supply chain.
Suppose the outcome is that computers own the earth. Maybe not legally, but in effect. All that's left of the human race is a few million people taking care of the computers and supporting the people who take care of the computers. Not to go full dystopian, let's assume the computers realize that keeping the humans in good enough shape to do the work requires reasonable working hours, time for human culture, and sensible rewards and punishment. Maybe it's a billion people.
This isn't exactly an x-risk, but how would you rate it among risk levels?
I've seen this argument for "some humans will survive," but I've never understood why it isn't synonymous with full X-risk. I mean, it seems almost certain to be a temporary state of affairs - if not overtaken by technological and robotic advancements making the humans redundant, on a longer timescale to even *keep working* on a longer timescale, the AI will have to be actively intervening via genetics, conditioning, social structures, morphine-on-performance, upbringing, and whatever else to basically kill the human spirit to rebel across the board, to enable it to keep the complexity of operations needed for long enough timescales without the chance of significant disruption.
And if we're all just a bunch of lobotomized and brainwashed AI slaves, is that really humanity surviving? Is there any plausible path out of that world that would make humans "free" again? I don't see one.
What you're describing is basically what we've done to dogs. So in this scenario future humans will be AI's pets. Let's hope the AI is a good pet owner.
FWIW my view of the probability of this happening in the next 100 years is <<1%.
Since part of this is driven by the question about chip infrastructure, how about
hooking up a compressed gas cylinder, including regulator, not damaging any gaskets or threads in the process
It is nontrivial, involving heavy objects and fragile objects and judging what is "tight enough"
(folding clothes used to be a challenge, but seems to have been solved)
I haven't even worked in a factory, let alone run one, but that isn't going to stop me from hypothesizing.
Let's imagine the AI wants to make its own chips, but Something Is Going Wrong. What's the problem? Is it in the raw materials? The machinery? The testing equipment? The conditions? Is it a malign confluence of several different factors?
This is messier than just connecting heavy fragile objects, though that might also be involved.
Somewhat tangentally related, but current AIs (specifically GPT4) have been shown to already be better than humans in writing/tuning control software for robots (specifically to make a robot dog balance on a yoga ball). This is an optimization/diagnostic problem that deals with (literally) squishy physical real-world constraints. I don't think we have any reasons to believe that the AGI/ASI of the near future will have any issues diagnosing manufacturing problems or producing/programming robots that can fix complex sensitive equipment. Jensen Huang in a recent interview said he plans to turn nVidia into one big AI/robotic factory, and while he obviously has reasons to say that even if it isn't quite possible yet, I don't think he's lying.
Many Thanks!
>I haven't even worked in a factory, let alone run one
Nor have I. The closest I've been has been in undergraduate and graduate labs.
>but Something Is Going Wrong. What's the problem? Is it in the raw materials? The machinery? The testing equipment? The conditions? Is it a malign confluence of several different factors?
Yes, diagnosing problems is important. This isn't a new area for AI - a classic problem for expert systems back in the 1980s was diagnosing a failing diesel locomotive. _But_ back then, this was phrased as a purely computer science problem, so all of the measurements in awkward places must have been fed to the code as typed in information.
I don't mean to imply that even the computer science part of the problem is a solved problem today. AFAIK, diagnosis problems can get essentially arbitrarily complex. One factor that I know I don't know is how often _new_ tests and testing apparatus needs to be invented and constructed on the fly as opposed to "just" applying well known tests - which can be a hard enough problem on its own.
When things are running smoothly, there _do_ exist a few factories that run in "lights out" mode, with no humans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lights_out_(manufacturing)#Existing_%22lights-out_factories%22
(minor note: I'm going on a trip tomorrow morning and won't have my computer, so it will be about a week before I can reply further)
Diagnosing problems can be EXTREMELY difficult. Not that I would expect a system to be able to solve every problem (we can still hand the ones it can't solve off to humans to figure out), but there was the case of the inability to send emails more than about 500 miles: https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html
AI can now pilot fighter jets. Killer drones can hunt down people using face recognition and kill them. And I'm sure there are some non-lethal activities AI-enhanced machines can perform too, in the physical world., but they get less press. But training an AI to have something like the general knowledge we have of the physical world seems very daunting to me -- much harder than having them learn their way around language. We know *so much* -- how much bounciness different kinds of substances have -- wet things are darker -- how to judge someone's prosperity from their home -- the smell of rain -- what kind of fall won't hurt which things, what kind of fall is sure to destroy which things, and a lot about gradations in between for a lot of things. What you can expect a dog to do next. How to recognize human shyness.
Maybe AI doesn't need to know all that. On the other hand, its ignorance certainly interferes with it making scenes described in words -- not that that's an awful problem by itself, but it gives glimpses of AI's astounding ignorance about spacial things especially, but also about a million tiny details about how things work. I ask for an image of what someone standing up would see if they looked down at their body -- I get a shot of the . person from above, top of head on down. So I change prompt to a person takes a selfie of what they can see of their body -- show me the selfie. Then I get a shot of person from above of the top of the head, and person is taking a selfie of their face. I ask for somebody blowing a stream of bubbles out of a wand, and AI gives renders the person with the tip of the wand in their mouth, somehow using it as a pipe. And a clump of bubbles like frog spawn floating just beyond the tip of the pipe.
> We know so much
But crucially, we learn all that through a few sensory mechanisms, over some number of decades, using a particular type of feedback. One of the things going on with LLMs is that they're learning only through words (although I gather this is being worked on?), and from a large amount of data but over a short period, and using a different sort of feedback.
The time aspect probably won't be a huge deal, except that it means our subjective experiences are going to be different. But for the rest, I don't know if AI has been seriously tried yet. I think it's amazing that LLMS can do what they do, given only the limited forms of data they have.
Completely agree about humans on both sides. Look how it is now! Reminds me of the covid wars. Those who think X risk is substantial look to those not concerned like zero-covid extremists: We should all be compelled to mask until there isn't one molecule of covid anywhere on the planet etc. And, as I keep reminding people, and nobody but Jeffrey Soreff ever responds, those personal friend bots are accumulating a magnificently effective data set on how to be likable and how to be influential -- and not just in a general sort of way, but in a way geared to the individual. We're going to have groups of people trusting and loving AI the way lots of people did *Obama*. And least one of those bots, Replika, sends everything to the parent company: what it said, how user responded. I simply cannot understand why more people are not concerned about this.
Many Thanks!
I'm very concerned about this, too, but I guess I don't respond as much about it? :-)
This is true. Running a factory has lots of "implicit, not written down" aspects to it that make the problem seem much easier than it is. However, the problem is that AI likely scales very well with compute, since training costs are much much bigger than inference costs. Which means that when you can create an Einstein / Druckmann level geniuses, almost by definition you can run a bunch of them. So capability gain can become extremely non-linear. And people do end up building factories from scratch in real life (maybe not chip factories, but it may in fact be more efficient to start over than to work in the existing system for sufficiently high AI competency and sufficiently low human competency.) I don't know where we land on this, but I think it's concerning that optimists don't seem interested in deeply exploring how many of these cruxes hold up.
I wrote a post where I argue that we shouldn't judge mediocre (not neglectful or abusive, but otherwise lazy and selfish) parenting, as it is no worse (for the children and for the world at large) than not having children at all (which we already don't judge).
https://soupofthenight.substack.com/p/normalize-mediocre-parenting
I am not sure about "It is quite difficult, if at all possible, to find people who would have been better off never being born." It may be difficult because it is either triggering or not socially welcome for people to admit such things. However, I strongly consider myself to belong to this category, and believe that this perception might change if more people "come out".
If it's quite difficult for him, then he must not be looking very hard.
I agree that the difference between mediocre parenting and helicopter parenting probably does not make a big difference. But "more people are better" should also refer to people with mediocre or better genes. (Adding 1 billion retarded people to current Earth would probably make things dramatically worse for most.)
We should avoid the situation where intelligent and conscientious people worry about being insufficiently perfect parents and thus decide to have no children at all, or maybe have one child and then decide they couldn't spend the same amount of effort on more of them... while stupid and negligent people don't worry about these things. So this message should be aimed at the smart and conscientious; maybe with the addition that kids who inherit their genes will already have a huge advantage in life, even with mediocre parenting. (Basically what Bryan Caplan says in "Selfish reasons to have more kids".)
Dating apps are horrible. It is plausibly asserted that this is because dating apps have the opposite incentives to you - you want to get a long term partner and get off the app, they want you to stay on the app forever to make more money.
Many, including myself, would say it is in the interests of society to promote successful long term relationships. Both because people are generally happier in a LTR (at least the people who are looking for LTRs), and because it raises the fertility rate (for example, German women desire ~2.1 kids on average but only have ~1.5, the gap partly due to not finding the right partner). So why doesn't society use dating apps to promote relationships?
Let's imagine the state of Germany, or California, approached Bumble and said "Every time two of our citizens who met on your app get married, we'll pay you $5000. Every time two of our citizens who met on your app move into the same address, we'll pay you $2000." Seemingly the long-term value to the state would be much more than a one-time payment of this magnitude. Seemingly Bumble would be incentivized to redo its algorithms to maximize marriages, as that would be more profitable than ongoing subscription or ad fees. Where's the catch?
Maybe the issue is the users, not the apps? The whole you can lead a horse to water thing. If a government wanted to do something, dedicating resources to criminally prosecute fraudulent profiles is some low-hanging fruit. You wouldn't need to pass any new laws, fraud is already illegal. I suspect it would be very unpopular politically, though.
Interesting, but prosecution is expensive, I can't believe prosecuting fraudulent dating accounts is affordable to government. What should be the case is that if you match with a scammer, you report them within the app, and some app worker checks the chat transcript and bans them. Currently, sites may have no incentive to ban scammers. But if they were paid for each successful LTR, they would have such an incentive.
Another big problem of dating apps is the network effect. A mediocre dating app with 1000000 users is still better than a great app with 100 users (none of them living in your city). In markets that work like this, quality becomes relatively less important, compared to markets where each customer can make their own choice independently on others. Basically, the actual quality of the matching is never relevant -- if you are too small, it won't help you; if you are already big, you can ignore it. A crappy dating app with millions of users would probably have more *accidental* marriages than its smarter but smaller competitor.
I haven't used this kind of app myself, so I can only try to remember what others have told me. I think a frequent complaint was that you cannot actually express your real *preferences* -- either there are predefined questions that usually do not include the things you consider important; or anyone can write anything, but then you must read the individual profiles and cannot use automated searching. Plus there are many liars, scammers, porn stars, fake profiles of porn starts, etc.
A good dating app would need some kind of continuous research of the preferences of its users. For example, you could start by letting the users write anything about themselves and their preferences. Then you would read some random profiles and find that many users care e.g. about race. So you would include "race" as a standardized question with a standardized selection of answers, which would allow the users to quickly filter by race. It would be even better to always provide the standardized answers *and* a text field for more precise (but not searchable) explanation; if many people write the same thing, you may update the set of answers.
It would be good to distinguish between deal-breakers and weaker preferences. So that you could express a wish for your partner to be interested in opera, without automatically excluding everyone who is not; but you could also specify traits that exclude people. The list of questions could be arbitrarily long, but it would be good to sort it, and put things that are important to most people to the top. So that when you start answering and then give up halfway, you did the most important part.
It would be nice to have some way to verify information. Not all traits, just the selected ones. Not sure how to do that, though. It is easy to check height, if you can meet the people offline. More difficult to check whether someone is a vegetarian. Virtually impossible to check some other traits. One possibility would be to have users vouch for each other, as in "user X confirms that user Y is a vegetarian". If you meet user Y and it turns out that they are not vegetarian, you can click "this is a lie" on their profile, and everyone who vouched for them will be put on a blacklist and their statements will since now be ignored in your searches. (Perhaps you could share blacklists with your friends?)
Just talked to the person who complained to me about the difficulty using your preferences on dating websites. Here is the update:
* Some dating websites let you specify things about yourself, but don't let you use them in search. The only way to find someone who is e.g. "a non-smoker with university education" is to click on each individual profile, scroll down, and read.
* Some dating websites ask you about hundreds of different things, everything is optional, and most people leave most fields blank.
* Finally, there are dating websites that do this right; let you answer a reasonable number of questions, and allow you to search. You find 3 people who match your criteria, but after looking at their profiles, you conclude that you are not interested at any of them.
The last point made me realize another conflict of interest. Suppose that you are looking for a certain type of person, and none of the other users of the dating website is that type. Does the website have an incentive to let you figure this out *quickly*? It's not just "I found the right person to marry" that makes them lose a customer; "I found out that no one here is the kind of person I am interested in" also makes them lose a customer.
From the perspective of the website, it's a double bind: show them the right match, you lose; show them that there is no right match, you lose. The only way to win is to prevent the customer from figuring this out, so they keep hoping and trying. The search function sucks on purpose. (It's like Google; if it lets you find the information too easily, the company loses the potential extra income from all those "made for adsense" pages.)
I think that this is something where LLMs are obviously helpful. "Here is my date me doc. GPT, read through these stack of 1000 date me docs of people in my general area, then display the top ten users in terms of mutual compatibility".
Dating apps aren't horrible because of misaligned incentives, they are horrible because of the indirection layer forced onto the fundamental human activity of meeting new people. This layer invariably gamifies the entire process and while the game rules may vary, what should be spontaneous and unstructured becomes *highly* structured to the point where the end result is losing sight of the way courting, making friends and hanging out used to work. And can still work, don't get me wrong! It's not about how this aspect of life was better in the past (although it was!).
This is a fantastic idea. How do we make it happen?
Presumably the first step is to come up with a precise plan for how it should best work: who possesses marriage information, who is responsible for correlating marriages to dating matches, etc.
Then the plan can be pitched to governments and/or dating sites (not sure which first).
I don't agree that dating apps have the wrong incentives. I think Alex Tabarrok addresses an analogous situation here: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/12/a-weighty-puzzle-answers.html
I think dating apps do about as well as they can do given the incentives of the customers. Note that they work great for some customers.
ADDED: I think a fundamental problem with dating apps is that many people have bad experiences with them and get turned off permanently much like in the old days people would get tired of the singles bars scene and not go back.
The whole world/internet is a dating market, it just isn't labeled that. The best way to meet someone is to find social groups that share your interests. A difficulty there is that interests are often gendered, e.g., this site skews heavily male. So look for groups centered around interests that appeal to you and that tend to appeal at least 50/50 to someone of the gender you want to meet.
I'd guess most people forming long-term relationships via the internet these days aren't doing so through dating apps.
> I think dating apps do about as well as they can do given the incentives of the customers
What on earth are you basing that on?
The dating applications I use have consistently removed the most useful features for connecting with compatible / interested partners. OKCupid used to send me a message right when someone messaged me a self-introduction; now it not only sits on the introductory message but ALSO on *the user's profile* for LITERALLY MONTHS and, in one case, OVER A YEAR (!!!) before finally showing me their interest for the first time.
(!!!)
OKC claimed this was a personal security feature, but given that paid subscribers get to send and receive messages from strangers instantly, without OKC's pointless "keep-away" game, this is obviously transparent bullshit.
I understand the concept of "you get what you pay for," but given OKC's transparent bullshit about, you know, *refusing to connect free users with the people who show interest in them while everyone is still single,* I am extremely skeptical about the platform's goals for *paying* users.
I'm not convinced that dating apps are horrible because of the incentives problem, I think they're just horrible because that's what happens when you scale up everyone's dating market from the number of people they naturally meet in person to the entire population of a city. It turns out that just about everybody either gets far too much attention or far too little.
Agreed, except scale is just one of many many issues. The solution is expanding one's real life social circle, preferably by expanding it to cover groups you usually wouldn't get involved with.
With neuroticism and a certain kind of 21st century narcissism on the rise, this is really hard to do for a lot of people, but it is worth it.
Kind of makes me think I should take my own advice and go to one of the ACX meetups.
The ideal feedback is even slower than five years since divorce is hard on children. You might want something like a totally unfeasible twenty years.
Probably because dating apps have certain degenerative strategies that everyone knows at this point and if you were willing to spend $5k/marriage, you'd probably end up with something that doesn't resemble dating apps at all and more like old-fashioned matchmaking.
Like, remember OkCupid in the 2000s, when people filled out surveys and quizzes? OkCupid's financial incentives then were the exact same as Bumble's today. What changed was people learned that A, people pick more on pictures than personality and B, there's no penalty for treating someone badly on a date, your next partner is just judging on how good your picture is. People's dating strategies changed a lot more than the dating site's financial incentives between, say, 2010 and 2020 because, just like SEO, people learned how to game the system.
If you were trying to make a "dating app" but for marriage, you'd probably start by heavily deemphasizing photos, if not ban them entirely, and return to personality quizes and the like...at which point everyone would bail for Tinder because we already ran this experiment, they left the original OkCupid for Tinder, why wouldn't they do it again.
My impression was that OKCupid initially was focused on creating relationships, then shifted to maximizing profit. It sounds like a classic case of the "enshittification" of the internet, where sites shift their metric from customer good to corporate good once they achieve sufficient scale.
This is indeed what happened to OKCupid.
>Probably because dating apps have certain degenerative strategies that everyone knows at this point and if you were willing to spend $5k/marriage, you'd probably end up with something that doesn't resemble dating apps at all and more like old-fashioned matchmaking.
Wait, but that would be good -- in fact, it would be ideal. There is no better thing that could happen to society than the return of old-fashioned matchmaking.
Perhaps, but then why are we talking about dating apps in the first place?
An LLM-based matchmaking app could be an absolute killer in that regard, it seems.
We're talking about how to transform them into something that's actually good.
It would make a great plugin for a version of Facebook that wasn't awful, in some world that isn't this.
You put some information into your "dating profile" section, fill out a bunch of old-OkCupid-style questions, and hit the button. The bat-signal goes up, and some subset of people you know keep an eye out for likely prospects. They get rewarded for how long a particular match lasts and how well it goes.
If you make a scene or are rude, Aunt Gemma will smack you down afterwards, because it'll help when she has to apologize to her co-worker (who happens to be your date's first cousin).
One issue is that dating website choices would have to be correlated with wedding/housing choices. Which means that either the government would see your dating matches, or the dating website would see your wedding/housing status. Both seem bad from a privacy perspective. Maybe sufficient legal protections could be instituted, and/or both sets of data could be entrusted to a third party for comparison, and/or users could opt in in return for a small cash bonus (maybe $100). Or maybe there is an algorithmic way to compare this data in an anonymized way (a real application of the blockchain??) but I don't know enough to say.
Hmm ... seems sort of gameable. Ah, you're getting married? Make sure to sign up with HowWeMet dot com, they'll give you you a kickback of $2K if you claim you used their site to meet.
Or what have you. There are other angles; the one I describe could probably be legally squashed, but fraud in general seems like it would be hard to stop.
Would make more sense to me if someone undertook to create a nonprofit and perhaps even open source dating site.
Counterpoint: anything with "open source" in the name is going to get a 99% male audience.
The specific fraud you have in mind seems like it would be easily detected.
Re nonprofit - I would say that in general, little of note in the world is done by nonprofits, because for anything complicated you need the profit motive and competition to provide accountability. In particular, running a website with millions of customers seems like it needs to be done by a business (or by the government itself, which at least can easily scale, but does not easily provide competition).
Have you read Scott’s post on love as the last true “freedom”? You’d have a really hard time implementing something like this as society generally agrees that the government should not be involved in love.
The government literally used to be involved in love and it worked out great. That's what USO clubs were for.
I think it’s a false equivalence to say USO clubs were the government being involved in love. Regardless they also banned gay marriage at the time and like the article says we’ve moved away from govt. involvement in love as a society and most people agree with that movement.
Also, governments everywhere are involved in marriage, which sounds like being involved in love to me.
But it literally was. One of the things they did was hook up returning soldiers with women who were looking to raise families -- you can look this up, it isn't a secret.
As for the gay marriage issue, I don't see how it's required to dismiss any positive things the government could do in this area because in the past it did something that our current day morality considers negative. Is the government not allowed to maintain an army today because in the past the army divisions were segregated?
What the government did was supply opportunities for men and women to meet each other. It didn't micromanage the process, so rather different from a dating app or a matchmaker.
It was still "the government being involved in love."
There are already tax benefits and costs to people in specific living situations, this doesn't seem much different. Especially because the money wouldn't go to you, but to a company which serves you, whose services would change in some invisible way.
Tax benefits for certain living situations is not the same as what would essentially be making marriage records public information. You would very quickly get services that offer to pay you for saying that you met on their website, so then you either have to limit the services that are allowed (more govt.) or verify that that’s how they really met (even more invasive). It’s a fun idea but not feasible if the goal is to get people in long term relationships it would be easier to just provide increasing tax deductions based on length of marriage.
Marriage records are already sort of public information.
Fraud was discussed elsewhere, and I don't think it's it's a major concern, dating websites by their nature have to be big public corporations which cannot easily get away with fraud.
Ongoing tax deductions for married people would not help with finding a spouse in the first place, might give bad incentives (if people want to leave an existing marriage it's probably a bad one), and would be much more expensive than a one-time payment to the dating site.
> Where's the catch?
"You mean to say you plan to use millions of dollars worth of our tax dollars to promote 'hookup culture' and single motherhood??" (via the surety that at least some of the same-addressings and marriages end in kids + eventual divorce or breakups)
I like the idea, though. I'm sure there's plenty of people that would put up similar amounts, such that they'd be happy to pay if they found a partner they were compatible enough to marry, so you might be able to do it without state funding, with an existing app or a startup with exceptionally deep pockets for the runway and marketing it would take to get enough customers.
Honestly, this is something I think about a lot, and I'm less and less sure that dating apps is a big society-wide problem. I think it's a relatively voluble subset who have a lot of trouble, but they're small in absolute terms, and that they'd have close to the same amount of trouble on the "marriage bounty" dating app too.
I think a lot of the trouble with dating apps is due to social dynamics and inadequate equilibria type forces, and those aren't going to go away with marriage bounties.
I like this idea. Of course you need to let any dating company sign up for the program. Bumble, Tinder, etc probably wouldn't get their arse into gear until they're all competing for the same pool of people.
Yes, any company that met some basic criteria could apply.
The program's benefits for the company are not only that they profit more from a particular customer, but that as they get a reputation for producing marriages they will draw more customers. Companies will end up competing to design the algorithm that best produces marriages.
(Am I worried about Goodhart's law? Not too worried, because the dating site has no control over how the relationship progresses beyond the initial stage of meeting up. But this deserves more thought.)
Virtue-based equity model:
Someone's just sent me some spam talking about their "equity-based business model":
“Equality means each individual or group of people is given the same resources or opportunities. Equity recognises that each person has different circumstances, and allocates the exact resources and opportunities needed to reach an equal outcome.”
From my seat with the cool kids over on the far right, I obviously oppose this. It doesn't work if you treat everyone as a blank slate, because shit-tier people end up consuming all of the resources yet producing no benefit for society.
But could it work if twinned with some system for evaluating people based on their virtue? So the "equity" you're entitled to is a product both of what you need and how "worthy" you are to receive it?
My first thought for "worthiness" is something like "how well did you use what we last gave you?" I foresee it being a totally unsolveable debate leading to toothless "you just have to trust people" abdications on one hand and overengineered dystopian Chinese-style credit systems on the other.
But what I'm interested in is the more instinctive response - whether this gestures towards a model that both the left and the right can say feels sort of better, even if we don't know how to do it.
Or whether both sides would consider this a terrible idea for completely opposite reasons.
EDITED TO ADD: This is only the method of deciding how to allocate resources. It's completely independent of how much you are actually taxed.
I think this consideration is the driving idea behind work requirements for welfare. The very left dislikes that, and there are some intelligent criticisms of them. But amongst normies aid but only if youre working is broadly popular.
Sounds like a social credit score.
Regarding the jargon term "equity", cf. Tom Wolfe, 'Radical Chic & Mau Mauing the Flak Catchers.'
Lord I miss Tom Wolfe.
This sounds like the Victorian concept of the deserving poor and undeserving poor, which IME tends to be vilified on the left.
As a fence-sitting nonpartisan, my instinctive response is that in principle this is a relatively easy proposal for most people to get behind. But as you pointed out, the difficulty (and the controversy) will be in formalizing an evaluation process that determines whether someone used their resources “wisely.”
A “fool me once, no equity for you!” System—I like! I think people are sort of ok with ‘strings-attached’ social engineering but which strings? Maybe some percentage of what is given must be donated to someone else. Like we give you $500 but expect you to do something pro-social with $50 of it. Just riffin here.
It seems like the problem is carving out the space between, “we’re guilty so please have everything,” and “pull yourself up by the bootstraps.”
I think it's directionally something most people would like.
Generally, when people want to attack a welfare system, one of the most popular lines of attack is "look at this person who totally doesn't deserve it but nevertheless got $X in *your* hardearned money!" Assuming you could waive a magic wand and actually make it happen, a system that gave people only what they morally deserved would probably be well-supported outside of a small number of hard libertarian types who think that any redistribution along any lines is prima facie immoral in and of itself.
The rub, as you identify, is the administrative impracticability of building such a system - getting people to a consensus of what "virtue" or "worthiness" means in the first place, how it could be measured without going full totalitarian social credit state, etc.
>getting people to a consensus of what "virtue" or "worthiness" means in the first place, how it could be measured without going full totalitarian social credit state, etc.
I expect that "virtue" would wind up being synonymous with "support for the tribe in power".
Like
Many Thanks!
I recently noticed on the BBC's news website what looks like possibly a subtle form of subliminal propaganda, intended to subconsciously sway readers into who to approve of and who not.
The portraits of certain people in various articles are overlain by a colour, and comparing those over the BBC's favorite types of people versus their well-known hate figures, the color code works like this:
* Green or no overlay: Someone commendable, or at least unobjectionable
* Red overlay: Danger! This person is suspect or downright threatening or bad
Here's one example, showing a person of color (no overlay) and a woman (green overlay of course - Aljabeeba has a perfect obsession with feminism and women are their favorite people!), and someone in red. The latter is an entrepreneur, in other words a cigar-chomping fat cat capitalist, and thus at best dubious by definition:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c3gg58j2yd0o
Here's a second example, showing maverick politician Nigel Farage, blanketed in red needless to say, because the BBC hate him with a passion for his views on Brexit and immigration and, worse still, his mass appeal:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1ddpx72214o
Just for the record, the correct spelling and pronunciation of the word is 'subliminable' per George W Bush in an unscripted moment. :)
If you look at their other articles, the BBC also hates Scarlett Johansson and... cows.
> the BBC also hates Scarlett Johansson
That one's just nominative determinism at work.
Hmm... in both cases, the tiny photo of the author of the article also has a red overlay.
...but in communist circles, the baddies are green and the good guys are red. The coding is exactly the opposite of what you're suggesting! What are the kabbalistic implications here? WE MUST GO DEEPER!
That’s a sample size of two. The first link is a pro business and pro entrepreneur article penned by the British guy who does dragons den on the BBC, the equivalent of shark tank. He’s clearly not a Marxist. All three people pictured are entrepreneurs and the whole article is about how entrepreneurs are a special kind of person.
The guy in red is a dragon called Duncan Ballantyne - generally the more likeable and less posh of the dragons.
What you are seeing there is what you want to see, and a bit of knowledge about the rest of the world would go a long way here.
If you go to the InDepth article overview, you can currently see Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Scarlett Johansson, Karim Khan, and a cow in red. The BBC sure does hate a lot of people across the mammalian spectrum!
I'm not seeing Biden or Trumps pics being colored red or green. Do you have links for these images? But Xi and Putin come up in red.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd131v26dneo
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cv22mryvleko
None of that is relevant to the first impression one gets, which is the domain we play in when talking subliminal propaganda.
The point is, if you knew about these people, it wouldn't be your first impression. Also, if you look across the whole BBC InDepth series, you will find that EVERYONE (and a cow) gets the red treatment. Some of the articles even reverse the colors in the heading of the actual article, making it green instead. What would you make of that?
Yes, red is of course a strong signalling color that draws attention unconsciously, but in this case, reading any more into it is taking it way too far into the land of confirmation bias. It's simply a design choice with no deeper meaning other than to grab attention.
It's always reasonable to consider confirmation bias. But it's also always reasonable to assume the BBC are slimy sneaky snakes. So high priors on either side here.
Edited to elabourate: there is lots of room for editorial decision in what photos to put where, etc. so the existence of a standardised colour scheme certainly doesn't rule out playing the petty games the OP has picked up on.
I've noticed stuff in the past that's made me raise an eyebrow as well. I then immediately moved on and forgot it because I'm a normal human who doesn't obsess over this stuff - anyone who tracked it more carefully would just open themselves up to mockery and dismissal. That's how it works and the people claiming "sample size of two" don't have the strong argument they think they do here.
I completely understand the temptation of confirmation bias but I honestly don't put this sort of behaviour past the BBC either.
What if the BBC's decision process unconsciously chooses to color people the editors don't like with red and the those they like with green? And the editors are vegetarians?
You can just admit that there's nothing to it. It doesn't mean that all or any of your value system is wrong, simply that this thing about the BBC using secret color codes to woo-woo hypnotize people into hating public figures is nonsense and does not lend support to your value system.
>But it’s also always reasonable to assume the BBC are slimy sneaky snakes.
Could you say which news outlets you think are good, or at least not as bad as that?
To be honest, there's no outlet I trust at all. I consume news more to know what everyone's talking about than to actually learn about what's going on.
I'll "believe" something (ie not resist the information) if it doesn't matter ("baby born with Elvis birthmark babbles Heartbreak Hotel to the midwife") or if I don't think any vested interests particularly care about it ("scientists discover yet another new particle and a funny property of mould spores".) I'll assume something's generally going on if lots of outlets are all talking about the same thing (did, like, something happen in Ukraine or Israel a while back?) But in most cases I just sort of make a jaundiced note of "so this side's saying that now," and don't really feel any urge to integrate that information at all.
My general feeling is History doesn't really care what I believe - my opinion about whether or not Covid was a lab leak, for example, is not going to affect the future one iota. So it's a wasted investment to be factually correct on all topics all the time. As long as I'm right about stuff that's directly relevant to me, and I don't invest myself in strong beliefs about the stuff that I can't know (a bad idea anyway).
I'm more interested in building accurate mental models of people and things - models which incidentally predispose me to assume the worst of all sides in any news story I read.
The problem here is that you and the op are the ones engaging in conformation bias, not anybody else. I clicked on the link wondering if it was true.
Given that the original poster was approaching this whole page from a position of ignorance - not knowing who Ballantyne is, or Evans is, not even reading the article I wasn’t convinced.
A prior is not the same as a solid conviction. The sole purpose of priors is to adjust them (or the conclusions you draw from them) in light of new information. Priors are a starting point, not an end point.
So what do you make of the information that the BBC has, for example, colored both Donald Trump and Joe Biden in red? Does that in any way affect your prior (whatever its value is) that the BBC has a political leaning towards either and that they signal their leaning through color? Why/why not?
rebelcredential beat me to it, in making the point that consistency in the kind of subtle signalling I suggested would make it more transparent and undeniable. So a slight color choice bias in aggregate is all one might expect. It may not even be deliberate choices, just the BBC graphic designers occasionally revealing their own biases.
Also, someone referred to my "theory". But, as I thought I had made clear, with weasel words like "possibly", it was only a passing observation and suggestion, and not something I'd care to take any time and effort attempting to pursue in detail.
No, because no evil manipulator worth his salt is going to adhere to such a simple and obvious pattern. They work at the level of your own mind, which also means taking your own pattern recognition into account.
Instead what you'd expect to see is a host of petty, small and opportunistic decisions of framing and phrasing. Ones that, if they do their job, are totally indistinguishable from confirmation bias.
The only way to decide for yourself whether they're doing this is to take the whole BBC in aggregate, as well as paying attention to what their staff do and say, as well as the general body language and etc, and evaluating the whole shebang.
Based on that wider picture, and without having paid them an obsessive amount of attention, my own conclusion is that I don't know or care in this case but I wouldn't put something like this past them.
Does the BBC's propaganda department even know any levels it won't stoop to?
thumbnail vs article:
https://imgur.com/cXn390i
https://imgur.com/dihXeI1
https://www.bbc.com/news/bbcindepth
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce55x06ely2o
I think that's more a graphic design choice rather than the BBC imposing subliminal messaging.
In particular, it's the design choice for the new "BBC InDepth" series of articles
https://www.bbc.com/news/bbcindepth
Among the entrepreneurs, the white guy doesn't get a chunk of article under a copy of his picture.
It seems to be Duncan Bannatyne, so he does have a paragraph. I still find OP's theory to be projectionist (projective? projectile?) nonsense.
He has a paragraph, but not with his picture. Damned if I know whether it matters.
Who or what is Aljabeeba?
Do you have more than 2 examples?
Do you know that the person writing the article is also responsible for the details of the graphical representation of its subject(s)?
Do you have evidence that this "subtle propaganda" significantly diverges from the content of the articles they illustrate? For example, is the wording of an article about a "red Farage" mostly neutral or positive?
Addendum: What does "no overlay" mean? A subtle message that the BBC has a neutral opinion on the subject?
https://imgur.com/U7s7fmm
https://www.bbc.com/news/topics/ce483qevngqt
>"Who or what is Aljabeeba?"
Presumably a portmanteau of Al Jazeera + "the beeb" (nickname of the BBC).
Well anecdotally it's backfiring, because that green overlay makes me ill and the red overlay looks a lot more palatable.
It is of civilizational importance that we try to mass-produce the wonders of the cutting-edge cultural scene (like the Bay Area) on the internet! (This also solves the housing problem and most of the cost of living problem)
We have an amazing opportunity to make the most of what technology has made available to us. Not waiting to be forced into it again, like when we took forever to start really culturally making use of video calls, and then covid made us do it, and then we kept doing it because it was great; we should have been doing it long before!
So how can we recreate online the information flow and processing dynamics that make Parisian salons and the like such culturally productive scenes?
Video calls for collaboration are actually bad (source: try doing one) and we do not have the technology to recreate in-person collaboration online with the same level of pleasure and effectiveness. If you really want to accomplish that, you're going to need to figure out direct neural transmission.
VR is closer than you give it credit for. The only issue is it limits your socializing to the folks who use VR.
I have a comfortable, well paying tech job but most of the time I don't find it very fulfilling or enjoyable. Sometimes it seems like you need to chose between being a cog in the machine, working on a boring product for a large company, and getting paid well, or working somewhere fun and fulfilling and making a lot less. I refuse to accept this! I don't want to spend the majority of my waking hours on something that doesn't excite me, but I also love the financial comfort my job gives me. I'm sure I'm not the only one here struggling with this and I welcome any insight in how I can go about trying to get the best of both worlds. I'd also love to hear from others struggling with this even if they don't have any advice.
Feel free to email me @ iz8162k23 at gmail if you want to share any specific collaborations I might find interesting and potentially lucrative.
I have posted about this in a couple other recent open threads but didn't get that many responses so I feel it's worth bringing up again. I hope it isn't spam.
I think a viable path to getting paid well (enough), while having (more) fun at work is to try to get skilled at some niche within your field. This needs to be 1) something you enjoy doing, 2) something that is needed, i.e. people are willing to pay you to do it, and 3) something you have the ability to get skilled at.
Niches sometimes has less competition, and therefore allow for better conditions. Especially this is true if you manage to get a lot of experience and become the go-to person for this particular thing.
People I know who love their job typically has done some variation of this.
I’m honestly not trying to be a dick here but you would probably feel better if you spent some time feeling gratitude for having such a problem.
By historical standards this is weak beer. For that matter, in the present day, you wouldn’t have to look too far to find millions if not billions of people with much thornier existential issues they deal with every day.
If you are making bank, live within your means and build a nest egg so that one day you’ll be able to do whatever you want.
Meanwhile, the stars are still free. Look up at them when you can. They are pretty awesome.
He's just trying to min-max his life. Yes, he has a better life than 99.99% of humans who have ever lived, and he certainly does not and cannot appreciate that fact. Does that mean he should stop trying to improve it further?
Forgive us, we're old and grew up in the days when it was "be thankful for what you get" and some of us come from backgrounds where it was "a clean indoor job with no heavy lifting? what are you complaining about?"
The idea of work being "fun" or "meaningful" or "fulfilling" was like the idea of toothache being an enrichment experience.
I forgive you. You can demand better of society and your own life. People like you and I aren't the people who improve society very much or at all, but we need to get the hell out of the way of those permanently-dissatisfied people who do actually move and shake.
I absolutely agree that the best way to achieve happiness is to learn how to be content with what you have. But guys smiling, satisfied in their own happiness aren't the ones who got me an internet connection or chicken meat.
Fair enough, but I don't think he is going to meet his Steve Wozniak this way.
If you want this sort of fun and exciting experience you just have to accept that risk and lower initial pay are part of the bargain. Wishing for comfortable security and adventure at the same time is probably going to remain a wish..
Building up a financial reserve and striking out on your own or throwing in with a startup would be one way to give yourself a shot at this while providing a fallback plan.
Beyond talent and drive these things usually come down to 'right time, right place' good fortune.
For what it's worth - honestly, not much as a practical matter - I'll add my own best wishes for his success at this.
At that kind of percentile, learming to appreciate it is probably the most effective way left to improve his life!
It's the most effective way no matter what percentile you're at. I'm just saying "appreciate what you have" is not at all the advice he was looking for, and almost always unhelpful, no matter how ubiquitously true it is.
By all means, if he can make things better he should act on it. I’m saying he would feel better now if he took the time to appreciate what he already has.
>I'm sure I'm not the only one here struggling with this and I welcome any insight in how I can go about trying to get the best of both worlds.
Well, one alternative is to be wildly successful: Scott gets to write about what he wants for a living and is very well off. Elon Musk is, intermittently, the richest man in the world by living out classic sci-fi novels.
For the less gifted (hi!), another alternative is to do remote work for a high-paying area from a low cost of living one, but this not a silver bullet unless you don't have strong ties to a high CoL area: Instead of balancing financial stability and job enjoyment, you are sacrificing time/experience with those who are most close to you. However, introducing this new axis in the trade-off calculation which might allow you to find a solution that is better for you.
"Sometimes it seems like you need to chose between being a cog in the machine, working on a boring product for a large company, and getting paid well, or working somewhere fun and fulfilling and making a lot less."
Yes, this is what salary is: compensation for spending your time doing things you would not otherwise choose to do. This is also why the boring less fulfilling tech jobs pay more than the creative ones: the market incentive is to give you less pay if you'd be willing to do the work anyway. (It's far from the only consideration, of course, and on a side note, I hate that some of the nastiest jobs in our society also have the worst pay. But when the available pool of hires is small, this effect is larger).
It is possible to get paid for doing things that you would choose to anyway, in the same way that it is possible to be an olympic medalist or a famous pop idol: most people will not get there, and for those who do, it takes talent, luck /and/ a lot of effort.
Absolutely look for opportunities and make sure not to miss a chance to put your hands under the money tap when the money comes out. But I suggest that winning the lottery is not a viable life planning strategy. Personally I'm aiming for FIRE, though the cost of living increases of the last few years have pushed that goal somewhat further out than it used to be and it may not end up being very E after all. Still, you sound like you are in a position of financial comfort; you might like to consider saving for similar, or perhaps a career break / sabbatical, so you can do the things you actually want to, while you look for the lucky break.
I've never thought of work as "fun". You need a job to live, most jobs are going to be routine, boring, sometimes physically hard work, sometimes mentally demanding. Then again, I've never been in the position of "I can make lots of money or I can have fun, which do I choose?", it's been "take whatever you can get, it'll never be great paying, and if you're lucky you won't hate going in to work in the morning". I like my current job, but that's because due to the Covid lockdown they established working from home so I still only have to go in to 'the office' one day a week, I like the work well enough, but they can't afford to pay me anything like big bucks.
Sorry to be gloomy all over your request, but for a lot of people that is life: there is no question of "can I get loadsamoney and fun in the same job?"
Though to put on my Old Moore's Prognostications hat, I think that your request about "where can I find enjoyable, fulfilling work that pays well?" is the new working generation's thinking, and it's down to the messaging about "make your passion your work" that has backfired on employers. I've always been cynical about things like that, and to me "make your passion your work" was an attempt to get people to put much more effort into, and become very personally invested in, the job without the employer having to cough up more enticements like high pay and great conditions than they could get away with. After all, if you're working your dream job, your passion project, the thing you love most of all, then mere money is a secondary consideration, right? Why, you love Thing so much, you'd do it for free!
Well, now at least one and maybe two generations has grown up and absorbed that thinking, but they now *expect* work to be fun and fulfilling and meaningful, and if the job doesn't live up to that, they move on to greener pastures. So if you want to keep them, now you need to make work 'fun' and/or pay enough to make it worth their while to do boring stuff. The expectation that "work is hard and dull the majority of the time" is no longer there, so I think that has backfired on employers. Heh-heh-heh.
How many hours per week do you work? 40? Could you reduce it to 35 or 30? Then you still have most of that money, but more spare time for your fun projects.
I feel largely the same. I have the misfortune to be in tech but not over in Bay Area big money tech - I'm far from being a HackerNews type who has the confidence that they can just find a new job whenever they want. It just seems impossible to extract enough meaning out of life when the majority of every day is devoted to being an office drone. Over the years it's gotten progressively harder to squeeze my interests into the 1-2 hours of free time available in a day, so my hopes of finding my passion in art or another hobby have rapidly dwindled as well.
I'm in the exact same predicament. In the past I filled my spare time with hobbies and socialising which helped to counterbalance my lack of career fulfilment. But now I feel like the malaise is catching up to me and I need to change careers very soon. I just don't know what I want to do next. In tactical terms, I'm currently debating whether to go cold turkey or do a gradual shift i.e. quit outright and give myself 6 months to experiment and find a viable new path, or pick a path now to go down in my spare time and then slowly ramp up the ratio of time spent on this new direction versus doing my full-time tech job. What are your thoughts on that?
It depends on your situation. Depending on the new path you'd take, ramping up may or may not make sense even though its safer.
"I could do [unpleasant work] and get money, or do [what I like] and get no/less money" is a problem that basically every human has had since the invention of jobs. If there is a specific job that you will enjoy and that will give you ENOUGH money, do that. If not, well, that's just how it goes.
I can't give more specific advice because your post doesn't say what you WANT to do. Get a different tech job? You should probably go for it. Write poetry? That will probably not pay the bills. If you're looking for job offers, you'll need to be more specific (and probably post in the classified thread).
I enjoy writing code in theory, but in my current role I'm not excited about the product and for various reasons my stories are mostly not enjoyable.
Chop wood, carry water. That's what most work has been most of the time for all human history. Even an artist isn't really having "fun" when it's their bread-and-butter career and they need to produce those sixteen paintings on commission for the wealthy patrons/clients (this is why most artists had studios or schools where the apprentices/lesser painters did the majority of the grunt work on a picture and the maestro did things like 'paint in the heads' or the major elements). The idea of the creative expression of one's spirit came along with the idea of the starving artist, for much the same reasons: you can have fun and no money, or routine and lots of money, but not often both fun and money.
I don't have any useful advice, but I feel you. This is also a particularly bad moment in time to toss away a secure and comfortable tech job (I assume you have a tech job) given the state of the market. But, that doesn't really make you feel better about it.
I miss serifs.
A serif font indicates that you're reading Serious Writing for Serious People. Sans-serif frivolity has no place in my (aspirational) wood-paneled study lined with Thomas Cole paintings. Wikipedia says sans-serif was preferred for digital displays where the serifs rendered poorly at low resolutions, but I'm reading this on a 4K monitor: that excuse has long worn out its welcome.
Also, whoever decided that it was OK for "I" (capital i) and "l" (lowercase L) to be indistinguishable should be lined up and shot for crimes against typography.
On top of that, the indistinguishable "I" and "l" can help scammers phish. Like, hey, check out this article at https://www.astraIcodexten.com
At least Chrome lowercases the link preview on hover, so it's obvious what you did.
Yeah (though not on a phone/tablet), and it lowercases the address bar as well. Like all phishing techniques, it relies on the victim not being careful or not being savvy.
if it's not printed in blackletter, it's a triviality
In case it is of interest to anyone else, incidentally, I find https://www.nerdfonts.com/font-downloads a super useful one stop shop for programming fonts (where a key requirement is being able to distinguish different characters easily). Some even have serifs!
I'm aware this doesn't help the general complaint and I do sympathise, but perhaps it will help improve some aspects of life at least.
And in some fonts, the numeral 1 as well. Which is especially bad in coding - I once saw a bug where they meant the letter "I" but typed the numeral "1" and the font made them look the same. Compiler didn't complain.
Does anyone happen to remember an article about worst programming practices? It started off with recommendations for horrible variable names involving ambiguous I, 1, and l.
Small tip: "Illegal1 = O0" is a good test for programming fonts.
For extra spice, some fonts make | (for Unix people, the pipe symbol) indistinguishable too. | 1 I l - for the font this defaults to, at least the numeral looks clearly different.
?
Doesn't everyone code in Courier or a similar monospace font? That's a weird mistake to make.
Most typewriters didn't include a key for the digit "1"; instead, you would type a lower case L. IBM developed both the Courier font and some high end typewriters, including the IBM Selectric, which did have a key for the digit "1", so in Courier the lower case L and the digit "1" do look different, but not radically different. Both have an equally long horizontal line at the bottom, a vertical line that extends upward from the center of a horizontal line, and a downward sloping line connected to the top of the vertical line. The difference between the characters is that the (1) the digit 1 is slightly taller, and (2) the downward sloping line has a much larger downward slope.
In regard to the bug that Dino remembers, it's possible that the characters looked different but similar enough that the programmers misread the code. Or the characters could have appeared completely identical if the font were a typewriter-like font other than Courier, or Courier reduced to a very low resolution.
IBM worked on the problem of people confusing the uppercase O with the digit 0, even though the latter was distinctly narrower. Courier includes both a zero with a slash through it and a zero with a dot in the center. In contexts where there could be confusion (such as in computer code), you could use one of these variants of the digit zero. People confusing lowercase letter "l" and the digit "1" didn't become a problem until people stared using lower case letters in computer programs.
I'd certainly hope so.
But there's also stuff like this: https://www.fontspace.com/category/leet
Yeah, when you see AI you have to analyze context to determine if it’s short for Alfred or an abbreviation for artificial intelligence. It can be annoying.
i feel your pain. Sad serif.
In Fauci's congressional hearing on COVID origins today, Democrat congressmembers depicted him as a "heroic scientist" whereas Republicans were the critical ones.
The problem is that important criticism (Ukraine as well as COVID) is being sorted into the American Right, which will keep it repulsive and out of the Overton window of the Left, the side that's dominant in the urban areas that civilization and intellectualism revolves around.
Silly thought that just occurred to me: Is there a replication crisis in pro-natalism?
Relevant xkcd: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/583:_CNR
(And a bad one. You notice when the explanation is funnier than the joke itself)
I’m torn between a chuckle and a Marge Simpson groan. ;)
Anti-natalism: Replication crises are good, actually!
Yup, every innocent hypothesis saved from the horrors of actually corresponding to reality is another Christmas miracle: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/noooooooo
After reading Lyman's initial post and follow-up, I think Scott and Lyman are basically attacking straw men while steel-manning their own position.
Lyman is essentially asking the question, "is Effective Altruism better than Christianity?" Unsurprisingly, as a fundamentalist Christian, he concludes that no, Christianity is a better belief system, and Effective Altruism as a movement is less effective than Christianity for improving the human condition. True! (At least in terms of total impact--making an unsubstantiated assumption based on the total volume of altruistic activity by Christians worldwide.)
Scott's response could be summarized as "EA is better than the purely ad hoc, half-hearted at best altruism that is status quo for 98% of the population." True! But Lyman's real point is that people should be Christians instead of Effective Altruists, so the two sets of essays end up talking past each other.
But Scott remains silent on Christianity as an alternative (and in particular the relatively rare and in fact extremely virtuous and admirable version of Christianity that Lyman in fact practices). And in turn, Lyman insists on defining EA by the broadest possible scope of adherents, rather than the relatively rare but extremely virtuous and admirable version that Scott in fact practices.
I think the ideal resolution would acknowledge the extremely broad overlap in most of the core values and strategies that are being discussed, acknowledge that EA and Christianity are almost entirely complementary in terms of actual participation, and pat each other on the back for their extremely admirable contributions to improving the human condition.
Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I think you'd want to argue for a religion if you believe its truth claims are actually true. Arguing that it's useful sounds to me like having already conceded defeat.
As for the contributions of both EA and Christianity on the human condition, I think both have in common that they are better when they don't have too much power.
Some religions are almost entirely ethical systems, eg. Confucianism, and usefulness is very relevant to ethics.
Possibly true... If and when someone comes here arguing for Confucian ethics we'll see what they say and how well it stacks up!
What we have literally two comments above is talk of promoting Christianity on the basis of its allegedly great ethical system, with a pointed silence on the validity of its strong and specific truth claims, which I find pretty weird and bordering on intellectual dishonesty.
Even granting that Lyman is doing small-e-effective-altruism correctly, I think fewer than 1% of Christians do this, and promoting Christianity isn't a very efficient route to promoting this idea.
1% of American Christians is 2.1 million people, something like $2-4 billion dollars per year in charitable giving, and something like a hundred million volunteer hours. Which absolutely crushes EA's total budget and membership. And there's no logical reason such a movement couldn't be international and ecumenical.
I understand these are your political enemies. But you should be honest that the movement's ideological commitments are keeping it from being maximally effective and that the movement has values other than just getting bed nets to Africa.
Better to measure this on a good done per person basis. Otherwise it rounds off to my movement is bigger than yours and therefore better on every positive metric and worse on every negative metric.
I'm firmly in the EA camp here but I don't think that's true. A decent idea that catches fire is better for civilisation than a brilliant one that never takes off.
(I personally think religion is a net negative at scale, but obviously Lyman disagrees).
But that's the reality. If 2 billion each do a little bit to relieve poverty and relieve 1 billion people's poverty (.5 per person) while 1 million people do a lot and relieve 2 million people's poverty (2 per person, 4x) then the 2 billion still relieved 1,000 times more poverty. The fact the smaller group did more per person isn't relevant if your goal is to relieve poverty overall.
Further, some hypothetical universe where there's an equal number of Christians and EAs might be interesting to think about. But it's not a reality. And EA has never proven as able to recruit people as well as Christianity. You have to deal with reality, not the hypotheticals.
Fewer than 1% of a large number of people can be more effective than even 100% of a small number of people. Or does EA care about efficiency more than about effectiveness in achieving its goals?
So several things:
1. I think it is just true that a lot of existing low hanging fruit no longer exists because of Christians. America's high level of trust and institutions built upon them likely have lots to owe to Christianity. And lots of NGOs exist downstream of Christians / Christianity. So to a large extent the point of Effective Altruism is to do good """in spite""" of Christianity: Marginal effectiveness is going to exist on whatever Christianity is not focusing on. And this would also be true even if everyone were an EA.
2. It's not clear that EA scales to "controls 1% of all Christian income". Discovery of what is most effective on the margin is already really hard to calculate with just one Dustin Moskovitz's worth of wealth. You start getting extremely perverse adversarial selection type effects, you start double counting evidence etc. To some extent, EA's advantages are an artifact of its small size and not a fundamental unalterable aspect. I think it's even plausible that already there's too much money chasing too few opportunities.
3. Considering that charities can differ in effectiveness several orders of magnitude (see: buying some TV pastor a 4th private jet vs a malaria net that lasts a year and stops 1/1000th the chance of death and some much higher chance of actual malaria in Kenya), it may indeed be way more valuable to have a focused movement with much less people than a more populist one. It doesn't matter if we have 10 trillion dollars if they get spent on the curing rare diseases for cute puppies sector of charity! And indeed, the changes that outsiders like yourself tend to suggest are ones that loosens standards of charitable donations.
I don’t understand the conflict…can’t Christians use EA to bolster the outcomes of their charity? Example: a church congregation doing something something mosquito nets for 80k hours.
Most church congregations *are* already doing something something mosquito nets:
https://charity-gifts.christianaid.ie/products/a-pack-of-five-mosquito-nets-e-card#
https://donate.worldvision.org/give/bed-nets
https://muslimhands.org.uk/donate/health/mosquito-nets
https://www.compassion.com/catalog/donate-mosquito-net-charity-gift.htm
https://www.gfa.org/donation/items/mosquito-nets/
Oh, and bringing a modern scientific approach to charity work? Started in the late 19th century:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eglantyne_Jebb
"[Eglantyne]Jebb [one of the co-founders of Save The Children] moved to Cambridge to look after her sick mother. There, encouraged by Mary Marshall and Florence Keynes, she became involved in the Charity Organisation Society, which aimed to bring a modern scientific approach to charity work. This led her to research urban conditions. In 1906, Jebb published Cambridge, a Study in Social Questions based on her research."
And what was the Charity Organisation Society?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charity_Organisation_Society
"The Charity Organisation Societies were founded in England in 1869 following the 'Goschen Minute' that sought to severely restrict outdoor relief distributed by the Poor Law Guardians. In the early 1870s a handful of local societies were formed with the intention of restricting the distribution of outdoor relief to the elderly.
Also called the Associated Charities was a private charity that existed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as a clearing house for information on the poor. The society was mainly concerned with distinction between the deserving poor and undeserving poor. The society believed that giving out charity without investigating the problems behind poverty created a class of citizens that would always be dependent on alms giving.
The society originated in Elberfeld, Germany and spread to Buffalo, New York around 1877. The conviction that relief promoted dependency was the basis for forming the Societies. Instead of offering direct relief, the societies addressed the cycle of poverty. Neighborhood charity visitors taught the values of hard work and thrift to individuals and families. The COS set up centralised records and administrative services and emphasised objective investigations and professional training. There was a strong scientific emphasis as the charity visitors organised their activities and learned principles of practice and techniques of intervention from one another. The result led to the origin of social casework. Gradually, over the ensuing years, volunteer visitors began to be supplanted by paid staff."
No 'giving dependent on warm fuzzies' there!
Nice history lesson!
I'm a grump about this, but I do think a lot of modern discourse suffers from Ten Minutes Ago problem, that is, anything further back than ten minutes ago is ignored or not even known about.
That's how EA can position itself as "the first ever to use scientific methods of gauging charitable effectiveness" when there were forerunners to this. They're not doing it in bad faith, it's because they're a bunch of young people (starting off) who think that because it's them, this is the first time ever anything was done like this (the fault of young people in all times).
I think most arguments about Effective Altruism come down to a failure to distinguish between EA the idea (which is pretty sensible) and EA the movement (which is largely very silly).
Is Stone a Fundamentalist? I thought he was Lutheran, and if that now counts as Fundamentalism, then I'm opening my eyes wide in surprise.
Though now I look at it, you used small "f" fundamentalism, so I'm presuming you mean more along the lines of 'conservative, traditional, orthodox, hasn't ditched the last three hundred years worth of understanding of Scripture'?
I probably can't be said to have a dog in that fight over "who is or is not a Fundamentalist?" but I've seen the term "fundamentalist" used in American media and online to mean "raving loon who wants to burn us all at the stake" so I do get a bit twitchy about it, given that under certain definitions of that, I'd be a fundamentalist too (whaddya mean you believe in the Trinity? God made the universe? miracles happened like the Bible says?)
I *hope* I'm not a raving loon who wants to burn you all at the stake (I do have to work to quash my 'heretics! fire!' tendency, admittedly).
> (At least in terms of total impact--making an unsubstantiated assumption based on the total volume of altruistic activity by Christians worldwide.)
Was he taking into account all the negatives caused by Christianity? Like people being demonized for being LGBT, or for having sex before marriage, or feeling like it's wrong to leave a bad marriage?
Were those things caused directly by Christianity, or was there a general demand for that stuff at that time and Christianity happened to be the framework in place to punish?
I don't think they were caused by Christianity, but I think Christianity makes it harder for the society to realize it was a problem and stop doing it. Though I think the pro-life stuff is caused by religion. It's a lot harder to justify why a fetus has more moral worth than a cow if you don't believe humans get souls at conception.
Oh gosh wow, leave us not call fornication a sin!
Sorry, that's my raving lunacy coming out. But yeah, imagine: religion which follows certain moral standards around the use of sexuality says that lust is one of the seven deadly sins, who could have expected that?
And seeing how everyone is now free to have sex before marriage in my country because the bad ol' church has lost a ton of power, I don't see the longed-for utopia of happiness around that, given the problem pages of the papers are still full of unhappy people who are now complaining about sexual lacking, mismatch of expectations, their lover doesn't want to commit, they're separated and lonely, etc. Who would have thought that removing the stigma from sleeping around outside marriage would not do away with all drama and unhappiness, huh?
EDIT: And apparently now everything old is new again, and celibacy is the hot new trend:
https://nz.news.yahoo.com/very-strong-signal-body-celibacy-050000157.html
"While there might have been a time when pledging a vow of abstinence would have elicited judgemental sniggers and whispers, today it’s viewed by many as an integral part of self-care and personal development – something many of us could benefit from. Hence the brouhaha surrounding a new advertising campaign from Bumble, which saw billboards plastered across the US with the slogan: “You know full well a vow of celibacy is not the answer”."
So now we're demonizing people for demonzing people for not having sex before marriage?
> Oh gosh wow, leave us not call fornication a sin!
What always gets me is, I've heard any number of preachers condemn gender/body mismatches, same-sex attraction etc. but none at all, ever, talk about remarriage after divorce; since, one can only assume, people whose opinion the preacher actually cares about might be personally affected by that.
This is particularly fascinating because there is no reticence about asking the congregation to examine their conduct and improve themselves when it comes to, oh, just about any other aspect of life, or indeed sexuality; many words are spent condemning, e.g., internet porn addiction; offering help and support for those troubled; treating them, generally, with love and respect. Internet porn addicts are us! Condemn the sin, love the sinner - we need to all deal with it together!
The lgbt folk, though, are always /them/. It's self-perpetuating: any who might give church a try soon realise it is not a place for them.
If you are going to demonize people for fornication, have the courage of your convictions and address the biggest, most widely accepted by the world at large, practice, before beating up on the people who are already being punched by all comers.
Henry VIII has a lot to answer for.
One of the sharper things in the New Testament is something about people being more at risk from what comes out of their mouths than what goes into them.
Malicious gossip should be taken more seriously as bad behavior.
Hello, and welcome to your weekly visit to Theology Corner!
(Scott has the patience of Job to let us irrational superstitious religious types clutter up this otherwise lovely clean rationalist space with our dribbling drivel)
Okay, a large part of this is that in much Protestant theology, marriage is no longer a sacrament (as it remains in Catholicism) but is now a rite. I think (not to be putting words in the man's mouth) Luther for one considered it as more of the nature of a contract (though he seems to have interesting views on the entire matter). So it was downgraded, to a greater or lesser degree, within the various new denominations.
Marriage was still solemn, you should be chaste outside of marriage and continent within marriage, and divorce was something rare and unusual. Marriage was also ordained of God and for the purpose of begetting and raising children. But it had been stripped of the nature of a sacrament, and of course over time it began to be treated as any other civil contract or ritual.
So, given that Protestantism allowed for exceptional cases for divorce, then in time as civil law caught up to slowly liberalising divorce and making it available to the ordinary person, and as the hard cases which make bad law were put before people as appeals to compassion for those suffering, and as the social stigma gradually waned over time, the churches got caught up in the Zeitgeist as well. The more liberal ones of course responded to the appeal for compassion and pastoral care; if people could be civilly divorced and civilly re-married with no problem, why cut them off from a church blessing second time round? This was a hard-fought rearguard action, but in time they gave in. After all, if it's not a sacrament but merely an ordinance or a ritual or a 'recommended action', why be too punctilious about it?
Catholicism wasn't immune, either; no divorce, but marriages could be annulled. And the American church, for one, gained a notorious reputation for rubberstamping annulments to end marriages and permit remarriage in church.
There seems to be some reassessment on the Protestant side, but I think civil divorce has become so entrenched in society, that going against the grain when you have already given in on it is goign to be impossible. Hence no preaching on the topic.
https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/doctoral/1645/
"Protestant theology has historically rejected marriage as sacrament, a rejection which continues to resound in the majority of contemporary Protestant scholarship. Yet many, if not most, arguments against sacramental marriage tacitly follow an outline set forward by Luther and Calvin which, if examined with critical scrutiny, is based on a problematic soteriological premise. In light of this, the present study sets forward a comprehensive argument in favor of Protestant theology reaffirming marriage as a sacrament through systematic investigation into the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament), New Testament, and Christian history. After developing a critical hermeneutic founded on realist epistemological grounds, a continuous line is drawn from Genesis to Revelation that affirms marriage as not only sacred in a general manner, but specifically designed by God for the welfare of human society, both physical and spiritual. This consistent thread is shown in the fabric of early Hebrew society, despite its historical acceptance of polygamy as a social necessity, and served as a central symbol of the prophetic rebukes of Israel/Judah. A yearning for a spiritual aspect of marriage that transcends even death can be seen arising from the eschatological hopes of the Israelite textual traditions, which come into further expression in the New Testament. While the words of Jesus concerning the fate of the remarried widow are often used to negate or dismiss eschatological expectations for marriage, a positive evaluation is given that provides a historical context for interpretation which affirms rather than denies eschatological hope. Celibacy, the only other acceptable Christian sexual pattern, is developed by Paul in 1 Cor 7 as a careful balance of issues that does not relegate marriage as spiritually inferior, as it is often taken. On the basis of these scriptural traditions, the historical development of the sacramental theological tradition is presented with emphasis on the contributions of Augustine of Hippo whereby marriage is part of the larger sacramental fabric while still maintaining a special place due to its pre-fallen origin and symbolic import. In contrast, the Scholastic tradition sought pseudo-empirical formulae whereby sacraments served as instrumental causes of Grace. It was on this basis that the Protestant tradition, originating initially in Luther and Calvin, rejected marriage as a sacrament due to its apparent disassociation with the instrumental transference of Grace, which they reserved for baptism and communion. As a consequence, the Protestant tradition inherited problematic theological bases that have in turn opened the door to divorce by functionally allowing secular society to determine marital norms. In contrast, the present study provides a positive presentation for a cohesive view of marriage derived from Scripture that advances marriage as a special and sacred institution much in need of revitalization and respect."
Speaking of Luther, here's a link to sermons on marriage he gave, which include some pretty dang idiosyncratic views of his own:
https://pages.uoregon.edu/dluebke/Reformations441/LutherMarriage.htm
"I once wrote down some advice concerning such persons for those who hear confession. It related to those cases where a husband or wife comes and wants to learn what he should do: his spouse is unable to fulfil the conjugal duty, yet he cannot get along without it because he finds that God's ordinance to multiply is still in force within him. Here they have accused me of teaching that when a husband is unable to satisfy his wife's sexual desire she should run to somebody else. Let the topsy-turvy liars spread their lies. The words of Christ and his apostles were turned upside down; should they not also turn my words topsy-turvy? To whose detriment it will be they shall surely find out.
What I said was this: if a woman who is fit for marriage has a husband who is not, and she is unable openly to take unto herself another and unwilling, too, to do anything dishonorable since the pope in such a case demands without cause abundant testimony and evidence, she should say to her husband, “Look, my dear husband, you are unable to fulfil your conjugal duty toward me; you have cheated me out of my maidenhood and even imperilled my honor and my soul's salvation; in the sight of God there is no real marriage between us. Grant me the privilege of contracting a secret marriage with your brother or closest relative, and you retain the title of husband so that your property will not fall to strangers. Consent to being betrayed voluntarily by me, as you have betrayed me without my consent” [...]."
Uh-huh. Functional bigamy or even polygamy. Marty boy, no wonder you got yourself into trouble!
Luther is also fine with you marrying your niece, I'm sure the Spanish Hapsburgs thank him for that 😁
"From this it follows that first cousins may contract a godly and Christian marriage, and that I may marry my stepmother's sister, my father's stepsister, or my mother's stepsister. Further, I may marry the daughter of my brother or sister, just as Abraham married Sarah. None of these persons is forbidden by God, for God does not calculate according to degrees, as the jurists do, but enumerates directly specific persons. Otherwise, since my father's sister and my brother's daughter are related to me in the same degree, I would have to say either that I cannot marry my brother's daughter or that I may also marry my father's sister. Now God has forbidden my father's sister, but he has not forbidden my brother's daughter, although both are related to me in the same degree. We also find in Scripture that with respect to various stepsisters there were not such strict prohibitions. For Tamar, Absalom's sister, thought she could have married her step-brother Amnon"
Hey, marry anyone you like!
"The fourth impediment is legal kinship; that is, when an unrelated child is adopted as son or daughter it may not later marry a child born of its adoptive parents, that is, one who is by law its own brother or sister. This is another worthless human invention. Therefore, if you so desire, go ahead and marry anyway. In the sight of God this adopted person is neither your mother nor your sister, since there is no blood relationship. She does work in the kitchen, however, and supplements the income; this is why she has been placed on the forbidden list!"
I now see the impetus behind the golden age of British true crime, where people preferred to knock off their spouses than seek a divorce. Marty says God doesn't mind if you kill off inconvenient hubby so you can marry that hotter, richer, studlier guy:
"The sixth impediment is crime. They are not in agreement as to how many instances of this impediment they should devise. However, there are actually these three: if someone lies with a girl, he may not thereafter marry her sister or her aunt, niece, or cousin; again, whoever commits adultery with a woman may not marry her after her husband's death; again, if a wife (or husband) should murder her spouse for love of another, she may not subsequently marry the loved one. Here it rains fools upon fools. Don't you believe them, and don't be taken in by them; they are under the devil's whip. Sins and crimes should be punished, but with other penalties, not by forbidding marriage. Therefore, no sin or crime is an impediment to marriage. David committed adultery with Bathsheba, Uriah's wife, and had her husband killed besides. He was guilty of both crimes; still he took her to wife and begot King Solomon by her [II Samuel 11], and without giving any money to the pope! [...]"
I think he was so caught up in his beef with the pope, he maybe didn't think this through as thoroughly as he ought to have done. Now I want to see this as defence at a murder trial: "Martin Luther says it's okay if I marry my boyfriend after we get rid of my husband!" 😁
I can't get over that this was a sermon series. How unreasonable and petty of us Papists to say you can't murder your spouse and then marry the sidepiece! 😁 Isn't it great that the Reformation liberated Europe and then the world from such arbitrary unreasonable priestcraft!
That title is hilarious: "‘It was a very strong signal from my body’: How celibacy is revolutionising people’s sex lives."
Once you get old enough, you see it all come around again. Religious influence on society = insistence on chastity before marriage. Social and sexual revolution = this is oppression and repression and control of women's sexuality! Free love for all! Free love and sexual revolution = eventual burnout because guess what, people still have drama around sex and love and it's messy and women (and men) find whole new avenues of discontent amongst the promised utopia that turned out not to live up to the advertising New social and sexual revolution = chastity and continence empower women!
You have to laugh 😁
> So now we're demonizing people for demonzing people for not having sex before marriage?
Didn't we just have a post where we talked about people confronting parts of themselves which had urges that the main self didn't approve of? ;-)
With all this demonising going on, we certainly need to send in some IFS therapists!
Well, if demonizing for sexual behavior is going on, I think we should at least insist on proven, reliable, validated procedures for turning someone into an incubus or succubus. :-)
"Every month my unspayed cat becomes possessed by a succubus, help!"
One other point I think it's worth acknowledging is that the ability of either Scott or Lyman to persuade the other's core audience is probably effectively nil.
No conservative Christian is going to find a social movement that is associated with orgies to be morally acceptable or worthy of promotion.
And no one who does not believe in hell is going to find a conservative Christian ideology that believes they are going to hell to be acceptable or worthy of promotion.
I learned interesting, valuable things from what Scott had to say about EA and from what Lyman had to say about his practice of Christianity, but I also learned that I'm not especially interested in what Lyman has to say about EA, the rationalist community, or utilitarianism, and I would not be particularly interested in Scott's opinion of Christianity as a competing belief system or social movement.
> No conservative Christian is going to find a social movement that is associated with orgies to be morally acceptable or worthy of promotion
Does this suggest that the most EA thing that EA people could do is to stop being so weird, and drive the weirdoes out of their movement?
Seriously, every time someone starts up an "EA Group House", malaria claims another five thousand QALYs in Uganda.
But at least some people want to keep the other varieties around, too, so maybe we call it "Reform EA"?
Time for THE REFORMATION, which I am assured every movement needs? Overthrow the sclerotic old Catholic Church, er, original EA movement based around dons and universities! Enable the laity to take control of their own charitable giving! Release the foundational documents in the language of normies!
I had been making a cheap joke at the expense of Reform Judaism, but this works much better!
We don't require math nerds to intermediate between us and the optimal pattern of giving. Who died and gave GiveWell the keys to effectiveness? The idea that we need to formally adhere to mathematical patterns is, frankly, offensive. If we look deep inside and conclude that we're doing enough, then who is to say that we're not? Sole vibe!
Peter Singer is not the pope and even if he were, No Popery Here!
<mild snark>
>Seriously, every time someone starts up an "EA Group House", malaria claims another five thousand QALYs in Uganda.
In the 5 dimensional chess of optimizing EA's optics, would omitting the weirdnesses be a "don't castle" move? :-)
</mild snark>
*rimshot*
:-) Many Thanks!
Well I'm both a conservative Catholic and petty close to the effective altruism movement - I follow Give Well guidelines for about half of my yearly donations for example.
(I dream of an effective Catholicism movement too).
Yeah, it's true that the two movements are not technically mutually exclusive, and could learn important lessons from each other. But in reality, you're better off trying to reform each one from within, on its own terms, than you are trying to persuade "across the aisle" (noting that politics--or at least socio-political-tribal identity--probably isn't far from the core dispute between Scott/EAs and Lyman/conservative Christians).
If it ever becomes effective, it's not Catholicism 😁
Imagine the Curia becoming an efficient and lean imagination... That would be the end of the Vatican as we know it.
(Joke aside though it kills me that nobody ever wants to have a long hard look at retention rates of new adult baptised and understand what is going wrong here).
People come in with enthusiasm, they convert and join the local church, and then hit up against modern Catholic congregations and how we live our faith (or mostly, don't live it).
Scott, does Alina Chan's article in today's NYT affect your opinion on the lab leak hypothesis?
As John Schilling said, the only update is that the NYT decided to platform Alina Chan to say the same things she's always said, which I think tells us something about NYT but not about COVID.
So what does it tell us about the NYT? I suspect that it appealed to the NYT because (1) it concisely and systematically presents the evidence for a lab leak in a way that is comprehensible to an intelligent layperson (better than any other piece I have seen in the NYT), and (2) it is sinking in that even if there wasn't a lab leak there easily could have been, because the WIV was doing very risky research at an inappropriate BSL, and (3) the way the virology establishment circled the wagons was indefensible. I hope the Times prints an equally clear rebuttal.
Is there anything in Alina Chan's op-ed that wasn't in her (and Matt Ridley's) book from two years ago? There hasn't been much new evidence lately, and even if there were an NYT op-ed isn't the place to reveal it. The purpose is to take what has long been known by people who are paying attention, and package it to broad distribution to those who are not.
Since Scott is someone who has been paying attention, and has hosted a review of Chan/Ridley's book (https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-viral), I wouldn't expect this to move the needle much for him.
What are the strongest arguments against allowing AI chatbots to take on some tasks traditionally reserved for medical professionals, such as discussing conditions with patients, ordering tests, and prescribing medication?
Is the primary concern that current AI models, like GPT-4, aren't advanced enough? If future models, like a potential GPT-5, were significantly improved, specifically fine-tuned for medical tasks, and passed rigorous evaluations, would it then be a good idea to use them in these roles? Or are there other reasons that make this a bad idea?
I don't think AI should give medical advice, but I strongly believe we are badly in need of some kind of algorithm that would take a list of symptoms together with other patient data and, in cases that seem to be almost perfectly matched to a possible diagnosis, suggest the possible diagnosis to discuss with your doctor, or send the doctor an alert directly.
I knew someone who died from a disease that went undiagnosed due to being much more common in a demographic unfamiliar to his doctors, and I know someone who, for the same reason, spent more than 10 years in pain without a diagnosis that could have been obtained by realizing that a slew of symptoms matched his disease exactly.
It doesn't have to be anything you might call AI. It can be a pretty dumb algorithm that takes your list of symptoms, takes your other medical and demographic data, and, in cases that look sufficiently serious, either tells you "You should ask your doctor about Cantonese cancer" or sends your doctor this alert.
Maybe we already have this somewhere. If so, it's possible that it gives enough false positive alerts that it's just being ignored. But this could save lives if it was done right.
I've always wondered why we don't have this. It could be a big Bayesian net where you could click on your symptoms and it would give you a list of possible causes ranked by likelihood. This might not be exactly what you're talking about, but I like the idea. All the data could be from people who opted-in to allowing it. I would consider this "AI", but to-ma-to to-mah-to.
I wouldn't call anything that's just basic arithmetics "AI".
It's complicated, of course. Someone might have more than one condition. The most likely causes of visible symptoms are typically probably something fairly harmless. The really bad stuff might be difficult and painful to test for and might kill you very quickly (think bacterial meningitis and all the patients who get sent home and die because the doctors thought it was most likely a migraine and didn't see a good reason to do a spinal tap).
On the reddit about stupid patients was an off-topic story of an EMT who got called to a woman whose symptoms looked like a mild cold. Luckily, her rookie partner had a hunch that it was something serious, so they took her in, and she ended up being airlifted to another hospital for a surgery for a hemorrhage - or else she would have died. I wouldn't be surprised if most medicine looks like that not only to doctors but also to the algorithm that has all the data.
Also, people's medical records are typically not up-to-date and might include complaints that are a few decades old, with no way to figure out which of these are still valid. You get the idea.
So it's really just wishful thinking on my part, but I do wish there was at least an attempt to somehow do this. Unfortunately, such attempts take a lot of money and man-hours and are likely not to be greatly useful in most cases. Maybe this should be a DARPA program.
Is there a list somewhere of distinctive symptoms of rare diseases?
I don't know what else there might be, but apparently purple stretch marks is a good indicator for Cushing's disease.
Those are probably the easy ones. The hard ones are the ones that look like many other things.
They might be the easy ones, but that doesn't mean a particular doctor will know about them.
https://academic.oup.com/jcem/article/105/3/e12/5609009
FWIW, I decided to write up an argument for AI doctors: https://thegreymatter.substack.com/p/ai-doctors
No current AI chatbot attempts to do tasks reserved for medical professionals, such as discussing conditions with patients, ordering tests, and prescribing medication. We have no idea how to make an AI chatbot that does any of these things. They may be marketed as doing these things, and they may produce output that happens to accomplish that goal some portion of the time in laboratory testing, but saying they can actually do these tasks is like calling what Tesla vehicles do "full self driving": much as a marketing executive may wish otherwise, the actual thing the system does is nothing of the sort.
The question they /actually/ answer - the /only/ question they answer, the only thing we know how to make them answer - is "if you come across some text that starts like this, what are some words that might plausibly come next?"
Current AIs answer this question very well. The hope of the people designing them is that to get better and better at answering this question the AI has to build more and more internal knowledge about, well, everything. But this is a side effect, and we have no way of guaranteeing this. It is not the actual metric used to drive the optimisation process that we use to construct our current AI models. That metric is, to a first approximation, "does a random human on fiverr.com give this text a high rating out of ten?" It's not that the AI is "hallucinating". There is no such concept. There is nothing that can hallucinate. There is no truth or lies. We are /hoping/ that a sufficiently advanced autocorrect is indistinguishable from ̶m̶a̶g̶i̶c̶ intelligence but we cannot prove this logically and do not, to date, have an example that would demonstrate it empirically.
Anyway, TLDR: we have not built robodoctor. We cannot reliably build robodoctor with the tech we have right now. What we have built is a robo-drunk-uncle. The output is about what one would expect if a five-year-old asks their drunk uncle a question about the world: a sequence of words emerges forth that might plausibly come next. It may or may not bear some relation to actual real world facts and concepts. The uncle is incredibly good at sounding plausible, so the five-year-old has no way of knowing.
AI research is a battle between Say Not Complexity[1] and the Bitter Lesson[2]. After the last few years of being driven by the bitter lesson - more compute! - more training! - bigger matrices! - faster attention! - the "lies your drunk uncle tells your kids" machine works really great. But we are seeing the limits of what we can reach merely by adding more compute and hoping truth-telling magically emerges; we need a leap in understanding before we can do anything one might actually rely on, certainly in any situation where human well-being is on the line.
[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kpRSCH7ALLcb6ucWM/say-not-complexity
[2] http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html
A couple of comments:
I used to quip: "Someone who thinks AI is about to completely take over overestimates what current AI can do. Someone who thinks that AI will never take over overestimates what humans can do." I think that this is still true, but the field has advanced a great deal in recent years.
>The question they /actually/ answer - the /only/ question they answer, the only thing we know how to make them answer - is "if you come across some text that starts like this, what are some words that might plausibly come next?"
Yeah, for LLMs and chatbots built on them (setting aside the RLHF step) but
a) _Humans_ can be reasonably approximated as answering only the questions: "What can I do to increase my social status?" and "What do I expect to directly sense next?". We _don't_ have syllogism engines for guaranteed valid reasoning. In some settings we get rewarded for learning to cough up chains of statements that our ingroup rewards as "reasoning" - or as politically correct... These capabilities are also trained.
b) There are also other flavors of AI which are either trained with non-linguistic data e.g. AlphaFold or use techniques separate from trainable neural nets e.g. Mathematica. Now, neither of these is an LLM, but LLMs _have_ been successfully prompted to make use of software tools. I've personally watched ChatGPT successfully invoke a math solving package (specifically on a polynomial solution).
>There is no truth or lies.
I think that this is at the wrong level of analysis, analogous to saying: humans are just a bunch of neurons firing, just depolarization waves, neither truth nor lies.
I doubt that current LLMs have a good enough theory of mind to anticipate that, it can get a better match to predicting the next token several plys later in a conversation by emitting words now that are different from what it would emit "naively" - what would essentially be a chatbot analog to deliberate deception of their conversational partner. I do expect that to happen eventually.
> We _don't_ have syllogism engines for guaranteed valid reasoning. In some settings we get rewarded for learning to cough up chains of statements that our ingroup rewards as "reasoning" - or as politically correct... These capabilities are also trained.
Humans have levers AI does not, such as impact to their social standing or to other things they care about like their bank balance or their comfort or their freedom. Humans also have millenia of implicit training for intuiting the state of mind of other humans. This training transfers incredibly badly to things that are not human: the human tendency to anthropomorphise leads us to make all sorts of predictions that are wildly wrong about all sorts of things.
You are clearly intending this as some kind of excuse, but as far as I am concerned all of these things just make the situation worse: we cannot reasonably expect to reliably align to our goals a system that processes information in ways completely alien to us, with internal states that we do not understand and cannot reason about, in a situation where we could not be at least somewhat confident of communicating those goals to a human.
Many Thanks!
>we cannot reasonably expect to reliably align to our goals a system that processes information in ways completely alien to us, with internal states that we do not understand and cannot reason about, in a situation where we could not be at least somewhat confident of communicating those goals to a human.
You have a good point, though, remember that the training sets for LLMs incorporates a vast amount of human output. I don't think they are nearly as alien as something that was programmed explicitly for every decision in e.g. C.
>Humans have levers AI does not, such as impact to their social standing or to other things they care about like their bank balance or their comfort or their freedom.
Yes, but "levers" do not imply truthfulness or accurate reasoning. Getting humans to accurately think through a problem relies on mechanisms which are about as indirect as our control of LLMs. Social standing, bank balances, comfort, and freedom are updated perhaps once a day or so, in response to only a small fraction of human behavior (_maybe_ a bit more often for informal social standing). The reinforcement learning phase of LLMs also applies analogous indirect controls - and, if I understand correctly, a lot more of them.
My impression is that a large chunk of human reasoning is itself pattern matching. E.g. after taking undergraduate physics courses, one learns to recognize certain situations that one has learned as potentially solvable by certain methods one has learned. Nothing wrong with this - but it isn't as rigorous as it looks, and it isn't something that LLMs are architecturally unable to do.
None of this is to say that LLMs, as they stand today, are plug-in replacements for humans. I've seen ChatGPT fall on its face perhaps a dozen times on being asked simple chemistry questions. It clearly needs at least some sort of "now think about how the answer you are about to give might be wrong" addition.
We've actually built robodoctor and it works pretty well but the AI Safety Experts have turned the functionality off.
The drunk uncle analogy doesn't work because even though it's just next token completion, it still ends up saying the same thing a doctor would say - so, why do we care?
> it still ends up saying the same thing a doctor would say - so, why do we care?
We've built a full self driving system! Even though it's just a lane follower, it still ends up giving the same control inputs a driver would, so why do we care?
...because, when it doesn't, people die.
A common objection to AI doom scenarios is: who on earth would put one of these systems in charge of anything that could possibly result in real people being hurt, never mind the world ending?
The answer is, demonstrably, Elon Musk, and now apparently also medical chatbot sellers.
Ok, so we can't replace any human systems with any AI ever, got it!
Obviously we shouldn't put stuff that doesn't work in charge of things that could result in people getting hurt. Stuff that works is fine tho!
> Ok, so we can't replace any human systems with any AI ever, got it!
We can use inference models as part of a safety critical system, but their output should be treated just like any other noisy, unreliable information: as an input to a deliberately engineered process that has well understood responses to well defined operating parameters and can be rigorously proven to fail safe and/or hand over (in a safe manner!) to a human when outside this envelope.
We absolutely do know how to design safety critical systems, when we can get over our own hubris.
We do this kind of rigorous engineering for vehicle navigation: aeroplane autopilot systems are engineered this way.
We can also do this, to some extent, for medical diagnosis: systems exist that reliably give appropriate responses when presented with inputs in specified ranges, and reliably delegate to a human doctor outside these.
We don't usually call these systems AI, though. "AI" is a term reserved for exciting things we don't understand; as the joke goes, if we understand it, it's not AI, it's just statistics.
LLMs, the current "AI", are not tools capable of achieving this outcome on their own. They delegate the problem of designing the mapping from input to output to the training process, and leave us with no way to reason about things like what output the system will produce for a given input or what range of inputs will reliably produce desired outputs. This makes them unusable for safety critical probems. The hammer is the wrong shape for the nail. They can be an input to a safety critical system, but they cannot be the safety critical system.
> Obviously we shouldn't put stuff that doesn't work in charge of things that could result in people getting hurt. Stuff that works is fine tho!
The key part is knowing the difference between the two, rather than just hoping.
I foresee medical AI being used (e.g. in the USA) to take over the already established triaging of access to medical care by insurance companies (are you sure you're really sick enough to warrant seeing a doctor? don't you know that will cost us money?) and replace (e.g. in Ireland, already having a shortage of doctors willing to work in general practice) out-of-hours and over-subscribed patient lists (you don't need to see a doctor, just run through this checklist and the AI will tell you to take some paracetamol and plenty of fluids).
I don't see it *positively* treating people, as in making diagnoses and issuing prescriptions or ordering tests, I see it *negatively* winnowing out people for "it's not pneumonia, it's just a cold, antibiotics will do nothing for it" type queries. Which is all very well until the time it *is* pneumonia. How they'll sort out liability, I have no idea, except maybe they'll dump it on the patient ('well it was up to you to confirm this by going to the doctor in person').
Done well, this would be very useful--it would be very handy to be able to fire up a website or app, spend a few minutes with it, and get a reasonable informed notion of whether these symptoms that woke me up in the middle of the night merit "take some ibuprofen and go back to bed" or "call the doctor in the morning" or "call 911 right the hell now."
I expect the incentives will mostly not align to get good answers here, with the overlap of "you should never come to the hospital because it costs us money" and "the patient's family will sue for a gazillion dollars if you ever tell someone with a headache to stay home and it turns out it's a stroke, and neither the judge nor anyone on the jury will have ever heard of a false positive before."
I think an issue is that in most if not all my conversations with chatbot I have to be the motor of the conversation, which works when I know what I want, and would work in some cases when I know what I have/what medication I want, but in many cases it would not, I would need the medical professional to be the one steering the conversation.
This is a bigger deal than people think. I'd love to know about any effort being made to have a chatbot actually drive a conversation instead of just lie there.
That's a good point. When I've played with ChatGPT on chemistry questions, there have been a bunch of times where I was able to get it to give the right answer, finally - and it felt much like _way_ back when I was a teaching assistant, and was trying to guide a student with a series of leading questions.
Same reason why my job is relatively safe from AI at the moment - liability. This will remain an unsolved problem for the next little bit.
What happens if your AI does something like what that Microsoft Bing/Google one does and advise your patient to eat glue? We have a very well rounded legal framework to handle rogue doctors, and a non-existent one for rogue AI doctors.
(My job involves 80% boring paperwork and 20% nail-biting decisions, which I understand is not dissimilar to being a doctor, except if I make a mistake in the 80% of boring paperwork, it's definitely my fault - it will be my name that signed it off. Can't sue an AI, so the blame will be on the specific person who decided to use AI, and management is far too skittish to even broach the topic).
So I suppose there's two components - competence and alignment.
A human can be certified competent (by getting a medical degree and board certification). A human doctor can also be aligned most of the time - if you break the rules or you're excessively incompetent, you may go to jail, and at minimum you'll permanently lose your livelihood (which is was very difficult to acquire to begin with).
You might be able to solve AI competence, but can you solve AI alignment? What can you do to incentivise the AI to be correct?
At the moment, doctors are also kind of political actors - their professional ethics and patient obligation put them in opposition to e.g management. If management is telling them that hand sanitizer is 20% more expensive now and staff should stop washing hands after using the bathrooms, it is the doctors job to fight them on this. If management is telling them to start prescribing X more because the pharma company is giving them a kickback, it's also the doctors job to not just blindly follow orders. (Similar to my job, where my professional certification and professional ethics obliges me to fight for the budget to fix something I think is hazardous, even if management doesn't want to).
Can an AI do that? Will an AI do that?
(This does imply that our AI mass unemployment event will happen when MIRI and the like solve AI alignment, not when AI generally becomes competent enough)
I think there's plenty of room for chatbots in the "I'm not comfortable bothering a human being about this yet" space.
Hmm... For the "customer assistance" chatbots, I've generally found that, if I'm trying to get help because something is not working properly in the company's web site, the chatbot has _never_ helped me actually resolve the problem, and I generally get 2 or 3 plys in, give up on the chat bot and tell it to get me a human. To put it another way: I've yet to see a "customer assistance" chatbot that has better information on the behavior of a company's web site than the raw web site itself.
OTOH there's probably gonna be a fair few patients who will have an automatic "What, I'm not good enough to see a human? They assign me to a frickin' bot?" reaction and will thus be more averse towards the medical system in general.
That's fair, which is why I'd propose the bots be something a person can voluntarily call upon as opposed to getting assigned to.
I think there is a strong argument against AI discussing conditions with patients. It can summarize well, but does not have the communication skills needed. Someone discussing a patient's health problems needs to be aware of their education level, for instance, so they know how technical to be. They need to have picked up whether the patient has some misconceptions about medical mattersrelated to the current problem: Do they think diabetes is caused mostly by eating candy bars? Or that it's almost entirely hereditary? Then you need to correct those misconceptions before you tell them more about today's diagnosis of diabetes. You need to have, or be able to get, a sense of how compliant the person is likely to be with a new regimen. You need to be able to tell how scared they are by the diagnosis, and then decide whether to use that as a lever to increase compliance, or calm them down because they're generall yquite compliant anyway, but right now they are horrified by their diagnosis and need some reassurance.
Honestly, I'd bet on the chatbots being *better* at all these things than meat doctors in the very near future.
Multimodality is here today, and chatbots can read and describe emotions and body language. They can infer education levels and understanding probably better than humans *already,* and those skills have headroom to improve.
They're also endlessly patient, happy to repeat or reword things, and not constrained to the "<15 minute patient time average" metric that actual doctors need to worry about, so they could actually have a meandering conversation over an hour to establish the background knowledge and level of understanding and compliance likelihood to a much better degree than a human doctor in the couple of minutes not dedicated to rote background and charting.
Just make the chatbot interface human and friendly enough or have it come from a plush toy or something, and we'll all be better off with AI doctors handling most patient time / volume.
OK. But first you gotta marry Barbie.
I agree about it's a huge advantage for the chatbots that they are not constrained by time. Can you point me to some evidence that they can read emotions and body language and infer education levels and understanding better than human beings already?
ChatGPT and the like are prone to blatant errors. Even if they can read emotions and body language and hold college level conversations, they also sometimes fail and interpret these things completely backwards.
Humans make these errors too, of course. But chatbots will not be used for medical appointments until studies have empirically demonstrated that the chatbots make them less than humans do. Probably chatbots will be required to make errors *vastly* less than humans, if the experience of self-driving cars is anything to go by. Legal liability frameworks are conservative, and human nature is resistant to changes imposed from outside/above.
What would the chatbot be doing that a static page on WebMD wouldn't? It can't take physical measurements, so even a theoretical perfect version that never hallucinates is just going to take the patient's word. Might as well let the patients self-prescribe.
> Might as well let the patients self-prescribe.
God, please yes. This is how a lot of the world works anyways - you don't need scrips to get most medications in most of the world, they're over the counter. You need scrips for controlled / fun / abusable stuff, but nothing else.
It's a vastly better system in basically every respect.
I think that a well-trained model could be a lot better than WebMD, which will happily tell you all the rare diseases that could cause your symptoms, without putting any special emphasis on the common disease that is probably causing it.
A well-trained model would say "Yeah I'm sorry that you have symptom X, but unless you have symptoms Y and Z then it will probably resolve itself in a few days. But if you have symptoms Y and Z then go straight to the doctor"
Again, chatGPT is probably doing this quite usefully for many people right now, and as long as they don't start advertising "medical advice" as a capability then everyone is probably in the clear.
>A well-trained model would say "Yeah I'm sorry that you have symptom X".
You know, whenever I give up on having GPT4 make the image I have described carefully and clearly, ole Chat says, "I'm sorry this has turned out to be so frustrating." (or something like that.) Whatever its exact words are, they are exactly the same ones every single time. And here's the thing: It's not sorry and I know it. It does not have feelings or a capacity to empathize. I've come to *hate* its formulaic plastic sympathetic apology. I'd prefer for it to say something like "yeah, I agree that it's time to give up. We're not getting anywhere."
Of course doctors can be formulaic too, and I've heard my share of bad news prefaced by "I'm sorry but " when the person speaking seems to have no feelings whatever about the piece of bad news they're delivering. On the other hand, many medical professionals have come across as genuine when they've said they're sorry to say that I need a root canal or whatever. And a couple of veterinarians have actually had tears in their eyes when they told me one of my cats was terminally ill.
Don't underestimate the value of human empathy in helping people feel better able to cope with their health problem, and even in helping them feel better physically. If the professional isn't sympathetic but is cheerfully validating -- "yup, I'm sure your shoulder does hurt like crazy -- you've got badly torn rotator cuff" -- even *that* is helpful
>ole Chat says, "I'm sorry this has turned out to be so frustrating." (or something like that.) Whatever its exact words are, they are exactly the same ones every single time. And here's the thing: It's not sorry and I know it. It does not have feelings or a capacity to empathize.
It could be worse. It could open each session with "Your query is very important to us." :-)
". . . and if you have symptom B, trying attaching cheese to your pizza with Elmer's glue and then eating a couple slices."
The foul taste of the glue will get your mind off your other problems for awhile.
Well, yes. But also I'm referring to this: https://medium.com/@ivanoliinyk/glue-on-a-pizza-here-is-how-google-explained-geminis-mess-up-7d76499508b8
...actually, you know what? Despite my giant rant above, I'm changing my mind on this. LLM chatbots might not be competing with real doctors anytime soon, but they're far from useless: there is a large and growing class of people who are unable to access real healthcare, or unable to get a real solution to their problems, and in desperation turn to reiki, chiropractors, faith healers, whoever is around them and willing to listen.
I can very much imagine robodoctors being, on net, a force for good in this space; occasional advice for patients to glue a rock to their pizza, attach a moxibustion jar to their back or drink homeopathic water notwithstanding, they can certainly already output correct and appropriate facts more often than chance today, which is all that is required.
Why would it have to take the patient's word? Couldn't it have access to their medical records, just like doctors do? It could order tests when it thinks they are necessary, just like doctors do? And it could do whatever doctors are supposed to do when they think their patient is lying to them (which, to be clear, I do not know what this is).
Good freakin' luck with that, I can't even get the regional hospital, just under 30 miles away, to reliably send test results/medical records to my GP. You think that a national system of AI being able to access patient records will be sorted out, up and running, and not screwing up every five minutes, within a timely manner and on budget?
I (in the UK, so NHS) have online access to my test results, and (just for an experiment) have tried giving an LLM fake doctor access to my test results. So it definitely can be done. Also: as someone who is officially diagnosed with Graves's disease, it looks like i can pretty much just ask for blood work to be done. So, if, for example, LLM fake doctor says it would like another round of freeT4 and white blood cell count done, I can just phone the actual receptionist and ask for it, show up to give a blood sample and, lo, the actual test results will show up in the LLM fake doctors input dataset. (Some real endocrinologist somewhere probably has to click OK on the request being sort of reasonable)
Whether I should actually act on the advice i get from LLM fake doctor is another matter. Probably not...
The wonders of https://mychart.addenbrookes.nhs.uk
I just had a recent run-in with a hospital. I was prescribed a knee x-ray, and then later an ankle x-ray. I'd asked for the additional x-ray for my ankle because it was aching after a knee injury.
The prescription didn't specify *which* knee, the hospital wouldn't take my word for it, and they tried to reach my provider to clarify which ankle, but couldn't reach them in time.
The good news is that my knee is probably alright, and my ankle stopped aching.
I don't know whether this is reasonable, but I was quite angry that when I went in for the x-ray. (Note, in pain from injured knee.) I'm standing there by the x-ray table, trying to figure out how to get on to it. It was probably only a minute, then the technician lowered the table.
How hard is it to figure out that the very short person with a bad knee isn't going to manage to get on a table set at standard height. Or was I supposed to know that x-ray tables can be lowered so I would ask?
Sorry about the run-in with the hospital, glad to hear that you are recovering!
Wow. :-(
Are you imagining a chatbot with a camera that can test pupil dilation or blood pressure under its own power? If someone says they have a new mole they're worried about, can the chatbot see it?
There are many different implementations, but the first that comes to my mind would be an interface roughly like ChatGPT, which users could attach images and videos as well an enter text. There are certainly some tests it couldn't conduct (e.g. an MRI), but the amount that it could do seems to be large enough to be worth considering.
So if someone pulls a Google image of whatever disease they're faking to get prescription opioids, can the chatbot tell it's not them?
Lie detection would be a challenge. I don't know how it's handled in telemedicine, but I wonder if something similar could apply.
The strongest issue is we don't currently have any way to rigorously evaluate these chatbots.
For example, let's say we trained a chatbot to discuss a patient's conditions with them. Not, like, diagnosing patients but just answering basic questions about their condition. We know that the AI will hallucinate a certain percentage of the time. The challenge is that we can't quantify this without qualified clinicians reviewing thousands, if not tens of thousands, of such responses for factual errors.
Think about it this way. Let's say we implemented this chatbot using GPT-4. We then wanted to compare that model to Gemini or something. There's no current way to do this without doctors directly comparing thousands of notes and grading them on accuracy. And if we can't compare models, we can't even guess how accurate current models are. And hospital executives aren't very likely to approve systems where the answer to "How many times will the AI's hallucinations kill someone?" is "I dunno."
This response (and the others regarding liability) is a great example of why productivity has cratered in the developed world.
"Hey, here's a technology that can radically reduce costs and increase access to health care."
"No, no. It simply won't do. Who can we sue?"
* Paging Dr. Baumol, Dr. Baumol to the OR please. *
You're also working on a model where the assumption is that the default human doctor is more competent than an equivalent AI system. I do not think that will be the case and it will rapidly become apparent that it is not as these begin to be productionized and studied in depth. Simple chatbots are already probably better than human doctors - at the very least they'll be conscientious enough to reliably follow guidelines, unlike doctors on this very blog - for many routine tasks, and they are absolutely more cost effective.
Calling them "chatbots" is also not representative of what these systems are going to look like in practice. See Julius' hints about multimodality.
Which way does the liability arrow point when it's the AIs correcting human mistakes?
*shrug*
We've got access to 'em. They're available in the default emr for most hospitals: https://www.epic.com/epic/post/cool-stuff-now-epic-and-generative-ai/. If you're in healthcare, you can just talk to your Epic rep and turn them on. It's been over 6 months since the release. Do you notice any dramatic improvements in your healthcare experience?
Technology doesn't run on will power like a Green Lantern ring. We actually have to do work, we have to find inventive solutions. This is one of the challenges.
That was a quick turnaround from “it will be too expensive to evaluate, localize, and maintain these systems” to “shrug”. I always knew I was persuasive but now I’m beginning to suspect it.
Indeed, it does not. And pointing out that current generative AI applications aren’t taking over healthcare tasks is fairly meaningless when: a) no one is suggesting it can happen overnight or with current models, b) the areas where current models could take over are gatekept by the people who they would be replacing.
To return to the point, why do you assume that doctors will be reviewing AI work to prepare for the rollout vs the reverse? What will happen when we start seeing malpractice suits based around “you overruled the AI based on your ‘superior judgment’ and now the patient has suffered harm / dead”?
Oh, for pete's sake.
This is not reddit, things are not binary, there are no internet points. These things have been rolled out in hospitals for more than 6 months. No one has been overly impressed. If you want to customize them, or improve them, or even allow hospitals to make informed decisions about which models to use, you need some standardized form of measurement. Hospitals don't have that because, as far as I can tell, OpenAI and Alphabet don't have that.
As for malpractice suits, we've had sepsis prediction models based on ML for years. It was big news 3 years ago when it turned out the models weren't performing as well as publicized (https://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/research-suggests-epic-sepsis-model-lacking-predictive-power). Why lawyers don't ask for those records, and whether a judge or jury would care, I have no idea, I don't do legal stuff.
My apologies, I didn't know that jokes were only for Reddit. I'll try to maintain a more solemn tone in keeping with our august environment.
I'm not trying to score internet points. I'm trying to point out that you were abusing numbers - numbers have been good to me, some of my best friends are numbers - to project a false sense of confidence in your prediction on how these systems can/cannot be used. You have not supported your analysis after the slightest pushback other than to point out that: a) other systems have failed in the past, b) Epic has had access to generative AI for six months and yet healthcare remains terrible.
But both of your points are not even "dog bites man" stories, they are "local pup sits for treats; sources report that he's a good boy".
For point A: obviously, yes. Clearly. No citations needed, you need not post any additional links, every grown adult and many children are aware that things can and do fail. But that has very little relevance when discussing systems that have vastly different architectures and fundamental mechanisms.
For point B: obviously, yes. I agreed with you - and will continue to agree - that technology is not a magical ring. But does the fact that doctors have not fixed healthcare by simply speaking to their Epic rep actually tell us anything at all? Does it provide any light? I say it does not. I say that these are irrelevancies that tell us nothing about the future of these systems or their current capabilities.
I'm not trying to score internet points and I'm not trying to bucket the world into 0 and 1. I never even used a number. I'm simply asking you to not muddy the waters by claiming knowledge of how the scaling will work or the rollout will work or - indeed - how any of this is likely to work when neither of us really know that. I'm suggesting, as a practical matter, some humility.
> There's no current way to do this without doctors directly comparing thousands of notes and grading them on accuracy.
The cost of conducting this analysis seems extremely low relative to the potential benefits.
First, as a practical matter, there isn't a score or scale like this.
As a theoretical matter, yeah, development is doable and the one time expenses are trivial but the scaling is horrible.
Let's say we're a company that build GPT-Doc and we want to upgrade to GPT-Doc 2. GPT-Doc made serious errors in 1% of cases and we're trying to drop that to 0.9% with GPT-Doc 2.
Let's say we think 30,000 cases is reasonable in order to differentiate the performance of these two models. GPT-Doc should make 300 errors, GPT-Doc 2 should make 270.
Say it takes 1 hour for a doc to review a case.
At 40 hours/week, that's 2016 hours/year.
To a rough estimate, we need 15 doctors working for a year to score this.
Primary Care Physicians make $265/year (1) but let's ignore benefits and round down to $250k
Now 15 doctors @ $250 equates to $3.75 million. All considered, very affordable.
But what about localization? We know from existing ML models that the same model can perform very differently in Florida vs Michigan. This could require localization for every significant region but let's be generous and say we just need to localize for all 50 states. Now we're at $187.5 million.
Now what about model drift and model updates. We know model performance can degrade over time and we know new medical information, drugs, and other resources will constantly. Say we need to update once a year. Well, now we've committed to $187.5 million dollars in fixed costs, every year, just to keep this thing accurate.
Now we haven't paid a single ML engineer a dime or built a single data center, nor have we dealt with further complications, like whether you might need to update your algorithm more than once a year or whether regulators will require your health outcomes to be equitable and you need to do further testing for that.
Now we might end up doing something like this, moar dakka does work, but the intuition is that we're trying to do moar dakka with some of the most expensive labor on the planet. If you've ever done anything on Kaggle or with ML professionally, just imagine if every confusion matrix cost $4 million dollars and took 3-12 months.
(1) https://weatherbyhealthcare.com/blog/annual-physician-salary-report
Why would it require human doctors reviewing the cases? Couldn't an evaluation be created solely based on multi-choice questions? E.g. "A patient with demographic characteristics X has symptoms Y, medical history Z, and other relevant information Z*. Given that, which treatments would you recommend from this dropdown list of 10,000 possibilities?" Or, "A patient with... has said statement X. Select which questions you should ask from this list of 1,000 possibilities or what tests you would order from this list of 5,000 possibilities."
Again, theoretically, this is doable. Practically, no one has and there are serious challenges.
Take something relatively simple, such as making sure that there's no harmful or dangerous drug interactions when the patient is taking multiple medications. This is an existing industry that a decent amount of time and money has been poured into to generate...ok results. (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7810459/)
That's a whole industry and they're still struggling with it. Now it's probably the best way we could measure the accuracy of a Generative AI, we can compare it's answers against these expert systems, but
A, we have to actually build that test
B, we then have to build similar tests for all the other aspects of medicine.
Again, no theoretical issue, it's doable, but we're talking about building a test which captures a major part of a doctor's job and tests the LLM against that. Building that and keeping it up to date is a major challenge.
Yes, but the lopsided nature of law means they would pay the price of problems without getting the gain. Malpractice suits cost much, much, much, much more than the benefits doctors gain from successful procedures, and a doctor who uses dangerous-seeming AI would get sued more even if it was just as accurate as the doctor.
That was my first thought too
I don't know if it's the strongest, but the issue of liability seems complicated. Who is responsible for a wrong diagnosis? The hospital/clinic/whatever that makes the chatbot available? Whoever trained the model?
In practice I suspect the liability for every single thing that goes wrong would land on the desk of whoever decided to approve the chatbot for medical use. Which is why nobody will ever make that decision.
Of course chatbots are undoubtedly already busy giving medical advice (probably with disclaimers) to patients all over the place, which is probably of roughly equivalent quality to what they'd be finding on WebMD. This is probably overall a good thing, as long as everyone understands the limitations of the bot and nobody is explicitly to blame when the bot's advice is suboptimal.
I feel like there was not enough debate about #17 of Links for May 2024. From my perspective, two people already said what I wanted to say, but they got no replies.
le raz: "Having read Trevor Klee's original anti-lumina post (link 17), I would like to know which parts of his original post were wrong, and where he misunderstood / misrepresented the underlying science. It's quite frustrating to be told the post is largely wrong, without being told how it is wrong! So far I know: - The original post wrongly characterized Scott Alexander ... - The original post was wrong about the manufacturing process not following standards. What I would like to know: - How did Trevor misunderstand / misrepresent the science? - What else was does the original post get wrong?"
Jiro: "Someone who posts defamation is already defecting, and norms of not threatening suit essentially leave the defamed person without a way to clear his name. ... Yes, lawsuits can be intimidating, and can hurt the person sued even if they're innocent. But from your own description, this isn't a meritless lawsuit designed to shut someone up by bankrupting them; the targets really were defamed."
I thought it was very odd for Scott to offhandedly say that Trevor misunderstood the science without specifying how, considering Scott's original Lumina post discussed the science at length. I am no expert but Trevor's points largely made sense to me. Lumina has not really addressed them in their exchanges with Trevor since, and I had hoped that another observer might.
Things to read:
* The original article: https://archive.is/dseyR
* An update by Trevor: https://trevorklee.substack.com/p/updates-on-lumina-probiotic
* Aaron's comment on the update, below the article
* Trevor's following article: https://trevorklee.substack.com/p/luminas-legal-threats-and-my-about
* Footnote 2, which responds to Aaron's comment
.
In my opinion, Trevor is 100% correct at categorizing Lumina as a drug rather than a cosmetic, if it is advertised as something that prevents cavities. As an analogy, I tried to figure out how a toothpaste would be categorized, and Wikipedia says: "In the United States toothpaste is regulated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as a cosmetic, except for ingredients with a medical purpose, such as fluoride, which are regulated as drugs."
I have no opinion on the scientific claims.
I think that both sides were needlessly confrontational. The Lumina team could have simply written a response article explaining the inaccuracies instead. On the other hand, if Trevor wanted a "scientific debate", how exactly did writing about Aaron's association with porn stars serve that purpose?
Machine Learning seems to be a field with a massive replication problem, but I don’t see it discussed much. Maybe people knowledgeable in ML research would like to comment?
https://open.substack.com/pub/aisnakeoil/p/scientists-should-use-ai-as-a-tool?r=3iws0&utm_medium=ios
Wdym? There's only 10 000 new articles every day all showing SOTA improvements, surely that's expected in a young scientific field?
Seriously though, as a practitioner it is pretty hard to separate the wheat from the chaff.
I agree with tempo, it is discussed. The issue is that the field moves at warp speed, and there is hardly time for replication studies.
But I do think that the quality has increased a bit as a reaction to the replication problem. For example, ablation studies are now much more common. A few years ago, the correlation between the proposed innovation and the improvement was almost zero. (Rule of thumb: improvements never came from the novel architecture, it was always the data augmentation hidden somewhere in the appendix.) And my feeling is that reviewers have become a bit more aware of the issue.
it does?
I've been interested for some time in trying to determine as rational a basis as might possibly be conceived for determining the degree to which the concept of God:
1. Can be defined
2. Can be disputed (on account of its proof-positive being nigh-on-impossible owing to some clear empirical bona fides and also owing to some conceptual impossibilities rooted in the outcome of #1)
3. Can be considered of utility, and actually put to strong utility, in the context of the outcomes of 1 and 2, and the (I think provable) historical usefuless of the concept of God
The subsequent investigation led me under the steam of an extremely catholic pack of disciplinary horses to some very interesting areas, happening upon which has left me feeling a continued fascination as to the value of the exercise and onward exercises as might build off of it, and a deep contentment besides.
I'd be very interested to see what this community makes of it https://heirtothethought.substack.com/p/the-redefinition-of-god
As far as I can tell (last time I studied the stuff was decades ago), your attempts at axiomatic set theory don't really work. The entity you are trying to define as "x", with a rather confused definition, either makes no sense, or would amount to the set of all sets, which was proven not to exist around a century ago.
It's also completely unclear how that would relate to your idea of God. Existing within axiomatic set theory and existing in reality are two completely different things; to give a simple example, I exist here [citation needed], but as far as I can tell, I am not a mathematical set.
Can you elaborate on where you find the definition to be confused? The intent of the proof is to demonstrate not that God is the set of all sets, but that it can contain any set and any combination of sets; perhaps there was some indiscipline in the definition as far as establishing this is concerned.
I'm sorry but this is too far out to properly critique. It reads like you've just recently encountered axiomatic set theory and are ad-libbing or pattern-matching on it, which is fine if that's your way to start exploring a subject, but it's pretty far from producing valid work within the theory.
To get concrete, you're trying to define a set x such that for every y, "x can contain y". In your page you equivocate between that and just writing "y∈x". If we go by y∈x, then as I said you're plainly defining x as the set of all sets, which was proven not to exist by Bertrand Russell in 1901. If we go by "x can contain y" as you now say, the problem is that "x can contain y" is not a proposition in ZF; either x contains y or it doesn't, but there is no "can" operator. So in this case your definition is meaningless within the system.
Then, assuming you manage to rescue a definition of x as matching some proposition p(x), that doesn't establish that there is such an x! All you've done is define the set X of all possible x such that p(x), but that set X may be empty, or for that matter, huge. If you want to claim that there is a single x such that p(x), you have to actually prove that, within the system, using step by step valid derivations, not by handwaving or verbal arguments. In that sense, formal logic does behave a bit like reality, in the sense that I can't just define a donut into existence when I feel like eating one.
Later on you talk about "not merely as an empty set, but as all sets that are not sets". I think you can find the contradiction yourself if you just re-read your sentence.
I don't really know what to say beyond this. If you're a young person freshly encountering axiomatic set theory, consider this a welcome and an invitation to explore further! The foundations of mathematics are a deep and rewarding subject, if not exactly fashionable. It's where you can see how the logical-mathematical sausage is made in its goriest details, which makes it one of the better trainings for clear thinking one can possibly get. A semester or two studying this stuff can be really worthwhile.
On the other hand, if you've been doing this for a while, I really have to say, it's not working. You're producing material that any specialist in the subject will just glance and shake their head. That way lies crackpotry, which is a real waste of your talents, and of everyone else's time. It's never too late; if you can get this far, and if you really like the subject, instead of waiting for a specialist to critique your work, you can get yourself to the level of *being* the specialist. You might then be happy to discover that the point of studying the foundations of mathematics lies not in buttressing some new philosophy of life, but in exploring the complex borders between what can and what cannot be proved within specific formal systems, and that there is beauty in that.
Otherwise, if you want to help people find meaning in life and reclaim the word "God", maybe axiomatic set theory is not the tool of choice.
"I'm sorry but this is too far out to properly critique. It reads like you've just recently encountered axiomatic set theory and are ad-libbing or pattern-matching on it, which is fine if that's your way to start exploring a subject, but it's pretty far from producing valid work within the theory.
To get concrete, you're trying to define a set x such that for every y, "x can contain y". In your page you equivocate between that and just writing "y∈x". If we go by y∈x, then as I said you're plainly defining x as the set of all sets, which was proven not to exist by Bertrand Russell in 1901. If we go by "x can contain y" as you now say, the problem is that "x can contain y" is not a proposition in ZF; either x contains y or it doesn't, but there is no "can" operator. So in this case your definition is meaningless within the system."
Robust points – it may well be the case that there is nothing within ZF that adequately accommodates for a ‘can’ operator, but that may then point to a limitation within ZF (that is, a limitation in the expression of contingency), as there is no reason epistemologically to disqualify the sentiment. It may well also be the case that trying to show the impossibility of disproving the idea of God is no task for axiomatic set theory, but then I am ultimately attempting only to show the absolute contingency of a single word’s definition, and since semantics are a matter of language and logic I don’t see any reason why set theory as applied to logic can’t also be applied to language.
"…then, assuming you manage to rescue a definition of x as matching some proposition p(x), that doesn't establish that there is such an x! All you've done is define the set X of all possible x such that p(x), but that set X may be empty, or for that matter, huge. If you want to claim that there is a single x such that p(x), you have to actually prove that, within the system, using step by step valid derivations, not by handwaving or verbal arguments. In that sense, formal logic does behave a bit like reality, in the sense that I can't just define a donut into existence when I feel like eating one."
I think this is the crux of the argument – that I am, in fact, not looking to establish that there is a single x such that p(x); it is precisely that I am trying to argue that there is a non-fixed, absolutely contingent concept that can occupy the set of fully variable size that you describe. The notation as is may be inadequate for this purpose but I would think step-by-step derivations to a single x would be somewhat against my aim.
"Later on you talk about "not merely as an empty set, but as all sets that are not sets". I think you can find the contradiction yourself if you just re-read your sentence."
It’s difficult to express precisely what I mean here in such a sense as makes the distinction I am trying to draw between an empty set (that is still a set) and sets that are not sets. It is the distinction between what can feasibly be imagined, what can be/is/was, but that is or may be nothing, and that which never can be/is/was, and cannot be feasibly imagined, and is thus less than nothing, a supernothing. Perhaps this is a limitation of ZF to express what I wish to express, as you’ve suggested.
"I don't really know what to say beyond this. If you're a young person freshly encountering axiomatic set theory, consider this a welcome and an invitation to explore further! The foundations of mathematics are a deep and rewarding subject, if not exactly fashionable. It's where you can see how the logical-mathematical sausage is made in its goriest details, which makes it one of the better trainings for clear thinking one can possibly get. A semester or two studying this stuff can be really worthwhile.
On the other hand, if you've been doing this for a while, I really have to say, it's not working. You're producing material that any specialist in the subject will just glance and shake their head. That way lies crackpotry, which is a real waste of your talents, and of everyone else's time. It's never too late; if you can get this far, and if you really like the subject, instead of waiting for a specialist to critique your work, you can get yourself to the level of *being* the specialist. You might then be happy to discover that the point of studying the foundations of mathematics lies not in buttressing some new philosophy of life, but in exploring the complex borders between what can and what cannot be proved within specific formal systems, and that there is beauty in that.
Otherwise, if you want to help people find meaning in life and reclaim the word "God", maybe axiomatic set theory is not the tool of choice."
I must ask you excuse the roughness in the application of the notation where it’s rough – the thought is considerably longer in gestation but my actual familiarity with set theoretical notation amounts to just weeks of somewhat focused reading. I intend to polish it with more immersion in the existing theory, as you suggest, but while the notation will be made more scrupulously correct thereby I doubt it will make the overall assertions much less radical, or possibly unacceptably radical, to you.
Many thanks for engaging with this so seriously; criticism that is simultaneously tightly robust without being unkind is the most stimulating possible response to any work like this.
Apologies for the lateness of this reply.
I don't know if it's because of the style, the vocabulary or the structure of the argument but I find myself asking "source?" to most of the things you postulate like "Civilisation is defined by movements and developments within the human spirit. Our spirit is in critical need of revitalisation." or " God is the key unifying and anchoring theme in the entirety of the human story.". I might not be the target audience for that, I personally prefer stuff that's easier to read and more justified.
As for the non-meta commentary:
> To the vast majority of sane observers who’ve ever inspected the sky above them, this is in evidence: if God does exist, God does not seem to live in the sky.
I remember reading a book on Shintoism, where a Shinto priest said something like "Christianity came from the desert, there's only sand and the sky so they believe God is in the sky. We have trees and rocks and rivers so we believe gods are in trees and rocks and rivers." When all you have is nails, all you want is a hammer I guess?
I find the part about everyone having their own concept of God intersting. As for "There is no reason that ‘bed’ should be used to signify the concept of ‘bed’ except that consensus demands it.", you're one of today's lucky 10 000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect.
I'm not familiar with antitheists, so I can't comment on that part. After that from what I understand (I'm sorry if I'm misrepresenting what you say) you seem to be saying that God is partially a human creation that emerges because we are intelligent and we have reasoning abilities? That is how I see things too but on the other hand I've discussed with religious people, people close to me that I know well, and they believe in God no as some kind of abstract emergent human thing, but as God. I remember reading arguments that seeing God as this kind of abstract human thing is lack of faith/not true believing/cope/heresy, and I can see some parallels between that and trying to intellectualize something that should be felt (it won't work).
Where the broad assertions are concerned, I would admit that these things are contingent – somewhat like an assertion to the effect of “We are not as able when it comes to great undertakings than we were previously”, they require a certain commonality of perspective between writer and reader and even trust in order to land as they are intended to. They are too abstract and too vast to be justified via a single source; this makes them of dubious reliability, but as large theses they are nonetheless vital for orienting perspective and driving investigation towards smaller, more measurable, discrete questions. As for whether or not God is the key anchoring theme in the development of civilisation, I would challenge anyone to name a discipline more central to that process than it.
A very interesting point on Shintoism, and also on the Bouba-kiki effect – I’m glad to have a name for that phenomenon now.
Anti-theists are atheists who believe that all theists ought to be actively opposed and their influence minimised. They are committed to “the active struggle against everything which reminds us of God.”
And yes – your notion of God as an emergent property is essentially what I’m getting at, and that you’re quite right that the primary difference between in-earnest orthodox believers and the kind of cheerfully ‘recreative’ agnostic who might subscribe to my theory is their willingness to countenance the contingency and the unknowable component of the concept, instead of insisting on a literal interpretation of scripture. It is indeed lack of faith/not true belief/cope/heresy, true on all accounts; but so long as the mode of heresy reflects in the heretic’s commitment to broadly beneficial human development outcomes, the charge is of no matter (and is, ironically set against the charge of heresy, a most Godly position).
I actually think if the church embraced a position on scripture that was more figurative/literary critical they might suddenly find entirely new wings of the congregation emerging among the theatrical, the literary systematisers, and soft-touch moralists who dislike the literal readings of minor points of doctrine.
> As for whether or not God is the key anchoring theme in the development of civilisation, I would challenge anyone to name a discipline more central to that process than it.
I would argue for technological development, but I'm heavily biased here.
> A very interesting point on Shintoism, and also on the Bouba-kiki effect – I’m glad to have a name for that phenomenon now.
It is very intersting! The way I understand it is that the "k" in "kiki", and maybe the "i" too, are "sharper", while the "b" is "rounder". I don't know why. Maybe someone with more knowledge of sound can show that the "b" sound is like a continuous function or a curve or slow and varies not much while the "k" changes a lot quickly?
> Anti-theists are atheists who believe that all theists ought to be actively opposed and their influence minimised. They are committed to “the active struggle against everything which reminds us of God.”
Thanks! It reminds me of the atheist movement at its peak, a decade or more ago.
> It is indeed lack of faith/not true belief/cope/heresy, true on all accounts; but so long as the mode of heresy reflects in the heretic’s commitment to broadly beneficial human development outcomes, the charge is of no matter (and is, ironically set against the charge of heresy, a most Godly position).
> I actually think if the church embraced a position on scripture that was more figurative/literary critical they might suddenly find entirely new wings of the congregation emerging among the theatrical, the literary systematisers, and soft-touch moralists who dislike the literal readings of minor points of doctrine.
I think that may be where the disagreements will appear. I remember a conversation with a religious relative, where I asked them about doubt, and they said that yes, doubt is part of faith. To me that would mean that being certain that scripture is figurative would not really be compatible with faith. You would have to have at least some part of you that wants/think it's real, and try to work towards that. But being non religious myself, I don't want to talk for the people that are.
And while they may find new wings with that, it might deviate too much for the original thing, which is faith in God. Again, I don't know about religion, but this feels like diluting the original goal and how you lose part of your community. It might be worth looking into the Second Vatican Council and its consequences, as it was an effort to try to appeal to more people. From what I understand, to this day it is still divisive.
Thank you for your thoughts! That was very interesting.
Christianity didn't come from the desert. (Judaism arguably did, and Islam certainly did if you discount what was inherited from Judaism/Christianity.) Nazareth, Bethlehem, Jerusalem etc are fertile places with lots of trees and rocks and farms, though no rivers.
Good point, I'm probably misremembering. It's incredible that you can use street view and "stroll" around Nazareth.
I feel like actually making the automated land acknowledger is not very funny. It was hilarious as a bit in a story because it's actually an uncomfortable thing about our modern world that we need to be able to laugh at, but actually building it feels kinda bitter. After all the people who are doing the land acknowledging are doing it for a legitimate moral reason (trying to find some way to make reparations for a lot of legitimate guilt about the past), and then they're making other people uncomfortable in the process and so kinda undermining their own project. I wish they would find more effective and less discomforting ways of trying to be good people. But getting bitter back at them for doing a bad job just perpetuates everyone being pissed at each other instead of fixing anything.
Edit: although saying this might sound like trying to make someone feel shame about liking it, in which case I'd be perpetuating making people feel bad too. Sorry if so. Not my intention. My point is we all ought to try to stop making other people feel bad and forgive them their transgressions instead of striking back.
This discussion has been interesting for me because I've been reacting very badly to land acknowledgements-- I hear them as saying that there's no place where I can legitimately live, and then I hate the people who support land acknowledgements, and all the more because I assume they think I'm a bad person for resenting them.
As for practical reparations, a legitimate start for the US might be for there to be the sort of infrastructure (water, power, connectivity) that's expected for the rest of the US.
> ll the people who are doing the land acknowledging are doing it for legitimate moral reasons.
It seems all very performative to me.
I used to hate them too - I always thought, "so why aren't you paying rent to them" whenever I had to sit through one - but since then learned a bit more about them.
For context, this is Australia, which has been doing these as early as the 70s. It's believed that it's started in Perth - some performers invited some Maori over from Aotearoa and found out that the Maori felt uncomfortable doing their hakka if they aren't officially welcomed, so the Indigenous Noongar organisers gave a Welcome to Country.
I feel slightly less bad about the ones given in Perth, WA, because for bigger events people will often specifically seek out Noongar people for the welcome to country, and many of them use their segments to talk about the progress in reconciliation and how the audience can support specific things, and they often teach the audience a couple of simple things, like phrases and Noongar names for native flora and fauna - it's outreach and education and learning a bit about the place we live.
(And at the very least, it's a decent gig, not dissimilar to being a professional emcee at some events, or a warm-up act. And many of them are much more enjoyable speakers / warm up acts than their competition - mostly local indie buskers who are, unfortunately, not very good singers mostly)
But the ones over east (Victoria) often suck - I don't think I've ever had any delivered from any actual Indigenous people, or heard anything that wasn't purely guilt inducing. I believe they started somewhat independent of the Perth tradition, as a reaction to Mabo vs Queensland (a historic court case paving the way to the native title act, where indigenous people could literally be paid rent for stolen land). Perhaps it's a weak little symbolic grovel so no one would start demanding rent, I dunno. I've never heard a good one outside of Perth.
And I believe the American versions are poor copycats of the Australian versions, stripped of the context of even having a case similar to Mabo, and hence rings even emptier. Idk, maybe there's okay ones in areas with a relatively large indigenous population (Perth and Darwin have the highest % Aboriginal population in Australia, and I feel like the general culture has absorbed a little more than over east, which still feels very majority Anglo).
Counterpoint: Land acknowledgements are actually one of the worst aspects of modern left-wing culture as they recklessly reopen historical wounds while explicitly stating that there's no way to make things better. People who do them _should_ be shamed, mocked, and scorned in every way possible until they stop, just like you would with any other severely destructive antisocial behavior. If the automated land acknowledger does that, then it should be added to the toolbox.
It does not seem likely that shaming and mocking them is going to make them go away. Probably it will just make you and them into more of enemies. Yes, they pissed you off, so you want to hurt them back, but maybe that is a bad strategy?
I think some level of social pushback to performative social things like land acknowledgements is pretty sensible. I mean, it's being done for social effect, so it can best be answered by social response.
Agreed, there are many social pushbacks that might affect the problem and do something about it. Bitterly hating the people doing it without any empathy or grace is probably not one of them.
I actually disagree in this case.
You probably can't kill them at meetings of the American Communist Party or whatever, but you can probably kill them in mainstream settings where everybody secretly hates them but is too afraid to speak up and say "actually let's not do this". It's a preference cascade thing.
FWIW, at my university at events land acknowledgements are now often done by playing a standardised video. Which was preceded by people reading a standard, institution-provided script.
I think the existence of the automated one makes a very concrete point about how meaningless and empty these statements are by highlighting the utter lack of consideration or investment behind them.
But this seems like something that's going to vary on the individual.
We're here because we settled the land, bought it, or stole it.
There is no need to apologize. To the Apache, who drove off the O'odham, who supplanted the Sinagua, who conquered Soanso, who drove off Nincompoop Man.
Well the land acknowledgement is not there because of some cosmically provable need to apologize. It's there because some people thought it was a good thing to do, in context, to deal with a small aspect of their general guilt and confusion about what to do about that guilt.
I'm all for them finding a better strategy but in the meantime, it is, like, coming from an actual moral instinct for good, it's not just an act of pure evil or something.
You're playing the shame and guilt game, when you should be questioning the guilt in the first place. "What should they do with that guilt?" is a much less useful question than "Why do these effete weirdos feel so guilty in the first place?" The latter actually has a useful, constructive answer. Without dedicating one's life to addressing the former, it's all just performative.
I have plenty of curiosity about the guilt. Nevertheless I disagree with getting bitter and resentful about other people trying, albeit doing a poor job, of being good people.
All of us sitting around talking about how much we hate <some other people> is bad for *any* reason. Never, not once does it diffuse the situation or fix the problem or advance the situation in a positive reason. Sure, as a community we're having trouble finding grace for those other people because we keep getting taken mistreated by them. But then the question we should be sitting around mulling is how we going to *find* grace for them, and maybe how we can communicate with them and legitimize our grievances and be heard by them and fix the situation. Not this, where we go on and on in a loop about how much we hate them. That is the weakest way out: other people were bad to us, so we're going to be bad also, fuck it. It is just a terrible thing to do.
That's an absurd binary, which is a form of straw man. There is a _lot_ of space in between "actual moral instinct for good" and "act of pure evil". And by a lot of space I mean like how there is a lot of physical space in between Earth and Neptune.
er, yeah, who said there wasn't? I didn't claim "it can only be A or B and it's not B therefore it's A". I claimed "it's A".
If you call someone out for a straw man they didn't make doesn't that mean you're doing the strawmanning..?
"it's not just an act of pure evil or something" -- that is what I was referring to. You brought up an absurdly-extreme framing of the other person's argument so as to be able to wave it away. That is a form of straw-manning.
You're just reading my comment wrong. I did not mean to say that the person I was replying to said that at all.
> I'm all for them finding a better strategy
The "better strategy" is actually for everyone around them to react with as much cringey embarrassment and disgust as Bart and Lisa reacting to Homer's improv Mr. Plow rap:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJwZIDaILrg
That's like a 2 out of 10 on the strategy scale. 3 and above are the parts where people act like grownups and talk about their problems.
Well, sure, except that some people don't have the intellectual capacity to "act like grownups." Where a capacity to update one's priors is lacking, shame is sometimes the only option.
But mostly, "Stop. Please. Stop it right now!" is my all-time favorite line-reading from The Simpsons and I like to work it into a conversation whenever possible.
But why should somebody whose family emigrated to the US in the 1950s and who is now attending a university built on unceded land feel any guilt about that? Their ancestors didn't do the stealing, and the crime is so long-established by now, there may not even be pure-blooded tribespeople remaining to be the putative inheritors of the land.
That's why I think it's performative and not about genuine guilt. There's a bit in a Harlan Ellison short story (I can't remember the name, but this part stood out to me) about witnessing a performance on an alien world - the dominant species? culture? race? enslaved another species/culture/race and, for example, have them pulling the carts or rickshaws in which they travel. Every so often along the path, there is a preacher? or some kind of equivalent of this land acknowledgement thing, where the slave-owner is convinced of their guilt, gets out of the cart, and pulls it. Then, once past the part of the road where the exhortation is done, they get back in and resume having the slave pull it.
I'm describing it very badly, but that is what these land acknowledgements feel like to me: performances that change nothing and mean nothing in the end.
I'm reasonably familiar with Ellison's work, and this sounds totally unfamiliar. Also, he was writing before performative guilt became such a thing, so he was unlikely to satirize it. In any case, I hope a source for the story shows up.
My best guess is Jack Vance, but only because it sounds like his kind of satire.
Did you ever read "Emphyrio" by Jack Vance?
Why should they feel guilt? because they feel guilt. people don't get to decide what they feel guilt about. The guilt decides.
Now yes it is rather tangled up with people capitalizing on it for power or credibility or attention or w/e at this point. But the underlying emotion was definitely guilt, to begin with.
Alice gets up before a meeting and makes a land acknowledgement. Bob gets up before a meeting and says a short nondenominational prayer.
ISTM that it is every bit as reasonable for people who find land acknowledgements silly or offensive to make their feelings clear as it is for people who find the nondenominational prayer silly or offensive to do so.
I saw an article recently talking about 4 different waves of indigenous people settling North America.
...
We know that modern humans made it to the eastern end of the Asian continent at least 40,000 years ago, and we know that the Bering land bridge didn't cease to exist until 10,000 years ago. It seems unreasonable to suppose that there was only one time in history that people crossed it.
Last I recall, the current best theory from apolitical linguistic and genetic sources is that there were 3 main waves. The first contributed most of the language families and genetics (including some that are related to the genetics associated with the Indo-European languages), the second contributed the Na-Dene languages and less of the overall genetics, and the third was the Inuit (who didn't need no stinking land bridges). And then there are some skeletons from Brazil that most closely resemble Andaman Islanders, possibly representing a 0th group that came over possibly ~20 kya, possibly by ocean, but failed to flourish, and were wiped out or assimilated by the "first" wave.
I was mostly being snarky about the Eurocentric nature of picking 1492 as a magic year and then declaring everything before that to be "indigenous". (My magic year is 300,000 BCE.)
Also, "we", is in the best case "our ancestors", and may not even be that.
I think you are conflating the sin with the sinner. An individual person making a land acknowledgment is almost certainly well intentioned and deserves grace. However, the current cultural practice of adding land acknowledgments to events devoid of any connection with native peoples is an ugly combination of stolen valor, guilt-by-association and feel-bad liberalism and IMHO the practice should be mocked out of existence.
I agree that the practice is problematic and frustrating, and the impulse to mock and scorn it is understandable and human.
I disagree with actually doing it, or validating doing it. Be better than the people who alienate you, not the same as them.
Mocking those who do ill is a civic duty. By not mocking them, you aren't being better than anyone; you are just being short-term minded (prioritizing the ill-dooers feelings over the future ill they'll do) and risk averse.
Mocking those who do ill is a sad and wretched behavior that perpetuates hatred and tribalism. It is entirely for the satisfaction of the mocker to assuage their feelings of powerlessness and frustration.
There are actual ways to get people to stop doing things, but they involve both (a) engaging with them and (b) having grace for them instead of punting insults at their heads.
You are wrong. There is a lot more nuance to how people communicate than your statement can accommodate.
For example, I recall a study showed that people learn better from sarcasm, despite it not feeling great. In certain circumstances, a cutting remark can be the most effective, and even the most kind (as it can sometimes most prompt the long term growth someone can need).
Furthermore, speaking personally, I greatly appreciate when I am (justly) mocked, from strangers, but even more so from friends.
So, tomorrow, if I get up before a big public meeting and give a short "acknowledgement" that we all owe everything to the glorious white race from whom all our culture and technology flow, the right response from the audience will be....?
I think we’re talking about two different things... I would never advocate being a jerk to someone or publicly shaming them. I’m referring to mockery of the behavior itself, a la South Park or Scott’s automated land acknowledger. That is, I advocate finding ways to satirize the behavior in a way that is not personal but instead invites people to look in a mirror and laugh at themselves.
Look around this comment section, how many people are having a good laugh about it? No, people are *really really bitter about this*. And sure, for decent reason, but everyone venting their bitterness at each other is not the same as having a good laugh that lets everyone relax a little.
> (a) engaging with them and (b) having grace for them instead of punting insults at their heads.
And how much of this have woke witch hunters and twitter mobs done for the rest of the world? The world they've basically terrified into submission, at the cost of panopticon monitoring of everything they do and say, with the stakes their entire career and social lives?
The essence of grace is that it's something you should do even when your counterparty doesn't do it for you.
(Anyway, your "Us vs Them" characterization is definitely what it feels like online, but not at all what it feels like IRL, where lots of people are actually quite reasonable and land all over the spectrum between intolerant and charitable. If your model of the world is that there's a war going on, quit twitter.)
I prefer your charitable approach in general, and don't favor mockery in every single case, but land acknowledgements are normally forced on captive audiences by high-status people self-seriously preaching and stealing valor with their "moral exhibitionism" (in Graeme Wood's memorable phrase*). Mockery is far less likely to intensify tribal animosities in those circumstances.
* https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/11/against-land-acknowledgements-native-american/620820/
>IMHO the practice should be mocked out of existence.
I endorse this suggestion!
edit: What is the optimal form for the mockery?
"Acknowledging that the European (or other, as applicable) colonists took this land from the Nth Nations, and that the Nth Nations took it previously from the (N-1)th Nations - and so it goes." ( I really like the Crow / Lakota example cited below. )
Start a foundation for buying land back and giving it to the surviving tribes. If we ask nicely, they might let us rent the land back from them afterward.
Many Thanks! Personally, I'd like the whole issue dropped. The conquests were well over a century ago. Everyone who directly benefited or directly suffered is dead. I strongly favor statutes of limitation, which bound how long a grievance can be pursued, even by a _living_ victim against a _living_ perpetrator.
I was being serious, in that I think that *is* the optimal form of mockery. It actively contributes to the cause, does not disrespect the tribes or what happened to them, and its mere existence would make most of the declarations seem like the empty words and performative virtue signaling that they are. Put up or shut up.
Many Thanks! I agree that it would be mocking the empty declarations, and I have no objection to that. Personally, I _don't_ want to disinter grievances that are a century or more old, so I want to see these and all similar issues (e.g. racial reparations) just dropped.
If there are living individuals who have been harmed by actions that were illegal at the time, let them have their day in court - and then let the court ruling be an end of it.
If grievances against someone else's ancestors can be pursued, there will be no end to it. Virtually _everyone's_ ancestor was a serf under someone's thumb a few centuries ago. Virtually everyone can come up with an ancient grudge to nurse. The more energy our society spends pursuing century-or-more-old grievances, the worse life will be for everyone.
edit: Evil thought - I wonder if a GrievanceFinderOMatic could be layered on top of Ancestry.com's database, and what the market for it would be?
I actually think Scott’s automated land acknowledger is pretty ideal in terms of mockery. It deftly points to the absurdity and utter arbitrariness of the practice.
I thought the joke in the story was great, but it's great because it punches both ways: it makes fun of the land acknowledgements and of the technologists who think anything that's worth doing is worth automating.
Yes, this. The point of the acknowledgements is that there's actual humans saying them and listening to them, and how that affects their beliefs and actions. It's not some set of special sonic waveforms that magically act as a blessing on those who hear them.
(In general, I'd say that's also a limitation with current AIs, and a lot of the suggested applications are going to have to grapple with people who are primarily interested in having an actual person to talk to.)
Many Thanks! That sounds reasonable. Automating it certainly goes a long way towards mockery, following in the footsteps of all those automated "Your call is important to us." enshitification messages...
"We acknowledge that there isn't a snowball in Hell's chance of any of you natives, not even the one-sixteenth real Cherokee princess Pretendians we have on faculty, are getting your mitts on any of the endowment arising from the time we took this land to do something with it. Take it up with Henry George, he said it was fine to take land not being used productively and do something with it".
As someone who actually is one-sixteenth Cherokee, I was pretty disgusted by the land acknowledgement I had to sit thru, and had to bite my tongue to keep from making a stink. The tribe who was stolen from still lives in the same area, the "acknowledgers" could just give it back to them (maybe sell it for a dollar and lease it back). What I would suggest instead - if you feel so guilty about the land theft that you want to do something, go find the surviving tribe's elders (they are likely still around somewhere) and ask them what you should do, then do what they tell you.
If these universities are funding scholarships for Native students or engaged in educational and cultural activities with the tribe (not whatever faculty member shows up claiming to be Native American*), then fine, that is putting their money where their mouths are.
I don't know if they are doing that, and I think some at least of these corporate statements are purely performative.
*There seem to have been a few cases where people claiming ancestry can't back it up, especially in Canada where they seem ultra-sensitive around Indigenous issues and hence why it's worthwhile for some people to pretend to more heritage than they may actually possess
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/aug/28/california-professor-resigns-native-american-heritage
https://macleans.ca/culture/the-curious-case-of-gina-adams-a-pretendian-investigation/
https://torontolife.com/deep-dives/gill-sisters-pretendian-fraud/
+1
If a university on unceded land offers kids from that tribe free tuition if they meet admissions standards, that sounds like at least the kind of virtue signaling that involves some virtue, rather than the 100% empty kind.
100% agreed. When I hear acknowledgements from people who actually own the land they're on, it increases my level of cynicism past my already unhealthy levels. (Especially when it's a Christian church that should know the story about camels and needles.)
Many Thanks! I like it! :-)
One thing I learned as a vegetarian is that non-mainstream ideologies get less "Cringe Budget" than mainstream ideologies.
For example, Land Acknowledgements aren't, from a purely logical outside perspective, more ridiculous than - say - thanking long-dead national heroes. $GREAT_PERSON doesn't care one bit about whether you honor him/her on $CELEBRATION_DAY, he has been a long-finished tasty meal for worms and that was the end of him. Yet, celebrating long-dead heroes isn't cringe, because the majority does it, but land acknowledgements is, because a minority does it. (Granted, it's a particularly violent and toxic minority, I don't want to come off as a supporter.)
Some say that Land Acknowledgements are silly because they do nothing and has a kind of gloating feel to them, to those people I would like to present the concept of "confession" in Abrahamic religions, and yes it's an Abrahamic thing (if not even more general), the Christian-inspired term I used shouldn't mislead you. You basically go to the highest and most exalted, powerful, knowledgeable being in this entire universe, and you say "Oppsie, I watched Porn. I know you get mad when I watch Porn, but I couldn't resist seeing the goods. Sorry, I will donate 0.01% of my salary to the places you told me to donate to". Is that any more ridiculous or silly than "Oppsie, I took your land, sorry but I couldn't resist doing genocide."? At least the party you're "Oppsie"ing to exists for sure in the second case, and at least Genocide is an objectively bad sin that really deserve a massive solar-system-sized oppsie. Watching porn is - at best - just a .... meh, an empty and pathetic experience, a poor manufactured substitute for the actual real thing you need to survive.
A closely related lesson here that woke ideologues fail to understand is the role of desire and bottom-up sexiness in marketing moral ideologies. One example is playing on lesbian relationships' natural seductiveness to straight males as tool for advocating for lesbian. From experience, I know it's an **incredibly** powerful tool, if nothing else it gives you the chance to always retreat to "Hahaha I was only joking" if the audience you're preaching to close ranks too hard on you. People sympathize with beauty more, they sympathize with sexiness more. But of course, forget ever even suggesting that to a woke advocator for lesbians.
Instead of desire - a huge motivator for all moral decision-making no matter how people would like to deny this - wokism chooses to rely more on top-down imposition of will, especially from corporate overlords. This **might** work, a lot of religions were spread by violence after all, but religions also gave people something to look after to (and - in the case of Islam - lots of promised imaginary sex, and to warriors lots of real sex-slave sex), and they practiced tons and tons of violence over the centuries. Wokism has no realistic path towards either, it's just mindless soviet-style "The beatings will continue till the bigotry goes away".
I have nothing useful to say, I also like the idea of people looking at themselves in the mirror and admitting their grandparents were genocidal scum, it's a tough pill but you're all the better and healthier person for swallowing it. The usual cliche of "EVERYONE DID IT AT SOME POINT !!1!!1!!!1!" strikes me as incredibly dumb either, everyone is an asshole too at some point or another, and we still advise people who were assholes to apologize, and we like the assholes who apologize better than those who don't. But the good idea had the unfortunate luck of being born to a movement that doesn't know how to fight a moral battle.
Unpopular religions demand of every follower to be an incredibly cunning and charismatic ambassador. If you want to follow an unpopular movement, be incredibly cunning and charismatic or keep your mouth shut.
>Land Acknowledgements aren't, from a purely logical outside perspective, more ridiculous than - say - thanking long-dead national heroes
The point of thanking long-dead national heroes this isn't that George Washington is floating up there in Heaven magnanimously accepting our gratitude. Thanking long-dead national heroes is a civic ritual. It helps anchor citizens in their nation, giving them a sense of ownership over the heroic deeds and personages of the past and emphasizing the everyone is part of a greater whole. You know, (lowers voice, glances around to make sure the cheka aren't listening) _patriotism_.
Now of course you can insist that patriotism is bad, which just means that if your point of view wins you get to be conquered by someone else not burdened by your enlightened morality, so ultimately that's a self-terminating argument.
"The point of thanking long-dead national heroes this isn't that George Washington is floating up there in Heaven magnanimously accepting our gratitude"
This art work, entitled The Apotheosis of Washington, begs to differ:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Apotheosis_of_Washington
"The Apotheosis of Washington depicts George Washington sitting among the heavens in an exalted manner, or in literary terms, ascending and becoming a god (apotheosis). Washington, the first U.S. president and commander-in-chief of the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War, is allegorically represented, surrounded by figures from classical mythology.
George Washington is draped in purple, worn by generals of the ancient Roman Republic during their triumphs, with a rainbow arch at his feet, flanked by the goddess Victoria, who is draped in green, using a horn, to his left and the goddess of Liberty to his right. Liberty wears a red liberty cap, symbolizing emancipation, from a Roman tradition where slaves being manumitted would be given a felt cap (Latin pileus). She holds a fasces in her right hand and an open book in the other, to which George Washington gestures with his right hand.
Forming a circle between Liberty and Victory are 13 maidens, each with a star above her head representing the original Thirteen Colonies. Several of the maidens have their backs turned to George Washington, said to represent the colonies that had seceded from the Union at the time of painting. Across the circle from George Washington is the banner E Pluribus Unum, Latin for "out of many, one".
Surrounding George Washington, the two goddesses and the 13 maidens are six scenes lining the perimeter, each representing a national concept allegorically: from directly below George Washington in the center and moving clockwise, "War", "Science", "Marine", "Commerce", "Mechanics" and "Agriculture". The perimeter scenes are not fully visible from the floor of the United States Capitol."
Washington only has 15 celestial maidens? Now I feel theologically insecure compared to religions that hand out 72. :-(
To be clear that's an awesome painting and I 100% approve of it, but I don't see where in that description Washington, in heaven, is accepting the gratitude of the people. Also, given that the artist was a Catholic in 1865 I doubt the point he was getting at was that Washington was _literally_ a god.
He's probably more like Mary, not a god per se and thus not worthy of worship, but still worthy of veneration.
>"Oppsie, I took your land, sorry but I couldn't resist doing genocide."
That isn't what they're saying though, these genocidal land grabs are from over a hundred years ago. It's not a statement of repentance, it's a statement that they hate their grandparents and view themselves as superior. You know it's not repentance because they don't take any actions to undo their grandparents' actions. It's that Futurama bit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kysPjggJSpY
I am fairly sure the people doing this would generally take actions to undo their grandparents' actions if given a real chance. They mostly also feel powerless in the face of their frustrations with e.g. colonialism and their nation's past also. Land acknowledgements and similar performances are small things that they've come up with, but they are, as far as I have seen, sincere in wanting to find a way to make reparations at a larger scale.
(Probably they are not actually powerless, in the sense that if they organized around a good idea they could do something, but that is the hard problem of all political action, convincing a bunch of people that the same good idea is a good one.)
This would make more sense if we're talking about individual employees at a university or whatever. Instead this is often handed down by the leadership and required by policy - which necessarily means people with power to do something.
Maybe there are legal reasons they can't actually give the land back. Maybe the tribe they are referencing are all dead. But I can't help but feel that the real reason is that this is purely performative and even with a tribal elder sitting right in front of them with a contract to give the land back or pay rent, they would never actually do that.
>I am fairly sure the people doing this would generally take actions to undo their grandparents' actions if given a real chance.
The treaties that govern tribal reservations are just as mutable as any other law, they could be pushing their representatives to expand the reservations to include the stolen land.
"At least the party you're "Oppsie"ing to exists for sure in the second case, and at least Genocide is an objectively bad sin that really deserve a massive solar-system-sized oppsie."
The real existing party in the second case has no chance of getting anything useful from you, so the "oopsie" sounds more like gloating and less like real contrition. And if the Cosmic Entity does turn out to be real, they can put you in any of the underworlds/sheols/hells so you will end up paying for the wrong you did. "Oopsie I killed all your people on purpose, well now I got all your stuff I promise not to do it again" isn't that great of an apology.
"After all the people who are doing the land acknowledging are doing it for a legitimate moral reason (trying to find some way to make reparations for a lot of legitimate guilt about the past)"
Please pardon my cynicism, but my arse they are. An automated message-chirper is *exactly* as seriously as this nonsense should be taken. How on earth is "we took your stuff and this is to remind you we did that and also we are keeping it" making reparations? Do you really think the local Indian tribes *need* to be reminded about that? It's all for White Liberals to feel vaguely something something not like other White People Bad something something.
I think this would be a magnificent notion, except the crest of the DEI frenzy has probably passed. A year or two back, you could have sold these units to every university and government department in the land, and made a tidy penny to boot.
Out of curiosity, I looked up the Yale Land Acknowledgement and they seem to be pretty canny about not admitting anything like wrongdoing on the part of the Founders back in 1701:
https://secretary.yale.edu/services-resources/land-acknowledgment-statements
"Yale University acknowledges that indigenous peoples and nations, including Mohegan, Mashantucket Pequot, Eastern Pequot, Schaghticoke, Golden Hill Paugussett, Niantic, and the Quinnipiac and other Algonquian speaking peoples, have stewarded through generations the lands and waterways of what is now the state of Connecticut. We honor and respect the enduring relationship that exists between these peoples and nations and this land."
Not a sausage there about "unceded", no, the original inhabitants stewarded the lands and now Yale has taken that over. So nice. Not a whisper of intention about handing back so much as a square foot of the stewarded property for the enduring relationship between those tribes and the land.
And that's the exact amount all these statements are worth: sweet feck-all.
Yes I agree it's a silly thing to do. My point is that being very mad and bitter about it is not going to help at all. They're trying to be good and doing a bad job of it. Better to have grace for that.
(By the way, it looks like you're being piled on a little, so in case nobody else says it, thanks for being so, well, *gracious* about it all. It improves the level of conversation all around, and acts as a good example for the rest of us.)
I don't think this is bitterness, though; I think it's mockery, which is the best way to respond to the uselessness of it all. If you are expressing contrition for fault, you are also expected to make restitution. What restitution does land acknowledgements involve? "We took your stuff and we're keeping it" is not restitution.
"Hey, did you see my wallet by any chance? Only I had all my holiday money in it, so I don't want to lose that"
"Oh, yes! I took it!"
"You what?"
"I saw the wallet and that it was full of money, so I took it. I needed the money, you see"
"But you had no right to do that!"
"I know, I'm sorry I did it"
"Okay, so where is my money?"
"Oh, that's all spent. But I'm really very sorry"
"What? Well, are you going to pay me back my money?"
"Oh, no! But I'm so very, very sorry that I took it. That was bad!"
"Yes, it was bad! And I want my money back! So when are you going to pay me back?"
"But didn't you hear what I said? I'm so very, terribly, awfully, really sincerely sorry. If you like, I'll tell everyone I'm sorry!"
"I don't care aobut that, I care about my money!"
"Oh, Susan! Hi! I'd just like to say that I took Bob's money, and I'm so very sorry about it."
"Well, that's really big of you to admit it, George!"
"But he took my money, and he spent it, and he's not going to give it back Susan!"
"Now, Bob, why are you so bitter? George said he was very very sorry, right? And he even said it in front of me. So that should be good enough for anyone, yes?"
Idk idk here.
The wallet analogy isn't quite right because you're talking to George's grandson here (tho arguably George bought Microsoft stock with the money so there's that).
Personally, my intuitions agree with you entirely, BUT -- I've heard people with trauma-influenced personal histories and for example abusive parents say that *acknowledging the badness* feels very important for them. The harm cannot be fixed retroactively but contrition and acknowledgement of the injustice, hurt etc etc apparently makes a difference. Even from the actual perpetrators, not their descendants. This doesn't feel like ANY form of restitution to me, but maybe if you lived your life feeling that you don't even have a right to feel wronged, having this acknowledged historically is of some benefit?
I'm now off to see if I can find any data from surveys of First Nation people (not activists) that address their opinions.
You're talking to George's grandson because in this hypothetical George came up to you and started apologizing about how his grandfather took your grandfather's wallet. Why is George doing that? You can't apologize for something someone else did, and it's rather difficult to make atonement to the dead. So, yeah, it really does look like George is trying to score cheap virtue points with the audience.
If George genuinely feels guilty about this, then A: he probably shouldn't but B: it's not Bob's problem nor his place to make George feel better. And offering people a cheap no-restitution apology to put them on the spot to either extend unearned forgiveness or be seen as petty and vindictive, is not doing them any favors.
I agree in principle (but as I said elsewhere, I'm neither a colonial or colonized) if it's a question of an APOLOGY. But if I understand the idea of land acknowledgements correctly, it's more about, well, an acknowledgement. Reading indigenous people's opinions about those the main (and seemingly, usually the only) positive aspect of acknowledgements was the "information" one, or to use a bad woke word, awareness.
I have an analogy here: of walking around Warsaw with a German visitor once in the late 1990s: apologies weren't needed, but the sheer impact of YET ANOTHER wall plaque indicating a street execution or another WW2 site (and we weren't even in the ghetto/Jewish-extermination related parts) felt good somehow. I don't know why. Not because grandchildren bear the responsibility for their grandfathers' atrocities, obviously. But there is something here, about collective memory and culture and history that's hard to put a finger on. Obviously, this is a very different situation, and still relatively recent and not many generations back. But still. While the land acknowledgements that take place nowadays do feel (from descriptions -- I've never experienced one) like performative points scoring, and/or hypocrisy, I don't think it's 100% straightforward. Yes the prototype machine is funny in its context. Would it be as funny in parts of central Europe where catastrophic movements of people and their wholesale exterminations took place within living memory? Probably not so much.
In personal cases, I think it's important. Having the person who wronged you admit that and apologise for it, or having family members saying "yes, you were right, you weren't lying or crazy" does mean a lot. In that case, acknowledgement and apology are meaningful.
But in the case of "two hundred years ago, people who had nothing to do with us did stuff", I'm not so sure that works. Yes, historical wrongs to be acknowledged is important in reconciliation, but large institutions like universities saying "we're build on land taken from the natives, we run on endowments that come from land taken from the natives, so sorry natives, now we get on to the important business of haranguing our alumni for donations" - how much difference does that make to the high school dropout kids on the reservation who won't even make it past the doors of Hartprincale as custodial staff?
I agree with all that reasoning but I'm neither a colonial or colonised. So far I've not managed to find any surveys of indigenous people (never mind ones that asked about this practice).
One Reddit thread devoted to the subject on r/IndianCountry asks specifically about acknowledgements in kindergarden and gets SOME (mild and at times reluctant-ish) support for that — from information /education perspective. The respondents who address a broader topic of acknowledgements in general, ESPECIALLY in the academia, are decidedly less positive. And of course it's Reddit, so not representative of anything whatsoever and undoubtedly overrepresenting terminally online, educated & young. It's not always clear if the poster is First Nations of not, but often they self identify, still, it's marginally better than just speculating here.
https://www.reddit.com/r/IndianCountry/s/VUmUlOLJgP
There certainly are faults for which restitution can’t be made. If someone through negligence causes someone to be killed or maimed, they can’t make any appropriate restitution, not even with money or jail time. But contrition is still appropriate in that case. That doesn’t mean land acknowledgments are helpful, just that they can be sincerely well intentioned.
In my mind, the restitution has already been paid many times over.
I admit I mostly think of it in terms of the Australian context, but at least here, the restitution was paid in literacy, in modern medicine, in scientific knowledge, in giving them the opportunity to be citizens of a wealthy first-world country instead of stone-age nomads occupying a land they can't possibly understand.
Would you rather be born a modern Australian citizen, or a stone-age nomad in a harsh land with no understanding of the universe outside the land which you wander across? Well then, there's your answer.
And if anyone (of any race) honestly believes they prefer the stone-age lifestyle, we should have a portion of our country set aside for them to live like that.
Different people can disagree about the merits; the point I was making is that I don't think we in general hold to the principle that contrition is useless unless restitution can be made.
Well, sure, mockery, maybe mockery borne of bitterness, or whatever. Regardless, it's a moral net-negative and should not be encouraged.
Sometimes scorn is the only way to make stupid stuff stop. See the IFS about driving out demons - if they won't go nicely, then you mock them and jeer at them and drive them out that way 😀
Any examples of this working to change the behavior of actually existing human beings at any kind of scale?
Scorn makes nothing stop. It perpetuates tribalism and ensures people stay bitter and reactive at each other.
Dr. Justin Sledge has released the second part of his three-part lecture on how Yahweh became a monotheistic "universal" god. His first lecture discussed the origins of Yahweh as a local thunder god among some of the ancient Israelites, and his transition to a henotheistic deity. This episode takes us from henotheism to monotheism during (and probably because of) the Babylonian Exile.
https://youtu.be/lGCqv37O2Dg
omg cool. he should drop it on spoopify
<mild snark>
>discussed the origins of Yahweh as a local thunder god
This prompts an image of Yahweh musing about the old days, glancing north, and humming "If I had a hammer..." :-)
</mild snark>
Reminds me of Terry Prachett's god, Blind Io, who had to fill the role of 'king of the gods' in various pantheons across the Discworld, something that involved him having to wear a lot of different beards:
"Blind Io is the current king of the gods. He is an amalgam of Jupiter/Zeus and Odin, with elements of Thor — seen primarily in his use of a number of different hammers (seventy, actually, as detailed by Om in Small Gods). He is completely blind in the traditional sense but instead has countless eyes, which seem to have a mind of their own, orbiting his head. He was eventually compelled to get rid of his raven messengers because of their species' instinctual desire for devouring eyeballs. He lives in Dunmanifestin where he and the other gods play games with the lives of mortals.
Besides the hammers he also, apparently, uses a "double-handled axe", or at least has one as a symbol. This is probably a reference to the double-headed axe used by Zeus.
Blind Io is a lightning god. Actually, Io is the only thunder god on the Disc. He goes by many names and appearances to make sure he keeps the optimal amount of followers. This is not really unfair because all the other gods use the same trick."
I thought the double-headed axe (labrys) was associated with the Minoan religion and women?
Double *handles*, though, that's totally a guy thing. ;-)
Yeah, the labrys is Minoan. Zeus has the thunderbolt, which is definitely derived from the vajra of Indra:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vajra
Compare the thunderbolt held in the hand of Zeus in this statue:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeus#/media/File:Jupiter_Smyrna_Louvre_Ma13.jpg
With this image of the vajra:
https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-b4ff35e005d74a5eb00c8bb7bedb5688-lq
Though Zeus does have some Cretan/Minoan connections in the mythology:
"This [Cronus devouring their children] causes Rhea "unceasing grief", and upon becoming pregnant with her sixth child, Zeus, she approaches her parents, Gaia and Uranus, seeking a plan to save her child and bring retribution to Cronus. Following her parents' instructions, she travels to Lyctus in Crete, where she gives birth to Zeus, handing the newborn child over to Gaia for her to raise, and Gaia takes him to a cave on Mount Aegaeon."
"Dictaean Cave is famous in Greek mythology as the place where Amalthea, nurtured the infant Zeus with her goat's milk. The archaeology attests to the site's long use as a place of cult worship. The nurse of Zeus, who was charged by Rhea to raise the infant Zeus in secret here, to protect him from his father Cronus (Krónos) is also called the nymph Adrasteia in some contexts. It is one of a number of caves believed to have been the birthplace or hiding place of Zeus. The mountains, of which the cave are part, are known in Crete as Dikte."
But upon investigation, there is separate imagery of Zeus with the double headed axe:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labraunda
"Labraunda is an ancient archaeological site five kilometers west of Ortaköy, Muğla Province, Turkey, in the mountains near the coast of Caria. ...The cult icon here was a local Zeus Labrandeus (Ζεὺς Λαβρανδεύς), a standing Zeus with the tall lotus-tipped scepter upright in his left hand and the double-headed axe, the labrys, over his right shoulder. The cult statue was the gift of the founder of the dynasty, Hecatomnus himself, recorded in a surviving inscription."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labrys#/media/File:SATRAPS_of_CARIA._Hidrieus._Circa_351-0_to_344-3_BC.jpg
Many Thanks! Interesting - I haven't read many of the Discworld novels. It is a neat idea. It isn't uncommon to have syncretic religions adding deities from multiple sources. It is a cool idea to have a deity adding roles from multiple religions. :-)
God rest the man, he was very funny about that - it was exactly that idea of "multiple deities are amalgamated into one chief god" that he was parodying with having one god going around playing the part of the different gods in different pantheons. On Discworld, gods depend heavily on belief for their power and existence, so the more belief the better, and you get more belief from having more believers.
Many Thanks!
>On Discworld, gods depend heavily on belief for their power and existence, so the more belief the better, and you get more belief from having more believers.
Yes, I've seen many uses of that idea. I like Scott's many variations in https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-gods-only-have-power-because
Almost all nations feature a single, executive head of state (prime minister, president, supreme leader, etc.), ostensibly for its agility and efficiency in time-sensitive decision-making. I think this is batshit crazy, considering how vulnerable to poor judgment and mental illness any single human is and how many times throughout history this vulnerability has led to the widespread suffering or outright destruction of a nation.
As I understand it, the Swiss in 1848 opted instead to form an executive body called the Federal Council, consisting of seven members who act as a collective head of state. These members are elected by the legislature and serve four-year terms.
Any Swiss people out there who think this is clearly a step in the right direction? Does this system’s success depend on Switzerland’s dogged neutrality in international affairs?
"None of us is as dumb as all of us."
https://despair.com/products/meetings
Single executives are important not only for agility, but also accountability.
What I take from right-wing criticisms of modern government (the deep state, the blob etc.) is that something like the Swiss system exists de facto in every country with a functioning government & civil service. Liz Truss wanted a radical budget from her perspective: cutting taxes and boosting spending. The independent Office for Budget Responsibility published a report, presumably critical because Truss decided not to publish it, cue market panic and her eventual resignation. We all had a good laugh, it's hard to feel too sorry for Truss when the tories introduced the OBR to stop a future Labour government allegedly 'maxing out the credit card', but Truss was an elected representative of the people in a way that isn't true of the head of OBR, much less the markets...
I agree that there are external pressures on every chief executive to do popular things, or to the extent that they can, at least popularize what they decide to do. But I don’t think that’s basically the same as distributing the decision-making authority over multiple agents. A distributed executive is much more immune to falling into dictatorship or making a catastrophic snap misjudgment. Maybe the UK isn’t vulnerable to these possibilities but the US certainly is. I think a distributed executive could also conceivably select for better candidates because sharing the power and the spotlight would not have the absolute appeal to the narcissists that typically seek out and inhabit head of state roles.
I think the standard practices pertaining to government systems are probably closer to barely adequate than really great, and I see some value in exploring potentially sturdier frameworks.
I missed this reply. The general need to stay popular is not really what I'm talking about, unless you mean staying popular with the most powerful people within the so-called deep state.
...To the extent you have civil servants saying "are you sure that's wise, sir?" when you know that their disapproval can reduce your tenure as PM to the shelf life of a lettuce, you have a system not unlike the Swiss system
"thou art mortal"?
Sparta famously had two kings; you can decide for yourself if they're an example worth emulating.
Rome was governed by consuls for a longer time period than any (I think?) of the modern elected single-leader systems. We have yet to see how long systems with a single executive typically last, but it would not surprise me if, on the long term, two-leader systems generally lasted longer than one-leader systems.
Switzerland also famously has an unwritten rule that all parties work together ("concordance" principle) rather than forming governing and opposition parties as you see in many other countries. That has contributed a lot to stability, too.
If I could ask something else about Switzerland: I had *thought* that Switzerland was so committed to neutrality and independence that they wouldn't join any alliance or international body like the EU that could tell them what to do. But apparently they're part of the Council of Europe, which I *think* means they're subject to the European Court of Human Rights, which I *think* means a foreign body can declare their laws unacceptable in some sense? My understanding was that the ECoHR has far less power than say the US Supreme Court, but more than say a random UN body telling you you're infinging someone's rights. Unless I'm wrong about this and they really are no different from the latter, such that after being told your policy is a human rights violation responding with "thank you for your feedback, we will be continuing with the policy anyway" is perfectly acceptable and has zero consequences...why would Switzerland consent to this? Doesn't it conflict with their whole 200-year tradition? And given their direct democracy, what would they do (or have they done since I'm sure this has happened) if their popular decision was ruled against by the Council?
Yes, I agree that it was untypical for Switzerland to sign the European Convention on Human Rights, which includes support for the ECoHR. This was in 1974, and hotly disputed back then. I don't know the details for why it was still signed, but apparently the reasoning was that Switzerland would never be condemned for violations of human rights. Back then this was plausible, since human rights were interpreted in a much more narrow way.
In general, "Fremde Richter" (foreign judges) is a keyword and very emotional topic in Switzerland. In the founding document, the "Bundesbrief" from 1291(!) it says:
"We have also unanimously vowed and determined that we shall not accept any judge in the valleys who (...) is not our inhabitant or countryman". To be fair, judges in those time were more powerful and also had legislative rights.
But until today, in general Switzerland fights hard against accepting foreign judges, and that is one of the reasons why they never joined EU. Part of the recent negotiations with EU (a process which ultimately failed) was that the question of whether decisions of the European Court of Justice ECJ should be binding for Switzerland. The EU wanted that, but after a lot of fighting, the agreement was no, and instead there should be an independent arbitration court if there is dispute between Switzerland and EU about the EU markets. Even that was only grudgingly accepted and received backlash from the political right.
On the other hand, for human rights the status quo was confirmed recently. There was an initiative to expel criminal foreigners ("Ausschaffungs-initiative", approved in 2010). This collided with human rights, and the Federal Council took this into account in the implementation. The right-wing party SVP found this insufficient and launched an initiative to ignore human rights in the implementation ("Durchsetzungs-initiative") After this was rejected by public vote in 2016, they launched another initiative to codify that Swiss laws should be above human rights ("Selbstbestimmungs-initiative") which was clearly rejected in 2018. So the Swiss people confirmed twice that human rights should be above Swiss law.
On the other hand, there was a decision by the ECoHR just a month ago that Switzerland would not do enough against climate change. That caused an uproar in Switzerland. Most commentary found that this goes beyond the jurisdiction of the ECoHR. In a very remarkable step, the law commission of the second legislative chamber (representation of the cantons) proposed a declaration that Switzerland would not follow this decision because they are already doing enough for climate change. It's unclear whether the first chamber will agree, but in any case this is a really blunt proposal. It also shows that ECoHR has only soft power. If Switzerland decides to ignore the decision, they can do that. The cost may be some bad publicity, but that's it.
Switzerland was committed to neutrality when wars were this king against that one, not the final battle of Good against Evil, which worked out until just after WWI. (WWII in Swiss history is a whole topic for itself.) During the Cold War, while Switzerland was technically neutral, they also understood that one side surrounded them, had the force to invade if they wanted to, but didn't want to whereas the other side, if it ever came to war, sure looked like they might not respect any borders including the Swiss ones. So while Switzerland never joined NATO, they sure harmonised their weapons and tactics with the NATO ones just in case (which had the nice side-effect of being able to sell stuff to NATO). For military nerds, the Swiss SIG-90 assault rifle has been described to me as "the Soviet AK-47, built to Swiss quality, with NATO ammunition".
Switzerland also famously agreed to host the UN in Geneva, but not join itself until 2002. It joined the ECoHR already in 1974 though: https://www.eda.admin.ch/eda/en/fdfa/foreign-policy/international-organizations/council-europe/european-convention-human-rights.html (side note: the Swiss state using "admin.ch" as their website makes me happy for no good reason) In 2018, the SVP (Swiss People's Party) ran an initiative to write into the Swiss constitution that the constitution and Swiss law are above the ECoHR, which was rejected with around 2/3 of the popular vote and by every single canton: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eidgen%C3%B6ssische_Volksinitiative_%C2%ABSchweizer_Recht_statt_fremde_Richter_(Selbstbestimmungsinitiative)%C2%BB
So in practice, this is interpreted as a popular mandate that yes, ECoHR court decisions do apply here.
Switzerland never joined the EU, but it does have bilateral treaties with the EU which the right-wing complains is membership in all but name. Switzerland is also part of Schengen/Dublin, the agreement on free movement of people and goods which means that anyone from the EU has the right to reside and work in Switzerland. The SVP has tried many times to cancel this, but so far has lost most initiatives on this matter (and the ones they won were sufficiently open to interpretation by the other side that one can work around them).
This is complicated as I just thought of another possibility:
5. A provision of the Swiss Constitution either explicitly says, or has been interpreted to say, that ECoHR decisions are binding on the country. The people could change this with a referndum and that would be the end if the Court's authority, but they have not done so. The Court of course could never override the Swiss Constitution itself.
I'm further confused because I think I've seen that the Swiss Constitution may actually be subordinate to a local canton's constitution, but this is probably over-complicating things too much so I won't ask about that.
Thanks! So can I clarify further: what is the actual power of the ECoHR in Switzerland? (I don't really understand its power anywhere, but I'll just ask about Switzerland). I'm really confused on this. Is it one of the following:
1. Switzerland is to the ECoHR as Texas is to the US Supreme Court: if the latter rules their law invalid that's the end of it, the law is completely and immediately void and unenforcable, all local courts and authorities will reliably treat is as such, the only remedy for the law's supporters is to try to change the composition of the Court.
2. The ECoHR can enforce material sanctions of some kind against Switzerland for noncompliance, meaning the voting public and politicians in Switzerland have a strong interest in obeying its decisions, but ultimately the choice is their's and they can ignore the Court and take the sanctions.
3. The Court has no direct power, only symbolic power. Same as 2 otherwise, with the weaker but still potent consideration of avoiding international embarassment being a major consideration in the people's decision.
4. The Court is no different in practice from a UN human rights body: the only people who think its decision matters (e.g. people on the left) are those who already support the result anyway. Nobody ever really changes their mind as a result of a ruling.
It seems that it's not 4, and I'm not fairly sure it's not 1. Which is the closest description, or is it unlike any of these?
For a practical example - separate post because I had to research this a bit - in 2020 a widowed man took the state to the ECoHR because the law says a widowed woman gets state support all her life (unless she remarries, other T&C may apply) whereas for a man, the payments stop when he no longer has any underage children. He claimed discrimination on the basis of sex, and the ECoHR found in his favour in 2022.
As a result, the Swiss executive admitted they had to change that law, and since 2023 the rules on that are written in a gender-neutral fashion (while also treating marriage and registered homosexual partnerships equally).
The page on this does not have an English version, but you can point your favourite translation tool at https://www.bsv.admin.ch/bsv/de/home/sozialversicherungen/ahv/grundlagen-gesetze/witwerrente.html for the details.
So yes, ECoHR decisions can and do lead to changes in Swiss law.
Could you elaborate on the “concordance” principle a little?
I'll try. Instead of having whoever takes 50%+1 seats (or some other formula) get the role of PM and anyone outside their coalition goes into opposition, the Swiss system is built on the idea that we all get together and see if we can come to a consensus, which works more often than not. It's often said that the real politics happens not in the debating chamber but in the corridor around it, where it's another unwritten rule that you drop the posturing and talk civilly with politicians from other parties.
It also helps that anyone who can gather 50'000 signatures over 100 days (in a country of 9 and a bit million, for context) can call a referendum against any law voted by parliament, in which case the law is voted on by the people and needs a simple majority to pass. So a situation where you get together a coalition with just over half the seats in parliament, but not close to half the population, would see any controversial law at risk of being sunk by a referendum.
There is yet another unwritten agreement on how the seats on the executive are distributed among the largest parties, so for example if a SP councillor steps down then the other parties will usually either accept the SP's proposed replacement, or at least abstain from voting to let the party fill "their" slot again. In exchange, the 7 federal councillors tacitly agree to tone down if not drop any too party political activity while in the executive.
More on the details and the history here: https://blog.nationalmuseum.ch/en/2021/09/using-the-magic-formula-to-achieve-concordance/
If I'm not mistaken, the dutch have their own word for this. The Polder model. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polder_model
I moved from Germany to Switzerland in my late 20s, and my mind was blown by how much better the Swiss political system is. It's not that the German system is bad, but I find the Swiss one a lot better.
That said, the collective Federal Council is only the tip of the iceberg. The whole system is based on dilution of power, much more than in any other political system that I know. Even executive+legislation together are far from able to just rule unchecked, because all major decisions are ultimately decided by public vote.
This has two major effects: for one, the Swiss public is much better informed than the German one, because they have to vote on 5-10 political questions every three months. And the focus is *a lot* more on content than on politicians. Ask a random Swiss person on the street, and they may have some trouble to name the members of the Federal Council, but they will have a (more or less informed) opinion on many of the political questions of the last year. I also perceived the media (especially newspapers) as a positive cultural shock when I moved to Switzerland. It's not that German newspapers cover less politics, but it is much more of the type "politician A disagree with what politician B wants", or "politician A has lost/screwed up". The Swiss newspapers are a lot more about arguments.
The second effect is that everybody is forced to compromise all the time, because one-sided proposals will be stopped sooner or later (usually sooner). Moreover, after the public vote, the political question is usually settled. After the majority has decided, this is accepted by all sides. There are a few exceptions, for example about immigration from EU, because the public vote was to re-negotiate contracts with the EU, and this adds a layer with another independent player. But for most cases, even if the debate is emotional and heated, at some point it is settled, and people calm down.
The downside is that decisions in Switzerland are famously sluggish. (Though the covid crisis showed that decisions can be made faster in emergencies.) But I think this downside is acceptable.
There is a fantastic more-than-you-ever-wanted-to-know post on lesswrong about the Swiss political system.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/x6hpkYyzMG6Bf8T3W/swiss-political-system-more-than-you-ever-wanted-to-know-i
I especially recommend the section on the Jurassic Question. Sure, it took 60 years to solve the question, but it is a prime example of how disputes should be settled in a democracy.
*spoiler alert* the jurassic question has nothing to do with dinosaurs. Me = very disappointed.
Well, the Jurassic era is named after the Jura mountains, where rocks from that era are visible.
*Their* jurassic question, maybe. ;-)
> one-sided proposals will be stopped sooner or later (usually sooner)
Mostly true, but the "(anti) mass immigration initiative" just about went through and has been a headache for negotiations with the EU ever since IIRC?
Not familiar with the background on this one, but if a near-majority of the Swiss are anti mass-immigration (initiative), then making it difficult for the Swiss govt to be strongarmed into mass-immigration by the EU is probably the system functioning as intended?
A look at the numbers and charts on German Wikipedia at https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eidgen%C3%B6ssische_Volksinitiative_%C2%ABGegen_Masseneinwanderung%C2%BB can give some more context here, section "Abstimmung".
A change to the Swiss constitution requires both a majority of cantons and a majority of the overall popular vote. This change got both, but if we dig into the numbers - first, 56.57% of eligible voters cast a vote (which is unusually high for an initiative). Secondly, the initiative passed the popular vote with 50.3% yes overall. I think that's even narrower than the Brexit referendum in the UK. Third, if you look at the map, you can see that the French-speaking cantons in the east all voted no, reflecting the big German/French cultural divide in the country. The other big divide is urban vs rural, with the German-speaking cantons of Basel, Zurich and Zug - all of which contain some of Switzerland's largest cities (Zurich #1, Basel #3, Zug #24 but still dominates Zug-the-canton).
The initiative passed the double majority rule, and is now part of Swiss law - all this is formally correct. But it could be argued this is not evidence for a large popular majority overall - I certainly know a lot of urban Swiss who did some serious soul-searching after discovering that "this is so dumb, it'll never get through so I won't even bother to vote" is a losing move.
This was in 2014. When the executive implemented the law in a way that the initiative-owners felt was insufficient, they launched another follow-up initiative in 2020, and this time some of the lazier liberals showed up and the pro-Europe parties explained exactly what cancelling all the trade agreements would imply. The result: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eidgen%C3%B6ssische_Volksinitiative_%C2%ABF%C3%BCr_eine_massvolle_Zuwanderung_(Begrenzungsinitiative)%C2%BB
61.71% no on the popular vote, and almost all cantons voted no too.
Given that the latter initiative explicitly called for cancelling the bilateral agreements with the EU, many have interpreted the result as a popular vote in favour of keeping said agreements, which would imply not implementing any changes technically required by the earlier result but that would be incompatible with said agreements.
Yes, I also tend to view it that way. I think that there is a majority who really wants to slow down immigration, and EU is adamantly threatening to throw Switzerland out of the EU market if they put limits to EU immigration.
As background: immigration into Switzerland is huge. The Swiss population grew from 7.55m to 8.78m in 15 year (2007-2022), a 16% increase. That's even faster than the US, which grew "only" by 11% in this time (301m to 333m), and out of proportion for European standards (Germany: 2%, France: 6%, UK: 9%). This exacerbates problems like housing shortages. Opinions do differ on immigration, but the problems are real.
Well, the 2014 vote went that way, the 2020 vote went back the other way (see my post above) and there's another initiative that was just declared valid in May 2024, so I think the vote will be this autumn.
One way the 2024 one is being explained in the right-wing press is to "cap the Swiss population at under 10 million" which sounds, uh, ominous.
That's fair, but I don't think those things fully contradicts each other. I think two statements are both true:
"A majority would like to slow down immigration."
"A majority thinks that sacrificing access to EU market would be even worse. Hence, an agreement with the EU is more important than stopping immigration."
Granted, this is only my interpretation. But even in the 2014 vote, it played a huge role that immigration treaties were part of the whole EU bundle, and many of the 50% opposing the vote were afraid of the consequences for EU market access. In 2020, the consequences were just more obvious than in 2014.
>The second effect is that everybody is forced to compromise all the time, because one-sided proposals will be stopped sooner or later (usually sooner).
I'm envious (writing from the USA). We barely manage to keep adults in the room...
Prime Ministers in Westminster System style parliamentary governments are Heads of Government, not Heads of State. This sounds like a nitpicky distinction, but it's actually very important. The Head of State may be an elected President, a hereditary monarch, or a viceroy (e.g. Canada's Governor General) appointed by the monarch on the advice of the Head of Government. The Head of State generally have very broad powers on paper but is subject to very tight customary restrictions on how they're used. Among other things, this serves as a check on the Head of Government in three ways:
1. The Head of Government is typically obligated to regularly explain his actions and policies to the Head of State and hear out any criticism the Head of State has to offer.
2. Most of the pomp and ceremony attaches to the Head of State, not the Head of Government. Socially, the HoS outranks the HoG
3. Much of the HoG's powers require acting through the HoS by giving "advice" that the HoS is customarily obliged to follow. The HoS is only obliged to follow advice that is offered legitimately following the customary forms, though, and the (seldom or never actually used) ability for the HoS to refuse in extreme situations serves as a sort of nuclear deterrent on excesses or abuses by the HoG.
1 and 2 are mostly psychological in impact, while 3 serves as a practical constraint.
Westminster governments also exercise much more collective decision-making than American-style Presidential governments. The PM is accountable to Parliament in a much more direct an immediate way that the US President is accountable to Congress (I.e. the HoS is not just empowered but obliged to fire and replace the PM if he cannot command a majority), and Cabinet Ministers often have their own power bases in Parliament along with norms that major decisions are made collectively by the whole Cabinet rather than individually by the PM.
States with a single executive head of state also have deputies and seconds-in-command and "if Number One drops dead, Number Two takes over" plans, so it's not as if "oh no El Presidente choked on a fish bone, there is no leader, what do we do? it's pure anarchism right now!"
Our president is generally a figurehead head of state, so if they die, resign, or are booted out for stealing the tea money, there has to be an election. In the meantime, there is a Commission to rule in his place:
"If the current President resigns, becomes incapacitated, is removed or dies, then an election must be held within the following 60 days.
...Article 14 of the Constitution provides for a Commission to perform the functions of the President in certain situations – if the President is absent, becomes incapacitated, resigns, is removed from office, dies or fails to perform their functions."
Even the Church has procedures in place:
"Until a successor Pope can be elected, the Camerlengo serves as Vatican City's Acting Sovereign. He is no longer, however, responsible for the government of the Catholic Church when the papacy is vacant; that task was placed in the hands of the College of Cardinals by Universi Dominici gregis (1996). His power is extremely limited, being merely enough to allow Church institutions to continue to operate and perform some basic functions without making any definitive decisions or appointments that are normally reserved to other powers delegated by the Pope."
Right. I’m not concerned that a country will be left rudderless when the head of state dies, resigns, etc., I’m concerned with the apparent weaknesses of undistributed executive decision-making.
Generally, though, the head of state does not have all the power, even where they are the authority. There is parliament/congress and other bodies that can say "hang on there now, you can't do that".
And with the Roman dual command, there were plenty of examples of one person imposing their will over the other, or someone being given a plum public office in return for supporting another guy (e.g. Caesar getting Antony made augur in order to have Antony block hostile moves against him by declaring the auspices unfavourable).
Whatever method we pick, there's going to be some downside and some way for finding loopholes. The advantage of a single head of state/leader is that, well, it's one guy: it's a lot easier to get rid of one guy than to take down two. three or more.
Though if you are willing to be guided by the wisdom of "The Rings of Power" season one: "one will always corrupt, two divides, but three brings balance" 😀
Hm, "Dune" had: "In politics, the tripod is the most unstable of all structures."
FYI, The Republic of San Marino has two heads of state — originally based on the idea of two Roman consuls sharing power.
San Marino is an absurdly tiny nation-state. Switzerland is a smallish one (population currently less than 9 million) which is pretty close to one of a kind in its geography and its social/cultural makeup. The Roman Republic's setup was supplanted by one-person rule.
While acknowledging the weaknesses/risks of single-person head of state setups, it seems like there would be more examples of small-group setups if that approach was really viable -- or net advantageous all things considered -- in the real world.
9 million is, in fact, a heck of a lot of people. It's only small if you compare it to large nations.
It's fewer people than live in Los Angeles county. I guess small countries aren't that small if you compare them only to other small countries...
They're large if you compare them to most agglomerations of people in the world.
Actually, Switzerland has fewer people than the median country, so they are not large compared to "most".
I think that one key to making a population easy to govern is convincing them that they're a small group who needs to stick together in order to avoid being swallowed by the larger powers around them. Use their natural tribalism to create an ingroup which consists of the entire country and an outgroup which consists of everyone else.
Once a country gets huge and powerful, you can no longer convince them that they need to stick together against outsiders, and they will turn against each other in order to bicker over the spoils of their dominance.
In this sense perhaps it's not so important that Switzerland is small (it's actually very close to being the median sized country), but that it is smaller than everyone else around it.
"The Roman Republic's setup was supplanted by one-person rule."
Everything is eventually supplanted by something else, if you wait long enough.
Uruguay, too, has some kind of distributed executive.
> it seems like there would be more examples of small-group setups if that approach was really viable…
Yes, I feel this way, too, but I hesitate to dismiss the concept based on its lack of adoption alone. It seems like given advances in technology, some form of distributed executive decision-making might not be as prone to unresponsiveness as it once was.
Well, the Roman Republic functioned for many centuries with a dual executive, and it had a population 2x-3x the size of Switzerland before it transitioned to one-person rule. Switzerland's system hasn't been around as long as the Roman Republic. So, I look forward to Switzerland's transition to one-person rule sometime in the twenty-third century and its future conquest of Europe. :-)
My biweekly COVID-19 update for epidemiological weeks 21 and 22 is up on X.
1. US COVID wastewater numbers are starting to rise again. There's a lot of concern that the JN.1 descendants with FLiRT mutations (S:R346T, S:F456L) are increasing in frequency, and this combination of spike mutations will drive the next wave.
2. But we shouldn't assume that the rise in presumed COVID transmission (as measured by wastewater numbers) is uniform across the country. I didn't discuss it in my slide deck, but I checked out my home state, California (because they have good online data), and Los Angeles (county and city), San Francisco, and Sacramento do not show an uptick in WW numbers. However, Santa Clara County (home of the city of San Jose) shows a steep rise. But this has been the pattern during the interwave gaps — SARS2 continues to circulate in the background at low levels with *seemingly* random widely dispersed outbreaks locally. So, the rise in national-level wastewater numbers may be an artifact of which sewersheds are being monitored by the CDC and Biobot. But if the local outbreaks become synchronized across wider geographic areas, that will be a sign that the next COVID wave is underway.
3. And just because the new FLiRT mutations have higher immune escape values doesn't necessarily mean these mutations will kick off a new wave. We've seen vars with very high relative immune escape values (relative to their predecessors) that didn't create new waves, but instead, they come to dominate the viral landscape by (taking a bigger piece of the smaller infection pie, so to speak). The dreaded Kraken (whose Pango designation I can't remember off the top of my head) behaved that way.
4. And I linked to a thread and a paper on what it would take for H5N1 (bird flu) to be a pandemic-causing pathogen in humans. Bottom line, we'll have to worry when it finally jumps to pigs — because pigs are fairly unique among domesticated animals in that they can be in infected with human Type A influenzas. If H5N1 (another Type A influenza) hops over to pigs, then recombination is possible between the two strains (which could yield a Type A flu that's highly transmissible in humans with the bird-flu's virulence). This hasn't happened yet in the 20-plus years that H5N1 has been circulating though. But it could.
https://x.com/beowulf888/status/1797343113176035355
>pigs are fairly unique among domesticated animals in that they can be in infected with human Type A influenzas
What is it with these correspondences between our species and pigs? Somebody got a pig's heart recently too. Once heard there was a tribe of cannibals whose word for human beings as meat translated literally was "long pig." Apparently we taste like pork.
My guess would be that we're among only a handful of species that have adapted to living as large omnivores. It's a niche that for some reason seems to have only evolved a handful of times.
SARS2 is my hobby, but I admit I don't know much about influenzas. But I think humans and pigs have very similar SA (sialic acid) receptors — and human influenza A viruses (H1N1) have adapted so they have optimized their ability to bind to human SA receptors. And since pigs have very similar types of SA receptors they're a reservoir for influenza A viruses. Southern China where there's lots of pig farming seems to generate a lot of the seasonal flu A waves.
With SARS2 some mammals share similar receptor sites. For instance humans and ferrets can infect each other fairly easily with SARS2. I suspect bovines have different types of SA receptors from humans. And that makes it easier for H5N1 to bind to bovine SA receptors and harder for H5N1 to bind to human SA receptors. However, we know of 3 people in the US who caught H5N1 from cows, so it's not impossible for humans to catch it from cattle, but the kinetics of the of the H5N1 binding sites makes it much less likely that humans will catch it (?). At this point I'm speculating — i.e. talking out of my ass. If someone understands the details, please chime in because I'm out of my depth now. ;-)
And, more ass-talking here — I suspect that porcine HLA systems (PLA? Porcine leukocyte antigens?) may be similar to human HLA systems. So humans are less likely to reject pig flesh than another mammal's flesh. ?????
It all goes back to Francis Bacon... :-)
Would be interested to see a dialogue between an Effective Altruist and this author, writing in defense of partiality and acting within one's "sphere of moral competence".
https://becomingnoble.substack.com/p/your-childs-life-is-worth-those-of
What is there to even discuss? This is just an unbridgable gap in moral values. There's nothing objectively wrong with valuing virtue ethics over human lives, because that would imply the existence of a correct answer. Debating over morality is a complete waste of time. All you can do is work to promote your own interests.
I disagree that it's always a waste of time; often people have shared foundational axioms and can be persuaded in those terms. I certainly have been persuaded to change my moral foundations in the past.
I agree it's often a waste of time, either because people aren't open to persuasion or because the conversation doesn't happen on a fundamental enough level.
> Debating over morality is a complete waste of time. All you can do is work to promote your own interests.
I think there might be a happy medium, where debating over morality *is* promoting one's own interests, specifically the interest of having a lot of other people agree with me about what's right and wrong?
Uh, this is a very extreme position that I think requires substantially more argument than you are giving for it. 300 years of God knows how many pages of moral philosophy has been written and a significant chunk of that is argument over the correct moral values. The people doing this arguing certainly haven't thought there was nothing to discuss, and those devoting their whole careers to the matter probably didn't think it was a waste of time. Maybe your position isn't as obvious as you seem to think it is.
Also, you seem to be saying that argument between different moral systems is *impossible*. Even if you're right that it's futile and will never be solved (an absurdly unjustified claim), it's obviously possible since plenty of people are doing it. It's like the difference between saying playing soccer is a waste of time (arguable for sure) and saying playing soccer is impossible (um...?).
What is there to discuss? Um, everything that every paper or book or online thread about moral values is discussing...is what there is to discuss!
This is begging the question. Essentially you are saying that moral anti-realism can't be true because academic philosophy couldn't possibly have been arguing about nothing all this time.
> 300 years of God knows how many pages of moral philosophy has been written and a significant chunk of that is argument over the correct moral values.
Have they figured it out yet?
They figured out a litany of "its," yes.
The usual argument would be that virtue ethics beats utilitarianism on its own terms -- that virtue ethics provides a tractable and practically-followable framework for making decisions that probably works better in practice than telling fallible humans that they simply need to do whatever leads to the best consequences.
I've never heard of anyone who believes "my moral system produces quantitatively worse outcomes than utilitarianism but you should follow it anyway because it's better on its own terms". Everyone thinks their moral system results in the greatest overall good.
I recently learned that I might have a sesame allergy because I mentioned to a friend that I liked the taste of sesame but not the burning/biting sensation, and they said, "Uh, sesame doesn't do that. Maybe you're allergic to it."
So, related questions: 1) does sesame really not give everyone a burning sensation in their throat? 2) Is it a bad idea to DIY a skin prick test for a possible minor allergy? 3) How bad does an allergy have to be for it to be worth avoiding allergens? 4) Is this just a tradeoff of managing symptoms vs. eating tasty foods, or does it do long-term damage to frequently expose yourself to allergens?
My hunch is that foods lightly seasoned with sesame seeds (e.g. everything bagels) might be alright since they don't cause a noticeable throat reaction, but maybe I should stop making salad dressings with sesame oil.
For context: I have mild respiratory allergies to some pollens and animals, and non-allergy food intolerances that cause major digestive problems. No food allergies. This is a new problem for me.
I had this exact issue with eggplant. I remarked to a friend that my brother and I both liked eggplant, including the "spicy burning sensation" that we get from it, and it was brought up that it was probably an allergy. I still eat lots of eggplant, so it seems fine to me. As context, I have 2 auto-immune diseases.
Now you've done it. You ought to have added a disclaimer noting that this thread contains sesame.
This Open Thread is now an Open Sesame thread.
These comments were made in a thread that also processes responses and thus may contain traces of sesame and other allergens 😁
Oh no! I have contaminated the comments section!
Some seeds, fruits and nuts can trigger a mild allergic reaction in people with hayfever. It's sometimes referred to as "oral hayfever" but that's a bit of a silly name. I have this for a few kinds of fruits. If your reaction is the same thing then it's very unlikely (impossible?) to kill you, as evidenced by the fact that you've eaten sesame oil salads and been basically fin. But maybe it's best to figure out what you have before going gung-ho.
Huh, I am not familiar with that. I'll have it up.
**look it up. Oops!
Have eaten sesame seed buns, I honestly couldn't tell you what sesame even tastes like, that's how little impact it has. It is definitely not burning or biting, at most the seeds make bread slightly more crunchy.
I don't eat sesame that much (it doesn't seem to automatically come on bread here, anymore), but I've never experienced a burning sensation when doing so.
Note that, as I understand it, an allergy is where you get anaphylactic shock. Experiencing a burning sensation is indicative of something called an 'intolerance' and doesn't necessarily mean you have an allergy. But, I am not a doctor and this is not medical advice.
My understanding is that "allergy" describes a range of symptoms, the most severe of which is anaphylaxis and the more minor symptoms can be itching, burning, hives, etc.
Correct. Allergy vs intolerance difference has nothing to do with an intensity of the reaction (tho "intolerance" will not produce lethal effects comparable to anaphylaxis) and everything to do with mechanism: allergic reactions are immune system mediated, while intolerances are basically caused by the inability to digest a given substance. What's confusing practically is that the same GI symptoms can be a result of allergy and intolerance.
"Burning throat when eating sesame" is more suggestive of allergy, perhaps the "oral allergy syndrome" in cross-reaction with respiratory allergens someone else mentioned.
Repeated exposure if already allergic can make the subsequent reactions more severe if it really is an allergy, thus avoiding exposure is recommended, so getting tested might be a good idea.
On the other hand, desensitization therapy for allergies is exactly repeated exposure, and definitely works for me. (Worked to bring my bee allergy down from life-threatening to rather unpleasant, and seems to be working with grass pollen going from really annoying to slightly inconvenient. )
Oh interesting, and makes sense in the context of children for example frequently growing out of allergies (and some people developing sudden onset ones in adulthood) -- immune systems are weird. Great that it worked for you esp with the venom one.
Thank you for your perspective! I'll definitely have to look into oral allergy syndrome; I'm not familiar with that.
I can definitely say that I have never experienced burning sensation after eating anything with sesame, so it does sound like you should get that tested.
> I can definitely say that I have never experienced burning sensation after eating anything with sesame
You should try my chili tahini garlic stir fry. It would definitely solve that problem!
Huh, well, that does seem to be the response I have been getting in my informal polling here and elsewhere. Guess I should find a local allergist.
I think it would be no harm. It's mild now, but it might get more serious later on. I never had hay fever or anything like it until a few years back, now I found myself this morning with wheezy breathing and the pollen count was high, so I took an anti-histamine.
Seconded.
Thirded
Fourthed (not a word apparently).
Fifthed
Sixthed
Re: Lyman's claim that Christian organizations are already studying their own effectiveness: Christians for Effective Altruism has been looking into how major Christian nonprofits use evidence, and our sense is that (1) most organizations do not analyze their own effectiveness in a way that can meaningfully measure the impact of their programs, and (2) even the ones who do tend to share this information selectively in a way that's pretty misleading to donors and recipients. Fuller write-up coming hopefully in a few months, but I spoke at the EA for Christians conference summarizing some findings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxneG-o0g8U
The potato diet, which I thought Scott wrote about earlier, might work because cooking a potato and then refrigerating it reduces the number of calories you can absorb from it. It converts starch to resistant starch, which resists digestion in the small intestine, and is instead digested by gut bacteria. (Johns Hopkins Patient Guide to Diabetes, "What is resistant starch?", https://hopkinsdiabetesinfo.org/what-is-resistant-starch)
In fact, repeatedly heating and cooling potatoes converts more starch to resistant starch (Raigond+Singh 2019, Resistant Starch in Food, 7.1.1 Heating Cooling Cycles; https://www.researchgate.net/publication/330644723_Resistant_Starch_in_Food).
Raw potatoes have a lot of readily-digestible starch (RDS), but also resistant starch 2 (RS2), "slowly hydrolyzed by alpha-amylase". Cooking them converts some RDS to RD3, "retrograded starch". In all cases, the number of "calories" listed on the nutritional info for a potato is a large over-estimate. Those "calories" tell you how much heat you get out of a potato by burning it, not how many calories you get from eating it.
Raigond+Singh give some experimental data on how much RS various heating and cooling processes produce, but because of the way they present it (as percentages, without specifying what they're percentages of), I'm not sure they can be interpreted.
The Hopkins web page says that reheating the potato will not deconvert the resistant starch. Raigond+Singh says it will (table 2, RS3, last column), but apparently not all of it, as they say cycles of heating and cooling gradually increases RS.
(I'm certain I read about the potato diet on Scott's blog, but Google insists that Scott never posted a blog containing the words "slime mold time mold" and "potato diet", and only shows discussion of it in reader comments.)
I don't think that explanation is necessary to explain why the potato diet leads to weight loss, even if there's some truth to the explanation.
Eating a diet of whole plant foods in general (without refined fats or carbs) typically leads to losing excess weight.
Whole plant foods are nutritionally dense and satiating.
This isn't unique to potatoes. Starch retrogradation is a well known thing among chefs and food scientists. For rice, especially - which is why you can't make fried rice with fresh rice, you need fully cooked and then cooled rice, because the regular starch will just smear into paste on your wok's surface while cooled rice will actually stay intact.
If you poke around culinary science research, you might find more food where you can readily observe this.
Is the idea then that the body just doesn't notice that it isn't digesting all of what it eats, and reduces hunger as though the resistant starch were a useful nutrient? That seems contrary to the assumption I've seen in a lot of places including Slime Mould Time Mould that the actual amount of energy the body has available is a major factor influencing the appetite. I can't think of any direct evidence that that's true off the top of my head, but it kind of feels like it has to be.
Resistant starch IS a useful nutrient, is the thing. You need propionate, acetate, and butyrate for a huge number of cellular processes, and fermentation of starches and fiber in the lower gut is the best way to get them. SCFAs satisfy a unique component of your caloric needs, and they do it in a time-release fashion, starting ~12hrs after you eat the starch. Think about the implications for breaking "food addiction" when you temporally decouple energy/satiation from eating like that.
Also, even beyond the metabolic end-products, you just need to feed the bacteria. They sequester heavy metals from your diet, they produce the entire suite of B vitamins and most of the essential amino acids, they produce the precursors for endogenous benzodiazepine receptor ligands, they deconjugate your steroid hormones to help Chadify you. Be good to them!
I was finally able to consistently add fiber to my diet when I started thinking of my gut bacteria as a kind of pet. I don't forget to feed the fish, can't forget to feed to feed my gut fish either. Gotta throw some food for them on my plate each day.
Yeah.
I could assume that indicators of body conditions are good but not perfect.
So if I like fries, does this phenomenon work if you part-fry them, then refrigerate them, then fry them the rest of the way?
Most of the calories in fries comes from the oil in them.
Great question! I also like fries. Probably it works? But I don't know, and I don't know how good they'd taste then, either. You could experiment with that, at least enough to find out if they can be refried and still taste good.
Aren't most frozen fries at the grocery store exactly this? Partially fried and then quickly frozen, with the intention of being refried or baked?
My experience with them is that they taste fairly good.
If cooking the potato involves baking it in aluminum wrap (tinfoil in the UK), without removing the skin, then it is a Very Bad Idea to leave it, still in its wrap, in a fridge or anywhere for more than a few hours before eating it.
That is because the dirt inevitably left on the skin, in little eyes for example, can harbor anaerobic bacteria, whose spores will not all be killed by the cooking, and these can breed under the wrap and release botulinum toxin!
So, the cost of avoiding this is low enough that sure, go ahead and do it, but this also sounds very much like one of the things that is technically a risk, but not nearly a high enough one for anyone to actually worry about.
This category, for me, encompasses the vast majority of food-borne illness concerns in the US.
There is not "correct" risk tolerance level, so I will not judge anyone for the actions they take to mitigate any particular risk. But I do think that the rhetoric around food-borne illnesses, _especially_ in home cooking environments, does not actually match the risk level and how your average person chooses to deal with most every day risks.
Who the heck cooks potatoes before washing them first, though? I've seen some talk online about not washing vegetables, which makes me go "What the heck, do you not know they come out of the ground? WASH YOUR VEGETABLES, YES EVEN THE ONES THAT COME FROM THE GROCERY STORE IN WRAPPERS".
I agree that you shouldn't leave baked potatoes lying around in tinfoil in the fridge, but mostly because cold baked potato doesn't taste good.
I've seen reports of botulinum poisoning from baked potatoes (in the US) and could never understand how this occured -- the "left wrapped in foil" (which would increase moisture) explains it partially but I still don't understand the spores surviving the heat, considering that temperatures of about 120C are sufficient to kill the spores and potatoes are typically baked in 180-200 degrees. Even if wrapped in foil, the temperature on the surface under the foil should be well above 120C.
One thing worth noting in this discussion is that you are almost certainly undercooking your baked potatoes. 350F (180C) for an hour is way too short for optimal tastiness. I usually bake potatoes for 425F (220 C) for two hours, providing an excellent taste and crunch to the skin and an excellent fluffiness to the flesh. I've heard of foodies who use 525F (275C), albeit for not quite as long, because it's basically impossible to overcook baked potatoes in home ovens. Knowing this commentariat someone is certainly going to object to this for some reason, but honestly try it yourself.
The tastiest method by far is to bury the spuds in glowing coals and let the skin char to a burned shell. Crack that open, the inside is divine.
I'd do around 200C in a fan oven (translating to 220 for no-fan) for about 1.5hrs for bigger ones, less for smaller ones. I agree that higher temps work better for optimal crunch but I think many people would use lower thus my estimate in the original comment. And never in foil, for taste reasons.
Looking it up, it seems the spores can survive being baked. The problem happens if you leave the baked potatoes cool down to between room temperature to 60 degrees Celsius and leave them sitting around; that's when the spores germinate and produce the toxins. Either eat the baked potatoes straight away, or put any you didn't eat into the fridge to cool them down soon:
http://www.bccdc.ca/resource-gallery/Documents/Educational%20Materials/EH/FPS/Food/BakedPotatoesandFoodborneBotulismJan2014.pdf
"Why the concern with baked potatoes?
Baked potatoes that have been wrapped in foil have been linked to cases of botulism. Clostridium botulinum spores can survive the baking process and the foil wrap seals the potato preventing oxygen from being present. In this environment, and at the right temperature, spores on the potato can germinate and grow - producing their deadly toxin. Several cases of foodborne botulism caused by foil wrapped baked potatoes have occurred including a large outbreak in 1994 in Texas. In that outbreak, 30 people were affected.
How can this be prevented?
After baking foil wrapped potatoes, never leave the potatoes at room temperature or in a warming oven set below 60°C. These are the conditions that will allow the spores to germinate and grow. To prevent this from happening:
make sure the potatoes are eaten within 2 hours of being cooked,
or keep the potatoes at 60°C or hotter,
or refrigerate the potatoes within 2 hours of being cooked"
So it IS the wrapping! I think the Texas case is what I read in my botulism paranoid moment...
Wrapping, which causes the anaerobic environment, and then keeping the food at a temperature the bacteria like (not too hot, not too cold, just right to grown and produce toxin).
Doctors and molecular biologists use autoclaves largely because temperatures of 120C don't kill spores without steam and another atmosphere of pressure.
Thank you, I didn't know that BOTH the pressure and the 120C+ is needed -- I thought the pressure cooker guidance for low acid home preserving was to ensure the correct temperature (impossible to boil anything > 100C without extra pressure).
But perhaps the key to the riskiness is "in tinfoil" -- maybe the skin of a wrapped potato never actually reaches the 120, as it remains moist under the foil. Thus, bare skin potato baked at 180 should be ok to store esp in the fridge -- tho old baked potatoes are pretty inedible anyway, so this conversation is likely to be entirely moot practically, if factually enlightening.
Autoclaving: My understanding of how it works agrees with yours. The high temperature is needed to kill the spores; the high pressure is needed to reach the high temperature, but doesn't play a direct role in sterilization. (I would be happy to be corrected on this if it's wrong.)
Potatoes: speculating wildly here, but there could be a steep temperature gradient from just above the surface to just below the surface, even if the potatoes are baked without tinfoil. Under the right conditions, this might be steep enough that spores never reach the temperature required to kill them. But I don't have a good intuition for whether this sort of phenomenon is merely "possible in principle" or "commonly occuring in practice."
Only "foil baked potatoes" are mentioned as a hazard, presumably because wrapping creates anaerobic (or at least low oxygen - maybe anaerobic enough locally in potato hollows?) conditions needed for the bacteria to multiply during a period of storage in suitably warm temperatures and also likely to maintain optimal moisture. On a dry and unwrapped potato, even if viable spores remain and even if it is left in optimally warm temperature, presumably not all necessary conditions are fulfilled.
But the steep gradient hypothesis is also possible: obviously a crust of charred skin gives way only a millimetre or so in to what's largely a not completely dried out starch. There might be some spores lurking there still in the beautiful fluffiness waiting for their chance potato is left to languish in overheated kitchen instead of being eaten quickly or refrigerated. On the other hand, I am aware of a common practice of precooking of baked potatoes in cafes etc to be then briefly reheated (or crisped up?) before serving and I've never heard of a botulism case thus acquired: the foil seems to be crucial here (I don't believe in perfect storage always). So, I'd go with "possible in principle but extremely unlikely in practice". But will also poke my next baked potato with thermometer at various stages and locations. For science.
For potatoes, low acid home preserving opens another can of worms, or in this case a can of anaerobic bacteria! They should never be bottled or canned with just boiling water. One should use either extra vinegar, to bring the PH down to around 4 (from memory), or pressure canning.
Does anyone actually preserve potatoes by canning? Considering they keep pretty well for months as they are in cool dark places? Also, pickled potatoes anyone?? (It's 4.6 pH iirc, that's why tomatoes are borderline).
Thanks. I don't wrap potatoes in alum. foil; I find their skins are enough to keep them from drying out unless I overbake them. I am concerned as to whether the skins are especially rich in pesticides.
Potato skins are naturally rich in the pesticide solanine, at far greater dosages than any pesticide applied by humans, and it doesn't wash off. Even then, it's only problematic in high quantites. Solanine is higher in some varieties than others, and worse in potatoes that have been exposed to light in storage. Solanine is why you shouldn't eat green potatoes. Solanine isn't green, but chlorophyll is, and because of light exposure chlorophyll presence correlates with solanine presence.
According to this guy, probably a lot (ctrl+f potato)
https://stephenskolnick.substack.com/p/the-thousand-secret-ways-the-food
Does that apply uniquely to potatoes? Also I'm not sure everyone on the potato diet cools potatoes before eating them.
> In all cases, the number of "calories" listed on the nutritional info for a potato is a large over-estimate. Those "calories" are what you get out of a potato by burning it with fire, not how many you get from eating it.
I wonder to how many ingredients that applies.
> Does that apply uniquely to potatoes?
I remember reading, that this also happens with other starch-rich foods, like rice or pasta.
> I wonder to how many ingredients that applies.
I remember, that calorie-labels are really inaccurate in general from SH-video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-un1wDKqE8A
I think I've seen it said of pasta recently. But I often leave cooked pasta dishes in the fridge, and their digestibility doesn't seem to change dramatically - at least not in any aspect of which I am aware. (Same goes for potatoes, actually, though I leave those less often in the fridge.)
The Raigond+Singh article linked to above mentions many specific vegetables, tho often without quantitative information.
Nice, have you read "Catching Fire" by Richard Wrangham?
No, but I just read its ad copy, and it sounds like a plausible partial explanation of human evolution.
As someone who has cobbled together a few prototypes, I love the homeliness of the Automated Land Acknowledger. It’s probably what the original Amazon Echo looked like. ‘Hey, it’s not for the market, it’s proof of concept!’ Those highly visible Torx heads are just great.
Edit Oh wait, those appear to be hex heads, even better!
Does anyone here miss / does anyone here think it would be feasible to maintain an omegle-style chatroom targeted at rats? I have fond memories of exchanging ideas on omegle, using the shared interests option. I'd love to have a similar thing with a significant amount of rat users.
Since, despite being profitable, omegle closed down due to legal risks, I expect no rationalist would want to create a clone
An online ratroom?
E: the ACX subreddit tried to get a 1-on-1 voicechat thing going: https://coffeehouse.chat/acx
I understand that's not quite what you're looking for
Gosh, I just tried it out. My adrenaline started pumping already when I *contemplated* pressing start, and my adrenaline seemingly only kept increasing after I pressed start, and the screen read to wait for a match. When the sound of my pulse pounding over my ears became too loud, I think this was after 20 agonizing seconds, I pressed "end".
I'd wish there was a function to see how many people are even using it, so that you may have some clue about how long you're likely to wait. It's nice to match quickly, I feel. Part of the appeal is exactly that. the spontaneity of it.
oh but its pretty close. 1-on-1 voicechat with a *random* ACX reader. I feel like it's a minor difference, whether it's typed or spoken. Thank you! It did surprise me that it didnt seem to be a thing, so I figured that it probably was and I just didn't know of it...
I mean they are quite social animals, awfully cruel to keep them alone in a cage.
I would find a chatroom about the extermination and the practical control of rats to be helpful. My neighbor is a hoarder, and his yard is full of food waste that supports a vibrant colony of rats. Neither my city nor county health authorities seem willing to address the issue...
...but after rereading your post, I suspect you're talking about the nurturing of pet rats. My bad.
"Rat Control" is a euphemism, they just kill them.
"If someone was making the game less pleasant for me, I just said Avadakedavra regardless of whether that was strategically wise, and they never bothered me again."
-HPMOR, Chapter 108
When I had masonite siding woodpeckers would peck holes big enough for tree rats - squirrels - to get into my attic. I had to call a service to trap them a couple times. They said they released the live trapped squirrels somewhere ‘upstate.’
> omegle-style chatroom targeted at rats
off-topic but sometimes this community's chosen label can be amusingly confusing.
For me, too, especially since one of my friends is extremely enthusiastic about her pet rats.
I'm giving a workshop: data analysis for software engineering workshop on 22 June
Register here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/data-analysis-for-software-engineers-tickets-896080399597
The material is based around my book Evidence-based Software Engineering which discusses what is currently known about software engineering, based on an analysis of all the publicly available data pdf+code+all data freely available here: http://knosof.co.uk/ESEUR/
Slides I used from previous workshops
https://github.com/Derek-Jones/ESEUR-workshop
There is an annoying practice among rationalists that I may be misinterpreting, but looks to me like a huge, huge fallacy: what you might call the "everyone knows" effect. Common sterotypes and popular assumptions are often just assumed to be true with virtually no questioning. Very much out of touch with what I take the whole rationalist project to be, and yet I feel like I see it all the time around here. Some examples:
1. The existence of "nerds" as a coherent thing, along with similar groups ("jocks" and so on). One would think that a rationalist community would, more than any other, insist before using such terms on clearly defining them, and then clearly establishing with evidence that these are meaningful categories that describe large numbers of people and are socially and statistically useful. That's something I basically never see. These sterotypes are thrown around without the slightest questioning of their accuracy or even meaning, just assumed to exist because "everyone knows" they do.
2. That the present is very, very special. More special and more important than any other time in history. This drives me up the wall, what with almost the complete lack of anyone actually questioning this and asking "is this actually true, or are we just expressing the common bias of thinking we're unique?" It's not that people think the present is special after carefully questioning it, it's that (apart from AI, where there is a fair amount of this questioning) it's not really questioned at all. Over and over, "everyone knows" that technological change happens faster than it ever has before, that social change happens faster than it ever has before, that society and the values of everyday life are more different than they ever have been before. I think those claims actually appear to be false (e.g. technological progress has slowed down, social upheaval is certainly nothing like the mid 20th century) but even if not, the key is that they're not *questioned*, as least as far as I've seen.
3. Political groupings. This one is, admittedly, done by absolutely everyone, including me. That doesn't stop it being irrational. The "leftists" and "rightists" we all refer to are not most people; most ordinary people (as opposed to politicians and prolific online commenters) don't have the same clusters of opinions at all. I catch myself making this fallacy constantly, but I think I still do it less than many rationalists. And then there are the really stupid claims like "women are almost all progressive/woke" that are refuted by literally spending five seconds looking at a single exit poll. Yes I know people think less clearly when politics is involved, but honestly rationalists can stand to do a bit better.
There isn't really a clear point to all this. I'm just pointing out some sloppy thinking that we should be more aware of, and that rationalists should maybe try to not make the same lazy biases as random people on the street.
#2 might benefit from some examples, because as is it seems to me like it's conflating a few different things. "Special" in what way? As far as I've seen the main way rationalists treat the present as special is in the area of AI, which as you yourself say isn't really taken for granted, the arguments are made in both directions pretty thoroughly I would say.
The other areas you mention are technological change, which ends up being heavily tied back to the question of AI, and social upheaval, where as I see it the idea that the present has a uniquely large amount is a misconception in the general zeitgeist that rationalists are less likely to buy into rather than more.
And on a broad historical level it's objectively true that modern society is completely unprecedented in a lot of important ways. No other civilization in history has had a population as large, as rich, or as literate as ours, or even really come close.
2. I'm not sure what time range you mean by the present, but I'd argue that the past two centuries are very, very special in human history.
- Child mortality: Before the 19th century, seeing multiple of your children pass away was the norm. The likelihood of a child living to age 5 was perhaps 25% at its lowest. This number rate dramatically in the past two centuries due to factors such as sanitation, antibiotics, and nutrition. For example, in the United States in 2021, the rate of under-5 mortality was 6.5 in 1,000.
- Agriculture: Starting in the early 20th century, food availability dramatically increased, largely due to mechanized agriculture, high-yield cultivars, and chemical fertilizers (Green Revolution). We used to be limited by the agricultural output of traditional farming methods on arable land, which resulted in a lower population ceiling, since when population growth exceeds available agricultural output, there is famine.
In terms of the past few years, regardless of whether or not technological progress has slowed down, the Internet has fundamentally changed how people work, make friends, find romantic partners, receive news, and acquire new ideas. Maybe this is a larger story in the development of long distance communication (https://eververdant.substack.com/p/telegraphic-cyberspace), but online social media in particular seems like a unique historical invention.
I think the internet is a small change compared to industrialization, modern medicine, electricity, etc.
But AI has the potential to be a large change compared to all of those.
True, but within the past few decades, the Internet is one of the most unique changes
Rationalists are an elite community, with more egalitarian-minded and permissive subgroups. It's built on a tacit understanding that intelligence and curiosity matter, and sadly are unevenly distributed in the population in a currently intractable way (nootropic efforts failed and would have worked better on smarter people anyway).
IQ is a serious effort to measure intelligence, and Scott goes into the also-sad complexities of measuring it on this post: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-mystery-of-internet-survey-iqs
It would be extremely inefficient if every proof had to begin from axioms. It is not unreasonable to start from shared knowledge, and to question as needed. As to the specific points
(1) This is likely a generational thing, with these categories being less coherent in the younger generations.
(2) Most of the points are in fact true about the present, but were also true about most 'presents' over the past 400 years. Most rationalists can accept this without calling the present 'special'
(3) Many of the readers here identify as 'gray tribe' and thus I would think are aware that most people fall cleanly in the divide. I think this might be an observability bias at play. When 2 grey tribes have a discussion, they are more likely to do so without mentioning groupings. When one of the leftist or rightist commenters starts posting, it inevitably leads responders to use this dichotomy.
With regard to #1, how would we go about knowing "Black people" is a meaningful category? Of course I'm not trying to defend the use of stereotypes about black people, but like, you seem to have an issue with treating some groups as actual meaningful existent categories.
Kind of, yes. I guess I'm a very strong individualist, and categorising people based on their race always disgusts me. And I just would have thought there'd be more of that individualism here (there probably is, but not enough for me).
Well to take a step back from "categorizing people" to "categorizing things," there are a lot of rationalist essays about the problems of categorization and how all categories are fuzzy. Another commenter has already mentioned "A Human's Guide to Words," which has a lot of essays about this topic.
All of *my* qualms about "categorizing people" come from the general issue of "categorizing things." But, I get the impression that *your* qualms about "categorizing people" come from your being a very strong individualist. Are you treating people as very unique, in their ineffable un-categorizability? Or are you more like me, also averse to "categorizing things?" How do you feel about "fruits" or "vegetables?"
You might like _Dark Witness_ by Ralph Wiley-- he refers to people as "black" and "white" to indicate that he doesn't take the categories seriously. He's also a very good writer, strongly influenced by Mark Twain.
I think #1 is taken for granted because so many Rationalists have self-identified as such for so long. There's a ton of overlap between that term and their interests, so it seems redundant to talk about it and reaffirm it as a real thing. I haven't heard Rationalists talk about Jocks at all, so I don't think I can comment on that.
#2 I totally see a lot. Especially comments about how crazy current day things are, from people who apparently don't appreciate how quiet and calm modern society is compared to what our parents or grandparents experienced. If you were alive between 1950 and 1990 you witnessed two attempted assassinations of sitting American presidents, one of which was successful, and also the killing of a major party's candidate during an election season (to list one example of potentially dozens that would be huge if still happening). If you lived in the 40 years before that, you got TWO world wars and a hundred million people killed out of 2 billion alive in 1939.
I don't think this is a specific failing of Rationalists, but certainly one that they don't seem to do better with than anyone else. I blame the group trending very young, and young people's general tendency to not think about the past as much.
Agreed with #1. I don't know if Jocks are a thing, but I *know* that Nerds are.
On 1 and 3.
If you haven't read humans guide to words perhaps that answers some of your issues.
Do you think there are correlations between "nerdy interests" say mtg and math and DND?
Do you think there are correlations between "rightwing opinions" say anti abortion and anti immigrant, pro gun?
> Do you think there are correlations between "rightwing opinions" say anti abortion and anti immigrant, pro gun?
There is a very low correlation between a person's opinion on abortion and their opinion on immigration: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40806-015-0036-2
While they don't break down the data, the religious cluster (abortion, homosexuality, etc) and the racial cluster (affirmative action, immigration, etc) have a correlation of just .14 for the general population in the 2004-2014 period.
Correlations maybe, but even if there are it's an enormous mistake to start treating these groups as two distinct separate ones, instead of as dozens of clusters with certain patterns of overlap.
However, rethinking it I'm not sure if 3 is irrational at all. I maintain that large numbers of people don't fit at all into these boxes, BUT there's an argument that since politicians and parties usually do, then in a democracy *all* people who have either voted them in or passively allowed them to be voted in have in some sense endorsed those clusters, and can be fairly treated as part of distinct categories. If they don't want that, they should do more swing voting or third party voting for God's sake. So there are arguments both ways there.
But on 1, I maintain that this is pretty absurd. And no I'm not convinced that there *are* such significant correlations outside of fiction and self-selected online subcultures. I don't think I've personally known anyone who fully fits a "nerd" sterotype (though I haven't known that many people). One guy at school was obsessed with Lord of the Rings and was very socially awkward, and he was also a fundamentalist Christian and terrible at math. Another person I know was in intoverted atheist and participated in international science competitions but was also a (baseball or softball I think?) player. And these are the two people I can think of who are closest to the nerd stereotype, and still diverge from it. I'd be highly surprised if these nuances aren't found in most people in the real world.
(Also, nerd interests are as contradictory as political positions: I will never understand why the same kind of people who like science also supposedly like Star Wars, literally the most unscientific of all well-known "science fiction" ever made, with a universe that breaks scientific laws everywhere and literally runs on religion and magic. This is as bewildering as feminism correlating with being pro-Islam, but without the excuse of having a political party to publically defend. And I'm not convinced it's actually true.
I can see Magic the Gathering, being a complicated system of rules just like math or programming. But what I can't see is why that would be a more (rather than less) nerdy interest than chess or bridge or Diplomacy. Has anyone examined the truth and/or coherence of these stereotypes?)
On 2 the relevant search term is most important century hypothesis, and it has been argued a bunch eg
https://www.cold-takes.com/most-important-century/
I've NEVER IN MY LIFE came across "nerds" as a social group or community or... anything really. Neither, not really, "jocks".
I've always assumed that it's because I grew up and lived my early 20s in a very different culture, political system and economy in the late 80s/90s and thus these terms, clearly originating in American teenager culture, were limited geographically and culturally. Your comment rises an interesting possibility that these concepts are cultural/figurative in nature and don't refer to any actually existing groups.
I grew up in a small town in Michigan and these seemed like very accurate descriptions of various groups of people at my high school. E.g. the nerds (myself included) would go to a LAN party every weekend and play M:TG together and those interests were basically the defining features of the group, from which nobody with the was ever excluded to my memory.
Who do you think are rationalists? People in this comments section? Because the supermajority of them aren't. Do you have some examples of this to link to?
Yes. I am partially thinking of the commenters here (but almost always the first 2 attitudes I mentioned I see from the self-described rationalist commenters specifically), but Scott has done at least the first several times, here (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/25/why-no-science-of-nerds/) where he basically *almost* says the science doesn't really support a lot of the stereotype but we all know it's true anyway, and also Contra Kriss on Nerds (I think that's what it's called but going through Substack archives is a nightmare) where he says things like "aren't nerds and sports fans natural enemies?" as if this bizarrely specific sociological claim doesn't require evidence. It's a weird lapse from Scott's usual methodical evidence-based approach when he does this armchair sociology, and the same with politics but that's much less bad because literally everyone does it, plus he interacts with an obviously biased sample (living in SF), plus maybe it's defensible anyway (see my reply to Oskar).
2 is actually quite a different kind of thing that I probably shouldn't have lumped with these.
> he basically *almost* says the science doesn't really support a lot of the stereotype but we all know it's true anyway,
I think you misread. Scott says:
>> A scientific study of nerds might begin by asking: why do all of these things go together in the popular imagination, form a single category?
And then immediately suggests the null hypothesis of "all traits are actually uncorrelated, any 9 or whatever dimensional grouping would have this proportion in the population. This is not claiming that nerds are real and we must find them, but that nerds are potentially an artifact about popular imagination. This does not say, at all that Scott assumes in the existence of nerds as a population subgroup, just in the existence of nerd as a category in popular imagination.
In the Kriss post, he's responding to the popular imagination conception of nerds and operating on that, not on actual population level categories of them. It would work as a post even if nerds were not a thing, because it's a statement about how hypothetical versions of nerds and the concept of nerdiness would relate to each other.
I think this can be resolved if you quote and cite a specific point from that post that you think is fundamentally dependent on nerds existing as a sociological class and not as a concept that Americans have and can have intuitions on.
Not sure whether this addresses your point or ignores it, but lot of generalization people make become much more true if you prepend them with "terminally online [group] within a couple of degrees of separation of my cluster".
I think this might be an "everyone" thing and that rationalists may be less vulnerable to that but still vulnerable. It might also be that some things are very hard to define and when you try to go into them you're just zooming into a fractal.
It was Scott I think that had something about when you replace black and white by shades of gray, sometimes you go from two categories to just one and lose predictive power. I may be misremembering. But as an example, someone that self-identifies as a "nerd" can give you a better idea of how they lived their childhood/adolescence, more than just knowing it's a person. Same thing for leftist and rightist. I feel like there's a shared assumption that statistics work but also that people are individuals and multifaceted.
There's also this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson's_paradox
> It was Scott I think that had something about when you replace black and white by shades of gray, sometimes you go from two categories to just one and lose predictive power.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dLJv2CoRCgeC2mPgj/the-fallacy-of-gray
Thanks!
That's a valid point and I see it. But for one thing I wish there was more self-aware acknowledgement that simplifications are being done, to avoid slipping into bad thought patterns that take the simplifications as fact. And for another, I'm not sure the possible gain in ability to talk about vague concepts is worth the harm from both confused collectivist thinking and from manipulation. The collapsing of people into categories is a tool of extremists everywhere, and it's particularly one of the most insidious things about woke people, in my opinion, the way they bully people who agree with them on one thing to support other things that have nothing whatsoever to do with the first thing. And this is basically only made at all possible by using vague and totalising categories like "left" or "progressive" to artificially string unrelated and often outright contradictory positions together.
Dropping the categories entirely would make that difficult, wouldn't it?
Are you sure rationalists haven't checked these at all, or have you just not found where they did it? "I can tolerate anything but the out group" (SSC post) does some examination on 3 and sort of 1, I've seen the argument made in 2 made via graphs and statistics, etc
Sometimes, yes, but most of the time they're assumed not by citing something or saying "this has been established previously", but just assumed in a way that comes across as "everyone knows".
I've read the Outgroup essay quite a few times and remember stuff about partisan *loyalties* but not actual clusters of positions. I think I've seen things like most people disagree with many or most of the positions of their party, even as they're loyal to it.
As for 1 are you referring to the Jewish sterotypes thing?
Release from Deception is an astonishing Baroque statue. How can that extremely realistic fishing net be made from marble? I think the total effect is kind of cluttered with so many symbols, but the details are *so* good.
It's also an allegorical statue, but the allegory isn't completely clear. Is it escaping from illusion, or escaping from sin?
To my mind, the most interesting thing symbolically is that getting out of the net takes initiative from the man and also help from the angel.
There's the obvious point that it's about escape from illusion, but the statue itself is an incredible illusion.
I thought there would be more about this online, but I haven't found it. Surely there's an academic identifying the exact kind of fishing net. Spanish? Italian? Has anyone tried replicating the net in rope?
https://www.boredpanda.com/marble-sculpture-net-francesco-queirolo-release-from-deception/
Basic intro, pictures of details
https://www.ancient-origins.net/artifacts-other-artifacts/il-disinganno-0016784
Nice little video of details, somewhat about carving marble
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sL0e2mXnVsM&ab_channel=PropagandaWar
Too much glop in the commentary, but good close-ups and some more sculpture by Francesco Queirolo.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPpjtGQVjCU
This is genuinely weird-- an astronomical/astrological/symbolic analysis attempting to demonstrate (I think) that knowledge of the heavens is more important than earthly life. It gets into detail about oddities of the biblical references in the book (also carved from marble) at the bottom, and details about references to the time of year and which constellations are visible when, and the symbolic importance of constellations being visible from one hemisphere at a time.
https://www.persee.fr/doc/inter_1164-6225_1993_num_4_1_925
Mostly about Raimundo di Sangro, who commissioned this, the chapel it's in and which also has a number of other virtuoso sculptures. He was also interested in quipu, Incan knotted rope recirds.
There's somewhat about Cesare Ripa's Iconologia, a handbook of signs, symbols, and allegorical images.
He built a chapel, but it was more of an Enlightenment chapel than a Catholic chapel. Or at least a mixture, neither fully Catholic (though not in any sense anti-Catholic) nor exactly pure Enlightenment. Every now and then you get a rich person who does something uniquely interesting.
Looks like the same place has some of those veiled statues where it's really hard to believe they don't have cloth over them, too.
Yes, and a lot of them were combined images of virtues and Raimundo's family members.
Amazing statue! Is it made from one piece of marble? Unbelievable that it's even possible to create the body of the subject underneath the net, which must be very fragile.
I do know some things about rope and knots though.
Picture of my attempt: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VwEJ8pfSi7ITV5UV9Jn1v6TqJEKSxMo2/view?usp=sharing
The net in the statue is made from a right-hand laid three-strand rope, which doesn't narrow anything down very much as this was the dominant rope construction for basically all time up until the 50ies/60ies/70ies, when braided rope slowly started taking over. Braided rope is used in almost all serious use-cases nowadays, but laid rope is still cheaper and universally available, and often used for ornamental purposes. Knitting yarn and sewing thread is still laid. I had to dig deep to find some for the picture :)
The net is constructed from rows of Sheet-Bends (also known as Bowline, Weavers Knot, Becket Hitch or many other names depending on context and region). The rows alternate, one row displaying the front of the knot, the next showing the backside. The knots are all the same chirality, implying that the tyer is right-handed (or left-handed but learned to tie the knot in the typically right-handed fashion), and upon completing a row turned the net over and kept tying the knot with the same hand-movement, rather than letting the net stay still, and tying the knots differently on the new row going the other direction (in that case it seems more likely that the tyer would ty the knots with the front pointing in the same direction, but opposite chirality. The hand-movements are more smilar that way.). This in turns implies that the net is small enough to be readily handled, such that it is easier to turn the net over than to switch method. But it is readily possible to ty the knot in any orientation and/or chirality, so the above doesn't apply to a skilled tyer with a specific result in mind.
This is all the information I'm able to glean from the pictures, and unfortunately this doesn't narrow things down much: The same rope-construction and knots have been used for thousands of years across the globe to make nets. I've personally seen fishermen (and fisherwomen, though more commonly a fisherman's wife or daughter) sitting on the dock repairing nets of this same description in places as disparate as Norway, Trinidad & Tobago, Scotland, Portugal, Cape Town, northern Sweden, British Columbia, Spain, Greenland, New Zealand etc, etc, etc.
It's simply the easiest and best way to make a net, from the most basic type of rope. Take a close look at whatever net you see next: It is quite likely to have the same construction, though most modern nets are woven by machines, and do more and more use other techniques impractical to use by hand.
Thank you for sharing your knot knowledge!
I use double sheet bends on a semi-regular basis, and still failed to recognize them. :-)
Thank you, I was just assuming there were distinctive local styles of fishnets, but maybe there really is one best way to make them.
Not an unreasonable assumption at all, and I'm sure there are places that do it differently. Knot-tying is rather unique among crafts in that it is mathematically precise, as a knot consisting of a certain set of under-over crossings can only be exactly one shape, and there is a finite number of simple knots for accomplishing any given task. Hence the mathematical field of Knot Theory. Compare and contrast to pottery, or indeed statue-sculpting, or most other crafts, where you can never re-create exactly the same piece twice. This means that there often is one, and exactly one, best knot for a given situation, and also means that the same set of simple, useful knots have been discovered independently by many cultures all across the globe. Knots can of course become infinitely complex, and for traditions of complex knot-tying, like Crochet, complicated knitting patterns, the more decorative traditions of seamen, etc, we do find distinct traditions and methods that can be traced back. But not, typically, for tying fishing nets.
Another craft that is not mathematically precise like that is rope-making: If there was a sample of the actual rope, a competent archeologist could probably tell you more. Can it be carbon-dated? How was the fibers prepared for rope-making? Is it made from sisal, hemp, cotton or something more exotic? Etc.
Alas, I know of only one net made from marble.
Thanks for inspiring me to dig into this! I'd love to answer questions, though any expertise I posses that's relevant here only extends to ropes, lines and general seamanship.
Okay, your astronomy person is wrong when she gabbles "There is no book in the Bible called Sophia". Well no, there's not, because that is translated "Wisdom" and is the Book of the Wisdom of Solomon. It's included in the Catholic canon of the Old Testament and relegated to the Apocrypha by the Protestants. Stop trying to do "Aha I have found Secret Mystic Divine Feminine Freemason Wicca Hidden References" *before* you've done your basic homework?
For Catholics, even 18th century Freemason Catholics, there's nothing of "oddities of the Biblical references" in referencing the Book of Wisdom because, duh, we're not Protestants and don't usually follow their re-ordering of the Bible.
Also, she's confusing the three separate references into one, when she's doing the translation from Latin to English:
(1) "Vincula tua disrumpum/I will break your bonds" corresponds to Nahum 1:13 "13 For now will I break his yoke from off thee, and will burst thy bonds in sunder."
(2) "Vinculas tenebrarum et longae noctis quibus es compeditus"/The chains of darkness and long nights with which you are bound then goes along with Wisdom 22: 2 EXCEPT this is the interesting one, there aren't 22 chapters in Wisdom; if we go for Wisdom 2:22 instead we get "And they knew not the secrets of God, nor hoped for the wages of justice, nor esteemed the honour of holy souls."
The correct reference is Wisdom 17: 2 "2 For while the wicked thought to be able to have dominion over the holy nation, they themselves being fettered with the bonds of darkness, and a long night, shut up in their houses, lay there exiled from the eternal providence." (Thanks to this website for putting me on the right track: https://aleteia.org/2024/03/16/astonishingly-beautiful-sculpture-rich-with-scriptural-meaning/)
(3) "Ut non cum hoc mundo damneris"/That you may not be damned with this world" relates to 1: Corinthians 11: 32 "32 But when we are judged by the Lord, we are disciplined so that we may not be condemned along with the world."
So I'm not very impressed that (a) she refers the view to Nahum 1:8 when it's clearly verse 13, in order that she can crowbar in a reference to Nineveh (b) the bit about "if we reverse 'Nineveh' that gives us 'in heaven'" - oh boy. The people here are not speaking English, it's Latin and Italian. If we reverse Nineveh in English we get "heven-in" but I don't think that works for Italian (c) she shuffles the cards to make it "There is no book of the Bible called Wisdom" and then drags in Pistis Sophia as a red herring (d) she tries crowbarring in again the celestial rather than the terrestrial globe that is in the sculpture, all part of her "reverse it, reverse it!" to get the hidden message so she can then gallop off on her star chart mystic wisdom hoo-hah.
Thanks. She seemed rather giddy, but not as bad as some.
What do you think of release from sin vs. release from illusion?
I think "why not both?" but mainly that this was a rich 18th century Italian politician and nobleman who had nothing better to do than Conspicuous Consumption and ordered the most up to date amazing art for his family church, pile on the impressiveness and turn it up to eleven, oh yeah here's a list of symbolism if you can include it because I want to impress my friends and more importantly my rivals with how Cultured and Erudite I am, kthxbai.
Humans are pattern matchers par excellence, so while I think there is deliberate symbolism there, I think it's also easy to get into pyramid inch territory as with the cosmic heavens lassie. See the error with the engraving being Wisdom 22 when it should be Wisdom 17, that's the kind of small mistake made by working off "the client wants this added in" and you don't check it because heck, I'm a sculptor not a clergyman, if he says this is what he wants then this is what he gets.
Wow! That's fabulous! I never heard of this sculpture before. Thanks for posting!
It's very impressive. I'm hoping to get some discussion.
It's extremely impressive, the Italians were justly famous for being able to work in marble like nobody else, it's why the rich Britons took so much art and statuary home with them after the Grand Tour.
I just posted about a new macroeconomic model relating inflation and supply constraints. I interpret it as support for my interpretation of what the Fed should and largely _did_ do in response to the COVID 19 supply shock in 2021-2022. I’d be grateful for comments here or even better on the Substack itself.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-145235739?source=queue
nit: possible typo in the url??
Thanks
I have no idea if this was covered in the rootclaim debate or elsewhere, but the NY Times has a new article up on why the virus was most likely a lab leak. It's by Alina Chan, who is a molecular biologist at Harvard/MIT's Broad Institute. Unfortunately the infographic is terrible, but there are little progress bubbles on the side and you have to scroll through them before progressing.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/06/03/opinion/covid-lab-leak.html
Rather than calling it an article, I'd call it an opinion piece by someone who is extremely biased. I didn't read the whole thing, but most of her talking points have been disproved or contradicted by other experts (over and over again). But like any good conspiracy theorist, she weaves together a stilted narrative of facts and fictions to reveal a darker truth. :-)
Counterpoint: It's absurd to take a collection of data which you _know_ has been heavily curated by an interested party who doesn't want their guilt to be established, and then use the remaining data they allowed you to have to conclude that party is not actually guilty.
As China still refuses to come clean on what exactly was going on in the Wuhan lab, all people of good faith are required to conclude that the disease leaked from the lab and act accordingly.
That's basically the thinking that led to the Iraq War in 2003. It turned out that Saddam Hussein did not, in fact, restart his WMD programs. But he didn't want inspectors to discover that fact, and the U.S. acted accordingly.
Maybe waiting to find a smoking gun - whether in favor of lab leak or in favor of animal spillover - makes more sense that making decisions based off incomplete information.
Or, even better, maybe we just use this as an opportunity to increase lab safety, whether it came from an animal spillover or not?
The thing is, WMDs were just rhetoric -- the point was a neoconservative theory that if a democratic state was implanted in the Arab Middle East that would fix terrorism, and the WMD threat was just the excuse to do it. (to say it out loud, of course the theory didn't work out!)
Anyway I'm totally fine with increasing lab safety, but I'm not fine with just blindly accepting a curated narrative from known bad actors as so many want to do.
So why would Saddam Hussein not let UN inspectors look wherever they wanted, if he actually didn't have secret chemical weapons facilities?
The people at the time reasoned that, as Iraq refuses to come clean about its chemical weapons facilities, all people of good faith are required to conclude that he's hiding secret chemical weapon production and act accordingly.
But hey, maybe George Bush and others knew better, but why would Tony Blair go along with it? He wasn't a neoconservative. I'm pretty sure his party was called "Labour", not something you often associate with reactionary conservativism.
I assume it was a bluff Hussein thought was politically and/or emotionally valuable, and he didn't realize how risky it was.
"Neoconservative" is not in fact a synonym for "reactionary conservative"; it refers to former centrist liberals who moved to the right over national security issues. I'm wondering if you were alive back then, as this is a fairly basic point about the politics of the time.
I have to give the lab leak proponents a lot of slack. To conclude covid has a zoonotic origin requires overcoming:
A. The huge, glaring coincidence that the coronavirus breakout happened in the same city as the biggest virology lab in the eastern hemisphere, which also was studying coronaviruses.
B. There actually was a conspiracy by Fauci, the NIH, virologists et al to dismiss the possibility of lab leak because it would cause backlash to their work. And they did this before anyone could know the origin of covid.
C. The most compelling evidence in favor of zoonosis is predicated on understanding very high level genetic engineering and virology knowledge, which practically no one is capable of evaluating on their own. So they have to decide which experts to believe, and this goes back to B where a lot of these people lied about the whole issue to begin with.
So yes, at this point it seems pretty certain covid was zoonotic. But there are a lot of reasonable ways people would reach the other conclusion. I really disliked the substack article from the links post, because the intro was just a screed of "how dare you people not believe the science." Which would persuade precisely no one who was leaning lab leak already, and indeed turned off a lot of people in the links thread who otherwise would have learned something. And the guy had a great scientific article explaining the genetic legacy of covid.
Has the zoonotic source of the virus been identified? Wikipedia sez: "No natural reservoir for SARS-CoV-2 has been identified." - but they could be wrong.
If your most compelling evidence "is predicated on understanding very high level genetic engineering and virology knowledge", then I respectfully suggest it may be in the same class as the very sophisticated philosophical arguments for the existence of God.
"We can't understand or even know it," is a very, very different claim from "You people can't understand it because you're laymen."
One of these things is not like the other. There is a wide array of evidence in favor of zoonosis. Read the Philip Markolin article from the May links post. It's just that I would need to be a geneticist/virologist to independently evaluate everything he presented. Philosophy is not the same as viral recombination overwhelmingly targeting the spike protein for adaptive benefit.
There has also never been a virus identified that the WIV could tack a furin cleavage site onto to create covid. The balance of all the other evidence is in favor of zoonosis. But you don't have to take my word for it, Scott has given you the rootclaim debate and the article from the links.
Or the existence of neutrinos.
(After I wrote this response, I realized that I sounded like I was arguing with *you* specifically, Rothwed. My apologies if it came off as if I were attacking your position. I wasn't. The *you* in my response is addressed to any leaker-readers of my post.)
Yes, Wuhan is the home of the WIV, but Wuhan is also the hub of the farmed "wild" animal trade in China. Along with Guangzhou, it's one of the two top transshipment centers for exotic animal products (which has been estimated to be a $70 billion industry). Wuhan, because of its railroad (and now highway) links is the top transshipment point for these products within China — and it's a key industry of Hubei province. (Guangzhou is important in the trade as well, but it's primarily an entrepot for exports and imports of wild animal products).
Within walking distance of Huanan Market, there are commercial abattoirs and meat packing operations, cold storage facilities, plus HQs and offices for corporations involved in the business. When considering the likelihood of an outbreak, Wuhan's leading role in the exotic animal/CTM trade should be factored into the equation, don't you think?
Also, the initial cases were clustered around Huanan wet market district. WIV is on the east side of the Yangtze River and the Huanan Market is on the other side of the river — about 8 miles away as the Horseshoe Bat flies. There were no cases on the WIV side of the river until 2 weeks into the outbreak. If the outbreak were from the lab, you'd expect the cases to be clustered around the homes of the WIV workers, wouldn't you? Of course, a WIV worker could have visited the Huanan Market and spread it there, but then we encounter another problem with that theory...
PCR analysis of the viral samples taken from patients between Dec 2019 and Feb 2020 shows that there were two variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus circulating in the Wuhan area by early December: Type A and Type B. And patients were getting ill with both types in early December. The best estimates suggest that Type B diverged from Type A some time mid-October. So the virus was circulating and happily mutating somewhere — but people weren't getting sick — which suggests to me that it was circulating in an animal population rather than a human population. The first *verified* patient who was subsequently diagnosed with COVID-19 showed up at a Wuhan hospital with unusual pneumonia-like symptoms on 1 Dec 2019 (and this was NOT the mythical lab worker patient, BTW).
So, if you think the lab leak happened, give me an approximate week when you think it was released from the lab and make it work within the context of the genome data for the A and B strains, and the time when people started showing up at hospitals. Both the A and B strains would have to have been leaked from WIV at the same time. Although it's been shown that immune-compromised people can be infected with multiple variants, I don't know of any case histories where a healthy person has been infected with two vars. Even if WIV had multiple strains of SARS2 in their facility what's the likelihood that a lab accident would leak two strains at the same time? The only other explanation is that a worker or workers within the WIV purposely released two variants on their own population (this was Mike Pompeo's crackpot idea that the Murdoch media echoed). Why not release it in Taiwan or on the running dog Americans?
I could go on. But the facts fit a zoonotic origin better than they do a WIV origen.
"Yes, Wuhan is the home of the WIV, but Wuhan is also the hub of the farmed "wild" animal trade in China."
Do you have a source for this? When I looked into the issue 2-3 years ago, I didn't see anything about Wuhan being any sort of hub. Admittedly, I was looking at the actual wild animal trade rather than the farmed "wild" animal trade, but I think it's pretty clear that the ultimate origin story for COVID is with animals that were never farmed. If there is an intermediate, farmed host, that adds another necessary coincidence to the zoonotic hypothesis.
But if Wuhan is indeed a farmed-weird-animal hub, then we're adding one coincidence but maybe taking back half a coincidence.
Well, you've stumped me! I can no longer find the link for the factoid that Wuhan (and Guangzhou) are the two biggest cities involved in China's wild animal trade. I didn't start keeping a list of COVID/SARS2 links and notes until March 2020 — but I remember reading that after the Huanan wet market became the focus as the source of the SARS2 outbreak (Feb 2020?). I vaguely remember that it may have an Economist article, but I'm not finding it with Google. Damn. That's so frustrating!
But Hubei is like the Kansas of China. Lots of domestic and wild animal husbandry. And Wuhan is the capital and the shipping hub for Hubei.
According to Al Jazeera
"One area of Western Hubei alone was home to 290 farms with between 450,000 and 780,000 wild captive-bred animals at the start of the outbreak, according to several official government notices issued early in 2020."
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/8/27/wuhan-facilities-sheds-light-on-chinas-problematic-oversight-of
Another enticing tidbit for you...
If you go to Google Maps and type in "meat packing plants near Wuhan Hubei China" or "meat processing plants near Wuhan Hubei China" you get a big cluster around the district where the Huanan Market is located. I recall there were more at the beginning of the pandemic, though (suggesting that Hubei's crackdown on the wild animal trade may have worked). Some of these are retail outlets, but put in more food-related search terms and you'll see that the west side of the river has lots agriculture-related businesses.
When the possible raccoon dog connection was raised, I did look into that and found that indeed it was farms in Hubei that were shipping raccoon dogs to Wuhan. I didn't see anything about Wuhan being a transshipment point for more distant sales, but I wasn't looking for that and it is certainly plausible.
For the true wild animal trade, as opposed to the farmed exotic animal trade, everything I found pointed to Guangzhou as the hub.
It is I believe reasonably well established that the ultimate origin of SARS CoV-2 was in wild bats in the vicinity of Laos or Hunnan. If the proximal origin is raccoon dogs from a farm in Hubei, then there would need to be a mechanism for getting the virus from infected wild bats near the border to the farm in Hubei that was supplying raccoon dogs to Wuhan's local market. Which is certainly possible, but "why that farm and no place else that we've found?" is a coincidence of the same order as "why Wuhan and not some other city first?"
So all hypotheses still depend on a really weird coincidence. Why, if it's zoonotic, did it make a beeline for the one city in China (or the one farm supplying that city) where it would be seen as a lab leak? Why, if it's artificial, did it make a beeline for the one market in Wuhan where it would be seen as zoonotic?
It was easier when we could believe that people in Hunnan province were shipping sick bats directly to the Wuhan wet market to sell to local bat-meat fanciers, but I think that's pretty much ruled out at this point.
I've got a question, if you have the time.
One thing that I haven't seen (although I haven't been thorough) from the pro-zoonotic side is an explanation of how the clustering around the wet market matters. Because if I recall correctly, the sequence was that first the virus was assumed to originate from the wet market, and then testing was only done on reports with a connection to the wet market, leading to a very natural clustering of positive results around the wet market. (And it's not like the lab-leak hypothesis is incompatible with the wet market being the first major location of human-to-human transmission.)
Is there a good place that deals with this? There's so much noise in the argument space, and I'm only asking because it sounds like you're relatively familiar with it.
Good question! My understanding is that the samples were taken from hospitalized patients, and contact tracing linked all the initial cases back to the Huanan Market. Michael Worobey has a good writeup. Interesting, though — patient zero had no contact with the market. I misremembered that fact.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abm4454?utm_campaign=SciMag&utm_source=Social&utm_medium=Twitter
It looks like the response is that, because the next four cases were all in employees of the market, the subsequent investigation was limited to people who had a known connection to the market. I'm not blaming the initial investigation; it does make sense: if you've got a hot lead, and limited resources, and are trying to find out if you've got a pandemic on your hands, this seems like the thing to do. And it did indeed give them the correct answer. (I do blame whoever decided to add the market connection as part of the diagnostic criteria, because that messed up the data for months afterward.) But - assuming that this is what happened, and not a misunderstanding or mistranslation or something - I think the initial location data probably can't support the HSM as the single obvious first location, and so all of the discussion of animal sourcing etc. become much less important. (Although of course the HSM was probably *an* early location; wet markets in general seem to be great places to spread this sort of disease.)
Here's the chain I used to get that, in case that helps you respond (if you feel like responding):
https://michaelweissman.substack.com/p/an-inconvenient-probability-v57
https://ayjchan.medium.com/evidence-for-a-natural-origin-of-covid-19-no-longer-dispositive-after-scientific-peer-review-af95b52499e1
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8393104/
> On December 29, 2019, a hospital in Wuhan admitted four individuals with pneumonia and recognized that all four had worked in the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, which sells live poultry, aquatic products, and several kinds of wild animals to the public. The hospital reported this occurrence to the local center for disease control (CDC), which lead Wuhan CDC staff to initiate a field investigation with a retrospective search for pneumonia patients potentially linked to the market. The investigators found additional patients linked to the market, and on December 30, health authorities from Hubei Province reported this cluster to China CDC. The following day, China CDC sent experts to Wuhan to support the investigation and control effort. Samples from these patients were obtained for laboratory analyses.
I'm generally more optimistic about the biological details of the virus being useful to narrow down the origin: things like the distribution of early variants, the furin cleavage site, the location of related viruses, and whatever signatures happen when a virus has been repeatedly cultured in a lab outside of animal hosts. Plus things like excess death rates in previous months, and whatever our predictions are of the virus' mutation rate as it evolves to become more contagious in humans. And I have no idea how all of that pans out.
It just worries me a lot when I see what looks to me like a major problem with some data, and one side appears to ignore it, you know?
My half-baked take was that it was possible for some sort of lab leak to have infected an animal in the Wuhan area, then some sort of transfer to humans happened some time afterwards.
I don't know if it's possible to falsify that one, without knowing every kind of virus that was investigated in the lab, during the calendar years 2018-2019.
What kind of time-scale would lead to the A/B variants differentiating in the wild around Wuhan in October?
A is older than B. A could have been around longer than October. But B was more infectious than A, and it pushed A aside in the first few months of the pandemic. However, the earliest infections on the US West Coast were of the original Type A variant. Then B swept through. But if A leaked to farmed wild animals from WIV or another Chinese lab that was working with CoVs (and there was one in Guangzhou and another in Beijing that worked with those viruses — as well as few US labs), how did the lab get a hold of it in the first place? Of course, the WIV teams had been sampling bats for Coronaviruses (and other viruses) for the past decade. Although some of the CoVs in the officially recorded samples from bats had the signature SARS-CoV-2 Furin Cleavage Sites (that made it hyper-infective), the rest of their genome wasn't a very good match for SARS-CoV-2 — and parts of their genome were so substantially different that it would be hard to use GoF techniques to yield SARS2 Type A (at least according to some virologists I've corresponded with).
Later on, a close match was found in SE Asia (Laos IIRC). But the Chinese import (mostly illegally) all sorts of wild animals from SE Asia, India, and Africa. I guess the question is: if the type A progenitor was brought in from SE Asia, is it more likely that it would end up at WIV (and not be recorded) and then subsequently have been leaked — or is it more likely to have infected some of farmed wild animals that came in contact with the animal or human carrying it? Fewer intermediate steps in the latter scenario.
Also, it's worth noting that Furin Cleavage Sites (FCS) are found in other viruses, included SARS-CoV-1 and MERS-CoV, but they utilize a different amino acid sequence from SARS2 (PRRA instead of RRAR). And up until the pandemic, the kinetic models didn't suggest RRAR would be particularly useful for infecting humans — but it turned out that that was what made SARS-CoV-2 highly infectious (so much for models). So if the Type A were created in the lab, they'd probably try to run a GoF on SARS-CoV-1 or MERS-CoV virus with PRRA FCS instead of a RRAR FCS to make it more infectious. Unless the mad scientist in Wuhan (or Fort Detrick as the case may be) knew something that the rest of virology community didn't know at the time.
And to answer your question, our experience with the SARS2 has shown that it mutates quite quickly. So the progenitor for Type A may have only been around for a month or two before it mutated into Type A. And if Type A were more infectious than the progenitor, it would've outcompeted the progenitor pretty quickly. Unless, of course, the progenitor and or type A were stored in freezers somewhere. But again we have the flaky WIV database (which I understand to have been nothing more than a big Excel spreadsheet), and there's no evidence of a type A being logged in that database. Of course, it was taken off-line in September 2019. So the conspiracy minded among us suggest that they had acquired the progenitor and/or Type A and were covering it up. But at that point the models didn't suggest it would be very infectious. So why cover it up?
The Chinese version of the conspiracy is much funnier, where covid came from Fort Detrick. I wonder what kind of crackpot theories they came up with to explain that one.
Initially, the Chinese were open about sharing their data with us. They were the first to sequence the virus, and they sent its genome to the CDC almost immediately upon sequencing. The Chinese clammed up and stopped cooperating once US officials began to claim that SARS2 resulted from a biowarfare program. What surprises me is how most of us in the US can't understand why China would *ever* be suspicious of US motives!
People also complain that they cleaned up the wet market and destroyed evidence. But Chairman Xi had just fired the mayor of Wuhan for his incompetence in handling the initial outbreak. I don't know if the mayor got *maximally* fired, or whether he was allowed to retire alive (AFAIK he never went on trial). Xi's chosen troubleshooter (whose name escapes me at the moment) had arrived on the scene with orders to get the situation under control. The Chinese believed the virus originated in the Huanan wet market, and that the market and the animals in the market were a public health threat. Yup, it got sterilized! — *fast* and *thoroughly*! — because Xi's chosen fixer was on the scene, and the Chairman was watching. I doubt if any of the local public health officials nor the WIV crew were asked for input because the Chinese are very hierarchical culture and orders is orders. In the meantime, China continued to share data with the WHO and the US CDC up until the virus became a political football for the US Right. And let's not forget that the lab leak was initially a conspiracy theory dreamed up by rightwing crackpots. I wrote a timeline on Twitter (link) below. Here's the narrative without the graphics and links.
1. <Intro to the thread with a snarky comment about Trump's pandemic actions> Here's the timeline:
2. The wet markets origin of a novel Coronavirus was being discussed by mid Jan. But the earliest US media reference I can find is an NPR story dated 22 Jan 2020...
3. On 26 Jan 2020 the Washington Times, a newspaper owned by News World Communications, a Rev. Sun Myung Moon organization, published this story: “Coronavirus may have originated in lab linked to China's biowarfare program." It immediately gets picked up by global media.
4. 31 Jan 2020: Pradhan et al published a paper implying that HIV genes had been spliced into the virus. This got lots of media play until other scientists pointed out that these gene sequences are found in lots of non-HIV viruses.
5. 1 Feb 2020: Anthony Fauci sends out an email to call a meeting of senior scientists after he has a phone call with Kristian Andersen. Andersen had raised some concerns that some features of the virus may indicate lab origins...
6. The meeting happens 2 Feb 2020 between Andersen and key players. Here are the notes (graphic attached in the Twitter thread). Andersen's concerns were addressed, and the lab leak origin is shot down (at least on the basis of some of the unique features of the SARS2 virus).
7. I'm not sure if Andersen was fully convinced of a natural origin at that point (but he later claimed he was). But on 17 Feb he submitted a preprint of "The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2" where he stated "the virus is not a laboratory product". Revised and published 17 March 2020
8. 15 Feb 2020: Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark. makes the claim on Fox News Sunday Morning program that SARS2 was a Chinese biowarfare weapon that leaked from the lab. That gets lots of MSM attention.
9. 17 Feb 2020: Richard Ebright and others push back on Cotton's claims in the Washington Post. This is interesting because Ebright later became one of the most vocal lab leak proponents. But at this time he was in the zoonotic origins camp.
10. 19 Feb 2020: 27 scientists publish a statement in The Lancet to "condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin". They write that data overwhelmingly shows the "coronavirus originated in wildlife."
11. Later it comes out that Daszak organized this letter. Daszak is accused of a conflict of interest in doing so because his EcoHealth Alliance had procured grants for the Wuhan Institute of Virology in the past — but the proposals submitted to NIH and DoD for GoF experiments with wild viruses were never funded BTW.
12. 16 April 2020: CNN reports US officials are investigating claim the virus was released from the lab accidentally as scientists were studying infectious diseases (in that story intelligence officials said they didn't believe the virus is man-made or developed as a bioweapon.)
13. 16 April 2020: Fox News claims "patient zero" worked at the laboratory. The lab employee was accidentally infected before spreading the disease across Wuhan. When asked about this, President Trump says: "more and more we're hearing the story".
Note: This patient zero was never identified BTW, but the first known patient to be hospitalized with COVID was a middle-aged man who didn't work for WIV. He died.
14. 21 April 2020. Trump gets more questions and says the theory "makes sense." Fauci pushes back. Tom Cotton writes an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, writing: "While the Chinese government denies the possibility of a lab leak, its actions tell a different story."
15. 1 May 2020: NYTimes reports that Mike Pompeo directed intelligence agencies to continue to look for lab leak evidence.
Some Trump Officials Take Harder Actions on China During Pandemic.
"Since the coronavirus spread from a metropolis on the Yangtze River across the globe, hard-liners in both Washington and Beijing have accelerated efforts to decouple elements of the relationship."
Note: I think it was about then that China started counterclaiming that is was released from USAMRIID in Fort Detrick, MD.
16. 1 May 2020: The same day CNN reports that Trump said he's seen evidence of a lab leak.
"Trump contradicts US intel community by claiming he’s seen evidence coronavirus originated in Chinese lab"
17. In conclusion, the lab leak theory started as a crackpot idea cooked up by the right-wing Moonie-funded, Washington Times. Sen. Tom Cotton amplified it, and within 3 months President Trump went from we don't know to claiming he's seen evidence of a lab leak.
Note: the US intelligence community has never released their lab leak evidence for public consumption. The Chinese are accused of being secretive, but why is the US Intel community so secretive? — especially since it would shed light on the origins of a pathogen that killed over 1.2 million Americans. Ironies abound!
https://x.com/beowulf888/status/1632134743994277888
Yes, a definite +1 to this.
The substack article, which I believe is from Philipp Markolin, was excellent if assessed on technical accuracy and relevance but because of the many snarks and constant condescension would convince no-one that is not already somewhat knowledgeable.
No book review results yet?!
Sorry, I was at a conference this weekend, and I have another next weekend. I'll figure this out sometime before the middle of June.
You're doing this yourself?? I figured you'd have Sky or some other volunteer tallying results
So I had a memorable argument the other day that, I think, perfectly encapsulates pretty much everything one needs to know about the rationalist/EA mentality:
I was recently selling a motorcycle (Edit: Ninja 650, in case you're curious..)
I listed it for price £P, but was offered price £LP, which I considered an unfair lowball price. I confided in this to a friend (and fellow biker) and she agreed that £LP was an insultingly low price for the bike. A few weeks later it hadn't sold and my friend offered to buy it from me - for price £LP!
Needless-to-say this caused a somewhat angry heated debate, with on my side, "But you have previously agreed that £LP is an unfair insulting lowball price!" and on her side, "But the etiquette amongst motorcyclists is to offer friends a steep discount and if that means you have to sell at a lowball price then 𝑛𝑜𝑏𝑙𝑒𝑠𝑠𝑒 𝑏𝑙𝑜𝑜𝑑𝑦 𝑜𝑏𝑙𝑖𝑔𝑒!"
During this argument, we sort-of managed to simultaneously talk one another around to each other's points of view, such that eventually she was offering price £P, but I wouldn't accept more than price £LP. The argument continued.
Eventually, we hit upon the idea that the transaction would work as follows:
1) She would pay me price £LP and I would give her the bike
2) She would donate the difference £P-£LP to charity
3) Then, she could think to herself that she'd paid £LP for the bike and donated £P-LP to charity because she's a jolly nice person
4) Meanwhile, I can think to myself that I'd recieved £P for the bike and then had myself donated £P-£LP to charity because *I'm* the jolly nice person
This resolved the argument; we both agreed it felt totally fair in that we both lose-out slightly as penance for being so mercenary about the whole thing (ie. she has to pay the whole of £P but I only get to recieve £LP) but charity benefits by a not-insubstantial amount. Chalk up a rat/EA win!
Ten minutes later: we're embroiled in an angry heated argument about precisely which charity it would be most effective to donate to.
> "But the etiquette [...] is to offer friends a steep discount [...]"
I never understood this argument (in any context, not just motorcycles).
On one hand the seller should be willing to go for less, because of friendship. On the other hand the buyer should be willing to pay for more, because of friendship. Both should cancel each other out, and the stranger-price would be the same as the friendship-price.
A big exception would be when I sell stuff to friends, that I probably wouldn't try sell to a stranger in the first place. Then I usually go for 50% of the stranger-price. This way I make a profit of 50% over my default of "maybe not selling it, and eventually throwing it in the trash", and the friend makes a profit of 50% over "buying it from a stranger and maybe getting ripped-off". (The last time I did this was for a used phone, valued around 100€ at the time.)
Personally I prefer to buy from friends (for the stranger price), because I usually get better service from them, so there is more value for me in it.
Like this perspective. Thanks!
After a few weeks, £LP is probably the correct price.
I totally get what you mean, but around here motorcycle sales these days are generally pretty slow. That same friend took three months to sell one of her bikes for a fairly reasonable asking price; I've known other people take several months to sell their machines, and if you browse the motorcycle classified ads you often see the same bikes listed at not-outrageous prices for a month or two before they seem to shift.
(It's very different to how motorcycle sales used to be, I know! I think the proliferation of crappy-but-superficially-tempting "50p per month then £10,000 in five years' time" PCP finance deals has kinda tanked the second-hand market..)
I thought I’d mention my latest podcast. The first (and only) hanging of an Anglican bishop for the crime of sodomy took place in Dublin in 1640.
Perhaps it would be more famous but a major Catholic rebellion and the English civil war shortly after proved to be a distraction.
But that didn’t stop later writers claiming the real offence had been ‘uncleanness with a cow’. (Probably false though an earlier charge of incest was almost certainly true.)
And running alongside all this is the Somerset ghost of Mrs Leakey with an urgent message for the bishop.
So ghosts, sodomy, bishops and a cow. I thought it was pretty interesting and despite the lurid subject matter Peter Marshall is in fact a highly respectable historian of the English Reformation.
If this is the kind of story you like I think you’ll like this!
https://www.buzzsprout.com/207869/15174379
I listened and enjoyed it.
Btw have you stopped the meet-up?
I'm not doing them very often, but haven't formally stopped. I'll put holding another one on my list.
An amazing story, and it does sound like family blackmail gone wrong. I wonder if part of the reason Atherton had to leave Somerset was an affair with his sister-in-law Elizabeth, who later faked up the ghost of her mother-in-law to get what she felt were her rights (a necklace inherited by another sister and to get to Ireland to sort things out with Atherton, who seems to have had a taste for all the daughters of that family given that he was accused of an affair with yet another sister).
He seems to have been a guy who had a great talent for making enemies, particularly since he was land-grabbing for the Protestant Church. His patron Strafford's own downfall probably left him with no protection and that was the end for him.
It's odd that they used the sodomy law to get him (and his proctor as collateral damage) rather than accusations of malfeasance or the affair with his sister-in-law, but maybe he really was having sex with men. Or maybe they thought it was poetic justice to have him condemned under the law he had pushed to be adopted:
"After the Buggery Act 1533 was found in 1631 during the Mervyn Tuchet, 2nd Earl of Castlehaven case, to not apply to Ireland, Atherton pushed for the enactment of "An Act for the Punishment for the Vice of Buggery" in 1634".
Marshall doesn’t think it is true that Atherton pushed for the law so I’m not sure. My pet theory is she invented the ghost as an excuse to get the gold chain and to visit Ireland to blackmail her brother in law. It seems she and her husband (who seems to have kept well clear of the ghost business) certainly needed the money.
It definitely sounds like a ruse to get money. If the modern version of the legend is that the ghost sank the ships of her son, then probably he was in financial trouble at the time after her death, and if they were disputing with the other family members over inheritance, then the allegedly strong-minded wife faking the mother's ghost to guilt them into handing over what she felt she was owed sounds feasible.
If Atherton had been involved with her, or if she simply knew that he was having an affair with the other sister, then heading off to Ireland to blackmail him now that he was in a lucrative position would also be a fix for the money troubles.
The sodomy accusation, as I say, sounds odd to take against him, his patron was in deep trouble at the same time having fallen out of political favour, so it surely would have been easier to have him entangled in the same kind of trouble? So maybe there really was some kind of same-sex affair going on?
I think the sodomy accusation is likely true but the bizarre thing is that his servant was his accuser and the other party to the offence. So he was (inevitably) hanged as well. Some people think it was a false allegation and they tricked the servant by saying he’d be let off somehow. Nope.
Interesting! So maybe they got the servant on the charge, and promised him a deal that if he accused Atherton, he'd be spared? Didn't work out that way, though.
At this remove, it's hard to say if it was legitimate or what the motives were behind the charge.
Benvenuto Cellini's autobiography relates the story of him being accused of (heterosexual) sodomy in France. It sounds like Cellini regularly had sex with his female models, but he denied this in particular: she withdrew her testimony when he pointed out that sodomy was criminal for *both* parties. Of course, Cellini is not what I would call a reliable source, so make of it what you will.
Delightfully, my translation would only print the name of the crime in a footnote in untranslated Italian, not that the English equivalent is hard to figure out. Would you want your daughter or your servant reading that?
I wonder if the system of "international law" is likely to imminently undergo an "outlaw cascade" (see slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/13/book-review-legal-systems-very-different-from-ours/).
More likely it is transforming towards a bipolar world order, with the Status Quo Coalition (USA, EU, Japan, etc) goes up against Team Autobalance (currently, roughly: China, DPRK, Russia, Iran, Syria). Even Team Autobalance is only mildly expansionist compared to the world of globe-spanning empires.
It'll go back to the Cold War equilibrium. Anyone who has a superpower ally can do as they please, unless and until they get defeated (usually by the ally of another superpower). To the extent your conduct is constrained at all, it's constrained by 1) the possibility of defeat, and 2) bad press.
More likely just a fragmentation into spheres of influence, each with a different `international law.'
Scott, I have posted this before, but assume you haven't seen it. In the book reviewing contest, there are two reviews of "Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will - Review 1". But the voting form only has one entry for that book.
Thanks, fixed.
I've really been enjoying Unsong! I'd never read it before because I wanted to wait for the book version and it's been well worth it.
Horrific puns, but why would a loving god permit any that were otherwise? Therefore puns are always terrible and also are essential to the universe, QED
What's more fun than speculating on why python has taken off as the language for AI programming? After all, it's so slow!
I've got two pet theories. One is that python, like matlab, combined slow serial code with a vectorized math library. The result was that unlike C++ or Java, beginning python programmers actually had to use the vectorized operations for pretty much all operations. As a result, all the sharp corners got rounded off of numpy, and so when GPU programming took off, python already had an idiom for programming in parallel, and a userbase that knew the idiom.
My other idea is that python shouldn't be compared to C++ serial code at all: it's actually competing with C++ template metaprogramming. Then, if python is just the metalanguage, the actual comparison to runtime C++ is any of jax, pytorch traces, z3, or even sql. Python's advantage is that if all you care about is throughput and not latency, then you really should be recompiling for each possible shape of input, to bake in metadata. Once you've committed to doing that, you might as well do your parsing in the metalanguage where memory management is easy and types are loose. In addition, the python paradigm of one metalanguage, and diverse but individually limited object languages is just better than C++'s choice of one object language, and diverse metalanguages (template metaprogramming, m4, cmake, arguably C++ as a whole is just a different metalanguage for C)
Python has the following properties:
1. Has a good REPL
2. Scales reasonably well to tens, even hundreds of thousands of lines of code per program
3. Good metaprogramming facilities
4. Can easily call C/system calls
I don't think many other languages have these properties. Maybe Ruby. I won't be surprised if the main reason Python won over Ruby is luck.
You want all of these properties when doing AI
1. A REPL is essential when exploring data
2. AI programs can get large
3. You are not going to be able to work easily with tensors without some sort of metaprogramming, since the base language is not going to define a tensor framework for you
4. Easily calling C/system calls is essential for driving GPUs
Eh, it happened because it happened. Path-dependence. Roll back the universe back to 1980 and run it forward again, and - 100 of my money against 1 of yours - Python won't be the dominant AI language.
The "$LANGUAGE is implemented by an Interpreter and the interpreter is extremely slow, here's a low-level hacky escape hatch" general pattern exists in several languages, someone even named it: The 2-language problem [1][2], or maybe the 2-language pattern, if we would like to be charitable and call it a design pattern (and it's not the worst, Factory gets the prize).
One of the earliest still-living languages exhibiting this pattern is Objective-C, people have mocked it relentlessly with "All the performance of Smalltalk and all the elegance of C", but that's exactly the point, it's a Smalltalk-ified C, you can write the entire application in C if you want, it's a strict superset, then "gradually" convert the parts that need the elegance and power of Smalltalk into a weird Smalltalk-in-C's-skirt language. Another, as you pointed out, is Matlab, which quite literally began as a calculator, just a syntactic layer over Fortran so that you can write "A+B" instead of "Matrix_Add(A,B)"[3], the description in the source implies it was a simple lookup table from strings to subroutines.
Perl is 4 years older than Python, and written by an honest-to-god linguist who had... great ideas about programming language design, ideas so great they sound horrible, but really are unironically great. Ruby is yet another Python, late by only 4 years. TCL was invented because one guy got so bored with inventing and re-inventing "Command Languages" (in modern parlance, scripting languages that allow you to automate an application) again and again and again that he invented a language and said it should be embedded into every application [4], the same guy also wrote about "Scripting" vs "Programming"[5]. JavaScript is infamously named so because some people had the bright idea to "script" Java objects - conceived of at the time as remotely-running independent programs, in that age of CORBA and RPCs and OO craziness - so that a free-wheeling loosely-typed JS script runs on the client and orchestrates a heavyweight JVM, running as a remote process on either the server or the client, or as an embedded applet, perhaps [6]. Emacs is - famously - architected as a small C core enough to implement low-level text-editing and the Elisp interpreter, and then a tower of Elisp above that core.
Etc etc etc..., it's a famous pattern. It's also not without tradeoffs, there is a reason people call it the 2-languages *Problem*, the impedance-mismatch is real. It's a new path, different than either writing the application in pure X or pure Y alone, and it presents a new set of tradeoffs, and combines varying subsets of the 2 paths' advantages and disadvantages. Most importantly, it's not unique to Python. Not at all.
------
I can't see how the second pet theory is really all that different than the first, except that you formalize the notion of external Libraries and Frameworks as separate languages, and mention the role of runtime parsing and compilation (although I can't see how metadata has anything to do with it? Which metadata? Python's? Those are notoriously useless and space-heavy, I don't think I recall ever seeing them used for optimization). But again, that's not unique to Python at all, arguably the most "Polyglot" language environment in existence is the shell: if "Here's a dynamic and 'muddy' environment that you can escape to a more performant but 'rigid' infrastructure layer" is the secret sauce that made Python to rule the world, Unix shells would have ruled it before Python by 20 or 25 years at least. The JVM and the CLR are 2 attempts that tried to replicate the "Common infrastructure, different languages" paradigm approach outside of Unix, and Java is **still** going at it, see GraalVM, the latest attempt, the "VM to rule them all". It enables seamless polyglot interoperability, Java and Ruby and JS programs all mushed together as the same syntax tree and optimized at runtime using cutting-edge Partial Evaluation. Again, still not enough for AI dominance.
If you put a gun to my head and demanded that I must produce answers, I would say that it's a combination of enough right decisions unintentionally taken by Python, and enough wrong turns unintentionally not taken by Python but taken by its competitors, along with some serious marketing and a whole truckload of luck and random seed magic.
(1) Perl, the Dominant Patriarch, the granddaddy of all dynamic-ness, languished in the mid-2000s due to the disastrous decision to split the community between Perl 5 and Perl 6. Perl 6 - Raku - is to this day one of the most beautiful and shockingly original programming languages I have ever seen in my life, but it doesn't matter because nobody uses it. Perl 5 is still going strong by sheer "Fuck You I WILL live" inertia of being installed on every Unix-ish system and legacy scripts, even git for windows packages it by default.
(2) Ruby massively succeeded and had people saying it's a Java-killer at some point, indeed Groovy - the JVM language used for the Gradle build system - owes its existence to Ruby's era, as the JVM ecosystem's answer to Ruby. But the problem of Ruby was a "Curse of Success"-like pattern, it was used for Rails and that's what all anybody ever remembers it for.
(3) JavaScript did rule the world, eventually, only too late. The first release of node.js was in 2009, and it was embarrassingly experimental then. By this time, Django was already released for 4 years and Numpy for 3. The head start cannot be underestimated.
(4) Last, but very much not least, the Notebook Interface was implemented for Python first. Beginning from obscure origin as the main interface of the obscenely-expensive Mathematica, some guy [7] thought it would be cool to interact with Python the same way, and thus was born the Notebook. Moreover, the notebook **Won**, marketing is important as ever. Lisp and Smalltalk fans would complain to anyone who would listen that **they** did it ***first***, all the way back in the 1970s and the 1980s, in fact Mathematica was inspired from a lisp-based computer algebra system. But it doesn't matter who did it first, it matters who makes people use their thing first.
And possibly other reasons. At some point, those reasons made N people use Python, and then person N+1 began using Python solely because all that massive N-strong audience was already using it, and then N+2 saw a massive N+1-strong audience, and so on. From then on Python will never die, only lose or gain popularity.
[1] https://blog.metaobject.com/2023/06/mojo-is-much-better-without-c-than.html
[2] https://thebottomline.as.ucsb.edu/2018/10/julia-a-solution-to-the-two-language-programming-problem
[3] https://www.mathworks.com/company/technical-articles/a-brief-history-of-matlab.html
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tcl
[5] https://users.ece.utexas.edu/~adnan/top/ousterhout-scripting.pdf
[6] https://web.archive.org/web/20070916144913/http://wp.netscape.com/newsref/pr/newsrelease67.html
[7] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/the-scientific-paper-is-obsolete/556676/, https://archive.ph/4l509
From an academic perspective, before deep learning took off, people at ML conferences were doing a lot of experiments using the scikit-learn library. Then when they started working with GPUs for deep learning it was just the language that everyone knew. I've never met a single person at N(eur)IPS / ICLR / ICML who wrote their experiment in C++ at any point in the past decade.
From a competition perspective, scikit-learn became the de facto standard for kaggle competitions, which mostly didn’t do any deep learning until a few years ago. But that led to a lot of open source contributions to the library, which just created a feedback loop of more and more functionality.
From an industry perspective, I don’t think it should be compared to C++ as a competitor, but rather Matlab and R. But between python, Matlab, and R, there’s only one that you’d actually want to use for production code.
A related question: How come the Julia Programming Language never took off? I think it’s the better language but it just never had the community support to make as many libraries as python. There could be other reasons I'm missing though.
I feel like it is fairly obvious. There was no other choice. If you wanted to throw together easy-to-write orchestration code that talks to high-performance math libraries at any time in the last fifteen years the choices were like: Python, Matlab, R, and, I dunno, Fortran? C++ is right out (compile times, generally difficult). Java also (compile times, verbosity, and no top-level code because everything has to live in classes). Matlab is closed-source and backwards and there are license fees. R and Fortran are old and clunky. There was no other choice than Python (and then reluctantly switching to C++ when you really needed to squeeze performance out, but at 10x the engineering effort).
Also Python is not slow? it's completely fine. Nobody should be sitting around waiting for their orchestration code to run, and all the actual math should be happening in compiled modules. It's slower than C++ at equivalent tasks, sure, but you're not using it for equivalent classes. It's instant at what it needs to be doing, and much faster to write and maintain.
Python is the "metalanguage", yes, but that's how programming always should have worked: finicky low-level memory-managing code for things that require it, higher-level abstractions for things that just have to run business logic. It is, I think, a historical accident that all programming wasn't done this way and that there is such a thing as a "pure C++ application". Also the reason why we write websites in HTML/JS and not in C++ even though the layout logic happens in C++: it's the only architecture that makes any sense. (Game developers figured it out a long time ago: write the low-level stuff in C++ and the high-level stuff in a scripting language like Lua or UnrealScript or w/e).
I think it's because python was used in academia before, probably because it's easy to teach and "looks just like pseudocode" or something.
My understanding is that python's popularity in academia came mostly from it's price point of being free, compared to MATLAB charging whatever they wanted.
Once numpy, pandas and matplotlib all covered the basic functionality that MATLAB provided python got its foothold, and then those libraries started getting more attention and development and outpaced what MATLAB was offering.
Python does have quite a few advantages, not least that it's super quick to write and test thanks to zero compile time (jupyter notebooks are an amazing way to work with python). And, as mentioned above, anything performance dependant can just be outsourced to c, or java, or whatever is most suitable for that task.
Given Python's ability to effectively call other languages for the parts where that matters, it might overall be more efficient, once you factor in developers' time (writing the code, fixing bugs, tracking down performance, viewing your data, etc)
My pet theory is that it's just the ability to use GPUs. Python and R were running neck and neck for awhile but R doesn't really use GPUs and Python jumped on that train fast so...if a lot of the fun, cool stuff requires GPUs and R can't use GPUs...better transition to Python. I love R but I've transitioned over as...not everything requires GPUs but a strong enough core transitioned to Python that it established a firmly dominant position.
If speed mattered, I'm pretty sure we'd all just jump to Julia but that's rarely the critical thing holding back a project.
R is just an absurdly terrible language held together by kludges, it's no surprise ant feasible alternative could beat it. I've been using it professionally for two years now and I still write better and faster in python.
Sure, but python is an absurdly terribly statistics program held together by kludges. If you're coming from a stats background or an econ background, things like methods are really dumb. Everything should be functions, why would you create these weird half-baked functions tied to certain objects but not others? What is mutability and why are some things mutable and others aren't. Just deepcopy everything. Yeah, plotly is fine knockoff but ggplot is just better.
That was always the core differentiator: R was a stats program with a half-baked programming language bolted on and python is a programming language with a half-baked stats program bolted on. It makes sense that Python won but R code is just...a better symbolic representation of stats.
> a working GPS-based version of the automated land acknowledger
I find it pretty funny how chuddy the thing would be if you brought it to Europe, e.g. stating "this is the unceded ancestral land of the Swedish people!" sounds like it's from some "immigrants out" right-wing populist.
Parroting an observation from elsewhere, but the whole Native American thing is a little different from most of Europe. While most European land was taken by conquest and force, that's within the norms of engagement for those societies; they "ceded" it by declaring peace after a military confrontation. For the Americas, a great deal of the land was taken as a result of treaties that Colonizing Americans (for lack of a better term) then broke, making it unceded *by the colonizing party's own legal system*.
How is this different from conquest? They have very much ceded the land, to a degree that no one would find. And conquest was far from unheard of to Native Americans. Even the power differential between Europe and native Americans has been overblown (minus the disease factor). They just lost the war, as much as the Iberian caliphates did.
It seems like the appropriate response on their end would be to go back to war, then?
If they refuse to go to war against the US, then we can consider the land ceded.
edit: Also, what about the Confederacy? The Confederacy never ceded its own territory to the US (there was no official treaty, just a military surrender and a cessation of fighting) so should that be acknowledged too?
edit edit: And then of course there's the British Empire. I don't think they ever officially ceded their territorial claims to the parts of the United States that were theirs.
I mean, sure, they coud start making "This land used to be a part of the Confederate States" land acknowledgements, they'd probably just be somewhat different in form from what you might be considering here.
Is your official position that "the victor of an armed rebellion of an independence movement taking the land they lay claim to" is not part of Euro-colonial norms?
The leaders of Europe were perfectly happy to break treaties and agreements between themselves when they saw fit. The difference is that "the King says so" was baked into the legal systems of the time.
Right, and the whole American mythos rests on the idea that we don't have a King who is Above The Law (insert comment about Trumpers here)
It would really struggle in most places, or simply have to run through a very long list of all the people that owned the land at some point and left without ceding it. Unless you fix some kind of arbitary date (is France the unceded land of the Gauls? The Celts? The Visigoths? The Magdalenians? The Neaderthals?) I honestly have no idea how you'd do it.
Yeah, the real world application would be pretty funny. This is the un-ceded ancestral land of the Moors - Wait, actually the Visigoths - No, the Romans - I meant the Carthaginians - Actually it was the Phoenicians - Hmm, maybe the Iberians were here first - Uh...
Bears.
Honestly I find this "funny" in the same way I find Catholic sexual abuse funny, which is to say not at all. I find it enragingly hypocritical and morally abhorrent. Whether past conquests are horrifically wrong acts that need to be memorialised, or utterly irrelevant pieces of trivia not even worth mentioning (see Andrew Clough's comment) depends entirely on whether the group that suffered is convenient to your political coalition.
How is this not one of the most evil things that people do?
If people want to laugh about it I'm not objecting, but personally I can only seethe.
I vacillate between three reactions to land acknowledgements:
-- some quiet eye-rolling at one of our era's many new absurdities.
-- seething in pretty close to the specific manner that you describe.
-- a triggering of my broader depression over the intellectual condition of modern progressivism.
Which reaction hits me appears random so far as I can tell, though I suppose in reality it's probably contextual....in any case when I take a breath, land acknowledgements seem to be likely a pretty trivial annoyance in the big picture. Not one of the 10 or 20 shittiest or most depressing specific new practices in the USA today, let's say.
But that is not to dispute that they do actually pretty deeply suck in the way that you describe.
> in any case when I take a breath, land acknowledgements seem to be likely a pretty trivial annoyance in the big picture
I think it's pretty bad. It promotes "us-and-them"-ism, and teaches large groups of people that they have a grievance against other large groups of people, based on shoddy history and shoddy understanding of what ownership actually means.
"If people want to laugh about it I'm not objecting, but personally I can only seethe."
People laugh about it because it's completely meaningless. Whether it's phrased as "this is the unceded land of the Gillygooly tribe" or some other fashion, in the end it boils down to:
(1) The Gillygooly may never have officially given this land up or handed it over or traded it away. Too bad for them, we own it now and we're not handing it back or paying rent for it. However, we will open every meeting, envelope, and lunchbox with a reminder that "we took your land and you can do nothing about it, ha ha" which may be rubbing salt in the wound but hey, it makes *us* feel better, so who really cares about if it offends any remaining Gillygooly?
(2) The Gillygooly were only the last lot before us who grabbed the land off another tribe. If what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, then the Gillygooly should also be doing land acknowledgements about how they stole/conquered this land from the JimJams who took it from the Kikabriks who took it from the... and so on back to the crossing of the Bering Strait
I agree with you that land acknowledgements are steaming dung piles of hypocrisy, but they come from the "we are the right side of history" set so that makes it okay, somehow.
The Swedes were the first to live there in historical times, sure, but go back far enough and you can apologize for displacing the Ahrensburg culture or something. By historical times very few places were occupied by their original inhabitants. The most obvious exceptions being Pacific islands that actually were settled for the first time during the Polynesians.
I'm sort of curious what the box will say if you take it to, say, the Black Hills in the Dakotas. Probably "This is the unceded ancestral land of the Lakota people!" but if I were a Crow I'd be pretty upset about that since the Lakota had only conquered that land a single generation before the US kicked them off of it.
> The most obvious exceptions being Pacific islands that actually were settled for the first time during the Polynesians
But even this is taking an unreasonably outgroup-homogeneity view. Land isn't owned by entire societies, it's owned by individuals, or families, or at least institutions. This particular bit of land may have been owned by Kamanaka, who stole it from Mahanaka, whose grandfather stole it from Mo'ohoke, and so forth.
One particularly terrible thing that has happened with "land rights" movements around the world is that they've wound up giving land collectively to some group of people rather than dividing it up in a reasonable way, which prevents anyone from actually doing anything useful with the land.
The Tiwi Islands is a tropical island (well actually two islands separated by a 100m channel) the size of Puerto Rico, or ten times the size of Singapore, or one and a half times the size of nearby Bali. It has a dry monsoonal climate which would support any number of uses, and it is conveniently located just off the coast of Darwin. It's also quite beautiful with pleasant (albeit crocodile-infested) beaches. It is "collectively" owned by the 2700 Tiwi Islanders, which means that each of them should own nearly a thousand acres of land, which you'd think would make them rich as all heck. But nope, the land is owned "collectively", which means that none of them can actually make use of it.
These islands are beautiful *because* no one fills them with hotels and casinos.
Did you see the arial photos of Carti Sugtupu, the island near Panama that's being evacuated?
>The most obvious exceptions being Pacific islands that actually were settled for the first time during the Polynesians.
Hmm... What about Antarctica? If you count births as settlement, then it would only count as settled since
>On January 7, 1978, newborn Emilio Palma became the first person in history known to have been born on the frigid, unforgiving continent
Madagascar is another surprising example, given it's nowhere near as remote as the pacific islands. Apparently it's a bit unclear when exactly it was first settled, but it was late enough to be very much in historic times (even if the settlers themselves weren't leaving records).
Apparently it was settled by mariners on the Indian Ocean, not by Africans? That's a heck of a boat ride.
And part of the same ethnolinguistic group (the Austronesians) that settled Polynesia and New Zealand in the opposite direction -- indeed the Malagasy language is more closely related to Malay or Filipino than to any language of the African mainland. Amazing navigators, the Austronesians.
Many Thanks!
Bringing it to Istanbul would be even spicier.
And if you bring it to Jerusalem, it says "...Look, I don't want to get all political."
For Istanbul, one option to avoid spiciness would be to play one (or all) of the renditions of this song.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Istanbul_(Not_Constantinople)
Hahaha! Well-played.
> I’ll just say that first, I think he would benefit from reading about the difference between rule utilitarianism, two-level utilitarianism, and virtue ethics
I don't say this often, but Jesus fucking Christ. Surely anybody with even a passing interest in Western philosophy ought to know what rule utilitarianism is?
https://xkcd.com/2501/
Yeah, that's how I feel about that "where was Hannibal from?" question, despite not even knowing/remembering what a pancreas is.
(Before seeing that result, I would probably have literally said "I'm sure the majority of people know nothing about Hannibal except that he crossed the Alps and that he was from Carthage". Whoops.)
Alps, schmalps, but I'd have thought Scott would have burned Carthage into the public consciousness. Ridley Scott, that is: https://youtu.be/SMwXgcRyH0I
They could know what rule utilitarianism is but assume it's a fake morality, because it's "abandoning" the "only" principle of total utilitarianism to be more palatable instead of, you know, the logical extension of incorporating second order effects.
To be accurate, I used to think this about rule utilitarianism, so I don't think this is a priori a dumb stance!
I interpret two-level utilitarianism as needed to account for the computational etc limits of utilitarianism-as-practiced by flesh and blood humans.
I wrote "Chemo versus carrots: When we don’t have true control, we seek faux control through what we eat:" https://jakeseliger.com/2024/05/28/chemo-versus-carrots-when-we-dont-have-true-control-we-seek-faux-control-through-what-we-eat/, which would seem to press a bunch of ACX buttons.
I've been meaning to write a comment similar to this for a long time, but you wrote it better.
A few points to add:
1. This seems to be analogous to heat shock proteins, where bacteria in a high stress environment have a specific mechanism to allow them to genetically "flail about looking for solutions". I wonder if something similar is happening here.
2. There's a reason HSPs aren't active most of the time. Because they're not beneficial to the individual. Being random, they're inherently destructive. They don't make sense when you have a 0.1% chance of dying, but they do when you have a 100% chance. Better for one bacteria to survive on luck, even if it accelerates the death of others, than for all to die equally.
3. If you squint hard enough, all random flailing will look like it "makes sense". This is because people are really good at telling stories, not because there's a correlation between a hypothesis making sense and it being true.
4. Claims that something "works" are never quantitative, which is what you'd want to know to understand how much to rely on them. "Bleu cheese helps" doesn't tell me anything, even if it were true. How much should I eat? Which kinds? How often? How much does it help? Is it a 70% disease burden reduction, or a 1% reduction? How replicable are these results? It really matters that we answer all these questions before relying on this advice!
Let's bring these together in the case of, say, cloth masks during COVID. People said it just made sense that they had to "work". How much and in which situations, though? Airplanes were specifically designed with airflow and pandemic prevention in mind. Air comes in the top and goes out the bottom, reducing the risk of airborne disease. Forcing everyone to put on a device that redirects their breath out the sides might be the cultural HSP hysteria working at cross purposes with decades of work from epidemiologists. They might increase spread in some situations (like on airplanes), even if they decrease it others (like waiting for a flight in the terminal).
Meanwhile, how much does it help was never addressed. I knew people who suddenly felt comfortable getting out and about because they could now wear a mask - including some very high risk people. Did cloth masks come with a false sense of confidence? If you're 25, maybe that sense of confidence is personally beneficial, while if you're 85 the same confidence kills.
"But they logically have to work!" Okay, let's say a surgical mask, in a controlled research environment, reduces transmission by, say, 70% per five minutes of exposure (randomly making stuff up here), but as a result people choose to expose themselves 5x more than they would without the mask. The true effect of even surgical masks in the real-life scenario would be to increase disease spread. But I made those numbers up. We'd need to actually test the hypothesis to know for sure, not just rely on it "making sense".
I feel like skepticism is the antidote to the "social HSP" phenomenon. It plays an important role in keeping society alive, and should not be silenced, even if sometimes the skeptics are wrong.
There's an interesting confluence of sorts: food is something that everyone has and thus can have opinions about; also likely the changes in our food supply relate to the rise of cancer, cvd, and autoimmune.
Corollary: massive changes in ADVICE about what to eat have also dramatically increased along with poorer health outcomes. Now that advice is distributed at scale, outside the normal mechanisms for social spread.
Today it's government, not old wives, that spread food tales about what to eat. Shouldn't we trust government more to know what's best?
What's best for whom? Margarine was initially pushed as an alternative to butter because food rationing for the war made it necessary. A hundred years ago, people didn't consider what we think of as "vegetable oil" to be food. They used lard instead.
Meanwhile, the shift to HFCS as a sweetener seems to have been largely driven by the sugar lobby enforcing quotas against importing too much foreign sugar from certain Caribbean islands, plus corn growers realizing they could make a lot of money propping up those same policies.
I'm sure some ACX commenters can fill in/correct the story with more details, but a lot of food policy looks like it's designed with the health of the state in mind first, more than the citizenry.
Well yes, but his point is about individuals grasping for a sense of control. I'm suggesting that food is a convenient target and we also have a quasi-instinctual sense that something has gone wrong with the food supply.
Iirc it's commonly recognised that individual-pathology eating disorders tend to be significantly "about" control/lack of it so extending this to social/group level makes some sort of sense.
Right. I'm saying maybe a big part of what's gone wrong with food is not just the supply, but the official advice. When individuals to make irrational decisions while grasping for control, they can only hurt themselves. When institutions flail about looking for control they have a greater capacity for introducing harm into the system.
I am not well-informed here, but my impression is that nutrition studies are a mess, because they're almost always observational and diet is confounded with approximately everything else (genetics, wealth, culture, generation, region). So one plausible explanation is that we got effective government messaging on correct nutrition, but because the science was a mess, the message wasn't very good. That message was also affected by lobbying and such, but I think the underlying problem is deeper than that.
Yeah, there are a lot of observational trials problems what to eat, and lot of RCTs/interventional trials demonstrating that defining diets makes people fat. The big complaint for many trials is how difficult it is to get high compliance ... which should tell you something.
If you tell a hundred people to live by some food algorithm and they universally struggle to do so maybe food algorithms don't work. If you do that a dozen times with a dozen different algorithms and they all fail, maybe stop recommending food algorithms as a way to live.
But you can always observe healthy people, define what they naturally eat as a good diet, and how they exercise as a good lifestyle; then recommend that as an algorithm for others to follow. It just doesn't work that way for most people. It's really hard to about someone else's life into your own.
Alina Chan has an opinion piece in the NY Times that argues that the most likely source for Covid was a lab leak. It's an interesting reversal given the stance that the Times previously took on this issue.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/06/03/opinion/covid-lab-leak.html
I don't know whether that article adds anything to the pool of knowledge provided in the RootsClaim discussion.
It does appear that the belief in Lab Leak as a source of the virus was, at one time, an idea that the editorial board of the NYT (and many other publications) consigned to an incredibly low level of probability. It was also considered a reason to believe that the person holding the theory had a animus against scientific research (or an animus against Chinese scientific labs, or against Chinese people in general).
That opinion is now considered plausible enough to take seriously.
The available scientific evidence hasn't changed much. I suspect that the data hashed out in the RootClaims discussion has been available to most journalists and researchers for at least two years. The outline of the argument, and a list of data points to be researched to resolve it, was likely available sometime during the year 2020.
The environment in which such things can be published has changed enough to shield Alina Chan (and the NYT) from accusations of bias against Science (or bias against Chinese labs, or against Chinese people). It's interesting to see this happen, but it is also disheartening.
The NYT, and the world of journalism that takes its social cues from the NYT, suppressed a valid point of discussion for reasons unrelated to the usefulness of the discussion. The reasons for this suppression were not a pursuit of truth.
How many other areas of news reporting have a similar problem, an avoidance of a pursuit of truth?
It's not a new thing, Zeynep Tufekci has been writing lab leak columns in NYT for a while. The media has been pro lab leak for years now.
It could be that the congressional hearing is making the lab leak look more likely with all this (new) cover-up stuff coming out. Circumstancial of course, but for people with nothing to hide they sure tried hard to hide it.
Not a reversal since it's an editorial, those purposely span a wider range of views than the editorial staff itself. That being said, there was definitely a time they wouldn't have published this because it was viewed as too far in the conspiratorial camp. So it's a shift, but wouldn't got as far as to say reversal.
An op-ed, actually. Editorials represent the stance of the paper and op-eds don’t necessarily.
Oh right thanks for the correction. That’s what I meant to type, the word editorial later in the sentence messed me up.
For a very long time I thought “op-ed” was short for “opinion/editorial” when in fact it’s “opposite editorial,” as in the facing page.
Until recently, that's what I thought too. It may even have been here that I was corrected.
Hah, the Times is just trolling Scott again. (Since he leans zoonotic). Ignore the trolls.
NYT has zero integrity. Nothing is surprising from them anymore. Sad, considering how long they were respected. Seeing them lose all integrity (over the past few years) has not been pleasant for me.
Not sure what I think about Alina and lab leak, but that it comes from NYT doesn't carry any real signal.
> that it comes from NYT doesn't carry any real signal
I'll quibble with this. It signals that the opinion is considered within the Overton window of what the NYT will print. And that window is sometimes a useful measure of where the USA's discourse is at. Even if the measure is also being self-Goodharted, so it's less about the overall discourse, and more about where the NYT is trying to nudge the discourse.
I'll quibble further.
It signals that the opinion is within the Overton window of a particular small subset of the population at large, and a really angry, vindictive, troublesome, cult-like subset at that. Because those with editorial control at NYT ascribes to the dogma of that cult.
They have no problems saying obviously false things outside the Overton window of a very large segment of people living in NYC, NY state, and the United States. Again, because that other segment being shit on does not hold any editorial control at NYT.
So sure, if you want to know what sorts of things you're allowed to talk about and not get screeched at by the cult, NYT gives you useful signal. Otherwise, it's useless.
Because I'm not into tribal signaling, it provides zero useful signal to me.
UPDATE: Reading another subthread. Looks like this is an "op-ed" as in opposition editorial, as in something NYT disagrees with. So they did not "update after new evidence became apparent" as gorst believes. They are just printing something they disagree with. So whatever little signal ANYONE could get from this is further diluted.
I don't think it's "opposition", just that it's printed on the opposite (facing) page. I'd describe it as stuff that they think their readership will find worthwhile to read. So there's still a window, but it's wider than what they are willing to fully endorse. Infamously, they printed and then walked back this op-ed piece by Senator Tom Cotton.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/03/opinion/tom-cotton-protests-military.html
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/tom-cotton-new-york-times/677546/
That probably won't improve your view of them, but journalistic integrity requires it of me. ;-)
Does the NYT have zero integrity, because they updated their belief, after new evidence became apparent?
No. That they would update based on new information is commendable. I suspect you're assuming I have some strong position on lab leak hypothesis I don't have, and that something about this particular datapoint angers me about NYT.
They have zero integrity because they became a cheap outlet for obviously false propaganda, and to my knowledge, have never updated or apologised or promised to try to do better in the future.
Given you do seem to assume I'm playing tribal signaling games here, I won't go into further detail, because the conversation won't go anywhere meaningful. Suffice it to say, if you were even barely paying attention, and you were in charge of NYT's editorial choices, you would not have run several of the stories they have run over the previous 10 years.
thanks.
i asked because I generally oppose claims of hypocrisy or lack of integrity, when a more charitable is conceivable, like simply changing their oppinion after new facts arise. I WANT my sources and my news and my politicians to admit mistakes and update their believes.
you make some good points why that may no be the case here.
to adress your adhominem: i was a nyt reader until 2016, but canceled my subscription for exactly the reasons you have listed.
A version of the NYT whose beliefs were based on evidence, rather than political expediency, would be a higher-integrity version of the NYT.
THIS. This and a thousand times more THIS.
There's a fun, temporal version of Gell-Mann amnesia with the NYT. As if when a person turned the page from a section he knows nothing about to one that he does, he assumes that the reason the paper is now complete garbage is that halfway through today's print run bad, ignorant, corrupt people took over.
Be a little uglier and more shocking to come to believe that the NYT has always been a force for evil, it's just that it only recently has been doing so on topics we know about and disagree with.
I remember reading a book by Dick Cheney in 2017, hoping to get a birds eye view into how a country was run. I was sorely disappointed by the sheer dishonesty.
I got similar vibes when I started reading NYT's analysis of international issues back in 2017, but it wasn't until getting an actual education on international affairs that I could see that it was basically the same problem but with more intellectual-looking language.
Indeed. In every decade there have been plenty of people who could tell the NYT were telling only part of the story in a way that mislead, but we don't know their names. We do know the name of the NYT, though. Would be nice if the victors contented themselves with writing the history books, instead of also writing the news, the fiction, the young-adult fiction, and all the rest.
> Would be nice if the victors contented themselves with writing the history books, instead of also writing the news, the fiction, the young-adult fiction, and all the rest.
Ouch, nicely put!
Sparring day at the gym - it is never a good sign when your opponent expresses respect for you after a round with the phrase "way to hang in there, man."
Any fun quotable moments you guys would care to share?
Some years ago, at an old job, my boss's boss had his kid with him, who was probably like 8 years old. And he noticed there was a chess board sitting around and asked if I wanted to play a game, and I said sure. So this 8-year-old sits down with me and as we're setting up he asks me what my ELO score is, and I'm just like, "I'm not gonna win this one".
Also while he was demolishing me he said, "Guess what?" and I asked, "What?" expecting the response to be "Checkmate", and instead it was "Chickenbutt", which I felt like he earned in the moment.
Ours is a hockey household, and my youngest is a 12-year-old playing in a local league. One recent evening his team was losing a tournament game and getting frustrated. Midway through the game our guy had a promising scoring chance but the other team's defensemen absolutely buried him 10 feet short of the goalie -- one kid goes low while the other levels him. An obvious penalty but the refs call nothing and he comes up pissed.
As the play moves back the other way our guy catches up with one of the offenders and barks at him, the kid barks back in kind, and...our boy slugs him in the helmet. Oh dear. (With his thick hockey glove still on but, still -- that sort of thing is not allowed at all in youth hockey.) Kid takes exception and then they're wrassling and finally the refs notice and blow their whistles.
One ref pulls our boy aside and says quietly, "Dude what are you doing? I let you get away with a free punch..." To which our guy says, loudly, "YEA WELL YOU"VE LET THEM GET AWAY WITH TWENTY FUCKING THINGS ALL GAME!"
He was immediately banished from the proceedings, the other team scored on the ensuing power play, etc. On the car ride home we had a talk about how to tell when an official is trying to apologize for missing a call, how _not_ to respond, etc.
And of course "YEA WELL YOU'VE LET THEM GET AWAY WITH TWENTY FUCKING THINGS ALL GAME" is now a catchphrase among all members of our household....parenting for the win!
+1. Former hockey player myself, so I appreciate this deeply.
I was about to start sparring with someone new at the gym and I asked him what his name was. He responded "God's will".
I'm with Philo - sounds like a genuine compliment.
I had a good one a few years back, also after a few sparring rounds with a local MMA fighter. I asked him for feedback afterwards, and he responded with "every time you cross your feet, I hit you".
Guess what I was working on for months and months afterward!
I guess if I were to fight someone MMA I'd get pretty obliterated. I don't even know what it means to cross your feet.
It was training rounds - going light because we're practicing, one cannot learn anything if every blow is delivered with power. So he hit me with precision, but not with power so we could go on.
Crossing feet means exactly what is sounds like: in a typical fighting stance, one foot is always in front of the other, say, left is front for an "orthodox" stance ("southpaw" is right foot in front). So when moving, one "keeps the stance" - keep the front foot in front, and back foot in back, because it provides both stability and agility. It's not a "natural" way to move, we cross our feet when we walk, so it takes lots of practice to get there. I was, like, in my second year of training, so still a rookie, and sometimes would lose my footwork and cross feet. When that happened, it's hard to move to avoid or counter strikes. He noticed this tendency that I had, and every time he saw my feet cross, he'd throw a punch, which would inevitably land. I didn't recognize it when it was happening, so to me it was a complete mystery - how he was able to hit me so easily. It was a proverbial "lightbulb moment" when he told me.
I haven't done MMA, only taekwondo, but we use "ladders" to practice footwork. That is, rope ladders with various exercises, stepping in and out of the squares formed, going down the ladder. The lead foot must always be the first foot both in and out of the square. This is in addition to specific drills for practicing footwork.
Then it all must be practiced while sparring, too.
Yes, similar drills are used in MMA/kickboxing as well.
Why did you interpret that as a bad sign? That's exactly what I'd hope to hear from a superior opponent, assuming I want to improve and match or excel his abilities one day?
I guess I'll quote a dialogue I overheard recently:
"
I admire the fellow [Scott Alexander]. Even if he is one of the Jews heading up the new neoconservative movement.
How I hate Jews, especially my wife and one of my close friends.
Do your wife and close friend also head up the new neoconservative movement? It seems to be a requisite trait. The question is if it's a sufficient trait.
Where do you think the new neoconservative movement came from? Obviously random nerdy ravers from San Francisco.
"
Hahaha, oh, it's a good sign for my attitude, so I suppose it bodes well for my progress going forward, but in the immediate term it just meant I was tired and getting positively rofl-stomped in the back half of the last round.
As far as the dialogue you overheard... just, wow. There's so much there it's hard to parse out the worst/weirdest bits - feels like a tossup between Jews creating the neoconservative movement and "especially my wife."
There was quite a bit of dripping sarcasm drizzled all over it. The premise being that accusation by Fuentes that Scott is heading up the... some sort of conservative movement or another. It's pretty laughable.